We’ve had one of the longest, hottest, driest summers since 1976 (I remember that one – I was a kid, and it was much hotter!)So, the most common task was watering…
Watering, watering, watering.
Sun + Water = Growth so, it was an amazing summer!
Keir Watson
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JUNE
The garden reaches its first zenith in June, with all the work of previous months paying off. This year, the roses were spectacular, as were the early perennials. They have all enjoyed the warm sun throughout April and have yet to feel the pain of prolonged drought.
My Modern Formal Rose Garden in June… The hedges are perfectly clipped and the roses are in full swing.Rose Emily Bronte — Stunning flowers from this English Shrub rose. I regularly deadhead my roses to maximise new bud production and repeat flowering.Yew Arch — at the back coner of this bed, I am allowing the yew hedges to grow across (in an arch) to screen the eye-sore behind, while leaving the narrowest way through the middle. Will it work?White Foxgloves — In my White Garden, these self-seeded foxgloves need thinning and any rogue pink ones removing before they spread their genes.Watering Pots and Containers — With almost no rain, potted plants need watering every other day.Beautiful Pots — I move pots around to show them off when they are looking there best, such as this large pot of asitaic lilies – right outside our kitchen door.Invasive Neighbour — A bamboo culm pops up from next door. I cut off the top and fill the hollow stem with herbicide to knock it back. It works well.New Green Roof Plants — I added dwarf purple berberis to my green roof this month…A blow torch is useful for making planting holes through weed fabric as it prevents the polypropylene fraying.Darmera and Roses — My umbrella plant (Darmera) usually wilts in hot weather, but I think it has benefitted from more regular watering of the green roof above it. The iceberg roses, though, are suffering from mildew, not helped by the high humidity.White Martagon Lilies – one of the last ‘spring’ flowers in my woodland garden is the martagon lily. But who is that there?…Crab Spider — This little fellow was defending his lily by waving his arms at me. Incredibly, I saw him here, on the same lily, last year.Welcome Display — At the end of June, my porch is flanked by blue agapanthus and trailing stems of creeping Jenny. Those hanging baskets have to be watered daily.
July turned out to be a month of wildlife and watering. Butterflies numbers are up, and I’ve seen a couple of new species in the garden. Watering is constant. It takes hours every week to keep the pots hydrated, but I didn’t lose a plant to drought all summer. I only put the hose on the beds once per month, but even after an hour, the soil is not hydrated all the way down. Still, the plants seemed to enjoy the attention and have grown well.
Small White Butterfly — In the ongoing heat we have the patio doors open wide. Local wildlife comes in to get out of the sun.Speckled Wood Butterfly — Another temporary captive this month: Pararge aegeria — a new species in my garden. (See more of my garden wildlife here)Roe Deer — in the field behind our house, deer sometimes come close. Flighty, they are tricky to photograph.Peach Tree — The prolonged heat and drought has favoured spider mite in the greenhouse, and I’ve had to apply biological control twice this year, as well as remove lots of infected leaves almost denuding the tree. Despite this, the peaches have been the best ever!Watering — many hours of watering are needed throughout July — mostly pots, but occasionally borders. Even after half an hour only the top few inches of soil are moist.Artificial rain — Water running down Echinacea. Mostly I water at soil level ato conserve water and get it where it is needed. But the spray offers some nice photographic opportunities.Sprinkler — bouncing off blue agapanthus flowers. For some beds, a sprinkler, carefully angled, can refresh an entire bed.Pastel Planting — My Mediterranean Pond Garden is looking wonderful. That silvery foliage in the foreground is Snow-in-Summer, which has recovered beautifully after being cut hard back at the end of May.Lifting the Crown – I pruned off the lower branches of my Vitex shrub to reveal the lower branches and let more light in to the perennials under neath. It opened up wonderful views through to the rest of the garden.Removing Seed Heads — I like red valerian (including the white variety, above) but like so many vigorous plants, I have to remove the seed heads to prevent them colonising everywhere.Starlings — This year, starlings visit the garden (or at least the edges of it) in great flocks of a hundred or so.Acorn nursery —I found this creation made by the children: “It’s a nursery — The acorns and snails are newborn babies in little beds”.Garden Spider — It’s about now that I start to see common garden spiders (also known as cross spiders). Over the next month or two they will become increasingly common, bigger and more bulbous.Rain at last! — On the last day of July, the rain finally came. In a few short hours, the soil was saturated all the way down for the first time since April.
