Things keeping us busy

Down here we've had a fair bit of rain over the past week and I have to say I'm thankful for it. I know that it's a shame to have rainy days over the summer and especially during the school holidays, but our lawns are still extremely parched and in need of a good drink. Needless to say the roses have been showing a few signs of stress too, with yellowing of foliage on some plants and others looking a bit tired. Heatwaves and prolonged periods of hot and dry weather can cause the odd problem for us sometimes as we don't water the garden.


I shall stop talking about rain, and start talking about what has been going on over the past couple of weeks. So this is the time of rear when we work through the beds giving the roses their summer prune as well as cutting back the companion planting as required and generally give the place a good tart up. This process started while I was away and some great work has been done.

Here is the Peristyle which has had quite a prune, especially if you compare it to how it looked only a couple of weeks ago (see pictures in earlier post). The process for this is much the same for any rambler you may have. What we do is cut off all the ties and take the plants down from the structure, then all the flowered wood is removed leaving the new canes that have grown on this year. These new canes are wrapped around the pillars and the growth that will come over the rest of the year is trained along the structure, with the hope that they will all meet and cover the whole Peristyle.

I must quickly mention the herbaceous borders as they are really starting to come into their own at the moment  and will only get better over the next coule of weeks. Stealing the show this week are the Agapanthus. The variety we have is 'headbourne hybrid' and they produce really good, strong plants and flowers that would be a welcome addition to any garden. The flower stems remain rigid and this means that we leave them with their seed heads all winter as the early morning frost catches them and they look simply beautiful.