June 2022. The blue ground cover is Campanula, with rosas hot chocolate and gertrude jekyll behind that, underplanted with fuschia genii. The front of the garden is hedged with lavender. Behind the roses is a white philadelphus (Bel Etoile) and the dark green is sarcococca humilis, for winter scent.

The tree cotoneaster at the corner has Rosa Madame Alfred Carriere climbing up into it. This rose is bonkers - it can do 6 feet in a season. It's been in place for two years, and already has flowers ten feet up into the canopy. Flowers are long lived and well scented, but a bit loose and floppy in appearance. Needs quite a bit of tying in, because it's almost thornless.

A lovely little rose I've planted, called Hot Chocolate. No scent at all, but beautiful flower shape, the blooms last a long time, and it repeats pretty reliably if you keep up with the dead-heading.

This is what happens when you don't keep control of aquilegias self-seeding.

Some mad bugger actually STOLE all the seed pods off my best purple aquilegias this year. All they had to do was ask, I'd have GIVEN them all the seed they could have needed. Sheesh.

An oldy but goody, the hybrid tea rose Alec's Red. Very variable flower shape, prone to stem sag due to large blooms (and balls like crazy, so keep an eye out for brown petals and pull 'em off), but the powerful scent makes up for all that. The colour here isn't quite right, Nikon digicams tend to over-emphasise red tones in any picture and make everything reddish look a little "flourescent".

Should've bought a Canon.

Rosa Gertrude Jekyll. I'm not overly fond of pink, but the combination of scent, disease-resistance, flower shape and sheer flower volume is hard to say no to. I have six of these beauties. The downside is that they're expensive to buy, and fussy about pruning. The key is to prune them to several vertical lengths, to prevent the plant only flowering at the top. Note: prone to suckering... a lot. Plant these guys DEEP.

Amazing what the cameras in modern phones can do, by the way. This was taken with my old Nokia 920. The camera in my current Moto G7+ isn't a patch on the old Nokia.

This Acer (palmatum dissectum 'Garnet') does a half-decent job of hiding my bins. It's been in that pot for at least 20 years.

Agapanthus flower head

The Agapanthus is in a medium-sized pot (will need potting up next year). This is one of the dwarf varieties that doesn't track the sun so much as the taller types, which can twist themselves up something rotten if you forget to keeping turning the pot every day. Even deciduous Agapanthus are not entirely hardy in a bad winter, so I pop it in the garage if a really hard frost threatens.

I had the builders leave some open ends on the screen-block wall so I could make my own planters to cheer up the wall. One afternoon to make new planters every 6 or 7 years, and I can plant bizzy lizzies (new guinea) in summer and pansies in winter.

A repeat-flowering fragrant old rose from David Austin, William Shakespeare. Nice "quartered" flowers, but has a very loose habit, canes can reach six feet plus, and badly needs support. Best avoided. I needed a pick-axe to get this one out.

Our best white rose, this is a floribunda called Margaret Merril. Opens with a pink blush, and fades to pure white. Gorgeous scent. Rather susceptible to blackspot though.

Plant it where you can reach the blooms to appreciate the scent, not where I did, right in the middle of the bloody garden. What an idiot.

I have a rose called Susan Williams Ellis (presumably named after a person) in a pot by the door. The scent is OK, but the flowers are short-lived and drop their petals suddenly in a rather untidy fashion. Makes a good button-hole rose if you're into that sort of thing (g).

This a Rosa Deep Secret, a lovely darker red. The buds are so dark they look almost black. They open burgundy as you can see, then show lighter red toward the centre. Best when half-open, as the centre of the flower seems to glow, as if lit from within. Really needs rich moist soil to give it's best, mine don't fare at all well in the dry soil at the top of the garden, no matter how much I mulch and water them.

My new obsession is dinner-plate dahlias. Because BIG.

It can all get a bit... pink at times though. Have to work on that.