Today we’re off to Wales to visit Alan Challoner’s garden.
I have a semi-woodland garden in Anglesey, and it is almost always giving me flowers no matter the time of year.
This year there has been a tremendous display of old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba, Zones 4–8). Like other members of the Clematis genus, old man’s beard (or traveler’s joy) climbs over other plants using its leaf stalks and flower stalks. The leaves are not unlike the familiar garden forms of clematis. The leaf stalks entwine around any convenient structure in their vicinity and then lignify (become woody). It has now grown to a prodigious length—high into the trees and down the hedge along the roadside.
As we get into autumn, I thought you might like to see a late rose flower, a plant that I have grown from a cutting taken from a hybrid tea rose. It is now in its third year, and this is its second blooming. As soon as I saw these two flowers up against each other, one a bit bigger than the other, I thought of a mother and daughter having a kiss before darkness and bedtime.
In spring, the weigela (Weigela florida, Zones 4–8) is lavish with pink flowers.
Spring flowers are popping up amid the lawn.
Daffodils (Narcissus hybrids, Zones 3–8) are growing here and there on the lawn.
Numerous clumps of snowdrops (Galanthus sp., Zones 3–7) in bloom mark the earliest sign of spring.
Later in the season, the garden is lush and full of green.
A golden chain tree (Laburnum, Zones 5–7) drips with yellow flowers.
The old-fashioned rose ‘Rambling Rector’ (Zones 5–9) lives up to its name, rambling over the garden with masses of fragrant white flowers.
Another rambling rose, ‘American Pillar’, has bright pink blooms.