Notwithstanding the rain that's forecast for Sunday, I have been watering the front garden. It's a lovely word, notwithstanding. I wonder whether Michael Gove has forbidden civil servants to start sentences with Notwithstanding, as well as However. I am quite partial to However myself. And And. Lucky I don't work for Michael Gove. Though he might like the Oxford comma in tonight's title.
I have been planting Salvia turkestanica in the long bed. This is a good plant in a rather coarse way, with hairy grey leaves and spikes of papery white or mauve, unmistakably salvia shaped flowers. They are not the longest lived plants, often dying after flowering though not invariably, and I should have planted my poor seedlings out six weeks ago. As it is they have become stunted in their pots, but I'm hoping that given a bigger root run in the open ground they'll find a new lease of life, as long as I water them. Salvia turkestanica does have one peculiarity, in that the musky odour detectable when you rub against many members of its species has been magnified to the point where it smells positively sweaty, but this need not be a disadvantage as long as you put it in the middle of a border where you aren't going to touch the leaves. It's not one to plant along a path so that you brush against it each time you go by, unless the whiff of stale sweat happens to be your thing.
I'm about half way through three trays of dwarf pinks, also raised from seed, slipping them into gaps around the edge of the Italian garden in the turning circle, and the arid centre of the long bed where almost nothing thrives, except for a golden leaved Scots pine, Pulsatilla, and, rather improbably, Gladiolus papilio. Even the felty grey leaves of that stalwart of magazine articles on plants for dry sunny gardens, Stachys lanata, have shrivelled back to little defensive tufts, and I had to water the Verbascum nigrum a couple of weeks ago to keep them from collapsing entirely.
My method is to weed and plant with the hose running nearby through its normal spray head, to spread the water across the bed. I periodically move the sprayer, aiming to give things a good soaking that will keep them ticking over happily for a couple of weeks, not just a quick sprinkle. The Penstemon in the long bed that I rescued from death's door two or three weeks ago are still looking glossy and much happier, though not growing and flowering as they should. I should have watered more and earlier to get a decent show. The neighbour's Leucanthemum superbum in their recently planted flowerbed are blooming densely at a height of about 80 centimetres, whereas mine are flowering sparsely at about a quarter of that, a testament to the fact that their gardener has been watering her handiwork more assiduously through the season than I have.
I've been watering the plantings in the gravel of the railway garden as well. Many of them are recent, and can't be expected to fend for themselves in this drought. Rabbits have grazed the tops off several things, including a nice prostrate blue veronica that flowered so well in the spring that I thought I must get some more. They have been eating the scarlet pimpernel as well, but that's not much of a compensation. They don't touch pinks, and don't seem interested in Parahebe so far, which is strange as the long bed was the first planting I started when we moved here over twenty years ago, and back then they ate some true hebes to stumps. They don't eat prostrate Gypsophila either, or thrift, but do eat Aethionema, and have had a nibble at a couple of the Rhodohypoxis in the exotic gravel planting by the entrance. The ways of rabbits are strange.
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