There are things in the garden which are beautiful for months on end, and there are the things which flare briefly into gorgeousness for a matter of days and then subside for another year. June is full of the second kind of things.
At the moment, the oriental poppy ‘Patty’s Plum’ is unfolding – every day a new flower, and more buds this year than any years since I planted it. This is one of my favourite things in the garden: that amazing subtle colour, a dusty, smoky, warm violet, and the petals that unfold like crumpled silk skirts being shaken out. In two weeks it will be over for the year, but the anticipation of its arrival starts when the first fat buds begin to form in early May.
Next to the rose arch in the front, a nameless peony which I planted by mistake – it was supposed to be a red one – but which I now can’t move for fear that it will suffer a setback. It could be Sarah Bernhardt, but maybe it’s too white and not pink enough? This also took years before it flowered, but this year it had thirteen buds – it would have been fourteen but I knocked one off accidentally – and waiting for the fat round buds to emerge into palest pink ruffles is also a joy. Once they emerge they last a few days and then they’re over.
Lots of my roses are repeat-flowering – the Lady of Shalott, in the front garden, has been known to bloom from February until December if I deadhead her diligently – but the Variegata di Bologna rose blooms only for a couple of weeks, with gorgeous white flowers splashed, Jackson Pollock-style, with crimson.
And pretty much over now until the next year, the iris germanica. I can’t remember any of the variety names, but I have about six or seven and this year only two bloomed – a deep purple one in the front garden, and a pale blue one in the back garden, with the most amazing and surprising scent.
They come, they are beautiful, and then they’re gone. Other things last longer – the repeat flowering roses, the dahlias that produce hundreds of blooms from July until November, the verbena bonariensis which is full of bees all summer long. But the things that give just a few moments of glory give as much joy as the stalwarts of the late summer garden which give months of pleasure.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. – T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Belle de Londres 
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