I haven't posted for a while because there hasn't been much to say. We're having a very hot dry summer, which for us means lows around 70F and highs in the upper nineties. No rain to speak of in June or July (none in the forecast, either): long, sunny, brilliant, blazing days.

For us this is unusually hot and dry, though I know many forum members would happily trade. Though we're dealing with it without air conditioning or swimming holes, so it has its discomforts. As for the plants, mature shrubs, even the natives, are looking quite dry and slightly wilted, while the baby shrubs and trees we planted in winter are very unhappy: we'll probably lose most of them even with watering, growing as they are in the blazing sunshine of the south-facing slope of the big garden. Shrubs that have been in the ground longer than a year usually don't get watered. The roses are among the happiest plants in the garden, confirming my faith in them as plants having considerable drought tolerance. Naturally this is in our conditions of heavy soil and abundant average annual rainfall; and though summer has been dry, we had a very wet winter.

What I find interesting is a few of my repeat-bloomers are still putting out some flowers, even after all these weeks without a drop of water. The roses at the foot of the paved terrace, 'Mme. Antoine Mari'. 'Duchesse d'Auerstaedt', and 'Mme. Alfred Carriere', all have some flowers; so did until recently, and perhaps still do, the climbers on the balcony and pergola: 'Jaune Desprez' (particularly floriferous), 'Marechal Niel', 'Cl. Papa Gontier', 'Crepuscule'. The first two have perhaps benefited from the runoff from our outdoor shower which we set up under the balcony, but the others have been perfectly dry.

I suspect that our policy of watering only the first year has encouraged our plants to root deeply, and not make top growth beyond what the root system can support. They grow more slowly than with watering, but are resilient. We mostly grow old roses. The ones I listed above as being in bloom incude both grafted and ownroot varieties, and all have been in the ground a decade or more.

Melissa