Tag Archives: sunflower

Flowers into Autumn…

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Now that the weather is turning colder, and the days becoming shorter, many of the plants we rely on for summer colour have finished flowering. But there are many perennials that flower late, allowing us to extend the season well into autumn. Asters, for instance, will have been inconspicuous in the borders as steadily growing clumps of dark green foliage, but now, they are bursting into bloom…

You may know that most of the asters we grow in our gardens were recently renamed by botanists as Symphyotrichum (I’m sure they don’t deliberately make our lives more difficult!) Another familiar garden plant that was renamed recently, and which flowers at this time of year, is sedum (now Hylotelephium)…

This is a dark-leaved variety called ‘Xenox’. Being relatively low growing, sedums (sorry; Hylotelephiums!) work well towards the front of the border. They are succulents, so quite drought-resistant, and the small, pink flowers are a magnet for bees (though not when I took this photo!)

At around eight or nine feet tall (depending on the variety) a plant you wouldn’t put at the front of the border is perennial sunflower…

While the annual sunflowers that children delight in growing from seed (especially the really tall varieties) will for the most part have finished now, perennial sunflowers are only just starting. Their blooms are smaller and less showy than their annual cousins (both are varieties of Helianthus), but they are a welcome ray of sunshine on a dull autumn day. And the flowers look great, and are long-lasting, in a vase. Just one note of caution – perennial sunflowers tend to send out rhizomes in all directions, so you’ll need to dig around the clump regularly, otherwise it’s likely to take over your whole garden!

There are many more perennials that provide a splash of colour at this time of year. Rudbeckia, for instance (this is Rudbeckia fulgida var. ‘Goldsturm’)…

Japanese anemones, or windflowers (in this case Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’)…

Hesperantha coccinea (previously Schizostylis coccinea!)…

And this is Actaea simplex ‘Brunette’. The flowers are pretty, if a lot more restrained than some of the previous examples, and have a very sweet fragrance. It’s a useful plant, because it’s happy in some shade…

And the list goes on! The message is that with a little thought, it’s possible to design a garden that will give you flowers and scent, and provide for wildlife, all year round.

text & images © graham wright 2021
NOTE: this post also appears on the blog for my new garden design company Strelitzia Garden Design

Black Sun…

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The sunflowers I grew last year were so successful, this year I decided to try another variety. I went for something a little different. This is called ‘Black Magic’…

I have to say, I’m not entirely sure about it. The plants grew strongly, with darker stems and leaves than the yellow sunflowers, and the blooms are certainly impressive. But they don’t stand out. This is ‘Soleo’…

It’s everything we’ve come to expect of a sunflower – bold and bright, you know as soon as the first flower is out. There’s no missing it. Whereas ‘Black Magic’ crept up on me by stealth, and there were half a dozen flowers out before I even noticed. Most of the blooms are a dark, chocolatey brown, but some of them have some orange in the petals…

I’m not sure why sunflowers are so at home in my garden. The soil is loose and dusty, and I’m fortunate not to have as many slugs and snails as I’ve experienced in previous gardens. I have memories of having to nurse the sunflowers through their early stages. There’s that difficult time after planting out, when they spend a couple of weeks putting their roots down and acclimatising. That’s when they’re vulnerable. If you can keep the molluscs off until the sunflowers start into growth, they should be safe – they might lose a fewer lower leaves, but the plants can avoid any more serious damage due to the spectacular rate of growth, and the strong stems.

The central flower is generally on a short stem, so no good for cutting. But the varieties I’m growing produce lots of side shoots with smaller flowers on longer stems, and it’s these that can be cut and brought inside, where the beauty of the flowers can be appreciated close up.

Elsewhere in the garden, the ligularias around the pond are starting to produce their bright orange-yellow daisy flowers…

This is one of three self-seeded plants brought from my last garden. They are Ligularia dentata ‘Midnight Lady’. This is small as yet; the mother plant was around a metre across. It seems amazing to me that such an impressive plant self-seeds freely, giving you plants for free.

White hydrangeas will play a large part in the design. So far there is only one – Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’…

It too is only small as yet, but it should grow into a large bush, perhaps as much as two metres by two metres. The flower heads are just about fully out now, and they really glow in a shady spot. They’re long lasting too, gradually changing colour as they age. Eventually they will dry out, but should be left on the plant over the winter (unless you want to cut them for a dried flower display) because they’re still very attractive. I took cuttings of this plant around a month ago, and roots are poking out of the bottom of the pot now, so it looks like a success (a relief, as I’m ashamed to admit my strike rate with cuttings is nothing to boast about). I’ve also got a cutting from previous years (and my last garden) of Hydrangea quercifolia (oak-leaved hydrangea), which is waiting to be planted, once the area has been prepared.

I brought three plants of a white phlox (Phlox paniculata ‘Peacock White’) with me from the last garden, and just like the sunflowers, they too seem to like the soil here…

Lastly, this combination is a happy accident. The grass (Phalaris arundinacea ‘Feesey’) tends to reproduce freely. I threw this piece into some spare ground by the pond. I used the same area to plant out some seedlings that were seriously stressed from having been left in their seed tray for far too long. It took a while, but eventually they came good. They are Phacelia; often used as a green manure, but the flowers are very pretty, and great fodder for pollinating insects; it would be a shame to dig them into the soil before they flower.

The Phacelia are a one year only crop; the grass is a perennial; I might even leave it where it is…


text & images©Graham Wright 2021

Tomato Recovery!

