Plenty to celebrate in the ‘June gap’
There doesn’t have to be a lack of bloom from spring to summer
Change can be a blessing or a burden depending on the circumstances, and gardening, as in other walks of life, is not immune to it. Sometimes it can be gradual, gently evolving over decades. Occasionally, it is brutally swift, shaking the foundation of our otherwise comfortable lives. In which case absorbing the need to plan, riding the storm, and adjusting our approach to the cultivation of plants, seems a reasonable strategy.
We have seen our fair share of gardening changes over time, while adjusting to the seasons and weather patterns, our constant companions as we’ve attempted to raise quality edible and ornamental crops.
In days of yore, when spring and summer bedding were the mainstay of floral displays, gardeners would bemoan the ‘June gap’, a perceived flowerless period when the former were spent and recently planted summer bedding was not yet in bloom.
There is little mention of this today thanks in part to the work of plant breeders whose creations have extended flowering periods. Nor are we totally dependent on bedding alone as shrubs, herbaceous perennials and others combine in the modern trend of mixed borders. Looking around this garden in midJune I see no lack of blooms!
Shrubby weigela is a mass of pink bells that are only outdone by a nearby Californian lilac (Ceanothus ‘Concha’). We have it in standard form, two metres tall, with a ball-shaped canopy one metre diameter. It is currently burdened with hundreds of dark blue flower cymes.
Standing next to it with your eyes closed, you can best appreciate the buzz of a bee’s presence.
Yellow flag iris blooms hover above the garden pond like several suns. A collection of highly fragrant garden pinks started their performance in April and will continue for the duration. Border geraniums in pink and blue are displaying the same flowering trait. Patches of common comfrey (Symphytum officinale) compete with groups of a tall, cultivated blue type from the Caucasus (S. caucassicum), and bees are mobbing them both. There are pink pyrethrums raised from seed, plus the stunning crimson-scarlet flowers of oriental poppy to equally large blooms of herbaceous paeonies. Talk of a June gap simply flies out of the window.