Teasing Iris

Multiple times I have complaint on this blog that bearded irises simply won't grow for me in my garden. Since I really love them, I always felt very disappointed about that.

I had five rhizomes of a white variety called 'Platinum', that were perishing in the front yard, saved from sure death by potting them up in plastic containers. They were sitting in my pot ghetto forever and weren't doing well in the containers either. So a few months ago I decided I will give bearded irises one last chance and planted two of those half-dead rhizomes in a different location in the 'White Garden Bed' in the back yard.

One was thriving almost from the get go, producing plenty of the lovely green-blue lance shaped leaves and presented me with one lovely flower stalk not too long ago, just reminding me how incredible beautiful bearded iris flowers are.




The one, which was flowering was planted in the background on the left side of the rose. The other one you can barely see on the right site of the rose, just planted a few feet away from the first, wasn't growing and wasn't dying. On closer inspection I found out that the soil surrounding that one was bone dry and the sprinkler were obviously not reaching it. At least this is a cause for not growing that I can understand and hopefully fix. So I fertilized the iris and water it deeply once or twice a week and see how it responds.




I think 'Platinum' is a particular beautiful, reblooming, tall, bearded iris variety. The color of the flower is a grey-ish white and it comes with a light yellow beard. The blooms look quite sophisticated in my eyes. The iris was bred by Byers and introduced 1994. Besides the unusual flower color it also has a great fragrance. For me this iris certainly is a show stopper!

I think that bearded iris are very nice plants when they are not in bloom as well. Their blue-ish green-ish lanced shaped leaves look stunning at any time. They make perfect companion plants for roses, but are nice partners for many other plants, too.

I am still not sure if I can grow bearded irises in my garden successfully in the long run. But after being able to enjoy these gorgeous blooms I am certainly motivated to give those beauties more time to find out if I somehow can make them feel at home here.




Wishing everyone a Happy Halloween!

See you in the garden!

Christina

Almost End of Summer

Actually, I can't believe that we are almost approaching the end of the summer already. Where has the time gone by? Even though many good things come with the summer, here in Southern California it is not an easy season neither for the garden nor the gardener. Highest day temperatures have been consistently anywhere from the 80ties to the 90ties over the last couple of weeks. Most plants suffer in this continuous heat or at least don't like it and need plenty of water to get through it. That means for me that I am hand-watering, and hand-watering, and hand-watering, despite that we have sprinkler systems in most parts of the garden. Still it is simply not enough and some plants, like the roses, benefit very much from deep-watering once or twice a week. Also most of my containers have to be watered daily in this weather. To be completely honest with you, by now, like every year, I am pretty fed up with my watering duties.

Despite that I still try to water as much as I can time-wise, because when the roses are watered and fertilized in my climate zone most of them continue to flower through the heat of summer. The blooms don't last that long though, in some varieties only a day, so there is tons of deadheading to do as well to keep the garden looking good.

In the following I would like to give you some impressions of what has been going on in my garden in the last couple of weeks. 

'Marie Pavie' is one of the roses that actually seems to like the heat and is pumping out one flush after the other. She is having a blue hardy geranium 'Rozanne' as a companion to grow with, which also doesn't seem to mind the warm weather. I love this combination. Both plants are fairly easy to grow in my garden.

Usually summer is not the time to do bigger garden projects, because it is simply too uncomfortable to work in the heat. But on 4th of July my husband and I decided that it is finally time for 'Madame Alfred Carriere', a tea-noissette rose, to go into the ground. You can see her in the foreground in the big terracotta container in the middle of this photo.

She was supposed to go into the very left corner of our backyard, between the metal fence and the wooden fence, right behind 'Georgetown Tea' (rose bush in the foreground), a pink Tea rose.

I had hired the gardener to pre-dig a nice big hole and my husband enlarged it the morning before we planted the rose. Usually in our bad soil I prefer a size of three feet width and two feet depths for a new planting hole for a rose. I completely discard the original soil, which is mostly stones and exchange it with organic rose soil.

While my husband was digging I pruned off the long canes of 'Madame Alfred Carriere', just to make her easier to handle for us. Here the dolly is already waiting to roll her over to her planting hole.

  And in the planting hole she is!

In the photo above shown from another angle. I think she looks fantastic already and seems to enjoy having her feet in cool soil instead of the hot terracotta container. 

This photo doesn't picture it very well, but 'Madame Alfred Carriere' is filling in the corner behind 'Georgetown Tea' nicely. I know that I am taking a little bit of a gamble with 'Madame Alfred Carriere', because she can be prone to powdery mildew in my climate, but you never know until you try. I have seen an absolute breathtaking specimen in another garden not too far away, though. So I keep my fingers crossed that mine will develop into a lovely white flowering rose and not into a mildew monster.

On the picture above I have captured a bloom of 'Georgetown Tea'. I love the frilliness of the flowers of this rose. Always reminds me of ballerina tutus.

On the photos further above you see that 'Georgetown Tea' has only a few flowers at the time I took them. That is mostly due to not enough water and fertilizer. So after planting 'Madame Alfred Carriere' I fertilized 'Georgetown Tea' generously with fish emulsion as an emergency fix and then organic rose fertilizer and alfalfa meal for more long term nourishment. Then I just have to wait and see what happens with both roses. Well, actually I have to water as well...  But I have to tell you that 'Georgetown Tea' broke out into a flush of blooms and 'Madame Alfred Carriere', too. Now they are back to their green selves and I have to feed them, again.

This hydrangea was planted in the ground just a few month ago and I saw it flowering for the first time in my soil. When I bought it as an unnamed hydrangea at one of the big box stores the flowers were huge and blue, but in my alkaline soil they turned out to be pink, which is a little bit of disappointment for me. With all my pink blooming roses I am always looking to introduce other colors to the garden.

