This Month in your Garden - June

But Shakespeare also says, ’tis very silly to gild refined gold or paint the lily’.

Lord Byron

Spring ends and summer begins in the month when the Magna Carta was signed and the summer solstice is celebrated. Of the very many flowers the rose is the birth flower for June but for real head turners lilies can steal the show and, even if you didn’t plant any back in March, you can pick them up at the garden centre in pots for instant display on the patio. Let the show begin by putting out your summer bedding now the frosts have passed.

Plant up containers and hanging baskets or if you have them growing on in the greenhouse you can move them outside to their final position. For more colour sow seeds of annuals but if you have areas of overcrowded hardy annuals thin them out.
Talking of seeds it’s easy to grow perennials from seed such as aquilegias or ‘granny’s bonnets’, lupins, hollyhocks, delphiniums, oriental poppies and many more in a nursery bed and plant out in the autumn for next year’s display. Keep an eye on training roses and vines before they get out of hand, lift overcrowded bulbs that have flowered, trim hedges, divide auriculas, arabis and perennial candytuft, plant out tender bedding you’ve held back, dahlias, begonias, salvias…steady on.

Remember if you haven’t been out doing all this for a while don’t try and do it all at once. Take some time as well to sit back and enjoy what you have created, preferably with some of those strawberries and clotted cream and a nice glass of wine.

• Lift and divide clumps of snowdrops and bluebells when the leaves yellow
• Cut back bulb foliage when it’s died down
• Stake tall perennials
• Pinch out Fuschia tips to encourage growth
• Lift and divide overcrowded bulbs
• Tie in and train clematis and honeysuckle
• Sow Brompton stocks and forget-me-nots
• Lift and divide June flowering irises
• Start to bud roses later in the month
• Sow wallflowers, sweet Williams, Iceland poppies