My English garden in summer - what's working and what isn't... #gardening #gardendesign

Hi there, it's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog, and it's the summer garden tour. It's an informal garden tour, just me and my mobile phone, so do excuse any wobbles. The Middlesized Garden is in southeast England, and it's a walled town garden, 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 in terms of weather, we've been having a very hot, dry summer. In June we had 10 consecutive days over 30 degrees Celsius, 85 Fahrenheit, and we had three days over 35 Celsius, which is about 100 Fahrenheit, and our systems, our houses, our transport, our everything, and particularly our plants, are really not used to those kind of temperatures. On top of that, we've had winters which have been very cool and wet. We rarely go below minus 6 Celsius, 21 Fahrenheit, and we don't get much ice and snow, but last winter we had a lot of rain, which means that plants are spending the winter with their roots in cold, wet soil, and then in the summer they're getting drought and heat and being scorched. It's a really tricky combination. It's also been very dry. We're nearly a month without rain, as you can see from the lawn, and at the moment we're on a hosepipe ban, although I would never irrigate my lawn. Lawns go brown, they bounce back. They always have in the 23 years we've been here. I'm reasonably pleased at how the garden is holding up at the moment, because a lot of the plants are either very well established, so their roots are going deep into the soil, or they're self-seeders, which means they've chosen where to plant themselves. I don't water anything except for pots, newly planted plants, and any trees that are less than three years old, and we've only got one of those. Here, where I'm sitting, is our north-facing shady border, and of course those borders always survive the heat so much better. Even the hydrangeas are pretty much okay, although of course we've got quite a lot of summer to come. Just beyond the hydrangeas you can see the self-seeded crocosmia, which is extraordinary because if you were to buy crocosmia, the label would say likes full sun, and there it is in definitely full shade, but it's chosen to be there, so that's fine. So we come out of the back door and we go up some steps into what we call the parterre. Just ahead of us there you can see the lavender, which is going over now. It has been glorious. It's monstered that particular type of lavender, and here on this side is the more colorful border. This is the view I get from my kitchen window. We put the main big border here on the right, partly so we could get some, and partly so that we could see it from our kitchen window, and so we try to have as much color and interest there all year round. Going closer up, the nepeta is just going over, but it has been glorious, and I will cut that back and it will flower again. The self-seeded things you can see here are the crocosmia, which is the red, and the poppy heads, and there are a few other bits and pieces dotted around. Now let's go closer to this, which is called Echinops retro or globe thistle. It is such a magnet for pollinators. I don't know why it's got so tall, but things do seem to get very tall in this garden. Now one of the self-seeders that has really worked this year has been the wild carrot. I think having those white umbels dotted through the border actually just make it all feel much less heavy, because there's quite a lot of dark leafed stuff in my border, and I think it just needs to be made a little lighter. This plant over to the left-hand side, the white one, is a clematis. It's a ground covering clematis called clematis recta, and it's usually out in the early summer, but I've discovered that if you cut it back, you get a second flowering, and it is a gorgeous second flowering, I think. This is verbena bampt, and it self-seeded into a friend's pathway, and she was only going to weed it out, so I asked her if it would be all right if I took it. I did, and it seems very happy here. Here I have planted one plant. Over and over again in all my videos, all the experts say don't plant one plant. Planting groups, I do not understand why I do not take my own advice. However, I am going to try and improve. So let's go up the steps and onto the open lawn. I think you can see how dry and hot it's been just by looking at the lawn, but once again, the hydrangeas on the north-facing shady side are still doing pretty well. That hydrangea was planted by my predecessor probably around 30 years ago, so it's really got some deep roots. Those spikes you can see are acanthus mollus rue le dam, which is a less invasive form of acanthus mollus, and they've got pure white flowers, although those are just going over. Above it, you can see some gadgetry, which my husband has created around the bird feeder to stop things like squirrels getting at the bird food. I think the squirrels have managed to overcome this little gadget, but never mind. The RSBB has advised that you need to be very careful about what you feed birds over the summer because some feeds tend to attract more spreading of diseases, so we've just got mealworms in that and fat balls, which the RSBB say is allowed. Over here, we've got hydrangeas in pots. You can see that hydrangea pinky-winky is really quite happy in its bigger pots, and I'm watering it just the same as the hydrangeas that are struggling in the smaller pots. Bigger pots make a big difference when it's a drought and heat. One thing I have learned is that the metal pots, however fashionable, do actually cook the roots if they get too hot, and I've had a lot of trouble growing things in these pots on either side of the steps, so I'm not actually putting anything in there at the moment until I can work out what to do with them and whether to change their position. And here we come to the obelisks I was gifted by AgriFrames, and I've planted them up with a patio rambler, a rose that's just small and rambling but very pretty. It's called Open Arms, and the reason why I chose a patio rambler for the obelisk is that this is what was advised to me by Ian Nimmer