The white flowered form of Rosebay Willowherb (Epilobium angustifolium 'Album') seems to be the bumblebees' favourite plant in the garden at the moment.

 Nice to be pottering in the garden for the first time in a while.

 The enormous Echium in the front garden is still flowering two months on from the last time I wrote about it (11th. May). Most of the thousands of tiny flowers have gone to seed but there are still enough to attract a constant coming and going of honey bees.
 I'm happy to say it became something of a local sensation with many passers by stopping to look at it and quite a few people made a point of coming to see it when word got around!

 The back garden is pretty overgrown by this point in the year (in a good way). It's more flowery in spring and early summer but certain plants do their thing later in the season like the Acanthus mollis under the apple tree. Tall spikes of white flowers with brownish/ purplish bracts emerge from the mass of large, leathery leaves.

 The Privet hedge is a feature of gardens up and down the land- the fragrance of the flowers is one of the evocative scents of summer. Generally the species grown is Ligustrum ovalifolium which came to us from Japan and Korea originally. Our native L. vulgare is better for wildlife but L. ovalifolium is more amenable to clipping and shaping hence it's popularity.
 It does attract bees and there is a great deal of it so it's worth holding off with the trimmers until the flowering has finished. Perhaps your neighbours will peek out from behind their net curtains and tut but never mind.

 Babington's Leek bursting into flower.

 I'm interested in ideas like forest gardening, companion planting and intercropping. In a small way I experiment with them on the allotment. For example the Runner Beans are underplanted with Nasturtiums. The groundcovering Nasturtiums form a living mulch retaining moisture and suppressing weeds (and are an edible in their own right). The Runners climb above them.
 The next bed has three rows of Broad Beans, mostly Bunyard's Exhibition which is a tall variety (about 4 feet/1.2 metres). Once they got going I seeded the bed with Phacelia, the fast growing annual often used as a 'green manure'. It doesn't grow as tall as the Broad Beans so I speculated they might co-exist reasonably well. Then I noticed a lot of Borage had self-seeded from last year. I love Borage so I was loathe to weed it out. Broad Beans have a tendency to flop and there is a school of thought that says plant them close together to support each other. I hadn't done that but the thought occurred to me that the Borage growing among them might have the same effect.
 The combination of the three might work or it might not. Little experiments like this are what intrigues me about growing plants.