“The garden in early summer has a heady sense of being at the peak of perfection – but all good things come to an end”
The days stretch endlessly, the weather tries hard to be good, and your garden has that magical midsummer combination of overflowing abundance, still lit with the freshness and inner vitality of late spring. Summer stretches out ahead in an unbroken festival of floral proliferation.
Well, up to a point. Disregarding what we can’t control, such as the weather and the soil, a great deal of how summer unravels itself in your garden, in the months ahead, will be down to what you do in the critical fortnight or so between midsummer, 24 June, and the middle of July. In effect, it is the end of one season and the start of another, and this transition can itself be awkward. The five-week season of early summer, between Whitsun and
