It looks colourful and luxurious enough from up here in my study but that garden is getting out of hand.
I have a small town garden in Lewes, England, that I have built from scratch in the last four years.
It is now showing its true colours at this, often the most unruly time of year for plants that have been left to riot and loot. Not so my new favourites, the vanilla scented and vividly coloured heliotrope plants that are currently adding their perfume to the whole garden.
They have made a richly textured impression outside my French windows, their colour nicely contrasting with the sky blue cornflowers that I grow from a few casually scattered seeds.
Elsewhere the rioting is in full swing and those clematis plants, once my idea of a subtle filler between the climbing roses, have decided that the world belongs to them.
In their youth, they looked so shy and well-behaved and, in those days, I could still see the lovely old flint walls.
The passion flower has the same tendencies even after the harshest of Southern English winters when I thought it could not possibly survive and when I even wasn’t sure if I wanted it to.
The roses, originally the main idea, are still flowering away in there somewhere but the time has come for a radical change…..
…not only is there less and less room for the roses but I am beginning to wonder where I fit in too so the clematis and the passion flower, sorry loves, you will have to go.
