Old-fashioned hydrangeas

I'm a bit of a sucker for anything that's out of fashion. Whether it's collecting garden gnomes, listening to bands with accordion players, or cooking time-consuming recipes, I'm your boy. 

Out in the garden, I'm often growing something that's supposedly out of fashion, and happily so. In a few weeks from now my cottagey old Nigella 'Love in a Mist' blooms will be out again, and today I've planted hydrangeas, to replace our unruly thicket of ornamental ginger which I reported on in my previous posting.

I like blue hydrangeas, and Pammy asked for a white one, so I bought both. This is the label for the blue ones (I bought three small pots at Bunnings for $13.95 each). 

And this is the far more traditional label for the larger and more expensive ($25) white hydrangea that Pammy wanted, which I found at a local garden centre.

Prior to planting I used the good old "put and look" method of figuring out where to plant each of the new people. The three small blue ones will grow together against the fence (and hopefully block our view of it) while the larger white one's job, apart from looking pretty, is to grow to its full 120cm high and wide and block any views of my less than gorgeous compost tumbler bin and various spare pots. 

Fortunately the blue hydrangeas' labels provided very good information on the plant size and spacing, but I have planted mine a bit closer together than recommended, as I want a dense effect from the hydrangeas to cover up the fence entirely.

After planting them, then watering in with seaweed solution, I spread out a good layer of sugar cane mulch to reduce the rampant weeds and retain some semblance of soil moisture. Besides, I just love the way mulched gardens look.

Once you start renovating, there's a "knock-on" phenomenon that applies to renovations both inside the house and outside in the garden. Fix or change anything, and it immediately makes the bit next to it, or behind it, look bad or weird or at least in need of renovation. The "knock-on" effect is that you are then obliged to do something about the next-door section to your renovation. It's a slippery slope of endless renovations ...

Now, in the case of renovating the ginger patch and turning it into hydrangea land, my previously hidden, messy disgrace of a composting area/pot storage zone is now there for all to see. The shame!

And so yesterday morning I spent a few hours pulling out every pot and sorting them out into this much better, much tidier area. I'm so proud of it that here I am including it in my hydrangea blog posting! 

The trouble is, now I've renovated my ginger patch, and then renovated my pot storage area, it has made me rethink how I am using pots in the garden, and that's what I plan to do a posting on next. 

It never ends!

Loving the Misty Companions

I love all the little experiments that I conduct in this garden, especially those which take a few years for the results to burst into bloom.

This morning, I can report that all the work saving the seed of our Love-in-a-Mist (Nigella) flowers a few years ago has resulted in a small but very pretty show of self-seeded, multi-coloured Love-in-a-Mist blooms this morning. Here's a blue one.

The experiment goes back to late 2013, when I collected the seed of the Nigella flowers after they finished blooming. I then planted the seed the next autumn, and in October 2014 they bloomed in the same mix of colours as the original seed packet. Next phase of the experiment was to do nothing. That's right, folks. Do nothing. I know that Nigella is considered a weed in some climates, so I figured that virtually anything and everything grows here in Sydney, so mine should do the same and not need any help from me.  

In midwinter this year I noticed the first ferny shoots of Nigella coming up, so all I did to help them along was pull out the usual bunch of weeds trying to smother them (and everything else here).

Being good weeds themselves, the Nigella have been growing and forming flower buds since then, but the big question for my experiment was "which colours will I get?". I suspected they might all default to just one colour. Well, so far the answer is two colours! White and blue, but there are lots of buds left, and for the perfect result to replicate the original seed packet I bought in early 2013 is that I'll need some pale pink ones, too.

 

I like everything about Love-in-a-Mist. The flowers are pretty but a bit weird with that ferny lacework (the "mist") around them. And the flower buds are definitely up there on the "ain't nature wonderful" scale of interesting things that only nature can design.

I'm happy for these flowers to become an established, self-seeding part of our garden. The more life goes on, the more I see all the annually flowering established plants that pop up every year as gentle, pretty little companions in my life. 

They mark the coming and going of the seasons (and the years), and it's not just the flowers that we notice. It's their whole life cycle, the emergence of the buds, the blooming itself, their inevitable fading and, in the case of several of them, their modest green summers as leafy people quietly building up energy reserves for their big show next year.

Getting Misty again

Well, it's hardly a spectacular success this time round, but I am still claiming one cup-of-tea's worth of self-bestowed job satisfaction for this 12-month-long effort, now bursting into bloom.

Last autumn I planted some "Love-in-a-Mist" seeds which I had harvested in January from the plants which I had grown from seed the previous autumn, and which flowered in October.

Hold on. That's a bit complicated. Here's the simpler version. These flowers below are from plants which I have raised from seed which I had harvested earlier on. That's better.

The original seeds came from a Yates Seed
pack called "Persian Jewels". These come in various 
shades of white, violet, blue and pink. The interesting 
challenge for me was to see whether this year's 
crop of harvested seeds produced all the colours, or 
just one. Well, it turns out I get lots of white, a fair
 few blue, and little blobs of pink here and there. 
That will do me!

As you can see, white rules, but other colours get a look in.

The pink ones are pretty but lonely.

