What a summer

I hope that you may have noticed that our Saltire managed to get onto the front page of the BBC Scotland News website a few weeks back now and it looked very impressive too with a very good photograph put in by our snapper Phil McDermott.


What I now have to admit is that it is no longer there, well not in its original format. Unfortunately the Delta Pansies just proved to be a bit to disease prone for our moist climate here on Mull, I had been aware that this might be the case. So I had ordered a batch of 1400 Viola's as an insurance policy I got these in as small plugs and grew them on as quickly as possible. We did the swap towards the end of June and I'm pleased to say they are performing much better than the Pansies and no need to dead head not even the white ones.


Since my last report the vast majority of our time has been spent weeding and mowing etc, but we have been doing some progressive jobs as well. Last week we spent several days having another blitz on the Colonnades, as I wander over there I have on more than one occasion caught couples having a smooch in the rotunda at the end, so we have decided to theme the Colonnades as our romantic garden, so lots of colour lots of nice smells including plants like Roses and Lillie's.

The Colonnades has been built on the site of the original Peach house and is probably the sunniest and most sheltered spot in the whole garden. The heat reflecting rendered back wall is still mostly there along with some of the old rusting plant supports and the cast iron grid path. With the 14 pink marble pillars that support the overhead pergola (Don't even know where these originated they look Roman) we really do have an unique feature with a classical distressed appearance.

Another area we have recently done a bit of restoration work on is at the near end of our large pond. Two particular plants in this part of the garden had got well out of control. Firstly there was a huge Rhododendron that had started to cover over the inlet from the feeding Burn making that part very dark and dull and hiding a bit too much view
Secondly next to the Rhodo is a very large area of Thuya plicata this had been poorly pruned in recent years and older low foliage had become a bit unsightly. what lay behind this was another of our very old spreading families of Thuya originally probably 100 years ago, or even more one plant had been put in, this will have developed into a good strong specimen with some long downward swooping limbs which in time would root down and form a new tree a process which then will continue to happen until you have a family of several generations of Thuya covering a very large area.
We actually have several of these families around the gardens one is called Elephants trunk because that's what some of the large limbs look like. Our newly opened up area has been called the Octopus tree as it has lots of long sweeping branches some are quite twisted as well looking like tentacles. The fun bit is trying to work which tree is the original mother or grandmother.


I usually like to talk about at least one type of plant that is currently looking good in the garden this time it has to be Eucryphia of which we are developing quite a good collection, right now the lucida forms are in flower. The best pink flowered form is Ballerina with large pale pink flowers with a darker edge we also have a largish Pink Cloud its a good specimen, but the flowers are smaller. Possibly my favourite though is the very rare variegated White Cloud lovely flowers with the usual pronounced stamens. The other species will be following along shortly including our 30 foot high cordifolia, a good species as it is fairly lime tolerant and the other contender in my favourites list is the very tender moorei this makes a lovely small tree with evergreen foliage that looks like a Rowan. The flowers are small and white but masses of them I really can wait to see it probably in about a fortnight