With just under an hour left of Saturday, here are six pictures from the garden today. Lots of yellow this week.
1. Alstroemeria ‘Konkajoli’
I have tended to avoid Alstroemeria hybrids, because many are reported to be invasive. This was advertised as a civilized cultivar that doesn’t take over the flowerbed. After two years, I’m starting to wonder if it is too civilized. It seems to produce just one stem at a time and shows no inclination to form a nice clump. Pretty flowers, though.
2. Hydrangea quercifolia
When I blogged about oakleaf hydrangea a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the flowers would soon fade to pink. Well, they have.
3. Verbascum chaixii
Unlike many mulleins, V. chaixii is a perennial rather than a short-lived biennial. I have both the yellow- and white-flowered forms growing in the sunnier areas of the garden. Hoping for volunteer seedlings but haven’t seen any yet.
4. Ligularia japonica ‘Chinese Dragon’
This species isn’t thrilled with our hot summer, but it seems to do reasonably well in the shade of a dogwood tree. The deeply cut leaves and big yellow flowers are interesting, but I really like the flower buds. They are ribbed longitudinally and look like miniature green pumpkins.
5. Canna ‘Tenerife’
Canna season has started, which means lots of bright flowers, lush foliage, and constant checking to make sure that caterpillars of the lesser canna leafroller moth (Geshna cannalis) aren’t feasting on leaves that they seal with a loop of silk before the young foliage can unroll. The leafrollers are ugly, maggoty-looking things that skeletonize canna leaves and make a mess with their frass. I hate to use pesticides on plants that attract so many pollinators, so I have to squish the caterpillars by hand. Yuck.
6. Canna ‘Pacific Beauty’
The flowers of this clone look almost fluorescent against the dark brown/purple foliage. In this climate, cannas can be left in the ground year round, as long as the rhizome is planted six or eight inches deep and mulched well in the autumn.
Great photos, Nick!
Your Canna ‘Tenerife’ reminds me of one I saw in cultivation on Long Binh post in South Vietnam in 1970. “Canna” was one of the first plant names I learned as a child. My mother’s relatives grew them.
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I’m impressed by your memory for plants seen many years before!
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Must get some canna. I would have to dig up over winter, probably, although it doesn’t get much below -5°c here. Banana plants too, also tempting. For the foliage not the fruit. See you again next week? Jon
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Yes, hopefully.
We can grow some of the hardier bananas in the ground here. Nothing edible, but I’ve had a clump of Musa velutina for the past ten years years. They freeze to the ground each year, but summers are long enough for the stems to mature and produce bunches of pink bananas full of hard seeds.
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I have yet to come across an invasive alstroemeria though I do have one like yours – produces a single 6-inch-tall spike of flowers in early June and then rots down in early July whilst others flower earlier and keep on going until very late in the year. But it comes back reliably the following June. Canna, for some reason, don’t like me – they may flower and immediately die or skip the flowering bit as they’ve done this year. I mean “die” not “die back”. I have to buy fresh every year. But the colour they display is worth it. Some years!
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John, It’s good to know that alstroemerias aren’t usually invasive. I’ll have to try some more and see if I can get one that’s a bit more prolific
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