Jearrard's Herbal

1st August 2021

Disa Olympic Dream .
A reduction in the temperature in the garden this week has been very welcome. The forecast has repeatedly promised rain but it has hardly arrived. The local news showed pictures of campers on the north coast being blown away as a storm passed through but in the garden the winds were moderate and the rainfall slight. However, the temperatures have dropped and even though my garden is heavily shaded, the difference has been welcome. I spent some time looking for the first flowers from Cyclamen hederifolium. They aren't up yet but they won't be long. The whole garden has changed since last week, the heavy stasis of midsummer has slipped into warm indolence and although the Cyclamen are still sleeping, the first thoughts of autumn have drifted into the garden. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that I have been sleeping through early morning mists!
The Disa have had a spectacular year, flowers have been large and abundant. I have had two major pollination "events". About a fortnight ago I went down to the greenhouse and did all of the pollinations I had planned for this year. I was quite focussed in following through my planned hybridisations. Inevetitably I pollinated too many flowers but some will fail to take and some seed will fail to germinate so the results will probably be manageable.
Unfortunately last week I returned to pollination and had an evening of wild whimsy with a paintbrush. Oh well, my planned hybridisation program now icludes some lunacy as well. Perhaps it will open a door to the unexpected.
The Disa are starting to go over, but this seemed like the right week to show Olypmic Dream. My clone is a soft peach colour, shaded with pink but I expect there are other brighter clones in circulation. It's ancestry is mostly D.uniflora so the majority of seedlings in the grex will be scarlet.

Hemerocallis 'Dresden Dream'

1st August 2021

Hemerocallis 'Dresden Dream' .
Gardening was exhusting during the recent heat but it didn't seem to get much easier as the tempertures fell. Last night I moved potted plants about, getting them closer to the point that they could be planted in the garden. Somewhere I have to find space in the sun for a lot of Rhodohypoxis. They are currently beside the house and they need to go to the top of the garden. I sit in a garden seat looking at them and hoping that they might carry themselves up the hill. It isn't going to happen but (caution:- contrived link) I can always dream.
This has been a week for dreams, and also for Hemerocallis. The two things come together in the form of H. 'Dresden Dream'. Raised by Lester in the USA and registered in 1959, I bought my plant in 1982. By the standards of the day it was a modern introduction, part of a wave of new hybrids from the States that built into an explosion of diversity in the genus. The first signs of development can be seen in the broad perianth segments with blunt tips and the pale colour. When this was introduced nobody could have forseen the astonishing changes to come.
Initially I planted it out in the garden, but in those days the garden was extremely unruly. A couple of years later I spent a sombre day or two sorting through the undergrowth to rescue the collection of daylilies. From then on it occupied a pot, looking more and more starved with every year. In spring this year the remaining collection were finally planted out again and it has rewarded me with a flower, the first I have seen for a few years. It is growing close to the original planting spot but thirty years later things have changed. If the undergrowth overtakes it a second time, I might just let it win.

Roscoea purpurea 'Red Sultan'

1st August 2021

Roscoea purpurea 'Red Sultan' .
The Roscoea have also been shunted in and out of pots over the years. Initially they occupied space in a bulb house (long gone) but were evicted to the garden when I needed more room. I had to make the choice between planting out the Roscoea or putting up more greenhouse space, and unusually for me, I chose the former. Since then I have become more involved with the red forms of R. purpurea and a number of plants have crept back onto the benches in the greenhouse along with a collection of new hybrids and some of my own seedlings. In my mind they fill the gap between the end of the Disa season and the start of the Nerine. In a more objective reality the Disa are still occupying my attention and the first Nerine angustifolia has already flowered. The "Roscoea gap" is a fiction, however that hasn't stopped me filling it thoroughly.
R. 'Red Sultan' is one of Keith Wiley's selections, he raised large numbers of red flowered seedlings and named a handful that had the broadest lips. This one has been particularly striking, the colour is darker than the original 'Red Gurkha' with some purple shades appearing. I have some spare ones now so they will once again go out into the garden and the greenhouse space will be occupied by new seedlings. I have a couple of salmon pink ones that look good to me, and there is plenty of scope for hybrids with other species ... Disa aren't the only thing I raise too many of.
I console myself with the thought that these all fit neatly into the "Roscoea gap" then I put my fingers in my ears and go "la la la".

Watsonia 'August Pink'

1st August 2021

Watsonia 'August Pink' .
Gardening introduces a whole range of new concepts to the innocent. Who would have imagined that one could suffer from anticipatory weeding? A friend showed me a glorious scarlet Watsonia in his garden that seemed brighter and more compact than 'Stanford Scarlet' so I came home to look at my 'Stanford Scarlet' seedlings in the bed by the house. They have been there for a couple of years now, managing very nicely despite a dry, rubble filled soil. Not a sign of flower spikes, it inspired a flurry of anticipatory weeding. An opportunity to clear the ground before I could do too much damage. A physical outlet for the frustrations of flowerlessness.
The Watsonia don't grow there as the result of a grand overview, some developmental masterplan for the garden. They are there because I took down a delelict conservatory and at the same time needed somewhere to plant Watsonia seedlings. A gardeners compromise between laziness and serendipity.
Immediately after my anticipatory weeding this pink Watsonia flowered. It germinated many years ago as a stray in a pot of Hemerocallis 'August Pink' (Kraus, 1954) that didn't survive the decades of neglect. The Watsonia turned out to be a good pink, much better than any of the hybrids I have raised deliberately, flowering at the start of August. Gardeners can hear the universe laughing at their endeavours when it throws random improvements into their garden plans. We learn to smile about frustriumph. When I planted the Watsonia there was already a label in the pot that said 'August Pink'.
Lazidipity.