Take stock of your garden now & plan for next year

August can be a challenging time in the garden as it’s an in-between stage in the flowering year.  Many of the early summer-flowering shrubs and perennials have finished and normally (although not the case  this year due to hot dry spring!) the later-flowering plants haven’t quite made an appearance.

Now is the perfect time to take stock, make notes and plan what needs to change next summer.  If you leave it until the spring it’s quite likely that you’ll be hard pushed to remember exactly what it looked like during the previous summer.  Taking pictures of the garden each month will really help as they provide a scrap book of the changes as they occur throughout the seasons.

My garden is in its second year of flowering since it was planted and because of the early late-summer flush there are a lot of blue/lilac flowering plants dominating the show at the moment.  Taking photos will enable me to reassess the planting again in the spring when I intend to add a few more plants to lift the colour palette.

I have also taken note that the asters really needed to be staked when they started to come through.  A couple of heavy downpours sent them flopping to the ground and now they’re starting to become a little unruly!

It is also a good time to assess whether you have any gaps in the planting beds.  In my garden, for example, we had to take down a robinia tree earlier this year and although we have replaced the tree, the planting area beneath could really do some additional interest.

The planting conditions have also changed because the shade cover has gone and this means that the skimmia are looking a little over-exposed to direct sun…

The shade will return eventually, but I may need to rethink the area for the interim period.