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Monday, 11 June 2018

This Month in Your Garden – June

It was June and the world smelled of roses – Maud Hart Lovelace


It’s fair to say with June 21st being the longest day of the year that summer arrives this month. We had that wonderful taste of summer in May, then the rain.

Sprinkle with light and more warmth and the roses burst forth to join the fragrant chorus of the June garden. And joining as well in this lustrous impact of scent and colour come the weeds. Well, you didn’t honestly think it would be all romance and no work, did you?

But the weeds can be more easily controlled if you get them soon enough and the ubiquitous hoe run over the bed will kill off most weed seedlings without the need to resort to a chemical weed killer. The trick is to choose a dry day with a little wind so the seedlings dry off on the surface and don’t re-root.

Now back to the romantic side of gardening at your own pace, sowing and planting here and there, maybe some Campanula carpatica, anemones, Alyssum and dahlias and begonias. The garden centre is awash with a sea of colourful choice at the beginning of the month, but wait too long and your options diminish, so go along and fill your trolley with the sweet- smelling and the sublime.

Hang out those hanging baskets, take cuttings of pinks, pot on cyclamen and repot auriculas, sow primulas, polyanthus and pansies for autumn colour, prune spring flowering shrubs and Clematis Montana....take a break and, as always, enjoy your planting and what you have planted and remember, in the words of Janet Killburn Phillips: ‘there are no gardening mistakes, only experiments’.  

  • Plant out summer bedding
  • Be water-wise
  • Cut off faded flower trusses of lilacs, rhododendrons and azaleas
  • Tidy Oriental poppies after flowering
  • Plant containers
  • Train climbers
  • Sow aquilegias, lupins, Oriental poppies, hollyhocks, delphiniums 
  • Stake tall and floppy plants
  • Examine grafted fruit trees for signs of scion growth
  • Start to bud rose stocks
  • Cut back aubretias, arabis and perennial candytuft in late June
  • Start to prune gooseberries, red and white currant bushes



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