At this time of year, is there a plant to compete with Dahlias when it comes to variety of flower shapes and sizes and sheer exuberance of colours?

My last journal provided a glimpse of this year’s autumnal Chelsea Flower Show. Although the organisers say this is a one-off occurrence due to covid, maybe there is a case for repeating this in the future, from time-to-time, to keep things fresh. There are a lot of flowering plants that run on through the summer, sometimes well into autumn and Chelsea show-cased many of these. In a sense these plants ‘hold back time’ – just what many of us need as we start to think gloomy thoughts about the warm weather coming to an end!

The days are shorter … the mornings are becoming crisp and misty … the summer is sadly almost over. However, I must admit that autumn is my favourite gardening season - there is something wonderful and warming about autumnal colour hues. They have had time to blend, evolve and mature, giving gardens a sense of harmony. There are still occasional bright and vivid moments, but they don’t clash or compete. They are part of the same story. Done well, they complement the whole.

The summer is in fill swing. Everywhere gardens are full of bright colours. A particular favourite for me are the tall hollyhocks – growing along boundary edges and even out of cracks in pavements – creating great towers of almost every colour. Some reach almost 2.5m in height, popping up suddenly above garden walls and hedges. I like the cottage garden look that is becoming more popular – where nature is given more of a free run. Less lawn and more plants. Hollyhocks suit this perfectly.

With this glorious weather we have had recently, we have loved our countryside walks. Roadside verges, hedges and fields full of wild plants and flowers, provide the habitat loved by bees, butterflies, and all manner of other insects.

For the last few years environmental issues have started to have an increasing influence on exhibits at the major UK gardening shows. Allotment gardening, planting for biodiversity, bee-friendly gardening, gardening for physical and mental health, have been some of the issues changing garden design. This welcome trend continued at the Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival that just finished.

Have you had a chance to visit the RHS Hampton Court Garden Festival this year? We have and it was amazing – after the long break caused by the pandemic …. gardens, people, flowers… all in one place! Finally!

The longest day of the year is here. SeeHow Volume 1 has now been available to buy for just over 6 months. This has been a busy time for us, monitoring the growth of flowering plants wherever possible, to compare with SeeHow’s beautiful life-cycle illustrations. We have also been checking peoples’ gardens to see what is growing – thinking ahead about SeeHow Volume 2. Actually, it was really encouraging to see so many plants growing that are in SeeHow Volume 1!

Launching a new product in the middle of a global pandemic – seems a bit surreal – maybe even a little crazy! Of course it was not planned this way. The Seehow garden planning tool has been three years in the making, from first doodles, to the product now available containing 140 beautiful hand-drawn unique illustrations – the building blocks of Seehow that we call ‘plantsticks’.