August 2022
Rain is the most predominant memory of August.
Rain on top of rain that left small lakes (we’re beyond trivial puddles at this stage) and rivers in the garden. Our rule here at Crofton (and for the suburb of Sandford) is that we never complain about rain. We are on tank water and in a dry area, so to complain about rain is to basically whinge about your source of life.
Perhaps it is a good excuse to not have to work in the garden. A forced holiday. It is always amusing when Jenny can’t work in the garden. She does not take to stopping and resting well. Even as children, my brother and I would marvel at our mothers need to run when she could walk. She hasn’t changed over time. When she’s forced to stop, she gets cranky. Distraction comes in the form of books and magazines, unfortunately for us, when she looks at publications, she gets ideas. Grand ideas. Lucky for us, this time round she was a bit tired from our previous work rejigging the Middle Bed so she settled for simply moving plants around – which is its own level of pain in the arse.
Another bold move was the coppicing of the Golden Willow. Never one for planting with appropriate space, we have an extremely rare Pink Birch being overshadowed by a rare Golden Willow. Do you move one of them and risk losing it? Both are equally hard to get and quarantine no longer allow any Willow into the state. We were going to move the Birch but fear got the better of us, so Jenny decided to coppice the Willow, which is vigorous and grows well, to give the Pink Birch room to grown and flourish. Fingers crossed our plan works out to the best.
We are opening the garden on the 30th October this year and it’s now that you start to get a bit edgy about whether the garden is looking any good. It isn’t, of course. We’re in the last month of Winter and, despite the stirrings of Spring, everything still looks a bit, well, dead. There also looks like there are a lot of gaps. There aren’t, of course. Once Spring hits, the plants will be fighting for room but you do tend to forget that and start trying to fill them in.
In this spirit we bought some Hollyhock seeds this year to run down the Stone Wall but none, and I mean none, of them germinated. This is a rare occurrence for us. It was most disappointing. Though rumours from our local Nursery let us know that we were not the only ones who tasted disappointment with their Hollyhock seeds this year. I wonder if anyone else has had any trouble direct sowing their seeds?
Oh well… we planted Hollyhock seedlings instead and comfort ourselves with the fact that the Magnolias are flowering, the Narcissus are blooming, the blossom is floating on the breeze.
And we realise August is the calm before the storm…