Today was a reminder why so little gets done in the garden in August. It's too hot. I remember once, years ago when I still worked in London, I booked a week's holiday in August, not to go anywhere but because I had some holiday allowance to use up and felt like a break. During that week I built the foundations, no more, of a very small set of steps, which then remained unfinished for another two years. High temperatures and humidity are not conducive to getting work done outside.
After just a few days with the thermometer in the high twenties parts of the garden are starting to show the strain. The leaves of the Pulmonaria in the ditch bed, that had been standing up quite handsomely and making good ground cover, unlike the ones in pots at work which looked dreadful and had to be cut back weeks ago, have started to flag, and the Kirengeshoma palmata is drooping. I'm not so fussed about the lungworts, since they have basically done their stuff for the year, but Kirengeshoma is supposed to be at its peak now. It is a Japanese woodlander, growing almost a metre tall and bearing pendulous yellow bell shaped flowers. The RHS says it has a reputation for being fussy and difficult to grow, but I've always found it straightforward, even in the dry conditions of the Clacton coastal strip, though I have put it near the ditch. Most plants for woodland conditions flower in the spring, and so anything that performs in August is useful. Interestingly, given that hydrangeas are one of the shrubby mainstays of the late summer garden, it is a member of the same family. It is an absolute shocker in a pot, the leaves browning and burning at the least opportunity, which makes it difficult to sell.
I pressed on weeding the entrance bed, with rather long breaks in the shade for glasses of water and cups of tea. I've got the outermost corner clear, which is a morale booster, since it now gives me a basis from which to press my advance. The ivy hedge has sent horizontal shoots out over the bed, many of which have started rooting where they touch, and I replanted some of those into buried 9cm plastic pots with a dose of mycorrhizal fungus, as the hedge has also gone bald in places, and I need new plants to thicken up the gaps. The shoots running out into the border looked far happier than stretches of the hedge, and I suspect that the original plants are starved. It is on very light soil, and I haven't been assiduous about feeding it.
The plan is to mulch the whole bed with chicken manure, then Strulch, then wait for fresh growth of grass and hit it with glyphosate. Some of the weed grasses in there have running roots, and while I've removed what I could it is never possible to dig all of it out, especially when you are working around shrubs. The shrubs look in need of renewal, poor things, and as well as cutting out some old wood I'll dose them liberally with 6X on top of the mushroom compost. I'm still thinking in terms of Santolina, box mounds and dwarf pines to fill in the gaps. There might be room for one or two flowering specimen shrubs, but it is such rooty, dry ground, I need tough, drought resistant doers.
The Systems Administrator moved the tractor and trailer for me to round up the piles of prunings that have accumulated in the back garden, and took away the woody debris that's built up so far in the entrance bed, though there'll be plenty more to come. I'm cutting the Portuguese laurel back to size, since much as I like it I don't want it to reach the 8 metre spread and 12 metre height that it would be capable of if left unchecked. The boundary hedge has sent great long shoots out into the bed, and I'm taking them off, though I shall need the step ladder and long handled loppers to complete the job. The SA was making noises about mowing the lawn, but took my advice to leave it until the weather cooled down. Yesterday's final trip to the cricket as temperatures reached around 30 degrees in London was probably a trip too far, and we don't want the virus to flare up again in a relapse. Apart from the SA's own health, comfort and well-being, it is only a month until we are supposed to be going on holiday.
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