June Garden Tour with Focus on Irises

Hello folks and you are very welcome to this June garden tour. Now it's the 1st of June today and the irises are in full flow and I do love my irises. Well I have various types, large, tall, bearded ones and also Dutch irises which I can't wait to show you. Now normally irises they're in full flow in May but this year they seem to be particularly late and well it's June now and the garden is looking fantastic. So come with me and let's have a look at what's in flower and what's looking good on this 1st of June. And here is my very first iris, a beautiful bearded one called Dance Ballerina Dance that I bought years ago from the National Collection at Procellions in France. Now if you're new to the channel you may be wondering what kind of climate I have here and it certainly is a very windy day today. Well I garden in what roughly equates to as hardiness zone 9. Now we don't use that system in Ireland at all so just take it as a general guide for what I might get through the winter but not in terms of what my summertime sunshine levels might be like. And if you're old to the channel and I don't mean old I just mean if you've been here for a while then you are very even more welcome, it's always great to see people coming back. They say that May is the in-between time, the time after the tulips have finished flowering but before the main bulk of the perennials kick into flower and therefore you can lack a certain number of flowers in your garden and that's why I urge you to plant irises because irises do an amazing job of bridging that gap. Irises like the beautiful Superstition which is almost black and also the Dutch irises are invaluable for injecting a bit of colour, a bit of movement certainly in this kind of wind and a bit of class into the garden in May and into June. What's not to love with these fancy flouncy dresses, almost like a ball gown, the bearded irises are really number one for glamour in your garden in May. If you're thinking of introducing some bearded irises to your garden then I'll link at the very end to my guide on how to grow them because they do need to have a bit of space so that their rhizomes can be baked by sun. Now you might think in Ireland we don't have enough sun but we have enough to give these plants what they need in order for them to flower. However if you don't have that kind of space then maybe you'll consider Dutch irises. These are great for just sticking in between plants and injecting a bit of colour in places where the perennials haven't yet gotten going. And if you're wondering how to deadhead irises because you do need to to make sure that the new flowers can come through and be seen properly then there is no real mystery to it. What you can do is take a secateurs and just cut across. Now I am leaving the seed pod in place because it's just easier to take off the flower without having to worry about getting all of the seed head off and potentially breaking the new emerging flower. And that's okay because once the spike has finished flowering I'm going to take the whole thing off so the plant won't get a chance to set seed at all. I'm very fond of the combination of irises with this Lenaria Peachy. This is possibly my favourite perennial in garden at the moment because it flowers all summer long. Now it's supposedly a short-lived perennial so I was just delighted to see it come back again next year, bigger and bushier than before. The Lenaria is just beginning to open now but I really love the combination of the tiny tiny Lenaria flowers and the big blousy bearded iris ones. And this arrangement is accompanied by a geranium, a hardy geranium but a double hardy geranium and there are very few hardy geraniums that have double flowers. One of which is this called Summer Skies. It flowers just once and then kind of needs to be cut back but it is beautiful when it's in flower, almost like a wedding bouquet. And now we'll move a little further into the garden and have a look at that border that I revamped last autumn. Now you may recall how last autumn I did a really big revamp on this border here, taking out a lot of plants that just weren't working for me. And the result is I have space at the back which I have populated with a lot of Canterbury Bells which are a biennial plant and this is going to look absolutely amazing when these come into bloom. And here's a look at my Bog Planter which I planted up with Candelabra Primroses a while back and these are looking fantastic at the moment. And over here is my second favourite Linaria. Now this one is a self-seeder which is brilliant because I have little plantlets popping up everywhere in the border. Well not in a weedy kind of way but they're just amazing for digging up, putting in a little pot, growing on a little bit and then dotting elsewhere. And this beautiful bush over here is called Jovalana. I think it's from Chile if I remember correctly but it is very reliable in my garden and comes back year on year with these beautiful vaguely mauve coloured bells. And I've had to kind of support it a little bit this year because it's gotten so big. I'll give it a little haircut after it finishes flowering. I'm a big fan of irises. The bearded irises are magnificent but the Dutch ones are so versatile because you can just plant them in those little gaps in your borders and I will be ordering more going forward. Now in all truth not all of the ones I planted last autumn came through because we had a very very dry spring but that's unusual and shouldn't put you off growing them. And if you are thinking of planting some Dutch irises in your own garden this autumn then you can pre-order now from Bulby, my favourite website. And don't forget the discount code of Dwensetown to get you 10% off the cost price. So let's take a quick look at my pot displays because I'm sure you want to know what happened to the dahlias that I ordered earlier on in the year and potted up. And here right at the front we have calla lilies and beside the calla lilies we have a martican lily that's been in a pot for oh I think maybe about four years now at this stage. I just keep feeding it, give it some slow release fertilizer and it keeps on flowering. Every year I think I really need to put that in the ground. And over here we have half of the dahlias that I potted up. So in the middle we have two pots of tartan in here and then on the side one we have the tall white one called Petra's Wedding. At the very front in the middle we have the white Playa Blanca which is doing really well and which I must stake today before the wind gets them. And at the very edges we have Nui Dete which was the black cactus flowered