Suddenly petunias are appearing everywhere, like Daleks from Dr Who - though instead of "exterminating", they are growing. And growing. And will keep growing until autumn. Vast hordes of petunias have taken over public places. They've snuck into pots on verandas and hanging baskets on patios, or are sitting smugly in flower gardens, just waiting to spread.
Thankfully, unlike Daleks, the petunias are not going to rise up and attempt to take over the planet, though at the rate they are spreading, they'd have a good chance if they had a mind to do it. I suspect the petunia invasion is an instinctive response to previous years of drought and current disasters. Having a heck of a lot of flowers blooming in every nook and cranny and garden bed is a great way to lift the spirits.
Petunias give you more colour, growth and sheer coverage than any other summer flower. Their main weakness is their tastiness to slugs and snails. Once established, petunias will bounce back after a hail storm and can survive a moderate late frost - though not several frosts in a row.
Nor do petunias demand much from their human hosts. Mostly they just need lots of sunlight. A neglected petunia will survive and even give you flowers. A regularly watered and well fed petunia (one given a weak application of fertiliser according to the directions on the packet, once a week) will give you constant blooms, ranging from the restrained elegance of white to the most gaudy of all combinations. Petunias supply something for every taste, except for those gardeners who think petunias are too common, both in the snobbish sense and their ubiquitousness.
Once upon a time, petunias only came in "gaudy" shades. Now there are not only an extraordinary range of colours, but varieties bred, like "spreading petunias" to fill at least a square metre of garden, or range brightly over a large hanging basket. There are less exuberant petunias bred for pots, and one petunia can fill a pot with flowers for your window ledge in a fortnight of heat, water and feeding. The better you treat them, the more you get. Petunias are about as "instant" as you can get with summer annuals.
Actually, just about everything I've just written about petunias goes for Californian poppies too, and nasturtiums - lot of new colours, fast growth and sun loving.
I've been indulging in two other old-fashioned but newly bred flowering plants in the last fortnight. Everything may have its season, and this is the one for flowers, and I'm going to make the most of it. My first indulgence are old-fashioned hydrangeas in new varied shades of pink to mauve. You get a heck of a lot of bang for your buck with hydrangeas. I have been assuring myself that the bushes by the front gate are not purely a selfish indulgence, as come autumn, I'll cut back the last of the blooms, bung them in a vase, then, when roots begin to form at the end of the stems, very gently cover the stems with soil, then water in well. By next spring we should have at least 20 new hydrangea plants to grow here or give away. Potentially, my five new hydrangeas could even produce 50 or a 100 new plants - or more if I worked at it all season - but 20 is about the maximum I can manage.
The other oldie but goodie I've just bought is a bright red "geranium-but-really-a-pelargonium" that now sits on my study windowsill. (The botanical name of the plant most people call "geraniums" is "pelargonium". This causes confusion or even downright slanging matches.)
We are already fairly well off for geranium/pelargoniums, even though the wallabies eat the plants when there's not vast amounts of grass around. I've even have a bright red variety for decades that I've been giving away as cuttings, just as mine originally came from cutting too. But this new geranium/pelargonium has the deepest, richest but still bright red blooms I have ever seen, and the leaves are exactly the correct shade of green to act as their background.
I fell in love, paid for it on impulse, and carried it home, and now it sits where I can see it for all the hours during daylight I'm on the computer, or every time I walk up the garden steps. It was one heck of a good investment.
I haven't actually planted any petunias this year as we are rich in flowers just now. The lilies have been magnificent, the acanthus groves are about to burst into bloom, the old-fashioned gladioli are opening their red and gold cups, and about a fifth of the sky is blotted out by wattle blossom. In between all this there are roses, plus hundreds of (non-invasive) agapanthus putting up stems to begin blooming in December. What with the new hydrangeas and geranium, I think we are okay for flowers this summer.
It is going to be a glorious one.
This week I am:
- Putting a pot of coriander on the outdoor windowsill by the front door, for easy snipping when needed in the kitchen.
- Filling vases with the last of the Madonna and Green Goddess lilies, which last for weeks if you keep the water topped up.
- Eating the first mulberries, a little watery and not desperately sweet, due to much rain and lack of sunlight, but they should get more flavour as summer gets sunnier.
- Making blackberry crush - cut off the mulberry stems, throw the fruit in the blender with a chopped frozen banana, and the result is cold, soft, and delicious to eat with a spoon, as well as possibly filled with at least six of the nutritionally essential ingredients one needs daily.
- Trying to haul up enough enthusiasm to keep weeding, and mowing, and whipper-snipping along fences, stone walls and other places where snakes may like to lurk.
- Not planting anything else till all the summer crop seeds I've planted have germinated, and been weeded enough to grow to survivable height.
- Picking large amounts of the best, most tender broad beans I have ever eaten, and zucchini that are still tiny enough to be sweet.
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