English Zone 8 Garden Tour in May 🌺🌺🌺

Well good morning everyone, it's Jeannette here from Enthusiastic Gardener down here in Essex on the south east coast of England. I'm about 30 miles east of the city of London and 30 miles again west of the seaside, south end on sea, and although we don't use garden zones I'm probably the equivalent of maybe a US zone 8 and May really is my favourite month of the garden and the alliums have all come out very pretty, these are all purple sensation alliums. So I hope you enjoy this garden tour, let's start around here. As you can see I have a lot of little stepping stones into the centre of the lawn, the stepping stones are all around the edges so you can walk into the garden onto the lawn from lots of different angles which is very useful and also useful for the dogs as well, here we have a nandina, very pretty nandina and right next to it is one of my new blues, this is the Picea pungens super blue seedling which I planted maybe back in February, it's doing very well. We have an alstroemeria here, this will be a white alstroemeria, it seems to be looking good, last year it didn't do so well, it was so hot last year and we have a lily, a lillium just here. Now my bay tree has done very very well but we do have a lot of suckers down the bottom and I need to handle the suckers because they are growing wild, it doesn't seem that the bay tree is affected by them but I think I need to try and sort that out and then this one here, that's a salvia and that gets enormous, absolutely huge. These are the beautiful pelargoniums that I planted last week and they are called contrast and they will have orange flowers and I just think they're so pretty and they pick up the yellow in the distance. Once the allium foliage has all gone and the daffodil foliage, which is these shorter bits that I've cut down, once that goes this will be a whole big mound and it will get quite large because I did that a couple of years ago, it was very impressive. This little geranium, we have one little flower about to start and as I've said before this area here, once the alliums have gone I'm going to be redesigning this area with something exciting. The heucheras which I divided maybe three weeks, four weeks ago now, all still doing very well. We have a seed in Autumn Joy, another little pathway in this direction which takes you across to Shady Corner. Let's go over to Shady Corner now because I'm so pleased with it. It's just filled in exactly as I'd hoped it would. It's very, I think, whimsical. Let's just look around this part. We have the impatiens that I planted last week. This is a hydrangea, it's Vanilla Fraise. Beautiful ferns in the background and you can see that I've planted the lobelia all the way around the edge of the lawn. You'll see that all the way around and that's what I did last summer and it looked stunning so I'm hoping to recreate that. We have a beautiful heuchera there just beginning to flower, Crocosmia. This is my Tuscan Van Gogh Cypress Totem Pole which I created into a three ball topiary but let's have a look at Shady Corner. This is a beautiful Pyrrhus which was a gorgeous, gorgeous colour maybe a week ago. Now I do love this. This is called an Adgeratum Altissima Chocolate and it was further over the back and I've moved it forward a little bit. That is stunning. We have some Pullman area dotted around at the back. My Fatsia, the older leaves you can see hanging downwards and the newer leaves, the bright green new leaves all coming out to the top. We have the Dicentra Bleeding Heart, starting to fade now those flowers but the most stunning, stunning thing are the Bronneras. These are sterling silver with their gorgeous little blue flowers which you can see is echoed as we go around. It's just very pretty. We have another Pyrrhus behind here that's Aquarius Flame that was brilliant red a while ago. Here is the Aralia Elata. We cut the Aralia Elata two weeks ago to do an experiment to see if it made the leaves at the top grow bigger. Well, it's doing well, doing well. Early days, early days. The ferns have all unfurled in their new fronds. I've been so delighted. I've had expert fern advice from a wonderful, wonderful Mark Border, his name is. You may have seen his comments popping up in the comments section on my videos. He tells me all about my ferns, how to look after them. He gives me recommendations for new different ones and that's been a great help. You can see I've moved the flamingos. We have another Pyrrhus back here, a couple more ferns, the hostas. Yes, the slugs have reached the hostas. But from a distance, it looks OK and the rhododendrons not yet flowered, but we have lots of buds on the rhododendron. So all in all, I'm very happy with Shady Corner. I think it looks just as I'd hoped. This is a wonderful, colourful, colourful border here and it's mainly the heucheras. The heucheras, I love heucheras. As you know, if anyone knows me, you know I love my heucheras because they're just such magnificent colours, as you can see. And I've got quite a few different ones. Unfortunately, I can never remember their names, but their names are just so wonderful as well. This is one of the favourite plants in my garden now. It's the hoopsie eye, the Picea pungens hoopsie eye. And I thought these were cones, but it turns out they're not. They're not cones. They're new little budding branches. So I think that's happy. That's in a bottomless pot next to my lemon cypress. I forgot to tell you, that's my King Charles coronation rose, very tiny, but I bought that obviously to commemorate King Charles in the coronation. And then this one here, this is my new rose wall. So this one here is a James L. Austin, a David Austin rose. The pear tree, I had to stake that yesterday because the wind comes