one. Yep it really is a blustery day today. And in we go to the main part of the garden. And this is my long border just before it bursts into flower. It's going to be so orange. Lots of annuals have gone in there this year. But I want to talk about the euonymous and you can see that there are several yellow balls punctuating the border and kind of echoing the colour as it goes down. And this my dear friends is my recommended substitute for box or boxus. Now as we all know box blight is a real problem and box caterpillar is also a problem making it not very wise to plant box in the garden at this point in time. Now I do have a video on how to deal with box blight which I will link to at the end and in the description down below. But if you are starting out and want something that is going to be a bit formal and can be clipped neatly then I highly recommend euonymous which is this plant here. If you don't like yellow there are green and cream variegated ones but this is such a great plant. It needs clipping once a year and then it really is no trouble at all and completely pest and disease free. Now the RHS have done studies on what is the recommended substitute for boxus for box and their recommendation is some kind of podocarpus which I have no experience of so I won't say anything about it. But what I will say is that my recommendation is euonymous because it is so trouble free and just gets on with it. Euonymous does better in sun than it does in shade. Well what happens in shade is that it grows more slowly as you can see with this guy here. By the way the geranium coming into flower at the moment is the beautiful Anne Thompson, a wonderful one that will flower all summer long. And in this little corner here we have a variety of things including lupins. So at the foot of the lupin is a sub shrub salvia. Now these are one of great ones that are quite hardy in Ireland. Sometimes we let them go a bit long, we let them get a bit too woody and in that case you can cut them hard back. But, and this is very important, do it at the end of April, the beginning of May, not in autumn and not any earlier. So this one was cut back just before I went on holidays and you can see that it is re-sprouting nicely. Over in this corner we can see that my cardio crinum has come into flower and we have five of them in flower at the moment looking absolutely magnificent. And this of course is a lily that's beautifully scented. Right down here we have the first roscoa to come into flower and this is a gorgeous little cutie that I absolutely love seeing arrive every year. It's flanked by this spreading sedum that always causes a stir when people come to visit. Now as you can see here at the front the acer is having a battle with the sedum and I don't know who's gonna win but they do look nice together. This is such an excellent sedum if you want something to cover a large space and to just keep the weeds down. And a little bit further over here in what was originally my mucky corner we have a fox glove called Pam's Split. Now you all know that Pam's Choice is my fox glove of choice, I just absolutely love it. But I'd also heard about this one called Pam's Split and it's something that's sprung up from Pam's Choice but the petals are split and it just gives it a little bit of an interesting variation. Now I still want just white fox gloves in my garden but if Pam's Choice and Pam's Split hybridize and produce something else, well I don't mind that too much at all. I'm certainly not allowing any of the pink ones to get in here because we don't want a mucky color in the mix. Over here we can see the martigan lilies just coming into bloom. This is a lovely white variety that just seeds about, I mean I think the pink one seeds about quite well as well. I originally got the white and yes that's what I have in my garden and I love looking forward to these lilies early on in the season. And over here we have a very large sambucus that actually this was a seedling that sprung up in the garden somewhere, so a seedling of thundercloud although it has less manners than its hybrid parent. And one thing a guest recently pointed out to me that I'd really never noticed myself before is that this one has white and pink flowers on the same bush. And here we have the first of the mock oranges coming into bloom. Just a little bit further up the garden we can see my intersectional hybrid peony, the first of them has opened its first bloom. And there's the second of the roscoas to come into flower. And up here at the top of this border we have one of Pam's choice, the foxglove called Pam's choice, the original. And is it the best? I don't know, we'll have to see which one grows taller. And this bush or tree, caenocalicanthus actually now I think it's been renamed to calicanthus, is in full flower and looking fantastic. This has got to be one of my favourite shrubs, the flowers are just so showy. Well we're nearing the end of this garden visit and I just thought I'd show you my crocus lawn which had become my Dutch iris lawn and is now being cut down. So I guess I had better go and help my husband do that rather than standing here yapping to you guys because it will certainly need to be raked up. Now if you have a crocus lawn you don't normally leave it this long because the die back much earlier but because I put Dutch irises in it this year I certainly wanted to see them flower. I'm not prepared to leave this lawn for longer for the irises to gain goodness from the sun in their leaves and to build up their bulbs because I don't think they'd come back anyway. But anyway there you go that's what's happening. And over here we can see the alliums coming the big one is gladiator and my clematis montana draped over an old tree stump is also still doing well although the pink one called marjorie is doing better than the white one now at this stage it's hanging on for longer. Oh and I nearly forgot to show you this herbaceous peony in full flower and this is a quite a common one really called bowl of beauty that many people have it's gorgeous and it opens with the flowers like this and then they kind of become a whole ice cream double fruity looking thing absolutely gorgeous this is the one I moved a few years back and it flowered the following year and has continued to flower every year since it just loves its new sunny position. And that brings me to the end of this garden tour of course I have a handful of weeds with me whenever you go around the garden you see the weeds that were forgotten anyway thank you for watching and if you enjoyed this video then do give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing and I will see you in the next video bye