Small English Garden July Tour! Gorgeous Dahlia Blooms, Pretty New Poppies, Rose &

We're greeting the bees and enjoying the breeze. Filming the high summer highlights that please as well as sharing the flaws no one sees. Good afternoon and welcome to our small garden in Kent, South East England. I'm leading you through the summer flower throng to introduce an elegant lady, fragile yet strong, understated yet alluring with blooms to beguile. Our poetic muse, beautiful dahlia Honka Fragile. Also known as star dahlia, orchid dahlia or windmill flower, my personal favourite is cartwheel dahlia which is how it makes one's heart feel. The blooms of Honka Fragile bear eight slightly recurved and gently rolled petals radiating from a generous central yellow disc, often accessorised with a big bounty-seeking bumblebee. Pollinating insects are drawn to the pollen and nectar-rich flower disc and the open centre provides easy access. The starry petal form and exquisite pink staining make this an irresistibly gorgeous flower. I first saw them growing in a container on a comfort break taken during a long car journey west last September and this rather hurried photo taken on the way to the loo probably doesn't do the composition justice. But I could not get those eye-catching flowers out of my mind so come early spring I was hunting online for the cultivar name. I discovered the original Honka was a soft and uplifting yellow and now there is such a colourful collection of varieties in this sculptural form including Honka Pink, Honka Orange, Honka Surprise, Honka Red, Veroni's Obsidian and Destiny's Teachers. It is rather dangerous looking up any Dahlia on the web only to find oneself sucked into the vibrant and diverse Dahliaverse. With its stars, suns and planets of endless beauty, colour and petal architecture stretching into infinity. But after a trip around various seductive galaxies I managed to stay focused on my guiding star and settle on the name of the beautiful flower I was seeking, Honka Fragile and purchased two tubers. I've never grown Dahlias from tubers before and the process has been so much easier than I expected. They arrived at the end of March and I planted them into three litre plastic containers of peat-free multi-purpose compost with the small section of last year's stalk facing upwards. It is the collar around this stalk where new growth will emerge from the eyes. I covered the tubers with compost so that the tip of the stalk was just visible and watered thoroughly as instructed to initiate growth but only once until green shoots appeared. To protect the tubers from frost every night I moved them into the pop-up overwintering tent with the Agapanthus and Salvia. By day I returned them outside to a sunny patio spot because the tent seemed so humid. I was concerned the tubers might rot. A shed or garage with a light source or a window sill indoors would do until all risk of frost has passed. Or you could plant them directly into a bed, border or large container once the garden environment is frost free. In May I transferred the leafy looking plants into one large patio container. So in fact this is not a single elegant lady but the perfect pair and they work in a very harmonious way with the white Agapanthus. It's a really pleasing and charming partnership. To extend the flowering season for as long as possible we need to regularly deadhead flowers and their immediate stems back to a lower joint. This prevents plant energy being expended on seed production. Honka Fragile likes full sun, moderately fertile, moist and free draining soil or compost. Grows to 80 centimetres high by 40 wide or 31 inches by 16 is lightly fragrant. In containers allow at least 12 by 12 inches or 30 by 30 centimetres of root space per dahlia. The RHS advise a weekly high nitrogen liquid feed through June and a weekly high potash fertilizer from July to September. Oops that's not something I've done yet but it's now top of the to-do list. These are great plants for impatient gardeners due to their fast growing nature. Staking with canes may be necessary however ours have resiliently withstood high winds without support. Hardy to minus 5 to 1 degrees Celsius or 23 to 34 Fahrenheit. If your location is not mild enough for overwintering outdoors after the first frost lift and store tube is indoors in a cool dry dark place. Our standard hollies in the box with doughnuts either side of the bench are in need of a crisper profile so I've got the shears out and I'm mindful that temperatures are set to nudge 30 degrees for the rest of the week so this is a pleasant pruning job for a relatively cool day. I plan to cut a mounded canopy with a horizontal base and now that the holly blue butterflies have emerged from their chrysalides and there are no birds nests in the dense foliage it's a good time to get trimming. The hollies have not put on a great deal of growth this year probably due to the exceptionally dry conditions so this is a relatively light leaf cut. I love topiarizing it is really satisfying and so therapeutic it's my favorite job in the garden. I'm not a perfectionist and the two hollies have a slightly different growth habit so they are going to be sisters rather than twins. In the winter months I will be able to squeeze past the hydrangea to cut any excess growth at the back but while the hydrangea is in leaf and flower there's no passing space. Once I'm happy with the shape it's time to get the bucket and hand rake to gather up the trimmings. An unintended payoff is that I'm also raking out a few box moth caterpillars that were eating the boxwood doughnut. On to the second holly standard. A clematis tendril has grown into the canopy so I'll just move that safely out of the way of my blades. These hollies are over 20 years old and provide lovely evergreen architecture during bare winter months. Here's the before and after. It's a subtle change but having a tighter shape in the space helps balance the very loose and unconstrained feel of summer features like the tumbling hydrangea waterfall. The mirror holly on the left also sharpens its surroundings and helps emphasize the elements of symmetry in the design of the garden. Here's the wider garden view before shaping the holly standards and after their trim. As I said before sisters not twins this was a thoroughly enjoyable little task making a subtle but quietly impactful change. As a fervent appreciator of blue-toned foliage and flowers I was really intrigued to see what the amazing grey annual poppies started from seed in spring would