JEARRARD'S HERBAL
28th September 2025
Roscoea purpurea 'Red Gurkha' .
The sun came out and it wasn't summer. There is a small pleasure in the unequivocal reality of autumn. We have had coffee in the garden this week, we have even had lunch, but we haven't had summer.
On Wednesday the garden was completely still and the sun shone with the best of intentions but the temperature hardly rose and the bright light was gripped firmly by the long fingers of shadow.
We had a celebratory lunch to mark the arrival of autumn. The sort of thing that might have been given to Roman gladiators before they entered the arena. Some soup, lovely little rolls,
perhaps some delicate cheese. You know the sort of thing. Summer that is about to die salutes you.
In the garden Roscoea purpurea is still flowering. It looks a little fatigued, as though it had just had a little tussle with a lion, but it is hanging on.
In the greenhouse autumn has accelerated. Roscoea purpurea 'Red Gurkha' has cloaked itself in autumn gold. It doesn't do it in the garden, it just stops flowering and then the stems fall off.
The calm warmth of the greenhouse coaxes another bright moment from it before the end arrives.
28th September 2025
Colchicum autumnale 'Alboplenum' .
Many plants in the garden proclaim the doctrine of late summer. They grow through the warm months and then burst into spectacular flower as the days shorten.
In a dry sunny garden they would be asters and salvias. In my garden it is the dahlias and Hedychium that perform the same function.
An early summer filled with lush promise and a late summer spectacle of floral vindication.
My garden is a Cornish garden, and Cornish gardens are about spring. Here the autumn bulbs flower with an unmistakable message of spring. The last spring azaleas flowered with a flourish in June
and the first Colchicum x agrippinum flowered in August. Summer here is more of a traffic-filled blip between the residue of one spring and the promise of the next.
When Colchicum x agrippinum flowered I realised that bulb planting season had reached the garden. Colchicum autumnale 'Alboplenum' was tipped out of the tub it has occupied for a decade,
the bulbs were split into small clumps and they were planted in a loose group in the new herbaceous border. This year the flowering will be moderate - they had already started to grow when I moved them -
but I am hoping that next year they will have benefited from a luxurious life in richer soil.
I was slow to take to Colchicum. Something about the nonchalant way they will flower from dry corms disturbed me. They were being flippant and not playing a serious game.
Perhaps I have become less intensely serious, I have taken to them now.
28th September 2025
Nerine (exbury copper 2 x Dingaan) .
Nerine hybrids are flowering in the greenhouse. Nerine bowdenii is flowering in the garden. They look like autumn flowers but they are really just spring daffodils with personality disorders.
As the Nerine bowdenii seedlings open in the garden I walk around and wonder why I rejected this one and why I didn't keep the next? I raised hundreds, there are hundreds still to be sorted.
I have held on to a dozen that I estimated the best, the rest went into the borders. If one comes up with blue flowers that play the Trumpet Voluntary as they open then I might reconsider
but otherwise the decision has been made, the sorting has been done.
Among the hybrid Nerine this is going to be the decisive year for the seedlings. I have already selected too many from the latest batch, one last check over the remainder
and then the benches are being cleared ready for a new crop of seedlings. For a couple of years I concentrated on purple and red colours and now I have far too many of them.
This seedling is a lovely colour but is it lovely enough? Over the next week the flower head will open properly and I will make a final decision. Then I will move on.
I have started to yearn for white flowers on stems like rhubarb.
28th September 2025
Galanthus reginae-olgae 'Ruby's Green Dream'
The summer Roscoea started to flower early this year. The first Colchicum flowered while I was still faffing around with the fluff of summer. The Nerine came so fast
that I missed the opportunity to do many really early hybrids (but seed is already fattening on the one I did get to).
I should have anticipated the arrival of spring. Last week I was still convinced that I could yank the weed out of the autumn snowdrop pots without trouble.
Then I noticed that the first stems had appeared. In previous years Galanthus reginae-olgae 'Blanc de Chine' has been the first up, and there is no sign of it at the moment.
I am slightly worried but not yet distraught.
'Ruby's Green Dream' has been developing very rapidly in the sunshine. The bulbs are increasing but not as rapidly as I would like.
It would probably help if I remembered to feed them. Yesterday evening the garden filled with drizzle, today it is overcast and dank, it is a perfect time for fiddling about with feed in the greenhouse
and pretending it's an urgent task.
I will daydream in the warmth and look into the distance at the approach of spring.