Guides · Garden year
Your garden in July
6 of the 32 species in our plant database ask something of you in July. Everything else in the garden can be left alone, which is half of what a calendar is for.
Most monthly garden advice is written for nobody's garden. It says "prune shrubs" in a month when pruning half of them costs you next year's flowers. What follows is the July row of our own Garden year: each job attached to the plant that asks for it, from the same database the Dossier is built from.
July, plant by plant
| Plant | What July asks of it |
|---|---|
| Sweet cherry (Prunus avium) | Prune the cherry now, in dry weather, straight after the fruit. |
| Cotton lavender (Santolina chamaecyparissus) | Remove the yellow flowers if you want the silver to stay clean. |
| Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra) | Keep it damp; it browns at the tips the moment it dries out. |
| Yarrow (Achillea 'Terracotta') | Deadhead to the next bud for a second flowering in September. |
| Hardy geranium (Geranium × oxonianum 'Claridge Druce') | Shear the whole plant to 10 cm after flowering; it refoliates in three weeks. |
| Blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum 'Andega') | Pick, then cut out the stems you picked from. |
Every job here comes from that species' own entry in our database — the same rows that build the Garden year in a Dossier.
The whole-garden job
- 01Do nothing in the heat except water the first-year plants.
What not to do
- 01Do not plant anything at all. Wait ten weeks.
- 02Do not prune in full heat: cuts scorch and stress shows for a year.
Next month: August. A Dossier includes all twelve rows, written on your plants — and on the first of each month we email you that month's three jobs.