My Garden in June

In the Gravel Area:

our sit-and-cuppa place

Long time favourite - Mexican fleabane

dwarf runner beans - slug chewed

one of two hanging baskets

cut and come again salad leaves

the other hanging basket

In the Borders:

Knautia

alpine dianthus

Perpetual wallflower

Oriental poppy

Alpine aster

Wollerton Old Hall rose

foxglove

sea thrift

scabious

lithodora

delphinium

nice arrangement round bird bath

In the Patio Area:

parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

freshly planted - these will flesh out

ditto the hanging baskets - only just planted up

and again just potted up

this basket is coming on nicely

swamped with Susan Williams-Ellis rose

In the Front Garden:

getting better each day

there will be masses of olives this year

Cruel to be kind

We had a bit of a gale rip through for a couple of days with a load of rain and I decided it had made a lot of the plants look very bedraggled so I hacked off all the impressive swathes of geum, goodbye Mrs Bradshaw (for a while), and all the very large and very tall granny bonnets (aquilegia).

The big surprise was that the borders that seemed to be so dependent of those displays still looked relatively OK.

west facing - always fuller than the east facing one

east facing still looking OK

Wollerton Old Hall rose just coming into bloom

Delphiniums - two half eaten by our friend the slug

The ferns were putting up their wonderful new fronds, so it was time to cut out the leaves which had died over winter and freshen them up.

hart's tongue fern

soft shield fern

For anything which gets 'taken away' much more sneaks in.  I bought more plants for pots and extras of various established plants such as the Mexican fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus) and these little gems.  The Rhodanthemum Marrakech was bought for around the feet of my Buddha to give him something to contemplate.  The teeny Erodium was bought for the gravel area but it actually proved too teeny, hence four more fleabanes being wheeled in instead and the erodium finding a spot at the end of each border......  an odd sort of punctuation mark but I couldn't throw them away.

Adding more to the borders

This really is the very last of my planting in the borders for this year.  They are so full that I actually had to give away six hollyhocks I bought and some other things because when  came to put them in there really wasn't a spare inch.

I accidentally bought two different Lavateras but they are at each end of the east border so it probably wont matter too much, I hope.  I also hadn't thought about their ultimate size and I was buying them to fill a sort of half a metre 'hole' in the planting.  If they flourish they will be at least a metre wide - hey ho, breathe in everybody.

I found some lovely huge cream foxgloves to add to the ones I already have - I like each border to echo the other so I thought I needed some more.  

The scabious was just because I wanted some more blue.

More blue too for the front of the border - I always knew this plant as Lithospermum 'Heavenly Blue' - basically because it is - heavenly that is.  It seems to have changed to  Lithodorum Blue...... thanks to genetic work it seems many plants are changing their family name.  

Gaura always lends a bit of 'fluff' to a border and will flower its socks off if happy.

All these 'Verve' purchases (above) were from B and Q.

Finally, after deciding there wasn't a spare inch and having given away a ton of stuff, these two Japanese Anemones sang their siren song and they were duly bought and planted.  I know they can be a thug but it doesn't seem like one of my gardens without them.  I decided on pink because, the national trust nursery I bought them from o the way home from York, didn't have white!!

If you aren't a gardener you will see a ton of spaces in the borders but I know just how much more growth there is to come in just a couple of weeks time.

By the time I had typed this - the garden looks totally different - pots changed and added to plants coming into flower and better still, today, the sun is shining.

Summer Pots and Hanging Baskets

I might be working at this a little early this far north but, as always, I am itching to get the summer pots underway.  The Spring ones were still doing really well and I have kept the left hand one in place with a view to changing it when I see another hanging basket I like at the right price.  Meanwhile on a visit to Dunbar Garden Centre, because I got two fabulous pots from there last year for 'two for twenty',  I found the same deal again this year.  I have no idea how or why it happened but after giving the assistant our customer loyalty card we got two for ten pounds.  These may only look just OK for a fiver each right now but they have the potential for fabulous as time goes on.  What a bargain!

pelargonium, bacopa, petunia, lobeilia

The two spring baskets were still doing really well so I just dropped them into an appropriate size pot where they can continue to flower for a good while yet.

still looking bonny

I then moved on to potting up various pots.  

These Pelargoniums were two for three pounds from Aldi

Add caption

I has also bought a selection of hanging basket plants from Dobbies to mix around the pelargoniums.

Add caption

Most of these went into pots for the front garden

by the door

under the window

around the tree after squaring off the circle

looking forward to everything being fully grown

Among the collection was a couple of herbs.  I dug up the old parsley and re-arranged the plants in the little herb bed and planted the mint into its own pot to stand on the patio nearby.

I then potted up the chimney after removing the spring planting.  It takes imagination to see this with a huge volume of plants tumbling over the edges but it will come.

The rest of the plants went into two of the six new wooden planters which were bought for the gravel area..

The planters were £12.99 each from Aldi.  We had some delivery issues and some quality issues but eventually they were an OK deal.  

Initially I just put the perforated bags in the planters and tried to fold over the excess liner and to hide beneath the compost.  This didn't work very well.

One was planted with dwarf runner bean seeds and the other with salad leaves seeds.

For the other pair of long planters and the square ones I stapled the top of the liner to the inside edge of the box which gave a much neater finish.

The remaining two long ones were planted with three strawberries in each pot.  They were runners from my very old ever-bearer strawberries which I gave to my daughter a long time ago and are still growing strong.  I have never found a better strawberry and once they start fruiting they really do keep going all summer.

The two square planters were filled with a pelargonium and some trailing lobelia just to echo the pots at the top of the garden on the patio.