My Garden Journal May 2021

This year seems to be going so quickly with the complications of changing Covid complications and such mixed up seasons.

Rapidly changing weather patterns have confused the garden with the plants and the wildlife being confused and impossible for us to predict.

I began my May entries into my garden journal by writing, “May arrived loaded with strange and widely varied weather. Within the first ten days we had experienced sunny warm days interspersed with storms of rain, snow, frozen rain, hail stones and thunder and lightning.”

However looking around our patch revealed many effective plant partnerships. Here is just a small selection.

On the following page I considered that old cottage garden favourite the aquilegia and I wrote, “The first perennials to burst into life after the flowering bulbs of spring are often the aquilegias, some of which we plant as named cultivars and others that self-seed wherever they wish. But they do choose good places!”

My painting of a striped tulip was the subject of the following page, which I created using Japanese Brush Pens.

The next double page spread features flowering shrubs and alliums. Concerning flowering shrubs I noted, “Every month different shrubs come into flower to add another layer of interest to our garden and to provide pollen and nectar for our insects.”

“Here is a small selection of our flowering shrubs in the garden in May”

My next page features alliums and I noted, “As the last of the spring flowering bulbs need dead heading, alliums take over, mainly flowering in shades of purple with a few white such as our Allium ‘Everest’ in the gallery below.”

The final double page spread features succulents, firstly a page of photos of a few of my collection and then a coloured pencil drawing of one in flower. Here I wrote, “We created a ‘xeroscape’ garden last year for our ever increasing collection of aeoniums. These special succulents glow in shades of reds, purples and greens.”

The photos below show just a small selection of my collection of aeoniums.

I finished off my entries for May with a coloured pencil drawing of one of our succulents in flower. Gasteria glomerata sends up a single fine stem which displays its delicate coral and green flowers.

And that is it for my May entries in my garden journal for 2021. I shall return to look into it in June.