I am sitting in the garden eating strawberries and yoghurt for breakfast. I am toying with the idea of fasting for the rest of the day due to an optimistic step onto the scales this morning which then plunged me into gloom. Irritatingly, I know the inexorable rise of my body weight will motivate me only for an hour or so, then it will be back to the coffee cake mid-morning. Heigh ho, on to my six for today:
- My totally favourite rose ‘Munstead Wood’. Named for the Surrey house and garden of Getrude Jekyll, the garden designed by Edwin Lutyens. The rose is a large, multi-petalled bloom, deep velvety claret colour and a sweet scent which is wafting its way towards me as I sit at the table on the patio (I may start to say ‘terrace’ – so much less suburban). It has quite a lax growth and really needed a bit of support this year, but I like the way it sprawls across the mound of erigeron and props itself up on a neighbouring verbena bonariensis.
- There are ten baby apples on the tree that we bought last year. There would have been twelve but MrOG snapped a stem while trying to untangle a clematis tendril. It’s still in a large pot because – sssh… don’t tempt fate – we are planning to move and want to take it with us. It’s an old variety, ‘Red Windsor’, and last year’s apples were tasty, although I think they will benefit from a little longer on the tree this season. We were too impatient to taste our first home-grown apples last year!
- This cloud of violet-blue is hardy geranium ‘Nimbus’. It was planted from a 9cm pot last spring and is already fulfilling its promise of being ‘fast growing and floriferous’. It is covering the dicentra that has gone over and is a good foil for the hostas behind it. The marigolds in this picture are entirely serendipitous – they appeared in a little cluster and are adding their cheerful, uninvited faces to the front of the border. I stopped for a minute just then to watch a pair of buzzards circling overhead and calling to each other. Still quite low, they were being harried in a half-hearted way by a single crow. In that bored way that buzzards have, they flipped a nonchalant wing at the crow, made a marginal change of direction and carried on circling in the thermal that would take them higher and higher over the garden.
- Some of you may remember the single cherry harvest of last year. This year we have an abundance of 15! It’s ‘Morello’, recommended for a north facing site but it’s looking decidedly unhappy against the wall. It has only produced leaves at the ends of the stems and although there was a good amount of blossom it only came to the 15 fruit. I wish they would all ripen at once so that I can at least pick them and preserve them in brandy. Frustratingly they are all at different stages but I will wait a little longer and hope the wood pigeons don’t get them.
- This is the offending clematis that was finding its way around the little apple tree. It’s clematis florida sieboldii and really doesn’t offend at all. It’s a bit spindly at the base because I didn’t prune it back earlier in the season, but it’s still producing lots of flowers. When the buds first open, the outer petals are a delicate pale green and the inner petals almost black. As it widens they turn to papery white and purple and last really well. Behind it is the hydrangea petiolaris which this year has rewarded our nurturing with two flowers. Double the production of last year. Yay.
- And this, dear gardening pals, is the view from where I am sitting. The stone tortoise on the table was rescued from my Dad’s garden after he died and is an everyday reminder. I have been here for an hour or so, lazily writing this, drinking tea, watching the birds, looking at the garden and generally feeling pleased with myself. I told you that the weight-gain-gloom wouldn’t last.
If you want to get a glimpse of lovely gardens from across the world, and chat to lots of lovely gardeners, then go here https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/six-on-saturday-a-participant-guide/ and join in!!
Happy gardening!
The O.G.
The Optimistic Gardener 
That rose is stunning.
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Lovely post June. I don’t do shrub roses, but perhaps I should. MW is a lovely colour. I also quite fancy Lady Emma Hamilton, as it were.
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Thanks. I have 3, all from David Austin. I bought direct from the nursery and they are fantastic. Healthy, full go flower after just two years. If you want Emma, go get her!
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Your fruit trees are producing about the same rate as my own – 1 plum, 4 pears, & 1 honeyberry. Loved the explanation for Munstead Wood. And that clematis, not offending at all! Very enjoyable Six.
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Our plum tree does well – we had masses of plums last year. It does get silver leaf tho and looks horrible, but the fruit are OK> This year we have had a big June ‘drop’ but there are still lots of little plumlets growing on. I absolutely will never grow another Morello cherry. The disappointment is too much to bear!
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Those are nice, although scarce, cherries. We grew up with only sweet cherries here. They were either the third or fourth most common of the fruits in the formerly vast orchards of the Santa Clara Valley, after apricot and prune, and maybe walnut. However, no one remembers the tart cherries. We know they were out there because some of them were pollinators for some of the sweet cherries, but sweet cherries were all we remember. Sweet cherries were used for everything, so some of us grew up believing that cherry pies were supposed to be that bland.
That clematis bloom looks like the bloom of a passion fruit vine! They were very long lived weeds in Beverly Hills (in the Los Angeles region). They were grown for fruit a VERY long time ago, and they STILL grow from roots where houses have been since the 1930s! They won’t die.
Your Yucca elephantipes is rad too. They can get HUGE!
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It does look like a passion flower – fortunately they last for longer – we also have a fairly useless passion flower vine which is pathetic and gives us one flower at a time that lasts a day. Definitely going on the compost heap this autumn.
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For us, the clematis are usually weak, and bloom only briefly in spring. There happen to be at least three at work that are doing better than most, but even they are not very big. Two of them are still blooming!
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