On The Cover Susie’s Garden Cut back and grow more
Take advantage of high summer to fill your border – and your veg plot – with gorgeously frothy and colourful blooms
On July summer evenings, I appreciate being able to stay out late in the garden, either working, pottering about, or just sitting and looking. The light can be really beautiful and the borders are looking full and colourful. Along the main path, the peonies might have finished flowering but I leave a few of the seedheads because they are so decorative. This path now looks gorgeous with soft blue catmint, white geraniums and the huge globes of Allium christophii.
I grow lady’s mantle on either side of the front steps and it has looked perfect with great frothy mounds of lime-green flowers. But I never let it go to seed because, as gardeners know, it can take over! As soon as www.myweekly.co.uk there’s a hint of brown in the flowers I get out my Jakoti shears and cut it right down to ground level. Being one-handed shears, I can hold the foliage with my left hand and use the shears in my right which makes it easy to put the foliage tidily in the wheelbarrow. It goes off to the compost heap and the lady’s mantle will regrow lovely fresh leaves in just over a week.
Back in mid May, I “Chelsea chopped” my Campanula lactiflora or milky bellflower. This can grow to five foot, a good plant for the back of a border. By reducing it by a third at the time that the Chelsea Flower Show would normally have taken place, it re-grew into a neat mound that is now absolutely packed with pale pink flowers. You can use this method to alter the size and improve the flowering performance of a wide range of perennials.
This pretty campanula makes a good cut flower, one of the many plants that I like to pick as informal bunches. I grow annuals such as zinnias for cutting and as colourful edging to the veg garden, with other annuals in containers. Favourites are blue lobelia, a good nectar plant, lavender, pale yellow argyranthemum, cosmos and dahlias. And in the veg garden, David is harvesting the garlic, laying the bulbs out to dry in the sun. It really is a time of plenty.