Clinging on

Bramble & Briar #164

It’s high time the hydrangeas had a haircut

I’m being haunted by last year’s garden. Amelanchier blossom over my head, green froth of spring begining to foam around my feet, but out of the corner of my eye the spectres of the growing season of 2025. The ghosts of perennial plantings past, present and to come, it’s high time I wielded the snips and exorcised the beds and borders – I’ve left it even later this year than usual and, most of the venerable stems have collapsed of their own accord, or been plundered for building materials by the birds, though in places, they remain, even as the new foliage pushes eagerly up and through. If I don’t get snippy soon, there’s going to be an impossible tangle of old and new.

Distracted by the wonder of it all at the best of times (a garden’s not going to stand and stare at itself, you know), I can feel the plants calling for attention while I bend to the hard landscaping (almost there), leaving me just a few days more to appreciate each plant in its decrepitude, at the very same moment it’s exerting itself with vernal vigour.

Spent stems of lemon balm Melissa officinalis catching the light

Lemon balm

I’ve written here before of how the stems of lemon balm manage to hold a volume of air within their bounds, and their seed heads sparkling in as they catch the light. Admittedly this plant it needs a firm hand (it’s high time I reminded it of its allotted space by the judicious application of a spade), but it’s a giver, year round, and I’m always reluctant to lose the height from the border.

Globe thistle Echinops ritro looking decidedly eccentric

Echinops

The passage of time is probably most unkind to the echinops, whose ageing is almost human in its brutal inevitability. It fades at the end of summer, losing its bright blue, but preserving it crisp, spherical structure, but by now it’s lost so much of itself it looks like nothing so much as the head of some crazy, mad old professor. I love it’s spiky energy all year long.

Love it or hate it in flower, the seed heads of goldenrod Solidago spp. are exquisite

Solidago

I wonder if I’ve been too ruthless in thinning the golden rod out. It can, and did run riot, but the growing shade was starting to check it’s progress, and my efforts have almost removed it completely. Still, it pops up here and there, and graces the garden with its fluff through the winter and into spring.

Weedy wonder, you can’t tell me a dock in flower, or gone to seed, is anything other than magical

Dock

Vying with the golden rod for the weediest of the standing skeletons, and winning as a native of this soil. There are few flowers I love more than those of the dock for their ability to split a sunbeam and throw the resulting sparkle straight into the eye of the beholder, and the seedheads do the job almost as well. You might want to weed them out, mine are staying put.

A rangy presence, the hemp-leaved mallow Althea cannabina manages to partially screen the view even now

Althaea

Tallest herbaceous perennial in the garden, that would give a hollyhock a run for its money, and beats stipa, giant scabious and Salvia ‘Hadspen’ from a standing start, these stems stay as a stubborn, contained little thicket, ornamented with short flowering branches and seedy punctuation points throughout. I suppose I need to cut it back now. Maybe I’ll wait a week or so.

I can’t possibly get rid of this till all the birds have plundered it for bedding material to make their new nests cosy

Artichoke

Ours, ‘Violet de Provence’, pretenting to be a cardoon at a height of six feet tall. All other seed heads, with the possible exception of a teasel (and I’ve got some lovely seeds from Milli Proust’s record breaking specimen to sow this year), can go home.

in case you missed it…