Writing this mid-July, the best description of ‘Charnwood’ is crispy! The rainwater butts are being raided: watering is an almost daily occurrence but carefully done to help preserve this lifesaving resource.

Recently planted trees and shrubs are on the list, those that haven’t yet got their roots down far enough to weather the heat. They get a good soak around once a week.  Then the beans, courgettes and sweet peas in the veg garden, and annuals in pots ready to be planted out. Pots next: the bigger ones don’t need watering every day and the agaves, geraniums and plants from hotter climates seem to survive well without water.  The hydrangeas seem to flag first, especially the glorious ‘Quercifolia’, meaning with leaves like an oak. 

Of course, the answer is to stick to that old mantra ‘right plant right place’.  The lavenders, Osteospurnums, Echinops, Yuccas, Eryngiums, Rosemary, Verbascum,  Achilleas, Sedums,  and Salvias to name a few are all fine, all of them regularly featuring in the chapter in gardening books entitled something like ‘plants for dry sunny borders’.

It can be heart-breaking for us keen gardeners to see their treasured plants struggling and, inevitably I fear for some, dying.  Some have sentimental value too such as my Mum’s myrtle and the beautiful soft yellow primroses we brought with us when we moved here from the Isle of Wight in 1987. But in the end, they are just plants and it is just gardening.  (What am I saying? Must be the heat!).

One of the best things in the garden right now is a huge Inula, sporting bold yellow daises and huge leaves, not stressed as yet with the heat. They stand almost 2 metres tall so do tend to dominate a border.  I planted some last year amongst the rough grass by our pond and they are starting to look really good, even with the grassy competition and not brilliant soil. 

The Autumn bulb catalogue has already arrived.  It is fascinating bedtime reading for me, I love spring bulbs. Reading about next spring is therapy in this heatwave that brings brown grass and drooping, tired borders!  This year I’ve kept it simple and ordered a bag of English Bluebells.  We do have some already, but I want to turn more of the front garden into a meadow and bluebells are a must in any natural, woodland planting for me.  Our current little meadow has been really good, and the yellow rattle has spread well, but it is all looking tired now apart from a pretty clump of the purple knapweed.  Two or more years ago, I planted a few plugs of red campion that promptly disappeared.  This spring it popped up somewhere different and gave us a wonderful show.  It has produced plenty of seed so I’ll have another go at getting it going where I initially wanted it!  I had to smile when reading this from Monty Don’s ‘Ivington Diaries’:

‘The garden must teeter on the edge of anarchy to unfold fully, and disaster and joyous success will therefore be separated by a few days or a few square feet of accidental combination.  The best gardeners hold the centre together by stealth and coercion rather than by strutting their horticultural stuff’.

Right now, I’m not really holding it together at all, but who knows, if you are reading this in September, perhaps we will have had a period of lovely, gentle rain.  I live in hope!