Endless London summer – EOMV 2016

It’s the last day of August, the last day of summer and autumn is officially starting tomorrow – but here in London the summer is far from over. We have had the best summer for years, once it finally got going, and the reminiscences of the unusually cold spring and early part of the summer is now a bleak memory. The good weather started on 16th July and today, nearly 7 weeks later I can look back on several short heatwaves with well over 30 degrees and the rest has been in the mid to high 20s. Last week we had 34 degrees a couple of days and for me that’s a bit too high, I am happier in the garden with around 25 degrees C. Despite having had some rain forecasted a couple of times we have only had proper rain once and it was a welcome 24 hours of rain – but that was back in July. Everything is really dry and the ghost of mildew is hovering over my garden, threatening to invade. So far I have managed to stay clear but all the watering is taking its toll. I wouldn’t mind 3-4 days of non-stop rain....

....but that’s not going to happen yet because the good weather is just continuing. The forecast says one afternoon with showers the next 2 weeks, but…promises, promises....I’ll believe it when I see it. We have had forecasts like that many times and usually end up with 5 minutes of a light drizzle. Hardly useful at all for the garden so I guess I will be watering Saturday evening as usual.

The garden is still green and full of flowers, but all the trees are a bit sad and droopy and the big cherry trees are already getting the odd yellow leaves because of the dry weather.

My plum tree looks like some sort of weeping kind of tree, a bit difficult to see in this photo with full sunshine but I just could not manage to get a photo taken without blazing sunshine. The plumtree is so full of plums it must have 3 times as much fruit as last year! I should have thinned out the plums, but I was recovering from my slipped disks in June and July when I should have done this and I never got around doing it afterwards. Some of the branches has broken and will need to come off once the fruit is off, but I am not so worried about it – I am still considering getting rid of the tree and I am dithering about what to do. The tree really is too big for that space and I have to squeeze past it to get to the plants behind it and especially when the branches are bent downwards in the summer the whole tree is just a nuisance. I can’t eat plums anyway (although I have tasted a few even though I really shouldn’t!), so the fruit is just being given away to anyone willing to take it. I will think about it for next year. Perhaps I will just have it taken out and put another obelisk with a nice climber there instead.

Some of the plants in my garden haven’t been so happy about the prolonged period of sunny dry weather, but this Lewisia cotyledon has been flowering for ages, I have had it for about 5 years and I can’t remember it flowering for 3 months solid ever before. Many years ago I had a peach coloured Lewisia which I think is a more common colour, but I love this white one, such a cheery little plant right at the front of my rose bed.

The roses should have been in their second flush right now, but although all of them are flowering it is a bit sparse. I have probably not given them enough water, especially those in the ground and I have seen signs here and there of mildew. The organic spray I use for mildew isn’t terribly effective, the best way to prevent mildew is to give them enough water. But I find all the watering hard work and I am determined to get a soaker hose down in all the flowerbeds during the winter, ready for next summer. I will still need to water the containers but it will save a lot of work. This is 'Scepter'd Isle – still beautiful albeit not as plentiful as earlier in the summer.

And this is 'Wildeve'. Both of these two roses have grown incredibly big since being planted in the ground last winter. They lived a container life in my previous garden and they have never been able to stretch their roots like they can now. They probably like the clay soil here better than most of the plants too so with a bit more water they should have really good conditions.

This is 'The Generous Gardener' - and I must admit I am struggling a bit with what to do with this rose – it grows like MAD! There aren’t that many flowers, but every time I look at it there is another new, waist high cane. I am trying to train it up the wall and along the trellis and was aiming for a fan shaped base structure. But this gardener seems to have other plans, generous plans. It is just a mess at the moment and I am letting it do its own thing for now.

Come January I will take charge though and be ruthless, cutting down and training and try to get a structure. I say ‘try’ with some trepidation as my goodness how this rose grows. If it could just use all that energy to produce flowers instead then it could be amazing as the flowers are lovely, even the new buds are really pretty.

