What’s Growing in My Garden at the End of August 🌿 Late Summer Garden Tour
Hello everyone, and welcome back to my windy garden. We are in the last week of August, so I thought I would walk you around and show you how everything is looking. It is very windy today, which is normal for us here in West Sussex, and the forecast is once again threatening rain from tomorrow. We have barely had any all summer, so I will believe it when I see it. Let us see whether I can manage a sensible garden tour in this wind.
Starting on the freshly painted decking
As always, I start the tour from the decking, and there have been a few changes. We have taken the tub down after a sudden change in the weather a couple of weeks ago, so the grass has a chance to recover, and it is slowly coming back.
The bigger change is that the decking has been painted. We have had it four years and it was only ever painted once, right at the beginning when it was built, so it was well overdue a clean and a fresh coat. We wanted it done before the weather shifts for good, because once the rain starts here it tends not to stop for months. It looks so much better, and it does make a difference.
It also looks quite bare, partly because a lot of clutter has gone and partly because the potted trees and plants have all been shuffled around. The ornamental dwarf cherry and the magnolia shrub are now on the sunnier side, which gets the longest run of sun, just to keep them happy.
The potted trees have had a hard summer
Almost none of the potted trees look happy, and no amount of watering seemed to help this year. The olive does not look well at all. I genuinely thought it would enjoy the heat, but apparently not. The young edible cherry in the middle has leaves that look scorched, which I think is heat burn from the sun and the drought. There is not much I can do beyond hoping it bounces back in spring. The royal burgundy ornamental cherry is the best of the bunch.
On the wall there is now only one pot, and that is a pear. I have completely lost track of which pear is which, because we have a couple of them and they are either Conference or Concorde. Comparing the leaves later in the tour, I think two of them are Conference and the one by the decking must be the Concorde.
The two geraniums, on the other hand, absolutely loved the hot conditions and flowered beautifully all summer. The small lilac shrub nearly dried out completely, but I kept watering and watering and it is still alive.
The Generous Gardener still has no home
The climbing rose on this side is The Generous Gardener. If you saw the video from around the start of summer you will remember what a state it was in. I cut it right down, so everything you can see now is fresh growth, and I keep trimming it back to keep it healthy because I still do not know where to put it in the ground.
Several of you kindly advised in the comments that a rose this vigorous needs a lot of room for its roots and something substantial to climb, and I just cannot find that space. My garden is quite full. The wisteria has the same problem and has ended up parked in this border after the great decking reshuffle, and it may well stay here for the winter. If you know my garden layout from previous videos and can suggest a spot for either of them, I would really like to hear it.
The rose itself has bounced back well and is growing without any sign of disease, so I am pleased with that much.
Fruit trees, blueberries and one last apple
The James Grieve apple had no apples at all this season, which is fine, it is alive. Behind it the lily stems are still standing so the bulbs can build up strength for next year, but they have become an eyesore and I think they are ready to come out.
The older blueberry has done really, really well. We have picked so much fruit from that bush over the season and there is still some left to pick, so it is clearly very happy where it is. There is a second, younger blueberry nearby, and next to them the Acer has grown enormously despite the heat. It looks a bit cramped now, so next year we may trim the lower branches of the apple tree to give it more room.
The gala apple is the real disappointment. It set a lot of fruit, but pretty much all of it got infected by pests and dropped through the summer, so eventually we took the rest off. There is one apple left that my husband hopefully left on the tree, and I can already see that it is infected too. Gala gives such sweet, crunchy apples that we were really looking forward to a crop. That is nature, though.
The Conference pear is the only tree still carrying fruit, and the two remaining pears are massive. The tree shed most of what it set in early summer, and the ones that stayed have grown enormous. There is also a very big spider living in there, which I discovered at close range, so I will be asking my husband to pick them.
Hydrangea, azaleas and the verbena
In front of the shed the bigger hydrangea is doing its usual trick, starting white and turning lime green with a pinkish hue as the season goes on. If it lasts into early autumn the petals may turn pinker still, although some of the flower heads have already started to dry out.
