A friend texts me as I sit down to drink my Americano with hot milk (… ironic isn’t it that it would be simply called coffee were we were at home?). “Would you like me to show you what a fully grown Cardoon looks like?” she helpfully enquires. Whilst thinking up an appropriate and grateful reply, I remove an ancient fluorescent cycling top covered in black marks (no memory of THAT happening) and plant the helmet on a chair.
Some days before, I’d shown her a youthfully exuberant Cardoon plant on a ‘tour’ of the garden. Recently grown from a tiny seedling, its leaves were becoming alarmingly large, albeit full of slug munched holes. By pure chance, within a matter of days, I was introduced to another specimen, comfortably established in its surroundings. The grown up ‘muscled up’ version dwarfed all but the trees and berry bushes around it.
Imagine, if you will, a garden that would barely accommodate a couple of rotary clothes dryers, already overflowing with late flowering blue, purple and pink Geraniums so prolific that they have covered what lawn there used to be. The blue geraniums were a great find last year, donated by kind chatty women at a local stall. As a result, for the first time in over a decade, beautiful blooms thrive in the north facing borders, where previously only weeds would grow. Consequently, access to the garden beyond them now requires a skill in hop scotch at the very least.
I’ve been plagued by a nagging sense of guilt for some years now, having failed to provide the healthy blooms that our precious ‘busy buzzing friends’ need to thrive. I guess that I’ve missed out too, as I do so love the myriad colours of the rainbow as well as the lush green jungle of Canadian Creeper, covering every inch of sun-bathed fence and shed around where I like to sit.
So now that most of the Montbretia grasses (also known as Crocosmia in the UK) are lying horizontal, exhausted, weighed down by fluorescences of delicate vivid orange flowers, and the rocket is going to seed, sprouting a sea of yellow flowers that seem particularly popular, judging by the humming gradually growing louder as each one opens. And the Poppies, Cornflowers and Cosmos are crowding each other out in their tiny border plot; I am determined that every flower has its chance to see out the summer.
Okay, so I may be overdoing it with the one-woman campaign to ‘save the bees’. However, as the Cardoon plant, bless it, is going to need a whole garden all to itself to spread out into, it is sadly going to have to find another home.
