Here are a couple of pictures about the garden that I took with no particular theme, relation or intent other than the fact that they may be useful for a blog post.

The Camellias in the back garden, have finished flowering now, they’ve given a great show but now the ground around them is littered with spent flowers; however, the ones in the front, which remain shaded by the house until the sun comes round in the afternoon, are in full flower. These are large established shrubs, many years old and one of the shrubs has given a wonderful show of splashed flowers, while the other has taken a year off after it was traumatised by ants, black fly and dry weather last year. I’m planning on giving these Camellias some attention this year by rejuvenating the part of the front border they’re planted in. With the additional rocket fuel, I’m hoping that next year’s display will be award-winning.

In a previous post on the front border, I wrote about how we took down a terrible-looking, long-suffering white ornamental cherry as we were completely re-working this border, replacing everything in it with drought-tolerant plants. So we removed the tree and hacked it to pieces. We saved the trunk for something, at the moment it’s resting against the house under an overhang. This is not how one should take hardwood cuttings.

The patio staging is currently being used to hold the pots that we’ve taken out of the greenhouses. These are from the nomadic patio pot collection but I’ve not put placed them out on the patio yet as most of the pots need dividing into at least two and probably three. It’s mainly hostas and irises and when I divide them, one piece will go back into the pot and the rest will end up in the garden, somewhere. I’ll need to do it soon though, before the plants become too advanced, so that they have time to re-establish their roots before the heat of summer arrives, eventually.

Last year, after yet another abysmal year for the Clematis that were growing in six trugs at the front of the house (they had become infested with vine weevil, among other things), I took them all out and planted each one against a fruit tree in the back garden. With the trugs now empty, we wondered what to plant in them this year. We eventually settled on sweet peas, mainly because we were given a couple of free seed packets. We sowed them last year, they over-wintered in the greenhouse and now they’ve been planted into the trugs. We ran out of pea netting and only have four of the six trugs planted up so far but we’re hoping for a stunning summer sweet pea show, I’m hoping they do much better than the Clematis, it shouldn’t be hard.

In the previous garden we had a set of arches, either side of which we planted roses. The year they were due to produce a fabulous flower show, we chopped them back hard, dug them up and moved house. They remained potted while we created the borders in the back (although one pair were planted in the front and one ended up on Magnolia Hill). When Magnolia Hill, the Crescent and Fruit Avenue were complete, the two arches went in and one hosted a Rosa Graham Thomas (front left) and the other a Rosa Gertrude Jekyll (front right). After recently clearing the front border, the second arch has now been planted with a Rosa Gertrude Jekyll (back left) and Rosa Teasing Georgia (back right):

Graham Thomas has a clematis planted by it, I think it was “Jackmanii Superba” and it got off to a great start, until it was munched on by deer. Teasing Georgia has Clematis “The President” planted with it and that was doing great where it was originally planted in the front, until I moved the rose and took the Clematis with it, cutting it back down to the ground. It’s still smaller than when we originally bought it as a small plant from £3 from the supermarket over a year ago. Oh well, my record with Clematis continues; we’ll just have to see how they grow (or die) over the course of this season. I’ll try and remember to report back in the autumn.