End of month view: August 2015

Late afternoon last Thursday 27 August. All the other photos below were taken early this morning on Wednesday 2 September. I’m a couple of days late but we have been on holiday in a mostly sunny Cornwall.

The view from a bedroom window and the pond is as full as ever. I’m not sure why my water lilies have not flowered this year. Too much shade, too much competition from other water plants, chilly nights?

Japanese Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’  finally flowering. With luck and good weather the flowers continue until November.

Hesperantha (schizostylis)  coccinea started flowering just before we went on holiday, again very late this year. I have known it flower continuously from July to December. They make a very good cut flower too.

Clematis Mrs Betty Corning, again very late into flower. I think all my garden flowers were waiting for the recent very heavy rain to get going.

Along the back wall of the house I have growing Hydrangea petiolaris, Polystichum setiferum, Clematis alpina, Clematis ‘Etoile  Violette’, Geranium maccrorhizum, chives, Rosa Sussex growing in a pot which has flowered continuously since the beginning of May and lots of volunteers including hardy geraniums. Alchemilla mollis, verbena and Erigeron.

You can just see Cyclamen coum which has travelled, probably thanks to ants, quite a long way to pop up here.

The grasses too are just starting to flower and shine. This should be Calamagrostis  x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ but sometimes I think it looks more like a Panicum and wonder if it was wrongly labelled when I bought it 10 years  or so ago. However, it is a well-behaved grass and I divided it about three years ago so I now have four increasing clumps around the garden.

I think I have a dying or even dead Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’, just visible behind the Sedum. I pruned out some dead looking bits before we went on holiday and the inside of the stems were white. I have lost a whole catalogue of mature plants along this border in recent years including Ceanothus Trewithen Blue, Euonymus Silver Queen, Rosa Iceberg, Jasminum nudiflorum and Hebe Midsummer Beauty. The rose was planted bare-rooted during the winter of 2013/2014 and has been very healthy and free-flowering up to now so who knows what the cause is.

So that is my garden at the end of the summer. I’m quite glad August is over. I don’t think it was a very good month for gardens or gardeners and we certainly had to wait a long time for any proper  rainfall in my South-east corner of the UK. We live in the lee of the foothills of the North Downs and quite often rain misses us completely. But I’m already enjoying September. We had a very good short break down in Cornwall including visiting a couple of different places en route and enjoyed a couple of days of swimming and snorkelling and falling asleep on the beach and an excellent but tough all-day walk. We also had a fun morning taking the little ferry boat across to Fowey to buy our fish and other provisions and we saw some fabulous sunsets from our little cottage just above Lantic Bay. I’ve already cut flowers for the house and I’m looking forward to going down to the allotment later this afternoon and bringing home a big harvest. September for me is a time of new beginnings: we found this house in September, we married in September and I had my first child in September. I wonder what this September has in store?

Joining in with Helen, the Patient Gardener, who hosts this very useful End of Month View.