drought

The long, dry, hot spell is really starting to hit the garden.  It coped pretty well for the first few weeks of no rain and relentless sunshine, because the soil was so wet to start with, and perhaps at the margin because I've put a lot of mulch down, compared to the last drought in July 2006. However, by now the soil is as dry as a bone, and so hard that trying to plant anything leaves you chiselling at the soil rather than digging in the conventional sense.  An increasing number of plants are showing their distress, the leaves of the asters grey, puckered and drooping, the hellebores and primroses collapsed, the Omphalodes prematurely shrivelled and dormant, and the perennial pea giving up on flowering.  The leaves and shoot tips on some well established shrubs, planted several years ago, have begun to flag.

I gave the water meter a hammering.  I don't waste water on the lawn, which will come back by itself when we get some proper rain, but I don't want to lose plants, or stress them so severely that next year's flowering is compromised.  I didn't feel even vaguely guilty about it, since the amount of water I use through one domestic hose is so utterly dwarfed by the amount that is pumped out daily on the lettuce farm, and the expense so small relative to the value of the plants.  Gardeners are always being told to feel guilty when they use water.  I don't hear golf enthusiasts being lectured about giving up the game in favour of clay court tennis, because of the strain that irrigating golf courses places on the environment, or motorists being warned that it is wasteful and vain to wash their cars more than once a year.

I would feel guilty if I were trying to grow thirsty flowers like Monarda and Phlox on pure sand, and finding myself watering them twice weekly, but I'm not.  Many of the things I watered today haven't seen a hosepipe for years.  Recent plantings that haven't yet got their roots down have been watered oftener than that, obviously, but in general the choice of species is about as ecological as you could get, short of sticking to a very limited palette of gorse, broom, Mediterranean shrubs and herbs, and Agapanthus.  And creeping sorrel.  And the trouble with Mediterranean shrubs is that in a bad winter three quarters of them die.

I was shadowed all day by a robin, which nipped in where I'd been working to snap up unconsidered trifles, and regarded me with a bold, enigmatic gaze.  The butterflies were out in force as well.  I need to work out what some of them are, since the only ones I know are peacocks, commas and red admirals.  I spotted one small toad, but I've seen very few this year compared to last.