Behind it I have three pots of azaleas, and I only noticed a couple of days ago that the ones on the left and right have completely dried out. Only the middle one is still alive. I will need to take them out and check the roots to see whether there is anything left to save. That is the downside of the hot weather we enjoyed so much.
The verbena is going over much faster than usual. Looking back at my very first video on the channel, the September garden tour, I think it still looked reasonably good at the end of September last year, and here we are in August. That is the drought for you. It is still bushy with plenty of flowers though, and there is bee traffic on it, just not as busy as a month ago. Possibly the wind is keeping them away today.
Dahlias that will not stand up
I am not going into the kitchen garden in this video, but I have to point out the tomatoes towering above the border. They absolutely loved this weather and the bushes are full of fruit. I think the cherry tomatoes are the best I have ever had. There is one random sunflower that has survived and is only now coming into flower, very late in the season, and a cucumber that decided to grow through into the flower border because I have cramped so much into the kitchen garden.
The hanging baskets hold Supertunia Bubblegum and a white Surfinia, and they are not doing well. They look the way they did at the end of September or even early October last year, so keeping them alive has been a battle.
The dahlias are the real struggle. Burlesque has a freakishly tall stem, taller than the hanging baskets above it. Wizard of Oz is falling straight over and I cannot find a way to support it properly. The ground is so dry, even with me watering religiously, that I think there is simply not enough moisture to give the plants the strength to hold themselves up.
The thick stems left in this border belong to La Belle Epoque, the one I mentioned in the potato harvest video. They were so huge that they covered the garage window and hovered over the hanging baskets, and they were doing real damage to everything around them. Wizard of Oz had no space to grow until I cut it back. Rhubarb and Custard is new to me this season and is lovely, creamy with a hint of red. There are a couple more in that border whose labels I have lost or cannot reach, so I will check back through my planting video and put the names on screen if I work them out.
Roses, clematis and the plants that loved the drought
Queen of Sweden has decided to produce another flower head. It is such a gracious rose, always upright, with stiff stems and the flowers facing the sky. Port Sunlight next to it leans much more, with the heads pointing sideways or down, so there is a real difference between the two.
The echinacea provided huge amounts of interest for bees, and I would recommend having at least one in any garden. The diascia has tiny flowers and is a perennial shrub that you cut down in winter and it comes back, although I have crammed too many plants into that border for it to develop properly. Maybe next year.
The clematis on the garage wall is Montana Alba, and I have trimmed it hard because it was taking over the entire wall and clinging into the flowers. It had completely covered one of the baskets. I think it needs a little more taken off yet. On the arch you can mainly see clematis at the moment, but The Pilgrim is growing there too and has done well, with big yellow flower heads. On the other side of the arch there is a younger climbing rose that we are fighting an aphid war on. I clean them off regularly and they come straight back. It is beautifully fragrant, but it has more thorns than any rose I have grown, on the young stems and on the backs of the leaves too.
I have said it many times, but when it comes to David Austin roses I cannot recommend them more highly. They are generous and beautiful and quite unique. They are expensive, but they are worth it.
And then there is the erigeron, which loved the hot dry weather and is growing out of the cracks in the wall in three separate places. It needs almost no water or nutrients to thrive.
In this video
- Freshly painted decking after four years and one coat
- Potted olive and cherry trees suffering from heat and drought
- The Generous Gardener rose and the wisteria still looking for a home
- A very productive blueberry and two enormous Conference pears
- Losing the whole gala apple crop to pests
- Dahlias too tall and too dry to stand up on their own
- Erigeron thriving in the cracks of the wall
That is how the garden looks at the very end of August. Plenty has struggled this year, but most of it is still hanging on. The biggest loss was the gala apples, mainly because my husband loves apples and had been looking forward to them all season, so I feel that one on his behalf. At least we may still have the pears, once somebody braver than me deals with the spider. Next time I will do a full update on the small but very full kitchen garden, along with the harvest of everything I have grown this season, so do come back for that.
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