lime-tolerant plants

Quick improvements in late summer to Acanthus spinosus

I’ve just updated the Limestone Garden website with some useful new info on keeping Acanthus spinosus looking good in late summer and early autumn.

Prostrate flower spikes and tattered leaves on late-summer Acanthus spinosus

This vigorous plant grows with enthusiasm, looking happy, healthy and lush even while other plants wilt as the sunny summer days fail to provide any rain. By late August the tall flower spikes fall to the ground, and the lower layers of those lush leaves are looking distinctly yellowed. What is more, in our garden I can’t easily cut the grass without shredding them messily, so they have to be brought under control.

Therefore, the secateurs come out, all prostrate flowers spikes are removed at their base and a good lot of the bottom-most layers of straggly leaves are removed. They head for the compost, while the resident frog settles in again under the remaining leaves.

Acanthus spinosus in late summer after tidying.

(Those white flowers next to the Acanthus are a white gaura (Gaura lindheimeri), which I grew from seed in 2014 from RHS seeds 14/57.)

Sagging Lonicera hedging in the snow – a solution

Sagging Lonicera hedge in the snow
old hedge

We woke to our first snowfall for years, and it has snowed (damply) all day. A shortcoming of our Lonicera nitida front hedge is again exposed, and I can look forward to a year or two or three of remedial activity. Before the snow, the top of that hedge was as level as three painstaking cuttings in the year could make it. Although it looks quite pretty, the compressed shoots won’t recover their previous height even if I knock the snow off now.

This old front hedge seems to be only a single line of (very) mature plants (I speculate that they date from the 1930s), with all of depth of the hedge provided by about 60cm of tangled, densely packed, old, dry stems. I have reduced the width a lot (I thought) already, putting up with a couple of years of brown patches in the side of the hedge as the old shoots woke up to the idea of sprouting again.

new lonicera hedge in snow with level top
new hedge

However a newer, double-planted Lonicera nitida hedge that has been regularly cut since planting has stood up to the snow much better. And thus I realise (1) I need to keep up the cutting of this new hedge, and not let it get too thick and (2) in early spring I need to grit my teeth and even-more-drastically cut back the old hedge to a width of about 20cm, and maybe plant a second row of new plants, and feed and water it, and hope for the best.

The contrast between the two hedges is quite obvious and I thought it might be of interest to anyone else contemplating a saggy, snow-covered Lonicera hedge.

Roses

Pink/red roses in the sun
Rosa Paul’s Scarlet

I was really pleased with a new solution for our south-facing terrace beds: Rosa ‘Paul’s Scarlet’ has put on a fantastic show for a first June in place, and now in July it is sending out new shoots aplenty, so I’m looking forward to more.

It has been fed in spring, fed while flowering and had a bit of extra water, because turns out it is susceptible to powdery mildew (Podosphaera pannosa) especially in dry soils – which of course is what we have. Bizarre as it sounds, spraying the rose with diluted milk while it is sunny is reputed to control the mildew, and it does seem to have done some good. At least, the mildew didn’t get any worse and was largely imperceptible. And no smell of bad milk, I’m glad to report although I did get some traces of the spray visible on the leaves after a particularly enthusiastic (and entertaining) spraying session. Another component of an integrated control approach is to deadhead carefully, removing the waste. The council composting bins can have the detritus, as our compost wouldn’t necessarily get hot enough to kill the fungus.

I have copied the training of this climbing rose over bamboo ‘half-circle’ loops from Waterperry Gardens and so far I’m finding it works prettily underplanted with winter and summer savories (Satureja montana and S. hortensis), and Salvia. Really the salvias should be too big but I think the conditions are fierce, which has conveniently limited their size.

This rose is even from an appropriate period for our 1930s house, as it was first introduced in 1916 by the William Paul company.

Bibliography:

https://garden.org/plants/view/3818/Rose-Rosa-Pauls-Scarlet-Climber/

http://homeguides.sfgate.com/care-pauls-scarlet-roses-24607.html

Save