in from this direction quite often and that was billowing around in the wind. So I've staked that to see if I can help it a little bit. The erissimum, let's step over this way. The erissimum, oops, that's looking very pretty. And this is my camysiporus, which I planted last year. Another heuchera. We have some very pretty lamium, which should spread eventually. I might get some more actually. I have to tell you today, I'm very excited because I'm going to the Highlands Flower Show, which is in Chelmsford in Essex. And I'm dragging Richard with me. Don't know that he's as excited as I am. Petunia red robin, beginning to fade now into brown. And of course it's flowered. They say the flowers aren't particularly pleasant to smell. What I'll try with the petunia is give it a little trimming haircut and then apparently, so I understand, more new red will flush through. So I'm happy with this border, very much, very pretty. Let's just go around the rest of the circle. This is the last section. We have a heuchera, we have a camysiporus there. This is my Atlanta spruce and this is the one that I had made it into a spiral topiary a few years ago now, but I don't think I'm going to recut it into the spiral. I'm going to leave it like that. Then we have my euonymous topiary, needs a little haircut there. This purple thing has got to go. I need to get rid of that. And my little cherry tree with cherries. I forgot to tell you, let's go back this way really quickly because my plum tree has plums. Where did I see the plums? There we go. Can you see a little tiny plum? Oh and another one. Let's just quickly look this way. Carnival Corner looks so dull now without the bunting. I miss my bunting. We have a little nest right up here. They come here every year in the roof of our garage. You can see that gap up there. There's the nest and that's where they all live every spring. The walnut tree's doing very well and these are the planters that I planted with the strawberries and cream mix last week. Just beginning to fill out. They'll look very pretty I hope. And these, I adore them. I've shown them to you quite a few times. I haven't had them long. They're soft, so soft. They're called Picea glauca daisies white and I think they're very happy, which makes me happy. And the new piece of little art that I put up a couple of weeks ago. We have the rose here and it's beginning to bloom. We have some buds and this has been in a couple of years but it's never really done very much but this year I think it's going to take off. They do say, don't they? Sleep the first year, creep the second year, leap forever more. So here we are here over by my hottest border, my southern facing border. We have an olive tree on the right which I love. The curly stem of that. I think what I'll do, I have these lavenders which I was thinking would make a hedge but what's happened is the hedge on the left is doing very well but getting covered by the formium, the brown sugar formium, while these ones on the right, well we've lost one there, so now I think it looks a little odd. So I think what I'll do is take them out, plant them elsewhere, maybe dot one or two, not have it such a rigid formal structure because I don't think that's working, and a gap. I might find something today at the Highlands Flower Show. I feel like maybe I need something red because we've got the green, we've got the blue with the blue fescue grass and also this Pinus van der Wolf's pyramid, that's a bluish tinge. We've got green, we've got brown, I think we need red. I'm happy to say my fatzia seems to have done okay after I cut most of it off because it had died in the winter, the harsh winter that we had. So although it looks a bit sparse, I quite like the architectural style of the fatzias like this. So I'll probably be going around taking off the old leaves, the ones that are facing downwards, so it's had a rejuvenation. And then these are the blue fescues which are doing so well and they just make a nice little mound, a little carpet. We've got new candles coming up at the top of the Van der Wolf pyramid. This is a yew, very pretty yew and the cedar mortem joy there. This is the Chinese plumbago which is finally, finally starting to put on some growth and we have the apple tree. The apple had blossomed for the first time this spring. More heucheras. Don't look at the awful state of the fountain, the fountain is going to be repainted. It hasn't been done yet, Richard wants to wait for constant nice weather, he doesn't want to spray it inside his workshop, he wants to do it outside so he needs some good weather. And my trachycarpus fortunii which was planted, well this will be coming up to two years now. Love that, it's so lovely and it's doing well so that's good. Final part of the garden everyone, this section here, a euonymus, here we have the juniper rocky mountain blue arrow. Oh I've got my shadow in the way, let's go this way. My Ilex crenata, cloud pruned topiary. This mahonia is doing wonderfully well. Berries, it's just got huge actually, really filling out. Another lovely nandina next to a holly. My beautiful petunia pink crispy which I planted a month or two ago, well it was at Easter actually. This is the rose which has been here the longest, I don't know what rose it is because this is one of the only things that was from before I moved here, this was already here. And then we're back this way for the view up to Shady Corner. So that's my garden in my favourite month of the year. I'm off as I say to the Highlands Flower Show today and I've never been before. I'm very excited, I hope to buy some plants. So I wish you all a very very happy week and thank you for watching. I'm Jeanette, I'm the Enthusiastic Gardener. I hope you've enjoyed my garden tour and I will see you soon. Bye!