What is in my garden in June?

I have had a day in the garden today, a day full of sunshine and nettle stings and planting out.  Somehow the brassicas in the greenhouse went in so late in a cold spring that I had almost forgotten about them and achieved that state where you look at something without seeing it.  I had been watering them but I had been closing my mind to their increasing legginess.  Today I suddenly saw them again and realised that if I didn't get them out there pretty quickly I may as well say goodbye to brassicas for the season.  Now that wouldn't be a bad thing if these were cabbages which I am not too keen on, or sprouts which I actively dislike, perhaps the only vegetable I can think of which makes me turn up my nose.  But these were purple sprouting broccoli and chard and kale, all of which I love, so it was time to relocate the protective mesh, anti cabbage whites and anti peacock, and get them into the ground.

But there is just so much to see in June to make me go back inside for my camera.

Everything is growing in green tidal wave.

Even the lettuces look beautiful and once again there are far too many to eat.  Older daughter gave me Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook for Christmas and everywhere I look there are things needing to be picked and cooked and eaten.  It is a great book for those who grow their own or those who eat seasonally, clear and intelligent with the sort of simple but wonderful tasting recipes which slip instantly into your repertoire.  I think it is her best book by far, and I like many of the others.

The alliums are just going over, revealing the beauty of the complex flower structure,  as lovely in its own way as the vivid colour of the young flower heads.

The oriental poppies are out in all their glory.  They are already beginning to spread and flop and sag all over the place.  They do this to me every year but they have to be forgiven for the sooty perfection of their blotched centres.  And they love our garden, which not everything does.  But next year I will reduce the number a bit, despite their beauty, if only to do something about the scale of the problem when they have finished flowering, are cut back and leave a gaping jagged scar desperate for disguise.

The chicks are out too, starting to grow feathers instead of fluff and moving from impossible cuteness to spiky teenagerhood.  Soon the mother hen will get fed up of them and will need to be moved back to the big hen house.  She has already stopped fussing and clucking over them.  The next stage is active irritation, or that is what it looks like!

The opium poppies are starting to flower, taking the baton of poppyhood from the perennial orientals.  They pop up everywhere here, they are practically a weed, but I never think of them as such.  I let them flower among the beans and the strawberries, pulling them up when they get over excited, but they also flower on the sunny bank and in the gravel path.  Last year there was a perfect ruffled pink and some brilliant reds amongst the usual purples and lilacs.  I hope they come again this year.  I did shake the pepper pot seedheads around but I could very easily have pulled them up somewhere.  If I could get  my garden recording right I would be so much better a gardener.  I keep diaries and make notes and carefully label things for weeks and then have an attack of what-the-hell and leave it for a week and lose track all over again.

Sometimes the simplest things are the best.  This is valerian.  I had wanted some for ages and my son and daughter in law dug a bit up from their garden in Derbyshire.  It hung on last year, looking a bit unhappy, but this year has thrived and spread on the sunny bank next to the penstemons and poppies.  I expect it will become another rapid coloniser and self seeder like so much we grow up here, but I like that.  It makes for abundance and surprise and you can always pull it up if it tries to take over the world, as my alchemilla mollis is doing in front of the house.
I didn't get into the side garden with my camera.  I think this must be a garden for spring and early summer.   There is so much to see.  I wonder if there will still be a gap in August?