This summer, the rose that had never flowered, the one I had long ago marked for the compost heap, suddenly came into bloom.
Not only did it do so splendidly, with half a dozen buds opening in succession, it turned out to be the much sought-after Rosa Munstead Wood (= ‘Ausbernard’). To see those plump buds opening into cushions of deepest burgundy velvet has made me happier than almost anything else this year.
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The slightly-too-thin stems of my Munstead Wood and their heavyweight blooms sit close to my other 2025 gardening surprise: the soft caramel, white and egg-yolk-yellow of Iris ‘Benton Susan’, the flower I thought I could never grow.
A couple of shy Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’ aside, this has been a good year for flowers.
This garden has always felt too shaded for irises, but my fears have been proved wrong. All the Benton irises I planted last spring have come good, save a tiny rhizome that needs another year or two to plump up. When the flowers of ‘Benton Susan’ and Munstead Wood fall close together, as they did after a windy night in May, the result is perfect harmony.
A couple of shy Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’ aside, this has been a good year for flowers. Always a principally green space, this spring I introduced more colour into the garden, mostly in the form of pinks and creams, deep reds and various shades of apricot and orange.
The green bones of yew, beech and hornbeam are now peppered with roses, verbascum, geums and linaria. Yes, I bought strong plants from reliable suppliers, but I was unprepared for the sheer quantity of flowers that would illuminate my oh-so-green world. Not usually one for bringing cut flowers indoors, there has been a jug of something on the kitchen table throughout the summer.
There have been mistakes, of course; but then, aren’t there always? The introduction of a variety of Styrax japonicus, whose promised white bells turned out to be as exciting as those of a privet hedge,
and a beautiful apricot-flowered rose with buds just that bit too yellow to sit comfortably with its deep-pink neighbour have annoyed my aesthetic sensibilities. I shall gloss over the chives that have refused to burst into spiky purple pompoms and the glacial progress of the ‘Black Velvet’ potted nasturtiums, but they do frustrate.
To see plump buds opening into cushions of burgundy velvet has made me happier than almost anything else and a beautiful apricot-flowered rose with buds just that bit too yellow to sit comfortably with its deep-pink neighbour have annoyed my aesthetic sensibilities.
For the most part, my floral hunches have paid off, though there will be some essential tweaking in the autumn. Some of this year’s successes have come from new introductions, but others have come as a result of drastic pruning of the existing flora.
A sulking viburnum burst into song once we opened up the canopy that was shading it, and the same with the somewhat brave removal of several branches of the medlar tree, which has brought enough sunlight to the bed beneath it to allow both an ill-sited hydrangea and a creamy white Potentilla fruticosa ‘Limelight’ to flower with a new energy.
There have been other celebrations too. My three Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Maculata’, whose lacecaps are invariably the colour of old tights, are currently festooned with the promised pink and violet buds. Even the zinc tub of lavender, far from my most successful of exploits, is showing a mass of luminous purple spikes.
To see plump buds opening into cushions of burgundy velvet has made me happier than almost anything else
Where the garden was once layer upon layer of green, from the chartreuse tones of Philadelphus coronarius ‘Aureus’ to the almost black of the Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’, there are now splashes of colour glowing (but hopefully not screaming) throughout. Claret pelargoniums and tangerine geums, pale-pink linaria and even a smudge of purple from a new batch of pelargoniums, have brought warmth to the previous emerald coolness.
It must be said that the flowering seasons have been somewhat unpredictable this year. Cornus ‘Gloria Birkett’ came into blossom a good six weeks late. Lamprocapnos spectabilis ‘Alba’ was all but over and done by the beginning of May and at this rate, the dahlias might be out by Christmas. The problem with the rearranging of the seasons is that the oh-so-carefully co-ordinated colour palette of the garden can go astray. A plant’s unexpected tardiness can give rise to embarrassing gaps.
The tulips were joyous this spring but finished a good few weeks earlier than usual, leaving the huge pots that sit either side of the path empty until the foxgloves appeared. This gardener was caught with his trousers well and truly down.
It is possible to have too many flowers in a garden. A backbone of green frames the blocks of colour and allows the garden to breathe. We have probably all passed gardens that make us want to reach for our sunglasses, that are chaotic with reds and purples, yellows and magentas – what I call ‘noisy gardens’. You can get away with it, but it takes a genius.
Those blooms I look forward to the most are those that appear when the leaves are still in tight bud and the branches still bare. The firework fizz of Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’ and, of course, the crocuses, cyclamen and snowdrops, whose flowers give us such hope in the dead of winter. But for now, as we reach the dog days of summer, the garden is more floriferous than it has ever been, and I ask myself what took me so long.
The garden is galloping towards the point where flowers are as proliferous as leaves. I just hope I can stop before I need to get my shades out.
