Gardener's update - gladioli and shield bugs

Day 58 of meteorological summer

Summer is beginning to fade but it’s a charming time of year.

It’s still very hot but less unbearable. I now have an established gardener’s tan, despite wearing sun cream each day.

I’ve been collecting fallen leaves, especially beneath Aesculus hippocatanum (horse chestnuts) and Acer pseudoplatanus (sycamores). Horse chestnuts are suffering from leaf blotch and leaf miner so likely they are dropping leaves due to stress - I haven’t seen a happy one in years.

Leaf miner is very curious - a moth lays an egg within the leaf, the moth hatches and eats the leaf. This entire process causes brown blotches and a generally unsatisfactory tree. They arrived in the UK in 2002 and it seems as though the poor horse chestnuts don’t stand a chance with both the blotch and the miner - it’s hard to be upset when you see the incredibly sweet moth species, only 3-5mm species in length.

Images taken from: https://butterfly-conservation.org/moths/horse-chestnut-leaf-miner

On my way back from a morning run, I heard lots of scratching and crunching. I followed the sound to the series of Corylus colurna (Turkish Filbert) which line my street. There was a community of squirrels nibbling on the nuts. They were sat on the ground or in trees, all happily crunching away. It felt very natural and a scene which makes me smile even to think of now.

Not much to report this week in the gardens, I’ve been watering more than usual and feeding all flowering plants with potassium to keep the development of flowers going.

I was quite glad when the rain fell on Wednesday, even if it was a little, enough to resolve some desperately thirsty plants. I’ve been texting clients to water all their containers, sending gentle nudges to ensure each plant stands a chance.

Have you seen the gladioli appearing all around the gardens? I’ve been in love with all the spectacular shades of the flower, each are gorgeous as the next. They flower from the bottom-up and last weekend, I bought a single stem of yellow and purple cultivar, known as Gladioli ‘Oracle’ from a sweet man who sells his allotment stock for charity.

This week a client gifted me a new Monstera deliciosa. She’s one of my favourite and most long standing clients. During each visit, she makes me a cup of tea and something freshly baked, whether it be a chocolate brownie or cheese scone with thick lashings of butter.

Her hobby is house plant propagation and she is very successful and intuitive with the process. Whenever I arrive, she shows me her new ventures - a Ficus Elastica (rubber plant) cut down to encourage branching or cuttings in a pot of soil incased in a sandwich bag, speeding up and ensuring propagation.

If you cut off the top of a plant (species dependant), you will force the plant to branch. This is due to apical dominance. A the tips of the plant, there is a hormone present called auxin. Auxin, in lay-mans terms, encourages the plant to grow upwards rather than outwards. When you cut off the tip of the plant, including those top buds, you remove that hormone and instead side shoots will grow. So if you have a particularly leggy house plant (again species dependant), you can cut it and encourage side branching.

I believe her to be the master of monstera’s. We were discussing how I could take cuttings of my own plant as it’s been slow to establish and reach maturity. She offered to gift me one of her propagated plants, taking me to her living room where her grand collection of monsteras stood. I gladly loaded one in my car and was on my way.

Gifted cheese plant on the right - clearly the show stopper.

I hadn’t finished my work day so to avoid the cheese plant getting over heated or burnt leaves, I took the plant to my next clients house with me. They were away so I left the cheese plant in the shady corner of the garden. It watched me while I worked, patiently waiting to go home while I swept leaves, dead-headed rudbeckia and watered, until it was lovingly packed back into the car.

I observed that each of her cheese plants have constricted roots and had been pruned rigorously. She said “treat em’ mean” which I agree with, however not usual for me, as I normally give all my house plants plenty of growing room and fresh compost.

Nature’s highlights

The following day, I visited another garden to find many tiny frogs, hopping around the garden. This client had a pond so no surprise they had taken over the garden in my departure. No one visits the space anymore and I keep it in check, it feels happy to let nature run wild, within reason.

The next highlight is the abundance of blackbirds which are appearing everywhere at the moment. They are usually soaked from a dip in the local bird bath or pond, their damp feathers puffed up and looking slightly bedraggled.

I was at a consult for a new garden after the work day and noticed a sweet black bird clipping around, soggy feathers in tow. They seem less shy at the moment, the overwhelming heat piercing through their shyness so they can take advantage of water spots around the gardens.

Allotment

I picked my first pears from the allotment. They sit proudly in my fruit bowl, ripening up (pears ripen off the tree). We indulged ourselves in the freshly fallen early green gauges, chopping them up and adding to kombucha or mixing in with our breakfast.

Palestinian courgette and pears :-)

I made a rose syrup, boiling sugar and water with the petals of a heavily scented rose. I’ve added to my chamomile kombucha blend so I’ll report back if this is a success.

Interestingly on my blackberries, I have a population of shield bugs. They don’t bother me, however will release a stinky fluid if distressed. There’s a real variety of them and I have unfortunately identified the shield bug below to be a recent arrival in the UK, non native, Nezara viridula. Non native insects can be disruptive to the current ecosystem, so considered concerning when new species establish themselves in the UK.

A friend recently stayed on a working farm in Italy and told me that shield bugs are very disruptive to crops over there, particularly tomatoes. Each morning, the gardeners would shake the shield bugs from the crops until they all dropped to the floor.

I’ve been adding nasturtium leaves and flowers to our salads. They are bitter and punchy, tasting refreshingly unique and like nothing bought from the supermarket. Their bright petals spark a meal to life and there’s something playful and childish about eating an entire flower.

When I was a child, my mother bought me a pack of edible flower seeds. I remember checking on the flowers daily until they were full grown where I gladly picked the heads and chewed delightfully.

Final note

I passed the pub Lucky Saint, located near to Regents Park. I had popped to bakery Miel for a pain suisse (a very good bakery) and walked a slightly different way, only to find this display.

The planting includes a variety of trailing pelargoniums and sumptuous begonias - how thoughtful and eye catching. Isn’t nature wild?