Well things never stand still in the garden, especially in the summer time sometimes at the speed of a snail & sometimes as fast as the wind as we will see! Here are just a few highlights of what’s being going on in the Reveley Lodge gardens this summer so far…

We have had a good year in the rose garden, and although the first flush with it’s heady perfumes and soft colours has already past, but we are awaiting the second flowering. Although the Rose Garden was planted with mostly old rose varieties, the rose garden was carefully planned to have a number of the later Old Roses which were developed to produce the much desired second flush! Such as the Portland & Bourbon roses. So there is still much to look forward to.

We are trying to develop the rose garden by underplanting with Stachys byzantina  and Stachys lanata with their soft “touch me“ leaves. We grew these  from seed in the greenhouse. Also adding Nepeta “Six Hill Giant“ and “Six Hill Gold“ for a softer fill look.

The vegetable garden is in full swing as you would expect. We have tried to pick varieties for both colour as well as for taste, for example a red tasselled mini sweet corn beside Purple French Climbing Beans. And although much has been relatively fast growing, one of our snail harvests has been our garlics, which was started in October and lifted at the beginning of July and won’t be available till August.

We tried 4 varieties: Carcassonne Wight, Solvent Wight, Vallelado Wight and Elephant Garlic. At the moment they are all curing in the potting shed and will be ready for sale later in August. It is always interesting to see which plants do well in a garden and which, for whatever reason, don’t. Vallelado Wight was our clear winner, each head producing big fat cloves, but as they say, the proof is in the pudding, so we will just have to patiently wait till they are ready.

And finally sadly in the recent summer storms we lost the very old apple tree beside the ‘Secret Garden‘ , it collapsed very unexpectedly. I think it must have been over 100 years old. It had rot issues which couldn’t be seen externally, but also it was having a bumper crop of apples. Added to this, the weight of the very heavy rains was just too much for the old tree to cope with.

Sad but true. I hope you continue to enjoy you garden and the rest of the summer.

Rory’s Blog

9 August 2017