Summer Lost And Found

Manage the midsummer transition from early to late season, with a new pallette of richly coloured plants

- Monty

The days stretch endlessly, the weather tries hard to be good, and your garden has that magical midsummer combination of overflowing abundance, still lit with the freshness and inner vitality of late spring. Summer stretches out ahead in an unbroken festival of floral proliferation.

Well, up to a point. Disregarding what we can’t control, such as the weather and the soil, a great deal of how summer unravels itself in your garden, in the months ahead, will be down to what you do in the critical fortnight or so between midsummer, 24 June, and the first weeks of July.

In effect, it is the end of one season and the start of another and this transition can itself be awkward. The five-week season of early summer, between W hitsun and midsummer, is the high point of the year.

Everything from the beginning of January has aspired to that brief period of glory and the garden has both the careless beauty of youth and an easy maturity. The roses are at their best, irises, poppies, foxgloves, lupins and clematis spill from the borders, and the garden has a heady sense of being at the peak of perfection and yet is filled with the promise of more to come.

But all good things come to an end. The secret and skill is to accept the change and make it work for you and your garden so that the next season, late summer, has all the possible riches and depth that only it can provide. In fact, although I love the blithe glory of May and June, I think Longmeadow actually looks best and really comes into its own in August and September. But it does not happen naturally. Do nothing and the garden slumps, hungover from June’s heady excess. It is time to detox, make changes and introduce a whole new raft of plants.