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GARDEN GROW? How does your
Anna Taylor, owner of Anna’s Flower Farm in Audley End, shares what’s going on in the garden this month
T hese weeks between the Whitsun bank holiday and midsummer are some of the best of the year. Frothy hedgerows, air warm on your skin buzzing with insects and golden hour late into the evening are a few of my favourites. I can work all day on the plots, with time for a late dinner and hanging in the garden. This is where it pays to have a seat just where the last of the sun hits your face. When planning yours, benches, loungers, tables and my personal favourite, hammocks, should be used to best effect dotted about to catch those rays. You’ll only know this by living with and observing your garden for a good year, otherwise it’s guess work. A bench for morning coffee in the sun at 11am, lunch under dappled shade in high summer and ideally a spot to lay almost horizontal on these balmy, dreamy evenings. Add in some scented honeysuckle or pots of sweet peas, and you have created a little heaven for yourself.
garden with colour for the next four months or more. I’m planting my favourites: nasturtiums, nicotiana and coreopsis in pots and gaps in the borders. There are many vegetable seeds to grow now too, such as lettuce leaves, annual herbs with runner beans and peas. I grow these to fill gaps while providing texture and interest to planting, especially in productive flower beds. There is one job not to forget though; that’s sowing biennials! Get it done today and feel smug for the rest of the summer. Foxgloves, sweet williams, wallflowers and honesty will be going to seed now, so collect the seeds and sow straight away. These plants must be germinated now (I sow into pots, prick out into modules in July) to ensure root balls are developed enough to plant
ONCE AND FLORAL Start sowing biennials now to set the stage for next year’s blooms
out in their final spaces in September. Biennials flower little in the first spring but the year after will be glorious. These are brilliant but oft-forgotten plants that bridge a tricky gap between spring bulbs and early perennials with the larger summer ones. They provide great foliage and the prettiest scented plants from April through to now. It’s the last sowing job to do, then you can get back to enjoying your garden knowing you’ve already started next year’s flowers! Anna Taylor grows cut flowers for buckets, events and weddings on Anna’s Flower Farm, Audley End, Saffron Walden. You will also find her teaching or designing gardens and planting schemes from a studio in the centre of the plots. Follow more of her writing on her Substack, Floral Notes
© ANNA TAYLOR
MAIN IMAGE © ANNA TAYLOR PORTRAIT © CHARLOTTE GRIFFITHS
Great design is all about creating these spots of sensual idyll
river swimming at Grantchester, picnicking on the meadows or on a rooftop terrace. There are still plenty of tasks; this month, it’s a tidy-up job. Yellowed spring bulb leaves can be cut down now, annual planting out finished off, staking stems before they need it and tying in wayward tendrils of climbers. A grass cut after ‘no- mow May’ makes everything look gorgeous when the grass isn’t tired yet; even the fluff of weedy beds looks soft and joyous. With the threat of frost now passed, tender plants can perform and fill the
Great design is all about creating these spots of sensual idyll. Gardens are to be experienced – notice where it is nice to sit, consider the vista from the kitchen sink, some scented shrubs to enjoy when sticking the bins out in the winter. Anticipating these moments makes the mundane delightful. It’s like soft towels, a bud vase of flowers and a pile of good books for a guest bedroom. June brings that with abundance, so I want to be out in the garden at every possible moment. If not, then out by the
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