My May flowers, ready or not!

It is Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day again, and just for fun I checked what I wrote last year on this day: “Here in London we have experienced the strangest spring ever, with a relatively warm winter, a dash of high summer for a few days in March and then over 5 weeks of rain and persistently cold weather with very low night temperatures. My garden has never been as late as it is this year.” As all of us living in Britain know, the rain just continued and I thought it couldn’t get any worse than what we had last year. Ha! I remember that whiff of summer we had in March last year, it was lovely, that was the summer we got last year. Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day means lots of photos and an extra long post here on my blog, so get yourself a cup of your favourite brew and park yourself somewhere comfortable, you might be here for a while :-) - and as always, please click on the photos for a larger version, it really is worth it.

This year we have had a very long, cold winter, an extremely cold spring and although we had almost a week of lovely weather in late April here in London, it is now back to cold, windy and with rain at times. 12 degrees C at daytime and 6 at night has been pretty average but the last month we have had everything from frost at night and hail during the day to 23 degrees and really nice. This is spring in Britain, no two days are the same and notoriously difficult to forecast. My garden is about 6 weeks later than a normal year, some plants as much as 8 weeks, and it is even later than last year – I would not have thought that was possible when I was waiting for my roses last May...It is middle of May and I still have daffodils in flower!

Depressing temperatures, especially combined with the bone chilling wind we have had the last week or so.

Let me take you on a trip around the garden and show you what I have in flower this mid May. Let’s start at the bottom of the garden in my woodland area, at first sight not very colourful, but there are flowers here, if you know where to look. This area was something I developed when I redesigned the garden in 2011, and it is by no means a finished article (when is a garden ever finished?!), but I intend to add to it as I am able to afford more plants. I am also not sure if I like the idea of ‘succession planting’ here, a constant stream of plants, one type taking over before the previous one has died down. It looks great at certain points, but at other points, like right now, I just have heaps and heaps of dying leaves to deal with. As most of these plants are bulbous I can’t just chop the leaves off, not if I want the plants to come up next year – so I just have to endure all the dying leaves everywhere. Not sure how to get around that, the alternative is evergreen plants that flower for a short time and looks green all year round, or perennials that lose their leaves in the winter, or herbaceous plants that die down in the autumn. They all have pros and cons :-)

This is a lovely semi-evergreen plant called Disporopsis pernyi. Imagine an evergreen Solomon's seal with glossy, dark green foliage - that's what you've got in this little known, tough-as-nails plant. Not a real Solomon’s Seal but a beautiful look-a-like! So easy to grow and trouble free. The arching stems have lots of bell shaped flowers in the spring and black berries in the autumn. The slowly developing clump (2' wide in 10 years) makes a superb show in the woodland garden. Prefers moist soil in part shade. Cut back old foliage in February to make way for new spring growth.

Disporopsis pernyi. It is a bit too early to see the flowers properly, in a week or two the flowers will have opened completely, but you’ll get an impression here at least.

I have lots and lots of Lily of the Valley in my garden, they have just started to open the first flowers.

Convallaria majalis , Lily of the Valley. Again, It is a bit too early to see the flowers properly, in a week or two the flowers will have opened completely.

My cyclamens are still flowering, the cold days and nights keep them going on as if it was March and not May.

More cyclamens.

This is Lamium maculatum 'Beacon Silver', an evergreen ground cover, but it usually starts to flower in early April. It has just started to flower now, and I guess you know what I am about to say, yep, in a week or two it will look much better, with lots of flowers all over :-)

Lamium maculatum 'Beacon Silver'

Here is my other Lamium, Lamium galeobdolon 'Hermann's Pride', a lovely plant that doesn’t invade other plant’s space.

It has started to flower, but will get lots more over the next couple of weeks.

And if you really get down to the bottom of the woodland floor, these little curious beauties are sticking up everywhere. They are Arisaema amurense, also called cobra lily or jack-in-the-pulpit. I started out with one single plant in 2004 and now there must be nearly 100 of them. They take 6-8 years to reach a stage where they produce this incredible flower, so many of those tiny plants I have are still just a single leaf. Give them time they will all produce flowers, and all the flowers produce berries which give new plants. I have started to lift some of the smaller plants and move to other areas as I think they are quite amazing plants.

Arisaema amurense. The flower hasn’t quite opened up completely, they look more spectacular when the spathe in the middle is sticking out. OK, familiar theme now, come back in a couple of weeks!

