6 Garden Gripes this Summer

Hello, I'm Rachel from Dwence Garden in Ireland and you are very welcome to this summer video all about the six things that have really annoyed and irritated me in the garden this summer. Yes, we all love the summer, we love when our borders are in full flower and looking amazing, but that doesn't mean we don't have a few little gripes about plants. So stick with me and we'll run through my six gripes for this summer. In this video I'm going to share with you the six gripes that have annoyed me about the garden this summer. Some of it to do with plants, some of it to do with techniques, anyway you'll see what they are as we go through. And if you're new to the channel, I just want to let you know that I garden in what roughly equates to as hardiness zone 9. So I'm in southern Ireland and we don't use that system here at all. So just take the hardiness zone 9 as a rough indication of what I might get through the winter and what I won't be able to get through the winter. I garden in a rural setting and my garden is about an acre in size, so that's a half a hectare. Right, so having gotten that out of the way, let's move on to my first gripe. And my first gripe relates to the border that you see behind me, which is looking really quite wonderful at the moment. But you know what? It could be looking so much more wonderful. And it's all down to some annuals that I planted here not very long ago. So I planted my annuals out in May, the end of May, and they were Tajitis or marigolds. I planted two types of Tajitis in this border, one of which is called Burning Embers, a gorgeous tall one that looks so wonderful, just popping up between perennials and orange in color because that's the theme going on with this border. I was also trialing a new Tajitis which is more bush-like and has vibrant orange colors, small, small flowers and vibrant orange color. And I was really anxious to see how they would do. But oh my goodness, it seems that I am not the only one who loves orange Tajitis because the slugs love them too. And when I passed by again a little while later, I could see that the slugs had been munching merrily on my marigolds. Wow, that's a lot of ems, isn't it? So the first one to go was the small flowered, shortish bush-like one at the front, completely decimated. I don't think at this stage there's even a stem left in place. But the taller one, the Glowing Embers, the slugs did in fact leave a few behind. And can you believe it? The ones that they didn't eat were the ones that were in partial shade. I know, we all think of slugs as loving those shady moist spots. Well these slugs, they went for the full sun and they munched all of the marigolds in the full sun but left the ones in the shade. What can I say? I have some strange slugs in my garden. And now let's move on to the second gripe I have to do with Canterbury Bells, over here. Whoa! Okay, so my second gripe has to do with the Canterbury Bells, which are these plants you see all around me. And I just want to start by saying that the flowers on these biennial plants are just amazing. So it produces really large bells, mostly in shades of purple but also white and pink, in profusion, and really in profusion. So you may grow Campanulas, regular Campanulas, and you may be impressed with those. But if you compare them to the flowers on the Canterbury Bells, there really is just no comparison. They're head and shoulders above the perennial type, which is why we grow biennials really. And these burst into flower here at the back of the border, so you may recall that this border here was revamped last autumn. And in so doing, I had some spaces and I had some beautiful Canterbury Bells that I was growing from seed. So in they went to the back of the border. So what's my gripe, you're asking? Well, my gripe is twofold. And I guess if I was being really picky, I might complain about the fact that the packet I got anyway, was mostly the dark purple, very few whites and very few pinks. Although we do have one there at the back and they are very beautiful. But my gripe is twofold, as I said. The first is that because this plant produces so many flowers, it could not hold itself upright. So it seemed that the plants were doing well, that they'd be able to support themselves. But once the blooms opened, then they tended to fall over, which meant I was doing remedial staking. And we all know remedial staking is not the best kind of staking, because once a plant starts to grow a bit wonky, then it's very difficult to get it right again. You can hoist it up, but the head is probably pointing the wrong direction and it always looks like it's been hoisted up. Plus, it was really hard to stake these plants over here in this border, because this border is so stony. And that meant I couldn't get single bamboos into the ground at all. If you have a stony soul, you'll know exactly what I mean. I had a much better chance using the peony hoops, the ones that have two legs, because if you have like a kind of hoop thing there and two legs, and the legs would be much thinner than a bamboo stake. And if you've got two of them, you have a much better chance of getting them into the ground than with just one thing that's going to move and fall over on