My plan to finish planting out the collection of things in pots waiting by the front door took another knock yesterday, when I called at the garden centre on the way back from the dump to buy barbecue charcoal, cobbles, gloves, grit, and weedkiller, and found I'd left with a tray of six gazanias as well. However, today I did plant out all the dwarf tulips, several geraniums, two Phygelius rectus, and the pink flowered cow parsley relative I bought yesterday. I should have done the tulips earlier, when I could see their neighbours flowering, but there were enough dying leaves in the gravel to avoid digging up any existing clumps, even if I had to rely on memory of what was flowering where to get the colour combinations right. Soft pink Chionodoxa with chrome yellow tulips would have been a bad mixture, though I think the former finishes before the tulips start.
The hot weather has caused a few things to collapse, including part of a stand of Persicaria bistorta 'Superba', which was looking very nice. This is a plant for damp places, with leaves which betray its kinship to docks, and spikes of fluffy, pink, bottle-brush flowers. It makes a generously spreading mat, though my RHS dictionary assures me that the rootstock is easy to dig up. So far I've been glad to have the ground covered, though my patch is now getting to the size where I might start to control it. You can have enough of even a good thing. Unfortunately in the last couple of days the damp spot has ceased to be damp enough, and to my annoyance the fallen spikes and leaves have not fully righted themselves even after repeated soakings from the hose. Next year I ought to try and remember to water pre-emptively, though the chances of that happening are slim, given everything else there is to do.
Stephen Lacey, a gardening writer I respect deeply because he combines lyricism with sound practical knowledge based on first hand experience, said in one of his books that if, by the start of June, you could see any bare earth in his garden, something had died. In a year like this one, which got off to such a late start, I'd add a week or ten days to his cut-off date, but it is a good time of year to look for gaps, and think about whether they need filling. I think Lacey was exaggerating for dramatic effect, since if you have a recently planted shrub in a mixed border you do need to give it some space if it is to grow. If you allow the exuberant foliage of herbaceous plants or annuals to swamp it, don't be surprised if, when you eventually come to clear their top growth away, the shrub is no more. But it's a good general principle. Gaps allow weeds, and diminish the visual impact of the planting, and around the end of May when things have had a chance to get going is a good time to take note of where the unwanted gaps are.
So it is that my shopping list now contains variegated London Pride, for a dry shady corner on the way to the Systems Administrator's secret deck, golden leaved Filipendula and more Darmera Peltata for the bog bed (assuming there is any golden Filipendula left at work by next Monday), a couple more of a little Asiatic woodlander called Mukdenia to add to my original experimental plant, which looks healthy enough to make me willing to risk two more, but rather pathetically small and lonely by itself, and a replacement Vitis coignetieae. This means that even if I manage to finish planting the collection by the front door before Monday, which is doubtful, by Wednesday morning when gardening resumes I'll be half way back to square one. But the gaps will be filling.
It's a good time also to check that plants are growing. That sounds daft, but plants don't always grow, even if they don't die. Sometimes they just sit there. It may be that the roots are busily at work, even if nothing is happening above ground level yet, and it is in the nature of some species or difficult sites that it takes a full season, if not two, before you see visible progress. However, sometimes nothing is going on below ground either, or a plant which was growing fine has ground to a halt. After the great burst of growth in May is a good time to see what hasn't kept up. Shrubs should have made extension growth, pliable young shoots which are a different colour to last year's old wood, and many species ought to be throwing strong new branches from the base of the plant. Conifers should have brighter coloured candles of new growth at the ends of their branches, and evergreens fresh coloured young leaves. If none of that has happened, it's time to ask yourself why not, and whether the plant needs something. Is it hungry, or too dry, or sitting too wet? Has it been undermined by ants? Is it struggling to cope with excessive shade? Have you absent mindedly planted a lime hater in alkaline soil?
In an ideal world, the gardener would have an individual relationship with every plant. Walking round the garden each morning, they would note how well or ill each of their charges was, and respond accordingly. Owners of large, messy, over-ambitious gardens with indifferent soil, prone to spells of drought or flooding, are unlikely to live up to that ideal. My treatment of many of my plants is more akin to that of a General in the Great War, sending waves of them over the top in the knowledge that many are going to die. The most valuable ones get more individual attention. You can bet I didn't let Paeonia rockii dry out when it was little, and that it had a stake, not to support it, but to make sure I didn't tread on it by mistake. But there simply isn't time to check regularly on every last geranium.
Tomorrow I really ought to take a break from planting in the gaps, to cut the edges. And pull the horsetail and goosegrass. Our neighbouring farmer brought the parish magazine round the other week, when I happened to be by the stash of plants waiting by the front door. You could tell he was not a gardener, because faced with a collection which included the rare and amazingly spiny Colletia paradoxa, and some seriously glamorous flowers, he did not exclaim over the interesting things in pots, but said that I had a pretty good showing of cleavers.
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