It’s the first Saturday of July, which means my American friends are grilling things and my Finnish garden is doing its level best to upstage them. This week: a rose that nobody planted, the first trickle of food from dirt to kitchen, and a grape with delusions of grandeur.

One — Rose by Air Mail

This is Rosa rugosa ‘Hansa’ — or technically some hybrid thereof, but it’s so recognizable that we’re just going to call it Hansa and move on. It’s rugged and pretty, with strongly-scented double blooms in a bright magenta you can see from the other side of the property. I didn’t plant it. Nobody did. It just appeared between the baby plum trees a few years back and I didn’t notice until it bloomed, because you can’t NOT notice it when it blooms.

My neighbor said she’d planted some near the road ages ago, but those are long gone. Mine is growing directly beneath the bird feeder, though, so you can probably guess how the seed got there. I don’t mind at all. A good rose is always welcome around here, especially one that shows up on its own and asks nothing of you.

Two — A Bit of Red and Green

Food is starting to trickle from the garden to the kitchen. Half a dozen strawberries here, a handful of yellow beet thinnings there — not a lot, but it’s nice to have something fresh that came from our own soil. In just a few more weeks I’ll be swimming in produce, so right now I’m enjoying the leisurely pace of early harvest. The calm before the canning.

Three — Meadowsweet Takes Over the Swale

The meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) colony in the swale is blooming. My vegetable garden sits right up against a swale that feeds the larger of our two wells, and this area has been colonized by quite a few wild perennials that I’m happy to let run riot — they keep the wildlife happy and put on a display that I couldn’t have planned better if I’d tried. The meadowsweet starts blooming a little after the Queen Anne’s lace, so the whole area is a revolving door for pollinators right now. Added bonus: when the wind wafts right, the whole garden smells like someone’s making something lovely and refusing to share the recipe.

Four — Lady and the Tramp

I mentioned last week that I’m in the middle of creating multiple rows of berry hedge (two down, one to go), populated mainly by various members of the raspberry and currant families. Down at the end nearer the road, though, we have a couple of sea buckthorns (Hippophae rhamnoides), a native plant of this region that happens to be dioecious — meaning you need a boy and a girl if you want fruit.

The female, Terhi, is a domestic variety bred for larger berries, ordered from the farm supply store. She’s never seen the outside of a pot. Her boyfriend (I named him Korpi, because it felt wrong for him to go nameless) was pulled out of a craggy coastal rock next to my neighbor’s summer cottage, tossed in a spare plastic soil bag, and left sitting for a few days next to the garage during one of our rare warm spells. He’s never had his roots in anything so fancy as garden soil before. It’s a cheesy romance novel waiting to happen.

Five — Japanese Spirea Takes the Stage

Back in May, I showed you our Norwegian spirea (Spiraea × cinerea ‘Grefsheim’), which had been waging a campaign of expansion into the forest behind the greenhouse (that post, if you missed it). Now let me introduce you to its pink cousin, the Japanese spirea (Spiraea japonica), which has launched a similar offensive into the area where our huge lilac used to live.

Both spireas are in dire need of pruning. Both might or might not get that this year. One can always hope.

Six — The Grape That Ate the World

And speaking of plants with ambitions of conquest — meet Vitis vinifera ‘Zilga’. Yes, it’s supposed to be a greenhouse grape. Nobody informed it of this, because it escaped out the back window, mingled with the trees that live there, and is now producing bunches of grapes in the forest canopy.

To be fair, this grape does make great juice and, from what I’ve heard, decent wine. How I’m going to get the fruit down from those higher branches, though, I have absolutely no idea. That is a problem for future me, who already has a backlog of pruning that would make a professional arborist weep.

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As always, Six on Saturday is hosted by Jim at Garden Ruminations. Pop over to see what everyone else is growing this week.