November and Christmas Rose!

Until now November has been warm (20°C) with much sunshine. Many plants have flowered "ahead of shedule" here and everywhere in Europe.

This happened with that Christmas rose (Helleborus niger) at István Megyeri's garden, which Christmas rose is already ours :)
Alas, the sunshine is over now (the erudite say that winter comes next week), so I had very bad light conditions for photographing.

Ten

The author of Mûvelt kert invited me to a garden bloggers' game. I have to list ten favorite things and invite ten garden bloggers to the game.

So, I list the ten favorite alpine flowers  of mine, which I have already "met personally" in the Alps. I put here the pictures of my husband from his Picasa web album. The sequence does not matter, these are all equally favorites AT THIS MOMENT, though it is possible that tomorrow I would list other ten... :)

Physoplexis comosa

Campanula morettiana

Ranunculus glacialis

Soldanella pusilla

Primula glutinosa

Primula hirsuta

Eritrichium nanum

Androsace alpina

Saxifraga oppositifolia

And last, but not least, this one is not yet uploaded on the net:
Androsace helvetica

I am quite aware of the importance of inviting personally some bloggers and putting their links here, but I don't want to bother anybody with this, so I invite EVERYBODY who feel disposed to participate. If they send me a comment I will put the link here.

Late Autumn Bouquet

Orostachys and Sedum sieboldii

Surprise

This one had never flowered for us until now, neither in spring, nor in autumn. We bought it in Prague 3 years ago.

Draba imbricata

Draba imbricata

Harbingers of Spring

Yes I know this is a nonsense, because the pictures show some overwintering buds, not an oddity at all.
But after all  the spring explosion is somewhere packed in them, and so they contain the promises.

Two herbaceous perennials, whose buds are overwintering near the soil surface:

Cortusa matthioli Alba

Dodecatheon sp.

An early flowering evergreen perennial with buds overwintering in the leaf rosette:

Draba lasiocarpa

And finally a shrublet:

Daphne sericea

And then the camera's accumulators went dead... Maybe I will continue this topic later if I can find another promising buds around.

Orostachys

I have written about it two months ago and I promised pictures when in flower.

Our balcony is not a good place for it because the plant gets sun only from one part and consequently the flowers open only on that part. It looks rather strange.

I bought some bulbs again:

• Iris 'Katharine Hodgkin' – 5 
• Tulipa turkestanica – 7 
• Narcissus bulbocodium – 4
• Sternbergia lutea – well, this was a present, many corms, the flowers just over.

Everything was planted in pots, the rest comes in spring.

Talk About Alpines

I was invited to another club to make a talk about our alpine plant hunting trips. It will take place on 3rd November at 6 p.m. The title is: Flowers in the World of Glaciers, and I will make a presentation about the Ortler region of the Alps and its flowers.

Visitor

My husband catched (with the camera) a little hoverfly labouring on the Crocus pulchellus:

Some time ago I have thought that these are some kind of wasps, and one has to be careful with them. I learned from Ian Young's bulblog that hoverflies (Syrphus)  are very useful insects. They pollinate our flowers and their larvae eat aphids. And do not bite at all. So they are very welcomed on our balcony. :)

Two Autumn Flowering Crocuses and Other Corms and Bulbs

Yesterday was plant swapping day at our Vera Csapody Hardy Plant Society and I purchased again some bulbs and corms. Not too much, just to have a little display in spring and also in autumn, because last winter I lost almost all our bulbs.

I planted them all and I will write about these in spring when in flower.

I also bought two autumn flowering Crocuses:

Crocus kotschyanus

Crokus kotschyanus

Crocus pulchellus

Crocus pulchellus

We Must Prepare for the Winter

Sadly.

This autumn was very rainy and cold. The autumn colors are not so wonderful as usual as the leaves suffer from all kind of awful fungal diseases because of the much cold rain. Our lime tree has lost all his foliage by now, which in "normal" years had happened only by the end of October.

I don't want the alpines to be wet any more, so we put the cover on the troughs in the garden. We cooked up something new this year, my husband made it and I believe him that it is stabile and okay.

At last the leaves of Cyclamen graecum are showing up. I've got these corms two years ago, in rather bad condition though with some healthy roots. But until now I did not manage to convince them to flower. I think these are only leaves again:

Cyclamen graecum

Here you can see the size relative to my fingertip: