The slugs have eaten the dahlia, and left mere skeletons of the martagon lilies I planted, but they’ve mostly left the toad lily alone, so I’ve got something flowering there at least!

The season’s first red leaves.

Slugs are bastards (together with deer) and they’re the reason why we can’t have nice things in the garden.

Bought and planted ground cover to fill in between and under the sad-looking aronia bushes.

The weather forecast promised rain for today, which was quite perfect. Ulriksdal garden centre is always busy on beautiful days, but during this gray morning there were no queues and no crowds, and I got my shopping done in record time.

A few light drops fell while I was planting, but I got everything in the ground before the real rain arrived. And then it did, and watered all my planting. Perfect!

As for the bushes themselves, the current approach clearly isn’t working. I’m going to start over and prune them heavily, and hopefully that will make them branch.

Five years on, the mixed flowering hedge is delivering mixed results.

Some parts, such as the spireas (on the right in both photos), are bushy and voluminous and looking like a proper hedge should.

Others are thin and scraggly. The aronias (on the left in the first photo) are looking almost as small as they were five years ago, not at all like aronia hedges are looking on the internet. You can barely even see them in front of the flowering quinces in the background. The Dasiphora/Potentilla (on the left in the 2nd photo) have gained a bit of volume but didn’t do well under the weight of the snow this winter. Neither is bushy enough after all this time to overpower weeds under them.

Today I did yet another round of weeding under the weakest sections of the hedge. Tomorrow I’ll fill in with ground cover.

On the one hand – some of these bushes have been disappointing. On the other hand – three cheers for a mixed hedge! I’d be so much more disappointed if I’d gone for Dasiphora all the way, and all of my hedge was looking like this.

Eight weeks of summer, five weeks of vacation, and I’ve barely touched anything in the garden. There’s always something else to do. I’ve got too many hobbies and interests I’m trying to keep up with, and something inevitably gets neglected.

As a result, parts of the garden are looking rather weedy. But here the weeds are all pretty, self-seeded perennials from the planting spreading to the cracks between the paving stones. And some actual weeds as well, to be fair.

The new planting is doing well! Almost everything is thriving.

The Tiarella is flowering. The deer ate some of the flowers at first but then mostly left them alone.

The Physocarpus is gaining some colour. It’s probably not going to be as strongly bronze-coloured as it would be in the sun, but it’s hard to find colourful bushes that like shade! Even if it just has an orange tint to some of its leaves, it’s going to be nice.

One thing that isn’t happy is the martagon lilies. Something has eaten holes all over the leaves. It remains to be seen if they survive.

Poppy flowers are so red that it feels like a visual glitch, like burnt-out pixels, like a hole in reality.

I love bleeding hearts/Lamprocapnos. They are so beautiful, both from afar and up close. Why are they not in every single garden?