Blooming into Flaming June

[Blackpuddingbertha]

Keeping the potting shed party going from the previous Rhubarb Society thread and all threads before it.

Please feel free to join in all gardeners, whether novice, professional or aspiring. Plenty of blackberry gin for all.

How can I join the FB group? Can someone PM me the details? I have taken lots of photos tonight and really want to share hem with someone who will appreciate all the hard work involved!

That's a nice combination of plants at the NGS garden FunnyP. I hovered over the Patty's Plums at the garden centre today actually, then remembered I have some seeds in my seed tin. I think. Garden centres are so expensive.

My planting plans so far are just mammoth lists of plants in my head. My friend wants architectural evergreens and an orange/yellow/red colour scheme. It all has to be low maintenance and suitable for a novice gardener though. I'm thinking geums, red hot pokers, Crocosmia...

My north facing border will have a Magnolia (still undecided which variety), a Cornus kousa 'Satomi', and lots of viburnums. Possibly a Cornus controversa variegata if I can squeeze it in. I may put the Cornus kousa at the other side of the garden; I'm still toying with that. Beyond that I haven't thought it through. My head is full of plants but I need to sit down with paper and pencil to work it out.

Beautiful iris Mousy.

Hm yes I have been thinking about you and magnolias in general. The garden I saw today had a grandiflora, though not against a wall as the exmouth variety often are, but in the middle of the garden: an old one, pruned to medium height and though still in flower it still didn't have the impact that soulanganea has against a blue sky. I wonder if one has to actually go and choose the tree when in flower, because, for example, different types of 'vulcan' which is very popular in France seem very different. Round here there were loads of magnolias in flower this year (a very good year) but only one with the most amazing scent and goblet shaped flowers pink with a flush of purple and it was the best one. The darker ones seem to come into flower with the leaves, which can loose impact though they look good in nursery photos.

Hello all, can I join in? Although I don't have a garden so much as a slug restaurant at the moment. All my lettuce seedlings have gone, and most of my borage Slimy feckers.

Yes, lovely Iris mousey nice photo too. I havent bought a camera yet. It is because I am still mourning a manual SLR fancy Canon I had years ago and the equivalent costs too much.
Lennei is an interesting magnolia, but is it what we fall in love with when we fall in love with magnolias? I'm not sure.
Then there is the bark colour: those with slightly grey bark and a slightly spreading aspect from lower down the tree are the most beautiful in my opinion. I dont know if one can go to a nursery such as Burncoose and exactly specify the sort of tree one would like.

eaurouge welcome: do have some home made rolls with honey and some elderberry cordial I have no slugs at the moment I am dreading slugs: where in the country are you that you have slugs this soon in the year?
Do tell us about your garden. What colours have you got /are you planning?

One of my clematis (a blue one of unknown name) on the arbour has started flowering. Very pretty, when a few more are open I shall take a pic.

I have iris clumps which have been donated from various gardens but have yet to see a flower. Just lots of green. I'm hoping one day they'll burst into life as I do like them. Yours is lovely Mousy.

I need more poppies...

Welcome EauRouge. I was hoping the slugs would eat my self seeded borage instead of my salad seedlings I still have loads growing as I have given them away to everyone who will take them and haven't the heart to pull the rest up and throw them.

Ooh, should I do a garden introduction? OK. Am very lucky to have a south facing slope, but my soil is solid very heavy clay. I've been improving it since we moved in 10 years ago but it's still crap. Mostly I'm interested in things I can eat, or put in Pimms. I grow a lot of native stuff too because I'm lazy and it doesn't need much attention. Strawberries are like triffids in my garden but I can't get lupins to do anything other than die a lingering death :(

I've got lots of irises, mostly in my pond, and they are about to flower! Can't wait.

Forgot to say, am in Cambs and I don't think my soil has dried out for about two years because of all the rain, hence the high slug population. I used to have a resident hedgehog but it's gone AWOL.

Welcome Eau - The slugs are rotters, aren't they? I put beer traps down for mine. DD1 complained I was making her late for pre-school this morning as i paused to count all my boozy drowned slugs

Rhubarb - That gunnera is mahoosive!!!

Rake - Is the gardener's equivalent of nesting the overwhelming urge to weed?!

