Late summer gardening

Ben and Duncan were here yesterday, so we got them to dig out the devastated box bushes that used to mark the boundary between us and The Boundary.  I paced out the distance, and reckon we’ll need a good seventy rosemary plants.  I potted up 32 rooted cuttings yesterday, and took another few dozen from the slightly overgrown bush up the garden.  So now I just need to survive to see them flower.  

The baby greenhouse is pretty full now, with rooted and new cuttings of rosemary, as well as cistus pulverulens and three colours of potentilla.  I tried to root some cuttings of the viburnum plicatum, but without success.  The daphne cuttings seem to be alive, but aren’t obviously rooting.

The eschscholzias we sowed in the spring are flowering now, most in the common orange, but a few in a range of other colours: lemon, a deep orange and even a mauve-pink.  The tagetes and bidens in the pots are starting to look a bit straggly, but are flowering well, so we’ll leave them a little longer.  The roses are still flowering, but past their best now.  The penstemons are starting to pick up the baton, but they are less impressive than in past years: I suspect it's time I started some new plants from cuttings.  A couple of fuchsias we planted last year in an old pot sink over-wintered successfully and are coming into vigorous flower.  Less impressive are a couple of hardy fuchsias in a nearby bed: hardly surprising, since I have done little to improve the terrible soil.  I’ll give them a top dressing of muck and see if that gives them a boost.  The miniature roses by the front door need the same treatment, so I’ll get cracking when the weather turns drier and warmer over the coming days.  

Meanwhile, I’ve been harvesting seeds as they ripen: the usual suspects.  Not sure if we’ll be doing a Macmillan coffee morning this year, but if we do, we’ll have plenty of seeds to flog at a pound a pinch as we did at our last one pre-pandemic.