Well it’s been a while… Spring has been and gone since the last blog. Over the last four months our gardens have been our haven and it felt like Mother Nature was there to hold our hand through these unprecedented times. From the moment we went into lockdown the sun came out, the gardens dried up and there was daily growth in the garden providing hours of solace in just being outside and seeing what had grown overnight.
We were all suddenly faced with extra time in our gardens but garden centres were closed. The horticulture industry did an incredible job of trying to meet the demands of the gardeners and stop millions of plants from going to the compost heap. With a couple of deliveries from Longacres I was able to get my pots planted up and after years of being a bit disappointed with my choices, at last I got it right and absolutely love them. A mix of petunia’s, providing gorgeous scent that will trail over the sides, trailing verbena for interest in different flower shapes and Agastache Blue Fortune in the middle to add height and structure, with the bonus of being bee magnets.
My Allium Globemasters that I planted in the autumn to coincide with my sister’s arrival from New Zealand bloomed right on time, unfortunately she had to make do with a video. The garden peaked beautifully for when she would have been over, with alliums, lupins, hardy geraniums, phlox, roses and peonies all on show.
After the initial flourish in the garden, there is a quiet lull, with veroncastrum ‘Pink Glow’, veronica spicata, and astrantia’s attracting the bees. I have a variety of astrantia’s that have been out for weeks and the astrantia major ‘Shaggy’ I bought last year at Great Dixter gardens looks so great, I was pleased to find it at Longacres and add a few more to the collection in my attempt to plant in 3’s. It was the same with the veronicastrum ‘Pink Glow’ that it adds such structure to the flowerbed at 120cm high it is a great focal point and always covered in bees.
I’ve made the mistake so many times of only buying one of a plant, sometimes due to budget constraints, other times to see if it will work in the garden before buying 3 or 5 of them. It makes the flower bed feel a bit messy so I am trying gradually to block plant. Not only does it make the garden look more organised but it also helps the wildlife in that it seems bees have to learn how to get the nectar out of the different flower shapes, so the greater the number of one flower in one place, the more efficient they can be in collecting nectar.
The garden is now 7 years in the making and at last it feels like it is starting to fill out. I am now trying to focus on what is working and what isn’t and bulk up on those plants or learn to propagate them. 5 years ago I sowed my first agapanthus seeds. These plants were planted out 2 years ago and the buds are getting ready to burst.
I’ve just changed a section of the flowerbed and bought a hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ to go with some cuttings I have which I’m hoping in time will be a great display along with some agapanthus and is another small section completed to help with flow in the garden.
My daughters flowerbed has progressed well over lockdown, her lupins have flowered beautifully and seeds she planted at the beginning of lockdown are starting to flower. Now she is learning what she likes and what she doesn’t like. Her flowerbed is also turning into a traditional cottage garden with vegetables planted amongst the flowers. She has tomato plants, a couple of pea plants that are yielding beautiful peas we are all eating fresh off the plant and she has some lettuce she is growing for the guinea pigs, Cocoa and Oreo, that have joined the family during lockdown. The peas are such a success I picked up more plants at Longacres that will give us something to look forward to later on in the summer.
On seeing how her lettuce has grown compared to her grandad’s it has become obvious how nutrient poor the soil is. That flowerbed previously had lavender and herbs in so needed poor soil so in 7 years other than a couple of bags of manure and peat free compost in the spring, it hasn’t had the enrichment the rest of the garden has, so we purchased some Maxicrop seaweed extract will be used to feed the vegetables and other key plants in the garden that seem to run out of steam at this time of year. Another recent purchase was to replace my Burgon and Ball neon hand fork. It is one of my favourite and most used tools but after 4 years of nearly daily use the neon paint is starting to wear off and I keep losing it in my flowerbeds, so time for a replacement before I end up driving back to clients to retrieve it from flowerbeds and will keep my old one for home gardening.
Now we enter into the next phase in the garden with the agapanthus, echinacea’s, phlox and asters getting ready to shine. I can’t wait.
