Salvia involucrata 'Bethelii'

I've always admired this woody based perennial Salvia for its terminal racemes of bright pink, tubular flowers.  Capable, with an established clump, of reaching heights of 1.5m / 5ft plus during our not overly warm summer and autumn seasons, this Mexican plant certainly adds brightness to any more exotic garden until the cold puts paid to its annual display.  

The only problem is that its not that winter hardy.  The RHS have it as H3: hardy in coastal and relatively mild parts of the UK (-5 to 1C).  I've tried it in my own Plymouth garden, lost it in the hard winters of 2010 and 2011, and, for space reasons, not tried again.  Mind you, my soil is rather damp and I think it needs better drainage to survive our harder winters.

This certainly seems the case at The Garden House, where Nick (Hayward), the head gardener has been experimenting with a number of these sub shrub sages in the walled garden.  Despite some sharp frosts down to -7 or -8C it's doing very well under the Wisteria clad wall of the east end of the lower terrace, flowering from midsummer onwards in conjunction with Salvia 'Amistad' and a clump of the impressively foliaged Canna iridiflora 'Ehemannii'.  Perhaps it's a little hardier than I thought and worthy of consideration for a recently cleared patch under my south wall.  Time to ring the changes yet again?

Snowdrop of the Day - Week 2

These are the snowdrops I've posted for  the second week of The Garden House Snowdrop festival.  These were in flower between 20th and 26th January 2024.  The number of cultivars and species in flower is ramping up and there are some interesting ones among those selected.

Galanthus elwesii 'Grayswood'

Galanthus elwesii 'Kite'

Galanthus elwesii 'Natalie Garton'

Galanthus elwesii 'Sickle'

Galanthus 'L.P.Long'

Galanthus 'Aunt Nellie's Danglers'

Galanthus 'Starling'

I hope this is beginning to give you a flavour of the collection!

A touch of frost

Living in Plymouth, one of the mildest areas of the country, frost and snow, though not rare, is not that frequent.  If truth be told, you can usually tell it's winter as the rain merely gets colder rather than turning to its icy stage.

But we've had some quite heavy frost recently and I took the opportunity to get up to the The Garden House and capture a few images.  There is something magical about the crystalline nature of ice on flowers such as Erica carnea 'Myrtoun Ruby'...

..or on snowdrops such as Galanthus 'Mrs Macnamara'...

...or the opening buds of the many Helleborus x orientalis colour forms we have scattered around the garden.

It all looks a bit drastic for the poor plants but they are all hardy and will soon recover.  And even parts of the garden such as the lower terrace of the Walled garden look all the better for a light frosting rather than damp anddepressing in the rain.

Snowdrop of the day -Week 1 

The snowdrop collection at The Garden House has grown over the last few years and, thanks to gifts and donations from other Galanthus collections, now encompasses over 500 species and varieties.  Every year they run a Snowdrop festival.  This year they started on 12 January and will continue every Friday, Saturday and Sunday till mid March.  This allows early, mid season and late flowering snowdrops to be seen. 

 Apart from photographing the collection, I also post a 'Snowdrop of the Day' image on their Instagram and Facebook sites to illustrate the diversity among the collection.  During the festival I've decided to add each week's image set to my own blog.  Although the images may be from previous years, all the snowdrops illustrated were in flower during the week of posting to give other snowdrop enthusiasts an indication of likely flowering times.

Here's the images from the 12th to the 19th January 2024:

Galanthus elwesii 'Orion'

Galanthus 'Franz Joseph'

Galanthus plicatus 'Yaffle'

Galanthus 'Trumps'

Galanthus 'Rosie'

Galanthus 'Magnet'

Galanthus elwesii 'November Queenspot'

Hopefully these weekly summaries will give an idea of the breadth of the collection at this wonderful Devon garden.

Mulching

Tis the season for mulching beds and borders.  In my own garden the surface application of spent tub and pot compost, combined with what I can glean from my compost heap and rotted leaf mould from collected autumn leaves provides a layer of organic material that will soon be incorporated into the soil by organisms and fungi.  I don't have a big garden so it doesn't take me long - but it makes a difference to soil fertility and the health of the plants I grow.

