Great to be back in the garden but so much work to do

You play, you pay, says my neighbour.

What she is referring to is the fact that while I was away in Europe for a month (playing), my garden was suffering and languishing from neglect.

And when I got back, there was a mountain of maintenance to do to get the garden back in shape.

I always expect to find leaf debris everywhere. Fallen leaves, dropped dead flowers. It takes me a day to sweep everything up.

But I am always surprised by how disappointed I feel to have missed certain flowers at their peak – alliums, bluebells, rhododendrons as well as the Welsh poppies and magenta flowers of my favourite ground-hugging evergreen geranium.

And then there are the weeds. Where did they all come from. Morning glory is such a sneaky pest, wrapping itself so insidiously around everything that is great and good, like my towering lilies and weaving its creepy way around clematis and the stems of shrub roses.

I have been working hard these past few days just getting things back in shape.

Watering has been a priority. Everything is alive and well but there clearly was not enough rain over the past month to keep everything in the style to which it is accustomed. I spent a morning just watering pots and borders.

But there were some pleasant surprises.

I wasn’t expecting my pyracantha arch to look as nice as it does with its white blooms at their peak.

And I was glad to find the two pillars I installed last year – one with honeysuckle around it and the other with a golden hops vine – have filled out and look pretty happy.

The garden is also full of the remnants of Allium Purple Sensation but there are loads of Allium bulgaricum everywhere. Where did they all come from. I think they must have been in soil I moved from one spot to another.

The hummingbirds love them.

One of the treats of working quietly alone in the garden of a morning is having a hummingbird stop by very close to sip from the upside down cupped-shaped flowers of these beautiful, unusual nodding alliums.

Next step is to add some summer colour plants to a few key places such as window boxes and flagging containers.

swhysall@hotmail.com