A Diamond Jubilee Posy

Tags

Anemone coronaria, Chelsea Pensioners, Diamond Jubilee, Diarmuid Gavin, forget-me-nots, Omphalodes liniflora, Orlaya grandiflora, Potentilla 'Gibson's Scarlet', Queen Elizabeth II, RHS Chelsea

Celebrations for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II will take place over this extended bank holiday weekend. My own nod to the Queen’s 60 year reign is with this posy of red, white and blue, picked from my allotment and garden.

It’s made from the white Orlaya grandiflora and Omphalodes linifolia, both are hardy annuals which I sowed last autumn to produce some early flowers.

The blue is provided simply with forget-me-nots and a few cornflowers. Forget-me-nots are a biennial and can be sown in July for flowering the following spring. Once growing in your garden they will happily self sow and pop up of their own accord every year. Some might say this is a nuisance but they are easy enough to remove if they appear somewhere they’re not wanted. The blue cornflowers are such an easy plant to grow and use as a cut flower. They are a hardy annual and can be sown in autumn to over winter and then flower in late spring and early summer. Further spring sowings can provide blooms right through to autumn. They are one of the best flowers for attracting bees and hoverflies into your garden or onto the allotment. Best picked just as the flower is starting to open, they will last a week in a vase.

Potentilla fruticosa ‘Gibson’s Scarlet’ growing in my garden

Finally, the red comes from a few stems of Potentilla fruticosa ‘Gibson’s Scarlet’. A clump forming perennial plant with strawberry like leaves, it is covered in shocking red flowers throughout the summer. The contrast of the red flowers and the green foliage makes me think of the Chelsea Pensioners, stood on Diarmuid Gavin’s garden tower, at this year’s RHS Chelsea Show. I don’t know where, or when, the saying ‘red and green should never be seen’ originated but I love the striking colour combination.

Diarmuid Gavin’s Chelsea 2012 Garden (image by Andy Paradise, courtesy of picselect)

The centrepiece flower is a red Anemone coronaria. These are grown from corms and can be planted in autumn for spring flowers or in spring for summer flowers. I have found them tricky to grow on my own wet soil, even with grit added for improved drainage, and only a few made it through last winter, but they are such beautiful flowers I will not be defeated by them and already have a cunning plan in place for success next year.

I fear the weather knows it’s a bank holiday, as this lovely warm spell looks set to end, with a return to more typical British weather. A wet bank holiday, what a surprise! But whatever you’re doing this weekend, I hope you have a great time.

The Cutting Patch Update

Tags

Alchemilla mollis, biennials, cut flowers, Orlaya grandiflora, sweet williams

My cut flower patch is such an important part of my allotment. Last year was my first year and my ideas about using some of my plot for flowers were greeted with some scepticism by the established allotment growers who couldn’t understand why I’d wasted so much of the plot on putting in paths, let alone devoting soil to growing flowers instead of potatoes and onions. However, it seems like the flower bug is catching and I won’t be the only one this year with blooms brightening up the site. A couple of the older growers were asking me where I bought my seed from, so I passed around a few seed catalogues and dished out some packets of seed I had collected last autumn. Then on a visit at the weekend I was chatting to two of them and they were telling me all about their plans for cut flowers!! Not such a strange idea after all.

My own patch is taking shape with the biennials and autumn sown annuals coming into their own. The much-anticipated flowering of the sweet williams has just started in the last week and I’ve been able to fill a good 2 buckets full of sweet rocket, honesty, alchemilla, orlaya and the last of the stocks.

Yesterday I got up to the plot early in the hope I could get a lot done before it got so hot that I started to wilt. I had to make two trips with the wheelbarrow, transporting little plants from home to the plot so that the first big plant out could commence. In went some annual asters, daucus ‘Black Knight’, white antirrhinums, didiscus, some pinks grown from cuttings taken in March and some bupleurum. There were also some small plants of lettuce, beetroot and chard for the edible part of the plot.

Sweet williams

Still at home and waiting for the second round of planting out are zinnias, rudbeckias, cosmos, sunflowers, cornflowers, gaura, dill, gypsophila and a few more larkspur. Oh, and two dahlias. It’ll be touch and go as to whether I can fit all this in. There was quite a lot of standing around with hands on hips looking thoughtful, on Sunday, wondering whether I’d had the garden equivalent of piling my plate too high at a buffet because my eyes were bigger than my stomach. My imagination is certainly bigger than any available land I have but I’m sure with a bit of jiggling around I can do it.  That’s squeezing plants in and not me doing some strange dance, by the way.

Cut flower posy

The great thing about gardening is that each year is different and new opportunities open up. I’m still very much learning just how much I can cram into a small space and for how long I can get the season to last. Plans are already being formulated for which biennials to sow later next month and which hardy annuals I’ll sow this autumn. But, for the moment, I’m enjoying this year’s first pickings from my cut flower patch.