The Systems Administrator has been photographing the garden through the summer, and got a set of pictures running as a motion activated slideshow on a digital photo screen, switching images every thirty seconds. It's nice to be reminded of what's been going on out there over the past few months, and rather poignant to think how quickly things fade and pass. The sea of pink thrift, the yellow stars of Ashphodeline luteus, the papery petals of the oriental poppies, all now just memories and photographs until next summer.
Some of the shots of single rose flowers make the flowers look so round and sumptuous they are worthy of the David Austin catalogue, and the SA admitted to having used a bit of subtle flash to lift them. Other rose blooms are equally gorgeous, but the pictures serve as a blunt reminder to me that the bushes have got black spot. I can't see myself spraying them. I did relax my no-spray policy just a little, to treat the box balls in front of the house, but they are (a) structural and (b) physically isolated. The roses are too mixed up with and surrounded by other plants, and a whole ecosystem of insects and spiders, and I don't want to spray them, even with fungicide. The roses will have to live with a bit of black spot, or die and be replaced by something else.
I have been trying to reduce the great stash of plants sitting on the concrete outside the greenhouse, waiting to be planted. Nowadays they are the feast or famine results of home propagation rather than things I've bought without having a place for them at that moment, apart from three geums and a salvia whose place is not in doubt, but where I've been holding fire while I see if my efforts blocking the gap in the bottom fence have cut back on muntjac visits to the garden. The geums are to bulk up my current tally of one 'Totally Tangerine', now that I've tested a pioneer plant there and it hasn't proved too dry, but muntjac have been grazing that part of the border particularly heavily, eating nearly all of Rudbeckia 'Henry Eilers' and reducing a plant of Knautia macedonica to a non-blooming dome of basal leaves. Since they seem fixated on that stretch of planting I thought it prudent to hold back on the new geums, ordered specially and at great expense from Crocus, and they've been sitting outside the front door for two or three weeks. Even our muntjac and rabbits don't graze right up to the door step.
It is a slightly mad time of year to be planting, when the ground is so dry and there's no proper rain in the offing, but the plants are deteriorating sitting in their plastic pots on the concrete, and will be better off in the ground. So long as I remember to water them. Things planted in discrete groups, like the Agapanthus 'Lilliput' I've just put in the gravel by the entrance, are relatively easy to keep track of. I can look in my gardening diary to jog my memory. Harder are the ones where I've dropped one into the borders here and one there, as I did with some Campanula a few weeks ago. It will be their second attempt in the ground for both. I had the Agapanthus in the long bed in the front garden, and the Campanula in the sloping border in the back garden. Neither did at all well. The Agapanthus were in about the dryest and most arid part of the bed, and struggled with the soil and the competition from surrounding plants. The Campanula were likewise in a rather nasty stretch of soil where nothing seems to grow very well. I dug up what pathetic remains of the plants I could find in both cases, mere scraps of root with weakly shoot attached, potted them up, and grew them on in the greenhouse for several months until they'd recovered to something that looked strong enough to risk planting out.
I hadn't managed to get much done by the time I finally gave up, driven indoors by incessant fine drizzly rain. It was really infuriating rain, not enough to give any help to the plants, just enough to make the gardener slimy and uncomfortable after twenty minutes of crawling about in it. The rain radar shows proper rain all afternoon only three miles to the north of us, but that might as well be in another country.
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