I had a fairly rubbish June, which was not improved by birthday migraines and a couple of painful falls. But! July is here, I’m walking again, and my garden is well and truly blooming.
My favourite flowers are sweet peas, which I love for many reasons: for the gorgeous, ungainly shapes they throw, for their sugary pastel shades, and for their scent, both utterly delicious and quite unlike any other flower. Sweet peas are immediately Proustian for me, recalling memories of childhood summers, my grandma and grandad’s garden, and the seasonal treats of the community flower and produce shows I later enjoyed as a allotmenteering student.
I think that there’s something very special about sweet peas – you can’t buy them in a florist and are only ever likely to acquire a posy from your own garden or that of a generous neighbour. But in fact, that’s what makes them such simple, everyday, blooms as well: raised by countless British gardeners every year from seed, they are perhaps our definitive home-grown flower. Who doesn’t love a bunch of sweet peas in a little vase?
Having got them in too late in 2024 my sweet peas were somewhat disappointing, but they are looking much better this year, with new blooms appearing every day.
I pick them as they come, and arrange them inside, where their delicious scent wafts by every time I pass the kitchen window.
I’m enjoying arranging them with other garden flowers, both cultivated and self-seeded. In this wee jug, for example, there’s the sea campion (silene maritima) I planted in the gravel last year (to echo the flora of our nearby beaches) . . .
. . . alongside some big white clover blossoms, which have appeared at the front of one border, and which I like, as well as being good for the soil.
There are also a few sprigs of lavender (which is really thriving), and a few of the precious pinwheel-type white dianthus which the previous gardener planted here and which have the most extraordinary scent.
Can I briefly sing the praises of the cottage garden dianthus?
I feel they are a somewhat unfashionable flower – rarely spotted in show gardens, discussed on tv programmes, or featured in gardening magazines. Perhaps they have suffered from their inescapable associations with late-night-garage floral offerings and 1980s buttonholes.
But dianthus are reliable, hardy, easy to grow . . .
. . . their grey-green leaves and graceful branching stems look great in border, pot or vase . . .
they come in a range of fabulous shades (I’m a sucker for any dusty pink variety, of which I’ve planted several)
. . .and they smell amazing.
This vase also includes some red campion (silene dioica) and a delicately peach-coloured variety of linaria, both of which I’ve allowed to self-seed in the gravel. There are also some ox eye daisies (leucanthemum vulgare), a ubiquitous feature of every Kintyre hedgerow and whose wish to define the outer edges of our gardens I and my neighbours all seem to enjoy.
I’ll conclude my cut-flower encomium with the roses, which are having an extraordinary summer, and whose garden delights I’m feel that I’m discovering for the first time.
Earlier in the year, I inexpertly pruned, tied in, and fed them and yet have been rewarded with so many flowers: some dense with ruffles, others loose and blousy.
The roses are completely glorious, but to this rose-novice somewhat confusing: they’ve all got different stem-types and different habits, some are lithe, some bushy, some just keep on growing upwards, some need lots of support, some less.
What distinguishes a hybrid tea rose from a damask, a climber from a rambler? I have bought a weighty rose-related tome, and hope to be enlightened. In the meantime, I’m just really enjoying the gorgeous summer gift of them – whether cascading over a wall, illuminating a border, or sitting in a vase, filling the air with their light fragrance.
Many thanks to Tom for complementing my current cut-flower obsession with fabulous floral photography! I’ll conclude with a heads-up for some actual knitting content: do keep your eyes peeled this weekend for news of our colour-filled KDD summer knitalong.
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