I have been pulling up horsetail. It's a purely cosmetic treatment as the roots are still there and will shoot again, albeit less vigorously, but as a quick fix it's very gratifying. You see an immediate transformation, infested areas of the borders restored to virgin Strulch, or a covering of whatever else was supposed to be acting as ground cover.
It's difficult to tell how much the horsetail struggles with the competition. As I've written previously, there is no getting rid of it, but it seems to me that it grows most profusely in the places where it isn't shaded out by other plants at ground level, such as around some of the roses. Of course, horsetail growing in among the tangle of geraniums, Brunnera, acanthus, and all the other dense smotherers that I've been packing in is more difficult to see, whereas when it emerges in the hybrid tea rose bed it is blindingly obvious, but as the garden matures my sense is that the horsetail does not like being heavily jostled by other plants and is growing less strongly in the most crowded areas.
If that's the case I should have ground cover under the HT roses. I won't, though, because they're unenthusiastic enough about the soil as it is, requiring heavy annual doses of manure, 6X, and fish, blood and bone. I don't think they'd appreciate having to compete with a thick smothering of ground cover, and I need regular access to the soil to top up all the supplements that their finicky natures require, and to be able to get to them for dead heading during the summer. I don't have ground cover under all the shrub roses mainly because it is a large bed and I haven't got round to laying my hands on that many plants yet. I've established patches of Pachysandra, dwarf campanula and Ophiopogon which are gradually spreading. So is Astrantia, nameless seedlings of a named red form which are still good, and acanthus, rather too much.
Some of the old roses have grown quite ridiculously tall, and one has toppled its iron support out over the lawn. That needs righting, with the help of the Systems Administrator to lean on it while I fix it in place using a stout peg and wire at the back to act as a guy rope for the rest of the season. I am going to have to do some substantial pruning, come the pruning season. Rose de Rescht is fully twice the size the books say it will reach and is muscling into everything around it. Normally our low rainfall and mostly grotty soil mean that if plants fail to match up to the books they remain on the small side. William Lobb had collapsed on all his neighbours as well, but that's my fault for not getting round to tying his long, whippy branches in on themselves in a sort of crown like I have in the years when I manage to get organised. All I could do for this summer was disentangle his bristly stems from the tops of the surrounding plants, heave them more upright and tie a length of brown plastic gardening twine round the outside of the shrub to bunch it up.
I ran the hose on the island bed while I weeded, moving it periodically. The spray head scatters the water over a reasonably wide area, and I hope that all the asters got a soaking. They were beginning to develop the dull and slightly drooping, soft leaves of plants that are badly water stressed, but I hope that today's artificial deluge will keep them going for several weeks. I need to do the same on the bog bed, which is no longer a bog, and several other areas of planting where I can see the plants starting to flag. We're on a water meter, and I don't water established plantings unless I have to, and never the lawn, but things are starting to get painfully dry. The SA went into Colchester after lunch and said that it was raining properly there, but here we just had the merest sprinkle.
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