of Peter Beal's Roses, and I'll put that video in the description below. Over in the corner here, we have the flomus. Now this is pretty much all self-seeded from a few scraps of roots that a friend gave me. It was a bright beautiful yellow a few weeks ago. It's still got some color in it. Those will turn little brown pom-poms and give a structure and interest right through the winter. Let's walk through to what used to be the vegetable garden and is now the wildlife garden. It's mainly planted with wildflowers. I'm hoping to turn it into a wildlife-friendly cottage garden, but at the moment the wildflowers are pretty much fighting back. One of the things we've done is to put in a pond, and when I last showed you this pond, it had algae on it. That's because it wasn't planted up enough. I've added lots of oxygenating plants under the water, a water lily and various other plants around, and it went clear almost immediately. It was absolutely extraordinary. Now you can see there's quite a lot of duckweed, and that appeared after I topped it up with tap water. Tap water has got more nutrients than rainwater, so you should really try and top up your pond with rainwater from water butts if you can, but of course we are in a drought and I can't. Karl Ashton of the YouTube channel Wild Your Garden has got quite a few videos about how to create a pond, and he says you should aim for between 60% and 70% of plant coverage in a pond, so that's a lot more than you often see advised, where people say you add four to five plants. I've got to do a bit more fishing out of the duckweed here, certainly, but otherwise I think you can probably see there's loads and loads of plants underwater, and duckweed is not necessarily all that bad for ponds, provided you don't get it to cover the entire area. What I'm particularly pleased about is that there is a newt, at least one newt, in that pond. When I spoke to the wildlife trusts about doing a pond and a wildlife pottage garden, they said you really must not add wildlife such as frogspawn to the pond. You must wait for it to come, and I said well I'm in a walled garden in town, it's a very high wall, how on earth are they going to find me? And they said they will find you, and indeed this newt has found us within about eight weeks of the pond being filled. Now this is teasel or dipsaccus. It's a very wildlife-friendly native British plant, and birds and pollinators just love it. It has got very tall, which I'm not that keen on, but there's not much I can do about it. The wildflowers in this border are from a shade-loving mix by Boston Seeds, and I've always found it quite difficult to grow anything in this border, so actually I'm quite grateful, but it's not looking brilliant I don't think. On this border, it's the third year of a packet of seeds from Kent Wildflower Seeds, and it's got lots of yarrow, which I'm really thrilled about because I'm always trying to grow yarrow. It's got some oxeye daisies and it's also got some wild carrot, but it's also got some of the plants that I planted. Now let me show you my mistake. I have here a new rose. You can barely see it. That's because I've only planted one rose, and although I did clear the wildflowers around it, it's still pretty overwhelmed by it. When I interviewed David Austin Roses, he said one of the best ways to get an impact from your roses is to plant them in groups of three, and when we get to the autumn and the planting weather, I am definitely going to add another two roses to this one so that it can just be something that people can see. Around here, willow telephium matrona used to be known as sedum. I planted two plants. In the background, you can see agastache, which is doing quite nicely, and I planted three of those. I think I should probably add a couple more and add a couple more to the sedum and then really thin out the wildflowers and just allow a few of them to pop up. I think they do look pretty. It's just that if I want a wildlife-friendly cottage garden, I've got to major on that. So let's head on the path back. We can just see on either side, I've newly planted some honeysuckle, and that's just coming up to flower. Now, here is a bald patch. It's really difficult to get anything to grow in the summer in this area. It's underneath two or three trees. In the spring, the leaves are off the trees, and there are wonderful bulbs here. It's a riot of color, but it's very difficult to find out what can take over from it, and it's a rather miserable patch. I've experimented with planting, say, one or two plants simply to see if they actually work, and the one that does seem to be working is this Heuchera Autumn Bride. So I think when the autumn comes, perhaps I should plant about half a dozen of those plants. We're coming in at the back of the big main border, and you can see more of the self-seeders here. We've got Euphorbia just going over. You've got Artemisia with the roses. That shrub directly ahead of you is a self-seeded version of the tree on the right. It's Cotinus Grace, and it's self-seeded itself, so I've let it stay. The lilies are crinum lilies. They were given to me a good 10 years ago by a friend. They take quite a long time to come up to flower, but they seem to be incredibly resilient, and they have survived everything that the weather has thrown at them in the last 10 years. Poppy heads, wild carrots self-seeded, Artemisia, and the purple spikes are Veronicastrum, and there in the distance, of course, is self-seeded Verbena Bomariensis. So we're walking around here and back to the terrace again, and here we've got Alchemilla mollis, which is between the pavers of the terrace. In order not to have to weed constantly between the pavers of the terrace, we've allowed certain plants just simply to self-seed there, and that is mainly daisies and Alchemilla mollis. It means quite a lot of selective weeding for the first year or so, but after that you don't often have to weed. I think the wildflowers have probably done best of all the flowers in the garden, so if you're thinking of growing wildflowers, don't miss this video coming up now on how to wildflowers, and thank you for watching. Goodbye!