2022 – CHW

A warm but somewhat overcast Good Friday. Karol and I managed three bits of filming including the Rhodoleia and various Michelias which Burncoose has for sale.

Magnolia x veitchii ‘Isca’ and Rhododendron ‘Cornish Red’ from the lawn.

Then a yellow magnolia garden tour with Geraint & Anne Richards.

Magnolia ‘Solar Flair’ – like many of the yellows this year a good colour and no leaves to be seen yet.

Rhododendron ‘Chip Luma’ – wonderful cross.

Magnolia ‘Banana Split’ – silly name perhaps but not entirely inaccurate.

Magnolia ‘Apricot Brandy’ with its peculiar buds and aptly named flowers.

The first wisteria flowers are starting to open by the Playhouse.

The Trevarrick barns development is two to three months from completion. Not as on time as we might have hoped but the new water main connection has yet to happen. South West Water are as hopeless, inconsistent, bureaucratic, expensive and slow as Western Power.

Another stump gone with the mini digger and another good planting place below Slip Rail.

My father’s hybrid, Rhododendron morii x Rhododendron euchates, just coming out by Georges Hut. Several other clumps in the garden and at Burncoose.

Rhododendron ‘Countess of Haddington’ plastered in flower as usual. We saw the first flowers showing a fortnight ago.

A good young Rhododendron calophytum with its first two flowers.

The scent at Donkey Show is superb – not least from these two clumps:

Rhododendron ‘Harry Tagg’

And Rhododendron ‘Ann Teese’.

2021 – CHW
An attempt today to photograph the flowers on various Rhododendron sinogrange, some pure and some grown from seed, which have considerable flower variations. Cold at night still but warm by day. Rain needed desperately after nothing for a month.Magnolia ‘Ivory Chalice’ (Magnolia acuminata x Magnolia denudata) in Old Park starting to flower away.

Cotoneaster chayes with bronzy new growth below White Stiles. One of the newish collection of 25 species.

Wild honeybees are busy in a hole in an old sycamore where they have lived for years.

Magnolia ‘Peachy’ in its full glory today below Slip Rail.

Rhododendron sinogrande ‘Lord Rudolf’. Pink in bud but eventually fading to creamy-pink.

First flowers now showing on Embothrium lanceolatum. Early, I think.

A sinogrande seedling with pink stripes in its flowers as it opens. This quickly fades. We saw another like this in the Rookery a week or so ago, but it had much smaller leaves.

A Rhododendron sinogrande with huge but fairly pale flowers.

Rhododendron suoilenhense now full out in all its glory.

First flower out early on Rhododendron loderi ‘King George’.

Michelia maudiae ‘Touch of Pink’ just opening. It is only a ‘touch’ at the tip of the tepals!

Rhododendron ‘Lady Montague Group’ (Exbury).

Rhododendron arboreum ‘Sir Charles Lemon’ can be a sparse flowerer but not here.

A more conventionally coloured Rhododendron sinogrande – a massive truss.

And yet another without such a large truss.

This is the ancient Magnolia soulangeana ‘Alba Superba’ (probably) growing at Trelowarren this afternoon. Slightly frosted.

2020 – CHW
There has never been a time previously when I could enjoy the garden twice a day and watch everything opening up on a daily basis at the prime time of the year for a woodland garden. I feel that I now know every nook and cranny in the garden as never before and could make a worklist for the next 12 months if we had more people to do all the work. A mental one now exists anyway.It is one hell of a prison to be shut up in but I have run out of rude things to say about the BBC for the moment as their worm has turned on their line now (a rather popular one here) is that we should go back to work; or some of us anyway. Having rushed to promote shutting the country down, which history will show to have been unnecessary and draconian (whatever the shortages), they are now riding on the popular bandwagon of public opinion again about reopening. Hypocritic bastards!We await Boris’ return and ‘the big decision’. Until then I might not even listen to the BBC’s bleating which, as I have said before, will soon now be ‘government inflicted hardship and misery for the poor’. This will be pretty rich from a BBC filled with Remoaners and easily classed as the metropolitan liberal elite! A few days before we get Robert Peston and Laura Kuenssberg on that but it is coming.A trip to The Vean to see that all was secure in lockdown with no one having been there for three weeks. All quiet but still a lot of tidying to do in the shrub borders as instructed in January.Phlomis fruiticosa just coming out as a huge clump.

A good show still of some double flowered daffodils.

A young Rhododendron ‘Tinners Blush’ on the bank above the front of the house.

A windswept but still standing Magnolia ‘Caerhays Surprise’.

Cornus ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’ out already on the main drive – greenish-cream flower bracts turning white. They will get much bigger yet.

Boquilla trifoliata ‘out’ as far as it seems to get.

A very elderly Azalea ‘Babeuff’ out just outside the back yard.

