Wild abandon

A couple of weeks away, and in our absence the garden has run riot.  A mix of warmth and wet in the weather has resulted in everything going mad.  I had started to cut back the rampant rose ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ (which I’ve been threatening to eradicate for as long as I’ve been writing this blog) and thought I had made a pretty good start, but now it’s bigger than ever.  Need to start again ….  And there’s a thicket of goosegrass at the back of the fruit patch.

Rose 'Gertrude Jekyll', Cephalaria gigantea and Stipa tenuissima

Not that all the wild abandon is necessarily a bad thing.  The rose ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ has had more flowers than I can remember (a lot of dead-heading to do), and the big Cephalaria gigantea, planted last year, has flowered spectacularly; it’s a pale yellow that looks fine alongside the pinks and purples (self-seeded linaria) in that bed.  There are also cosmos planted out hurriedly before I went away, but not yet in flower.  The dahlias, all potted up, are starting to produce buds.

The '(not-so-)new' patio bed

Corn camomile, foxgloves and Sweet William behind

Foxgloves and snapdragons (antirrhinums)

Down in the veg patch the Sweet William is going great guns, as is the corn camomile that self-seeded from last year’s wildflower show, and the space given over to self-sown foxgloves and snapdragons is looking colourful.  The orchids under the plum tree are also out.  There don’t seem to have been any plant casualties while we were away; a neighbour has been watering the tomatoes, which look a little heat-stressed and have thrown out a lot of side-shoots, but are already showing some little green fruits.

Pyramidal orchids in the grass

Also in flower is the pak choi that I planted out before our holiday; I keep forgetting not to sow it until later in the summer so that it doesn’t run to seed.

On the subject of casualties, sadly Prickles the hedgehog (see last post) didn’t make it.  The hedgehog rescue people gave him excellent care, but the vet thought that he had been hit by a strimmer that injured his brain, and the damage to his nose affected his ability to breathe.  They were able to give him pain relief that would have eased his end.  We’re hoping that the second hedgehog that was around last year might still be with us – fingers crossed.

The weather has now turned very hot – records are about to be broken!