I was sure I pressed the publish button on this post yesterday, never mind, one day later…

We were forecast thunder and lightening this weekend, but it’s been pleasantly warm and dry, a little cooler than the last week or so, perfect gardening weather. I spent several hours in the garden today, dead heading and weeding.

Most of the roses are past their best now, but Champagne Moments and the beautiful Lady Emma Hamilton are still looking great. I bought Lady Emma about 4 years ago now from David Austin, it’s a gorgeous colour and a wonderful heady scent, especially in the evening. As the bush is on a raised bit of the garden it’s about nose height when you walk up the steps, perfect position!

The bees are loving the veronica flowers, I have several round the garden as they are a lovely shade of blue and flower later in the summer when many plants are past their best. I’ve got a couple of pink ones too.

This sea holly ( eryngium ) is looking pretty good too. The leaves are quite lime green colour, which adds interest to the bed earlier in the year, but the silvery blue flowers are stunning. I wasn’t sure if they were officially flowers but I just googled it and according to wikipedia each head has lots of tiny flowers packed into the tight ball.

The amber and amethyst garden is still looking pretty colourful, though the rose on the obelisk badly needs dead-heading, that’s a job for tomorrow! You can just make out (out of focus, sorry, I think it focused on a rosebud!) the spikes of veronica, the bright yellow next to them is a crocosmia, it’s one I bought at the Harrogate show a couple of years ago, it’s not as tall as some (I’ve got the giant crocosmia lucifer next to the pond) but it’s flowers are also a bit bigger.

It’s not rained for quite a while now so I keep having to water recent plantings and occasionally these pots. They’re not in full sun for much of the day so they’re usually undemanding when it comes to watering. Right at the back on the right are two large pots, one with a fatsia japonica, and one with a large hosta. They were the only plants I could think of for a corner which has a tall fence behind, an arbour to the right and a raised bed with an overhanging sambuscus to the left and overhead…pretty shaded!

They all make quite a colourful, lush corner. You may notice that yet again my hydrangeas aren’t showing any signs of flowering!! They look happy enough, just no flowers. I’ve had one about five years now, it was beautiful when I bought it…nothing since!

We’ve hopefully got some light rain this week, the garden could certainly do with some, though they promised us heavy rain and thunderstorms on Saturday but nothing materialised. I heard recently that the reason our weather forecasts are more inaccurate than usual at the moment is that they usually get loads of data from airplanes but obviously there’s not as many flying, so less information to work on…makes sense!