June in my garden
Hello and welcome to any new subscribers this week. This is my monthly diary post, free for everyone to read, giving you an update about what’s going on in my own garden at this time of year, and some tips on what you can be doing in your own gardens this month. Upgrade to a paid subscription and you’ll receive weekly posts with my notes on the gardens I see, the people I meet and the planting combinations that have caught my eye. I’m incredibly lucky that my job at House & Garden takes me to a wealth of gardens both in the UK and abroad, so I have so much to tell you! Without fail, I find gardeners are the most generous people and always eager to share their hard-earned knowledge, so in turn I hope to pass this information on to you.
Plants are what motivate me most. I’m fascinated by the sheer abundance of plants available to grow in our gardens; there is so much diversity in colour, scent, form, shape and texture. Each plant is a work of art in itself when you look at how it is formed, but when you start putting these plants together, you can make a composition that is exciting and unique. More than anything, I love playing with planting combinations in my own garden. I’m always looking, tweaking, moving and adding plants in this ever-evolving tableau. It’s not a perfect garden by any means, but I love it and I love the fact it never stands still.
So what’s happening in my garden at the moment? Well it’s been a funny spring - some things seem to be early, and some things are now slowing down because of the drought. Plants are generally less lush and leafy than normal because of the lack of rain, but some are thriving. The front garden, planted mainly with robust, reasonably drought tolerant plants, is looking pretty good, with Euphorbia oblongata, Alchemilla mollis and the white valerian, Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’ in full flow. The peonies are doing OK although one of them (‘Sweet Harmony’) is full of rather small buds this year.
The roses are flowering prodigiously - but then again they flowered well last year too, in almost the opposite conditions. Geums on the other hand are looking a little sparse, and the pink ‘Coral Reef’ poppies I sowed from seed last year are flowering well but their leaves aren’t looking lush at all.
The back borders are still rather green and looking a bit dry, but they don’t usually come into their own until late June. I added two shrub roses last autumn with a name that makes me laugh: ‘Tottering by Gently’. Whoever named this rose was perhaps gently drunk at the time, but despite the name, it really is a lovely rose, with pale yellow single flowers that stand out beautifully amongst the greenery.
I’ve been watering sparingly, and mainly only the areas that are newly planted. I planted one new border last autumn, which I wrote about in a previous post. It was meant to be a ‘freebie’ border, planted with divisions and cuttings from existing plants, or those that had been moved from pots or given to me, and I was true to my word apart from buying three new hellebores, two astrantias and three Calamagrostis brachytricha, as I felt that Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ (which I had already) would have been too tall there. The border is looking OK - still sparse, but I have infilled with a few seed sown annuals so in a month or so it should be looking fuller.
I also planted a new border under the oak tree, which I envisage as a lovely area of evergreen mounds and hummocks in different textures and shades of green, with yew, sarcoccoca, choisya, Lonicera nitida and Osmanthus burkwoodii. I’m also trying Teucrium fruitcans, to give it a common thread with the front garden, where there are three large domes. It’s an area that gets the morning sun but then goes into shade, so it may not work, but so far they look happy. This space is nothing to write home about at the moment, but I’m hoping in a year or two the plants will start knitting together and it will start to look like how I imagined it when I first planned it. In the meantime, I’m just about to plant some foxgloves in the gaps. I have lots of Digitalis x mertonensis plants which I grew from seed this year, a cross between the native foxglove D. purpurea, and the pale yellow D. grandiflora, both of which I have in the garden. They may or may not flower this year….
The other new element in the garden is the curvy back hedge. This laurel hedge has bugged me for years. I’m not a fan of cherry laurel at the best of times - it’s such a monster and grows like the clappers both outwards and upwards. But I didn’t want a brand new fence there either, so we decided to live with it until I saw in someone else’s garden a laurel hedge cut into a gentle wave. Hey presto, we copied the idea, and it has made all the difference. It looks more natural and right for the middle of our country village.
In my veg garden I’m experimenting this year too, by growing everything together in a polyculture system. That’s a serious-sounding way of saying that I’m growing flowers, herbs and vegetables in a mish-mash with self seeded poppies, verbascums, marigolds and ammi rubbing shoulders with lettuces, beans, courgettes, lovage and parsley. It is quite a wrench to stop yourself planting in the straight rows that are traditional in this country, but I’m loving the freedom of it. And because you’re mixing everything up, you don’t need to worry about a rotation system. (In theory, you won’t get a build up of pests in one area, so the rotation becomes unnecessary). It’s all looking rather green still, but the poppies are just about to burst open, and I think it’s going to look beautiful when things start to flower. I can see already that the blackfly are going for the ammi rather than my beans, so I think this extreme form of companion planting is going to work!
Garden tasks for June
My main focus this month is our village garden open day on June 15th, so I’m frantically trying to get ready for that. If you’re local, do come along. (I live near Pangbourne in Berkshire). Send me a message on Substack if you’d like to come and I’ll send you the details. Meanwhile, these are the many jobs to be getting on with in your own gardens this month.
• Lift tulips from pots and replant with summer annuals
• Tie in new stems of climbing roses
• Pinch out cosmos seedlings to encourage bushy plants
• Plant out tender veg like courgettes, squash and tomatoes
• Mulch crops at the base with compost to conserve moisture around the roots
• Feed pot plants and fruiting plants every two weeks with a liquid plant feed to encourage strong growth and lots of flowers/fruit
• Tie in tomato plants to canes or string and pinch out side shoots on cordon types
• Prune spring flowering shrubs such as viburnum
• Always keep an eye on weeds and pull them regularly to keep on top of them
• Sow biennials such as sweet williams, wallflowers and foxgloves
Thank you for reading this post and let me know if you have any questions or comments. Have a lovely weekend.
Clare x
So much interesting information packed in thank you! The undulating hedge is genius, amazing what a difference it makes.
I loved this - and your collie in the garden!