Why my life in the garden is still an endless joy

Am I still having fun in the garden? Yes, gardening is still a wonderful pastime. And, hard to believe, I am still getting excited about new plant acquisitions and new planting ideas.

This week, for instance, I saw for the first time a Tasmanian blueberry vine (Billardiera longiflora) in the garden of a friend on Salt Spring Island.

This vine, which apparently also goes by the name purple apple-berry and grows in cool, damp forests from southern New South Wales to Tasmania, produces greenish-yellow flowers in spring followed by lovely purple berry fruit in late summer.

I have never seen the flowers but I did see the masses of purple berries on my friend’s plant. They looked stunning set against the vine’s clusters of small, dark green leaves.

I fell in love with the plant immediately and was lucky enough to find one to buy at Salt Spring’s popular Thimble Farms Nursery.

I’ll try to carefully keep the vine over winter and grow it up a metal spiral trellis in a pot in the spring.

I also had fun growing another vine, the black-eyed Susan vine (Thunbergia alata) in a pot up a trellis in my garden this summer. 

This vine very quickly shot to the top of the trellis and smothered it with beautiful orange flowers with a black centre. I liked the look and will probably do it again next year.

Another very pleasing planting this summer was the well-known Proven Winners spider flower, Cleome ‘Senorita Rosalita’.

I have used this cultivar many times before and always been pleased with the results, but this year I was knocked out by how well it performed dotted in a sunny border and fronted by the sturdy stonecrop, Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’.

As well, it was immensely satisfying that both these plants turned out to be so popular with bees, especially the sedum.

In late summer, the sedum’s flower heads were covered with honey bees working extremely diligently.

But generally I derive pleasure in the garden these days from quite simple successes.

For instance, I love the look of an arch that I replanted with pyracantha a year or two ago. I took out the roses and clematis and planted pyracantha as part of an idea to create a more green-on-green landscape.

The pyracantha not only flowers wonderfully in spring, producing masses of lovely white blooms, but also puts on an attractive show of orange berries in September.

I couldn’t be happier: two seasons of colour and evergreen foliage plus a nice structure branching around the arch all year round.

I was also very happy with the outcome of my honeysuckle pillar, an idea picked up at Powis Castle last year.

It filled out and flowered beautifully and I hope it will continue to get better and better as the years go by.

The cascading white begonia flowers in our kitchen windowbox also caught my eye this summer and made me smile, especially at how they combined so beautifully with the airy spray of white flowers of Euphorbia Diamond Frost.

And I’m still having a lot of fun using Sedum palmeri to fill pots and hanging baskets and to underplant things like abutilon, aeonium, oleander and fuchsias.

These have got to be the easiest plant to propagate: simply snap one off and push it into a new patch of fresh soil. Works every time. 

A ball of echeveria also looks wonderful in the garden and I am always delighted and surprised by the flowers that they produce that give such an exotic feel to the garden in summer.

However, I still have a lingering desire to have one or two of the plants I saw while visiting Jimi Blake’s lovely nursery, Hunting Brook Gardens in Ireland.

I can’t, for instance, forget how beautiful the silver foliage was of Celmisia semicordata ‘David Shackleton’. Or how fabulous the bronzy colour of the leaves of a fantastic new form of Astelia looked when I saw it for the first time in Jimi’s garden.

I’ve been asking around, but as yet no one has been able to tell me where in BC I would be able to buy either of these plants. Pity. They are both amazing.

But, as I said, I am getting my gardening pleasure these days from simple things – black-eyed Susan vines, purple spider plants and a pyracantha arch.

And there is always the promise of new delights next year when my newly acquired Tasmanian blueberry vine starts to show its fantastic clusters of berries.

swhysall@hotmail.com