look like and the smoky lavender grey petals do not disappoint. These ruffled flowers are truly captivating but amazing grey provides an amazing array of colour. We find that with any cultivar of the native field poppy there's almost always a scarlet petaled poppy popping up in the mix just to jolt the senses from soft focus dreaminess to intensely sharp clarity and it makes one appreciate the subtlety of the nuanced hues all the more. Apart from the scarlet interloper amazing grey seeds produce a soft colour spectrum including antique lilac pink blooms which I think I love as much as the grey form even though we are not exactly short of pink in the garden. They are completely delightful feeling modern yet nostalgic at the same time. We also adore the stylishly elegant pearly white petaled flowers which seem to be the colour of choice for the bumblebees and suddenly a change in the light can reveal captivating grey and lilac undertones. Plants producing lavender grey flowers with full double petals are darling with a wonderful tissue paper texture but do not seem as floriferous as the other plants so every brief bloom is extra precious. We germinated amazing grey on the windowsill indoors in March. These poppies are fully UK hardy but our slugs take a liking to the young seedlings so we start them off for a month or so indoors growing them in root trainers which offer the depth their taproot likes and thinning to a single plant per cell by choosing the strongest looking one. They are cutely hairy little things which is how I can distinguish them from our Lauren's grape poppy seedlings which are smooth and hairless and which have grown into even bigger and bolder poppy plants of beauty. On our garden tour last month you may have watched me potting on some opium poppies called Lauren's grape which we'd grown from seed. I got a little distracted by a World War II spitfire flying over the garden but now this poppy is in flower it's hard to drag one's eyes away from the jewel-like gorgeousness of the generous deep plum chalice of petals held above large glaucus ruffle edged leaves. The poppy seed heads are also very attractive. Each flower is short-lived but supremely glorious. We've positioned one plant by our Buddleia Summer Beauty which also bears deep plummy blooms against cool tone leafage so the pair work as a very effective and pleasing combination. Made all the more striking by the contrast with the bright foliage of Salvia josh. Zingy josh has a few scarlet flower spikes but will not truly hit its stride until September. To the left of the poppy stands our birdbath. It might not look overly clean but that's because it is too fragile to scrub vigorously however I do disinfect the bowl regularly with a hydrogen peroxide solution to prevent the spread of avian disease between our feathered visitors. Along with our small frog pool it is an essential water source in the garden for birds feeling the summer heat to cool down in and drink from. This bath is over 25 years old and for much of that time following an incident with a football the baluster has been bound together by electrical tape camouflaged with daubings of acrylic paint. The tape covers a crack that grows a little larger every winter. I expect each frosty season to be last and it really is about time I researched a more robust solution to fix it because I love its clean classic form. It is a gorgeous design no one has even noticed the very basic make do and mend and this year Lauren's grape is a delightfully effective distraction as are sleeping butterflies in the buddleia who won't have far to travel for their breakfast. The opium poppy is also known as the bread seed poppy for the nutritional and flavoursome quality of the seeds celebrated in recipes such as poppy seed bagels and lemon poppy seed cake. But did you know consumption of poppy seeds which do contain a minuscule trace of opium content may even produce a positive result on drugs tests. I think just the sight of them is a gorgeous garden high. I think my favourite time in hydrangea season is the anticipatory stage when the most mature blooms are suffused with pale pink but developing flower heads are still in soft transitionary shades of cream and green. It's so delightful and a charming colour counterpart to our climbing rose Mary Delaney who provides waves of blooms in an ebb and flow over the summer. I've used these floral hoops to try and create a more tiered effect with the flowers so that they are not exclusively at the top of the arch but I am not entirely sure how successful it's going to be. It's something of an experiment. The idea is that by training branches over the top of the curve the rose will generate new upright flowering shoots which has partially worked and the air circulation is improved helping prevent black spot. And yes these are the same floral hoops I used to extend the height of the perennial tulip container when I was potting up my opium poppy back in the June garden tour. If you haven't seen this and are interested I've added a link below. We have one garden visitor who is very much enjoying the rose hoop installation and that's the little robin. It makes the perfect perching place. Robins are usually the first birds to investigate any changes in the garden. Our hydrangeas loved last year's wet summer and are not so keen on the high temperatures and sparse rainfall of 2025. They wilt a little in the peak heat of the afternoon but their tentative June colour wash is now an unapologetically bold pink. The hydrangea waterfall tumbles over clipped evergreen boulders below. The fountainhead hydrangea at the top has very sparse blooms which rather dampens the impact but this is usually the case in dry years and the composition is still a fun feature that makes us smile. The secret this full looking planting area conceals is that the border here is actually only about a metre deep and this hydrangea growing next to the golden-leaved euonymus and in front of the buddleia is actually a bottomless planter concealed by the evergreen foliage allowing a little more space to plant in a narrow strip. Thank you dear friends old and new for joining us here we appreciate your kind support and truly hold you dear. You're a part of our garden now the seeds that grow and flourish your subs and likes and comments most positively nourish. I find myself in a rhyming mood must be the mercury rising today but here friends is our heartfelt message in the phrase you hear me say until next time we wish you all flowerful times and nature-soothed minds.