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!