The last of the roses today is a bit of a surprise flower. It is another rose I inherited with the garden and I had decided to remove this one as it is in a very narrow bed, half growing under the tall hardy fuchsia. I just haven’t had anyone to dig it out for me yet so up until now I have just removed every branch it produced. And suddenly last week I realised I had missed one branch and the rose had managed to grow a 5 ft tall branch inside the fuchsia that I had not even seen – with flowers on. And here are the flowers – really pretty. I think I will try to salvage the rose and move it out to the front garden. Sometimes the garden takes charge and makes the decisions for you if you are a bit late getting things done :-)

Want to see something exciting? My Fuchsia boliviana ‘Alba’ is flowering – and producing fruit! I can’t wait for my first harvest, I have no idea what they will taste like but I have read they taste a bit like kiwis, just not as sweet. The fruits of Fuchsia boliviana are apparently in sale everywhere in markets in South America, but they don’t store very well so that’s probably why we don’t see them in the supermarkets here.

The sunflowers are basking in the sun, I have 5 along the tall wall, but the sunflower to the far right is either a wrong seed in the bag I bought, or it suffers from gigantism – it is a monster! One of my garden helpers had to climb a stepladder and extend the bamboo stake to support it as I was worried it would break. I measured it today and it was 3.56m tall, but only last Saturday it was 3.32m tall so it grows fast. It hasn’t started flowering yet so by the time it stops reaching for the skies it will be much taller.

The sunflowers are a nice burnt orange and yellow, really gorgeous. There’s something about sunflowers that makes me smile whenever I look at them.

A few harvest photos – the plums first – some are already picked and some are weeks away from being ripe, a plumtree needs to be picked every few days and sifting through the plums to get the ripe ones is a bit of a chore. Next weekend I have invited people around to come and pick what they want - saving me from having to pick lots of fallen fruit from the ground.

The tomatoes are still going strong, I have lots in the freezer and I have given away several bags already. I like roasted tomatoes and they are also good to just pop into soups and omelettes – once they have been frozen they don’t look like a fresh tomato anymore but can be used to lots of different things.

Some of the tomatoes come with their own personality, like this one with a distinctive nose.

And I grow only cherry tomatoes, but this one to the left was apparently aspiring to be something bigger than that.

I have grown Lobelia cardinalis 'Queen Victoria' for many years, the red one to the left, it has now got company by a princess – the pink one to the right is called Lobelia x speciosa 'Russian Princess' and although they are totally clashing in colour I think they look good together.

Here are some other newcomers, I am trying Echinacea again, for the umpteen time. But here in my new garden they should be happier, more sun and drier conditions. Fingers crossed they will come back next year. This is Echinacea purpurea 'Magnus' and ‘White Swan’.

Yet another newcomer, Malva sylvestris 'Mystic Merlin' – a perennial plant currently in a pot but it will join the queue of plants that will be planted hopefully during the winter and early spring.

This gerbera is no newcomer, I bought the plant for £1 in Ikea in 2002 or 2003 and it has lived outdoors ever since. It usually flowers from autumn right through the winter until late spring but this year it has decided to do the sensible thing and flower in the summer. Perhaps getting a new, bigger pot for the first time in almost 10 years helped it to get its act together. Or maybe the gerbera will flower non-stop until next year, I have no idea – I don’t get to enjoy the flowers much because the local squirrel population has worked up an appetite for the flowers and they break them off and eat the whole lot as soon as they open up leaving me with just crumbs on the side. Having two whole flowers at the same time is a rare treat.

The cannas in my tropical corner are doing remarkably well, I bought them as bare-root last February and this is the first year they are flowering. I am amazed at how they flower, I didn’t really know that they would produce new flower buds over and over from the same stalk. As soon as one is finished, the next one is ready to take over as you can see in the photo to the left. On the top photo you can see the two plants together, quite sizeable by now, and to the left of the cannas, on the ground is my absolutely huge Zantedeschia aethiopica.

