My July flowers

I have been trying to take photos for the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day the last couple of days, but it hasn’t been easy – dodging the showers! I so wanted to show you how much my garden has progressed since last month and it would have been nice to show everything off in glorious sunshine, but alas, the rays of sunshine have been few and far between the last month. Well, not just the last month, the last three months to be honest!

But I have managed to take my photos, some of them even in pouring rain, well, what don’t I do for my beloved readers! I was outside yesterday with an umbrella to protect my camera, wishing I had at least one more arm so I could hold the umbrella and the camera properly without getting too wet! My garden is still later than any year I have gardened at this house, without much sunshine there is no way it’s going to catch up but everything is getting there, eventually. So, despite being middle of July I still have only Lilium reagale of my oriental lilies in flower, the rest are in buds. And the crocosmias have just barely opened, many weeks later than last year, same with the hydrangeas – probably 4 weeks later than last year. But I have lots to show you, my garden is lush and green from all the rain and there are colours wherever you turn, here is a selection for you.

My astilbes are flowering, they were moved last year when I redesigned the garden and now got a much more prominent place which they rightly deserve.

I love this plum-pink coloured Astilbe chinensis 'Vision in Pink' ....

....but the purple astilbe is great too, although it didn’t have any fancy name on the label, just ‘Astilbe!

And just behind the astilbes is one of the groups of Lilium regale in full flower.

These highly fragrant trumpet lilies fill my garden with the most exquisite scent.

They even look gorgeous in pouring rain!

Here is my dahlia corner. I have 5 dahlias, 3 called ‘Sunshine’ and 2 called ‘Striped Vulcan’ The latter hasn’t flowered yet, still even waiting for buds on the one at the front!

Roses! Can’t get enough of them. This is ‘Crimson cascade’.

And this is ‘Peace'....

....and another ‘Peace’, a bit more opened.

And this is a pot rose I bought in a supermarket some years ago.
After it was finished flowering I planted it out and it has been
outside ever since. Look how tall it is!

The roses last for a long time, much longer than many of my garden roses.

It produces masses of lovely pink flowers. Pot roses are great outdoors!

This is one of my three hydrangeas, and this one had to get a rather unseasonal trim last autumn because it had grown so big that the heavy branches were bending down to the ground and started to produce new shoots in all sorts of strange directions. Pruning hydrangeas in September is not advisable if you want flowers the next year, so I did it with some reluctance, but it had to be done even if I was going to lose one year’s flowering. And it hasn’t flowered as prolifically as previous years, but because of the cold weather we have had it actually isn’t in full flower yet!

Here is a photo of the same hydrangea last year in late June, look how many flowers I had! But over the summer all the branches started drooping and I cut it down to a third in size. Surprisingly it is now back to almost the same size, just not as many flowers. I hope the stems will be stronger so I don’t have to keep cutting it down every other year, that would be a shame. What this lovely hydrangea hasn’t got in terms of numbers of flowers it has instead made up for in the SIZE of the flowers this year. You can’t really see that on the photo above from yesterday so I just had to take a photo of one of the flowers up close....

.....look at the flower next to my hand!! I have quite large hands, but the size of this flower is gigantic!

And here is the second hydrangea, the same type as the first one, Hydrangea macrophylla which produces flowers dependant of the pH in the soil. This one is placed in my woodland corner and gets a different soil condition than the first one, so therefore the colour is also different.

The flowers are delicately pink/purple.

And this is my third hydrangea, Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle'. Despite lots of staking all the rain has weighed down the heavy flower stalks and it is now a bit of a mess.

The flowers are beautiful though, going from pale green to completely white when fully opened.

And my Dregea sinensis has finally started flowering! I have written about the dregea many times before here on my blog, especially on the pruning challenges it gives me every winter. It is a lovely plant though, with a strong, sweet scent which is most noticeable in the evening after a sunny day – not many evenings like that lately I must say, but the dregea is going to flower well into September so I can always hope for a shift in the weather eventually!

The flowers on the dregea are tiny, but with masses of them they cover the inside and the outside of the arch.

My Acanthus spinosus has started to flower. This year I have 11 flower spikes! Never had that many before. I guess the rain has been doing some good here too....

Acanthus spinosus is also called Bear's breeches and is often viewed as a weed, I quite like this architectural plant with these tall spikes that flower for weeks.

And here is a teaser for you for later, my summer flowering hellebore!

Yes, I know....my hellebores flower in February too, just as everywhere else, but one of my hellebores is a bit special.....it flowers for a second time, in July!! Ever heard about that before? I wrote a post about it last summer, you can SEE THE POST HERE This year’s summer hellebores are just emerging, here is the first flower and there are more to come so I can see a separate post about this topic coming up a bit later this year too :-) And just in case you were thinking that this photo might just be one I had saved from February; here is the tiny bud next to my astilbe, which definitely doesn’t flower in February!

So that was a selection of my flowering plants in the middle of July in my tiny London garden. I have more summer plants to come, thanks to the cold weather we have had, and my autumn plants are just coming into buds. Why don’t you head over to Carol’s at May Dreams Gardens and see what other people around the world have flowering in their gardens right now, on this Garden Bloggers Bloom Day! Until next time, take care.