Garden Diary May 2019
Photos by Oliver Hobbs
May has been surprisingly cold until this weekend. It was a bit like going back to winter again after the Easter heatwave, and we've had torrential rain (which we needed), gale force winds and hail, finally returning to sunshine this weekend. I adore this time of watching the garden spring to life, patrolling around to see what's coming up, working out which seedlings are worth keeping, and which are weeds. The tulips are going over, but everything else is growing voraciously, bursting with that fresh green intensity that is unique to this time of year. Foliage colour and texture is important now, before the colour of the summer flowers revs up, from the glossy dark green mounds of geraniums to the lime-green zing of the euphorbias. My stalwart May flower is the geum, and I have three varieties: 'Princes Juliana' (classic orange), 'Totally Tangerine' (softer orange with duskier shading) and 'Bell Bank' (small, understated rose-crimson flowers on dark stems). The combination of 'Bell Bank' and tulip 'La Belle Epoque' was one of my accidental successes this year.
I had a plant sale earlier this week for Maggies Oxford, where I'm a trustee, and raised over £200. I'm addicted to making new plants, whether grown from seed, from cuttings, or from seedlings dug up from the garden. Some of my plants are clearly very happy and have seeded themselves everywhere: Stipa tenuissima, Dianthus carthusianorum and Lunaria Corfu Blue are spreading themselves around in beds and in the gravel, so I dug up masses of them about six weeks ago and potted them for the sale. I also sold lots of dahlias (very popular) as I dug most of my existing plants up last year and divided the tubers. Added to that I took cuttings for the first time this year, all of which were successful, and at £1 each these flew off the table. This weekend, the forecast is looking pretty settled for the next few weeks so I decided to plant some of my bigger potted dahlias out, as well as plant runner and French bean seedlings.
