This month my garden seems to have burst into colour, which is a good thing, and so to capture the moment I'm sharing flowers from around the garden during May. Its purpose is two-fold, as well as documenting our garden progress I'll also be able to retrieve it the next time MOH proclaims our garden as "boring" or "too green"
Let's start with the succulents, which I grew most of from a single, discarded leaf. Haven't they done well?
They are gradually filling their small trough and having their own babies. It makes me so proud!
Our dogwoods have also grown considerably and are flowering. Their flowers are similar, but flatter, to a white allium I have.
So detailed aren't they?
My alliums are all but done, but they are such dramatic flowers. I've shared this photo here before, but I think it's a great example of an allium and a photo I love, as much as the flowers.
Since I moved my Gertrude Jekyll rose, it's flourished. Clearly now it's in the right place, and brings a burst of colour to the patio. In the really warm spell we had, you could see the flowers wilt before your eyes. I think the key to keep this flowering will be dead heading and I've a post to come on how I've tamed my patio plants next week, assuming the weather plays ball.
I learnt the name of this plant this month - it's Jerusalem sage - and it's been in our garden since we moved here. At one point years ago, I thought I'd lost it, but it seems it's more resilient than I thought. And it is a furry as it looks.
This year for the first time I've had success with foxgloves, and I'm so glad I have. I'm hoping that they'll self-seed now and, as long as I can stop MOH pulling them up as weeds, I'll continue to have them in years to come. It's easy to see why they could be weeds, I have another one growing in pot which even I thought could have been a weed. Turns out it wasn't and so I've two of these beauties this month.
I'm hoping to move the potted foxglove into my new gabion basket planters, and it seems our garden likes the woodland kind of plants.
Roses. The pink one is Gertrude Jekyll in full flower, when it's like this it's easy to see how roses are related to peonies, or the other way round, whichever it is, with all the petals folded tightly into each other.
The raindrop shots were taken the weekend of my birthday, just after the sleepers were installed - the flowers were beautiful before, but with some raindrops I think they're even more so. Sadly the Canterbury bells have been blown over this week in the wind, so I'll be adding a stake and tying them up this weekend.
Peonies. They are such lovely flowers, and always bring back memories of my wedding bouquet. A few years ago we bought three peony plants and this year is the first time they've really flowered. And I mean really flowered. They look great with raindrops too, but also coped less well with the wind, with a couple of stems breaking under the extra weight. I've seen many pictures of pink peonies on Instagram and if I'm honest, I've been enjoying them and glad I could join in too.
This photo is the odd one out in this post really, as there's very few flowers in it other than the hardy geraniums on the right of the photo. I'm including it as it's another of my mini-projects undertaken this spring. I've reused all of our old patio slabs that I'd saved and 'paved' an area in a staggered form by our cherry tree and by the bamboo.
I'm hoping that it will deter the bamboo a little, as well as provide a place to store pots over the winter. The fern that is looking so glorious is only in the pot temporarily, as that too is destined for the gabion planting area, but more on that in another post. It'd recently been dug up to make way for the gabion baskets and it's another of my free plants. Ferns seem to grown in a old unused stairwell by our outdoor tap, which I regularly scrape out and pot up. The fern in the pot is the result.
I really do love free plants.
Talking of which, my yucca which was one of the few plants I brought from my old house was also free. I had it in a pot on my porch, but it outgrew that a good few years back, and it's survived a location move when we moved where the shed is. During the month I wrote about how it was repaying some love with flowers, and there's still a way to go, but it's getting there.
It last flowered in 2013, so it's a plant that doesn't like to be rushed. But it's worth the wait.
So looking back at these photos my garden has been quite colourful, and I think it's one of the garden's best months. Remember that MOH's overall view of our garden is that it's "too green" and I think that at least for the past month, I've disproved that.
How's your garden been over the last month?