Monthly Archives: June 2025

What a year!

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The longest day is behind us and the garden is full of flower with a second flush of roses and lilies, daylilies and dahlias in bloom. We’ll sow biennial seeds like foxgloves, honesty, forget-me-nots and wallflowers and – at the end of August – hardy annuals seeds from  cornflowers and larkspur to pot marigolds or some poppies. They’ll all make it through winter to flower next summer.

Much of the gardening, however, will be about keeping on top of the weeds, watering (yes, even with the British weather), feeding and deadheading to keep as much of the garden as productive as possible.

Dedham Horticultural Society meanwhile takes a bit of a breather and some space to look back on the year that’s been and prepare for the programme to come.

This year, it was a pleasure to be able to learn more about designing and building a show garden at Chelsea Flower Show from the designer of the Panathlon Joy Garden, Penelope Walker, and landscaper Mark Richardson of Stewart Landscape Construction.

They were able to take us through the year (or more) of planning the design and the landscaping a show garden requires, to the challenges of finding those perfect trees – and what to do when what you get doesn’t match up to expectations or requirements! Penelope gave us insights into how to make a garden accessible for people with different abilities and how to plant for biodiversity.

Our annual Zoom meeting welcomed Ben Pope, Head Gardener for the private garden of Grayshott Manor in West Sussex. He shared his knowledge of how to create and manage beds and borders filled with herbaceous perennials and gave us plenty of tips to apply in our own gardens.

We learnt how Tim Smit developed the Eden Project, turning it from an old china clay pit into one of the most visited tourist attractions in the UK, and the plants and flowers from this country and around the world that can be found beneath its famous domes. We gained insight into how the attraction has evolved over the years to continue to appeal to people, and about Tim’s other project; reclaiming the Lost Gardens of Heligan.

We welcomed the Ipswich Bonsai Society to give us an introduction to this fascinating hobby and artform. David brought some stunning miniature trees from his own collection and talked about how to turn a sapling found in the garden or hedge into your first bonsai tree. There were tips on care and plenty of questions from the audience.

Brenda Eyes gave two excellent talks on flower arranging, providing demonstrations and letting us put the finished results into our raffle. There were plenty of extra tickets sold on those occasions! She gave us tips for how we could create our own arrangements and the different styles to think about.

If you know someone who gives a great talk on gardening (even just a slight connection to gardening), we’d love to hear from you (contact details on our website). We’d also love to know what might encourage you and others to come along. What kind of garden do you have? How do you use it? What kind of plants do you like?

If you have a general gardening question, why not email that to us too and we’ll try to dig up an answer based on local knowledge (you never know, it might be something the internet and AI hasn’t discovered yet). Maybe we’ll address your question in a future article in the Parish Magazine.

Although our seven speaker evenings took up a significant part of our annual programme, we also held two open shows when anyone can exhibit their homegrown produce and plants for free. It’s very much a village show and we’d encourage anyone who has a plant or two or a small veg patch to have a go. Maybe you’ve a knack for cookery or love taking photos – we have classes for that too. Every show welcomes some people who have never exhibited before and – although it can seem very formal – we’re happy to offer tips to anyone unsure what to do or what makes a good entry.

Our annual plant sale outside Dedham Church in May proved once again that everyone likes a bargain and we sold more than half our stock while we were still setting up! We had plenty of lovely donations from members and other people who had spare plants and vegetable seedlings, for which we are very grateful.

Soon after our final speaker evening in June, most of our members joined us for a relaxed morning of coffee, cake and plant talk in a local garden – the weather just about held after the rain and wind.

Our members also get first refusal of tickets to our annual Christmas Supper and Quiz, and our day trip by coach to a great garden attraction – both subsidised by the Society for its members. We went ‘all out’ for Christmas last year with lights, table decorations, music and silly hats for the committee, complementing the three-course curry supper and entertaining quiz – maybe we’ll drag a tree in for 2025 (maybe).

We work hard to put on such a varied programme of events that is enjoyed by so many Dedham residents and people from further afield. We’d welcome anyone new who’d like to come and learn a bit more about gardening and horticulture (even if you only have a balcony or the odd container or two). If you have a bit more time, we’re also looking for new committee members to ensure we can keep the programme going.

Let us know what you think or what you’d like to see by emailing us at dedhamgardening@gmail.com.

Midsummer’s here

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June is the month of roses, and my garden is filled with a huge range from clusters of small white double flowers to obelisks clothed in single pink climbers.

There are roses on the front of the house and over an arch as you walk to the front door. Every border and bed has at least one rose, ranging from white to pink to red, from cream to yellow. With so many, I will be busy deadheading them throughout the summer to keep them blooming.

The roses are complemented by early large-flowered clematis in pink and deep purple, as well as alliums, foxgloves, delphiniums and the white forms of valerian and rosebay willowherb. My bees are going mad on the pyracantha hedge that floats above one of my fences.

As we approach the longest day of the year, there’s plenty to do and even time to relax and enjoy the fruits of our labours.

The best way to deadhead your roses is to use your secateurs and cut right back down the stem to the next leaf or bud. This will prompt a side shoot to grow and eventually another flower.

You can deadhead other plants of course, both annuals and perennials. The production of flowers is part of how flowers reproduce. When the flowers die, they leave behind seeds (essentially the plant’s eggs) from which more flowers are born. Once seeds are produced, the plant thinks its job is done and has no further need to produce flowers. Deadheading therefore keeps the plant in a state of perpetually giving birth (flowering). I think I might be a bit mad about that if I were a plant and is probably why I come in from the garden covered in thorn scratches.

Although some plants will only ever flower once, deadheading will also work on asters, campanulas, delphiniums, daylilies and scabious. It is especially important for sweet peas, which is why you should pick as many as you can whenever you can so that seed pods aren’t produced.

I love aubrieta for its vibrant purple flowers, which look great against late flowering daffodils. It offers early nectar and pollen for my bees, but by now it can be looking a bit tatty so needs cutting back. Lightly trim your aubrieta if it still forms a quite neat mound, but if it’s straggly with an almost bald centre then it needs to be cut back harder to within a couple of inches of the base of the plant. Make sure to keep it well watered after cutting back and it will put on fresh foliage within a few weeks.

Cut back perennial Oriental poppies too after flowering, taking them back to ground level. Water – you can feed them with poultry pellets or tomato food if you like – and you’ll get new foliage and perhaps even some new blooms. Hardy geraniums (not the tender pelargoniums) can also be chopped back now too.

My wisteria plants have been magnificent this year, and their powerful scent seems to reach all round the garden. Once they’ve finished showing off though, it’s time for their first prune of the year this month.

Wisteria produces its beautiful racemes of purple, white or pink flowers on new growth, so to encourage lots of flowers next year, I’ll need to cut back the whippy new shoots that have grown this season. Prune back to the sixth bud from the base of the shoot. If you’re not sure, cut lightly as you’ll do a second prune in winter when it’s easier to see what you’re doing.

I put some garden pinks (Dianthus) around the beds last year and they are beginning to bulk up so I can take some softwood cuttings. Just pull a non-flowering shoot with four pairs of leaves off the plant using your thumb and forefinger. Use a sharp knife to cut below the lowest pair of leaves to make a cutting 5-10cm long. Remove the lower leaves and dip the base of the cutting in hormone rooting powder or gel. Make a hole in a pot of compost, insert the cutting so the lowest pair of leaves is just above the top of the soil, then water. Pop it in a propagator or under a plastic bag and place somewhere warm, and it should root within 2-4 weeks. Although it can be a busy time in the garden right now, don’t forget to take time to soak up the summer sun this month.