Here are also some beauties from the woodland floor, if you missed my previous post, these are Arisarum  proboscideum or 'Mouse Plant'.

If we move a bit further along the bottom of my garden, you’ll get to my hellebores, all still in flower but not exactly pretty anymore. I will soon snip off all flowers and just leave one seed producing flower on each plant. Right behind the hellebores, in the centre of the picture is my Rhododendron Christmas Cheer which I bought early last year. It came in bud, but most of the buds fell off and I had just a few flowers. Since then it has more than doubled in size and I was looking forward to seeing it in flower this spring. Unfortunately that will not happen, this new rhododendron has spent all year putting down roots instead of producing buds for flowers, naughty plant, but not uncommon for rhododendrons. I have given it a handful of slow release ericaceous fertiliser and hope for lots of flowers next year. Patience, patience. So, just one flowering plant to show off here really, can you see it among all the green?

Dicentra spectabilis 'Valentine'  a beautiful bright red variety of Dicentra. They often come in all shades of pink, plus white, but I think this red one is rather special.

Dicentra spectabilis 'Valentine' – a row of red hearts on a branch :-)

On the margins of my woodland area is this tiny rose bush. It is one of my David Austin roses, called 'Wildeve' and it was planted early last spring. It was beautiful last summer, and had lots of big roses, it grew to about 1.5m tall by end of July. Unfortunately, when I dislocated my hip right here in the garden on the 6th August last year, this rose bush was one of the casualties. The ambulance crew had to cut down this rose to the ground in order to get me out. I guess roses don’t take very well to be cut levelled with the ground, it did have some growth last autumn, but it was a very thin and spindly twig. I have just left it to it, there is still just one, thin twig, but at least it is a bit taller now, almost a foot tall :-) I haven’t recovered very well after my dislocation, but I hope the rose will recover better, it was a beautiful rose.

Next to the rose is another casualty of my hip dislocation, my beautiful Acer palmatum 'Garnet'. The ambulance crew had to break off half of this bush to get me out, I think if I had been aware of what they were planning to do a bit earlier I would probably have stopped them, but at that point the garden could most likely have melted around me without me noticing or even being bothered. It was only when I came home from the hospital 5 days later and had my first trip out in the garden I saw what had been done. OK, not blaming anyone at all, the ambulance crew were very nice people, all 4 of them and they got me out eventually, I don’t expect them to take people’s gardens in to consideration too. But I did get upset for a while every time I went out and saw the Acer. I was therefore very pleased when the new leaves came out a few weeks ago and I realised that many of the bare branches now have new leaves sprouting. I no longer have half an Acer, I have a much fuller, rounder Acer. It doesn’t look so strange anymore. OK, so it does look a bit funny still, but not as funny as it did, honestly!

Let’s move upwards a bit, passing swiftly all the dying tulips and the acanthus barely out of the ground. Too late and too early...and ending up here, this is an area for development this year. The pots are my attempt to buy plug plants last September. I won’t do it again. Ever. The plugs were so tiny you could barely see them. I potted them on in 9cm pots, even though it said they were ready to go in the ground. Ha! I also bought some primrose plug plants at the same time, all of them were potted on but some of them went in the ground after 3-4 weeks. Big mistake. Some of those still haven’t flowered! These pansies have been in these big pots since January or so, and they started flowering first week of May. They were meant to be my bedding plants for the winter! No more tiny plug plants for me in the autumn, thank you very much.

But now that they finally flower, they look quite OK. They are called Can-Can, advertised as frilly pansies, but I don’t think they are at all as frilly or as mixed colours as in the photos on the website where I bought them. They weren’t expensive, but a lot of work for very little. An experiment not to be repeated.

Behind the pots of pansies is one of my oldest plants, a Viburnum 'Eskimo' . It is 10 years old this summer, and considering its age it should be a formidable bush of about 1.8-2m tall and wide. Go back 2 photos and see what it looks like and you might see why this bush is destined for the compost bin this year. It has never grown any bigger than this and I don’t think the 8-10 beautiful flowers every spring is enough anymore to keep the plant. Out with the old, in with the new. Do you notice the sea of pink in the background? It is camellia petals!

My camellia is in full flower, and I am just letting all the petals fall to the ground. There are too many Lily of the Valley under the camellia for me to go around scooping up petals. Because of all the cold nights we have had, there are a lot of frost damage to my camellia, an unfortunate feature whatever time it flowers, when the night temperature creeps down towards zero, the flowers that have opened gets brown edges. But the cold temperatures, both night and day probably means it will flower for another good few weeks. I have never had a camellia in flower in June before!