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You may remember that last time, I posted pictures of our horribly distorted tomato plants. I sent pictures of them to the RHS advice service, and they confirmed the cause was herbicide damage – even though I never use weed killer in the garden! There were some fruits on the plants, so I decided to cut off the most affected parts (the tops) and hope for the best. And things started to look a little better.

You can see that the fruits are ripening nicely. In fact, we’ve been enjoying them for more than a week now. I just hope we’re not poisoning ourselves! They taste OK. Hopefully those nasty chemicals won’t have made their way into the fruits. This is how the top of the plants looked…

I never thought I’d see them produce trusses like this…

This one is exceptional mind – they’re not all so full. The cuttings from the offshoots are outside, growing in the garden soil, and they look perfectly normal, which supports the idea that the compost was contaminated with weed killer. They are starting to set fruit, but it’s late in the season now, so there might not be time for the fruit to ripen. I guess I should start looking for a recipe for green tomato chutney!

Elsewhere, the runner beans plants that are growing on the new pergola this year (in the autumn I’ll get some more permanent climbers in) are finally starting to produce beans.

They’re quite late. I had a nightmare with the white flowering variety I tried first. I tried everything – numerous sowings in pots, in different composts, in the ground, but they just wouldn’t germinate. Finally, I resorted to sowing them on wet kitchen towel on the kitchen windowsill. Even that didn’t work too well. Most of the seeds rotted. From a rotting, fly-infested mess I salvaged three mouldy seeds, with pathetic, weedy shoots, and planted them in the garden. Two of the plants survived, and are producing some beans. But most of the plants are Scarlet Emperor, grown from seed later on, after I’d given up on the white ones. The red-flowered plants are more vigorous, and producing more beans.

There have been a few disasters this year. I’m going to use the rather pathetic excuse that I’m somewhat new to growing produce, being more of an ornamentals man (though by no means an ornamental man!)

The courgettes have been a learning experience. I intended to grow those up the pergola too, but they never really stretched out in the way you would expect; just stayed as small clumps at the base of the uprights. I think the problem might have been that they were sown (indoors) too early, and by the time it was safe to plant them out, they had been sitting around for too long. They are producing, but intermittently, with a lot of the fruits rotting while still small. The weather has been up and down – too hot and dry at first, then cold and dull. More excuses!

The new fruit trees that were planted in the lawn in late winter have rewarded us with…

…one apple! Actually, one of the pear trees had a fruit earlier on, though it’s not there now. I’m not complaining – by rights you should remove any fruits that form in the first season to make the trees concentrate their efforts on roots and foliage. But I’m sure this one apple won’t exhaust the tree!

The sunflowers – sown to fill in for the first year while we get the garden sorted (in the long term the beds will have mostly perennials) have been a glorious success, but I’ve given up dead-heading now. The seed heads can stay over winter for the birds. Storm Francis tore the sunflowers to shreds, along with the beans -the garden looked like it had been hit by a cyclone.

Being able to cut sunflowers for a vase over perhaps two months was a luxury I will try to keep in my memory all winter…

text & images © Graham Wright 2020

A New Greenhouse…

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It’s been a while coming, but we’ve finally got our greenhouse. Here it comes…

The base under construction, with the topsoil put aside. It doesn’t look much, but days of work went into moving rubble and gravel from elsewhere in the garden.
Eight bags of cement, a large pile of ballast (sand and gravel) and numerous back-breaking mixes later, and the paving is finished. I re-used paving from elsewhere in the garden – the greenest materials you can source.
The greenhouse under construction. I’ve built a (smaller) greenhouse before, I can make short work of flat-pack furniture, and I’ve built two kitchens (one from scratch, the other from kitchen components) but I struggled with this. You really do wonder about some of the design decisions that went into it, and as for the instructions; well, had it been cold, they would have been more useful as kindling. But finally…
The finished product.

Despite the traumatic construction process, it’s actually a very good quality greenhouse, with none of the nasty sharp edges of the one we built in our last garden, and a doorway you can walk through without bending double (and risking lacerating the top of your head). It took us the better part of three days to build, and with amazing timing, we’d literally just tightened the last bolt and put the tools away when there was a cloudburst.

The greenhouse is a Hercules Hastings, in Old Cottage Green, from The Greenhouse People. We got it up and running not a moment too soon – just in time to get the tomato plants in (proudly grown from seed) before it was too late. We’ve also got a pepper plant, which is doing well. We picked it up on a fraught and hurried trip to a garden centre and food store earlier on during the lockdown. I must have picked up the wrong plant, and it was only recently that I discovered my mistake. It will be nice to have fresh peppers, but the one plant will only produce perhaps half-a-dozen, while a single chilli plant would have kept us in chillies all year.

Elsewhere in the garden, we’ve been dividing our time between watering, to keep all the newly planted trees and shrubs alive during the Mediterranean weather, and digging out bootlace fungus. Not my idea of gardening, but we have been able to concentrate on some of the nicer things. For instance, the sunflowers are coming into bloom…

Since the weather broke the annual weeds have suddenly burst into action, and the grass has turned from brown to green and started to actually grow. I’d forgotten it did that. So there’s been some mowing to do.

The chickens are continuing to keep us amused. The garden reached the stage where we couldn’t continue to let them out (too many delicate seedlings for them to destroy) so we bought a long roll of chicken wire and have sectioned off an area where they can’t do too much harm.

The chooks enjoying a dust bath huddle – chicken heaven!

So, the greenhouse is done, but there’s plenty of garden building still to be done…