I gave the Zantedeschia a really big container this spring and deliberately made the drainage holes rather small. The container is huge, big enough to bath a small child in and every evening I give the plant a bath – I fill up the container with water until it reaches the rim. I just lay the hose between the leaves and leave it to go and do something else. It takes a good 5 minutes to fill up the container and I do this every time I water the garden – most evenings. The Zantedeschia loves it and is lush and green and has been producing flowers since early June. Look at the size of that flower!

The dahlias are in full flower, they would probably prefer to be given bigger containers so that’s the aim for them all, in my garden there won’t be any dahlias in the ground, only container dahlias as the soil is not suitable. This is ‘Happy Days’ in a mix of colours.

Do you remember my Dregea sinensis, the vine I had over the big arch in my previous garden? I have a new one! It is still a baby, but I have now got it planted in the ground and it will grow up this fence. I need to get a trellis soon!

The woodland bed is lacking a bit in the flower department, I need to get some early autumn flowers for this area, everything is just shades of green here. Later on there will be primulas and cyclamens here, but in my garden the cyclamens doesn’t start to flower until around November when it gets cooler and wetter. The bare patch at the front had 3 lovely tricyrtis from my previous garden, none of them came up, I don’t really know why as the soil here is not too bad. Maybe the pH is so high they just gave up, or maybe it was too dry. I miss the tricyrtis, they are so lovely late in the autumn.

And here is a photo of what’s meeting me every day when I come out in the garden – this is what the squirrels do to my pots and containers. The rose here can tolerate a bit of digging, but some of my plants have been killed by all the destruction and in my cutting area there is complete havoc every day with uprooted plants and compost everywhere. Apart from destroying a lot of things, the squirrels create a lot of work for me. Did you know that squirrels were originally brought over to the country in 1876 in the Cheshire area by the Victorians, it is thought that they were introduced because the Victorians wanted to liven up the woodland and make it more interesting to look at. They were completely unaware of the destruction they can cause and their negative effect on the native red squirrel. Say no more......

But the birds are a joy and I so appreciate being able to sit and watch them. I never thought I would have so much entertainment from having birds in the garden, and although I tried to feed the birds in my previous garden I never succeeded getting them down in the garden, they just flew over. Here in my new garden they are right next to me and they seem to get more used to me too, I am allowed to film them outside now, I don’t have to stand in the kitchen anymore and do it through the window. Even the sparrows allow me to come quite close to film and take photos which they didn’t do last year. The pigeons are literally walking between my legs, not scared at all.

I have made two movies for today’s post, one is my usual garden movie and one is of the birds in the garden. The bird movie is centred around one of the bird feeders and the day I was filming it was mainly sparrows visiting, although I see the odd blue tit and great tit still too. I suspect there will be more of them in the winter again. Well, I say birds on the feeder, but one of the visitors to the feeder in the movie is definitely no bird, you’ll see....

If you don’t usually view my movies in full screen you should probably take the trouble to do so today for both the movies, just use the buttons in the bottom right corner - and please change the setting to 720p or 1080p as the quality will be too grainy unless you watch them in HD.

The music for this movie was: Slow Waltz from the Suite 'Fancy Dress' by Cecil Armstrong Gibbs

The second movie is my usual end of month movie, and in the middle of the movie I have included some night shots from the garden. I so wish I had a really expensive camera so I could show you all the night lighting I have, but my little camcorder was not up for the task. I was however able to film some of the lights I have, and I also filmed my chimenea which features in the film.

If you are not sure what a chimenea is, here is a photo of it, the metal burner in the corner here. It usually stands here when not in use, but I can pull it out when I want to use it and I think it gives a really nice ambience and it is rather mesmerising to sit and watch the flames.
The chimenea can be used with charcoal or wood and with such fuel it can also be used as a barbeque, but I usually use biofuel as I don’t cook on it, I just use it for a cosy fire.

The music was: The Banks of Green Willow by by George Butterworth

That was it for today, next post will be on the 15th September for the Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. I am linking today’s post to Helen at The Patient Gardener’s Weblog for End of Month View.

Until next time, take care.