Anemone x hybrida 'Honorine Jobert' at Marshborough Farmhouse

Lilium lancifolium at Branklyn Garden

Rudbeckia at Kew

Great Dixter; gardeners; and an Autumn Plant Fair

Colchicums from Jacques Amand at Vincent Square...

Amicia zygomeris - a Mexican curiousity

Viburnum tinus - 'A thing is not vulgar because it is merely common' - Hazlitt 

*****

I neglected to give details of the 'mystery' plants that I showed in August and September. The yellow South African thistle is Berkheya multijuga from the Drakensberg, a place of many interesting and sometimes garden worthy perennials and alpines. The two pictures below show this plant on the rock garden at Edinburgh and at Cally Gardens in SW Scotland. In our garden this has made a striking specimen, not setting seed or spreading in the way that the more familiar B. purpurea does. But this latter species with its large and colourful flowers will be the one that most gardeners will be drawn to - nothing more like an osteospermum over a thistle's garb!

And in September a useful late flowering shrub - but treated more as a perennial - and 'of a rather weedy character' (W.J. Bean - 'Trees & Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles'): Elsholtzia stauntonii.