I went to the Clacton dump (sorry, domestic recycling centre) this morning, since the brown bin can't keep up with the volume of horsetail and shaggy lawn edges as well as the weeds coming off the poor, neglected vegetable patch. I called in at the garden centre on the way home, to see if they had any trays of heathers left, and get some dwarf pinks I noticed the last time I was in there. It was about half past nine on a grey Monday morning, and mine was almost the only car in the car park. The staff greeted me with almost as much joy as if I were an old friend, which I practically am by now, but I overheard one of them grumbling about the weekend's takings, fifty per cent down on the previous weekend. There's still loads of bedding plants out there, I heard him say, I'd better tell him not to get any more.
There were a lot of Dutch trollies with bedding plants on, and I didn't help them out by buying any. It's mid June and I've done as many pots as will comfortably fit by the pond, and enough to go by the front door. I'd make space to squeeze one more in if I found some unusual and charming plant I hadn't tried growing before, but I don't need any more bog standard geraniums or petunias. Many other gardeners are probably in a similar position. The trouble with selling bedding plants is that they have such a short shelf life. At least with trays of heathers you can keep them sitting around for months, as long as you water them properly, until finally one of your customers decides they want some.
The dry weather doesn't help garden centres. Obviously they want nice, sunny days to encourage people out into their gardens, and off to the garden centre to stock up on plants to fill those gaps and tubs and make the garden ever more beautiful. Or at least, that's the gist of the Wyevale Garden Centre ads on Classic FM. But once the soil is dry people hold back on planting, as I saw in my old job. I haven't stopped planting yet, but I'm willing to pay to keep the water meter running while I drench the borders where I've been working, and if we don't get some proper rain then I'll be joining the ranks of the non-planters fairly soon. At the moment I'm just keen to get things out of their nine centimetre pots.
Today I planted yellow flowered foxgloves into the island bed in the back garden, raised from a packet of seed that came with a magazine. I only got seven plants, but that's enough to make a nice group. The island bed has developed a sort of pink and pale yellow colour scheme without my really planning it that way, which I rather like. A permanent dose of burnt ochre comes from the Thuja occidentalis 'Rheingold' at one corner, and the low hedges of Lonicera nitida 'Baggeson's Gold' by the steps at the other end. The Thuja is a lovely shrub. It has grown only slowly on our light, dry soil, but is marvellously solid and by now I have to tip it back lightly to keep it within bounds. Conifers as a group remain obdurately out of fashion since their overuse in the 1960s and 70s, but I have no truck with such blanket prejudice.
Phlomis russeliana does splendidly in that bed, so much so that if I didn't keep pulling seedlings out and reducing the size of the clumps it would happily take over. The flowers are held in whorls at intervals up strong, vertical stems. I have heard them described as dirty yellow, which I suppose they are, but I like them anyway. Soft pink and yellow come combined in one flower in the tall bearded iris 'Chantilly', which I bought as part of a bare root offer from Peter Beales, and a self sown tree lupin. I've had tree lupins in that bed for years. They never live very long, but replacements always pop up. All previous generations have been plain yellow, and I don't know how the pink element got in this time round.
There are shots of bright, pure pink from the surviving Cistus. I am so exasperated by the way that cold winters finish them off, if they don't suddenly die after late frosts you wouldn't have said were that sharp, that I am using the gaps left by the last wave of Cistus suicides for other things. Pure yellow comes from a Phygelius which is running around fairly happily. Some detective work is required to decide which one, since I've planted several yellow varieties in the bed over the years and in growing conditions which can only be described as inhospitable not all have survived. The purple-grey foliage of Rosa glauca pulls things together nicely.
Still to come are the white flowers of Romneya coulteri, finally established at the third attempt and now growing freely, the little purple flowers of Verbena bonariensis, another self-seeder, and the asters and chrysanthemums, and earlier in the season were a vivid red poppy, nominally Papaver bracteata, the forebear of the oriental hybrids (assuming my free packet of seed was the true species and not itself a hybrid) and the white flowers of Ashpodeline albus, grown from seed, so the soft yellow and pink scheme is only a passing phase, but it's pleasant while it lasts.
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