My Garden This Weekend – 26th May 2014

For a change the weather gods have been kind to me and the forecast rain has  held back and allowed me to garden to my heart’s delight.  In fact I stopped when my back was aching after some five hours of happy pottering and contemplating.  The garden is going through one of its lulls of transition from the spring bulbs to the summer perennials.  All the color seems to be coming from Aquilegia and the odd Geraniums at the moment.

You have no idea how happy this view makes me despite the weeds in the patio.  The whole patio has been covered in pots of one sort or another for weeks.  There was no way you could use the table which was also covered in trays of annuals and the seats didn’t even have anywhere to go.  I have spent the morning potting up the dahlias and the last pelargoniums and set them around the garden. This is the first year in ages when I haven’t planted up hanging baskets or mixed pots but they have been such a faff in recent years that I have decided not to bother.  However, I needed a home for the dahlias which were in the Big Border last year and had come through the winter stored in wood shavings in the garage so I decided to plant them up one per pot.  Hopefully they should look quite stunning once in flower.

The new seating area also has a small selection of pots but as you can see I need to get more gravel to do the rest of the steps but thats a job for a few weeks time when my son is here to move the bags for me.I even bought a new pot for the Acer I won in a raffle recently.  I have positioned it on the bottom of the top steps adjacent to a large weed which I have obviously overlooked and need to sort!  What you can’t see is that my original Acer which has been in the ground for some six or more years and is in the border to the left has died for reasons unknown.  I am a little upset as the boys bought it for me with their late Aunt but plants come and go and I am seeing it as an opportunity to try something new in this area.

I spent the afternoon weeding, dead heading and staking in the Big Border.  I am really pleased with this border considering that it was only created last year and wasn’t planted up as it is now until this Spring.  I dithered for a while last year trying to decide on how to plant the space but needing to relocate the asters and calmagrostis from the back slope helped clarify my thinking.  The main focus of the border is late summer but I have added peonies and yet more aquilegias to give it some interest earlier in the year.  Today I added some border auricula which I have grown from seed and which are very run of the mill to the edge of the border as well as some annual scabious and corncockle to fill gaps.

I think there is lots of texture and interest in the border even without lots of flowers but then I have  a bit of a thing about foliage.  I thought through the planting carefully and I am hoping that as the year progresses it will match the idea in my head – only time will tell.