Here you can see a full bush shot of the hydrangea. The color of leaves is turning a little bit into a light green and I guess that this is either due to the heat, not enough water or lack of nutrients. So I intend to feed it and check if the soil feels too dry around the plant.

This is catmint 'Walkers Low'. I planted two of them just a couple of weeks ago and they do amazingly well in the heat. I am very surprised that I haven't seen this plant in the neighborhood at all, because in my garden it seems to be so easy to grow. Another plus it that it attracts a lot of bees.

'Pierre de Ronsard', started its second flush a few weeks ago even though it is not fertilized. I simply love this rose.

This pictures of 'Pierre de Ronsard' was taken from the side and you can see that the rose has grown to a very decent size. I have to tie the long canes up to the fence since they make mowing the lawn very hard for my gardener.

This sad little thing is 'Sir Henry Segrave', a rare early Hybrid Tea rose. I thought he hadn't survived our vacation and was debating with myself whether to just throw him out or keep him and pot him up to see if he comes back from the roots. If it wouldn't be such a beautiful and rare rose I wouldn't have bothered, but in this case I don't know if you can acquire this rose anywhere commercially nowadays since it came from Vintage Gardens nursery, which is closing very soon. So I thought it would be worth to try to rescue it. Being busy like I am I didn't even get to pot the rose up, but made sure it was well watered and...




... a few weeks later there were new leaves. Even though this was wonderful I know better than getting my hopes up too high. In my experience, when a rose is damaged to this extend, it is very difficult for it to survive. The slightest glitch in watering, too less as well as too much, will push it over the edge and it will die, so I try my best but hold my breath!

Even though I don't get to blog as often as I would like to, I have been wondering how the summer for other gardeners and my fellow garden bloggers has been going. I am sure you had your share of ups and downs as well. I would love to hear from you, so if you can spare a moment, please leave a comment on my blog.

See you in the garden!

Christina

Manor Farm, Hampreston - Part II

We continued to explore the big private garden of the Manor Farm (please click here to see my first post) and discovered an area that showcases the roses in formal boxwood edged beds located in the back of the property. The walls of the house here were covered in a humongous wisteria, which looked so pretty, but I am glad that I don't have to prune this plant to keep it in check!

Unfortunately the roses were not in bloom, yet. Just very few bushes had a flower or two. But the boxwood edged beds were so beautiful by themselves, that it really didn't matter to me.

The same garden area, but looking more to the left. In this photo you can see the formal, symmetrical layout of the rose garden even better.

There were also more herbaceous borders to discover surrounded by a lovely stone wall. Here I like the different color of foliage, especially how the light yellow hosta stands out.

On the photo above you can see the yellow hosta more closely. I think it is so pretty, that the light greenish-yellow leaves have a stripe of darker green around the edges.

This poppy will surely not be overlooked. The red color was so intense, absolutely spectacular!

You just have to love these old stone walls. This one is almost as colorful as a painting and enhances the lovely border in front of it so much. 

This and the following photos show some close-ups of the plants you could find in the border pictured above.

I really liked the delicateness of the flowers of the plants that were used here.

The cheerful yellow rose together with lilac alliums, a combination that is hard to beat!

Walking further to the left, the border is taking on more blue hues.

Close-up of some plants from the border shown in the photo above.




This is my favorite plant in the whole garden. It is flowering in a spectacular clear blue tone that was truly calling your attention. Mrs. Trehane, the owner of the garden, was so nice to tell me the name, but unfortunately I wasn't writing it down immediately and later I forgot. May I ask again, if anyone reading this blog knows what it is, please, please leave me a comment!

Looking back towards the house and the formal rose garden. This photo indicates how spacious this property is. I really like the spacious lawn areas. You could breath there and the senses had a place to rest and calm down. And, of course, in England the lawns are greener than anywhere else in the world!

Just have a closer look at this container. See how lovingly it is planted with so many different individual plants? For me, in this property and in others that we saw, the attention to detail that the British folks put into their gardens is just amazing and really touched my heart.

A particular lovely clematis adorning a wooden post belonging to a pergola that was shading a seating area where we sat down to take our Cream Tea.

On the way out of the garden we passed this stunning bed which was running around the back of the house. The contrast between the very dark green yew hedge and fresh light green of the boxwood hedge is already striking by itself. But the lovely border filled with alliums and many other plants made it perfect.

Wonderful plant pairing of alliums with a delicate bell-shaped flowering plant.

Photo from the end of this border.

The big leaved hostas together with the spheric shape of the alliums, just brilliant!

This photo was taken in the same area. But here differnt shades of green is the predominant color. Isn't that already enough to please the eye? You also see how accurate the hedges are pruned. Fascinating, how they are able to do this, isn't it?

One last shot but photographed from the other side. Here the wisteria was in full bloom and you can get a better idea of the size of the yew hedges, when you compare it to the height of the house.

You might have noticed these "mushroom sculptures" scattered throughout the garden. They are called staddle stones and originally they were used as bases for structures like hayricks, granaries etc. It is almost impossible for rodents to climb the circular head of the staddle stones and get to the hay or grain sacks which were stored on top of them. Besides that, air could freely circulate underneath the hay or grain and this helped to keep it dry. 

Nowadays staddle stones are used in this and many other gardens that we saw in this area for decorative purposes and seemed to have become coveted garden antiques. I think they are really cool!

We are at the end of my tour of the Manor Farm. I hope you enjoyed seeing this spectacular garden! If you are in the area make sure you check the yellow National Garden Scheme (NGS) brochure or their website (click here) and pay the garden a visit, if it is open. I am sure you will love it as much as I did!

Wishing you all a Happy Independence Day!

See you in the garden!

Christina