Love your weeds
You may have heard about Salvia ‘Hot Lips’? The name is certainly intriguing and actually very apt!
I have used it as my logo from when it first came about and I started my Yoke’s Magic Garden business!
Continue reading “Salvia ‘Hot Lips’; the wondrous one!”
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!
Continue reading “Salvia Chapter 8 Salvias from Ashwood and Robin!”
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.
Continue reading “Sycamore and other woody members of the Sapindaceae or Maple family.”
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.
Continue reading “Yoke’s Magic Salvia’s Nursery is growing and Wollerton Old Hall visit!”In this post we’ll talk mostly about the medicinal uses I found in the family of Umbels or Apiaceae as they are now called.
We introduced this family with a post on the most ‘detested’ member called the Ground Elder which you can find here.
After this came an entire list of our native ones as well as the edible uses of our garden Umbels.
Most of the below information is of the brilliant book by Julian Barker: Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwestern Europe
Pictures by Matt Summers unless stated in link.
A. archangelica or Garden Angelica
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’.
In another post the Ground-elder was fully described for all its useful attributes and this week I hope to tackle all the others in the last family of all the Dicot families in Stace. In another post the Medicinal properties of the Apiaceae are highlighted.
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.
Medicinal Uses mostly came from the Med Flora by J. Barker as well as from the Plants for a Future website.
Pictures with gratitude by Matt Summers, Mike Poulton and Wikipedia Commons.
FBBC is added behind the Common Name in the contents below if the plant occurs in the ‘Flora of Birmingham and the Black Country’
This is a beautiful Salvia found by my late friend and Salvia collector, Robin Middleton. See here
It has proved to be a very popular one, now sold by several nurserymen in Britain!
It came from seed found on the cross Salvia ‘Silkes Dream’ see here
This was the most vigorous seedling, which Robin grew on and gave it the name I suggested to him in honour of my dear friend Penny, who was a beautiful girl and left this world far too young.
She really loved the salvias of which I planted several in her late gardens. And she particularly loved this colour; so a more apt tribute couldn’t be found! To my surprise it has survived many cold winters here in the Midlands. But some shelter would be recommended.
Penny’s Smile’ is a bushy, upright plant to 1.2m high, evergreen if not cut back by frost, with small, aromatic, pale to mid-green leaves. It has large, showy individual flowers, similar size as one of its known parent, ‘Silkes Dream’ and the inflorescences are also well above the foliage and with many flowers for a long flowering season!
In the first chapter about the salvias I told the story how I became hooked to them and this time I would like to introduce you to all of the Rodbaston ones!
There are 6 ‘survivors’ of the original 7 which is much better than I had hoped a few months ago!
Fortunately for me was that the owners and present Head Gardener of Wollerton Old Hall had still kept the varieties after they got them from me for the RHS trials from 2012-2014 of what I call the ‘Shrubby salvias’ (Salvia microphylla, S. greggii, S. x jamensis and varieties + cultivars/hybrids).
Continue reading “The Rodbaston Salvias!”
The most easy, versatile ones for use in sunny borders or pots are which I call the ‘Shrubby, small leaved Salvias’. These are hardy to at least – 10 degr. C. and much more than this in my experience. Here below are some tips on how to grow them:
Continue reading “Salvias: Chapter 4, The Shrubby ones!”As I like this to be a very informative blog on salvias, I like to start on:
Something about the history, of mainly the New World Salvias:
Here in Britain we had Pat Vlasto, Beth Chatto, Beryl Davies (from former Probus Demonstration Garden in Cornwall) and later Christine Yeo to thank for the wonderful pioneering work the’d done with salvias!
We now have two lovely salvias to at least honour them in Salvia x jamensis ‘Pat Vlasto’ and Salvia ‘Christine Yeo’, which is, what I always believed, a tough cross of S. microphylla and S. chamaedryoides.
The flowers are mostly purple but I also had sometimes violet flowering forms! Both Beryl Davies and Christine Yeo (part I & part II) have written some of the first little handbooks on salvias, which are rare and not easy to get hold off any more.
I had to have a read in John Sutton’s book: ‘the Gardener’s Guide to growing Salvias’ and discovered that:
Continue reading “History of the New World Salvias: Chapter 3”