Maud - That's good to know about poundshop seeds, I was v tempted by heir bulbs. Have you tried them?

Funny - I fed my new hostas blood, fish & bone, they are settling in well.

I am aching all over tonight as I finally got to dig over the last part of my border. I have heavy clay with slow drainage so it was not a fun job. I've mixed in lots of compost, manure & fertiliser then covered it with bark. I was inspired as I popped into lidl this morning and picked up a blue hydrangea macrophylla. I tell DH we shop there as we're on a budget, but really t's for the bargain plants. I'm not sure what PH my soil is but I guess I will find out when the flowers come out. I put lots of ericaceous compost around it, so hopefully it will stay blue this season at least.

That's almost the last of the bastard digging done for his year. My next job is to flatten and lawn over the bed I mud pit I dug all the ancient shrubs out of. Does anybody have any tips for this?

Please do PM me the details of the FB group. I'm itching to share with a more enthusiastic audience. I showed DH the finished border and he said it looked much better but didn't even notice the new hydrangea right in the middle of it, quite handy really...

Googled gunnera and they look wonderful. Do they get to the giant size in the uk?
Maud i have planted some lidl seeds with a really good sucess rate and they are cheaper than poundland
Funny i feed my hostas with tomato food. They seem to like it.
Not i have a husband like yours, Last year when i had a conifer higher than the house cut down it took him 2 days to notice. And his idea of working in the garden is pulling the ring top of a can of lager.

I am another one waiting for details of the facebook group as i would love to see and share garden photos.

Welcome Eau [smile ]. Cantspel and NotanotherNewNappy you should have a PM...

That's the thing with buying plants, you do need to get them in. I'm waiting for the plant sale Grockle and I went to last year, only another month or so.

Lovely Iris Mousey, I'd like some in my garden. Sum total of gardening here today was potting up 3 cucumbers which are spares in case the ones in Autopots die (and they look like they have seen better days). First Morning Glory Flower has appeared, a lovely purple c

Wynken reply sent

Forgot to say welcome to Eau. I also have clay soil and slugs but i grow mainly flowers. the only edibles i grow are chilies to make chilie oil and stawberries as my son loves them but then so do the birds.

Hello EauRouge

Well done NANN for all your hard digging and Cantspel for your ground elder extraction. Sounds like a lot of hard work has gone on this week.

Funny I am in complete agreement with you about what constitutes a good magnolia. I've got the Burncoose catalogue but it has 200 varieties in it, which is just not helping. I ordered a book on magnolias yesterday to try to get things clear in my head. I am in danger of over-researching and never making a decision. Perhaps I should just ring up Burncoose and chat to them.

Yes Gunnera are wonderfully, ridiculously big. The best place I've ever seen them was in Trebah Garden in Cornwall, where you can wander around underneath them in a sort of Gunnera labyrinth. I bloody love them. I hope mine won't be lonely; it's going to go in the corner of the middle garden which has a densely clipped Leylandii 'wall' around it with archway openings on three sides. There is nothing inside this garden 'room' but lawn and a few surviving pond marginals in the corner where the pond hole was. The Gunnera will go in the middle of the former pond hole. So it'll be lawn, Leylandii, and a stonking great Gunnera like a surprise triffid in the corner.

Magnolia Campbellii var Darjeeling looks as though it might be astonishing too: grey bark, spreading aspect and stunning flowers. Also not too long till they are truly established. Apparently the Savill valley gardens at Windsor have some very good magnolias, planted after the 1987 storm, which have reached maturity, including Campbelii.

What would be the setting for your Magnolia? I always remember one which was the centrepiece of a courtyard in Geneva with a fountain nearby. Very elegant and tranquil. Round here they tend to be front garden plants. In Hampstead they are invariably underplanted with crocuses and scilla and grape hyacinths. What would you plant with it for when it finishes flowering? Would you echo its colours in the out of season planting?

I believe the Savill garden has a few 'champion tree' magnolias: meaning trees which are amazing, though none are older than 1987.

Isnt it extraordinary that Magnolias are pollinated by beetles? Also, I really like this phrase in the Wiki write up

'Because the family is quite old and has survived many geological events (such as ice ages, mountain formation and continental drift), its distribution has become scattered.'

