Week 27
Jo's beautiful Hampton border; drainage revealed; horse chestnut highs and lows
Hello! I hope you’ve had a good week. This is my post of the week where I ask…what has been particular about this week? How have I marked the season as it moves from mid-summer to high summer?
We will kick off with the highlights from your comments of last week. Here’s how you did Week 27:
Multiplying swifts; staking flowers after rain; salad leaves, raspberries and strawberries; watching Glastonbury on the telly; grilled peach and basil salad; tomatoes sending themselves skywards; a swimming pool colonised by baby frogs; a hummingbird hawk moth; munching home grown broad beans; the Florida sun slowing daytime life to a crawl, while brown anole lizards do their push ups all day; watching the sun set over the Atlantic from the rugged, wild and windy eastern Algarve; the first Charlotte potatoes; the smell of sun cream; packing a suitcase complete with a new swimsuit and new dress; Bougainvillea in full blown pink, trailing the streets of Gibraltar; lunchtime in a pub garden; moorhen chicks with their fluffy red and yellow crowns; black striped demoiselles flirting on lily pads, making pretty, graphic patterns.
Beautiful. Like we’re all really settling into summer now, though this week has been chilly in the UK so maybe next week’s wont be so dreamy…I’m sure you will all find just the right things anyway.
Here’s my Week 27:
Jo’s beautiful Hampton border
I was at RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show at the beginning of the week. Hampton Court beats Chelsea in one main respect: you can buy plants there. I have been particularly on the look out since we ripped out all of our old dead box plants (got by box caterpillar), but I had been struggling to find the colours I wanted - pinks and blues and purples are easy, but the colours I love are peach, coral, buff and cherry. I want a garden like a bowl of whipped Chantilly cream and crushed raspberries, perhaps shot with a sepia filter.
WELL...one of the first things I came across on arrival was the garden of wonderful pair Jo Thomson and Kate Bradbury, planted for wildlife combining Kate’s wildlife nerdery (she wrote the nature sections for the 2024 almanac, by the way) and Jo’s flair for colour. And within this garden, which was entirely a-flutter with creatures, as intended, was this section of exactly what I have been looking for! Look at these colours! Jo kindly listed the plants for me and now I am off and running and very excited about how my new boxless border is going to look next summer. I would share the list but it feels a bit too much like giving away someone else’s secrets so instead I will point you towards Jo’s substack The Gardening Mind, which is a mine of information on planting and design, and her excellent book, The Gardener’s Palette, packed with her thoughts on colour and combinations.
Drainage on the common
It’s been so dry that we can now see the drainage ditches on the common. I havent noticed them before, though they must have become apparent during last year’s drought. Watch out for emergent Roman villas.
Horse chestnut highs and lows
Baby conkers are here! How cute. However…
…so is horse chestnut leaf miner, which turns the leaves prematurely brown and crinkled. Remember how glorious the canopies of umbrellas looked early in the year? Boo.
That is it from me. Apologies that I wasn’t great at chatting in the comments last week as a result of being away. Please do continue to leave me your comments and I will do better! What has been particularly ‘this week’ about this week?
Oh but I love that garden 😍 I too had noticed the green conkers and leaf mincers but as so often with these things it was with a subconscious part of my brain that didn’t really register it. My three things are discovering wild strawberries at our barn down Devon - it made me think of the Swedish word ‘smultronställe’, which literally means a place where wild strawberries grow but can also mean any secretish place where life feels like an epiphany (the cool interior of a church on a hot day, the place high up in an old tree where you can see the world, a moment in an art gallery where it is just you and the paintings). Secondly, seeing great stretches of rosebay willow herbs like pink fire on the verges. They have been joyfully joined by some of my favourite wildflowers - frothy Lady’s bedstraw, purple scabious, and umbellifers of wild carrot. And finally, in Ashton court, a quiet view of Bristol, framed by golden wild grasses rushing gently in the breeze, spreading beneath the pooling darkness of huge green oaks and linden trees with their honey, lemon scented blossom. Another kind of smultronställe. July feels full of those 🌿
Thank you for sharing and I am absolutely with you on garden palette, your description is delectable! I love Jo’s garden shot and hope I will make it to Hampton Court one day. I loved the heavy rain overnight this week, it felt so necessary for the garden/land. We visited a new park this week with a huge lake, it felt calming and peaceful (which is rare in the presence of my 3 and 1 year olds!), the sweet goslings, swans and a heron amongst the reflections of the trees dripping into the water was a wonderful sight! So I suppose water has been a feature this week.