Beauty of being back in my garden
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It was great to step back into my garden this week after being away in England for a couple of weeks looking at other people’s gardens.
There was, of course, the usual mess to clean up; mainly leaf and petal litter and some pots of tulips past their best.
There were weeds to pull. Funny how quickly buttercup can grow. Funny how the buttercup I saw in the meadows at Great Dixter looked so cute and harmless compared to the thug kind I have growing.
But there were so many new things in bloom. Roses – ‘Complicata’, ‘Reine de Violette’, ‘Compassion’ (next to the front door – I always like to think of people finding compassion here) and a lovely pink roses I forget where it came from or what it is called. I think it could be ‘Wedding Bells’.
I was delighted to find white foxgloves in bloom amid the dwarf purple and lime green physocarpus.
And I was equally thrilled to see so many bees – a whole hive, for sure – enjoying an abundance of flowers on the
Styrax tree with its dainty white flowers. This is located at the top of my driveway, so you always get to look up into the canopy – the best way I think to see the flowers at their most beautiful.
The flowers on the Manglietia insignia are just starting to pop and the honeysuckle is massive, almost a wall of yellow, and it combines very nicely with some spirea which had a few alliums in there the last time I looked.
I have yet to put in some summer colour plants, although I did overwinter a few pelargoniums and they are blooming very nicely already.
There are Alliums bulgaricum in bloom in the perennial border along with some white Mount Everest ones and there is blue Centaurea montana everywhere, although I know it leaves frightful holes when it is done and I have to do some quick coverups.
When I left for England two weeks ago, there were masses of bluebells in flower and almost as many aquilegia but now they are all gone but for a few remnants. I will watch them go to seed and hope for an even better show next year.
There’s clematis, two kinds, spilling out of a terracotta pot. There’s pyracantha – a replacement for roses and clematis on an arch – in full flower. It is part of my new green-on-green planting scheme.
All in all, it is fun to be back in my own garden, even though I still have visions of Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, Hidcote and Kiftgate dancing in my head.
Ah, John Clare, “Despised, unskilled, or how I will, Sweet Poesy! I’ll love thee still.”
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