My camellia have flowers of different shades of pink.

Let’s head over to the other side of the path, it was still some sunshine when I was taking pictures here. This is my lovely Chaenomeles superba 'Crimson and Gold', it has been in flower since January!!

The big question before making this post was: would I get any roses in time? I am afraid I didn’t. It really has been a weird spring. Normally my first roses open in early April. This is as close as I get to my Crimson Cascade, usually my first rose to flower.

And this is my trusty pot rose, not long to go, but still, not an open rose for GBBD. In a couple of weeks there will be some.

This was meant to be my sea of alliums and irises for today, instead I have still many daffodils left, only two irises out and none of the alliums properly opened – although many of them are just days away from popping up. Yeah, a week or two would have done wonders here too!

But the two irises I do have look quite sweet, don’t they?

I bought a bag of 30 mixed Dutch iris last year, I can’t wait to see what the colour is on the rest of them.

Some of the daffodils have just opened up. I think I will have daffodils well into June this year. Weird!

This is the first allium to open, not really there yet but isn’t the colours fantastic?

All the alliums, irises and daffodils are in the right hand bed at the top of the garden, and when they are finished flowering there is a wealth of other plants already growing through their leaves. I have crocosmias, Paeonies, three different Hemerocallis and lots of oriental lilies, just waiting for their turn to shine. Next to them is the area with all my pots. There are so many pots now that I wonder if I have just too many, if I need to take some of the plants and find a space for them in the beds. Anyway, do you remember the magnolias I bought? The tall one has now got all the buds opened, and it turns out that none of them were flower buds, just leaves. So I have to wait a whole year to see and smell the flowers. The small magnolia has still not open up all the buds, but they are all just leaves so I am not expecting anything else there. In a few years time they will both be great assets in this patio area, when they get a bit bigger.

And the last plant to be presented here is the second of my Dicentras, Dicentra  formosa 'Bacchanal' . It is magenta coloured, a colour my camera has a bit difficulty picking up with the sun shining through the flowers. It is a lovely plant, with leaves a bit different than the spectabilis. I have this one just in a container, it doesn’t grow very big.

Dicentra  formosa 'Bacchanal'

Before I end this post I would like to talk about a website I have joined. I don’t often endorse websites on my blog, or even provide links in my posts, but this time I think it is something many people here will appreciate to hear about. First of all, my apologies to all my readers from outside UK, this website is for people in the UK only, but read on, you might have something similar where you live, and if you haven’t, maybe you can pick up some ideas and be the one starting this in your area, who knows!

The website, called Green Plant Swap, is a place for selling and swapping your plants. You can be a private gardener with just one plant to swap or sell, or a semi professional gardener with hundreds of plants to sell or swap, or a nursery with thousands of plants to sell. You make your own ‘grower’ page, a profile of yourself and with a description of your garden. Then you add the plants you would like to sell/swap with photos if you have. For anyone used to writing a blog this is easy-peasy stuff. The website has just started up so at the moment there isn’t that many members, that’s why I wanted to write about it here and hope you can do the same when you have discovered their potential. For this to work there need to be lots of members, it’s no good if you find your favourite plant with someone willing to swap, if the grower lives 150 miles away from you. So come on, sign up, list your stuff for sale/swap and then make sure to tell all your friends about it so we can become many members. It is totally free and you can list as many plants as you want, here is the SIGN UP PAGE.

And here is my own 'GROWER PAGE’, click on ‘View all listings’ at bottom right to see all the plants I have for sale/swap. When you sign up you fill in your postcode (or your full address, that’s up to you), and when you click the button for Swap & Buy Plants, the site will find growers near you. I have visited quite a few other, similar sell/swap website over the last few years, but none of them took my interest – they had either very poorly design and qirky navigation, or a lot of stuff not relevant or, as with most of them, designed as a forum where pictures of the plants for sale/swap was a rarity. Because this one is different I immediately found it interesting, perhaps you will too? So, what are you waiting for, not only can you get some new gardening friends, you might even earn a few quid on those plants you haven’t got room for yourself, or swap them with something you always have wanted but couldn’t really afford or get hold of.

OK, this became a seriously long post, especially on a day when I didn’t really have much in flower! But as it is Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, let’s say thanks to Carol at May Dreams Garden who is hosting this meme, why don’t you head over to her place and see what’s flowering in other people’s gardens around the world this mid May. Until next time, take care.