Astilbe Peach Blossom, like all the other forms of Astilbe in our garden this one just thrives in the cool Summers of the North East of Scotland

 We wouldn’t be without Astilbes in the garden, in fact when a plant grows as well as these ones do we tend to fall back on them time and time again as if there were a shortage of other plants to choose from.

Three of them which I feature today, I know the names of, we have others which look good, however they were planted at a time when I was less fussy about taking note of cultivars or varieties.

Peach Blossom above, we planted in the back border of the front garden, its pretty well shady and doesn’t get the sun until quite late in the afternoon. It hasn’t half taken a good hold though and gave a spectacular show in July/early August.

The flowers are a pale rose, peachy shade and the dark green leaves are deeply divided.  Many of the Astilbes still look good when the flowers have faded, Peach Blossom is one of those.

Hardiness – Fully hardy

Height – 60/70cm

Position – part/full shade where it does not dry out

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Astilbe Rheinland

 Astilbe Rheinland is in the east facing border of the back garden. These ones were planted last Autumn, very young plants they were and I did not expect such good results in the first year.

This is a most unusual Astilbe the flowers almost sparkle and the mid green deeply cut foliage is very attractive. Rheinland received the RHS award of garden merit which is always a good piece of information to have before purchasing a plant.  Astilbes in general really do prefer a moist shady spot, however they will grow well enough in a semi shaded position as long as the soil is kept very well watered.

Hardiness – Fully hardy

Height – 50cm

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Astilbe x Arendsii White Gloria

Astilbe x arendsii White Gloria (Weisse) planted in the woodland area of the garden, in a border which requires a little more watering in Spring and Summer than the others do..  This one in our garden grows to about 3ft tall.  A very handsome white form.

There is no doubt about it. Astilbes  just hate to be in dry areas of the garden where performance will produce sparse flowering and generally sickly looking plants.  Astilbe is in fact known to thrive in boggy conditions and they always look  good when planted alongside  Hosta and Phlox,  which also like similar conditions.

 

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Clicky Stats

Going back to the early days when I started my blog one thing that really fascinated me was the stats.  Well to be quite honest when I first came across it on my dashboard I didn’t have a clue what it could be. C’mon, at my age if it had said statistics then I would have put two and two together, well maybe!

Anyway I eventually got my head around it and found what the wordpress stats did.  It let me see how many pages had been viewed each day, week or month. Not only that it showed me which pages received the most visits.  At my time of life stuff like this fascinates me, younger folk would say, your easily excited.

I carried on for a few years happy with the results then I came across something similar called <-Clicky Stats->    this really did take the statistics to a whole new level.

Not only did it show me how many pages were visited but also the amount of individual visitors. Clicky also shows where your visitors come from, Country, city ip address, even what they had for lunch  (I made that bit up). You are also shown how long each individual stays on your site and which pages were visited.  Now and again you can pick up that someone had been on your blog for an extremely long time, (two hours) This leads to curiosity making me want to contact the visitor, however even with the ip address I havent figured out how to do this as yet.

I know most of you will be well acquainted with the likes of Clicky but I expect there will be some of you who may well welcome information like this.  The free version of Clicky Stats offers all that most bloggers would wish for.  I have checked out others but found none of them quite compared.

If you happen to leave a comment I will be sure to visit your site and do the same

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