Through the garden gate--July 2019

The weather has been beautiful this month, but too hot to do very much gardening. I have pottered about a lot, snipping off dead flower heads and cutting a few things back. But the garden hasn't needed much attention thank goodness and I have taken time to just sit and admire it all.  With having a fairly new garden  I still can't remember all the plants which are in there. So sometimes I have a lovely surprise as a plant comes into flower which I forgot I  planted earlier in the year.

    

The garden has been a riot of colour for a few weeks now.  The bottom border which collects all the water when it rains heavily seemed to suddenly burst into flower with pink astilbes and yellow lysimachias and a lovely pink campanula.  I don't normally put pink and yellow together but it looked wonderful and we were able to see it all from the house.

 This is geranium 'Rosanne' and it is full of bees.  It was in the back of the raised bed last summer and got a bit lost amongst all the other flowers, so I moved it to the front of another bed this year.  It has been flowering for several weeks now and I think it will carry on until the autumn

In the last week there has been a lot of heavy rain and the flowers have take quite a battering, both in the borders and in the patio containers, so I need to get out and do more deadheading.

The sweet peas are now flowering and provide me plenty of cut flowers for the house. I had to cut some of the lavender back last week as it was falling over the path, causing a bit of a trip hazard.  They looked lovely in vases around the house.

I am linking this post to Sarah's blog at 'Down by the Sea' for her monthly 'Through the Garden Gate' post.

Through the Garden Gate--June

At this time of the year everything in the garden suddenly seems to go 'woosh' and get really big.  We have had a lot of rain recently which has helped the plants to grow and they are now all over the place.  So I have been cutting back some of the early flowering perennial plants especially the hardy geraniums. This has made room for the later flowering plants to spread out a bit and I have even found some plants in the borders which I thought had disappeared. In the gaps made by cutting back I planted some cosmos which I grew from seed.

There are also a lot of plants which have started to flop over because they needed staking. So I have been buying plant supports and canes and trying to tidy up these dangly plants. This is of course a job which I should have done earlier in the year before they got so big, but I am never organised enough to think so far ahead.

This Thalictrum is a really tall plant and looked much better after I had supported it with some canes.

I planted up lots of containers with summer bedding for the paths and patio and they are looking lovely now. I used a colour scheme of mainly pink, blue, purple and white. These seem to be the colours I go for in the flower  borders too.

This lovely deep pink poppy is called 'Bolero'

I love the blue veronica which I have in the garden and I was pleased to find this pink version in the garden centre.

When we needed a break from the garden we have visited the RHS garden Harlow Carr and one or two NGS gardens. It's always good to see how other people do their gardens and we always come away with some ideas to try out in our garden.

I am linking this post to Sarah's blog at 'Down by the Sea' for her monthly 'Through the Garden Gate' post.