My Little Garden 23rd July 2022
Did anyone enjoy our heatwave at the start of the week? Not me that’s for sure, but on a positive note, it brought a wealth of bees and butterflies to the garden to sample the delights of the summer flowers. I was very lucky that I only had childcare duties on the Monday afternoon and could spend the day in relative shade on the Tuesday. In years gone by I would have been working in non air conditioned offices with no respite from the heat, and only the prospect of someone doing the afternoon ice lolly run to look forward to. Happy days!
On Wednesday, when it was considerably cooler, I had an early start at RHS Tatton. There were some splendid gardens to see and all the designers had done extremely well in just keeping plants alive in the preceding days. Gold medals for the show gardens were few and far between this year (only two!) but those gardens were among my favourites. There’s some photos on Twitter and no doubt a couple more before the show is over for another year. I was also very pleased to see that Sue Beesley and her Bluebell Cottage Garden team had won their seventh gold for the display in the Floral Marquee.
In my own wilting little garden, I hunted out some goodies to share for this week’s Six on Saturday.
- Echinacea
Last week I shared the first of the Echinacea ‘Green Twister’ flowers. It’s now started to acquire it’s pink colouring which makes the flower so attractive.
And it’s been joined by Echinacea ‘Rubinstern’. It has to be said that the first flower is looking a bit battered but the bee is happy. It’s been such a struggle keeping this perennial from wilting in the heat because it resides in a very dry part of the garden. The rain yesterday helped enormously.
2. Agapanthus
Not a success story this year. It peaked in terms of flowers in 2021 (thirty plus blooms I seem to remember) but I just didn’t get round to repotting it. I shall try harder for next year. I did ‘accidentally’ buy myself a new agapanthus at RHS Tatton. ‘Twister’ has five flowers about to open, but I’ll save that for next week.
3. Allium sphaerocephalon
I don’t have enough of these so they’re on my list to plant more of in Autumn. The bees love them so it’s rather surprising that this is a bee-less photo.
Maybe they were all on Allium ‘Summer Beauty’ instead. I bought these as bare-root perennials from Farmer Gracy and am super pleased with them. They look great at the front of the border so I might acquire a few more of these too.
4. Penstemon ‘Raven’
Such a lusciously blackcurranty coloured flower. Maybe it should be called ‘Kir Royale’.
5. Butterfly
There have been so many of these tiny little Holly Blue butterflies this year. And it’s great when they perch long enough for a photo.
6. Dahlia
Drum roll please…
In my fairly disastrous dahlia year so far, I finally have the first flower on what’s supposed to be ‘Honka Fragile’ but looks more like ‘Honka Rose’. Either way, I’m very happy to see it even if a couple of the petals are nibbled.
Next week marks the start of the school holidays which puts me out of action for two whole days rather than just three or four school runs. Actually, I’m not sure which takes up the most time, but I’m sure we’ll have fun.
Enjoy your weekends and if you’re following me on Medium, thank you very much and I’d highly recommend the #SixonSaturday hashtag on Twitter for more blogs and garden photos. As always, thanks to The Propagator for starting this. https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/
