Create the ultimate garden prettiness with easy plants and fuss-free plant pairings. Also: Elton John's garden and gondolier's underpants
Coming home to the garden in June, my garden notebook, the final call for the Real Life Meet-Up, and another garden book giveaway
What’s coming up in this week’s Gardening Mind:
Happy accidents, excellent plant partnerships, and sunshine at last
June. The month of lovely, almost a hashtag in itself.
Today we’re going to be looking at some of the loveliest and most importantly easiest plant pairings you can make to create the prettiest of effects in your garden with just the tiniest bit of effort.
I’ll be taking you on a virtual tour around a corner of my garden to show just how easy this is.
And to top it all off, there’s another book giveaway from my library.
If you’re new to The Gardening Mind, a huge welcome to you and I’m hoping you’ll decide to stay, becoming part of the very best online gardening community there is. It’s the best because you all take part so enthusiastically, and I’m really looking forward to meeting some of you at this week’s Gardening Mind Real-Life Meet-Up, which is a thank you for being a paid subscriber. If you haven’t answered the poll yet, please could you head to the end of the ‘How to Make Your Garden Look Great in June’ article here, and just tick if you’re coming, and also if you’d like lunch? There’s still time if you’d like to join in. More details at the end of this post.
For those of you who can’t come to this meet-up, I’m going to be organising an online Zoom chat and catch-up next month so do watch out for the date.
If you’re new to gardening, or you’re just pondering about dipping a toe into it, then an extra big hello and welcome to you. You might like to explore the How to Garden Series, which starts here.
If you’re here because you’re interested in creating your own garden design, and you’d like to catch up on the Small Garden Design Course, you can find a full-round-up of all the assignments and articles, in chronological order, here. So whether you’re just about to join in for the first time, or if you want to catch up, you can find each relevant piece here to work through at your own pace.
And here’s the weekly reminder about this week’s Show Us Your Plots on the Chat- and I can’t wait to see what’s going on in your garden - I’ve got a lot of photos to show you. Start planning your photos - look out for the post which starts:
“It’s Sunday 23rd June and it’s time to SHOW US YOUR PLOTS! This is our weekly get-together on this Chat thread (topic) where we show each other unfiltered, unedited photos of our real gardens or gardening space, wherever we are in the world. Tell us where you are in the world and what’s going on in your garden.”
If you haven’t used the Chat before, think of it as our very own WhatsApp group. Have a play-about with making comments and uploading photos - it’s fun, and everyone’s very welcoming. Each week it gets bigger and better, so come and join in - it’s even easier now to follow the many gardens and comments from all over the world and there’s a note on how to do this at the end of this post.
So as you see, there’s LOTS to get involved with.
Without really thinking about the timing, somewhere during the relentless Wet British Spring,
I’d committed to a couple of weeks in Italy, to carry out research for books and a tour, and, I admit, to escape the rain. At the time of booking, I hadn’t even given the garden a thought, aside from being pretty confident that the planted pots wouldn’t suffer from a lack of watering.
I hadn’t considered the fact that it was going to be June. June, the month when the roses arrive. The month when the perennials start to show their shapes, all those mounds, spires and plates of colour which blur together to create the picture which we’ve held in our minds for an entire year. The picture which gets us through the cold and the drear of winter. We’d had so much rain since January that when the opportunity to escape had arisen, all I could think of was the guaranteed sunshine and spritzes in Venice, the city of dreams
And so it was, a few weeks later, that I found myself in one of the most beautiful places on earth yet pining for my garden left behind right at the very moment of its annual revival.
I might have seen some beautiful things. I might have seen some brilliant washing-line arrangements. I might even have had a peek into Sir Elton John’s garden tucked away in an unassuming little place just where you absolutely wouldn’t expect Sir Elton John’s garden to be. I might even have seen the cocktail cabinet of dreams:
But I was desperately missing my roses just when they’d made a supreme effort to come and say hello once more. I was longing for them. Honestly at times the longing felt visceral. I have to confess right now that I did secretly wish the time away until I could come and see them again.
I definitely did feel guiltily ungrateful, lucky enough as I was to be sitting by the milky jade waters, dreaming not of this city’s wonders but instead of my little cottage garden back at home. I know we shouldn’t wish the time away, I know we should live in the moment and savour all that we are fortunate enough to have. But the pull of those roses thousands of miles away, the knowledge that they were reaching their peak in my absence. That was just too much: I felt like a neglectful parent swanning off on holiday instead of going to their child’s school prize-giving ceremony. I had FOMO and POMO1
Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever been on holiday, yet longed to see your own green space?
A week later here I am, back at home writing this on the morning of the summer solstice2
Feet soaking from the daily dawn wanderings around looking for the latest garden treasures, grass cuttings traipsed into the kitchen floor as I’d been too impatient, as every morning, to take an extra few seconds to put on shoes before going out to see what the sunrise was bringing with it.
I’ve done this every morning since I got back, and each time, new surprises come along. The mistake-rose Rosa ‘De La Grifferaie’, once the rootstock of a neglected-by-me standard Rosa ‘Macmillan Nurse’, which reverted to its rootstock precisely because I’d neglected it, is one of the things I love most about my garden. All the more so, I think, because this is a rose that was never intended to be there. This was due to be a white corner, but DLG has made a compelling case for her right to remain.
Underplanted with the magenta-shocking pink Geranium ‘Patricia’, this mistake is here to stay. I think I even need to repeat it, further along the border so that you’d see it just to the right in this photo. I’ll use a different rose, Rosa ‘Penelope Lively’ - her colours are, I can tell you, sumptuous, not quite the same deep pink as DLG but I’m positive they will tone beautifully. The pink is actually, in my garden at any rate, deeper and richer than in the photos online - I certainly can recommend it.
The July gap-fillers that I wrote about here are starting to fill out:
the most energetic has been Dahlia merckii, which is proving to be so far one of the easiest plants I’ve planted this year:
So restrained, so elegant – single flowers of palest mother-of-pearl pink with muted yellow centres. The small flowers sit high on top of the tall stems, a very lovely punctuation in the border. There’s lots of flower already, and I’m confident that these will go on appearing for the next few months. If you don’t know Dahlia merckii, don’t be put off by the word ‘dahlia’ - unlike most dahlias, it is fairly hardy in the UK. Farmyard Nurseries have a few in stock.
The roses and the clematis have been stupendous this year
There’s way, way more to come on roses in later articles; today I want to focus on using roses as a support for clematis, a plant so light that its weight isn’t going to damage the rose.
I’ve taken a bit of a potter round this collection to show you just how easy it is, with three plants, to create an outside floral wallpaper. (It was a bit of a breezy moment, just in case you’ve got your sound on):