One of the buds on the Sanguisorba 'Lilac squirrel' is starting to open.

This is one of the two plants that were a must have at the beginning of the year for me.

Unusually it is starting to open from the end.

It has been very dry for a long time now, it maybe rained once in June and there was very little rain in May either. The last time that I noted a lot of rain was in mid April.

So the rain today was very welcome, seems strange to be writing this but it seemed to be quite the event at the time! There was a few hours of rain, at times reasonably heavy.

Not sure how long that is going to last, but at least all the garden is now wet, including the bits that I have not being watering.

The forecast is for more warm dry weather for the week, so watering may have to resume at some point.

Weather still dry and sunny, but possible rain for Monday!

Its time to find six things in the garden and wrap them into a blog post as part of the Six on Saturday meme run by The Propagator.

1. Ligularia 'Miss Labelled'

This is my second Ligularia to flower and it has large daisy like flowers. Although the label correctly showed the flowers as they are, but it was named as Ligularia wilsoniana. I realised today that that species has spikes of smaller flowers, not the daisy type.

So, I don't know what it really is. The best I have is that it is Ligularia × palmatiloba which is also known by the even longer name Ligularia × yoshizoeana 'Palmatiloba'.

There is usually lots of tiny black beetles crawling over the flower, but I don't see any in this photo.

Lovely large flowers, apparently some people don't …

This is the plant that I bought at the tail end of last year with a single flowering stem which managed to have a half open flower before the winter cut it back.

This year it has returned as as a much bigger plant with plenty of flower spikes. Here are some of the first flowers. They have a fine delicate frilly edge.

These flowers are lasting well, which is very unlike Sidalcea 'William Smith' which has flowers that seem to last a day or two.

This is my last Geranium to flower. It is a sprawling type and doesn't have a lot of room to spread.

I was suprised and delighted at how great this looked, and I think that the photo isn't showing it quite as splendid as it looks.

Weather as seemingly always is sunny with no rain in sight. The lawn amazingly is still looking quite green, so some moisture is still down there. But I have not tried to cut it short since the dry spell started, there are some shockingly brown lawns around where they have been cut very short.

Today I watered even some of the more established plants as well as the new ones.

This is the eve of my first Six on Saturday, so here goes...

1. Helenium 'Mardi gras'

This is new this year and was only planted in May but is the first of my Heleniums to flower.

2. Monarda 'Prairie night'

This is an interesting flower and a lovely colour too. It is a great plant. It is not staked but it stayed standing during the very high winds we had a while back. It also hasn't appeared to …

There was very little rain this month, I think it has only rained once. It has been dry for a long time now, although not always accompanied by hot sunshine. The last two weeks have all been very sunny, on many days the sun was shining all day and most days there was at least some sun.

For this months round up, we will start with what is flowering, you can compare with June last year.

Flowering

Pictures of many of the plants that were flowering at some point during the month. More can be found in the other blog posts this month.

Knautia macedonica 'Melton Pastels'

This flowered well during the month. Many flowers, well liked by the bees too. I would not really describe the colour as a pastel shade...

Centaurea

For some reason this flowers much later in my garden than anywhere else. It finally had …

Last year I concluded it was mostly a waste of time to plant annuals early in the house. So this year I planted Zinnia and Californian poppies directly into the containers. Other seeds were either planted in cells straight outside or germinated indoors (I did get a better germination rate) and then quickly moved outside. All this was well after the frosts had passed, at the end of April and beginning of May.

And here we have the first Californian poppy flower. Last year the first picture of an open poppy was on the 2nd of July but it may have been out for a day or two already.

So there we go, planting in mid March as I did last year provided no earlier flowers.