Six on Saturday: Boo!

Every year Colchicum ‘Water Lily’ jumps out at me with a resounding ‘boo!’ I know it usually appears around this time, and even cast an eye over its usual spot just a few days ago, but nevertheless it has caught me out again. I am guessing it was in flower before Wednesday because we had a good shower that morning, which would have immediately sullied the presumably once perfect blooms, suggesting that the exceedingly double blooms might be an inherent design fault for a plant that blooms at such a variable time of year.

Bringing a bigger smile to my face is the hard-won appearance of a single bloom on herbaceous clematis C heracleifolia ‘Cassandra’. I had a sizeable clump of the similar C heracleifolia ‘New Love’ for many years, fooling visitors who struggled to believe it was a clematis, but inadvertently pruned it too soon and too severely one year, and killed it off. Trying to replace like for like, or indeed with ‘New Love’ proved surprisingly difficult as two clematis specialists had both been supplied with the wrongly labelled plant by their wholesaler, but a few years down the line I finally have an established plant which is slowly settling in – and blooming to prove that point. The metal plant support around it was purpose-made by a local metalworker to support the luxurious growth of my original plant, but has been redundant for the last few years – perhaps next year?

In a burst of enthusiasm during the week, the Golfer agreed to cut down the remainder of the stump of the oak tree, which had been left at around 4ft high with the intention of growing a sprawling clematis over it to add more colour to the woodland edge border; sadly, the clematis failed to thrive, perhaps daunted by the surrounding growth, so I