JEARRARD'S HERBAL
Thats enough introduction - on with the plants!
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... out in the garden.
12th October 2025
Allium thunbergii 'Ozawa' .
The tone of autumn in the garden has changed this week. For a few weeks the garden has still been filled with screams of illumination like the distant sounds of summer's roller-coaster.
This week a new face has been revealed, like turning over a stone and finding a sleeping toad. The sunshine is watery, the grass remains wet. Autumn colour is beginning to show in the Liquidambar.
We may still get some bright days at the end of October , possibly even into November, when the light lands in its branches like a flock of twitching migratory birds.
The tree will fill briefly with restless life and movement and then it will be gone.
The sleeping toad is blinking blearily, the garden is heavy and the colours match its mood.
Some days are filled with joy, others with dread. Onions are exactly the same. They say that a wise man "knows his onions" and a wise man knows when to stay in bed.
I slept through the last rain storm and congratulated myself for my good sense. I could have put on wellingtons and trudged around despondently but the bed was warm.
I don't grow many onions deliberately. Allium 'Purple Sensation' sputters like a dying firework if the deer leave me any flowers. I had more-or-less given up the genus
until I discovered the autumn flowering forms. Allium thunbergii is a tiny Japanese species that seems to prosper in a pot in the greenhouse, sleeping flaccidly through the summer heat
and then wiping the sleep from its leaves to flower in autumn. I am enchanted in a rather slow and leaden way.
12th October 2025
Geranium procurrens .
Slow and leaden, ha! Chance would be a fine thing. In my youth I had a bit of a thing for Geranium. Margery Fish said 'When in doubt, plant a Geranium". Doubts crowd like threatening spectres in a young mind
so I had a lot of geraniums. I still have two of them. Geranium x oxonianum/endressii once filled the garden with cheery seedlings. I had about an acre of them at one point
and not a single one of them distinct enough to keep. I have removed them slowly, but they still stage an occasional comeback like a disgraced politician who can't let go.
I was delighted when I stumbled across Geranium procurrens. It had intriguing dark eyed flowers and is quietly intent on global domination. When I first bought it, I thought I had been very lucky.
Forty years later I wonder if the Geranium had actually been planning it all along. "There's a gullible young man, he lives in Cornwall. I shall go home with him and the county will be mine, ha ha ha ha!"
I have tried to kill it, I have hit it so hard that I have exhausted myself, and still it prospers. I like it, I am fond of it but it still terrifies me.
From time to time the sunlight catches the flowers and the garden is a better place for its presence. There is a Geranium for every location.
This one is planning to be it.
12th October 2025
Persicaria amplexicaulis 'Eastfield' .
I have a penchant, let's put it no higher than that, for thugs in the garden. Things that will look after themselves without a great deal of effort from me.
Sometimes it works, sometimes I regret it. Persicaria campanulata does what it can to dominate the Geranium. There's a fight that would be worth televising.
Forget the Rumble in the Jungle, this would be Disorder in the Borders. That is a face-off that might finally seal the fate of this garden. In the meantime
I try to keep them apart, keep things civil. In the last resort I will hide in the house and sell tickets.
Persicaria amplexicaulis has been more managable though I do worry that they might just be humouring me. P. a. 'Atrosanguinea' has been lurking under the same tree for the same forty years
without any slight encouragement from me. I sometimes think that it is just biding its time.
I like most variegated things. P. a. 'Eastfield' was a no-brainer for me when I saw it offered. It came home with me and spent a decade in the same pot under a magnolia.
I nearly killed it with prevarication many times. The problem was that I was slightly afraid of what it might do.
Last year I had nothing but a single sickly shoot with two dying leaves. I planted it out and twelve months later this is the result.
I am enchanted and still afraid.
12th October 2025
Spiranthes 'Chadd's Ford'
Spiranthes 'Chadd's Ford' was found in a ditch. One might expect it to be rather vigorous and under some circumstances I am sure it can be.
With me it has always been a bit reluctant to grow. Something I do, or don't do, doesn't suit it. I have killed and replaced it a couple of times, I am learning
(glacially) slowly. I would like it to be a bit invasive, a bit stroppy even, but instead it is fey. It looks fine all summer then sends up flower spikes
and promptly drops all of its leaves. I should feed it more, I think it wants more sunshine. Perhaps it needs a lighter compost. Would it prefer to live in a ditch?
After years of speculation about its proper identity, it is now called Spiranthes x bightensis, thought to be a natural hybrid between S. cernua and S. odorata .
It has been a frustrating thing to grow, and life imitates language.
Many times I have called it a bastard.
To find particular groups of plants I grow, click on the genus name in the table above. Click on the "Index" box at the top of the page for the full list.
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