A border of summer annuals - July

My new annual flower bed, with cosmos, stocks, cornflowers and my first zinnia
of the season

You know what they say, one person's loss is another's gain.  In this case it is four bushes lost, a summer annuals border gain.  I have posted before about how we ripped out the front hedge consisting of four raggedy bushes and were left with a lovely big border just ripe for the planting.  I put in three wigwams of beans and a couple of lines of dwarf but this still left me with plenty of room for other things.  And if that wasn't enough the mother then decided to cut into the grass and expand the border to make something a little more pleasing on the eye.

One of my beautiful marbled antirrhinums, nestled in next to my runner beans 

If you are a long-time reader of my blog, you would be aware that since January I have in effect been running an annuals breeding programme.  On cold cold Saturdays I would be huddled in my garage, pushing seed after seed into compost, dreaming of a beautiful summer display.  As this started pre front border emptying I figured I would just find holes for all these annuals here and there amongst the established plants.  That plan would not have worked.  I probably have grown around sixty plants of various varieties, my supply of nooks and crannies is not that endless.  They would have been tucked away and hidden.

It really has the feeling of a proper cottage garden, with a mixture of vegetables and
proper old fashioned cottage garden flowers.  Here is glorious bright red runner
bean flowers with white stocks

But not now.  Now they have taken centre stage in my garden, in full view of the road and all my neighbours, and I think it looks rather good.  Plants I managed to get in fairly early are happily flowering away.  At the other end my beans are also in flower surrounded by more annuals and then I have just put in my last plants in between.  There are also around fifty gladiolus bulbs in this border, when it is all out it should really be a joy to behold.  The first two spikes of gladiolus have just shot up so I am expecting flowers very shortly.

My border is full of these lovely dark burgundy cornflowers

Why did I grow all my annuals in pots rather than just chucking the seed in where they are to grow? Not in my soil they don't!  Nothing but aquilegia grows from seed in my heavy clay soil.  The task is too hard.  They do much better if they can be allowed to get established and then I leave them to the mercy of the clay.  I have given each plant a little sand around them to help improve drainage, and they seem to like it enough.  The great thing about this bit of soil is that because it had large bushes in it with extensive root systems, the soil is not too compacted and digging a few inches down is comparatively easy.

I am thrilled with this zinnia, its just the most beautiful colour.  I have several varieties
so there should be a good mix

Among my varieties are cosmos, zinnias, cornflowers, antirrinum, scabious and stocks.  I did not deliberately co-ordinate the colours but they do actually all compliment each other.  I will be doing individual posts on each variety, saying what I think of it and close-up pictures, that kind of thing, but I wanted to show the border as a whole as it is at the moment.  It is pretty today, but I hope it will change and morph across the next month and look different but equally pretty in a months time.  I will share how it has changed over the next month at the end of August.