We have now reached the stage of summer where there’s enough sun and rain for everything around us to turn an aggressive shade of green. You can almost see the plants growing while standing in front of them. Despite having experienced this jungle-like state of affairs every year for more than a decade, I’m never quite ready when it hits. So please excuse us if you notice that the backgrounds of these photos are starting to look like more wilderness than a garden, we’ve reached the point where weeding is on a triage basis, and for the most part, we’ve accepted that’s the way it will probably always be.
1. Fuchsia hybrids ‘Dark Eyes’ (with the purple skirt) and ‘Elma’ (with the white skirt) have bounced back from a sulky June and are putting out plenty of blooms to decorate our front terrace. This might be the year that I will manage to overwinter them, now that we have a functioning root cellar.
2. A before and after picture set! Sort of. I forgot to take the “before” picture until after we’d cut down several of the young saplings in the weedy patch at the end of the vegetable rows. Hence the picture of all of them in a pile on the ground. The “after” shows the two young fruit trees that are living there now! Unlike most of our other fruit trees, I’m determined to keep these at a manageable height (8 feet or so). Family pear tree on the left with ‘Tohtori’ (Doctor), ‘Pepi’, and ‘Souvenirs’. Family apple tree on the right with ‘Zemzyshnaja’, ‘Vuokko’ (Anemone), and ‘Keltakaneli’ (Yellow Cinnamon).
3. Achillea millefolium ‘Summer Pastels’, winter-sown in early 2022, is in its second year and starting to put out blooms in a nice variety of shades. We’ve got wild yarrow everywhere too, so it’ll be interesting to see if any hybridizing occurs over time.
4. Oriental poppies, winter-sown early this year, have started flowering this week. They seem a bit smaller than the ones I’ve had in the past, but they still have time to catch up over the summer. I’d love to have a huge patch of mixed poppies, so here’s hoping they make it through the winter this time.
5. Austin rose ‘Scepter’d Isle’ is the last of my 2022 trio to bloom and it has the most adorable cupped shape. The aphids were going to town on these buds last week, but the predators arrived just in time. We’ve been very fortunate to have enough local wildlife to help keep things balanced.
6. Last but not least, my first harvest of garlic scapes! Pulling them out is oddly fun, though I’m still perfecting my technique — 75% of mine snapped before I got all of the stalk out. Now, if only I can figure out how I’ll be using them…
Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!
Little Blue and White House 
11 responses to “Six on Saturday | 15th July 2023”
I find that Achillea does hybridise with common yarrow and you end up with wishy washy babies. A lovely rose and I love that fuchsia.
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Good to know! I guess there’s no use saving seeds, then. Dividing the clumps as they get bigger will be the way to go.
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I think I saw some ‘pink yarrow’, escaped from a garden on my walk today. Lovely rose!
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I think some of our wild yarrows are light pink naturally, but it’s hard to tell when there are so many gardens that could have cross pollinated with them. It would make sense, I suppose, if that’s what the brighter colors were selectively bred from.
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A lovely six but the rose, in particular, is simply beautiful.
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Thank you! Yes, I love how symmetrical it is, more like a painting of a rose. I think I’m going to have to try the other colors now…
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Two lovely Fuchsias, Angela. I’m particularly taken with F. ‘Elma’. I lost my five bushes last winter, and the replacements aren’t doing as well as I’d hoped, though I suppose there’s time yet for them to grow and produce more flowers.
It makes sense to keep your fruit trees at a manageable height. I hope they produce mouth-watering fruit for you.
I love Achillea in the borders and your ‘Summer Pastels’ is a variety I could happily find a spot for.
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Thank you, I think Elma is adorable too 🙂 Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that you lost so many bushes! I suppose you can leave them outside over the winter usually? I wonder if rooting new cuttings from the replacements might work, since they are technically growing up in your garden and can adapt from an earlier age? It seems that the cuttings I took this winter are growing much faster than the full plants I got from the nursery.
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Sadly, fuchsias rarely survive winters outdoors here. Most were in pots and taken into the (unheated) greenhouse, but they didn’t cope last winter. I’ll be taking some cuttings this year, Angela and hoping for the best! 😁
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Everything is looking lovely. It has been several years since I’ve had success with Fuchsia, and your photos remind me of how beautiful they are and how much I miss them. It is a bit too hot to get them through the summer here. Good luck with your new fruit trees!
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Thank you! I’ve loved them since I first started gardening, but we treat them as shady perennials in California so learning to overwinter plants now that we live much further north is a skill that I’m still getting the hang of! There are so many varieties that I’d love to get, so it would make a lot more sense to save them than to limit myself to the same ones started from scratch every year. If you guys are zone 7, I’m pretty sure you could get away with sticking them in the shade like we used to!
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