At The Garden House the principle is the same - but the scale is vastly different.  Their compost heaps are fed are by numerous barrow loads of collected weeds and prunings from the garden...

..add in tons of shredded Dartmoor bracken, grass clippings from lawn mowings and long grass cutting in the Arboretum, and fallen leaves and, after suitable composting time - not long with big heaps - the end result is a rich, dark mulch that spreads easily on the beds and borders that make up a large amount of the garden.  The annual intake of two horticultural students get a good winter workout.  Filling their barrows from the deposited heaps...

...and raking the mulch over and between the plantings.

Accompanied, of course, by the ever present European robins, ever on the look out for a tasty worm or grub in the newly applied mulch.

Daphne bholua

The scent is the first thing you notice on a still January day.  Powerful, sweet, it perfumes the air for yards around the source, a relatively unassuming evergreen shrub Daphne bholua. 

Best known for the cultivar 'Jacqueline Postill' (above) the plant is available in a number of forms, reflecting the variation in their natural range in the Himalayas in and around Nepal. Some forms appear to be hardier than others but the other three I'm illustrating here are all hardy in the edge of Dartmoor, Devon, garden, The Garden House.  Frost and snow may not be as frequent as further north but are frequent enough to test the hardiness of any plant.

So, pure white 'Alba' thrives on the edge of the birch wood at the far western end of the garden, scenting the approach to the Acer glade, while closer to the house 'Garden House Enchantress' (below) with a faint pink blush to the clusters of tubular flowers provides fragrance to the garden entry area.

Meanwhile the pinker 'Garden House Sentinel' (below) stands at the western end of the Wisteria bridge.  Now a substantial shrub the fragrance is delightful.

Hardy, relatively tolerant of any soil that remains moist but well drained these are superb shrubs for a sheltered position where the fragrance can linger on the winter air.  There is only one downside.  All parts of the plant are toxic if eaten and pruning does require gloves to avoid skin irritation.

Note:  This post has been edited to include the photo of 'Garden House Sentinel' and replace the photo of 'Jacqueline Postill'.

Clematis urophylla 'Winter Beauty'

Sitting on the South facing aspect of the tower in the walled garden at The Garden House is one of the winter stars of this edge of Dartmoor garden.

Blooming in January, this white, bell flowered evergreen climber certainly stands out as a feature during the start of the annual snowdrop festival.  In theory it shouldn't even be here.  The RHS hardiness classification is H3, hardy only in coastal and relatively mild parts of the UK (-5 to 1C).  This may be a little conservative.  I first photographed it in situ in January 2017, my first winter as a volunteer, and this Dartmoor garden has certainly had no shortage of frosts below the -5C minimum and the plant has come through unscathed.  Yes it's against a south wall - but it's not that sheltered.  The soil is an acid shale, well enriched over the years with annual dressings of organic mulch, so it has the free drainage with water retentive fertility it needs.  And it certainly pays for the space it occupies.

 A tale of two climbers

Even in a small, overcrowded, garden there's always room for more climbers.  As long, that is, as they are non rampant.  Two I've added in recent years certainly fit the bill.

First is Bomarea edulis:

Related to and often described as a climbing Alstroemeria this is a half hardy deciduous plant, producing yearly growth trails from small tubers that can be easily overwintered under a protective mulch or even lifted and started afresh in spring each year.  

The red and yellow bell flowers dangle in clusters at the end of the twining growth trails.  With me they start in August, brightening up a short section of my west rear garden wall.  I've clad this in a bamboo framework, where the Bomarea shares space with winter flowering Jasminium nudiflorum, a relic from a previous planting in the area and the later summer flowering Clematis florida var. sieboldiana 'Viennetta'.

Reminiscent of a passion flower with its central violet boss this is certainly not vigorous but manages to produce annual trails of growth that twine through the bamboo supports and produce the glorious, very tropical looking flowers.

I think it would like a bit more summer warmth than my Plymouth garden can provide but even a few flowers brighten the space.

Mind you, I think there's room for another climber in there.  A spring Clematis perhaps.