My garden in Fife, Scotland

I took these photos of my garden on the 5th of August.

my garden , Fife, Scotland

The combination of a few hot days followed by some really terribly wet days has resulted in a lot of lush growth. You know what British summers are often like – two hot days followed by a thunder storm. Just a few days after I took these photos we had the worst thunder and lightning storm in the east of Scotland that anyone could ever remember, it lasted for at least twelve hours and towards the end of it our house actually shook, it was more than a wee bit disconcerting. Remarkably my garden survived unscathed.

my garden, Fife, Scotland

August is traditionally a bit of a slack period where flowers are concerned, often the mid summer blooms have gone over and the late summer plants haven’t got going yet, but my garden still has quite a lot of colour within it.

my garden, Fife, Scotland

If you look at the tree in the top right of the photo below you might be able to see some apples growing. This tree had been sheltered by a large native honeysuckle at the time of the May air frost which killed off the pear and plum buds. Failing to cut plants back sometimes ends up being an advantage!

my garden, Fife, Scotland

The perennial sweet pea which is flowering in the photo below is becoming more thuggish each year. I really should pull it out, but I know that I’ll never get rid of it all. I like the flowers but sadly they have no scent, unlike the annual sweet peas, and I have a feeling that the plant is choking anything else that’s growing near it.

my garden, Fife, Scotland

At the moment our garden waste bin men aren’t coming as regularly as they used to, so whenever the bin has been emptied by them it’s no time at all before it’s full up again. This has been curtailing my garden tidying somewhat – well that’s my excuse! I must admit though that if I hadn’t had a garden to potter around in during the lockdown I suspect that my mental health would have suffered. There’s something about the combination of exercise and the thought processes that you go through when gardening that are just perfect for balancing life out somehow.

16 thoughts on “My garden in Fife, Scotland

  1. Your garden looks so lush and colorful! Because I live in the state of Florida where we routinely experience severe thunderstorms every afternoon during the summer, I forget that other parts of world don’t experience them often. It does sound like you had a really bad one if you felt your house shaking! I actually find them fascinating and comforting, in a strange way, but not if there are high winds, too. We need the cooling off every day and the rainfall to keep our sandy soil moist enough to grow things. Thanks for the lovely photos.

    • Paula,
      It’s almost always windy here but not during that storm so it hung over us for 12 hours just going off a few miles and coming back. I enjoy them but that one went on just too long. Unusually it featured sheet and forked lightning at the same time.

  2. Absolutely lush!
    In the photo with the apple tree, what is the lime-green conifer-looking plant in front of it?
    The perennial sweet pea is rampant! I remember trying to get it established when I lived in the country, and how annoyed I was when the sheep and goat got into it. Left unmolested by livestock it does grow profusely.
    Must have been an epic thunderstorm, I’ve read other reports of spectacular lightning and rain.

    • Valerie,
      The lime-green conifer is actually a type of heather, it’s about 2.5 feet tall so quite big, mind you I do trim it so don’t know how big it might get and is really more golden and has white flowers. I can look up the actual variety if you want. It must be somewhere among my plant labels. A sheep would be handy now and again to keep the grass and sweet pea down!

      • Ah! Would it be something like Erica arborea ‘Estrella Gold’?
        I must keep an eye out for it or something like it, very striking.

        • Valerie,
          I think it probably is Estrella Gold, it is a tall growing heather so must be a tree heather and it’s good as it doesn’t get bald at the bottom as so many heathers do.

  3. How pretty! I always enjoy your photos of your garden. We are experiencing abnormally dry conditions. Our grass is burnt and everything looks a bit faded and dusty. We need rain badly. On the plus side, for my son at least, the yard hasn’t needed to be mowed in weeks!

    • Jennifer,
      You should see if you can borrow a book by Beth Chatto, she didn’t water her dry garden so you might have a better chance with plants that she recommended. Jack is now the grass cutter since he retired and he hates it! It does grow very fast here.

  4. Just lovely, Katrina. I would love to have a garden as lush with greenery and flowers as that.

    I agree with you that gardening has really helped me keep centered in the last few months, and I am happy that I have been motivated to work on it so much. We have a much smaller area of course, but I am relearning a lot about gardening that I had forgotten.

    • tracybham,
      Thanks, but you might not like the amount of rain that leads to all that lushness!
      My garden isn’t at all big but by modern garden standards it isn’t bad, some houses we looked at had just enough space to put up a garden rotary drier. I couldn’t stand having something that small.

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