A YEAR AT HENLEY MILL
‘One continuous pleasure’
Sally Gregson’s garden alongside the River Axe has suffered like most from a hot, dry summer but September she says is the time of year when it’s like starting again - new subjects, new friends, more challenges.
I interplanted the Salvia with rosy-white Gaura lindheimeri which did work well visually and seemed distasteful to the long-eared foe. But next season I will combine the Gaura with another survivor, Oenothera stricta ‘Sulphurea’. This evening primrose has moon-yellow flowers that fade apricot the next morning. Its calyxes and stems are soft buff pink and the whole plant flowers continuously all season. And it too produces quantities of seed.
And the Oxford-blue spires of Salvia uliginosa and royal-blue S. patens combined with white cosmos, white antirrhinums and Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’ proved a winner. So I shall be collecting seed of most of these so that I can colonise the whole area next summer. I mulched this salvia-populated area with fallen holly leaves. Perhaps they deterred the soft- pawed bunnies.
On a dry day this month I will arm myself with large, used, paper envelopes, plant labels and a pen, and go seed
Taking seeds from an Evening Primrose
For me a garden is such a continuous pleasure that it’s hard to decide when one year ends and another starts. But in September I feel like a school-girl starting a new year: new subjects, new friends, more challenges; all based on what has already been learned from experience.
Not only was this summer hot and dry, but it seemed to be a trial by rabbit in our garden and I am gradually discovering the hard way what our local population finds palatable. Consequently most of my favourite Salvia ‘Purple Rain’ with its summer-long, misty blue and lilac spires will need to be re-planted further back into the border: I refuse to be without them.
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Country Gardener
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