Yes it is the fact that they are so ancient that is one reas

...reason I love them. I am in awe of monkey puzzles, ginkgoes and Wollemi pines for the same reason. In London we had a beautiful old magnolia in the corner of the front garden, underplanted as you describe with Scilla. I added a monkey puzzle slap bang in the middle (it was a double fronted Victorian villa - it needed a monkey puzzle, and then crammed in a Wollemi pine, plunge planted in a pot to keep it from getting too big. It didn't like being plunge planted though. I won't do that again.

Here, my new magnolia will go in the corner of the main garden, close to the fence on one side and with the back wall of the garage behind it. It's a bit of a funny spot, a triangular bulge off the side of a rectangular lawn, so my intention is to run a path to 'chop off' the triangle and make the main lawn symmetrical. The triangle will have the magnolia in the middle and shade planting underneath. I haven't decided what yet; there is a beautiful shady bed under one of the majestic trees in the garden of the Inner Temple that I have always admired. I'll probably try to copy that. Ferns, Brunnera, Pulmonaria and spring bulbs. That sort of thing.

Yes to Monkey puzzle tree. I like them too. And cherry weeping Higan.

Yes I see: you could be creating in effect a city garden in the country. A potentially problematic concept as city gardens depend on the microclimate created by the 4 walls of the garden and are milder in winter as a result.

I am reading Vita Sackville Wests' garden book atm as I am resting and in it is a beautiful photograph of a dark magnolia in her walled garden with a backdrop of clematis Marjorie, which is a gentle and subtle late spring flowering clematis. Hers is a country garden which she walled in. Country gardens may have the countryside as backdrop to consider. Also it seems fashionable nowadays to introduce a 'wild' flower such as ravenswing or pink cowslip or ragged robin or ammus major to provide a counterpoint and lightness and 'bring in ' the countryside hedgerows to the gorgeous cultivated flowers in the beds. Hope I dont sound too analytical but I had this conversation on Tuesday, and thought I would share it.

Hello everyone.

We have just put ravenswing in the garden into the herb beds. I think you must have great RL conversations about gardens funnyperson.

We went to two gardens today as it was DH's birthday. Lovely. The first one was in Kilvert country, and there was actually a mulberry tree in the garden that he planted. I really liked it. Browbury Court. The second, Hergist Croft, was FULL of azaleas. They were impressive but I couldn't warm to them. The specimen trees were astounding though. I was sooo tired when I got home. Why can't I be like those pregnant women who run marathons?

Thank you Funny that is very interesting to read. I agree there is a big difference between city and country gardens, but I think it can be fun to mix things up a bit - a very formal garden with carefully ordered beds can look stunning set amidst country wildness, in the same way that a London front garden planted with frothy cottagey perennials can be a complete breath of fresh air. It's good to try different styles and see what works. I can do the 'borrowed landscape' thing here - a church spire, hillside with sheep and many big majestic trees can all be seen from the garden, so with a bit of careful planting I should be able to blur the boundaries. I already have cow parsley rampaging through my borders after all. But I shall have some formality. We already have the clipped Leylandii hedges and archways dividing the garden up into rooms, which lends a nice structure.

How lovely that you begin with rooms Rhubarb. We have had to make ours and it will be years in the growing, although we did splash out on the hazel fence which will last about as long as the yew hedge takes to grow. Your view sounds stunning. We are plagued by a south west wind and we have planted a hornbeam hedge to limit the ill effect of constant wind bombardment, thus regretfully giving up a good part of our view. We own the field on the other side of the hedge though, and will one day extend the garden beyond so we are not giving it up for good.

I associate monkey puzzle trees with my childhood, there was one in the front garden next door. I love them.

maud mentioned wiggly wigglers on another thread
www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/native-plants/wildflowers.html

I have a wild garden (with a bit of structure here and there) because of an innate love of softer lines, but was very impressed with formal Italianate gardens in Pompeii and the Swedish formal romantic garden at Chelsea
www.rhs.org.uk/Shows-Events/RHS-Chelsea-Flower-Show/2013/Gardens/Garden-directory/The-Laurent-Perrier-Garden