Early summer garden tips & tour – no-fuss, easy wow factor plants..

My pick of the easiest flowers in my summer garden – these plants really look after themselves, and don’t need any fussing over. Plus how to edit your border in early summer.
00:00 The early summer garden tips and tour of the Middlesized Garden
00:12 The size and climate of the Middlesized Garden
01:13 Every border needs ‘firework’ plants – the iris
02:10 Self-seeders: borage, foxgloves, wild gladioli and alliums
02:43 Alliums
03:00 Borage
03:11 Foxgloves
03:26 Wild gladioli (Gladioli communis Byzantinus)
03:45 Shrubs are easy care
04:00 Ninebark – Physocarpus ‘Lady in Red’
04:21 Viburnum opulus – Snowball bush
04:50 Clematis recta
05:36 Chinese virginia creeper (Parthenocissus henryana)
06:06 Ornamental kiwi vine (Actinidia kolomikta)
06:47 My top easy plant from seed – phacelia
07:53 How to edit your border
08:55 Video on contemporary cottage garden: https://youtu.be/IGb6mihkynQ
08:59 Ground cover plants video: https://youtu.be/ckUwEcn7oI0
10:27 Lamb’s ears (Stachys byzantina)
12:57 Self-seeded artemisia
13:02 Globe thistle – Echinops ritro

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It’s the early summer garden tips and tour, and I’m going to focus on the really easy plants that are looking gorgeous at the moment in the garden. It’s Alexandra from The Middle-Sized Garden YouTube channel and blog. And the Middle-Sized Garden is in southeast England. It’s a walled town garden. It’s 100 feet long and 80 ft wide at its widest, but it’s L-shaped, so it’s 40 ft wide nearer the house. And we roughly equate to a USDA zone of nine, because our winters are very mild – it’s rare for us to go below -6 Celsius 21 Fahrenheit, but usually our summers are nowhere near as hot as a zone 9 would be. And indeed most of the plants in this garden grow across a wide range of zones and climates. So I’ll put their hardiness up on screen. When you come out of the back door, we go up some steps and into an area we call the parterre, and on the right hand side is our main herbaceous border. About 18 months ago I virtually cleared that – I did leave some plants in – and so last summer it was getting established. It does take a border a year or two to get established – you’re not going to get an instant effect. But because we’ve had a very wet spring, and because the border is now in its second year, it’s absolutely bursting. It’s what a friend of mine used to call plumptious. So, to start with the firework plants. When I interviewed Tom Brown, Head Gardener of West Dean Gardens in Sussex, he said that a border needs a firework plant for every stage of the season. And if you think about tulips being the firework plant in late spring, then irises have to be the firework plant for early summer. And irises are so little work – they’re certainly much less work than tulips. You literally plant them. And they’re probably not going to be at the most floriferous in their first year – they take a bit of time to settle down – but after that they flower and they spread, and all you ever have to do is to remove the spent flower heads. And their sword-like leaves create a lovely contrast to foliage in the border after the flowers are over, and they are literally no work. They are frost hardy, they don’t mind the drought, they seem fine with this very wet spring – they’re just easy and gorgeous. The next really gorgeous plants in the border are the self-seeders. Now one warning about self-seeders is obviously plants that self-seed easily can be invasive – in some places. However, don’t ever take anyone’s word for it as to which plant is invasive near you. You need to check online, and governments and universities have got lists of what’s invasive near you, because different plants are invasive in different places. But I have some wonderful self-seeders, and the four I would really recommend are borage, foxgloves, wild gladioli and alliums. Now I did plant the alliums. I planted about 15 about 10 years ago, and last year I counted over 60 in the border. So I had to pull some out. But it’s an awful lot easier pulling a plant out than it is putting it in. So you do have to pull self-seeders out – that’s not really a problem. The borage is something that just arrived in the garden. I’d always wanted borage, and one day it was there. And now it’s spread quite widely, and I will have to pull some of it out. But the pollinators adore it. As for the foxgloves, I’ve never actually planted any. I’ve always just enjoyed where they spring up, and they of course are brilliant at springing up in shade. Once again with them, if you leave them – you don’t even cut their flower heads off – then they will go to seed, and they will spread all over the garden, and you can just pull them up. The wild gladioli I think are very special, because I think they’ve been in this garden since Victorian times. There was a Victorian botanical artist who grew up in this house, and she painted wild gladioli, and I think she might have painted them from this garden. So that means they could have been here for well over a hundred years. Now shrubs are really easy