JEARRARD'S HERBAL
23rd October 2022
Saxifraga fortunei 'Bychan' .
It has been an autumnal week, and it couldn't have been mistaken for anything else. Warm days, cool nights and bursts of torrential rain that temporarily clear the mist.
The garden is very full of itself, heaving with moisture and determined to grow frantically in the last heat, even as the leaves colour and fall.
Cyclamen hederifolium was looking good under the sycamore trees and then in no more than an hour or two, the sycamore leaves fell in a thick carpet
and obscured them. The wind soon shifted the leaves, the Cyclamen emerged again.
The garden is full of unexpected moments. Saxifraga fortunei 'Bychan' is a good thing. but I was surprised to find it flowering so well among the alpines in the greenhouse.
It is perfectly hardy, it might even survive the shade here, but it wouldn't survive the vine weevil. I have a friend who planted a narrow border of Saxifraga fortunei
forms to cheer herself up in the autumn. It wasn't very successful, none of them made it to the third year. In the greenhouse I can make life difficult and uncomfortable for the vine weevil
and thus far I seem to be winning (with the help of the friendly nematodes).
23rd October 2022
Nerine exbury red 2016.
I spent most of last week catching up. It is amazing the things that pile up if you go away for a few days. Last weekend was Nerine Weekend! The collection here was it its prime,
so naturally I spent the time rushing around the country looking at other people's collections. It reinforced my view that there are very few good pure red cultivars of
N. sarniensis being grown. I have been musing on the deficiency for a few years now. This year I collected together all of my purest reds - I had three so it didn't take a lot of organising.
I started the process of crossing them so that I could raise a generation of red flowered plants to select from. No hint of orange and no hint of pink, it is a challenge.
While I was away, I saw a couple of other cultivars in the right colour range and was able to bring bulbs home.
When I got back, I found this one in flower. It is a seedling that I selected from the seedling beds at Exbury (thanks to Exbury for letting me have it). The colour is almost perfect
and it may well be the pollen parent for most of the next generation of seed.
I selected it in 2016, so I have clearly been considering the shortage of red cultivars for longer than I thought.
23rd October 2022
Pitcairnia bergii .
Red flowers have a strange character at this time of year. If the sun shines, they are filled with the brightness of summer. In dull weather they hang above the plants
like brooding clouds of anger. A splash of orange makes all the difference. This Pitcairnia sits on the ground in the corner of the greenhouse and when it flowers it radiates good cheer, winter or summer.
Pitcairnia bergii comes from the lower Andes in Ecuador and isn't very fussy about daylength. It flowers when it feels the time is right.
It tried a couple of times through the summer, but I think there was a particularly voracious slug living in the greenhouse this year. I looked hard to find it but without success.
Eventually I put down some slug bait and I think it has gone now, but not before it had eaten a couple of Pitcairnia flower spikes.
When I started growing Pitcairnia I had very little success, this was the only one that survived. I grow a few more now and they seem to do perfectly well,
so something must have changed. I am at a loss to understand it. I don't have much truck with the idea of increasing experience improving cultivation.
The more experience I get, the more incomprehensible it all seems to be.
23rd October 2022
Camellia 'Takanini' .
I have been watching for Camellia flowers in the garden. A friend has the first C. sasanqua in bloom, and I saw a magnificent C.sinensis flowering at Nymans
a week ago. Nothing here, I can't even see buds on the C.sasanqua cultivars. C. brevistyla has tiny buds forming that will become tiny flowers, but not for a few more
weeks. I even checked out C. 'Nobilissima' for an early and enthusiastic accident but there was nothing to see. I was convinced that I would have to wait for the December flowers of
C. 'Show Girl' to prove that the seasons were hastening along towards spring.
I was surprised to find a flower on 'Takanini'. When it was in the greenhouse it had a very long flowering season, but I thought that life in the garden might curtail its exuberant glee.
In some ways it has. In cold weather the scarlet flowers turn purple, evidence that there is a chill in the night air now.
It seems too early to think about Spring, even for me, but there are snowdrops in the greenhouse, Primula flowering early and a Camellia in the garden.
The declining days of Autumn are still setting the tone, but even as the last Hedychium flowers rage against the gloomy skies, next year's new shoots are forming at their base.