The photo above shows just how beautiful the Pond Garden is in August. This was a month of relaxation, with the garden filled with the squeals of children playing in paddling pools. Beyond essential mowing, watering, weeding and hedge trimming, very little gardening took place. I turned my attention to astrophotography and days out exploring the countryside, so I’ll include a few of the off-topic photos from those adventures in the gallery below…
Summer Dining — With so many long hot days, we open up the whole of the back of the house. The design of the planting ensures the planting comes right up to the house, making the dining room feel as if it is part of the garden.Rosa ‘Emily Brontë’— by August, the roses are in their second flush, filling the garden with scent and colour. I deadhead every week or so to keep new sprays coming.Step-Over Apple — This is my 16ft wide single-tier espalier (step over) cooking apple. I gave it a summer prune last month. We’ll be using the apples from this tree for the next 4-6 weeks.Verbena bonariensis— This prolific butterfly magnet self-seeds easily, appearing to be a free-lunch and a tasty one at that. Unfortunately, vervain serves up an excess of super-sweet deserts you didn’t order leaving you bloated. Consequently, I exercise a heavy controlling hand, removing seedlings and seedheads. So, yeah…. no free lunch.Vitex agnus-castus — My chaste tree has enjoyed the hot summer and flowers profusely throughout August. To the right: Rosa ‘Desdemona’ is back in flower after last month’s deadheading.Pyracantha Espalier— This year, I left the initial pruning until after flowering so have been treated to this beautiful display of fruit. The downside is that it spent most of June covered in browning flowers before the fruit develop, and will have to be pruned in October before the fruit starts turning brown.Euphorbia ‘Miner’s Merlot’ — I have been putting together an article on my favourite garden spurges, but I delayed it as I have grown a new one this year (above). It is very colourful, and has a long season of interest.Raised beds — The planting in the gravel-topped ‘Mediterranean’ beds that surround my pond have provided a long summer of flowers. In this one, you can see Alliums, Sedums and Tulbaghia still going strong at the end of August and drawing in lots of pollinators.Astrophotography – Here are some of the night-sky photos I captured this month, starting here with star trails above Agapanthus in my garden. The smudges on the left are clouds interferring with an otherwise clear sky.Milky Way & Andromeda – Another taken from my garden, looking almost straight up (SW horizon towards bottom) this time capturing the Milky Way. This is a wide angle shot (approximately 90 deg field of view). The smudge towards the top-left is the Great Galaxy in Andromeda.Moon Rise Over The Trundle – This composite image consists of timelapse 4 minutes apart. The obelisk is the surveying stone at top of the hill. The South Downs National Park is a darksky area, but a full moon makes it hard to see the stars.Radio Tower — Captured over a couple of hours – with the pole star close to the tip of the radio tower. The two diagonal streaks are perseid meteors. I used a torch to light-paint the mast as the image was being recorded. A bit Sci-Fi don’t you think?Star trails over South Downs — Near the Trundle is this lone tree that made a good foreground subject for this star-trails shot. The lights to the right are a car that pulled up on a nearby road.
Box moth and Blight The incidence of box moth has remained very low over the summer. I saw no evidence of caterpillars until late August. Perhaps they have run out of nearby box plants to migrate from reducing the local population? Or perhaps the drought has reduced their numbers? Or I’ve just been lucky with the timing of routine spraying? Anyhow, towards the end of August, I discovered a few very small outbreaks which were easy to treat. My regimen appears to have reduced the problem to almost a non-issue. Hopefully this will continue going forwards, but this year may have been more luck than anything else.
Unexpectedly, the reverse was true with box blight. I have found outbreaks on several of my large box balls, and so far, treatment has only lead to reduction, not cure. It’s odd that there is blight now, as the summer has been so dry and sunny. I have only watered the box a couple of times, and then only at ground level, so their foliage has remained dry. I see there are some blight resistant box varieties coming on to the market (going under the branding ‘BetterBuxus’), but these are very expensive. It’s a pity they haven’t developed box-moth resistant breeds yet.
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6 thoughts on “Garden Diary — Summer 2025”
In these garden diary posts the monthly image gallery is cut off for me. I can only see the first image and half of the second image. I assume there is supposed to be 3 or 4 images per month and an arrow or something should let me scroll right to see the images? I’m using Firefox but it also happens with Edge.
Hi John, Thank you! I’m really grateful as I’m sure this has affected others and I didn’t know, so you have really helped. I think I’ve fixed it, so you should now see a scroll bar under each side-slider which you can grab and drag to scroll through the images. Please let me know how it goes or if you come across any other issues. Much appreciated, Keir
Thanks it works now for the Winter, Spring, Summer diary posts. From a user perspective it isn’t obvious that I should grab the little grey line to see more images. Cheers – I love your garden and your pictures of it.
Keir, your photography gets better and better — this was a pleasure to read, and beautifully illustrated. Please do remind your readers if you open under the National Gardens Scheme.
Meanwhile, a quick question: that impressive pot of white Asiatic lilies seemed to have dozens of flowers. How many bulbs did you plant?
Thanks Tim, I really appreciate your feedback.Re: the lilies… I think, originally, just 5 bulbs. I had them in a smaller pot, but as they increased year-on-year I had to pot them on into the large terracotta pot in this photo. They really have been magnificent.
In these garden diary posts the monthly image gallery is cut off for me. I can only see the first image and half of the second image. I assume there is supposed to be 3 or 4 images per month and an arrow or something should let me scroll right to see the images? I’m using Firefox but it also happens with Edge.
Hi John, Thank you!
I’m really grateful as I’m sure this has affected others and I didn’t know, so you have really helped.
I think I’ve fixed it, so you should now see a scroll bar under each side-slider which you can grab and drag to scroll through the images.
Please let me know how it goes or if you come across any other issues.
Much appreciated,
Keir
Thanks it works now for the Winter, Spring, Summer diary posts. From a user perspective it isn’t obvious that I should grab the little grey line to see more images. Cheers – I love your garden and your pictures of it.
Glad it’s working for you now! Point taken, I’ll try and find a way to make the scrolling mechanism more obvious.
Keir, your photography gets better and better — this was a pleasure to read, and beautifully illustrated. Please do remind your readers if you open under the National Gardens Scheme.
Meanwhile, a quick question: that impressive pot of white Asiatic lilies seemed to have dozens of flowers. How many bulbs did you plant?
Thanks Tim, I really appreciate your feedback.Re: the lilies… I think, originally, just 5 bulbs. I had them in a smaller pot, but as they increased year-on-year I had to pot them on into the large terracotta pot in this photo. They really have been magnificent.