Popcorn hydrangea goes crazy

My popcorn hydrangea ‘Ayesha’ is starting to show a range of flower shapes

It’s six years now since I first posted about my popcorn hydrangea ‘Ayesha’, but this summer, with all the rain, it has grown huge and vigorous. It has also started to diversify! Usually the flowers remind me of lilac but now the sepals are starting to appear flat as in many other hydrangeas.

I thought the proper word for it was “recidivism”, which I thought also applied to variegated leaves turning back to plain green, but now I can find no reference to this word botanically, only in the sense of a prisoner returning to a life of crime or a medical condition relapsing.

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Beyond Blackweir in spring

A very pink red campion (Silene dioica)

When I go to visit “my” 100 elm trees in Pontcanna Fields here in Cardiff, I am always tempted to walk on, cross Blackweir Bridge over the River Taff and keep going until I reach Bute Park and eventually the city centre.

I was last in this wild area in January and blogged about it here. Last week I visited again and the spring wildflowers were wonderful. I also think I found the purple maple tree I failed to locate back in the winter.

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A meadow in the car park

Yarrow or milfoil (Achillea millefolium) in the office car park, June 2016

For a few months now I have been working three days a week in an unprepossessing low-rise office on a small industrial estate in Newport, South East Wales, about 10 miles down the road from Cardiff.

I don’t go out much, as the weather has been wet and there isn’t a lot to see apart from corner shops, but the other day I found myself wandering around the car park in the sunshine, while on my mobile phone to someone. And I suddenly realised that the scruffy edges of the car park are full of wonderful wild flowers.

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Some blousy blooms of summer

Peony in Bute Park, Cardiff, June 2016

These days I have trouble noticing anything but trees when I walk in Cardiff’s many parks. But I made a special effort to think about the flowers when passing through the herbaceous borders in Bute Park a couple of weeks ago. I followed the borders quite closely last summer (see my flower posts here), but now it’s a little bit “been there, done that”.

This time I snapped pictures of big ball-like flowers, skipping everything else. Although sadly my subjects – peonies and poppies – are dying off now it’s midsummer.

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The herbaceous border in August

My favourite flower from the latest trip to the Bute Park borders – I’ll tell you what it is later…

Just as I have been following a tree every month in Bute Park, Cardiff, I have also been “following” the herbaceous borders there since they came to life in spring. My latest visit was on August 6. This is a view of the borders taken while standing near my Paulownia tree, but zoomed in quite a bit…

Bute Park herbaceous borders in August

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The herbaceous border in July

Pink peony in the herbaceous borders of Bute Park, Cardiff, in July 2015

Every month or so I am visiting the herbaceous borders in Bute Park, Cardiff, to see what’s in bloom and learn to identify a few more plants. This visit was on July 2, just after I had been to check up on the Paulownia tree I am following. It was early, so I stopped for breakfast at the park’s Summerhouse Cafe before walking through the borders to work.

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By Jupiter’s beard – red valerian gets everywhere

Pink valerian (Centranthus ruber) growing on a street wall in Cardiff last week

There is red valerian in flower everywhere in Cardiff at the moment, growing from walls and flat roofs where it wasn’t planted. I always notice this stout plant, as it was one of the first I could put a name to. It grew on the lean-to shed outside the back door of the cottage where I lived as a child. I don’t remember

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