It feels like we’ve missed a summer this year. The weather has been unimpressive, the stats might say it’s been an ordinary year and we’ve just been schooled to expect the extraordinary so we have unrealistic expectations of temperature and rainfall. But this has been a dull year, the garden has behaved perfectly respectably, but the very long wet winter/spring following on from last year’s poor summer has set everything back and it feels like the garden and I have never really have recovered our stride. I am starting to resent the gardens on Gardeners’ World – compared to them mine is a sorry affair, lacking lusciousness and colour, really only bountiful in snails and slugs.
This time last year I was getting things ready to remove the dead tree and get the pond established, so there were lots of changes and planning, 2024 feels staid in comparison, and we’ve lost a lot of what made the garden colourful last year – the achillea and cosmos, destroyed by slugs, the heleniums which didn’t appreciate the wet and cold weather.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Grubbed up the corydalis in the patio – it was looking very mangy and will hopefully grow back. As a result there are now dozens of homeless snails – where will they end up? The nicotiana have flowered well but are over now and have been pulled up.
Successes
Lots of flowers on the pink anemones. The darker pink ones are showing buds but are swamped by the all-conquering euphorbia. The loosestrife flowers are over but the plants are holding their structure at the edge of the patio. The echinops is the best thing in the garden this year, although there are noticeably fewer bees buzzing around them. The valerian in the farthest bed is flowering, the lovely rusty red you see in Devon. The ones in the closer bed look smaller and no flowers yet. New growth still coming on the rose, good growth on fatsia and epimedium. The alchemilla flowers are starting to brown, but the plants still look great, especially when it rains.
The first few flowers are appearing on the Poundland honeysuckle (though nothing on the honey bush) and there’s a flower on the Poundland gladiolus which I’d long given up on. Tomatoes starting to show on the plants which survived the slugs.
Hmms
The fuchsia is having another bad year – so is the astilbe. Plants in the west-facing bed between the echinops and bay are struggling – to be replaced/moved?
Weather
The stats tell me that there were 10 sunny days out of the 31 in August, the rest were cloudy or rainy, with temperatures rarely hitting anything to write home about.
Sole Trader PR 