31.07. Last day of July

Hello! It seems like my promise of getting back to writing again has been hard to keep, it is the last day of July and this will be only the third post this month. But my recovery from the hip replacement operation last month is going slower than I was hoping for, and I just haven’t got the energy to do much at all. I have been taking a few photos over the week-end though, and I thought I would share them with you over the next few days.

Tonight I will show you some photos from next door’s garden; regular readers will probably remember that I spent best part of the winter and spring clearing that garden from debris and weeds and planting cuttings and seedlings from my own garden. After the very warm weather we had in May and June, the garden has grown a lot and started to fill in nicely. It will take a few years before it looks mature, but there are plants already flowering that I didn’t expect to flower until next year. Here is the garden from the usual angle.

And here are beautiful gladioli, Gladiolus 'Black Jack'. They will eventually become over 1.5 m tall and with a bit of fertiliser when flowering they will come again year after year. I really like this dark red colour and have many flowers in different shades of dark red. I just had to share a couple of my gladioli with my neighbour garden, hoping it will spread in the future. By the way, the word gladiolus comes from the Latin word gladius, which means sword - easy to understand when you see the plant, and in fact, it is sometimes called sword lily.

And look at the rose! This was a freebee from the online company I use when ordering plants, I got it last year and had it in a large pot over the winter. It was labelled with type and colour, but according to the label it should get pink flowers, which it obviously hasn’t, so I have no idea what kind of rose this is. I just know it isn’t the same as any of the red roses I have in my garden, so this is anybody’s guess….Any suggestions?

And speaking of red, look at the petunias in the next door garden; they have done very well…much better than in my garden actually! That’s because here they are in full sun and in my garden I only had a spare space in the shade under other plants. In my own garden space is premium, if something is going in on the sunny side, something else will have to come out…But I do have a long-term plan of changing the lay-out of the garden, getting rid of the grass and making the beds bigger. That way I will be able to squeeze in a few more plants eventually :-)

That’s it for tonight, the rest of the photos next time. We have had a lovely weather this week-end and have been promised sunny skies and 28-30 degrees the next 3 days. I think I will be spending the next few days in my garden, although every time I go out there all I see is work that should have been done. I’m afraid I am terribly behind with pruning, weeding and deadheading, and the grass is ankle high again….but one thing at the time, as long as I manage to water the garden, nothing will die from lack of deadheading or pruning I guess. See you next time, take care.