fourth day

Voila, my bouquet put together from the following ingredients:

A branch of Kolkwitzia, the beauty bush shrub. A giant beast of a shrub, covering 400 square feet of the backgarden. It's in flower for a good three weeks and I adore it. At present the red bud tree, cercis siliquastrum, is trying to overlay one side of it and I shall have to tame that tree somehow.

A branch of this shrub, Deutzia "Rosamunde" which grows next to the vine house so that I can photograph it through the windows. When the glass gets mucky with green algae, it gives a nice patina to the picture. I know, I could get a similar effect with layers, but somehow I like the immediacy of an actual layer of dirt :-). Makes it look romantic, don't you agree? Besides, who likes washed windows. The birds certainly don't as they get a headache from the headbanging against clean windows.

Wisteria sinensis "Pink Ice", a 30 feet wide climber reaching for our roof, which covers the kitchen window at the front of the house. More about the Wisteria in the previous post HERE

Mock orange or Philadelphus, another giant shrub, covering 30 feet

Then I added a perfect bloom from Rosa 'Arthur Bell' [ a McGredy rose] plus its immaculate foliage [ won't be long before snails get to that shrub, even though I grow it inside the vine house, it is still not immune from pests.
I added 2 flowers from the deep purple/blue clematis Viola, and a piece of driftwood sticking out of the top of the concoction.

Then the whole thing fell apart and the rose started to drop its petals, so I simplified it a little as seen in the first photo at the top of the post.

This is for Cathy HERE



My garden has developed into a matrix garden, where planting is concerned with successive layers of vegetation, one above the other, through which plants form multi-dimensional communities.


The concept of “matrix planting” is based upon models of natural vegetation types, wherein a variety of species grow together in harmony and in support of each other. Think of it as a fruitcake: small plants are distributed across the larger plant matrix like nuts and fruits are scattered through the fruitcake dough matrix.



This is for Nick's page HERE

and for Denise's page HERE