August GBBD in London

We have had a great summer so far, but August has brought cooler weather and some really heavy downpours. That’s been good for my parched garden although heavy rain for a few hours doesn’t last for long, I soon have to drag the hose out again. I don’t think I have ever watered as much as I have this summer and I have already decided I am not going to have as many pots next summer as I have this year. The plants in the pots need water at least every other day, the plants in the ground manage for much longer.

Let’s start this GBBD post out in my front garden where my containers and pots are doing well but looking a bit tired and battered from the heavy rain.

The fuchsias are still flowering, not as much as last month but still producing new buds.

The window baskets are full, almost overflowing! Here are 3 types of bedding dahlia, trailing begonias and Calibrachoa.

I like the effect they make but I could possibly have had less dahlias in each box. They looked so small when they arrived, just tiny plants so I put 3 in each box, now that they are fully grown they are fighting for the space.

Back in my garden, the plants here are fighting for the space too. August is the month of the year where I have the least flowers and it is like my garden is having a break. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of flowers, but many of the flowers I have now are here almost all year round and not typically for August.

Here is a view from the backdoor steps, with the tall conifer towering above everything else.

My nursery shelves are emptied of cuttings – almost, at least for now, but next month they will start to fill again and will no doubt be bursting soon. On top of the shelves is my kitchen garden, 4 window boxes filled with vegetables and herbs.

I am growing tomatoes for the first time! Not sure why I haven’t done this before, I have known about container tomatoes for a while, but this year I decided to give them a go. They don’t need any pruning or pinching, they are supposed to just grow as they like. I ordered the 3 seedlings in April but they were not delivered until first week of July! They are all still producing flowers so I hope they will have time enough to produce ripe fruit. There are plenty of green tomatoes though :-)

The 3 tomato plants are all cherry tomatoes; ‘Tumbler’, ‘Hundreds And Thousands’ and ‘Gartenperle’ and they are all hanging out over the edge of the window boxes filling up this narrow corridor so I have to carefully walk past them.

‘Gartenperle’ is the only one so far showing signs of red fruit, I hope the other ones will soon follow.

I also have 2 chilli plants, also a first for me, not sure how hot they will be to eat as the Schoville heat rating of approx. 20.000 and 24.000 doesn’t really say me much but they were sold as ‘mild’ chillies. Everything is relative, time will tell. The 2 chillies are Cayenetta and Loco, this is Loco and the fruit will turn red when ripe.

Back to the seating area in my garden and the view is definitely more ‘jungle’ than last month. I sent off 5 large rubbish bags to the council’s composting department last Monday, you can’t really see where I pruned and cut off all that but it all came from the garden.

On the sunny side of the garden I have a mix of plants in flower right now, the white tall ones are Gladiolus Callianthus, I have planted them in pots as it said you could, only a few of them have flowered so far so a bit disappointing, but they are very different from your standard gladiola so I hope they come back next year, better and bigger.

As for better and bigger, if you remember my sunflowers from last year, look at this year’s sunflowers! Last year I had only one type, this year I have three – or 4 if you count the fact that I think one type is not the type supposed to according to the seed packet.

This one is supposed to be ‘Claret’, with dark red flowers and brown stems. I might be a tad colour blind, but not that much!

This is 'Valentine', probably what I had last year.

The sunflowers were all supposed to be 4-5 ft tall, these ones didn’t read the instructions! It is still just August and last year the sunflowers grew until middle of November. It is already impossible to deadhead some of them as they are too tall to reach.

Back on my seating area, the tender geraniums that survived the winter outdoors is having their second flush of flowers and are still looking great. I think I will try to keep them, possibly give them all a bigger pot and some new compost and see if I can overwinter them once again. You never know, next winter might be a repeat of last one, fingers crossed.

On the other side of my bench the fuchsias are growing like mad, here on the shady side they really thrive. This is Annabelle and these 4 plants are now taller and bigger than they have ever been. At the front is a container with a new plant in my garden, Buddleia 'Blue Chip', a dwarf buddleia. Well, it was advertised as dwarf but it has grown quite big in this container since I got it in April and looks nothing like the compact little plant I saw on the photo from where I bought it. True dwarf plants are rather rare, I wonder what it will look like in years to come, even with hard spring pruning.

On my last post I promised photos of my 3 giant begonias, but to be honest they have been battered so terribly by the heavy rain so they are looking a bit sad right now. And despite heavy staking they all have drooping flowers as the sheer weight of them is far too much for the plant to keep up. If they recover and look a bit better before next post I will take some photos, they are gorgeous, but this was the only decent photo I could get.

Further down in the garden, all the lilies are now finished flowering, it is a bit sad when it’s all over and I know I have to wait until May next year for more lilies. All I am left with are seed pods I am carefully watching, as I intend to grow quite a few from seed this year. So in 4-5 years I will have even more lilies than the around 150 I have today :-)

The dahlia area is crammed full, they have never been as tall as they are now and I think I perhaps need to dig up and divide some tubers soon.

Down at the bottom of the garden, my passionflower ‘tree’ is growing like mad, really MAD. I am afraid that the dead tree stump it is growing on is going to collapse under the sheer weight of it one day. I must admit I am a bit fed up of the passionflower, some of the novelty has gone off and all I see is WORK every time I see it. The passionflower sends up seedlings all over the bottom of my garden, even behind the fence on the wall, I have to keep pulling them up or else my garden would literarily be taken over by passionflowers.

But the flowers are soooo beautiful so I am not sure whether to keep it or just get rid of the whole thing. I would really like to use this tree stump to try to grow kiwis on it instead, there are several types of kiwis that can grow outdoors here in London with lovely fruit. The fruit of the passionflower is although edible, not very tasty. I have tried it!

The whole bottom of my garden is actually in for a rethink, it is not working very well and some plants are suffering from being in too much shade while others have long since outgrown their space. I need to sit down and make some hard choices about what to keep and what to chuck out.

But back to some more flowers. My penstemons are growing between the roses and are therefore in more shade than they really should have, but they are OK with that, just flowering a bit later than normal. This is ‘Strawberries and Cream’.

And this is 'Amelia Jayne' growing next to a sunflower called 'Vanilla Ice'.

Have you noticed I haven’t showed you any roses today? Well there are roses in my garden, but they have finished their second flush and from now on there will be just the odd one here and there flowering all the way to February when I cut them down again. But my fuchsias are still going strong, they will be flowering until we get frost, if we get any.

I keep deadheading the fuchsias as best I can, but sometimes I miss one here and there and they manage to set fruit. The fruit tastes lovely, if you have never had fuchsia fruit before you should! They all taste slightly different but most of those I have in my garden taste a bit like blueberries – and just as you are about to swallow the berry you get a slight hint of pepper! All fuchsias are edible, all parts of the plants, so they are great plants to have in the garden if you are worried that children or grandchildren might pop one in the mouth. And the slugs and snails don’t like them so that’s another plus!!

My mature fuchsias have all flowered since last summer, non-stop – for 14 months!! With the mild winter we had last year none of them went into a dormant period and they just continued flowering all through the winter and spring. Here is a collage I have made of Fuchsia 'Velvet Crush', which started life in my front garden window baskets but are now so big that most of them have been moved to large containers.

That was the end of the tour for this GBBD post for August, I am linking my post to Carol at May Dreams Garden, If you head over to her blog you can see many more gardens in flower around the world right now. Until next time, take care.