Friday 7 October 2011

cannas, cannas everywhere

I'm really starting to move forward on the new front garden bed.  I've got a birthday party on the 29th so I'm eager to get some plants in before then!

Here's a bit of a "before".  A palm in a pot will go where that cardboard is now (we've filled TWO council bins with cardboard from the furniture and there's still some left!).  At the moment we've just got the yuccas, the pond, and some dichondra at the front.
http://www.alexareynolds.com/garden11/frontgarden1.jpg
http://www.alexareynolds.com/garden11/frontgarden2.jpg
The plan is to pull out the two shabbiest hedges along the brick and grow some ginger lily.  I also want cannas in front of the yuccas and some bergenias along the bath about to where the pond is.  Finally I'll fill in with some annuals.  Lush, green and a bit tropical!

Cannas aren't in the shops just yet as they seem to wait until they're in bloom and beautiful.  So I ordered some from a canna website.  It also let me be really picky about what I got.  There are hundreds of varieties of cannas in short, medium, tall, with leaves that are green, red, or stripey and flowers that are pink, red, yellow, orange or spotted and either large or small in size.  So much choice!

I ordered five plants and they arrived in the mail yesterday.  So far when I've mail-ordered plants they sure tend to be generous - I count 8 rhizomes here!  Three of them were a bit small so perhaps they thought they should together count as one.
http://www.alexareynolds.com/garden11/cannaplant1.JPG
I dug a shallow trench in front of the yuccas, spaced the cannas out (not quite in a straight line, that was on purpose!) and filled them in with some horse manure to enrich the soil. 
http://www.alexareynolds.com/garden11/cannaplant2.JPG
Now it's pretty clear they won't be blooming before the party but I hope they at least settle in and put out some leaves for a bit of foliage.  The variety is called "copicana" (no, not tropicana!), about 1.5 metres tall with green leaves and elongated orange blossoms.  Hopefully they'll look like this!

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