Fingers Crossed, the Mitcheldean Garden 2021
June is Bustin Out All Over Part 1

This page is part of a series of garden blogs from 2021. Click here for the index.

Within a couple of days of my completing the hatchet job on May 2021, the weather gods relented, the skies cleared and the temperatures climbed into the sub-tropical. We were then treated to 4 weeks of glorious weather although we have now come to the end of that and much needed rain arrived last night followed by a day of unrelenting stygian gloom. This part covers the lower garden

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This honeysuckle came from the garden centre at Cannop in our early days, somebody insisted it would go well against the garage wall. It disagreed until we got the wall installed and it was raised two foot vertically. Once it popped its head above the roof it became unstoppable and when we added two cuttings, from it then the three combined soon stretched the length of the garage and I then gave it an aerial bridge. It's a bit risky letting it grow on the garage roof but I am careful to remove any dead leaves, flowers and other debris so there is no way it can root itself there. It's now the kind of plant where you can't turn your back on it, but this year it looks fabulous. Not far from it is our #2 (white) lilac, for whatever reason it's running about two years behind #1 which is a more traditional colour.

Last month I showed the south side rhododendrons. There are five on the north side which are now engaging in a turf war. One of them is now twice the size of the others and it always flowers first. The red one was particularly attractive this year.

At the moment we have just the traditional sulfinias at the bottom which will now bloom well for a couple of months or more. Garfield is a summer garden cat, he tends to switch resting places on a weekly basis, on this occasion he had followed me to the front on a morning photographic safari but by and large, like us, he prefers the back away from the traffic.

There were some very cold nights during the winter, we lost a bush here and  what we call the Abergavenny bush had a near death experience; it's flowering now as I type but it will need a good summer and a mild winter if it is to get back to its former glory. We'll not be pruning it for a long while. The orange brown ball is actually one of our three remaining rock roses, it also suffered in the cold but is now also on the mend. It's not deciduous but it lost all its leaves... The good news is that the lupins and Johnson's blue are very happy with life as are the two peonies, the smaller one of which lost a chunk of its main stalk to a large slug, I carefully tied it up and it's now about to flower.

If I show any sign of boredom, Yuehong always comes up with a dream project which by and large I file under 'next year, maybe'. As I related last time, I have finally removed the useless blackcurrant and now we have a proper bed between us and #35. It's never been conditioned and the bags contained all our autumn 2020 leaves and a very large dollop of horse manure. To avoid wrecking the grass I stored the 'diggings' on empty compost bags.

Most of the leaves went in first, then several inches of horse manure, followed by a second thinner layer of leaves and the original soil. The bed is now lined with last winter's fancy primroses and has some 24 dahlias from Lidl, all of which are going well which is a higher %-age than the more expensive ones which came from our regular internet supplier. They have had all sorts of problems with late deliveries this year and as a result we shall be using local garden centres and supermarkets in the future, which at least allow you to check the quality directly. 

The spring hyacinths are long gone from here and after a spell winding down on the normal bonfire space have been finally dug up and will soon go to the garage. Spot the difference? The tulips too have been dispatched and the dwarf snapdragons installed although most had already nearly finished their first flush, hopefully they will come again. The picket fencing is now in place to protect them from people walking on the path.

The original yellow rose next to the front door won the race for the first healthy bloom although it still considers it was overpruned a couple of years ago. Nearby is our Lidl hanging basket which matches it well as the bloom fades to a pale yellow and then almost white.

The cold weather delayed the azaleas with the result that more or less all of them were in flower together. The deciduous orange ones are slowly getting stronger and the white ones had a very good year. Of the main line of roses, the blue moon was early and strong.

It seems that standard roses do not have a long life but ours are still going strong and the original David Austin roses at the front are all still healthy. The yellow rose outside my 'study' comes from the same stable and Yuehong has run a branch sideways which means I can see very little out of the window. It does look very good though, coming from the steps.

We haven't yet lost faith in Tua Pek Kong although he and his Javanese assistants seem to have been 'asleep on the job' on occasions recently. With the tomatoes down in #2 greenhouse, #1 is currently a passageway and used for drying out bulbs, those shown are all our tulips, I would guess at least 500.

We have two wisteria, the bigger one has been a dreadful disappointment, its flowers are frankly pathetic and its main use is to provide shade for our bench under the pergola. The second one had to be moved when we built the greenhouse and has taken a long time to recover. However, it does have proper flowers and I am now gradually cutting back the monster to allow the other to show its potential. We see our frogs and toads regularly but the newts are very shy, this one managed to fall into the pond overflow tank and I fished it out before returning it - no doubt it and its friends inhabit the damp loving plants in the area.

That's the end of part 1. Click here to continue with part 2 which covers the upper garden.