A June Garden, in Three Palettes
June is the month a British garden looks most like itself. Three palettes for the early-summer border — roses underplanted, a garden of spires, and oriental poppies while they last.
The Month It All Arrives
June is the month a British garden looks most like itself. Everything that spent spring as foliage and promise comes into flower more or less at once — roses against a warm wall, foxgloves leaning out of the shade, the last alliums holding their colour as the first delphiniums open behind them.
There's more to do this month than there is time to do it, so we're less interested here in the list of jobs than in the picture they add up to. What follows are three palettes for June: combinations worth planting, cutting, or simply standing in front of for a while.
Roses, Underplanted
June is the rose month, but a rose alone is a stiff thing — a bloom on a stick. What makes it sing is what you grow beneath it: the froth and haze that hide its bare legs and soften every edge.
Underplant climbers and shrub roses with Nepeta 'Six Hills Giant' for that lavender-blue blur, Alchemilla mollis for acid-green froth, and a hardy geranium — 'Rozanne', or 'Mrs Kendall Clark' for something cooler and greyer. Leave the spent allium seedheads standing among them; they hold their shape long after the colour has gone, and they earn it.
Keep it going by deadheading to the first true leaf below each spent flower, and feed after the first flush. A rose in June is only halfway through its year.
A Garden of Spires
If roses are the garden at rest, the spires are the garden in motion — the verticals that draw the eye upward and catch the wind on a still evening.
Plant foxgloves at the back of a shaded border, where Digitalis purpurea will seed itself about for years, or 'Sutton's Apricot' for something softer and more deliberate. Set delphiniums where they'll have something to lean on, and let verbascum and the tall alliums — 'Purple Sensation' early, the great seed-globes of Allium christophii later — punctuate the planting below.
If you want foxgloves next June, this is the month to sow them: scatter the seed where they're to flower and leave them to it. Stake the delphiniums now, before the first heavy rain finds them lying flat.
Poppies, While They Last
The oriental poppy is the most extravagant thing in the June border and the most fleeting — open one morning, blown and gone within the week. It's worth growing precisely because it won't wait for you.
Plant Papaver orientale 'Patty's Plum' for that bruised, smoky mauve, or 'Beauty of Livermere' if you want the full pillar-box red. Set them among geums — 'Totally Tangerine' carries the heat on into summer — and the last of the bearded irises, and let the whole corner be louder than the rest of the garden for a fortnight.
When they've finished, cut the lot back to the ground. They'll look like nothing for a few weeks, then send up fresh foliage and, often, a second smaller show. Feed, mulch and water once you've cut them down.
Three palettes, and a hundred small jobs around them — the watering, the staking, the deadheading you do almost without thinking on your way past. June rarely asks for much at once. It just asks often. Plant for the picture, and the picture mostly looks after itself.