My Garden in June Part 2 2026

The garden is looking spectacular, everything is in full flower, the fruits and vegetables are all in flower or early fruit. It's jsut a shame it has been too hot to sit in the garden and enjoy it.

We've finally got round to cutting the fir tree down and hoping to be able to transfer it to the front garden along with the hydrangea, along with the rest of this soil to finish levelling the front lawn off and create a hedge.

We're being conservative with watering and our more needy plants are in the shade.

I'd not realised how many of Stephanie's roses had bloomed, they've now been dead headed. They smell so beautiful.

The water butt is almost empty and no rain is forecast for another week. The overflow containers have been empty for ages now. We're already using the washing up water for the front garden. I want to get another water butt for the house extension to be able to collect more rain water.

We had a fab day out to Hidcote in the Cotswolds with Mary and her son last weekend. I love visiting gardens to get ideas for ours. It was the planting combinations that I was interested this time and I identified lots of plants in full flower that I'd been pulling up out of our front garden thinking they were weeds. 

Obviously everything one sees in these gardens has to be scaled down when one tries to replicate it and I'm not sure most of these ideas ever work. However, I can replicate these ideas.

My garden in June 2026 Part One

 The pots are doing well, bulbs have all finished and been cut back, autumn bulbs planted and all now weeded. Herbs thinned and planted out into the raised beds.

There are grapes on the vine.

The raised bed is doing really well, this is only two weeks apart.

I pulled the cornflowers up before they went to seed.

Then planted the second bed up.

We've just let the front garden grow, weeds and all, it's now been thinned out a little. It's been fun watching the cow parsley grow, it was a tall as me, before we pulled it up.

The red hot poker came and went.

We've had quite a few strawberries from plants that are 6 years old. The cherries are on their first year and are so sharp.

Second year with the apple tree, first year we may get some apples.

Second year for both the tree and fruit. 

Stephanie's namesake rose on the left, highly fragranced and 'In loving memory' on the right.

Finally the pesky squirrels are back digging up. their nuts.

My Garden in May 2026

Peter has been working hard in the garden in May. I've been supervising.

He's painted recoated the shed and the raised beds and set up a watering system on the raised beds for me.

With the extension pipe fixed on the wall in the back garden it's made it a lot easier to water the garden now.

 I've been using this Ikea planter for the over run from the waterbutt and fill up the watering cans and use them first to water the pots and collect rain water in this buckets. The neighbours child came round needing rainwater for a new house plant he had bought.

The brick wall under the canopy is going to be clad with wooden panels. Peter is measuring up this week. We're going to display my late fathers random collection of road signs, car parts and pub memorabilia and I want to put up some hooks for coats, a chalk board and some other random items.

The last job for the back garden is to move these path over to the left, it's for aesthetic purposes only, but the fir tree, jsut in the shot needs digging up and a lot of soil needs to be moved to the front garden, o it can wait a bit longer.

We have some gorgeous flowers blooming and some buds waiting to flower. I hope I don't miss them as I'm in Northern Ireland this week. I've asked Peter to send me some photos if they do.

The neighbours rose bush in the front garden and it smells divine.

May is of course the RHS Spring Festival in Malvern. My friend came with me on the Sunday. I also visited on the Thursday after work.

There were interesting talks with TV gardeners and chefs

Fantastic blooms

Fab displays

Gold medal gardens

Lots of ideas to take home and recreation, if not on a smaller scale.