…and breathe!

We’ve had a great weekend with family visiting but it is nice to have a quiet house again!

The garden seems to have gone mad whilst we’ve been away, everything seems to have grown several inches and lots of flowers have been and gone. I spent an afternoon last week dead-heading and generally tidying up a little so the garden looked presentable to the guests, we did manage to sit out with a glass of wine on Saturday. We’ve had several thunderstorms over the last few days accompanied by the usual heavy rain, whilst the rain has been welcomed, the blooms have taken quite a bashing, I need another dead-heading session already.

This is a rose called Champagne Moments, we bought it when we got married in 2007, it’s probably about 4.5′ tall and it flowers profusely all summer, it’s not got the strongest scent but I love it. Even with quite a few rain bashed blooms it is still putting on a good show.

The rose rambling over the arbour is flowering well too, I managed to deadhead the right-hand side last week but I can’t easily reach the rest. The deep purple spikes in the border is a veronica, it looks particularly good against the lime green of the pieris next to it.

I’ve several hydrangeas around the garden, one of them has been banished to the back of the garden as it is steadfastedly refusing to flower but a cream one I bought a couple of years ago has a few flower heads on. This one is planted down by the bird feeders by the patio. They’re gorgeous…

I particularly like the view just as come out of the conservatory, peeping under the branches of the standard rose bush (Claire Austin) across the patio towards the arbour. The perovskia (otherwise known as Russian sage) is in flower at the moment, that’s the one on the right with purple-blue flowers on silver leafed stems. The light mauve flower at the front is a hosta, pale green/white spiky flowers are astrantia, these are growing like weeds in my garden now, I keep having to thin them out a bit! The taller purple spikes are veronica again, the purple leaves are sage.

As we don’t have any dogs at the moment the path up to the railway line isn’t as well used and you can tell! The astrantia (I said it grows like weeds!!) and alchemilla mollis are leaning over from the left and the hosta leaves spread out from the right!

The view from upstairs is looking pretty full… The white rose in the middle is the champagne moments one, The raised bed below it is filling up now, it always seems to look untidy and empty in the middle for the first half of the year, like there’s not much going on, I think maybe I just need to think of it as a late summer border and plonk one of my chicken wire sculptures there in the spring.

I’ll hopefully manage to get a bit of time in the garden this week, generally tidying up and weeding, as of course the weeds are growing even faster than the plants!