Highs and Lows of the 2023 Garden

There’s no doubt that the 2023 garden saw some extremes – and not just in the weather, which ranged from unbelievably cold to searing heat.

I’ve had some pride-worthy success and some abject failures, while there are been fairly major changes in the garden, not all of them planned.

Winter was slow in arriving in 2023 – I finally gave up on waiting for frost and lifted my dahlias before they floated away in the endless rain. So, it seems hard to remember those early days of the 2023 garden and the losses that a winter of plummeting temperatures caused.

The difficulty of deciding what to plant to cope with winter chill, summer heat and the possibility of both drought and flood, means I’m still plugging gaps. Is it worth risking salvias or ceanothus?

It’s also why there’s still a space where the box bushes used to be. The box moth caterpillar came back stronger than ever last year and I decided the battle to keep the bushes just wasn’t worth the fight.

What to plant to replace them is proving tricky. I considered yew as I want something evergreen that will ‘frame’ the view looking up from the house but I’m not sure it can be kept small enough. The obvious alternatives of hebe or pittosporum are risky if we continue to get severe winters. Any suggestions are welcome.

Despite a slow start thanks to a cool spring, the 2023 garden was a good one for fruit and veg with bumper crops – especially of cucumbers!

It was the first growing season with my new greenhouse and the extra space was bliss. We’ve put in one raised bed and I filled it with peppers, aubergines, chillies and basil. It was so successful, another bed is going to be installed on the other side.

The small greenhouse was kept purely for tomatoes and it was great to be able to get inside without a machete. The tomatoes were plentiful and there were some interesting new varieties (you can read about my tomato gardening trials here).

The thing I’m most proud of though is growing not one but four melons, two each of two different varieties. Melons are something I first grew years ago but a lack of greenhouse space meant they’d not been tried for a while.

Among the flowers, there was a surprise. I grew Antirrhinum ‘Mango Twist’ (seed gifted by Mr Fothergill’s) expecting it to be orange-peachy shades. It turned out to have flowers that were a vibrant mix of red and orange. Striking and not what I had planned for the border where I planted it. It just shows you should read up on plants before growing them.

Sunflowers are a favourite and I had three different varieties in the 2023 garden. ‘Toy Shop’ (seed gifted by Unwins) was a mix of double and single blooms on short plants. ‘Pro Cut Plum’ had wonderful dusky pink flowers while ‘Italian Green Heart’ had lovely pale lemon flowers with green centres (seed for both gifted by Chiltern Seeds).

There were a few more new flowers as part of my Gardening Trials. This dainty cosmos (seed gifted from Thompson & Morgan) had really pretty flowers though I found it wasn’t the easiest as a cut flower due to the number of buds on a stem – I know you should take those off but I never have the heart to do that.

Marigolds are a favourite but this mix – Calendula officinalis ‘Sherbet Fizz’ from seed gifted by Chiltern Seeds – didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped. I found the flowers went over quite quickly and it was slow to rebloom with the plants getting scruffy quite early on in the season, although it may have been due to the weather or grower error! ‘Canteloupe’ is still a top pick for me (read about it here).

I hadn’t grown strawflowers for a couple of years and this white version (seed gifted by Thompson & Morgan) was a great colour but, like so many white flowers, died badly, going a rather unattractive brown. I think I prefer the pink shades.

Patience is something you always need in gardening, along with a generous helping of optimism, and I had to wait to see the results of sowing Oenothera odorata ‘Apricot Delight’ in 2022 (seed bought from Chiltern Seeds). It was worth the wait. This evening primrose had beautiful, delicate flowers that were a very pale lemon. Better still, the dying flowers took on a lovely pink-apricot shades. It’s a perennial so I’m hoping for more flowers this year.

Also on my wish list for 2024 is a good display of spring bulbs after a few weeks of planting what seemed like a never emptying box full of them. Hopefully, I will manage to thwart the squirrel and mice this year.

A more settled year of weather with the seasons behaving as they should would be good too. I fear that may be a vain hope and learning to cope with extremes of weather will be one of the biggest gardening challenges.

What’s on your gardening wish list for 2024? Let me know in the comments below.

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