I have been trimming the edges of the lawns. It's a slow process, partly because I don't confine myself to the edges, but attack the visible weeds in the front sections of the borders as I go, and even do odd bits of summer pruning. My passage around the garden is thus slow, but pleasant, although hard on the lower back.
Now is when I see any odd tufts of weed grass I missed in the beds, when I was weeding, mulching and Strulching back in the spring. They make their presence known by sending up tall flowering spikes, which is handy if I can trace the stems back to the root, and pull the whole thing out, but fiddly, especially when the grass has seeded itself into the crown of another plant, or the base of a hedge, and slightly revolting when covered by the decaying leaves of Allium triquetum, as is the case for one stretch of the sloping bed. Once again I wondered about the stories I read in the magazines, of prairie plantings whose owners simply put a mower over them in the autumn, or even set fire to them to clear the old top growth. Evidently they don't get any grass seeding among the asters in their prairie plantings. Perhaps not, and I am a uniquely slovenly gardener.
In general the Strulch has worked very well. There are some young goose grass plants, and a few annual weeds, but the beds I covered in a fresh layer of Strulch are pretty clean. Of annual weeds, that is. The horsetail cares nothing for mulch, and nor do dandelions, or creeping thistle, or creeping loosestrife. Earlier in the season I dosed these with spot treatments of glyphosate (except for the horsetail) but there's too much foliage of everything now, and I don't want to damage the borders' rightful inhabitants, so limited myself to digging out the dandelions as deep as I could reach with a narrow bulb trowel, and pulling the stems off the others. It won't kill them, but it will stop them flowering and seeding, and I won't have to look at them for a while. Come autumn I'll resume hostilities with the glyphosate.
Two small branches had died in a diminutive Pieris 'White Pearl', which I noticed days ago, but hadn't got round to visiting that part of the border with secateurs. If you have time to keep right on top of tasks like that, it does help a garden look loved. The rest of the Pieris didn't look too happy, with no new leaves at all on half its remaining branches. By this stage of the summer it ought to be growing much more than that. The P. katsura down below the rose bank is a glossy mound of fresh, bronze coloured leaves. I don't know why the ailing specimen is so sad, but suspect that the soil, stony and slightly stagnant clay over entirely stagnant clay, is not to its liking. I do not like it so much as I did when I bought it, having originally been enraptured by its fat, white flowers, and now finding it rather blobby, so if it shuffles off to the great arboretum in the sky I will not be heartbroken. On the other hand, I don't yet dislike it enough to dig it up.
Lots of other things looked fat and happy and were making good new growth. The replacement Hydrangea quercifolia, planted after its predecessor succumbed to one of the hard winters (or perhaps it didn't like the soil any better than the Pieris) is making strong new shoots after a shaky start. Nearby, Euphorbia shillingii, which I bought as a young plant last year after trying and failing to raise some from bought seed, is twice as large and plump as it was last year. The assorted herbaceous clematis seem to have liked their diet of old mushroom compost and 6X, as they are sending up vigorous new shoots. It is very easy, when running through my mental tally of the garden, to remember the things that are ailing or concern me in some way, but misleading. Lots of it is absolutely fine.
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