The lack of rainfall is starting to show across more of the garden. In the long bed in the front garden, plants in the two areas where the soil is particularly light and starving were looking wilted and half dead, when I checked on them today. Centaurea hypoleuca 'John Coutts', which is a mouthful of a name for an unassuming little plant with pink, feathery flowers, lay shrivelled and defeated on the dust-like earth, and even the self sown Verbascum nigrum, which have volunteered to live in that bed, unlike the Centaurea, and normally take summer in their stride, were drooping pitifully.
I ran the hose on them while weeding and deadheading in the vicinity, and realised that could be how it's going to be until September. And September is often a dry and sunny month, albeit cooler, so it could be as much as three months before the garden sees much natural respite. When I think about all the things I want to do in the garden and plan when I'm going to tackle them, I seem to forget that in July and August often all I manage to do is weed and trim, in between getting up every few minutes to move the hose. Come September it will be time to help the Systems Administrator give the long grass its annual chop, and we're going on holiday. Throw in another session with the Eleagnus hedge, and it will be October before I know it, leaving me with a haunting feeling that I haven't done anything beyond tidying and watering for three months.
That is the nature of summer gardening, especially in a dry county like Essex. Garden centres and plant nurseries hate it, as plant sales grind to a halt, but there you go. There isn't time to keep planting, what with trying to keep the existing plants alive and happy, and anything newly planted runs the risk of quick death by thirst. It is chastening to come upon the dessicated remains of a cherished new acquisition half hidden by the foliage of its more established neighbours, and realise you forgot it was there, and haven't watered it. But the ground is rapidly achieving the consistency of concrete anyway, and the prospect of scraping out anything except a small hole is getting less attractive by the day.
I planted my final three alpines in the railway garden, the last of my Pottertons order and an odd rooted sedum cutting. The ground was like dust, and I gave each of them half a can of water after planting, which should keep them going for a while. It is so difficult to spot the newly planted in the railway gravel among the old hands that have already survived a year or two that I've been watering the entire area, and most things are looking OK, but as the dry spell stretches on the list of areas that need watering is getting longer. As well as the long bed there's the Italian garden in the middle of the turning circle, where I've noticed a variegated myrtle and a small tree, Albizia julibrissin, looking distinctly stressed. I'm particularly fond of the latter because I grew it from seed. One of these days it should bear fluffy pink flowers, but at the moment its little leaves are folded together with a pleading air, while the brick red flowers on the Watsonia I got from Beeches last year are undersized and shrivelling so quickly that rather than a gleaming spire of lustrous terracotta trumpets, there is only flower per stem, with buds above and faded flowers below.
Meanwhile, in the back garden there are a lot of Campanula I planted recently, and a couple of things I moved because they were completely invisible at the back of a bed. And then there are the blessed vegetables. I'm afraid my great stash of pots of plants raised from seed and cuttings, that I have just arranged neatly on the concrete outside the greenhouse, are going to have to stay there for some time.
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