Garden Centre

Monday, July 9, 2007

How is your garden growing? The All Seasons garden is much as it was in June – green, green, green. Everything is sappy and verdant, putting out masses of green growth, but the floriforousness (to coin a word) that I’d usually be seeing by now is not there. The lilies have begun to open, a week later than this time last year, and the roses are at their best, although they are almost lost in the green leaves of everything else. My bay tree has gone insane, putting on about eight inches of growth in the three weeks since I last trimmed it, and that’s eight inches in all directions, up down and sideways, so it looks like a haystack rather than a cone. And my laurel and fig have also sprung up a couple of feet on the warm and rainy weather we’ve been having.

The big shock is the wisteria. We pruned it back so hard that it didn’t flower this year (we had to, it was so rampant on the garage roof it was lifting off the tiles and chucking them onto the paving, like a delinquent child!) but that hasn’t stopped it roaring into new summer growth, and it is now only about two feet short of its height in November when we took the machetes to it. The problem with wisteria is that it throws out long whippy new growth like a cowboy’s lasso and if you don’t get on its case immediately, it will have travelled six or seven feet in a weekend, hooking its clever little tendrils onto anything in range.

Three of the four kinds of lavender I grow are in full growth: Lavandula augustifolia, the classic lavender, Lavandula intermedia with white flowers, and Lavandula latifolia which has no flowers to speak of but has very wide leaves that can be hung up and dried and used to scent cushions, wardrobes and so on, but the fourth, Lavandula stoechas, which has fatter purpler heads, really isn’t thriving – it seems to need more sun than this year has given it to perform well.

My broad beans developed rust overnight and my pea pods aren’t fattening as fast as I’d like – and the forecast is for yet more rain …

Labels: garden news, garden tasks, lavender, wisteria

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:14 AM

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