Before and after or is it the other way round

 Unfailingly, year after year this white allium (an onion to us plain Janes!) treats us to a thrilling show of shooting starlight blooms for months, where the bees are the encore de Havilland flyover celebrating the joy of Summer. And such nice manners too! Maintaining a neat green clump of strappy foliage until the magical seed heads come along. I have been harvesting all week in the sunshine - drop me a line and I shall send you a little bit of magic.

Beeloved by butterflies and bees

My Scabiosa atropurpurea has wonderful flowers about 2 inches/5cm wide floating over a lovely emerald green foliage all summer long. Scabious is better known as the butterfly blue or pincushion flower and it was believed "that the Devil did bite it for envie, because it is an herbe that hath so many goode vertues and is so benificent to mankind" - given where the name comes from I hardly like to think of the manner of uses Scabious was taken for. It is enough that it grows in the baking hot places of my garden and is beeloved by butterflies and bees and can be cut for the house as by harvesting the flowers you get many more all season long.

Dreaming spires

With apologies to Mathew Arnold! Wonderful spires of Echium reflect the blue sky and pop out from the gold of diosma behind. 

I love to love my Echiums but like a summers lease they are all too soon over and you are left with sad reality - leggy growth, and in my garden they just grow and grow up to 2m tall, which can be stunning when in flower but all the nasty prickly leaves kill everything underneath them so the look unsightly. Once in a decade I go mad with a chainsaw and cut the down to the ground and just a few months later seedling come back and harmony is restored.

You're weird, I like that

I've had this shrubby phlomis for a few years now placed at the top of some steps and it has just sat there and looked …well scrubby shrubby and hardly a flower.

This year is another story, magnificent grey green spikes of foliage and covered in extraordinary whorls of yellow flowers. I also like the idea that only bees can pollinate the phlomis, a great reminder of how important our little bee friends are. I'm looking forward to taking cuttings when it finishes its firecracker display and then I shall continue them along the back of the long border with nepeta and 'Silver Ghost" rose.

I'm not 100% sure but i think this is Phlomis fruticosa, Jerusalem sage.