We're having a mild summer, not our usual experience. Today there was a brief shower; a week ago we got a generous rainfall during a night of thunderstorms; all this after a wet June. It is hot during the day, but not blazing--you do die out in the sun--though often sultry. I still sleep with a cover and light quilt over the sheet, and it's comfortable in the shade.

We never have many roses in bloom in July. We're doing a bit better than usual with the rain: 'Mrs. B.R. Cant' and 'Mme. Alfred Carriere have some flowers, and so does 'Archiduc Joseph'. Rosa moschata is blooming, of course: this is its season. The plant is now eight to ten feet tall, and wide spreading, with its musk-scented milk-white single blooms. We keep it caged or it would sprawl prostrate. The plant, perhaps ten years old, has gotten quite hefty. There's a scattering of flowers on 'Souv. de Mme. Leonie Viennot', and more than a scattering on 'Crespuscule'. I see pink in the Second Serbian Bed, too, but I'm sure not going to walk down there in the sun to find out what it is. I need to stop the car on my way back home and take a look.

Summer isn't a big time for flowers here, or so I've always said. I'm becoming quite interested in weedy meadow wildflowers: anthemis, yarrow, a host of daisies, including fragrant Inula viscosa; mullein, yellow-flowered bedstraws, fennel, field sage. There are others whose names I don't know. Asters are a popular traditional plant, mostly in shades of pink and purple, a meter tall and indestructible. Lavender blooms in summer, and so does caryopteris. After the delicate woodland flowers of early spring, and the opulence of rose and peony season, the summer flowers are a new, welcome phase. The once-blooming old roses assort particularly well with them. Of course the garden is a mess, and I can never get caught up on all the tidying....what a fantasy, to imagine all the garden chores done and the entire garden looking its best! It'll never happen. But here and there are pleasant areas. Come fall I could dig up a few more of these weedy wildflowers and add them here and there. One more chore among a thousand.

P.S. I was out working among the once-blooming old roses, now well past their bloom. At least one of the roses I was working on was very pleasantly aromatic, possibly the vigorous and painfully thorny 'Petite Lisette'. I enjoy the old roses, also when they're not in flower.