Hello Friends!

Greetings from partly sunny, sometimes damp, sometimes hot, sometimes cool and breezy Finland!! It’s the first week of July 2024. How’s your summer going? I’m hoping very well 🙂

We can’t seem to pick up more than 5cm of rain at a time, whenever rain does happen to cross our garden path. A little here, and a little there – but it does start to add up eventually. Temps have once again slacked off from the warmer temps we eventually managed to get back to after my last post. Between the scattered rain and fluctuating temps, it’s been a bit of a roller coaster here weatherwise. Currently, it’s once again a bit breezy and cool, and we picked up our allotted 5cm of rain today. More rain is forecast through the weekend, but the cooler temps look to be in our forecast for much longer.

Plants look quite happy for the rain, even if a bit droopy – the sun poked out while I was taking a quick walk around this afternoon after the rain had stopped. Breezy and the occasional gust complicates my good intentions of capturing some pleasant photos to share with you. Plenty of bees and bugs enjoying the flowers and pollen opportunities. The birds have been having a field day digging for worms and bugs to eat. Seems some birds are nesting again in various places throughout the garden. Lots of activity and chirping as I was out walking around gathering photos and checking up on things.

Despite being in the garden every day for hours, I manage to see something new or see it in a new way every time I’m out there. I especially enjoy how the sun and shadows through the day contribute to interesting and dramatic variations in the color, intensity and aesthetics of every single leaf and flower. Taking the time to notice these small aspects is at the heart of gardening for me ten years on. There’s a lot of satisfaction knowing other people enjoy seeing the garden, looking at photos, and now watching the videos uploaded to our YouTube channel. I wish you could feel the sun or the breeze on your face as you inhale the wonderfully scented fragrances that intermingle and abound. Sit on a bench to watch the bees hard at work, listen to the birds chirping and see them flitting to and fro.

This is fickle Finland, and our summers can sometimes be a bit of a let-down. Too much of anything is usually not a good thing, and that holds true for cool, damp, dreary weather. It makes for a lot of unhappy campers! Most Finns have ample time off during the summer, and many have access to a summer cottage. At this time of year, Finns are flocking to summer cottages to spend time with family and friends. The luckiest cottage owner has one located on any one of the 180,000+ lakes throughout Finland. Rivers, seasides and ponds also make great places for a summer cottage. Wherever the cottage may be, it’s a lot more fun to go to one and hang out for a few weeks when the weather is warm and sunny instead of cool and rainy.

While I’m delighted our garden and local farmers are receiving some much-needed rain, I’m sorry for the cottage goers and school kids on summer vacation who aren’t getting the sort of summer they were probably hoping for. Instead, they’re having to put up with fickle Finnish summer conditions, which currently are nothing close to hot and sunny. It’s only the first week of July. There’s still a chance Finns might yet enjoy the summery temps and long nights we all long to enjoy. Fingers crossed!

I snapped these photos while taking a meander through the garden this afternoon. I managed to pull off growing some ‘Lauren’s Grape’ Papaver from seed, and have them scattered in various places. The clumps around the Gem Garden are getting quite big and their dark purple flowers really are stunning. I hope they self-seed their little hearts out! 🙂 I will definitely be seeding them again next year in any case.

The Gem Garden continues to delight. The Iris display was still quite good despite the drier conditions we had in May and most of June. Now that they are mostly all done for the year, Delphiniums (larkspur) are showing off like mad. If you have the space for them in your garden, do give them a try. I doubt you’ll be disappointed. As a matter of fact, I saw a recent article where Martha Stewart was showing off some from her extensive gardens. The Clematis ‘Rouge Cardinale’ on the Gem Garden structure is really putting on growth, I have two of them on two opposing sides. Can’t imagine what they’ll look like in the years to come, but even right now I’m loving it!

There are a lot of plump and lovely blooms on several of the David Austin roses. Shown above is a newcomer called, ‘The Ancient Mariner’. How I failed to pick this variety up years ago is beyond me. Luckily, I have three planted in this section, along with three ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and three roses from German grower Schultheis called, ‘Inge’s Rose’. Together, these roses are dotted alongside the gravel path in the area we once had a greenhouse. So, the rose bed got the name greenhouse bed. Sometimes, the simplest name is the easiest! 🙂 For us at least, neither of us will forget the name of this bed anytime soon.

These delightful and cheery blooms are Asters. Specifically, Aster dumosus ‘Anneke’ – I think they’re pretty common throughout Finland and Europe. They are so frilly, I just love them. They are supposed to be a late summer through autumn bloomer, but ours are always in flower in late June, so maybe a plant tag got misplaced at the nursery, and they aren’t ‘Anneke’ after all. Either way, I need to do a better job of keeping them all upright, so better supports are needed for these next year.

As we are now well and truly into July, even if it’s only the first week, hydrangea florets are about ready to pop into full bloom, at least for the ‘Annabelle’ varieties. The ‘Limelight’ are always a couple of weeks later in their bloom cycle. ‘Mustila’ hydrangeas share a similar bloom development cycle with the ‘Annabelle’ type. Eventually, all the hydrangea will join in together and dazzle us for the remaining months and moments of Finnish summer with their incredibly beautiful blooms. For right now, this is just a sample of how they’re looking at the moment – nearly there. Soon, all those florets will form into the mop heads of this variety and be ginormous globes of blissful beauty!

Now imagine there are close to 180 hydrangeas all over the place. They really do steal the show for the rest of the summer, right into the first frosts of autumn. We definitely recommend the ‘Limelight’ variety for flower bloom and stem structure, these just cannot be beat. So happy with their performance and what they bring to the garden. It’s my guess the day lilies will start flowering next week or so, I saw a couple tell-tale early blooms today. Since there are now so many of them, they too really bring a lot to the table in terms of structure, dependability and bloom performance. I’m really thrilled to have quite a few putting on some heft. Someday I will probably complain about having too many and will have run out of places to put all the divisions, but for now that’s a long way off!

I made a large batch of German-style potato salad earlier, since it was a rain-out for garden tasks. I think I’m going to go and enjoy another little sample! Pekka hates the stuff, which means there’s all that much more just for me!! :DD YUM

Hope your summer is off to a good start wherever you are. I will give it another go for a fresh video midway through July, so keep an eye out for that if you’re at all interested. You can link to the channel above.

❤ Until next time!