Blog

Just before Christmas I was telling a friend that I’d spotted and lusted over a stunning plant of Clematis x jackmanii ‘Superba’ in our local nursery, and, though I’d planned to plant one in t ...

Some plants just make you ache.  There’s thousands of plants I like, hundreds that I love, and just a few that can make my heart skip a beat – plants that hold my attention for ages, and then hav ...

Car troubles yesterday had me walking home from the garage.   I didn’t regret this at all, as I’d spotted one or two Gladiolus tristis in the grass on the side of the road from the car, and I wa ...

It’s diabolically windy out there.  I’m wondering if guy-ropes might help to keep the house on location, like Gulliver pinned to the ground by the Lilliputians.  Must get me some decent pegs. It ...

With about one sunny day every seven – if we’re lucky – I’m changing the terms by which I judge a snowdrop. On those occasional sunny days you can almost hear the snowdrops making stretching n ...

There are few individual plants for which I’d be happy to be part of a greeting party – for which I’d consider it a privilege to line up for the chance to shake their hand as they entered the wo ...

I was wandering through a client’s garden the other day, and casually said something nice about Sedum ‘Matrona’, which was looking sensational.  The reply was more spat than said.  “I don’ ...

If you’ve followed the discussion after that last post (I love those replies), you’d have seen Cathy’s on Sternbergia – an Autumn-flowering crocus-like thing. It had me trawling through pics t ...

Seems like some climbers are happier when they’re going up, and others when they’re going out.  The wisteria I kept going on about back in early summer absolutely rocketed up its wire, but lost i ...

I’ve never had any problem remembering the name of this fabulous sedum.  I can’t, even if I wanted to, shake the lingering images of Steve Martin playing Prince Ruprecht in Dirty Rotten Scoundrel ...

Clearly there’s supernatural forces attached to blogging.  It seems as if by making any form of declaration or assertion, wild or conservative (I’ve a habitual preference for the former), your ex ...

Driving to a clients place a few years back, I was all but blinded by this outrageous garden en route, bursting at the seams with Gladiolus dalenii.  I had to stop and take some pics. (Apologies for ...

Some time late last night, while no one was watching, that deceptively feeble looking shoot made it to the top Now it should start photographing me, to measure the response time taken to establish the ...

I was lounging on the verandah Saturday afternoon and, with nothing else to dwell on,  was wondering (loungingly) if the feeble little vertical shoot of wisteria that had finally got the idea of wind ...

I’m still on the hellebore thing, and have just today got my hands on the most sensational macro lens – two good reasons to show some pics of Helleborus ‘Penny’s Pink’.  A third and altoget ...

I’m supposed to be doing that promised final post on meadows.  But I want to shoot off on a short tangent just cos its current, and if I don’t do it now the moment will have passed. The miniature ...

‘Did you say yellow hellebores?’ I hear you cry..(actually there was no such cry, but come on, I’m tryin to get some back and forth going here) ...

Neither snowdrops or hellebores are frost sensitive, and they’re happy in climates colder than the coldest of ours in Australia.  But that’s not to say that they’re unaffected by frost.   When ...