Plant Life

My mother-in-law has brought us some roses from my wife's grandmother's house. These are actual plantable roses, I hasten to add, and are now planted in the back garden, equidistant from the tool shed and the Experimental Potato bed. They look to be settling in nicely. This inheritance-style arrival of plants is something I like greatly, although I'm going to have to consider carefully my brother's offer of a small oak tree, since, like oaks anywhere, it won't remain small. Nonetheless, with a few more inherited plants, a few foundlings and volunteers, and the usual selection of planted and bought ones, we should have a nicely eclectic selection in a few years time.

The Experimental Potatoes are also doing nicely, and the rain washed away a little soil in the bed; enough to reveal a large-marble-sized new potato. I reburied it, rather than carry it off, which I think shows great self-control. The spring onions in the bed beside them are not showing any great level of growing, though; there are half a dozen now starting to look properly like onions, and no more. Since the seeds were a freebie with a magazine, I'm a little more inclined to blame those than anything else - especially since the courgettes, from the same pack of free seeds, have thus far produced only one viable plant from about twenty sown. Although I gather that if that plant gets going, it may well supply our courgette needs all on its own. To be fair, I suppose, the onions should perhaps be someplace a bit sunnier - there's more shade from the trees in the western hedgerow than I expected.

There has also been the discovery of some climbing roses by a fence near the back of the garden. At least, we think they're climbing roses. For my level of knowledge of garden flowers, they could be anything. Something leaning in from a neighbour's garden at the front of the house has big pink flowers, and some brambles in the hedgerow have flowers, leading me to hope for blackberries in the autumn. I'm wondering if it's possible to encourage blackberry brambles in any useful way, should that be what they are.