We were all set to go around and lay out the design for my friend's garden. Two nice, smooth, silky ropes that looked as though they might lie in serpentine curves without kinking, a handful of bamboo canes to stand in for the position of trees and the larger shrubs, a tape measure to carry out reality checks on planting distances, two of the pieces of rose root I dug up from her old garden now growing away nicely in pots, and an aerosol of white grass marking paint for when she was sure she was happy with the layout, my housewarming present to her. It is absolutely impossible to lift turf working from a line delineated by a rope (or hosepipe) laid on the lawn. I guarantee that within five minutes it will have moved. I was rather pleased by how well the roses had taken, given that late June is not the normal recommended season for digging up pieces of root from shrubs and expecting them to grow.
Half an hour before we were due to go out the phone rang and it was my friend, sounding dreadful. She had a cold. I said not to worry at all about postponing the garden session, and advised her to drink lots of tea, and she said that what she really wanted was to go to sleep, so I told her that in that case she should go back to sleep. Then she began to worry that she had to be better by the weekend because the grandchildren were coming to stay, and I told her that if she was still ill then their parents would just have to make other arrangements. It is much easier to take a ruthless view of children and grandchildren when you don't have any.
I was rather nonplussed by suddenly being left with most of a free morning. Not quite all of it, as I'd been having a leisurely start to the day up to the point when I found I wasn't going out, and then I wasn't wearing my gardening clothes or even the right earrings and had to change into them (my gardening earrings are the pearl studs I used to wear to the office. Not out of any desire to emulate Vita Sackville-West or any other aristocratic lady gardeners, but because the pearl studs have gold posts that haven't eroded over time and so are less likely to fall out while gardening, and if they do they are of no sentimental value whatsoever).
I decided to spend my unexpected free day working on the back garden, as a change from the front garden and because my back was politely indicating that it had worked hard yesterday with the pick axe and would like a day off. That's the trouble with getting older, the spirit is willing but you discover that the flesh is no longer happy to go outside every day and hit things with a pick axe. The jobs that needed doing in the back garden were very decorous, trimming off the great long rambling rose stems the wet end to the summer has sent scrambling yet again through the flower beds and across the lawn, trimming the edges of the lawn, and clearing away the sere and brown remains of the Camassia. I could usefully have done the latter a couple of weeks ago, if I hadn't been doing other things.
The experimental planting of Geranium 'Rozanne' seems to be coping in the far rose bed. In the spring the ground is covered with the densely packed foliage of the Camassia, which have seeded themselves joyously over the years. By high summer the Camassia leaves are starting to look tired, and by late summer they have withered entirely, leaving a gap. I racked my brains for ages last year trying to think of something that would make a suitable underplanting for roses, coping with the partial shade cast by the roses, the evil clay soil, and average rainfall of only around 550 millimetres (or twenty-one inches if you are still metric), and the fact that up until mid June it would be more or less overwhelmed by Camassia leichtlinii. It needed to fit in with a blue and yellow colour scheme, and flower in the second half of the year for as long a season as possible. After much head scratching I settled on hardy geraniums, and went for 'Rozanne' because it is sterile and has a long flowering season. In 2013 it was voted the RHS Plant of the Century, and for some reason I didn't actually have it anywhere in the garden.
The three plants I put in last autumn vanished rather quickly, and I didn't really see any signs of life before the Camassia got going so was not utterly hopeful, but as the bulb foliage faded so the geraniums appeared, late but triumphant like a reinforcing cavalry force appearing on one's flank in the field of battle. Now they are flowering blithely, and I'm eyeing up the bare spaces in the bed trying to work out where I could fit a few more, where they would not be completely smothered in early summer.
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