I bought a beautiful Red Witch Hazel from a gardening show. But it was in a pot, and like several other things in my garden was optimistic about last year's early and unseasonably warm spring, and then destroyed by winter's sting in the tail; a week at about -1, reduced to -10 by wind chill. I waited for it to recover. It didn't recover.
Marigolds can cope with any conditions, of course - but this frantic flower-head resprout suggests that they had a very hard summer this year. Not much survived in the way of marigolds this year; only a couple in pots where the main plant died. Too much water competition from the other plants.
The grub that has been eating my Service Bush for almost two years now came to a sticky end, unable to exit its flight hole. Honestly, I'm not sure if that's the beetle or a parasitic wasp in the end, but either way it didn't survive. When I took this problem (at an earlier stage) to a gardening forum the best suggestion I got was "a full coppice, if practical", but I'm letting nature take its course. As ever, the Service Bush is way ahead of me and has already started a sort of emergency back-up resprout from its bole, anticipating the possibility that this isn't recoverable damage (it certainly had a bit of a rough year with pretty much no fresh growth).
Lots of plants that could get away with not flowering gave it a miss or well well down on flower this year. Of the few that did appear, I got used to water-marked and water-damaged petals from cold tap water. This geranium is normally quite busy. This year; one flower spike.
No Himalayan poppies this year. The two smaller plants fell prey to dandelions growing apparently in the same hole as them. A neat herbicidal trick if the invading weed can manage it, as when you take out the dandelion you can't avoid damaging the poppy too and you can't get all the dandelion, and guess which plant bounces back better... this is the "big, healthy plant". It did very badly this year. I don't know if it'll be back next year. My hopes aren't high.
These withered fronds are part of the the ruins of my tree fern. I wrapped it. I tried to keep it wet enough not to die, but dry enough not to freeze. Nothing helped in the teeth of that brutal late-spring cold snap we suffered. The growth plate died, leaving a steadily withering halo of dying fronds which I observed and watered sadly all summer, but it wasn't coming back. I'll shortly decant the dead stump from its last-chance bucket into some kind of final resting place in the garden. It's quite sculptural, in its own "oops I died" kind of way.
Finally, to the Rhododendron. This is its third or fourth crop of flowers, in late July. The flowers flushed, withered, dropped and were replaced by more flowers continuously all summer. There was never a good bush full of flowers at any stage, the best it managed was one or two fit blooms on a bush that mostly looked like this. Hopefully this wasn't a panic-and-give-up move. Next spring will tell.
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