Posts Tagged ‘cotinus’

I met up with Rona Wheeldon of Flowerona yesterday and she was telling me that she was very surprised to see that her hyacinths in the garden had started to shoot.   She’s not the first person I’ve heard say this recently, I have a client who was saying the same thing about her garden.

This has been a really strange year in the garden world.  You may remember back in the Spring that the very hot spell we had early on meant that many plants were coming into flower a lot earlier than they should have been.

For those nurseries exhibiting at Chelsea Flower Show, they had to work really hard to hold things back from flowering so that they looked as good as they could for the show.  I remember watching some of the Chelsea Flower Show coverage where they interviewed one nursery who had had to keep their plants in a chiller for 6 weeks prior to the show to prevent them from coming into flower.

My garden at the moment seems very behind some of the other gardens in this area.  The trees are finally starting to drop their leaves, but the Cotinus coggygria has only just started to go its rich autumn colour.  Although the asters have finally given up flowering, the Geranium ‘Rozanne’ is still in full swing and, believe it or not, the Verbena bonariensis is still showing signs of life.

When I planted up the garden in Woking a month or so ago the Hamamelis mollis was starting to come into flower, 2-3 months earlier than it should.  For the same garden, I am waiting for the delivery of some bare root roses but they’re not quite ready to be lifted yet so we’re looking at a December delivery now.

I think the plants are a bit confused this year.  The very hard winter we had last year certainly had a huge impact on many of the evergreen shrubs mostly, I think, because they hadn’t quite had time to go dormant before the snow arrived which, if you remember, was at this time last year.  I lost a lollipop bay tree in a pot and the Pittosporum ‘Tom Thumb’ also suffered a bit, although they soon recovered over the summer months.

The Spring was very hot and dry and the summer wet, wet, wet.  Now that we are in autumn the weather seems to have turned very mild again and I think yesterday was the first day that I felt the need to wear a coat when I went out.  No wonder the plants are confused!

Do you have anything in your garden that has behaved oddly this year?

(Photos: Lisa Cox, Epicnom)