Lavandula
Your lavenders will be coming into full flower now. L. ‘Hidcote’ and L. ‘Munstead’ flowering stalks can easily be cut just as the blooms start to go over. Tie the stalks together in bundles and hang them upside down in full sun in a shed to dry off. Once the old flowers have become dry and brittle you can shake and pull them off their stems to create bowls of sweet scented lavender in the house. Lavender is also an excellent deterrent to hibernating flies later in the Autumn if living on window catches.
Dwarf Alstroemeria
These plants make excellent container or front of the border plants and will flower until late autumn. You can pull the flower spikes to bring the flowers into the house, and this will encourage the plants to flower again. Leave some on the plant to finish in the garden, and as the flower spikes finish pull the dying spikes out from the base to promote new flowering shoots.
Aquilegia and Digitalis
These plants produce enormous quantities of seed and will self sow themselves perhaps too widely into your borders. You can however readily save the seed for sowing elsewhere by cutting the flowering stems just as the seed pods start to turn brown. Lie the stems on newspaper in the sun and the seed heads will pop open so that you can shake the seed gently out.
Lilies
Keep check on your Lilies in containers or open ground for the red lily beetle. These can decimate plants over night. The only real cure is to catch and destroy this fast moving pest.
Hemerocallis - Day Lilies will begin to flower now and carry on right through the Summer. If you look closely at the individual flowering stems you will find several buds at the top alongside the flower which is actually out. If you pick over and deadhead your Day Lilies regularly they will save their energy for new flowers rather than setting seed. Deadheading will greatly extend the duration of flowering and the number of flowers actually produced.
