Six on (last) Saturday – 02/11/2019

We had a bit of a storm Thursday night into yesterday – power was out for about 10 hours, a lot of rain, branches and trees down everywhere including a large one over the driveway. A neigbour kindly roared over to chop it up a bit, making the driveway passable, but pretty much all of today will be spent on clean-up. Silver lining: future firewood! In any event, today’s photos were actually snapped last Saturday, with apologies to The Propagator, who hosts this weekly garden blog round-up. Take a look at his site for more current garden shots around the world.

First, the pretty.

Like several other perennials, this Blanket Flower – Gaillardia – has sent up a final bloom of the year…nice for the bees, and perhaps in time to produce a few seeds for next year.

This strawberry wasn’t labelled an everbearing, but it’s had flowers and a few fruit (for the chipmunks, of course, heaven forbid I get to them first!) since May.

This is a Christmas fern – Polystichum arcostichoides a fern native to Ontario. It’s evergreen, even here, and survives well in very dry, very shady conditions. That said, I’ll be moving my small colony to a brighter, more moist spot in the spring and I believe it will get much larger.

This is a ‘Mount. Airy’ Fothergilla – nice green leaves all summer and fall foliage to match the brightest red maple.

Now, the not so pretty:

I was gifted a box of Canna lily rhizomes in July so these got a very late start. As a result, no flowers this year but with luck the rhizomes will survive the winter in the basement and I’ll start them earlier next spring.

And finally, although Winter is Coming, a hopeful sign of spring….

Foliage for next year’s Oriental Poppy flowers have emerged. These leaves will soon be covered in a lot of snow but will survive ’til spring and, while they can, now, are creating energy for even bigger leaves and many flower stalks.

That’s it for this (last) week – perhaps I’ll have something more current next Saturday, although with temperatures plummeting to below zero in the days to come…..