top of the canterbury bough. So I put in hoops in the end. Of course, I didn't have enough because I had enough hoops for other perennial stuff that's going on in my garden, not for biennials that I'd raised from seed. Then they flowered and they were magnificent. And then, as you see now, they started to go over and we come to my second gripe, which relates to deadheading. Well, deadheading these plants is so, so time consuming and that's because it produces so many flowers. Now, I thought after the first flush had passed, that would be it. And I'd just take these plants off, remove them from the border and plant something else in there. But no, this is a plant that has much more to give and it produces lots more flowers along the same spikes. So whenever you have a bell that goes over, if you look closely in the axils of the two leaves directly under it, you will probably see the embryonic new flowers beginning to form. And you don't want to cut those off. And by the way, the perennial Campanula that I grow has exactly the same problem, let's just say. It produces so many flowers and from the axils that it takes a lot of time to deadhead. So there I was with the little scissors and with the snips, snip, snip, snipping all the brown heads off individually because I didn't want to snip off flowers and it takes a lot of time. So I guess this gripe is, you know, I mean, it's not really a gripe in a sense, because what I'm doing is I'm complaining about the fact that this plant produces so many flowers, that it's not just one flush and it's done. I'm complaining about the fact that it produces more, which I shouldn't be doing, but it's quite difficult to manage. And I would say, maybe I shouldn't have planted so many of these in the first place, but they are pretty. Okay, so now we're going to head on over here and have a look at my Achillea, my Yarrow. Okay, so right in here, this feathery plant here is my Yarrow and this is a cultivar that I sought out and bought last autumn because I saw it looking amazing in somebody else's garden. But just look at it now. So just to recap, this was a normal sized pot that I planted out last autumn and oh my god, look how it has spread. And this is what the wild Yarrow will tend to do. It produces such a mat in the border or anywhere else that other plants can't grow, they can't get up because it just kind of takes over. And I am astonished to see that that's exactly what it's doing here, even though it's a named cultivar. The only positive thing is that it is going to flower, so I'll have flowers this year before I rip it out of my border. Really anything that grows that vigorously, you really don't want to have in any border in your garden. And it reminds me of why I stopped growing Yarrow in the first place several years ago. I guess some lessons don't stay learnt. And that brings me on to number four of this year's annoyances, which also applies to the same border. So you'll recall that this border was completely revamped last autumn. And the thing that I was trying to hide in the last shots, but that you may have spotted anyway, is the base of a mock orange which I cut to the ground last autumn. Now basically in my garden, if I want to get rid of a large shrub, I don't have the manpower to dig it out. So what I do is cut it to the ground and then the next year it will resprout. If it's deciduous it will try and come back and then just keep cutting it to the ground the whole time. And it can be a bit tedious for the first couple of years depending on what the particular tree or shrub is, but it gets the message in the end and dies off. So in this border last autumn, I took down this very large mock orange. It was just cutting out too much light and I do have an ugly stump here which I do my best to camouflage. And it has grown back and I have spent a lot of time ripping it out again, ripping out the new shoots again. There was also a minor catastrophe last autumn in that I had a daphnifilum tree in this border, one that I loved and cherished and had grown in the ground for 13 years after, well originally buying it from Krug Farm which is a specialist nursery in Wales in the UK. And it had never been any trouble and then last winter it died. So in autumn I'd removed a big bush because there was too much height in this border and then this spring the height in the border, the remaining height in the border just died for no good reason, the daphnifilum. And of course the mock orange which I don't want, is the one that's vigorously trying to come back and I'm pulling it out. And the daphnifilum which I would love if it resprouted and came back, well it really is just dead. And my fifth gripe also relates to this border and it's to do with the colour scheme in it. And I guess I have a few bits of information to impart to you about colour. Look now this may be very obvious to many of you but my best advice is when choosing plants always choose the colours that you love, that you really like. And if you do that you won't get into any trouble at all. Now for years I chose plants on the basis of what made my heart sing so the result is that my garden is full of oranges and reds and a fair bit of white too because I do like white to kind of balance the other things out. I don't