August
Anemone ‘Ruffled Swan’
I can’t tell you how much money I have spent on anemones over the years. I mean, it pales into comparison to roses, but at least with roses, I have something to show for all that investment. Anemones, the Japanese ones, seem to find the climate of Malus Farm inhospitable.
Single & doubles
Which is slightly upsetting to say the least. Anemones are known for being tough as boots. Enthusiastic to the point of invasive. Thuggish even. Not so for me. I bought hundreds of pounds worth of plants from Arvensis two years ago, dug them all into an interesting random mixed border and barely three have survived. I tell myself that they are like peonies; they just need a bit of time to get their roots down.
(Like peonies, there is an accepted truth that anemones don’t like being moved. It isn’t true for peonies and I shuffle mine round all the time, you just have to not bury them too deep. I am intrinsically quite lazy and generally averse to the effort of digging very deep holes, so me and peonies get on just fine.)
The ones that are doing fabulously though, truly are doing fabulously. They are in a huge cattle trough by the back door. I was inspired by the alleyway of South Wood Farm, so I placed the trough where it could be seen down the length of the bootroom. I am not sure there is quite enough flower in the anemones for this to work, there is a little too much green. It looked an absolute treat full of white foxgloves though.
The only solution? To buy some more. As I mentioned the other week, I have been planning to give over a piece of ground to the Arne Maynard border as detailed in House & Garden, and the scheme includes Anemone ‘Wild Swan’. I just happened to be browsing the reduced racks at my local plant nursery when I discovered A. ‘Ruffled Swan’.
There isn’t a lot of signal at the nursery so I often have to buy things without the usual research. Plants out of flower are a particular punt, and like going into a school exam without notes. I have to rely on my horticultural knowledge as to whether this particular variety of something will fit. Not that google will necessarily help me; the one thing that catches me out every single time with both seeds catalogues and plant websites is scale. They only ever photograph the flower, and I am responsible for drawing my own conclusions. This is how I came to mistake Cephalaria gigantea (2m=+) and Scabiosa ochroleuca (30cm in my soil) as the same plant.
Not being able to check A. Ruffled Swan’s credentials, I had to assume they are of the same bloodline as A. ‘Wild Swan’.
And so, I have some beautiful tall anemones and I have some pink ones which are tiny. I don’t know if they are meant to be tiny, or whether they are just finding their way and next year, they will be the height I expect a Japanese anemone to be. What I do know if that I shall probably keep buying more and planting more, and hoping that I find the perfect spot for them. Right plant, right place.
I am not a perfectionist though. Good enough plant for a hospitable place. My Wild Swans are likely to often be a little Ruffled.
Other things that are out now:
Fruit in the hedges as well as the kitchen garden.
A truly awful year for dahlias, except my rugged red one, which starts in May and flowers continuously until Halloween. There’s always something that likes day length and the beginning of September mirrors that of May (thirteen and a half days give or take, although shortening rapidly) so I have had a sudden burst of hesperis (white sweet rocket). The nasturtiums have put on feet of growth in a week, and are flowering in all sorts of wonderful colours, as well as yellow.
One single echinacea, and not even one I like. I am sure it was meant to be E. pallida.
