Today I am celebrating the abundance of the cutting beds with the brightest dahlias and zinnias available, with a few others for support.
David Howard is in there again, with Geoffrey Kent (red), Dorothy Rose (pink), Top Totty (purple, and sadly only visible on the view above) and ‘Happy Single Juliet (single, cerise), with zinnias Benary Giant Lime, Orange King and a pink and startlingly bright red from Benary’s Giant Mix. They are joined by Rudbeckia ‘Marmalade’, Salvia viridis ‘Oxford Blue’, Antirrhinum ‘Liberty Classic Rose’ and Bupleurum rotundifolium.
I have a sneaking suspicion that ‘Gaiety Club’ may be a misnomer and that it is not the sort of place where cocktails abound, as suggested by the spotty cocktail umbrella but, if the addition of Amaranthus ‘Hot Biscuits’ is anything to go by, more of a club with leather armchairs and sleepy gentlemen nodding off in the daytime – but let’s continue to pretend otherwise and maintain their jolly image…
Instead of the deliberate contrasts of the main vase, I also have a more subtle vase of sweet peas to enjoy, culled yesterday by stripping all the blooms to ensure flowering is maintained, which seems an eminently sensible routine to get into. I have mentioned the combination of Gwendoline and King George VI several times and am really pleased with the pairing, although a random lilac one has recently appeared in the mix, presumably from just a single seed.
I know both these vases will bring me pleasure during the week and I wonder what those of you reading this post might find in your own gardens to pick and pop in vase or jamjar to bring you pleasure too. Please share them with us by leaving links to and from this post.
Before this post was written, I had to check back on the blog to see when the cutting beds first came into existence, and was surprised to find it was as long ago as 2014. Their creation was the result of an increased love of flowering plants at the expense of paltry attempts to grow vegetables, and a growing admiration for the cutting beds shown on other blogs, whilst their success has been directly proportional to my increased proficiency in seed sowing and dahlia cultivation.
These two beds were new for this year, created by reducing the size of the fruit cage, and have already proved their worth, if only for the success of the sweet peas. It seems to have worked well having most of the dahlias together as well, rather than split between the other beds and large pots.
We also have some Ammi visnaga, but the less said about that the better…
Curiously, about 30cm away in the adjacent bed there are some craspedia, grown for the first time, that are struggling too, and I sometimes wonder if it could be something to do with the soil or location of this spot. In the same bed, though, are Sunflower ‘Velvet Queen’ which although slower to mature than some years is still doing OK, Clary ‘Oxford Blue’, that wonderful overwintered antirrhinum and Amaranthus caudatus.
Moving along, in the next bed is a glorious stand of cornflower, so much the better for the netting, Calendula ‘Snow Princess’, Rudbeckia ‘Marmalade’, Helichrysum ‘Silvery Rose’, Scabiosa stellata, alonsoa and Amaranthus ‘Hot Biscuits’:
The fourth bed is mostly filled with cosmos and zinnias, cosmos from the Double Click series in three different shades, and Zinnia ‘Orange King’, Purple ‘Prince’, ‘Benary Giant Lime’ and ‘Benary Mix’, with Rudbeckia ‘Cherry Brandy’ and a white helichrysum separating the two types of blooms. Success with zinnias has certainly come with experience, learning finally that they don’t like to be crowded. They supposedly don’t like root disturbance either, but that has never been an issue for my with my pricking out and potting on; time of sowing doesn’t seem to matter either as my February sowing did well but was troubled by aphids, and the second sowing did equally well, with both coming into flower at the end of June.
That’s my colourful six for today, and I shall now go over to our Six on Saturday host, 
We say it so often, but it’s hard to believe another month is over and that the garden has moved on thirty days since I last shared views and a video of the garden as a whole. Posting pictures every month is still helpful for me to assess the garden’s progress from month to month and year to year, but please skip through them to get to the video link at the end if you want. You can find an 
Looking at the shrub border from the opposite end:
The woodland:
The main borders form the bothy:
And the same area from ground level:
The clematis colonnade:
Woodland edge border:
Looking back along the woodland edge border:
The three ‘bold’ borders:
Dahlias and sweet peas in the cutting beds:
Other cutting beds:
Blue & white border:
Rose garden:
Looking back at the house:
And beyond the Coop to the Coop Corner and the mini hostas:
And finally, a link to the video, with some amateur editing this month! You can find it at 
I was waiting for more than just one bloom on Dahlia ‘David Howard’ before I used it in a vase: there is a small handful today so here he is and definitely glowing in a marmaladey sort of way. He is such a distinctive dahlia and after putting off adding him to my collection for a season or two I finally succumbed and know the decision will not be regretted.
