Summer in the Garden
Guest post by AJLR
I love gardening. I came to it relatively late, in the second half of my twenties, but since then I’ve been slowly learning how to grow different things, which plants prosper in particular conditions, how to keep things (mostly) alive and well and growing greenly. I’m fortunate in that I live in a part of the world – Southern England, right on the coast (about 300 yards from the sea) – that is friendly to a wide range of plants.
The garden that goes round our house is not enormous, but it’s enough for me (for both of us) while I’m still working full-time. The back garden is something like a deep crescent in shape, with a gate through to the front garden on the tips of the crescent, at each side of the bungalow. There are 14 apple trees, spaced out around the edge of the garden. We have lots of different areas within the garden where we can each concentrate on what interests us – I’m more interested in plants and growing things while my husband is more interested in wildlife and their habitats. It seems to work – we rarely have turf wars. We garden organically, no chemical sprays (apart from the occasional bit of carefully controlled glyphosate in the perpetual War Against the Bindweed), and I’m in thrall to my two compost bins/heaps.
Anytime in the summer months, if it’s still light when I get home from an office day of work (other days I’m travelling and the hours are weird), I tend to head straight through the house and out into the garden, to go round and look at, touch, smell (and talk to) all the plants I’m most involved with. In the summer this always includes whatever vegetables and fruit we’re growing, some of which you can see in the raised beds and greenhouse below, which are situated close to the left-hand tip of the crescent, near the door into the kitchen.
I’ve got pot herbs growing in small beds near the kitchen door – rosemary, parsley, sage, mint, and lemon thyme. Also some self-sown fennel, with the seeds of which I like to make a tea. The smell coming from the rosemary and the thyme on a hot summer day is wonderful. As is the smell of rain there too, on hot summer earth, when big, warm, fat raindrops first start their slow falling and splatting in a shower.
The beautiful yellow flowers of the winter squash (‘Crown Prince’) that you can see growing in the photo above have a lovely sweet smell – something I hadn’t known about before trying that variety this year. The squash (and courgettes behind them) and the tomatoes in the foreground all needed to fill out at the time I took this picture in late June. That’s because I’d had to plant the courgettes and squash in the long centre gap between two rows of potatoes, while the young tomato plants had had to take their chances in between the broad beans that preceded them in the bed. I miscalculated the time those earlier crops would be harvested and out of the ground this year…every year I learn a little more. The summer plants are all doing fine now, thank goodness. With tomatoes fresh-picked and still warm from the sun, I slice them, scatter over them small fresh basil leaves from the plants growing in the greenhouse, and serve with some oil and balsamic vinegar. That’s one of the tastes of summer, for me.
Continuing on beyond the raised beds is one of my husband’s wildlife areas (about 10’ x 20’), where we let the grasses grow as they will in summer and cut only in September, when the seeds are ripe and scatter. We’ve put in lots of native wildflowers – a purple knapweed, Meadowsweet, Ragged Robin, vetches, Snakeshead Fritillaries for the spring (when I can keep the lily beetles off them…), Fleabane, cornflowers, etc. It’s a sea of butterflies, bees, and other insects from about May onwards. In this photo, it also seems to have a totem cat keeping an eye on things for us – that’s Smudge, a neighbouring cat who is currently trying to inveigle himself into our lives (our own Tabbs keeps him in order).
You can see a Painted Lady butterfly here, below, on one of the purple Knapweed flowers. This butterfly is a visiting summer migrant in England, although this summer they came in such numbers during May that we now have a summer brood that has hatched here.
There are also Peacock butterflies galore this year. This one on some buddleia seems to be enjoying itself, wandering about among the flowerlets and stocking up on nectar as it goes.
Looking across to another part of the garden, a self-sown teasel has infiltrated the far border. You can see it in the centre of the picture below, looking rather like a triffid.
Teasels are amazing plants – seven feet tall, as prickly as they come, and with a history of use in the wool industry in this country from medieval times. I can’t say I really wanted one there this year but it deserves its one summer in the sun. The teasel flowers (photo below) are a magnet for butterflies and bees and the little birds such as goldfinches love the seeds in the autumn.
In the photo below you may just be able to see a glint of water. That’s our small (8’ x 6’) pond, almost completely overwhelmed by this summer’s plants. Most of those are self-sown and will have to come out this autumn, when we clear out the pond and make it a bit deeper. We keep this pond for wildlife only and there’s a lot in there, of all shapes and sizes and varying voraciousness. Those of you who are short-sighted will know that we myopics can see things close-up in much more detail than can those with normal sight. I lie on my stomach on the grass in the summer, with the sun on my back, looking into the water of this pond from a distance of about six inches and being amazed at what goes on in there.
Our bigger pond, just beyond this one and behind yet more wee…er, wildflowers, is a small and elderly retired swimming pool (c. 12’ x 18’) that is full of assorted goldfish and waterlilies, put there many years ago by the previous owners of the property. It’s a bit of a problem and we really need to take the whole structure out, make the hole a proper shape for a pond – ie, not four feet deep all over and with sheer sides – and then landscape it properly. But that will take more from the budget than we have spare right now, so things will just have to go on as they are for a bit longer. The fish are happy, anyway, as are our tabby and the occasional feline visitor; the cats hunker down on the broad rim of the pool, about 18 inches above water level, and go off into dreams of piscine-related bliss. This pond is also home to a number of dragonfly nymphs and in the warm August days the mature ones (it takes three years, on average, for a nymph to complete that stage) climb slowly up out of the water, split down the back to let the adult imago haul itself out of the old case, and then crouch nearby, drying their wings in the sun before setting off on their first adult hunt. You can see one, a recently emerged Common Darter, in the photo below.
At the far end of the big pond the garden narrows to the other tip of the crescent. We have a small paved area (8’ x 10’) there where our olive, citrus, and fig trees spend the summers in their pots, near the west-facing wall of the house. It’s a quiet area, populated mainly by bees on the honeysuckle hedge, and the heat in the summer lets the fig and olive trees fruit well.
Summer in the garden is a lovely time, when I can see what works, what I need to do differently next year, what does or doesn’t like where I’ve put it. There can be days when it’s too hot to work at weeding, days (rarer, these years) when it’s too wet to work at weeding, days when I’ve just had enough weeding, but being out there, watching things grow and harvesting as crops come ripe, is always a delight.
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