Tag Archives: slugs

I lined the pictures for this post up in early June, and then never got around to actually writing it. I think it’s very inconsiderate of the chemistry research community that lots of conferences take place when I should really be in my garden in June, July and August, but at least this time I went away on my own so we didn’t have to ask the neighbours to keep things watered as master and hound were still around. Not that anything outside the greenhouse needed much watering… There will be a post about our Ninja slugs and snails which have decimated any hope of a vegetable harvest this year, in due course!

While we got through the harsh winters of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 reasonably well, as in only the borderline hardy plants and some of the smaller ones didn’t make it, the strangeness of the autumn/winter/spring just gone (2011/2012, too warm, too wet, too dry respectively) caused some more unexpected casualties in my garden.

I’ve already mentioned my Agastache rugosa ‘Golden Jubilee’ but perhaps the most surprising of those were three of my biggest Helianthemums. Two of these, Helianthemum ‘Ben Afflick’ (I’m genuinely not sure whether that was supposed to have been named after the actor and somebody got the spelling wrong) and the double Helianthemum ‘Cerise Queen’ were planted in the our slightly too shady rockery and had been romping away quite happily for the last 4 years, losing a lot of their foliage each winter and requiring a serious trim after flowering, but reliably coming back at the first signs of spring. Until this spring – a couple of leaves came up, and then nothing else.

I confess to never having liked their accidentally too close proximity (I didn’t really read the labels in those early days of just getting anything into the mud) and colour combination (cherry red and orange, ugh) where they were planted, so after an appropriate period of waiting for them to come back (at which point one of them might have been moved to a different site) I dug them out. In the odd way of gardens, the other rockery plants breathed a huge sigh of relief that these two straggly bullies had disappeared and have been growing to fill the gaps ever since. And I have planted a new one, Helianthemum ‘The Bride’ in the rockery as well, which will fit in much better.

I know this, because the other Helianthemum we lost was a ‘The Bride’ as well. It used to live on the edge of the grasses bed, posing only a small hazard to general traffic when it was in full flow, and, like the two in the rockery, did not make a convincing comeback after the winter. There is now a new Helianthemum ‘Henfield Brilliant’ in its place, again a better colour match for the rest of the bed. So it has hopefully worked out ok.

The other somewhat surprising losses were a couple of hardy salvias in the front garden. If memory serves, they were both Salvia nemorosa ‘Ostfriesland’ and like the Helianthemums (as a good former student of Latin I want to make the ending i, but I’m pretty sure that’s not right for plant names) they made it through two fierce winters unscathed, but not much came back this spring – it seems that they didn’t like the wet and were then finished off by slugs. I replaced them with a Geranium sangiuneum ‘Vision Light Pink’, which is doing fine and, much more foolishly, with two other S. nemerosa, ‘Lyon Steel Blue’ and ‘Marcus’, which got munched, along with a Leucanthemum ‘Sunshine Peach’, by those slugs and snails again. This is what happens when I go away for a few days and there is nobody to get the copper rings out. Although I think the wretched gastropods have actually figured out pole vaulting, and one had obviously gotten hungry from the exertions when it couldn’t get back out and ate the last few green bits. So that could have been a second nice tale of redemption after the winter took its toll, but alas not.

However, I also found some unexpected survivors from the milder winter. I’ve already mentioned that my Mathiasella bupleuroides ‘Green Dream’ picked this year to flower (and it is still going, 2 months later), a borderline hardy, shrubby Salvia ‘Stormy Pink’ is also still going strong where previous generations were lost, and just today I found that my bulbs of Tigrida pavonia, which had done nothing last summer, have not just put out leaves this year, but the first one is actually in full flower, with more buds coming up. So I’ll stop there!