What a strange old month June is freezing winds and baking hot days in the garden. Those walls sure can reflect the heat when they want to!
We did have a flurry of excitement with the discovery that our visiting ducks had made a home on the pond and raised 9 ducklings.
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A few days later we had a reminder of the cruelty of nature when I returned to work to find Mother duck trying to get her remaining 4 ducklings to climb through the grill in the wall to move to safer accommodation. The tiny ducklings couldn’t leap high enough to follow her so I spent a busy half hour trying to catch them to reunite them with their mother.
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It’s amazing how quick they can move even at this size.
Sadly I was unable to find where the last duckling had hidden himself and by this point mother duck had moved on. So ‘Bill’ remained on the pond and we fed him part of our lunches.
A few days later and mother duck was back calling loudly with no sign of the rest of the ducklings and Bill, cheeping back was still on the pond. Bill is no longer there, we can but hope the Mother duck returned for him. Nesting close to nests of Red Kite and Buzzards did not prove to be a good idea.
On a more positive note our replanting of the garden continues with a bed which was previously full of invasive garden mint being mulched and replanted. The theme of this bed is large leaves with unusual Telekia speciosa at the back with it’s yellow daisy flowers in late summer and Astilboides tabularis whose round leaves are supposed to grow to the size of a dustbin lid.
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Variegated Hosta ‘Twilight’ brighten up this shady spot too.
Other beds have had pockets of replanting to replace lost plants and are looking much brighter now.
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Siberian Iris and Dicentra Valentine with perennial honesty in the background.
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New pink persicarias join the foxgloves and masses of Allium christophii.
We have been working on the bed next to the shelter this week, clearing the mass of willowherb and mulching our clay soil for moisture retention. We already have Tetrapanax and a mass of Romneya coulteri or Californian Tree Poppy in here and we are building on this tropical theme by adding ginger lilies or Hedychium. We also planted the large leafed foxglove tree, Paulownia tomentosa, New Zealand Flax and the honey spurge, Euphorbia mellifera. Most of these plants came from our plant swap with Stackpole Walled Gardens.
The veg garden is now pretty much planted up and will be a more floriferous potager garden this year with Zinnias and a new orange Cosmos ‘Bright Lights.’ We just need the cold winds to ease and then the soft leafed plants like our poor runner beans would be able to get going.
Your donations mean that we will shortly be doing some more maintenance works to the garden. We hope to be able to re-open the doorway (which was closed due to the doorframe being completely rotten) by the summer holidays.
I also did a presentation to Sainsburys Lampeter last week in the hope that The Ty Glyn Davis Trust could be their partner charity for the next year, we haven’t heard back yet, but fingers crossed.
We will also be hosting two events in the garden for local charity DASH in the summer holidays. If your charity would like to visit the garden or have an event here in conjunction with us please get in touch.