Summer arrives in a large box from our local Camden Garden Centre. One of the big bi-annual shopping trips to signal a shift in light and growing season.
We are with my daughter Kala. On the hunt for summer plants to refresh our pots and window boxes. The allotment and Kala’s garden will wait, to be grown from seed we’ll mostly sow a little later.
I think many of my feelings about pots and planting are stuck in the happy summer I worked at Rassell’s nursery in my late teens, selling competitive plants and window boxes to the smart lady gardeners of Kensington.
There will always be deep red geraniums at our house. Some trailing, some not, depending on where they’ll live. There will always be lobelia, always hanging, always dark blue (though we toyed for 10 minutes with thoughts of white when we couldn’t find any blue).
Luckily, Kala’s and Henri’s thinking is more free range. They hunt for cottage garden blooms to grow in rooftop pots. This time including a blue lupin, a bright orange geum picked for a glazed pot we spot, the colour of a Greek island summer sea.
There are daisies and salvia. New homes for plants outgrowing their spots. The terrace will take on a brighter hue, the window boxes will be refreshed. Other plants will be pruned and moved around, maybe given new sites depending on their appetite for sun or shade.
Henri is in charge here. The roof terrace is largely her domain. Her architectural austerity aces my still-teen over-exuberance. As ever though, there will be a happy marriage between plot and pots.
It is one of our oldest family rituals: buying plants together (Kala lives close by), made happy by shared history and the thought of summer. The family that grows together, stays together.
Now, perhaps, your turn: please tell us any summer planting plans.
Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £9.99) is out now. Order it for £8.49 from guardianbookshop.com
