Phyll Bears Garden and Good Rain.

  Good Rain.  

At long last we have had rain, things were looking very grim indeed, I was worrying how I would keep everything alive. You can keep the water up to the plants that you can't replace, the troughs and glass house, but other parts of the garden were suffering.
I had a mountain of slides to scan to the computer and I had a few days to my self, so I set everything up on the dining room table and spent several days scanning some of my old slides, it always takes much longer than you think and I didn't get all of them done. I was quite excited when I found my slide photo of Tremacron aurantiacum a plant we imported from China, that Aaron still grows very well, this is his plant in flower in a shady part of his glass house. Grows very much like a Ramonda perhaps needing a little more shade and in a moist position, a rosette of crinkled leaves lightly covered in brown hairs. It is an endemic plant of Sth. Sichuan found growing on rocky slopes at 1,000 meters.

Hyacinthoides lingulata var. ciliolata syn. Scilla lingulata from Morocco. Otto gave me this dear little Autumn flowering Scilla, only growing to about 10cm high with deep blue-purple anthers and a deep blue ovary, the leaves form an attractive flat rosette.

Actea pachypoda an Eastern Nth American woodland plant getting up to 80cm high. It is becoming endangered in its native habitat and a lovely pink to red berried form can be found in the wild not to be confused with the form below.

Actea rubra Native to North America 60cm high, it forms lovely big clusters of red berries another easy woodland plant. Rodgersia leaves in the back ground.

Coptis quinquefolia from Southern Japan and Taiwan in Mountain woodland, often on mossy rocks. I grow mine in the garden in a shaded position. Lynn Mc Gough and I imported this plant from Japan and Lynn sometimes has it listed for sale as it is slow to increase.

Another scanned slide I was excited to see, Paraquilegia anemonoides syn. P. grandiflora I used to grow in a trough, but when we had that 45deg plus celsius day, during the drought, I'm afraid it just did not cope. Forming a silvery mound to about 10cm high with flowering stems getting to about 15cm above the foliage. From Siberia, Turkestan East to Gansu province in China.

Narcissus Jenny a N. cyclamineus hybrid, is no longer grown in large quantities and is now very scarce, I haven't seen it listed for ages. Milk white-lemon cups fade to white a beautiful Narcissus.

It does not like to be to dry and I think our climate is getting too hot for it.

Phyll Bears woodland garden with masses of Trillium's, Dwarf Rhododendron's and Scilla's and her beloved glass house in the back ground. A group of us about 20 people walked down the Mount Dandenong Tourist Road carrying this glass house to her new garden. I would have loved to have had a video of that. "A walking glass house." Not a pane of glass was broken, I think we removed the glass out of the louver windows to make it lighter, but the wooden structure was still heavy!