The "Mist" in its name is of course the whispy veil of fine,
needles of foliage around the flower heads.

However, this low angle shot reveals the plant is a little
cloud of flowers floating atop a green mist, too.

In the interest of the full picture, here's a shot taken in early
January this year, of the papery, hollow seed pods after harvest.
These split open and drop a lot of seed on the ground, but
my harvest managed to gather enough seed to fill the whole
backyard with plants, if I wanted to go mad.

The black seeds themselves are heavily ridged and hard.
I planted them last autumn in rows, and they do take a while
to come up, and the plants look like they are never going
to ever produce flowers through August and most of
September. Then in October they get a move on, and flowering
is always about now, in mid-October.

(One interesting sidelight on this plant, for bloggers at least, is that its botanical name is Nigella. Now, unless you never watch TV or cookery shows on TV, you will have heard of the British TV cook, the lovely Nigella Lawson, who has unfortunately been in the media for some very sad reasons in the last 12 months. Well, innocent old me called last year's posting on this plant, "Nigella's secret admirer" because a little insect, a hoverfly, was photobombing all my love-in-a-mist photos, so I made it both the heading and the lead-in to my blog posting. This of course led to quite a spike in (very disappointed I am sure) visitors to my flower-loving post on these flowers. So, if you want to drive traffic to your blog, which I don't actually have any real interest in doing, try to work a celebrity name into your blog title. That should do the trick!)

Casting pods

Gardening deals out all manner of minor punishments to the keen, and one I am about to willingly risk once more is that of saving flower seeds in late spring to sow in autumn next year, in the hope of seeing a pretty colour show a year from now. 

The last time I did something similar was back in 2010, when I saved the seeds of colourful Zinnia angustifolia plants, hoping to get the same nice mix of yellow, orange and white flowers that I had enjoyed the year before.

Alas, they were virtually all-orange, with a few yellows and no whites at all, plus one pink one that I didn't want. Despite all that effort for such unpredictable results, I'm giving it a go once more, this time by collecting the seeds of Nigella, or love-in-a-mist. Besides, such interesting looking seedpods deserve to be saved.

These pods make a fair bit of noise, as they are dry and
papery, in some case with seeds rattling around inside.

There's no shortage of seedpods to harvest either. Lots of them.

Just as a reminder, here's what I want to see next year. This
year's flower colours were blue and white, and I'm interested
to see what pops out in early spring 2014.

The seedpods themselves go through a few stages before they
are ready to be picked. These are the youngest stage, fresh
green with green lacy surrounds that form the 'mist'.

As time goes by the pods colour up with a light wine colour,
but even still this one isn't ready to be picked. It still feels soft,
and the lacy surrounds are still green. I'm only picking the pods
when the lacework has dried to bone colour and the pods
feel dry to the touch, like paper.

Splitting a dried pod open reveals the plump
black seeds. I'll collect all these over the next
week or so and put them in an envelope,
ready for sowing in autumn next year.

And who knows which flower colours we
will see. The original seed mix, called
'Persian Jewels' had a mix of blue, white
and pink on the packet. I didn't get any
pinks at all this spring, and my suspicion
is that my collected seed might end up
producing all-white flowers, but I'll just
have to be patient until next spring, won't I?

Loving the Mist

"Hey Pam, the first love-in-a-mist flower is out," I cheerfully called to my darling girl on Friday morning, to which she replied: "It was out yesterday". This is of course not the first time that has happened. She's always first to notice things in our backyard. An artist by training, she's just more observant than I am, I guess. But I'm delighted to see it blooming, even if I am a bit slow off the mark. Growing annual flowers from seed is as much fun as growing vegies from seed. I'm loving it, and that's how I've grown this love-in-a-mist – and best of all, they were free seeds.

There's a couple of different flower colours happening here, as my seeds came from a free packet of Yates Persian Jewels, which is a mixed colour range.

This is a different blue compared to the one above.

And this one is a blue and white two-tone, quite dazzling.

Viewed side-on, you can see the 'mist' of fine green foliage surrounding the flowers. It's this partial covering of the flowers which gives the common name of 'love-in-a-mist'. Botanists call this plant Nigella damascena.

Standing further back to give you an idea of the whole plant, it's a green cloud of very fine foliage. There are flower buds everywhere, but only three flowers are out now. What you're looking at is about six or seven plants, grown in a cluster. They blow about in the slightest wind, reach about 60-70cm tall when standing up, but several have been so bashed about by winds that they have flopped over and are leaning on neighbouring plants, but all are starting to bloom now.

The little flower buds are quite attractive in themselves, and after flowering finishes the large seed pods offer some last-gasp visual interest as well.

I planted my free seeds in early May this year, and so it has taken them six months to slowly progress through all the stages of growth until flowering time now in late October. They haven't been grown in perfect conditions, either. It should have been sunnier but all the sunniest spots were taken. So it has been a good trouper growing and flowering so nicely, despite everything.

I'm actually attracted to the fact it's one of those neglected 'out-of-fashion' plants, an old-style cottage garden plant. I won't grow it every year but I will definitely sprinkle around some more love-in-a-mist seeds again at some stage in the future, as it's a wonderfully pretty and delicate little thing.