Wild Strawberry flowering in May along an old shady wall.
As some of my loyal readers may have noticed, it has been several weeks ago when I did my last post on the very large Asteraceae family!
Unfortunately you may have to wait till I am getting a lot less busy, with all my activities in and around my professional gardening..
Hopefully will see you back in several months time as there are many families and genera still not written about in my Virtual Etnobotanical Garden….
Will also attempt to rewrite some of the older blogs as several pictures have disappeared and I can’t add those back in as there is now a new editing version of WordPress.
It has been a while since my last post as have the excuse of seeing a friend in Tuscany on her herb farm which was like being in paradise. Nature and plants there are just stunning.
But whilst I’ve been away the salvias put on a lot of growth and there has been a lot of activity in the nursery, this being the busy season for all us gardeners!
The lovely flower of Salvia microphylla ‘Wild Watermelon’
Some weeks have gone past since I last wrote about my Salvia nursery here in the West-Midlands and thought I’d update on our latest new varieties which we collected from our good friends and colleagues, Hillview Nursery in Shropshire.
You might be wondering are salvias hardy? Hopefully this post will answer all your questions.
Salvias are a fashionable plant as they seem to have been popping up in recent years in your local garden centre, on markets and even in your local supermarkets.They are showy and very colourful, come in reds, pinks and purples and as a salvia collector and salvia lover I’ve noticed that in this very large group of plants many varieties are either towards the red and others are totally on the other scale; towards the blue of the spectrum, and then obviously all those colours in between as well as the whites, greys and pastel-shades in between!
They are very seductife as the colours are shouting out; buy me!
Last week I wrote about the purchase of my first few salvias for my new venture: Yoke’s Magic Salvias. These first few salvias were particularly important for me as they were some cuttings of my Rodbaston-named varieties, which I had been worried about that they might have gone extinct forever..
Here on the left: Salvia ‘Moonlight Over Ashwood’ has unusual yellow-green variegated foliage making the plant attractive even when not in flower!
The pendulous flowers of the Sycamore in early spring with fresh palmate leaves. (All pictures by Matt Summers)
The Sapindaceae is a large family (number 77 in Stace) but in Britain it is represented by only “3 genera which all have a totally different appearance” (Stace, 370). He mentions Acer, Aesculus and Koelreuteria. Only one of those genera and one species is native and the genus Acer is what gives the Sapindacea it’s common name, ‘the Maple family’.
In the Wild Flower Key it is still called the Aceraceae and only the 3 most common Acers are mentioned here, while the Horse Chestnut, now also in the Sapindaceae, has his ‘old’ own family here too; the Hippocastanaceae.
My ‘hot’ bench: complete with new sand and cloche windows!
Thought I’d do an update of the progress we are making with building up my collection of Salvias since a few weeks ago.
Our first few salvias came from Wollerton Old Hall, near Market Drayton in Shropshire. As well as a magnificent garden to visit in the season, they also have a nursery, propagating and selling specialist plants from their garden with approx 90 different varieties of salvias as well as a good number of Iris, Phlox and Cupheas.
Pignut is one of the Apiaceae, flowering en masse here at Bury HillPark near Dudley(Picture by Mike Poulton)
I’ve always liked the Apiaceae or Umbelliferae as they were formerly known as! And everybody knows the carrot so it is also known as the Carrot family.
It is easily recognisable, especially the second subfamily, which are the true ‘Umbels’.
It is a large family with 50 genera and many genera have just the one native species or a few species.
Several of our root vegetables and herbs belong to this family, although these are cultivated forms and the wild species of which they originated are mostly not native (NN in list below) to the British Isles.
I’ve used Wikipedia, PFAF or other websites a lot again as they have such valuable information about the individual species and their uses.
Also links with the online atlas of the British and Irish Flora of the Biological Records Centre in order to find out the natural habitats of the plants.