care, and we forget about shrubs because there’s so much talk about perennials. There are three shrubs that really contribute to this garden in early summer, and which have been virtually no work at all. And the first is physocarpus lady in red, or ninebark, and that was given to me by a friend about 3 years ago. And I planted it. And I haven’t done anything to it since. I did look up the care of ninebark a few minutes ago, and it did say that you could cut it down to the base after flowering to benefit from the new foliage, but I’ve never done that and I’m very happy with the foliage. The next shrub is viburnum opulus, or the snowball bush, and I planted that about 15 years ago. And once again I don’t do anything to it. After it’s flowered, we cut it back if it’s spreading in a direction we don’t want it to spread. Viburnum opulus can get viburnum beetle, and this one does get it – it gets a bit nibbled. However the advice from the RHS is that if you can live with viburnum beetle just live with it. And certainly only a few leaves get nibbled. It’s towards the end of the viburnum season, and often there’s so much else going on in the garden that nobody notices. And the third shrub has been here since I was here – it was planted by my predecessor probably over 30 years ago – and that’s clematis recta. Clematis recta comes up in spring in a sort of oval – quite sculptural – of dark leaves, and then it tumbles over the frame, and it flowers for about four to five weeks. If you cut it back you sometimes get a few more flowers, which I did last year. But otherwise I do nothing to it – except in November chop it right back to the base. Couldn’t be easier really. And so where would the early summer garden be without climbers? There are two climbers here on the back of the house, which I wouldn’t be without, and which have been easy – one has been super easy, the other has been a bit more work. So I’ll start with the one that’s a bit more work, which is parthenocissus henryana or the Chinese virginia creeper. Now of course one of the things about invasive plants is that you can also get varieties that are not invasive, and the Virginia creeper is considered invasive in many parts of the world, but the Chinese virginia creeper or parthenocissus henryana isn’t. And it does grow more slowly. I have to say it still does grow quite fast, and we usually need to clip it back about three times a year, but I think it’s worth it for that, and it has beautiful foliage. The plant on the left of me here is actinidia kolomikta, or the ornamental kiwi vine, and anyone who comes into the garden in early summer goes "Wow, what is that plant?" This too was planted by my predecessor – so over 30 years ago – and it literally sits there. It loses all its leaves in winter, and then they come back in spring and early summer. And they’ve got these pink tinges to them, and it’s got some very pretty little flowers as well. We cut off its branches, once again if they’re going somewhere we don’t want them to go, but it really is no effort at all. We cut off a few branches a year, just with a pair of clippers – it couldn’t be easier, no fuss, it’s lovely. Now growing plants from seeds is usually a bit more work, because you plant them in seed trays, you pinch them out, you pot them on, you harden them off and you plant them in the ground. And I usually found that putting seeds directly into the earth isn’t very successful. However in the autumn I did a green manure, and green manures is where you sow green manure seeds over a border in order to have something growing over the winter, and then weeds get less of a chance to settle. Then in the spring you either cut the manure down, or you dig it in, and it benefits the soil. There’s quite a few green manures, and one of them I planted was phacelia. So I literally just scattered the seeds over the border. The seed companies often recommend that you leave a clump of phacelia there because it is so loved by pollinators. And I did, and I’m so glad I did, because it is absolutely exquisite. The pollinators love it, and it smells delicious, and it was so easy – I just threw some seed down. When I interviewed rosarian Michael Marriott, he told me that phacelia was a very good partner for roses. So I’m thinking of throwing some phacelia seeds along my roses in the front garden. One of the things that’s really worth doing in early summer is editing your border, which means looking into it and finding out which plants are just overwhelming other plants, and where you’ve got gaps, and just tweaking it a bit. And a few days ago I did that for the most difficult border in our garden. So let’s go over and check that out. This border has been my most difficult border, because it’s got a lot of dry shade. There are evergreen trees, there are deciduous trees, there’s a wall. And it’s the furthest away from the house, which means that even when I plant plants that are happy in dry shade or under trees, they do need to be watered for about their first year or two, until they get their roots down. But because it’s the furthest away from the house, it’s out of reach of the hose. It’s