The front garden is at its best after 6pm when the sun has dipped low enough to lose most of its bleaching power and colours return to their full saturation.
Between the rugosa rose in the foreground and the byzantine gladioli there’s a bit of an unplanned hot pink theme happening.
Which I have decided to run with, bringing into the mix a pot of magenta pelargoniums that were beside the back door.
Although a rather shocking shade of pink, the wild form of gladiolus byzantinus possesses an elegance which eludes the trumped up modern hybrids. The hot pink spikes would be lovely punctuating a meadow as they must do in their native habitat Turkey. Hopefully this modest clump will be happy enough in this spot to multiply.
On the other side of the path, the cotinus ‘velvet cloak’ is looking like something out of a dr seuss story. I had originally planned to keep coppicing it and grow it as a shrub for its foliage, sacrificing the flowers which erupt in puffs of smoke at the ends of its branches. But have changed my mind because I’m loving its gangly limbs, especially when they sway in the breeze.
