Summer colour

The hum and buzz: it’s all go in the vegetable garden.  And apart from editing out the most annoying poppies, I have a crop of them.  They bring in the most fantastic insects and lift the whole productive garden.

By the end of this month, however, I get tired of tripping over the plants, tired of having to shove the foliage out of the way to find the tomatoes and strawberries underneath. And really, it’s time for the insects to work a bit harder at the courgette pollen and the second flush of broad beans.

So each trip to the compost bin involves an armful of poppy stalk.

To distract us all from the news, I thought we needed another picture gallery of flowers.  I still can’t adjust my settings to introduce the pictures in a medium size unless I do a photo gallery. So here you have them.

Lovely salvia caradonna in the herb garden in front of the flowering sage.

Mad nepeta making a nuisance of itself on the barn garden path. Hesperis hanging on in the potager.

And the roses are now coming to their exhausted end, but are still giving me lots of scent and petals for my rose petal syrup.

But as I was sitting (head in hands, what have the voters of Great Britain done?) in the courtyard looking at the roses in the planters, I think I will make a change this winter.

The roses on the wall of the guest house are just not thriving.  Before the flood and the enforced change of the courtyard, these roses had escaped their planters and the roots had travelled well into the gravel and deep into the ground.

But I had to sever them to move the planters during the change.  And they are grumpy.  And I feel mean.

So I think they are going to have to come out and I will plant them in the open ground on the north side of the barn and see if they revive.

And then comes the fun of deciding what to put in their place.

Call me mad but I am leaning towards pelargoniums. I know, not trying hard enough there.

But in this heat and the summers, I think it makes sense to accept that fussy English roses just won’t ever be happy here, and I’ll just have to do what everyone else does and shove the geraniums into the planters every single spring.

I’ll need to build up my collection of dark flowered pelargoniums. I foresee a lot of cuttings in my future.