End of month view

I seem to have been away for most of July, what with Oxford and daughter visiting, Dartmoor and parent visiting and Austria and puffing up mountains.  The garden has a dip in early July when lots of things get cut back and it all looks a bit bare and sad.  I know this is my own fault for letting oriental poppies take over and for loving the rush of spring and early summer so much that later summer gets neglected and I am trying hard to balance out my year a bit better.  I chopped back the hardy geraniums and the alchemilla and they are filling out again and there is a lot of cosmos grown from seed quietly filling in the gaps, but not yet really flowering.

Here is the side garden with the hens on the march in the bottom of the picture.  I often wonder, when I find a patch of scratched up seedlings or a flattened plant, how much better my garden would be if I didn't let the hens roam in it but I do think they add their own special something to the place.  They are lovely colours themselves and they make nice contented little noises and, really, this is not a place to be precious about damage, being so nearly just a bit of field and a veg patch.  The crocosmia lucifer is fountaining away in the back corner next to the fronds of fennel.  I think I shall have to have another clump on the other side of the fennel as it has great shape and foliage even when it is not in flower and the contrast with the feathery fennel, strappy lucifer and spikes of persicaria is one I really like.  It's only downside is that it takes up a lot of space.

Here is the cutting garden.  The phlox is flowering away and the echinacea is just coming.  The row of pinks smells warm and spicy in the sun as you pass.  I always grow lots of sweetpeas and this year is the best I have ever managed.  They smell wonderful too but are best when you have just cut them and put them in a jug.  I had a bit of a saga with sweetpeas this year.  I sowed some in November which were Sarah Raven varieties, a present from the lovely Zoe.  Every one was eaten by mice so I had to try again.  I used the heated propagator and got new ones going toward the end of February and then a warm spring and early summer meant that they were all flowering quite early.  These are Singing the Blues, Hi Scent and (typically) another variety where the writing washed off the label.  They have all had long stems and strongly scented flowers.  While we were away walking some began to set seed as the flowers weren't being picked often enough, so I have been going around every couple of days picking huge bunches for the house and the cottage and snipping off those which have begun to form seedheads.

Here is the cottage garden, lavender still going strong, lucifer flowering here too (I know it sounds odd with lavender but I promise you it looks ok with a buffer of silvery sedum) and the heads of the alliums making their bleached presence. 

Here is the sunny bank, in its own lull.  The irises and the opium poppies are over and the penstemons and sedums which will fill the middle of this space with a rich wine colour are only just beginning to come.

 And here is the kitchen garden, crying out for me to spend some time in it.  The onions have been lifted and are drying in the wooden greenhouse and the beds need properly clearing out and some more things sowing.  Somehow I managed not to sow beetroot earlier this year and I think I might just get away with getting some in now.  I will also sow more rocket and a variety of salad leaves.  In spring I sowed far too much of the same varieties of lettuce and some has bolted now and been pulled up today.  We just couldn't keep up with it, despite my practically making everyone have some shredded lettuce at every meal including breakfast.  I shall put small amounts of different salad stuff in this time.  In another month's time when the apples are ripening this garden looks wonderful but at the moment it is a bit heavy.

I think I might have to take my camera out again tomorrow and get some close ups of the combinations which are pleasing me to add to these more distant views.