The garden at Elephant’s Eye in September

In Paradise and Roses, there are rosebuds showing colour, but that garden is focused on Paradise. Autumn Fire and Spring Promise, the dark and the Pink, are the two beds which are enchantingly filled with flowers. Taken yesterday.

Paradise and Roses yesterday

Just 10 days ago I cut the path free ….

Paradise and Roses tidied 10 days ago

Diagonal view of Paradise and Roses as you step off the verandah. Dietes happily blooming between the last of the winter rain showers. After hard pruning, feeding, mulching, and cool weather, my roses are exploding into leaves with fat buds on Burning Sky. Chocolat between Summer Gold and Autumn Fire.

Paradise and Roses, Dietes wild iris
Burning Sky, Chocolat

The plum trees are having a good year, absolutely covered in blossom, now turning to leaves.

Edible plums
Bottom right Prunus nigra

Walking around Ungardening Pond you can see the karee trees reaching long graceful arms up – but – we need to retrieve our view of the Elephant’s Eye.

On Ungardening Pond

Foreign (plums, roses, smelly white daisy Argyranthemum, lavender and nasturtiums ‘Cistercians’), Wildflower Wednesday and Dozen for Diana. All together, as this September went to spring flowers in Nieuwoudtville, exploring False Bay dreams, and gardening. 

Veltheimia, Albuca, Babiana
Clivia
Melasphaerula, vlei lily, Lachenalia, Freesia

Potted bulbs, daisies in all colours. Sitting in the garden, a flying ant landed on my butter yellow shirt. A lesson in minimalism and shedding excess baggage – she dropped her four wings, as if I were to unzip and cast aside a jacket – and walked away to a different life.

September brings daisies to my September garden
and Gail's WFW in Tennessee
rain daisies, Felicia, bietou
Dimorphotheca jucunda, Argyranthemum
Dimorphotheca jucunda, Gazania
 Gazania, Euryops, hawkweed

We drove along the False Bay coast. The mountain slopes down to the sandy shore covered in layers and patches of colour. Ticking off what grows in our Porterville garden – white arum lilies, yellow bietou daisy bushes, brown beach sage, pink pelargoniums, and on open patches there is a sea of white rain daisies, a haze of tiny Barbie pink vygies, carpets of yellow and orange daisies, with shrubby Searsia/Rhus bushes. From Mother Nature a colourful wildlife friendly garden, desiring the sandy soil and cool sea breezes, proof against the howling South Easter, and what balm to the human heart.

Pelargonium, garlic buchu, nasturtium
Strelitzia, Salvia, Buddleja, lavender
vygie, Euphorbia mauretanica, beach sage, Pelargonium
Melianthus, hoopoe, jasmine, Erica baccans

In Dozen for Diana what lights our garden in September are the Seriously Purple daisies. Dimorphotheca jucunda (was Osteospermum). According to PlantZAfrica they come from the mountains on the Eastern side of South Africa, and survive frost in the Pretoria winter. Butterflies and beetles love them too. Their name jucunda means delightful/lovely.

A royal carpet wherever I’ve put the cuttings in. January’s blue sage has been cut back hard, and is again reaching for my shoulders. February’s witkaree tree is embracing the mountain view, tends to pollard when pruned. March’s spekboom fuels the visitor’s exclamation – your garden’s so green and lush! April’s Plectranthus neochilus bears its purple spires, an architectural homage to familiar lavender. May’s Very Pink pelargonium is blooming steadily on. June’s reeds remind me of the ‘essential to a wildlife garden’ pond. July’s Lachenalia rubida are a faded memory, but we have other Lachenalia, Freesia alba and Albuca in the pots. August’s pig’s ears, leaves and flowers remain one of my immediate ‘must go with me’ choices. My first nine choices in Dozen for Diana this year are deliberately indigenous/native – for Gail at clayandlimestone's Wildflower Wednesday.

Nine in Dozen for Diana

Joining my Dozen for Diana

- Laura at patiopatch in London brings Astilbe plumes of pink with 'toothed, ferny foliage', and ‘Moonlight’ a Japanese climbing hydrangea with heart-shaped leaves.

- Donna of gardenseyeview upstate NY reminds me of milkweed Asclepias. First I admired the seedheads by the roadside, then I discovered African Monarch butterflies.

- circle back to Christine of thegardeningblog in Cape Town. Tried and tested - lavender and Gaura 'I will plant in any garden I own … even in pots on a balcony if that is all I have.' Nandina 'I am delighted every season.'
- spin the globe back to the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania and Pam's English Cottage Garden where she grows zinnias in tubs and in her raised vegetable beds. Grown from seed each year, she tells us.  

Winter has not left us yet
the new Indian Summer bed

As September draws to a close, we still remember winter. Shall we have the last fire this evening? 

Pictures by Diana and Jurg

words by Diana of  Elephant's Eye

- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 
Those are my links.)