In the Garden

JUNE IS A GLORIOUS time of the year, and a peak time for a riot of colour in the mixed borders of the English garden. This has been a very good year for blossom especially the apple and pear trees and experts say that the apple harvest should be excellent. Our Bramley apple tree which has not performed well for years and which we had planned to chop down was laden with blossom and so, with the thought of all those apple pies, we are giving it a second chance. The camellias were not affected by the winter and were spectacular this spring, but our new planting called Yuletide, which we expected to flower at Christmas, didn’t flower until April.

I find it very useful to keep a gardening diary because I find it all too easy to make plans for the following year – what to dig up, plant, move, divide etc – but when the time comes I can’t remember! Gardens need to evolve as they mature and tastes change and sometimes plants just outgrow their site or don’t thrive.

We plan to divide several clumps of primroses, giant alliums and helianthus Lemon Queen and to move various dianthus to sunnier positions where we have improved the drainage with gravel.  We removed a large clump of thrift and replaced it with some lovely bright pink incarvilleas which a friend gave us. You have to be careful with incarvilleas as they disappear completely in the winter and then it is all too easy to hoe them up in the early spring.  This also applies to geums, which when they start to come through the soil in spring, look suspiciously like weeds. Unfortunately the large rhododendron which had a bud blast last spring has succumbed again and so we have decided to remove it and replace it with a pieris ‘forest flame’.

Because we lost our cerinthes in the winter, we have grown several more from seed and intend to grow them in large pots because they can get very untidy and intrusive in the borders.  We had success with our cowslip seeds and now have about a dozen new plants. We always tend to collect too many seeds and friends give us seeds of plants we admire in their gardens. Every year we say we must cut down on the work but this spring our small greenhouse was again full to overflowing. But June is the time to empty the greenhouse and enjoy the fruits of one’s labour.

Maureen Reynolds