Out early in the garden of the longest day, and already it is warming up. I can see the plants around me switching gear: late spring to summer. Some change feels instant, and I’m sorry to see the small cascades of Cornelia and Penelope roses fading fast, their petals suddenly dull and papery. They have flowered since late May, their scent filling our small back garden, competing even with the serial winds. Likewise, I note that several of the hardy geraniums have swiftly departed – yesterday mounds of glorious blue, busy with bees, today a tangle of spent green stems. Time to wield the secateurs.
Meanwhile, the rose in the photo above is just starting out. St. Cecilia, she with the pale and floppy blooms. When we moved into The Gables nearly three years ago, I found her as a couple of weedy stems, much overgrown. I’ve fed her up since, although I have mixed feelings about shrub roses in the midst of herbaceous borders. Vicious to weed around for one thing.
Directly under her is blue geranium Rozanne, a new arrival last year, who struggled to settle in during the drought, and then was disrupted by an ants’ nest in the top of the wall. Usually this is a plant you can’t stop. Once she gets going, she should flower all summer and into the autumn. In fact I often used to curse her in our Wenlock garden as, year by year, one plant sprawled into an invasion many feet wide and long. Now I find I’ll put up with sprawl to have the long summer blue.
In the front garden borders, the earlier mauve shades have given way to the vibrant gold of Moonshine achillea and yellow loosestrife, and to the leafy greens of euphorbia and golden marjoram. There’s also a very vigorous cotton lavender tumbling from the crab apple’s raised bed, presently a mass of yellow buttons on brilliant green stems..
In the back garden, now is the time of bindweed – both wild and cultivated. In the hedge we have the locally feral, pink and white flowered version. It even survived last Friday’s big cut.
And then among the nearby sweet peas, where I planted the seedling some weeks ago, I found the first Morning Glory flower – Black Knight is its name; here keeping company with hardy geranium, Ann Thompson. They both like a good ramble. It will be interesting to see where they end up.
The hedge, as may be seen, is a challenge. It wants to be a forest and is filled with sapling ash and sycamore trees. This has happened because the whole length was once hemmed in with chicken wire and so impossible to keep a check on invaders. And then, egged on by ivy, everything has leaned on everything else so that the holly is horribly meshed with hawthorn, privet, field maple, forsythia, elder, and cherry. There are also some rather strange gaps, which I’m attempting to fill with cherry and field maple and briar rose (these presently at sapling stage). The bindweed does briefly improve the overall look.
In the back garden bed, with geraniums over, the sheep’s bit scabious are the current stars…almost literally, a floral constellation and a magnet for hoverflies and bees:
The feral foxglove season is over now. All through May and early June we had majestic self-grown spires – purple ones, white ones – in every quarter. Some of the plants were enormous, making the most of the overwintering mulch I’d spread on the borders. I’ve pulled most of them up. There are already enough seedlings about the place. In their stead, in the shady periphery under the old apple trees, come the perennial foxgloves. They are altogether more delicate in looks and structure – ivory white and buttery yellow. Very cooling to look at.
In front of them is a path and then a row of raised beds for vegetables.
Here the French beans, cabbages and herbs have all put on a sudden growth spurt – almost overnight. I also appear to have grown something that I can only describe as a brassica bush (top left corner). It is nearly as tall as me and is a mass of branching stems of tender kale leaves, but also among them now, some sprigs that look like purple sprouting. It’s been in the garden since last summer and only now decided to perform, having missed the March-April ‘hungry gap’ when I was expecting it. Ah, well. Am happy to crop it whenever it comes.
The two rows of potatoes are looking promising. The runner beans, too, are growing well, finally each plant up its own stick, now that I’ve untangled the knitting nonsense created by the June winds.
The next big blooming event will involve the sunflowers. They have sowed themselves all over the garden. One is already so tall it clearly has magic beanstalk ambitions. So as they say: watch this space.
Copyright 2026 Tish Farrell
Good to have something positive and creative to focus
Wow, Tish, you almost make me want to garden! Yours is so beautiful.
Well that surely is a compliment, Anne. My gardening is all rather random, but somewhere in all the pottering there are elements of a plan. Not sure when this will emerge 🙂
that’s a beautiful garden!
Many thanks, Beth.
What beautiful flowers.
Thanks, Marie.
Your garden is clearly thriving in your capable hands 😀 So many lovelies to enjoy, among which the scabious stood out for me!
The scabious is a new plant to me in all senses. I bought it last autumn and I’m so pleased with it. Each flower goes through a sequence of several distinct phases.
what a thriving sunny garden Tish – you do gigantica so well! I love the scabious -and snap, we have similar boundary hedge problems with convolvulus and in parts not the most ideal assortments – there is some sort of willow in mine which outreaches everything else
p.s. I think I saw vines of your Morning Glory in Zealand where it is most unwelcome but suits your plot beautifully-
Ooh, willow. Now that is a pain, especially if it’s goat willow. I can well imagine Morning Glory getting out of hand, but I seem to feel our climate, which doesn’t altogether suit it, keeps it growing politely. I usually do plant out a few seedlings among my climbing beans, but they often don’t get round to flowering until October when it’s far too late. I also discover last year’s efforts have seeded themselves under the phlomis. Must remember to relocate them.
yes definitely polite as I have struggled with them out in the garden but they suit the theme as the Japanese love Ipomoea nil – once used as a laxative apparently
Beautiful..I could be so jealous.
Thanks, Beverly 🙂
I love the delight you take in your garden, Tish. A hive of activity xx
Indeed, Jo. I have buzzing about – along with the bees 🙂
Tish, your garden is beautiful!
Thank you, Beth.
Gorgeous borders and blooms, Tish. 🌸
Thanks, Flavia.
The Englsih are the world’s true wizards and magicians of gardens.
I can only imagine the elves waking up at night and helping you (and Hubby?) create magic in the garden.
Tous mes compliments, Memsahib. I can only imagine the long hours planting, culling, weeding for such a spectacular result.
👏🏻
You’re too kind, Brieuc. Now that I’ve made the beds and borders, I truly do more pottering than labouring. Compost and mulching are the answer to a happy garden (and the gardener).
Good to know. Must be better on one’s back. 😉
I had to look up ‘mulching’ (paillage…) Od course, once you’ve “done” the areas, the rest should grow by itself. (Plus a lot of “tailler” et tailler et tailler.
Yes, lots of pruning. I have a ‘hot compost bin’, a rather ugly item hidden beside G’s shed. All the prunings and vegetable waste, mixed with ripped up cardboard packaging, go into it, and after a few weeks it makes lots of mulch.
Cardboard now? I’d never have thought about that. I suspect the rain helps too.
Yes, it’s surprising, but compost pundits swear by 50 % ripped small cardboard to green stuff. It seems to work.
Cardboard is a kind of paper, made of wood, cellulose I guess? There must be chemical reaction that speeds the process. I’ll ask my wife. She’s a chemistry researcher. She might know. Happy SUnday.
I’m sure you know Colette’s gorgeous evocation of a French garden in My Mother’s House…
I probably studied it at school. Must be “La maison de Claudine” which I don’t have on my shelves. I do have “Dialogues de bêtes” and “La chatte”. Still. I’m amazed! (We were very much cat-oriented in my family…)
Thanks for the reminder. I’ve moved the books to my TBR shelves…
Kwaheri sassa, Memsahib.
Beautiful, I really like the perspective of the first one!
Thank you, Pamela.
So very beautiful!
Thanks, Jennie.