Absence makes the heart grow fonder... and the garden wilder
Returning from holiday, Agnes Stevenson breathes a sigh of relief to find her garden has survived and starts planning for autumn and the years ahead
After a break in the sunshine, it is always exciting to see how the garden has grown in your absence.Will the roses have stopped flowering because they haven’t be deadheaded? Have the big agapanthuses finally opened? Are the creeping buttercups in the process of strangling the geraniums?
While other people spend their holidays lying on poolside loungers and soaking up the rays, I am checking the weather back home and hoping for rain.
This time I wasn’t disappointed, as heavy downpours followed a spell of hot weather, allowing recentlyplanted flowers and trees to tick over until I returned home.
Things didn’t go so well in the greenhouse, where my irrigation system failed and it was only the daily watering routine implemented by my next-door neighbour that prevented the tomatoes from collapsing and the fig tree from dying of drought.
Meanwhile, for the next week I’ll be sorting out the weeds, moving pots around and finding homes for clematis and hydrangeas that are big enough to go into the borders and I’ll be making plans for tasks to be undertaken during the autumn.
There’s nothing like a few days away to let you see your garden in a new light. It’s always when I return home from a trip I find solutions to design challenges that have been bothering me for months or I notice the tiny details I’ve been overlooking.
My first task will be to find new flowers to carry the borders into August and beyond. It will take more than the echinaceas. But what should I choose? White Japanese anemones to mingle with pink ones already growing here? The yellow plumes of golden rod? Scented phlox or the bold spires or red hot pokers?
Whatever I decide, I’ll be
raising them from cuttings or seed. Because this is the bit of gardening I love best – growing things from scratch, nurturing them until they are big and sturdy and then watching them flourish.This isn’t instant gardening and, in fact, with some things, such as peonies, it can mean a three-year wait before you see flowers. But what I’ve discovered is plants raised on the plot are better suited to the conditions in my garden than anything that I can buy in.
If you plan to do the same, but worry about living with areas of bare earth while you wait on small seedlings to fill the gaps, you can always sow annuals and enjoy their bright cheerfulness for a couple of summers until the permanent planting takes over. I’ve done this and loved it.The bees will also love it and you will have so many flowers you’ll be picking them for months.
Lots of annuals can be sown in the autumn then overwintered under glass, either in a cold frame or a greenhouse, for early flowering the following summer.