brunnera update

Two months ago this week I made cuttings of my brunnera Jack Frost.  Of the four cuttings, two of them now have long healthy roots and the other two rotted and died.  Look at those roots!  So I can officially report that brunnera will take from cuttings.

So today I moved them into their own punnets.  The leaves sure don't look like much but if I don't manage to kill them now they should start settling in and put out now growth.  Hopefully by the autumn they'll be big enough to plant out.  I just have to figure out where to plant them...

brunnera cuttings

I love my pretty little Brunnera "Jack Frost" and decided I'd try to see if I could get it to root from cuttings. Some plants, like rosemary, mint, salvias and plectranthus, will easily grow from cuttings; you just cut a section of stem, pick off the lower leaves, and roots grow from where the leaves used to be. But I couldn't tell from my internet research whether brunnera was a plant like that. But there's no harm in trying!

So I cut this flowering stalk from my brunnera. I cut off all the flowers and cut the stem into four pieces. I tried to give each stem a section where I picked off the leaves to see if roots would grow where the leaves used to be.

Then I dipped each cutting in root-hormone powder that's meant to encourage it to grow roots. I put them in a Ziploc bag with moist potting mix and sealed it closed to keep it from drying out. Now I just wait and hope! So far they haven't shriveled up or molded.

anemones at last

I decided a while back that one of my planned additions to the garden were white anemones (also called Japanese windflowers).  They're just so graceful and charming in the autumn garden after the heat of the summer has passed.  But I didn't realise just how hard that would be to achieve! 

Garden shops tend to sell plants like this when they're in flower so they're more appealing.  So as I saw the anemones flowering in my neighbours' gardens I starting asking about anemones in my local garden shop.  It took them a few weeks before they got them in ... and they were pink.  I've got nothing against pink flowers in general but to me, pink anemones just don't have the magic of the simple, clean white ones.  So I looked around at other garden shops.  Pink.  I checked back at the local.  Still pink.  Bunnings?  Pink.  I had a chat at my local and found out that they'd called every one of their suppliers, and only one had white anemones and they weren't yet big enough to sell!

So with atypical patience I asked them to put down my name and waited for my anemones to grow in some distant nursery somewhere.  Every weekend for about a month I'd stop by, just to check if they were in yet.  At last, just before Easter I got a message on my phone that started with "now don't fall out of your chair, but..."

At last they'd arrived!  As soon as I could I stopped by and sure enough, there were the little baby anemones.  And also some big, beautiful two-year-olds covered with perfect white flowers.  Now usually I'm patient enough to buy the small plant and wait a year for flowers, but not this time.  I'd waited long enough.  They weren't cheap, but they were mine!

Here's the "before" picture of where they went, in the back western bed. 

And here's the after - one on each side of the vitex bed (it's hard to see the one farther from the camera).  I took out a few more tufts of the liriope; it's a tough little plant and a good contrast but boring and worth sacrificing for these beauties.  Next year they'll grow even higher, their flower heads dancing in the breeze.

I'm really starting to be happy with this corner of the garden.  The vitex is growing incredibly quickly and the hydrangeas are powering along slowly but steadily.  The Japanese maple is doing so much better in its new home and the brunnera "jack frost" (just to the side of the nearer anemone) is happy too.  I'm amazed at how big the elephant ear colocasia has grown in that back corner, so it's obvious that the two small ones at the corner of the square bed are going to have to move soon.  And I've let some wild violets take seed behind the vitex to give the dichondra "silver falls" some competition.  The marigolds and ageratum will die down over the winter but they're still going strong for now.

Now I couldn't just let you go with only that distant view of the anemones, could I?  I've been playing with my new smartphone recently and having a ball with a camera program I downloaded that lets you set all kinds of old-fashioned filters on your photos.  So here's a whimsical photo of the anemones to finish on.  I hope it captures for you the beauty that attracted me to these simple, pure, white anemones.

little jack frost and rosemary sage

My little brunnera "jack frost" really perked up, and surprised me with a few flower spikes!  The picture's a bit washed out but those flowers are a beautiful forget-me-not blue.

And my sage and rosemary patch is still going stronger and stronger.  It looked like this once:

And today it looks like this!

spring spring spring

Spring is well and truly here!  We're getting more and more days that touch on 18 degrees and the last week has had a fair bit of sun.  The days are longer, the fruit trees are flowering and deciduous plants are starting to break dormancy.  Here's my little Japanese maple, bursting with life in its new home.  It has lost a bit more of its tip growth but I'm hoping this new spot will see it thrive from now on.  I love how vividly golden the first growth is, it's actually tinged slightly with red too.

This is that little Brunnera "Jack Frost" I mentioned.  Almost not worth the photo at the moment but isn't that foliage lovely?  By next spring it should fill out to around a half-metre clump with blue flowers that look exactly like forget-me-nots.

And I can't stop taking photos of the hellebore!  I can't quite believe just how many flowers they put out!  Last year only one clump had any flowers and it only had a few.  This year all three clumps are covered with blossoms that start out dark purple and fade to mauve.

Unfortunately, my cavallo nero has also felt the call of spring and decided to flower.  It's kind of cute actually, a little mini broccoli head.  Shows you how closely related the brassicas are (broccoli, kale and cabbage).

This is the purple-sprouting broccoli I started late in the winter.  I don't know if it'll grow fast enough to harvest a head before I want the pot for a summer vegetable.  But in the meantime the radishes I planted around it are coming in really well.  They should be ready to start eating within a week.  I'm thinking I'll make a salsa with tomato, onion, radish and parsley.

Finally, I had to take a picture of my compost.  In the autumn I ran out of room and had to leave a lot of the fig leaves under the tree.  They became absolutely full of worms, which all got dumped in the compost bin once there was room.  And now whenever I turn the compost, it's packed full of them.  The photo's pretty blurry but it gives you an idea - there are even more than this but they instantly shy away from the light.

Mmmmm that's good compost.  I've actually run out of space for compost in the beds where I usually put it.  I went to put some under the hellebores and realised there was already so much of the manure/soil mix that any compost would start to bury the plants!  I'm going to have to start putting it on plants I don't usually bother with, like the cumquat trees or the birch trees out the front.  Better to have too much of the stuff than not enough, I say.