May heralds true Autumn, with Winter knocking on the door at times. It is still a very “growy” month though, so the garden is still looking floriferous , lots of the annuals are still doing their thing and of course the roses…
As I mentioned last month, new gardens are afoot and new roses are expected in June, so the great procession of the roses is happening in earnest. I have currently completed the move of 30 polyanthas from their former home in “The Brests” to their new home in front of the house. I call this garden “Christmas Rock” in honour of the 2 ton rock my husband delivered to me for Christmas as a centrepiece for the garden. It is also adorned by a structure my daughter and her handy partner built me for my birthday after I mentioned the need for something to show off Red Cascade! I am lucky indeed to have such input and now the roses are in and the mulch mostly laid I can start moving and planting perennials. There are also annuals in here, I think the busyness of wildflowers looks great with the understated Polyantha roses.
There’s been a fair bit of possum shooting going on over the last few weeks, not to mention a very successful fishing trip, so nearly all of the evacuees have been given a possum or some fish carcasses to soften the blow of upheaval. Not that they will mind in the least, as I’ve said before, roses love attention and being hacked back and dug up definitely comes into the category…
In other calamitous news, I have finally been forced to succumb to the modern world and procure a smart phone. My old faithful decided it couldn’t charge anymore so an urgent change over has occurred. Any minute I’ll learn how to load photos from it onto the computer and will be able to adorn my blogs with multitudes of pictures…not this month though, or this blog may never be published (started it 2 weeks ago)
Instead I will rob the facebook page again with some pictures of the real stars of the Autumn/Winter gardens, which are undoubtedly Salvias. So many start about now and flower on into the Spring, and so many others have flowered since Spring and are still flowering away like there’s no tomorrow!
In an aside, some of the early Spring Species roses are flowering already! All the Banksias, some of the Pimpinellifollias and also a sprinkling of other Once Flowerers. It’s a mixed up world we live in!