A half-finished corner

A day spent digging, until the weather came in, at least. Doesn't look at all spectacular, and the lawn is a little worse-for-wear (since it's had half a tonne of soil and rocks on it for the past six months), but very happy to have that little white cherry tree (centre) in place at last.

For those playing at home, that assortment of twigs and trees from left to right is (not including the trees right along the fence): the grafted weeping mulberry, dwarf white cherry, thornless lemon (at back), my beloved Moorpark apricot (largest), and the dwarf black cherry (far right).

Underneath so far, and so small most are almost invisible, are a couple of volunteer broad beans, three Salvia leucantha, two Penstemons (I think "blackbird" possibly, cuttings from an unknown variety in my mother-in-law's garden), one surviving peony (forget which), "Munstead Wood" David Austin rose, a prostrate caper, some Gaura from self-sown seedlings transplanted from the front garden, "Sandford" raspberry, and far too many Oxalis pes-caprae (Sour Sobs) that I just can't seem to stamp out. That seems like a lot, now that I make a list, but there is more depth to this area than appears in this 'in-progress' shot. And, let's face it, I tend to over-plant. 

From Saturday, there'll be a couple more plants in here because it's ROSES COLLECTION DAY! Wheee! 

This autumn's obsessions

I have recently been obsessing over (reading about, buying, planting...) Penstemons of all varieties, Cosmos atrosanguineus (Chocolate cosmos), Nepeta spp., Salvia spp (including, but not limited to, Salvia leucantha, Salvia nemerosa, and Salvia discolor), Agastache spp, Perovskia atriplicifolia (Russian Sage). I seem to be creating a perfect hummingbird-attracting backyard; shame we live on the wrong continent. Let's hope honeyeaters will enjoy these plants just as much. 

Pictured below are  just a few of my newest acquisitions. I might have bought out most of Adelaide of the supply of smaller (read: cheaper) Chocolate Cosmos... 

Edit: forgive the strange bold/not-bolded text. Sometimes technology will not cooperate with me. 

A series of mishaps

A whole ten days ago I posted that I had some penstemon and geranium cuttings waiting for me to pot them up. It has, as I mentioned, been a long ten days since then. Apart from the various illnesses doing the rounds of the family, there was also the part where I was walking home from work, after getting off the bus at 3am last Saturday night. One minute I'm calmly, but quickly, walking along (it was very cold, wet, dark, windy...), and then next thing I know I'm lying on the side of the road. In the mud. I'd stepped right on the edge of the asphalt, and my ankle gave way beneath me, tossing me over into the gutter: SPLAT. All very undignified. My ankle hurt; the palm of my hand hurt, and there were some furious embarrassed tears too (although, at 3am, it's not like anyone saw me.) And I'm then sitting there, ankle hurting, owwww, how am I going to get home now? Before my better-self piped up with, oh just get over it, stand up for Heaven's sake, can you walk on the ankle, or not? Staggering to my feet, I realised sheepishly that my ankle was not, in fact, broken, and I could limp the last 200m home, where once I got into the light and the warm I realised I was quite literally covered in mud, leaves and debris to my waist, and I even had mud in my eyebrows. In my eyebrows! Good work, if I do say so myself. The next day my ankle hardly hurt at all, my hand had barely a scratch, but my wrist was hurting and my whole knee had turned purple (and still is) which is ironic because I didn't even realise I'd banged it at the time.

Anyway. Moving on.

So, as I said, it was a bit windy that night. I discovered in the morning that apart from my purple knee, the wind had blown my cuttings off the table outside -where I'd left them because I was going to pot them up 'any minute now,' and smashed the glass all over the paving. Bugger.
I rescued what I could and put them back into some water (where they languished for another week).


During the week we went around to our little cottage and I pottered in the garden out the front, clipping roses, planting strawberries, planting my second persimmon, and also, as it transpired, doing a little impromptu pruning on one of my favourite correas by being careless with the hose, accidentally ripping off the entire leading branch. Feck. I guess that particular plant is destined to be even more of a ground cover than I had intended. I thought I might be able to save some of it somehow, so took it home and put it in a container of water by the sink. Look how big it was!


What's a girl-gardener to do? When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. (An unfair judgement on lemons I always think; I like lemons particularly.) Or when you accidentally rip out half a correa, try to take as many cuttings from the poor soul as you can. Like so. Or not like so. This is not meant as instructions because I have very little clue, I'm just winging it really, but more of a record of 'What Katie Did Next.'

This is as far as I've gotten with my propagating for a week: filled pots. They've been waiting, and waiting... and waiting... for me to get my act together.


Then I clipped off as many usable correa twigs as I could and pulled off most of the leaves.


I trimmed them all off to the same sort of size and dipped the ends into the rooting powder.


Then I made a little forest of them in a pot. There may be too many in here, but then I'm assuming that most of them, if not all, will not strike.


While I was there, I finally got around to making cuttings of the penstemon and the geraniums too.


Like little ducks all in a row...


I'll update this one in a couple of months or so when I know if it worked or not.

May your working week pass quickly xx

Lurgy lurking

I've got The Dreaded Lurgy (MIL had it, then SP had it, then me, D next?). Still, I am pretty robust, generally speaking, and feel vastly better already compared to very early this morning, which I put down to my famous 'stomach of steel.'

The plan for today, before I was struck down and confined to bed for the day, was to pot up the cuttings I took the other day, which are waiting calmly and greenly for me on the kitchen windowsill. I noticed them when I was lying on the floor trying not to be sick, or pass out (my body, at that moment, couldn't seem to make up it's mind. Fortunately, after a few minutes 'resting' on the cold lino, I did neither.)


From left to right I have: Penstemon (magenta flowers as in yesterday's bouquet, see the photo below), then a big pelagonium, then a little ground cover-type pelagonium I have fallen in love with (see here, halfway down, bright fuchsia-coloured flowers, green-grey leaves), then another big pelagonium. Or are they geraniums? Anyway, I don't know exactly what they are but they are all dense, very leafy mounding types, rather than the leggy sort.

I found some pots in the shed, I have a new bag of potting mix, and I've even gone all out and bought a little bag of rooting powder to help them along (after staring blankly at the rooting gels on the shelves in a certain Humongous Hardware Store and wondering if my cuttings were hard wood, soft wood, or medium wood.) As you may have guessed, I'm a propagation newbie. I've tried a few things here and there, but without much success, apart from a furry peppermint geranium which I merely snapped a few bits from the mother plant, poked them in the ground and then forgot about them. Some things need no care or knowledge at all!

So wish me luck, both that I'm up and about tomorrow, and that this bumbling gardener successfully propagates at least one or two plants out of this bunch.