Summer 2017

Sitting in my bedroom recovering from flu, listening to the birds twittering away, I am reminded of the coming season in the garden.  Having failed to blog much last year, I am belatedly posting some pictures of the garden as it was last June.

The Taming of the Bank

It's taken a few years, but this weekend we have finally tamed the bank.  We applied some of the unmentionable a few weeks back, which made the job a whole lot easier, and have now cleared and reshaped the bank ready for sowing with phacelia to ward off the weeds until we can smother in foxglove seeds and other delights.  I have definite leanings towards woodland gardens, and I'm thinking this might be the way we go for the bank.  I can just see it smothered in primroses, foxgloves, helebores and other woodland beauties.  And there are not enough trees in the world, so who needs an excuse to plant a few more?  The top photo was taken just a month ago on 12th March, and the other two today.  I do so love to see a bit of progress!

August 2016

I have been a very lazy gardener and an even lazier blogger in the last year.  I have realised I did not write any posts last summer, so to set the record straight, this is where we were last August.  The garden is full of colour, very little of which I can take the credit for.  The poppies, hollyhocks and borage have all just appeared, nothing to do with me, just Mother Nature doing her thing.

Honey Locust

I have had this tree on my wish list since our last visit to Canada two years ago where I first fell in love with her striking leave shape and colour.  Thanks to a chance discovery in a local nursery, the beautiful gleditsia triacanthos  is now firmly planted in the Sunnyside garden, showing off her splendid acid yellow foliage.  

The wild flower meadow

It might not look like one yet, but this is our new wild flower meadow.  After a couple of weekends of power harrowing sowing, rolling and digging in fence and gate posts and burying small children, we are not far away!  Just need the rain now.

July in full bloom

This was the picture in late July with the herbaceous borders at their peak.  Things are looking a little more ragged now a month later, and after a fortnight's neglect whilst on holiday!

The garden in June

These new borders are filling out, but this photo hides a multitude of sins behind, where the ground is still not prepared for the various trees and hydrangeas I have planned for this end of the garden.  Here we have the very young betula jacquemontii guarding the entrance to this pathway down the garden, melissa officinalis (lemon balm to you and I) frothing beneath, paeonia delavayi lutea (tree peony) and stachys byzantia (lamb's ear) to the left, crocosmia lucifer behind and nepeta 'walkers low' to the right, and foxgloves popping up all over the place, curtesy of mother nature. 

 Leycesteria formosa or pheasant berry just coming into flower on the other side of the path.

I love this combination, the anchusa azurea with the lychnis coronaria or rose campion that I remember so well as a child.

 Self sown poppies and foxgloves play a big role in this garden

But the star of the show right now is the rose pergola which knocks the socks off anything else in the garden.  You only have to stand at our front gate to be hit with the stunning fragrance of these roses, and the display is simply breath-taking.  I am convinced that the pink rose to the left is New Dawn,  it was taken as a cutting from one in my parents' garden and they don't know the variety, but it is so similar in form and timing to the New Dawn I planted up the side of the out-house.  The creamy yellow one again was taken as a cutting from an unknown rose in my parents' garden, and the little pink rambler is Paul's Himilayan Musk.  The other rose on this pergola, which I must photograph and post before the season is out, is the bold and blowsy Compassion.  All completely contrasting roses, which strangely complement each other very well, all producing this great mass of fragrant blooms.  June is the very best of months for roses.