after the rain

After all the charging about, the charity talk, the long working weekend, the gallery trips and visits, I woke this morning to the prospect of an entirely blank diary for the rest of the week so that I was free to garden.  Even the weather forecast was favourable for working outside.  It was an almost infinitely enticing prospect.

There was rain last night, enough to refresh recent plantings and make weeding easier.  The day was humid and overcast, so that great drops of moisture hung on every leaf and were slow to clear, and I looked at my list of things to do for tasks that wouldn’t leave me with a wet shirt and spectacles, until things had had the chance to dry out.  It seemed worth postponing my next trip to the dump as well, rather than put wet bags of weeds in the car.  Cutting the edges of the lawn and pulling horsetail out of an area of what will in due course be ground covering clipped box seemed a good place to start, though I still had to stop periodically to wipe beads of water off my glasses, and my gloves were soon soaked.

The rain had beaten down some of the old roses, which drooped over the edges of their iron supports.  I hope they’ll perk up somewhat, once they dry off.  I was reading David Austin’s book on Old Roses and English Roses at the weekend, in quiet moments between serving customers during my stints on the till, and he recommended pruning the once flowering old roses as soon as possible after they’d finished blooming, to encourage them to make new growth that would flower the following season.  I tend to prune all our roses in the winter, but it makes sense to do them in summer, given that you prune other summer flowering shrubs immediately after they’ve flowered (which reminds me, I must do the deutzia tomorrow).

A hazel tree at the end of the wood had grown out too far across the deck in the back garden, and was starting to smother the witch hazels in their pots.  Hamamelis resent too much shading, and any branches enveloped in the growth of rival shrubs respond by dying back.  It was time to bring the new pruning saw into action, and remove the encroaching hazel.  I cut off the new long strands of the rambling rose ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ too while I was at it, those which were growing so determinedly away from their supporting tree that I would never be able to train them into it.  The pile of prunings in the middle of the lawn grew to a couple of trailer loads, ready for the Systems Administrator to collect.

The blue Baptisia australis in the far, predominantly yellow rose bed had started to flop over, which annoyed me since staking the Baptisia was on my list of things to do, and it looked as though I was just too late.  However, when I experimentally scooped the fallen stems back upright, banged in some iron stakes around them, and tied string to the stakes to stop them falling out again, they didn’t look too bad.  The stakes are rather nice ones, bought from the firm Room in the Garden before they jacked their prices up to ridiculous levels, and are of rusted iron topped with a substantial ball.  Provided the blacksmith does a good job of my iron bean tendril so that I remain a happy repeat customer, I shall start commissioning plant supports from him every now and then, when I can afford to pay for them.  I could do with a tall spiral for a herbaceous clematis that seems to have flopped and disappeared into the undergrowth, instead of being poised to form an attractive late season feature between two rose bushes.

A robin followed me all day as I worked, even perching on my mud-encrusted garden radio at one point while it was on, darting in to where I was working to seize beakfuls of things to eat, and regarding me with beady, curious eyes.  It’s strange how they are so much bolder in human company than the other garden birds, given no extra encouragement.  The blackbirds seem to have had a good nesting season, and there are blackbirds furtively scuttling into the shelter of bushes everywhere that you look.  The big tabby came and ran about the garden for a bit, and peered into the dark gaps between plants, but I don’t think he caught anything.