Solstice scents

Mid-June is perhaps the garden’s most colourful time. With summer having reached its zenith, that amazing surge of herbaceous growth is replaced by the urge to flower.

The hybrid teas

Over the last couple of weeks, one by one the hybrid tea roses have come into bloom and the north-west corner of the Walled Garden now resembles a florist’s in scent and colour. Hybrid tea roses are big, blowsy, brash, very bright, beautifully scented and we love them! Yes, they are a lot of effort but we don’t spray them at all for anything (chemical sprays will not bring you or your roses any happiness) and if you keep shovelling on fertiliser (and by the way, we no longer use chemical-based ‘rose food’ but plain old pelleted chicken manure, which curiously works just as well, if not better),  continually dead-head them, dressing them with fresh compost each winter, they will reward you from June until Christmas with a continuous succession of colour that arguably no other plant in the garden can match. I know they are very 70’s and that something that resembles an explosion in an highlighter pen factory is not everyone’s cup of tea. And yes, they don’t really like sharing which means looking at a bunch of sticks in a bare flowerbed for around six months of the year (although fresh spring rose foliage is a thing of beauty, I would argue) but you can just roll out that line that you’re recreating a bit of Arts & Crafts garden history if anyone comments. If you do have space and want to grow something so much a part of the British (or for that matter, French) summer garden as strawberries and cream or croquet, then hybrid teas might just be the thing.

That said, modern English shrub roses are perhaps a bit more, well, fashionable than hybrid teas - they’re very Chelsea, and we do have those  too in our borders where they mix quite happily with herbaceous. They too have a wonderful scent and after a main flush in June, do come and go during the summer depending on variety.  So far it’s been a really good rose year here, as the climbers, now concluding their first flush, have proved. We’ll keep dead-heading all our roses, to maximise ongoing flowering.

I’m not sure anything can beat the scent of a rose on a hot summer’s evening, but the honeysuckles are vying for attention! We have a couple of large plants in different areas of the garden which release their heady scent early morning and mid evening. Honeysuckle, like yellow azaleas, wisteria and mock orange, through their scent alone, annually transport me back to the garden I grew up in, a garden which is sadly no more. The memories, or some of them, live on however, triggered by these scents.

The first of the Agapanthus

Despite some rain in the forecast at present, we have witnessed a much warmer and sunnier spring and summer than last year’s disappointment, and nature is responding. The air is filled with the aeronautical acrobatics of swallows and house martins, busily preparing their nests. The cotoneaster and now the lime trees are gently buzzing with bees, bumble- and honey,  while hover flies, er, hover over the first of the Shasta daisies. Most of the agapanthus pots have been extending their long flower spikes, their large buds offering tantalising hints of what is to come, white and blue fireworks in slo-mo. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen so many water lily blooms, and so early, in the pond, including the double-white, which hasn’t flowered for years and the temperamental yellow, a dainty thing with narrower petals and a more exotic look.

The lily pond

The gardener has a full schedule at this time of year. Regular mowing, lawn edging and pot-watering of course. Tomatoes to be side-shooted and tied in, lettuce seed to be planted and potted on, gravel to be hoed and raked. Much of the work is in the herbaceous borders, though, cutting back the spent lupin heads, propping things up, hoeing weed-infested soil where it can be seen. The gardener’s role is one of editor or perhaps conductor. Nature puts on the performance; our role as conductor is to make sure that everyone can be heard at the right time, keeping those always-enthusiastic but inherently noisy trombones under control.

Phlomis steals the show in the east-facing border

And the compost heap’s been growing as a result, building up a nice heat. Hot enough indeed to reduce some Green matter to ashes. To the more mature compost bays, we’ve been adding in last autumn’s part-composted fallen leaves, which will break down faster than just leaving them as leaf mold, inviting  up the worms from the soil below.

And the kitchen once more smells of  very strong Ribena - the blackcurrant jam season has begun…