have difficulty placing it like some people do. I think there's information out there that white is very difficult to place in the garden. I don't find that. And if you always choose the colours that you like and that you feel go together then you never have any problem placing them in your garden because everything matches that colour scheme. But quite recently I decided to do something a little bit different in this section of the garden and to plant up a pink theme. Now I'd never chosen pink flowers before. Pink and blue were colours I tended to steer away from for whatever reason and I decided to embrace the pink. And when I revamped this border here at the end of autumn I took everything out or so I thought but I did leave a few plants behind and one of the plants that I left behind is this beautiful day lily called pumpkin king. One that well I have loved and grown for several years and you know what I just completely forgot it was orange and this border was supposed to be pink and it was not supposed to be pink and orange. And I suppose I really ran into trouble this spring when I went to plant the cosmos out in the garden because cosmos I had in my mind are pink but of course I've chosen red cosmos because I love red. I planted the pink ones here and then I suddenly realized I don't have enough to fill up the spaces in this border. I'm going to have to plant out some of the reddy purpley ones and I thought oh okay that's okay pink reddy purple that can work but I completely forgot about the orange pumpkin king day lily which popped up and just kind of made everything made my toes curl just from the mishmash of unthought-through color. So I mean I suppose this pumpkin king is going to have to relocate at some stage but I think unless you're really really disciplined and take everything out of a border to reinvent it with a colour scheme that you're not used to, unless you do that then I don't know maybe just stick to the colour themes that you like and that you want to grow in your garden. And finally my gripe number six relates to this border here. Now this is right beside the greenhouse and although it's north facing it gets a lot of sun because the sun comes through the greenhouse from the south and it is an opportunity to grow lots and lots of flowers and I've gone with the colours I love here. A lot of orange I guess there are little touches of yellow and you know I really like it it's the oranges that I adore in the garden. And last year at a plant fair I bought a plant which I wanted to a delphinium called red lark. Now you'd think from the name red lark this was going to be a red delphinium a friend said to me but there are no red delphiniums well you know if it's a new plant maybe they've managed to hybridize them finally. In any case I bought delphinium red lark thinking that this was going to be a red delphinium and I planted it in this border here and the good news is it grew well and it grew strong and this year it flowered for the first time. And here we have my delphinium red lark now as the buds started to open I knew straight away that this wasn't going to be a deep red delphinium oh no the buds were far too pale for that and as it opened we got this beautiful colour which some say is pink but I tend to disagree I think it's a kind of orange and I say that because it matches so beautifully with the alstroemeria the lig2 hybrid alstroemerias which happen to be planted in the same border so I had planted the delphinium here to match the potentilla which is a deep red and in fact it goes okay with the potentilla but it it echoes the colour of the alstroemeria which is just perfect and I know that this video is supposed to be about gripes and this isn't really a gripe it's a gripe because I didn't get the colour I wanted but I got a beautiful plant which happens to fit beautifully in the border that I placed it in which is a definite bonus and the great news is that it's a really strong plant I haven't had to stake it at all so we've got one two three four five six seven spikes from the one plant no staking and three in full flower and four about to come I think it's a great great doer and one that I'm very happy to have in my garden so maybe look out for it delphinium red lark and it's going to be echoed further by the colours in this border which is of course orange themed my favourite colour because we have well we have some annuals and stuff in here but we also have the alliums I planted out last autumn the dark maroon red alliums which are just opening so amazing to see those opening up their flowers at last they're gravity defying because they're very tall and yet these alliums need no staking at all they manage to stand up there and wave above the other perennials in the border I think they're a definite bonus a definite plus and I suppose on that more positive note than the other gripes I will end the video perhaps you have had some gripes yourself in your garden this summer that you wish to share with me if so then jot a comment down below and I'll be happy to read it maybe we've shared the same things maybe you'll give me some hints on things to look out for and to avoid as I hope I've done for you thank you as always for watching and I will see you on the next video bye