always the one that gets left out if I’m short of time, or if I forget. So I’m afraid I have lost more plants in this border than anywhere else in the whole garden. However I think this is the perfect time to get the border really sorted, because there’s a lot of natural water in the soil. I’ve been inspired by two videos that I’ve done recently. And one was the contemporary cottage garden designed by Tim Pilgrim, and the other is the ground cover plants with the interview with Tim Ingram. What Tim Pilgrim said was that in any border he relies on about 70% of the plants being what he calls safe, ie he knows they’re going to grow there – not a problem – and then 30% he experiments with. I think I’ve got this border to the state where there will be 70% of plants I can rely on. So I think I can experiment a bit. And as for the ground cover plants with Tim Ingram, he plants lots of different ground cover plants in woodland situations – so under trees like this – and he sort of lets the plants decide where they want to go. So Tim relies on plants that spread and self-seed, and that’s very much what I’m going to be doing here. Because if you give the plants the chance to decide where they’re going to grow, very often you can get plants to grow in places that they don’t normally grow in. So starting with this border, what we’ve got here is self-seeded smyrnium perfoliatum, a weed called mustard garlic or Jack in the Hedge, green alkanet which is considered to be another weed, and borage which is also self-seeded. And I love these self-seeded plants. I am going to have to thin them out, because they’re crowding the plants I’ve planted. And most specifically there’s a very pretty hellebore down here, which creates a lovely pattern of colour earlier in the year, and that’s being completely crowded out by this self-seeded euphorbia and borage. So I’m going to have to thin that out. One of my 70% safe plants is this – the lamb’s ears or stachys. I took a few roots from another border, and it’s just gone really well. So I think we can repeat that a bit more along the border. Here we have got an area which I’ve already started to clear. I’ve got epimedium and geranium. Now both of these do well in dry shade, but they do need to be looked after, or to have some damp while they’re establishing. And also small plants really need to be not overwhelmed by big plants. And what I’ve got here is this very vigorous phlomis russeliana, which once again I’ve planted from a couple of roots a friend gave me, and it’s spread all over the border. So I’m going to call that one of my 70% plants, but I am going to have to thin it out where it’s swamping plants that I’ve planted. And the same goes here, I think, for the self-seeded euphorbia in the front. I think it’s taking light away from the epimedium and the geraniums while they get established. I don’t really like leaving bare earth, however I think I’ve really got to give these young plants a bit of a chance. So under the tree here, we’ve got the phlomis which has self-seeded itself, and that’s fantastic – it’s really difficult to get things to grow under that tree. So I’ll leave that there. But there are some hellebores down here which are getting a bit swamped. So I think I’ll have to clear some of the euphorbia away. Here’s some more phlomis – it’s a very large clump of phlomis – I think it could do with some thinning out. Of course, all this bulb foliage will die down by midsummer, possibly leaving bare earth, so I need to find something that I can put here, that the bulbs can grow through, but will cover it in later on. Here’s a clump of self-seeded something or other. It seems to have a potato in it. I’m going to clear that and see what I can put there, but I’m not going to have anything very tall because I don’t want to obscure the shape of this topiarised holly golden king. Then we come to the acanthus mollis Rue Ledan. Now this is an acanthus mollis that’s less invasive than the straightforward purple tinged acanthus mollis. This one is pure white, and it doesn’t spread much, but boy has it loved the wet spring – it’s just risen up. This was taken from a few roots from further down the garden, and it will have lovely spikes of flowers later on in the year, and so I’ll leave it there. But behind it is some self-seeded euphorbia, which is looking really good now, but it’s completely swamping a peony, so I will have to thin that out. And then right at the end here, we’ve got artemisia which is self-own – I’ll leave that there. We’ve got echinops ritro, the globe thistle, which gets much too tall and then it leans out like this. The echinops ritro – I’m going to see if I can reduce its height by clipping it back quite soon – giving it a sort of Chelsea chop. And the same with the artemisia. It gets very tall, but if you chop it back regularly, then it stays much more bushy – and it’s a lovely gray contrasty foliage in amongst this. If you’re interested in making your borders better than ever, then don’t miss "How to Plant a Stunning Perennial Border" which is the video coming up now. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!