BLOWING HOT AND COLD
From cold and blustery with frequent showers the weather suddenly turned hot and dry again, and it was back to the daily use of the hose just to keep the pants alive.
Have you ever noticed that plants never seem to grow as well in spite of frequent watering and feeding, as they do when getting showers of rain?
Well the alpines in the scree beds loved the wet days and then the two weeks of dry warm weather, they must have thought that they were back on the mountains, for everything burst into bloom again. Even plants like Campanula Alpina and C. Barbata that had finished flowering and had settled down to producing a good crop of seed, managed to produce a few more flowering stems. Digitalis ferruginea and D. lamarckii also managed a full stem of flowers all-be-it a little late in the season.
Campanula X haylodgensis plena a cross between C.carpatica and C. pusilla has a beautiful circle of semidouble lavender blue flowers, and not to be outdone nearby a plant of Borago reptans is still producing dozens of beautiful sky blue flowers. This is the most beautiful pale blue that I have ever seen in a flower with the exceptions maybe of some of the gentians. I will certainly be saving the seed of this one, and I might even have a few to spare for the seed exchange.
In the raised bed Satureja continues to spout its little tubular red flowers as it has done for the past two months. Polemonium viscosum has flowered at last and after a long wait I have finally got the correct plant. This plant is from the Eximeum group and comes from the high peaks of the N. American Mountains where it is commonly known as the Sky Pilot. I have grown seed from various sources over ten years but most of them turned out to be P.pulcherrimum or P. caeruleum. The true type plant is very compact and has flower stems of no more than six inches with beautiful pale lavender blue flowers.
One of the best of the later flowering alpines is Cyananthus lobatus. From a thick root rise many stems which radiate to form rounded pads terminating in a single rich blue flower. Cyananthus shereffii from the high planes of Tibet is thickly clothed in silvery hairs in the early stages of growth but became sparse as growth elongates and eventually ending each in a single tubular light blue flower bearded in the throat. It is supposed to be a risky proposition outside but I have it in a raised bed and so far it is doing ok. I will probably cover it for the winter though.
Latest Articles