Strawberry fields are here and now everything looks rosy for summer
Gardening editor Agnes Stevenson gets her roses in order and prepares the garden for summer as everything blossoms into full colour in the sunshine
June is the month for roses and mine are looking lovely. My favourite at the moment is Eustace Vye, a shrub rose with pink flowers that fade to coral and after a slightly rocky start, when the rabbits ate the first buds, they are all now growing strongly.
I also have an un-named rambler that should have been cut back but wasn’t so is now sprawling dramatically in a tangle of thorny branches.
When I finally get around to whipping it into shape I think I’m going to have to hire a suit of armour to avoid being severely scratched.
Elsewhere in the garden the astrantias are in flower and I’m trying my hardest to be delighted by them but somehow they never quite live up to their promise and I always feel a bit underwhelmed by them. I think it is because their flowers have a dry, papery feel that makes them seem a bit lifeless but I know many people love them and so I think the fault lies with me and not with the flowers.
I have no such qualms about the decorative strawberry, ‘Pink Panda’ which is romping through the flowerbeds with gusto.this started off in my garden as just one small plant given to me by a friend, who told me that it would soon be flourishing. I took one look at it and thought otherwise but it has proved me wrong.
Its a great alternative to hardy geraniums where you need a bit of ground cover and, in my garden at least, it does just fine in both dry and wet soils.
I’m sure there’s a saying that goes something like “a watched peony never opens”. If there isn’t, there should be because I’ve been staring at the buds on mine for weeks now and they stubbornly refuse to make any signs of unfurling their petals.
I grow ‘Sarah Bernhardt’
which makes a gorgeous cut flower and I’ve been adding more every year for quite some time in the hope that I’ll finally have enough to pick, without leaving obvious gaps.
The lupins I’ve been growing from seed are finally beginning to put on some serious growth. For a while they just sat in their pots and sulked but over the last few weeks they have been romping away. And it’s the same with the echinaceas that I bought last year as very small plants, which actually shot up overnight after weeks of doing absolutely nothing. All these lovely perennials will eventually fill out the borders, keeping them looking lovely from May until September but I still need some more late-season flowers such as rudbeckias to keep the show going until autumn.
However, that’s still some way off and now I’m just enjoying all the delights of early summer, including the nasturtiums and geraniums that are spilling from pots on the patio, and the first of dahlias which has opened in a warm, sunset colour.