Rain dancing...
Yeay! Rain - enough to soak the lawns and paddocks and give some natural relief to my garden. Yeay for rain! And I'm loving my uber-adult ballet class. So much fun. My super-stiff gardener's body is coping quite well.
Darcey Bussell Roses
I think the patron of the Silver Swans (the name of the dance programme) is the ballerina Darcey Bussell. Yeay for Darcey! She is a rose, an English David Austin, and is repeat flowering right now in my garden. It's a sign!
Wet Pink Dahlias
Heaps of fun...
My feet and legs find the ballet class extremely challenging, but this is OK. Finding things I'm happily hopeless at (like holding a non-wobbly arabesque) gives me some life balance. Balance? Aargh! I have no balance, dance-wise. Didn't realise I was so stiff, either. Heaps of fun.
Back to the rain. So lovely, I can almost hear the garden breathing deeply, the shrubs calming themselves, the trees smiling. I've still got the hoses on, though. Today the Allotment Garden gets hose-watered some more. The rose Buff Beauty has gone into survival mode, starting to drop its leaves.
So what have I done today? Something naughty : I've weed-killed more California thistles in my Hump garden. They grow off long horizontal runners, so it's not possible just to pull them out (she said, defensively). Then something rather mundane : I've trimmed more Lychnis, and picked up gum bark from the lawns.
On with the horse manure...
I've spread twelve bags of horse manure in the Allotment Garden, and planted a red fountain Cordyline in a space there. Two Mrs Oakley Fisher roses need to come out - the Viburnum shrub has grown large and overcrowds them. But that can wait until autumn. I've just been working in one of the garden compartments, which is now being well-watered. Loving that wormy horse manure (as are the blackbirds and thrushes, oops).
Mrs Oakley Fisher Roses
The hose is also on in the new Pond Paddock Garden, the shape and style of which I'm really loving. I sit on the Pond Cottage's verandah in the mornings and admire the curves. I should have reshaped these gardens years ago. I have three juvenile Camellias to plant in the gaps, donated by my friend.
It might seem daft watering after some reasonably good rain, but the garden is still dry. My untimely shifting around of shrubs in mid-summer hasn't helped, either. Here's hoping everything will survive.