High summer garden tips & tour - lavender, thugs & re-vamping the border...

It's the high summer garden tips and tour so I'm going to show you what's working in the garden and what isn't. It's Alexandra here from the Middle-sized Garden YouTube channel and blog and the Middle-sized Garden is a walled town garden and it's about 100 feet long and 80 feet wide at its widest but it's L-shaped so it's 40 feet wide nearer the house and we're in southeast England which very roughly means that in winter we equate to a USDA zone of 9 because we rarely go below minus 6 Celsius. In summer our summers are much cooler than the zone 9. They might average at about 23 Celsius. One principle I have and I know a lot of other gardens and gardeners share this principle which is if at each time of year you have one thing that really knocks people's socks off so that people come into the garden they look at this one thing and they say wow and then by the time they've got to see that actually things aren't looking so great in other parts of the garden they're having a cup of tea and they're feeling positive about it so they're different things obviously at different times of year it's really impossible to keep a garden even a very small garden looking fantastic in all parts of it all year so the best thing to do is to have your special wow factor for each season and in winter for me it's the topiary trees in high summer it's the lavender now this lavender has been here for 11 years and that's old for lavender and when we first got it I read all the things about you know when you prune lavender cut off the flowers and about two-thirds of the foliage but don't cut into the wood you must never cut into the wood so I pruned it cautiously for the first three or four years and in fact some of the other plants I'd planted elsewhere in the garden got very leggy and I in fact took them out in the end and then a professional gardener pruned my lavender and he took it down really tight in fact it almost looked as if it was wholly brown with a thin flecking of the little gray silver leaves at the top and at first I was a bit shocked oh gosh is my lavender going to die but it came back really strongly and we have pruned ours like that ever since and many people tell me that actually that's why it's lasted so long that it's lasted the 11 years however even with really hard pruning back it has to be said this lavender is getting leggy it's getting woody and a smaller proportion of it is flowers so I'm looking at it thinking is this the last year should I take it out but of course it is creating a pretty amazing effect providing you look at it from certain angles and from other angles it looks really quite gappy and holy but anyway it's so huge it certainly stops people thinking about the borders at the back of the garden there's a north facing border to the left of the lavender and actually this border doesn't give me much problems it's very shady and once you've got a shady border working it is so easy to look after because weeds don't grow as fast plants don't grow fast flowers don't go over so quickly it's a really easy position once you've got the plants right and in this border I have various different kinds of hydrangeas which are very happy I've got a conifer and I've got a few other things but they're not particularly out at the moment along the back border I have a real problem with thugs now thugs are plants that do very well and actually I sometimes think if you could just fill your garden with thugs and they could slug it out then you'd never have to do any gardening however the thugs on the left hand side are Japanese anemones now they have swamped every other plant I've tried to plant in there except for quite a pretty rose that has risen above them and I have therefore tried to dig them up because it there literally is nothing except Japanese anemones in part of this border so I dug them up and they came back so I assumed that was me being incompetent so I got a professional gardener to they still came back so I think I've got Japanese anemones in my garden forever and I need to love them and I do love them but I would quite like to be able to plant something else in there further down that border I have something called acanthus mollusk and in a few weeks time that will be the wow factor for the garden because it comes out with these amazing spikes of white those of you who know acanthus mollusk will know that acanthus mollusk is also a thug but this Rue Ladan is a rarer variety and it doesn't spread that much what you can see in those clumps once again it was planted 11 years ago so then we move across the border on the right hand side and the Flomis is a thug here and actually I love Flomis it's very drought resistant it's pretty resilient to anything I grew this from just literally a few fragments of root that a friend gave to me but nothing else there is a spring thug in there and it's a self-seeded plant called Smyrnium perfoliatum I bought literally three Smyrnium perfoliatum plants about 10 years ago and I planted them in that border and they now have spread everywhere and so the border is full with a lovely citrusy green yellowy sort of almost like a euphorbia in spring but of course it is so prolific it chokes anything else that's there but because nothing else much likes growing there I sort of think oh I'll leave the Smyrnium perfoliatum in and then I leave it in for too long so at the moment it's a battle between Smyrnium perfoliatum and Flomis and everything else is looking a bit sorry for itself I will just briefly waft you past the veg beds which have been completely neglected this year and this is my little bit of rewilding I think that weeds and rewilding look really lovely when they're contained in something like a raised border at least that is what I am telling my husband and indeed anyone who asks so the main border how is that working out last autumn and I've got videos about it in the description below I completely cleared it garden designers said if you want to revamp your border take as much of the planting out as you possibly can because you can't really revamp a border if you're planting in around a lot of stuff that's already there so we completely cleared it and this is what it looked like so I bought quite a few perennial plants and planted them we're also getting more recommendations to plant perennials in autumn because then they can get established before the winter and really crack on when the spring starts so I did that but very unfortunately we had an unusual autumn we had a lot of rain followed by a very early freeze so these young plants were sitting in wet very cold soil and most plants don't like that so I did lose some astrantias and a few others however there are jams there which were perfectly happy planted in the autumn the other problem with planting perennials is if you buy them in nine centimeter pots they're quite small plants but you still need to plant them the right width apart in a video about buying plants with Rosie Hardy of Rosie Hardy Gardening YouTube channel and she said that if you take perennial plants and you hold them roughly shoulder width apart and plant them at that distance although bigger plants do need a bit more space and smaller plants may need a bit less that's a very good rough way of planting them at the right distances but of course these gems which I did exactly follow Rosie's advice are not filling all the soil and there's gaps in between now Rosie's advice and many other people's advice too is you fill it with annuals so I put some cosmos in there but once again you have really got to do quite a lot of policing because the annuals can swamp the perennials the main annual in my garden is poppies and they're self-seeded so I didn't plant them but they've come up and they've just swamped the whole border and actually they look great for a short time and also their seed heads look lovely for quite a long time but they have completely surrounded some plants so that I'd forgotten I'd even planted them and I planted this little spirea in the spring the poppies came up completely choked it and by the time I remembered it was there it had one leaf left anyway I cleared away the poppies I gave it some water and it is coming back but if you're revamping your border I think there is just a constant policing that needs to go on the other thing is the alliums now those are self-seeded but they have just self-seeded too much and what is quite clear is that I need to get about two-thirds of the alliums out of my border and that will give me space to plant more perennials high summer isn't a great time for planting perennials because they can get very dry we usually get the droughts around this time of year but if you're prepared to do the extra watering then why not the other thing I could do is to buy them in pots and actually keep them in their pots until September and then plant them then so if you'd like to know more about revamping a border I've put together a revamping border playlist at the end of this video and thank you for watching goodbye