Azalea ‘Blushing Bride’ just out by the Azalea ‘Hinomayo’ clump.

Azalea ‘Tebotan’ just starting too and Azalea ‘Greenway’ nearby about to show.

Rhododendron ‘Johnny Johnstone’ with its double flowers.

Rhododendron ‘Van Nes Sensation’

Something is, like last year, biting the Embothrium flowers in half to get at the nectar. Pigeons or squirrels? The flowers on the ground have been halved!

Wonderful new growth on Schefflera taiwaniana.

Michelia foveolata, one of the last of the species to flower, now showing colour.

Lindera obtusiloba now fully out.

Chusquea gigantea by Tin Garden is flowering prolifically and will now die as all bamboos do when they flower. The three here were planted in 2011 and had got to 20ft or so. I only noticed because I was cutting back a few canes that had flopped onto two other plants nearby.

Magnolia ‘Stellar Acclaim’ is rather small flowered and dull!

Aesculus bushii with new growth and flower heads already – four to six weeks in advance of normal?

Aesculus wangii with new growth too.

Magnolia ‘Purple Prince’ – no comment!

This Aesculus species with wonderful orange indumentum on the stems of new growth and flowers which have just emerged from the sticky bud casings. It is labelled Aesculus chinensis but I do not think the label is on the correct tree! After a lot of reading it might in fact be Aesculus splendens but the problem is that none of the reference books refer to this sort of rust coloured downing on the new growth.

Malus ‘Jelly King’, planted this year, with its first flowers.

Aesculus carnea ‘Aureomarginata’ just in leaf.

Acer campestre ‘Red Shine’ living well up to its name.

Magnolia ‘Carlos’ – no comment here either. Only one flower!

2019 – CHW
Time to look at some yellow magnolias as they come into flower a month or so earlier than usual. Needless to say I get distracted!Magnolia ‘Lemon Star’ (syn. Swedish Star) is a brilliant yellow as it first comes out.

Magnolia ‘Purple Globe’ with its first flower somewhat battered. A new one to us.

Magnolia (Michelia) platypetala now full out. A superb species which improves each year. We will need to give it more space.

Pheasants lay their eggs everywhere. The dogs learn to search them out as do the crows, magpies and jackdaws. Cock pheasants also eat eggs where they can.

The first time I have ever seen flowers on Eriobotrya deflexa from Taiwan. They appear before or with the reddish new growth.

Magnolia ‘Royal Splendour’ is a new one to us but clearly in the ‘Peachy’/’Daybreak’ category.

Cestrum ‘Newellii’ full out in flower in the nursery.

Rhododendron williamsianum x martinianum on the drive at Burncoose. Superb and well worth naming and registering properly.

2018 – CHW
We are off on a tour of Irish gardens for four days so there will be a pause in the diary.Much work last week in laying the main electric cable much deeper into the ground in Beach Meadow, our new wedding venue. At a previous event a tent pole hit the cable and blacked out several villages. Hopefully the cable will now be too deep in the ground for this sort of problem to arise again.

Frankie Tregunna is clearing out the top pond in the water meadows with a swing shovel. It had become silted up and totally overgrown with trees so that there was no open water left at all. This used to be an important stretch of water for wildfowl and will now be restored to what it was 50 years ago.

Thieves have again ransacked the honesty box in Portholland car park securing £30 perhaps. Nobody saw nothing of course as is always the way with minor rural crime of this sort. The new metal cover replacement will be harder to break into we hope.

I have been wondering why several daffodil clumps dotted about have their leaves obviously dying already? Eel worm does not really strike in bulk like this. Then I wondered about spraying but there has been none here. Perhaps scorched in the cold?

Rhododendron cumberlandense – dark form just coming out and rather a good colour.

Ross is taking down an old beech tree and some laurels threatening our Rookery Nursery bed extension. A huge messy fire and it is still a quagmire but lots of room to replant. He has also demolished what was left still upright and what was not from an old leylandii hedge. Most of it blown over in early March.

The Ilex platyphylla windbreak will now have more light to get going and do its job.

Rhododendron ‘Loch Awe’ at its very best. Delicate colour changes and tones.

Despite the three original Camellia reticulata ‘Captain Rawes’ being totally denuded of leaves they are covered in flowers. Perhaps new growth will yet emerge and they survive? A startling comeback if they do.

‘Magnolia mania’ may have been delayed in this late spring but it is certainly here now so visit Caerhays this week and catch it at its best:Magnolia ‘Sundance’ – an early yellow

Magnolia ‘Atlas’ – can there be a bigger magnolia flower?

Magnolia ‘Purple Splendour’

Magnolia ‘Yakeo’

Magnolia ‘Crystal Chalice’

Magnolia ‘Raspberry Fun’

Magnolia ‘Betty Jessel’ – what a colour!

Magnolia ‘Princess Margaret’