Some plants should be sold with a health warning, and I don’t just mean the poisonous ones. Euphorbia or Spurge, with so many variations used to be a favourite of mine – no longer! I planted Euphorbia cyparissias half a dozen years ago and I’m still pulling it up (with gloves I hasten to add as it owns a milky substance along with all Euphorbias that you wouldn’t necessarily want to come into contact with your skin). It even invaded an area beneath my pond liner, and has proved the devil of a job to remove. Had it been Alchemilla mollis (Lady’s mantle) then it would have been altogether a different story as I have never been able to persuade it to survive in my garden even though it grows rampant in gardens that suit it.
Anemone Pamina has taken quite a few seasons to acclimatise to my garden but now it has, my one true mixed “border” is absolutely full of it and when it has finished flowering, which probably won’t be until the end of September, from experience, I will sadly have to dig a lot of it out and replant for more interest. I hate to dig anything out but my small garden simply cannot accommodate large swathes of anything, even a plant as pretty as Anemone.
Reluctant Heroes.This Rosa Zephirine Drouhin (thornless rose) has taken years to flower anything more than half-heartedly, but I persevered with it, more out of bloody-mindedness than anything else. Clearly it didn’t like where it was but I didn’t have anywhere else to put it. For some reason, this year, bless it’s heart it’s flowering quite beautifully – presumably I have proved to be the more bloody-minded of the two of us.
Bumming around.
Don’t you just love buff-tailed bumble bees – fewer this year than in the past sadly. This one couldn’t quite keep away from the hardy geraniums (Cranesbill).
