Two sleek, gentle presences have appeared in the garden, soon after the arrival of new neighbours next door — their rescue cats.
Normally, I don’t welcome cats in the garden. They stalk the birds and leave their messes in the plots. These cats, however, are different. They wear bells and name tags with contact numbers, and they’ve been trained to use litter boxes, both inside and outside their house.
My first encounter was with Blaze, a black-and-white kitty sauntering along the side of the house toward the backyard. Instead of scooting away, he stopped at the house corner to assess me for a while before proceeding to the far back corner of the house. He stayed there for some time, striking a comely pose amid the ground covers.
Blaze became an almost daily companion in the garden until, one morning, as I was absorbed in the bountiful blueberry crop, he came running toward me out of the bushes. Startled, I screamed. He ran. Haven’t seen him since, but his companion, a beautiful Siamese called Bowser, has taken to wandering over for the odd visit. Bowser exudes the same gentle calm as Blaze did, before I frightened him off.
Blaze and Bowser -— my new neighbours.
A new rose. In a column last month I speculated on what plants from my current garden I would want to have also in a more compact garden, should I choose to downsize from a big family house and large, productive garden into something I could manage alone at a more leisurely pace.
I mentioned Narrow Water, a rose I would certainly propagate for a new plant in a new garden. This is a heritage rose, introduced in 1883, that I ordered from a long gone specialty nursery on the mainland. It’s a compact climbing rose, ideal for a small garden, with large clusters of semi-double, pale pink flowers from late spring through late autumn.
After reading the column, Pauline, one of Russell Nursery’s customers, wrote to the nursery commenting on the attractiveness of Narrow Water. Sue replied from the nursery to say she’d noticed a new rose, Perfume Breeze from PanAm Roses, that “looks a lot like Narrow Water. It must be good as PanAm is including it in their Clean ’n Easy Series.”
Pauline’s next email commented: “Perfume Breeze in the Pan American catalogue (panamnursery.com) looks interesting as a substitute for the short climbing Narrow Water and has the added feature of being fragrant.”
PanAm describes Perfume Breeze as a “climbing Hwybrid Tea rose that produces double blooms in clusters, up to hundreds on a mature plant. It has a very fresh fragrance and can climb up to three metres high on a support.”
The director of Pan American Nursery Products in Surrey assures me that Perfume Breeze will be widely available in the spring. Russell Nursery will have bare root plants in February.
Empty plots? In August, it’s not unusual in home gardens to find areas emptied of early summer plantings. Rather than leave the ground bare, consider acquiring transplants of fall and winter vegetables such as lettuces, cabbage, kale, and others. If the soil needs it, dig in some compost and a little fertilizer, and plant.
An alternative, rather than leave the soil bare, is to plant buckwheat, a warm season green manure (cover) crop that takes just five or six weeks from seeding to flowering. Buckwheat suppresses weeds, protects the soil, attracts beneficial insects, and adds organic matter to the soil when the plants are chopped down and dug under as they begin blooming. It’s easy. Just rake in the seeds.
Message to chrysanthemum seeker. In the Aug. 8 column, I directed a reader to the Victoria Chrysanthemum Society as a possible source for chrysanthemum varieties not found in garden centres. Now, another reader who grows hundreds of the specialty plants has offered to be a source. Unfortunately, I’ve deleted both the question and my reply from my email lists. To P.W., contact me and I’ll put you in touch with a plant source.
