LONG,Bits and Pieces
- Subject: LONG,Bits and Pieces
- From: g*@hba.trumpet.com.au (Gay Klok)
- Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 23:48:32 -0800 (PST)
Dear Gardeners,
Thanks to those who let me know that I could still
bother you with my meanderings. Our server is changing
his "something" this next fortnight so I suppose my
address will change too and I will have more trouble.
Our weather has been disgusting this Spring, rain and then
rain and then hail storms, just to vary the damage. Actually,
I am quite proud how well "Kibbenjelok" stood up, I think our
wind breaks are working, though there are still two chancy spots,
wind channels have been formed. To get your wind breaks quite
right is one of the hardest garden design tasks.
I still have a few camelias in flower, also the last Rhododendrons.
The heavily pregnant helleborus are giving birth and so are the
Himalayan Primulas. These Prims. are unbelievably beautiful this
year [all that rain] - great slashes of scarlet, orange pink or yellow
flowering as rivers through the wetlands of the garden. Some have
as many as 8 whorls up their flowering stem and the babies are already
poking through the earth around their protecting leaves. I try to
plant them in a collection of the same colour but already they are
showing signs of a quite active sex life and there is variation on the same
theme. The garden is full of "bumble" bees this year, they only
appeared in Tasmania last year - imported from New Zealand, I believe.
More welcome than the possums, Tim, that Aussie gave to NZ!
Our roses are only just starting in the country garden, very late,
I suppose the rainy days held up their opening curtains but they
are full of blooms and black spot. We don't spray in the country
garden, when polite visitors ask "What do you do about black spot?",
I explain this to them and remind them that black spot is always worse
in clean atmospheres!
I grow a lot of Heritage Roses, David Austin roses, and they always
wait until after Christmas to have their day. Have not been able to
beat the possums and peafowl and stop them eating all the rose
shoots growing across the members of the arbours.
A few perennials are starting to flower, white Lychnis [Campions}
and flos-jovis have seeded in just the right place.
The salmon and white digitalis [foxgloves] are helping to put
the rhododendrons that need dead heading and have grown too big for me
to reach, into the background and the Meconopsis are showing their very pale
yellow and blue flowers.
My daughter always comes down before the official Open Garden Day
and pleads with me to pull out a few thousand acquelegias, last
year she didn't so the result is that they made hay while the
sun shines [rarely] and are covering every spare spot they can
find within the gardens and through the brown gravel of the paths.
Being so morally loose in their habits, they are every colour
imagineable - deepest purple, vivid sky blue, soft grey-blue,
plum up to light pink, blue and white, red and yellow and
green-pink. Many are in the original specie form, real
"granny-night-caps" and they mingle with the sp. geraniums white
and blue. The blue geraniums are showing variation, most coming from pratens
seeds which I have thrown "willy-nilly" particularly in the rose
beds.
The iris germanica have been good until cruelly cut down by hail stones.
The Californian Iris are finishing, the Louisianna and Japanese,
just starting. I am also fond of the sibirica, very neat in
habit and such an electric blue.
There is so much happening but I won't bore you any more. Next weekend, we
have 3 appointments in both gardens, garden groups, and then I will
start the Christmas Pudding, cake and cooking the ham! Looks
like, with our awful weather, there will be plenty of blooms in this
late flowering year, to fill the house with perfume and beauty on
Christmas Day.
Regards
Gay Klok, 2 Red Chapel Ave, Hobart, Tasmania - "Kibbenjelok", Middleton,
Tasmania
http://members.tripod.com/~klok/WRINKLY_.HTM or ask Yahoo for Gay Klok
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