Making babies.

The summer visitor peak has passed, Tatton is over, our final NGS day for the year has come and gone and now it’s all about the seed harvest for next year. Every day brings another ripe set of pods to squirrel away with all the optimism that ripe, fresh seed holds. I can’t help it; I make continuous mental notes of seed potential all day – sometimes down to single flower heads – and find myself following an ever more complex path through the garden each day to check on their progress.

Peter has tuned into this quest very adeptly and almost instinctively knows which plants to just get on with cutting down and which ones to check with me first, just in case. Amongst this year’s haul are Primula elatior, a single meconopsis ‘Lingholm’ seed head, Astrantia maxima, a prized bag of Tulipa sprengeri seeds and a pod from a gorgeous greenish blue Fritillary in the woodland garden. And that’s just some of the interesting stuff. But I’ve missed the white Thalictrum aquilegifolium again – last year it got cut down too soon and this year I forgot to mark which were the white ones. I’ve also lost track of a single Campanula glomerata ‘Superba’. But not much has passed me by.

I’ve sown some seed now, mainly the Pulsatillas and Primulas and some have already germinated, but I had huge trouble last year keeping overwintered seedlings going if they were too small to pot up by early September. The greenhouse is too damp (it leaks all round) and too shaded by the hedge so it gets very prone to fungal problems. Same applies to cuttings. The bag of Clematis wilsonii cuttings that the nursery staff at Great Dixter gave me have all taken and been potted up already so they will be fine, not so the C. jacksonii ‘Superba’ taken from my garden at the same time which are still sulking. The Salvias, Nepetas and Penstemons are unbelievably easy too and will be out of there in a week or two. But I’m going to leave most of the propagation work until spring and give myself a slightly easier time this winter.

Finally, I’m having a few days off this week, so H & H and I went for a walk to the river. We went via a nearby Woodland Trust meadow and just happened to have some seed bags with us and returned with a phenomenal seed haul of Corncockle, blue Cornflower and a yellow daisy-like flower that I don’t recognise. And all we did was collect what we could reach along the path. Mixed with our own native poppy seed I think they’ll make a lovely overseeding addition to our own meadow next year.