18 St Johns Avenue, Brentwood
Essex, CM14 5DF, England.
E-mail: roger@themagnolias.co.uk

Back

Even though we are still in the depths of winter, we are cheered by quite a few brave flowering shrubs including our group of four Daphne bholua which smell absolutely superb. When they mature they will, we are sure, scent the air for yards around. Another beautiful scented shrub currently in flower is Hamamelis mollis, and H. x intermedia 'Pallida'. Our Camellia sasanqua 'Narumi-gata' was beautiful until the frost and snow just after Christmas. The remaining undamaged buds continued to open to perfect white blooms when the weather eased a little. A new plant we have been very pleased with has been Helleborus thibetanus. Our young, two crowned plant has flowered early, before any other Hellebore carrying seven pale pink flowers, each about an inch across.

Much of the Autumn and Winter period has been spent working on our various water features. Our three interlinked concrete ponds, built over twenty years ago, have all been emptied and repaired. The middle one, which had leaked more significantly, had been repaired unsuccessfully twice before. This time it has been professionally fibreglass lined by a local contractor. We have also removed nearly two tons of 10mm pea shingle from the small under-gravel filters in the three ponds, and replaced it with a similar amount of 20mm shingle. We hope that the filters will not clog up so quickly with the coarser gravel. In the past we have had to carry out a gravel cleaning operation every year during the winter season.

Linda has suggested I may be developing an obsession, as I have spent what amounts to hundreds of hours catching duckweed. All seven ponds and eight tubs, plus the numerous water pots now have very low levels of my least favourite weed. I sometimes delude myself in my more cheerful moments, that someday in the not too distant future, that on at least one of the ponds, I may find that mythical last piece of duckweed.

We have recently planted a new Hosta bed, in the forlorn hope of reducing the number of plants in pots which require watering. Already since the planting we have attended the inaugural meeting of the Hosta and Hemerocallis Society, Home Counties Group and bought some more plants in the auction. So much for good intentions!

Old news

Last year was very special for my wife Linda and I, as it was our silver wedding anniversary in March. On our honeymoon all those years ago we bought a seedling Magnolia campbellii, in the knowledge that it would probably take 20 to 30 years to flower. We hoped that with a bit of luck, it might flower for our silver wedding anniversary. It had flowered with up to a dozen or so blooms, on and off since 19 years from planting. Right on cue last year it did its first proper flowering, with several hundred blooms. Click on the picture to the left to see a bigger picture of our tree taken in mid March 2000. 

Both our families clubbed together and bought us a Chinese, granite, cantilever lantern (shown right), as a silver wedding present. It looks great in our oriental style section of the garden, when viewed from the pagoda. It appropriately stands on our 'blockery',a rockery made of pieces of granite kerb stones of a very similar hue.

Last Summer we had a sudden death of one of our favourite plants an Edgeworthia chrysantha. It had only been planted two or three years and had grown extremely well and had flowered well back in in March. Very suddenly it started to wilt, which at first I put down to sunshine or dryness at the root. However, when even after rain over night it had not recovered. I had a closer look at the base of the stem. The bark at ground level had gone brown and mushy. Clearly it was not going to recover.

I took all the rather wilted shoots as cuttings in an attempt to save, what I think is a rather large flowered form of the species. I keep my fingers crossed at least one of the cuttings will root, but most have now rotted. The death may have been due to the soil becoming waterlogged and/or a pathogen in the soil. Many years ago a fruiting cherry died in the vicinity, giving us a space to erect the reptile and amphibian greenhouse.