April 27th, 2019 - Popular posts, Spring gardening

With the recent sunshine some of my more useful garden plants have gone quite mad and started spreading and growing and flowering.  I love them and am very happy for them to go as mad as they like.

Here they are:

One

Clematis Montana – needs a lot of space to go mad in.

Clematis Montana rubens, possibly the variety Elizabeth or similar which is useful to cover a shed or something ugly.  Here it’s way up in my neighbour’s apple tree. If we needed to we could just cut it right down and it wouldn’t do it any harm.   The prettiest bit for us is where it cascades down the wooden ladder of pots like a pink curtain.

Two

Next the common forget-me-not which comes of its own accord every year.  You couldn’t get rid of it even if you wanted to.  It sets seed in autumn and flowers now.  When it’s done around the end of June I will pull it out easily and shake the seeds around before composting the plants.  And Lo, there it is again the next year.

A haze of blue forget-me-nots in the flower border

Three

Below is the spurge called Euphorbia amygdaloides Robbiae – a fancy name for such a useful garden plant that you can find on waste ground and in the dry shady places where nothing else will grow.  Many consider it a weed but here it is providing a splash of lime green in a poor soil under a huge street tree where nothing else would grow.  It just spreads and spreads and is easy to pull out if you want to control it, which I don’t.  It’s a fantastic colour to have in the Spring.

Euphorbia amygdaloides – ideal for dry shade

Four

The heart shaped leaves here are an Epimedium, another useful garden plant for spreading in a dry shady place.   For me the common ones are the best for ground cover and a carpet of green.  They have beautiful flowers too and are easy to buy mail order.

Epimedium with a more dainty euphorbia behind it

Five

Common ivy covering the fence and climbing the tree

Here behind the acer, covering the fence and climbing up the apple tree is possibly the most useful garden plant of all, the common ivy.  Again I couldn’t get rid of it if I wanted to.  It’s everywhere along these London back gardens and pulling it up would be a hopeless task so I am thrilled that it looks so lovely here on the fence outside the back door.  It’s great for wildlife and gives me an unplanned green wall.

Six

This Trachelospermum by the front door has put on a lot of growth of tiny shiny leaves this year and you can see the larger darker leaves at the base from previous years. In the summer its flowers smell of jasmine and I’m hoping it will make its way up the house to the top.  We can but hope.

Trachelospermum climbing up the wall

Every Saturday we bloggers show six things in our garden and this theme is curated by the Propagator so a big Thankyou to him for hosting.