Boing!

One of my favourite experiences in our garden is simply to step out into it every morning, to see what's happening. In Spring I'm guaranteed to find something new every day. Just like me, it's alive and breathing (but unlike me it's young and pretty and growing fast). Oh well, I'm happy to settle for "it's great to be alive".

And so here's a photo-driven little posting of just some of the lovely things I found in our garden this morning.

I think we're at "peak native orchid" today. The show has been brewing for a few weeks but this morning all of them are on song. 

Pammy wants me to send her this close-up of a tiny native orchid bloom, taken with the camera about an inch away from the small but perfectly formed bloom. I think she can sense a watercolour painting coming on ...

Speaking of small but perfectly formed blooms, the first of our purple mint bush blooms made an appearance this morning. As I have three bushes and each is covered in flower buds, these are the first wave of what promises to be a few thousand more. Can't wait ...

And to finish off our purple patch, our potted common sage, the kitchen garden herb, has started to do its thing.

Just a few feet from the sage, also growing in a pot, the Thai lime plant is making good use of all the spring fertiliser I fed it with a few weeks ago. The young "double" leaves are the freshest green, every nook and cranny is filled with bum-like blooms and all is good in the fragrant, spicy Thai flavouring department.

A much quieter chap, the Turkish Brown fig looks such a treat as the morning sun shines through its new green leaves every morning. After its winter repotting, I am hoping for good things this summer. No pressure, though ...

Our Westringia 'Elizabeth Bough', covered in light pink blooms, cuddles up close with the astonishingly capable geranium 'Big Red', which flowers pretty much all year round.

And last of all, in a deep, dark corner of the garden when the sun doesn't get much of a look in, the yellow clivias have decided the time is right. I love how they know this stuff.

Sage advice

Good old gardening hunches. There I was several months ago with a gap to fill in the garden, standing in a garden centre looking at a bunch of herbs and other potted lovelies for sale. Which one to choose? That's where the hunch came in handy. 

The spot to be filled was small yet sunny, and it wasn't that far from the place where a culinary sage bush had thrived gorgeously for several years. And there I was staring at a potted seedling of purple sage in the garden centre. Thank goodness I followed my hunch because the purple sage is also thriving now, and this week it has burst into full colour with its combination of blue blooms and purpley-green foliage. A very nice show indeed.

Here it is in close up...

… and standing a few feet further back. So far
it is staying as a smallish thing, no more than
two feet high and wide at the most. Hopefully
it won't get any bigger.

My 'other' sage plant is now limited to a pot,
as it always grew too big and sprawly for the
spot it called home. It was a constant workload
cutting it back to size, and eventually I just
decided to dig it all up, retain one section of
stems with roots and planted that in the pot.
It has been happy there ever since.

The leaves of the common, culinary sage,
(Salvia officinalis) are longer, narrower and
decidedly greener than the purple plant's
foliage. They also seem a bit more fragrant.

The purple one's leaves are shorter and
wider. They have been even more purpley in
colour through their first winter, and they
seem to be greening up as the weather
warms and the flowers appear. I suspect that
is what will happen: it'll green up for summer
then purple-up again in autumn or winter.
It'd be nice if that happened, but I will just
have to wait out my first year with it to
find out.

Anyway, the moral of this blog posting is that if you are looking for a small (well under 1m high and wide) shrub with very nice foliage interest year-round, and a pleasing spring show that has been happening for a couple of weeks already and doesn't look like slowing down any time soon, have a look at purple sage. 

As far as growing tips go, it needs sunshine, soil that drains well and that's about it. Haven't fed it, clipped it, or bothered too much with watering it. It has just looked after itself, but maybe that's just my good luck that sage likes it here.