It has been an interesting few months in lockdown, with our garden openings cancelled because of it, but it has given me time to explore, enjoy and tweak the garden without the hindrance of days when it becomes public property for a few hours. I say ‘hindrance’, but I don’t mean that in a derogatory way – I have loved the flexibility and freedom it has given me to enjoy it for myself, but nevertheless miss having been able to share it with others and will continue to open it in future years.
I have had time to notice what a pretty and underrated plant hebe can be, and will look out for more of these short varieties:
Being able to monitor my ‘experiment’ of moving plants from one of the bold borders into pots with little concern for what they would look like in June has been a boon. As it happens, most things have done better than they have done before, thriving it seems on the lack of competition and showing that partial shade was not the reason for their previous failure to do well. Above all, it has demonstrated that cramming a border is counterproductive, especially cramming in new plants lifted from 4″ pots. Of course a sensible gardener would leave space for each plant to mature when planning a new border, but if we like plants most of us also like to fit as many as we can into the space we have got.
Reviewing a couple of the borders is a necessary requisite of my other new project, for which that pile of bricks is required – but that’s for another day. So is the realisation that planting an oak tree in the garden is not necessarily a good idea 15 or more years down the line, and removing this misjudged specimen would be sensible before it got any bigger. We have enough shade from our neighbour’s huge and elderly beech tree and our own little woodland without the ever-expanding canopy of an oak tree, so it will have to go – and last Wednesday’s aerial view shows just how much tree cover there is in the garden.
No doubt there will other projects and schemes to keep us busy in the garden till we are able to open again for visitors next year – and at least we were able to open in February, despite the floods!
…not of picking its nose or biting its fingernails, but growing! It doesn’t seem very long since I built a wall around the compost heap, with a feature extension utilising two pieces of stained glass from an old front door, but this is what it looked like yesterday before I introduced it to the loppers and secateurs:
…and here it afterwards:
We might have gone pretty hungry otherwise, because we mightn’t have known that home is where the bread is:
Cutting back Rambling Rector was not such a straightforward task, despite it being an annual one, but at least by tackling it annually the rose no longer reaches the bird’s nest stage when a complete overhaul is required. However, it was made much easier this year by the discovery that lurking in the shed we have a telescopic pruner we had forgotten about – no more perilous reaching to pull down the stems with a fence stake with one foot on the ladder, thank goodness.
It’s not all been pruning and trimming, lopping and hacking, this week and there has been plenty of time for observation, noticing the embryonic flowers on the various witch hazels, for example. I realised a few years ago that the flowers were formed the previous year, but not that they could appear as early as this. It’s a reassuring sign, as some of them skip a year or otherwise flower badly, undoubtedly weather-related and perhaps dependent on the timing of rainfall, and there is no doubt that Hamamelis ‘Zuccariniana’ will be smothered in blooms this winter, making up for its poor show last time. You can see seed pods here as well as the new flowers – and most of my witch hazels sport generous quantities of these, testament to the number of pollinating insects around in winter.
Further exciting news this week is that I have zinnias! Orange King, Benary Giant Lime and another from Benary Giant Mix, they were sown in mid February with a second sowing in early April as the first had suffered from aphids, and planted out mid-May. It has taken a few years, but I was close to Zinnia Success last year and have now finally cracked it – joy of joys!
I have also discovered a bud on seed sown Trifolium rubens, although it has taken a couple of years to get to this stage; this clover relative makes a pleasing and tactile impact in a border and by next year these potted ones will hopefully be snapped up by garden visitors, assuming we will be able to open ‘normally’ then. My original plant, shown here with astrantia and allium, was bought from a local NGS garden, invariably a good source of interesting plants.
That’s my ten for this month – next month dahlias, zinnias and sunflowers are sure to feature somewhere along the line, with the first two already beginning to flower in the cutting beds. Thanks to Chloris for hosting the meme.
I was working through my list of garden tasks today and had just about finished deadheading, with tying in of clematis to follow, when I spotted this unusual visitor in the blue & white border. It took a fair amount of perusing our butterfly and moth book and a searching conversation with Google to determine for sure that it is was a Scarlet Tiger Moth. Mostly found throughout the south and west of England and Wales in damp wetland areas and coastal sites and flying in the daytime in June and July, sightings have increased further north and into the Midlands in recent years. They often lay their eggs on comfrey, which we do have in our garden, but it is far from being a wetland or coastal site!
The decision has been made about the aconitum, though, and that will be out as soon as it had finished flowering…
A whim is a dangerous thing when one has time on one’s hands, and last week I cut down the honeysuckle on one side of the lychgate, albeit on the basis that similarly severe attention given to another honeysuckle following aphid infestation produced lush new growth the following year. Hopefully, the result will be equally successful, and in the meantime it looks so much better without all that woody growth.
Tomorrow Rambling Rector will be tackled – but not on a whim as this is a routine maintenance task by which time we could have filled our garden refuse bin three times over!
