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Enjoying the Fruits of Your Labour

© Michael Campbell

Now that the hanging baskets are all up, the window boxes allocated their usual space and the bedding plants safely tucked into their beds, it is time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour. Or is it? The cuttings of the alpine plants should have started some weeks back, not to mention Nemesia, Diascias, and Violas that are growing strongly and just crying out for reproduction. Now is also a good time to take a few cuttings from Surfinias to keep as stock plants for suitable rooting material towards the end of the season. These plants can be stopped back as required and will produce lots of fresh young growth ideal for cuttings, and save you from having to rob your plants in baskets and containers. These seldom produce suitable material anyway because the shoots quickly run to flower.

Taking the alpine cuttings usually turns into something of a treasure hunt as I frantically search the gravel for that elusive label. It should be there for I always bury the label to the north side of the plant. I wish someone would come up with a decent workable system of labeling alpine plants, without having the place looking like a dog's graveyard. Even with the labels buried they keep coming to the surface and if not covered immediately the wind blows them away. That is why I keep a record of all plants acquired, and a note of where they are planted.

Geranium harveyii has managed to produce some flowers at last, a kind of purplish-red colour, but the silver foliage sets it off to perfection. Campanula nitida white has put on a very good show this year, it is rather enjoying the wet weather. The blue variety is not as vigorous and has only managed to produce three blooms to date. This plant does not come true from seed and has to be vegetatively reproduced. As the plants in the scree bed seed around freely I left a few last year just to see what they would produce. All the seedlings from the white plant produced three-foot tall plants with blue flowers.

The ramondas and harbelas are also producing lots of flowers this year, again probably enjoying the cool wet weather, although I did cover them in the winter, which may have had some bearing on the flower production. Nemesia 'Confetti' is in full bloom as usual and Nemesia caerulea is just showing colour. Rhodophoxis douglasii, a nice deep red has been in bloom for two months now and shows no sign of retiring just yet. The scree beds are awash with seedling Aquilegia flabellata nana, and while the dainty little blue flowers look well nodding in the breeze, some of them will have to go, as they are encroaching on the territory of other plants. The white form, Aquilegia flabellata nana alba, does not seed around like the blue form and seems quite content to stay in its allotted space.