Onwards and Upwards

What a week - temperatures soaring, no rain, almost too hot to garden but we struggled on knowing that, for our open weekend, we needed to have the garden looking shipshape. Friday we saw temperatures reach 26'C which is as hot as it gets for us. But I walked around on Friday evening and basked in the beautiful warm air, balmy evenings beating the heat of the overhead midday sun anyday. The garden was alive with the swallows and blackbirds, followed by the bats. It couldn't get any better.

Then the rain came...proper heavy straight down, soaking wet rain....and it didn't stop until Sunday evening. The thing is, we need rain....but couldn't it just wait until after the weekend??! One thing we can't control...the weather. Nonetheless we had a small group of very keen gardeners who were determined to tour the garden whatever the weather. And we've been really lucky this year so far with visits - all dry days bar the Giro D'Italia day. 

Anyway enough moaning....onwards and upwards - it's strange but I feel rather invigorated and more gardening obsessed than ever before. I have spent the last few hours researching old roses in books and online, yet again, discovering some wonderful new blogs from around the world like this one http://www.mooseyscountrygarden.com/ and http://bloomingwriter.blogspot.co.uk/

I love making rose wish lists (Baltimore Belle, Lupo, Jacques Cartier, Old Blush China The Countryman), rewriting, taking a few out (not good in the rain) adding a few more (longer flowering, good scent). There are a lot of rugosas not yet tried such as Sir Thomas Lipton....in fact, there are just too many to choose from - how lovely!

The new autumn bed starting to fill out.

Rosaraie de L'Hay

Ispahan

Summer Days

Time, as always, has passed by in the blink of an eye. Anyone ordered their turkey yet? 

The beauty of gardening is, as dismayed as I am at the weeks rushing by, there is always something to look forward to. 

The majority of the old roses are coming to the end of their flowering period - our open weekend is coming up and it has made me consider whether we should hold it slightly earlier next year but then, we would miss out on the prairie border coming to a peak with the crocosmias, rudbeckias and heleniums. And the hot bed in the cottage garden is only starting to reach its full glory with the dahlias, liatris, crocosmia, heleniums.

That said, I've been looking at longer / later flowering roses (all suggestions gratefully received) to prolong the season. To some extent, it's a difficult time on the flower front in certain areas, as the oriental poppies have been cut down, the foxgloves pulled out, the lupins are over, except for the wonderful "The Page" although they are one year old plants so I'm not sure if they will flower earlier next year and so go over sooner. Alchemilla mollis and early flowering geraniums have also been cut back - we try as much as possible to keep interest in all parts of the garden at all times but of course this is something that can only come with careful planning, years of experience, predictable weather and is rather difficult to achieve. 

Fortunately most visitors look at the garden with a less critical eye than mine and the feedback makes all of the hard work worthwhile!

If you are looking for inspiration and advice on successive flowering, it's hard to beat the late great Christo Lloyd, for example, cutting your oriental poppies right down and planting a bedding dahlia or cosmos beside it. I didn't pot my dahlias on enough so they were slightly starved and checked at the time of going in and haven't done much since (in just over two weeks) but then if I pot them on into big pots, it's more difficult to dig a big enough hole. I do wish I had potted on more c

osmos and kept them back to fill gaps - oh well....there's always next year!