At its best

This is probably the week that my garden is at its very best all year.  I have planted the back garden for a summer show as this is when we are here so it isn't great in Spring and it has pretty much waned by September.  Because of this I do keep adding to the web album fairly frequently right now but don't post here necessarily.

That said, I thought I might share a couple of today's with you.

I think this is Iris Spuria and it has finally flowered!  We visited the Cotswolds four years ago with some friends and they were overflowing their beds at the B & B they were staying in - the iris, not the friends - .  I asked the owner if I could snaffle a couple and was told to take as many as we could dig up.  They knew what they were doing - we couldn't hack them out of the ground.  They were in baked clay alongside a concrete edging, bordering a gravel drive in high summer. My friends bought me a trowel and we had another go.  We gave up at two or three of them, brought them home and planted them.  I confess to having moved them around a few times as they look 'odd' in my garden (and still do) but I was determined to have them after all that trouble.  As I said this is their first year in bloom.  If you look at the photo carefully you will see there are four flowers per stem and the whole thing is more than three feet tall, so they are remarkable specimens.

This is another odd ball.  A primula, yes, but strange colour and even stranger development.  As it starts to put up the flower stem it is covered in a silver grey powder so they look for all the world as though they have some mold/fungal problem.  They then come to fruition and produce the prettiest of flowers above pale green, spotless leaves. It is the Asiatic primrose -Primula capitata.

This is a bit of my wild and woolly garden.  My other half loves little tidy plants dotted about surrounded by clean black soil and I just love this!  Good job I am the gardener.....

As I said if you want to see more take a look in the web album now and then.