I missed #SixOnSaturday yesterday, but I do have 21 snaps to share for Midsummers’ day. Inspired by Roy Ayres, ‘Everybody loves the sunshine’ and his lyric about ‘bees and things and flowers’ in the sunshine, here we go…

1. Nasturtiums, with the blurry bum of a white tail bumblebee just visible in the centre of the bloom.

2. The remains of the mullein flower stems were a feast for a couple of mullein moths.

3. A lovely yellow rose, with a tiny bee, which google suggests is a masked bee

4. Knapweed, with a carder bee and a leafcutter bee

5. Wild carrot – we’ve got loads of this in the wildflower patch, the flowers are sweet and the bees seem to like them. (Bee not shown in this snap as it had buzzed off)

6. The pond is looking perfectly clear, and we’re lucky to have lots of damselflies around when the sun shines.

7. For Tony Tomeo, here’s the yukka, living by the garden bench under the apple tree and getting ready to flower again.

8. Also for Tony, here’s a snap of the copper beech. The woodland trust notes that copper beech is Monoecious, meaning both male and female flowers grow on the same tree. The 20th century gardener Russell Page said in his book The Education of a Gardener “Nothing destroys the harmony of a garden more than the dark blotch of a copper beech”. I think that Page was wrong, and I like the dark blotches of dark leaves, and we’re planting more of them around the garden as I happen to like those dark blotches that occasionally catch the sun and glow red.

9. Here’s a Japanese maple, we planted by the bench and bird bath. It’s another lovely dark sploge to annoy judgemental 20th century gardeners. Beneath that is a swathe of ‘fishmint’ which has pretty white flowers and spreads like wildfire.

10. Speaking of things that grow fast, here’s the wisteria on the pergola.

11. This is the bench, which is often occupied by the cat.

12. Above the compost bay and the laurel hedge is the holm oak, a splendid evergreen oak in next door’s garden that we get to enjoy as a wild wisteria winds its way through it.

13. The property next door garden belongs to an old folks home, which was once a rather grand building with a fancy garden. This includes a lovely large ash tree that looms over the pergola, providing a proper sense of scale.

14. Back at the bench, we have a nice little bit of colour wheel contrast here, where the yellow sedum flowers and the purple lavender are bright against the little striped rock. This was pretty much unplanned, but I like it. 🙂

15. The raised bed under the beech has been cleared and seeded with a mixture of annuals by my lovely husband, let’s see what comes up, from a ‘woodland mixture’ of wildflowers, California poppy, nasturtium, stock and aquilegia.

17. Out front, this morning the sun was catching the rich purples of lavender and clematis.

18. Out back, the pots by the back door are a quirky collection, with the nasturtiums stealing the show.

19. The little jasmine by the back door is a garden survivor that has travelled with us from place to place for many years, and when it begins to flower it seems like meeting an old friend.

20. Now we are in midsummer, the garden path is practically invisible, and impassible without collecting a variety of seeds on your clothing.

21. And finally, we have some wonderful wild strawberries that invited themselves into a corner of the garden, they’re sweet and very cute.

So, that’s my 21 garden highlights for the 21st of June, midsummer’s day.

Have a lovely summer

J xx