In a Vase on Monday

/ karen

We’ve had two nights of frost, so flowers growing outdoors are getting scarce. Luckily, there’s plenty of chrysanthemums in the greenhouse and poly tunnel. I bought these originally from a Hardy Plant Society sale. They don’t have a label, but I think they are an heirloom variety called Cranberry Wine. If you know different, please let me know! As always, my flowers are for my mum. Each week, I run round the plot and find stems of shrubs, twigs from trees, and anything in flower to create a bouquet called ‘all of the garden.’ It gives mum a flavour of what my garden looks like. Flowers last about a fortnight if the water is refreshed each day.

Here’s a view of one end of the greenhouse with pots of chrysanths in amongst the lemon and orange trees. I clean the greenhouse out at the end of summer, wash down all the glass and repaint the structure. It’s a second-hand Alton cedar greenhouse we bought 30 years ago for £260. I heat it to 3C using solar panels and an electric thermostat controlled fan heater.

Behind the chrysanths you can just see the bougainvillea which flowers through to January. Then I stop watering it for a month or two and trim back all the long extension growth. In spring I start to water it again, top dress with fresh compost and give it a potash and seaweed extract feed.

When I’ve picked all the flowers, I cut back the chrysanthemum foliage to the ground. New shoots start to emerge after Christmas and hundreds of tiny cuttings will be taken. Isn’t it a beautiful flower. I love the colour and the delicate overlapping petals tipped with white.

Pittosporum Silver Queen is the background foliage. I have two huge plant pots with 5ft shrubs. They don’t seem to mind being regularly trimmed back to make bouquets. I love the white picotee edge and the tiny, highly-scented flowers.

I’ve forgotten the name of this tender perennial plant again! It has lovely soft aromatic foliage and spires of blue flowers in winter. A very lovely plant and highly recommended. When I can think what it’s called! Update: Thank you Eliza Waters for reminding me it’s Plectranthus. I have several varieties, all with gorgeous pale blue flowers. Recommended. Easy to grow from cuttings

A spray of the pretty blue flowers. Bees love them.

You’ll also notice a pale pink chrysanthemum. This also came from the HPS in Nottingham at one of the recent lectures. Another lovely flower. Name to follow when I can retrieve the label from the garden. it’s currently raining, pitch black and 3C!

There’s one stem of alstroemeria, the first to flower for winter. I get them to flower out of season by giving them a dormant period in late summer, then top dress with fresh compost and start watering with a tomato fertiliser. They will come into flower between January to April- just when some colourful flowers are needed. Normally they flower all summer long.

This shrub is just the right colour to go with the chrysanthemums. Birds love the berries. It’s common name is pheasant eye bush. Stems look like bamboo in the winter when all the leaves fall off.

In amongst the chrysanths there’s some salvia Hot Lips which is still flowering its heart out on 27th November. Really good for such a tender plant. It sometimes flowers until Christmas. I cut it down in spring, having left the tall stems intact to protect the crown from frost.

Here’s a close up of the salvia. A good match for the chrysanth. Foliage is Senecio Viravira from Coton Manor nursery.

Thank you for reading my blog. I had a bit of excitement in the week when 1,000 people checked out the blog in one day. Usually the figure is nearer 300. Anyway, I’m grateful if just one person reads it to be honest. Hopefully it will inspire someone to have a go at growing their own flowers at home. I love the challenge, and mum loves her bouquets.

Thank you to Cathy for hosting the IAVOM meme. Why not check out her blog and see what gardeners are growing all around the world. It’s fascinating to see what everyone puts in their vases every week! I learn something new every time. Gardeners are so generous with their help and advice, aren’t they.

https://ramblinginthegarden.wordpress.com/2023/11/27/in-a-vase-on-monday-sultry-serendipity/

15 thoughts on “In a Vase on Monday”

  2. This is such a lovely selection, Karen, especially for the time of year – is the chrysanthemum in the polytunnel all year round? Reading that you cut yours right back after final flowering will encourage me to do the same on my fantasy ones. Well done on such a high readership – you are clearly in a different league to most of us, so please don’t undervalue yourself

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    • Thank you Cathy. The chrysanths go outdoors all summer along the sides of the poly tunnel and greenhouse . I lift them indoors when they come into bud. They could be grown outdoors but the wind and rain makes them look a bit bedraggled so to make them last longer I bring them indoors. I’m cutting them back now as some have gone over quite quickly. Luckily there’s early mid season and late varieties. Have a happy day. Xx

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  3. Giant bird of Paradise, lemon, bougainvillea and those other plants that live in the greenhouse seem out of place in a greenhouse. They all live in the garden here. Wouldn’t you know though, the top of the bloom of the ‘Barbara Karst’ bougainvillea just recently got a bit frosted. I did not expect that. Frost happened here before it happened in some other climates!

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    • Gosh, that must have been a surprise! How wonderful to have them growing outdoors. Thank you for reading my blog and letting me know how plants are doing in your country. I wonder if I’ll ever travel and see those plants growing wild one day. That would be a treat.

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      • Well, I should have protected the sensitive vegetation. It would not have taken much to move them over a few feet, under an eave. Although I did not expect frost, it is not totally impossible, and a possibility of mild frost was actually in the forecast. I grew forty or so cultivars of citrus in the early 1990s. On the farm, young plants sometimes experienced minor frost damage. They are more resilient to frost as they mature. Even on the farm, Mexican lime was the only cultivar that we protected.

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      • Must admit, the lime is the only citrus I cover in fleece even in the greenhouse. The orange is the hardiest and I don’t have to worry about it. I’m hoping my grapefruit flowers and produces fruit next summer. This citrus needs the highest temperatures to do well here. I just threw the last two pots of pelargoniums indoors last night. We are having a really cold spell now with -5 last night. Dahlias are under 2ft of dried leaves and a cloche. Fingers crossed they will survive. Hope your plants recover from the frost.

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      • Oh, mine will recover. I am just annoyed that I did not take the potential for frost seriously. I bring too many plants back from Southern California anyway. I should not grow so many species that want special attention. There are plenty of species that need nothing special. I enjoy citrus, but would not grow them if they were not as easy to grow as they are here. Of the forty or so cultivars that I grew in the early 1990s, ‘Eureka’ lemon, as well as ‘Lisbon’ (which ‘Eureka’ is a mutant of) were the biggest. They could get twenty feet tall, so would not fit into a greenhouse. ‘Marsh’ grapefruit did not get big on the farm, but the biggest citrus tree that I ever met was a ‘Marsh’ grapefruit that was a rather broad shade tree. Much of the fruit was unreachable, even with big ladders. We harvested only about a third of the fruit, and filled two and a half pickups with it.

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  4. A beautiful bouquet for your Mum Karen. I really like the Chrysanthemum. The sage-like flower is pretty too. We have snow covering everything today so the only gardening I will be doing is shaking snow off shrubs and grasses! I do like the idea of having a polytunnel one day. Not sure if it would be of much help in our climate though – too hot in summer and too cold in winter!

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