Where did July go? It seemed to fly by and I am late with this blog post.
The weather has been very dry for ages and I seem to have been spending a lot of time watering. Obviously the tubs need regular watering, but normally I rarely water the flower beds. There have been a lot of plants which were wilting in the heat and I have been worried I might lose them. So extra watering has been done. We had a few days of extreme heat when it was too hot to do any gardening or even to just sit outside. The hot weather just drains me of energy and doesn't agree with my arthritis, so I spent a lot of time indoors resting. Our front garden is quite shady and we don't spend a lot of time there, but when it was really hot we were really glad to be able to sit out there in the shade.
It's that time of year when I find the main jobs in the garden are just deadheading and cutting back. But sometimes it can look a bit bedraggled as flowers go over and I wait for the late summer ones to come into bloom. There are a lot of gaps, where flowers have gone over and the soil has been so dry it has not been the right conditions for planting any new ones to fill the gaps. The astilbes which like a moist soil have been struggling and are now looking brown and shrivelled up, even though they are in the damp border. I'm wondering if they will come back next year.
You don't always need flowers to provide colour, this Hakonechloa grass is a lovely and bright, there are clumps of it around the garden.
This bright pink phlox flowers from July onwards, but its got battered by the rain this year.
I don't know the name of this rose--it's either 'Rachel' or 'Pride and Prejudice', I got the labels mixed up. I do like it though.
