A few days ago I posted a gloomy thread about climate change. This thread is about garden things that make me happy.

We're in heatwave week, so I work a little outside, then come indoors and sit under the fan. I've been piddling around in the yard: the garden right around the house. Part of it was cutting old growth out of the roses. The reblooming ones are enjoying a modest second flowering: gawky difficult "Miss Mystery"--but such blooms as she does produce are glorious--'Mrs. B.R. Cant' and 'Mme. Antoine Mari', and a very fair second flowering on 'Crépuscule', which faces a little north of east and has a building at her back, which help protect her from the sun. Just coming into bloom now is R. moschata, and oh, she is good to have in the garden. The musk rose starts blooming around the time everything else is shutting down for the summer. The plant looks cool, with its gray-green foliage and milk-white blooms, and it's fragrant. Mine is growing at the corner of a building, with around the corner other fresh looking plants: a variegated persicaria (?), green leaves splashed with yellowish cream, followed by variegated Japanese iris, and with a couple of clumps of agapanthus just coming into flower, all this in the shade of the long narrow pergola on which 'Crépuscule' is growing; and at at the end, a variegated small-leaved privet, sunshine in vegetable form. These are all excellent plants and utterly easy to grow here. I should add, I checked on HMF what they have to say about R. moschata, and I would take what they say about it with a grain of salt. I find it too floppy to make a decent shrub, though it's true I hate to prune a plant that doesn't require it; and as for the 8' to 12' height, mine is currently about 10' by 15', with support, and not looking like it intends to stop any time soon. In short, where it's suited it may get bigger than you were thinking. My plant is about fifteen years old, on its own roots, and I recall it took some years to get started. It's growing in terrible soil, and tangling with common jasmine with which it shares a pergola. That's another cool-looking plant with a sweet scent, and if anything growing in even worse soil.

I fret quite a bit about getting enough organic matter for the garden, but, this time of year, it's more a question of what to do with the stuff. (Getting it for planting holes is still a concern.) I chop it up more or less and throw it on the ground and beds. In the small orto, which has pavers, I lift up the pavers and put pruned and pulled plant matter beneath them. It decomposes in time, and this keeps the pavers from sinking below the level of beds as they get their organic amendment. Slow, inefficient, and slightly ridiculous, like much of my gardening, but the plants grow. I would like things to be tidier.

The man who's helping me clean up the big garden, and who is doing a valiant job, is off for the rest of the month, as I have no more money to pay him and will have to wait until July. It's just as well, as his last working day was hot and it will get hotter still. He has finished the mowing, and is now clearing the brush out of the bottom bed, which direly needed it. There's more cleanup ahead, and then I want to set him to digging planting holes.

Growth in the garden has overall been good this year. I've been slowly cleaning out the Serbian Bed in the newer part of the big garden--again, slow and inefficient--and in the process having a look at how everything's doing. I have some suckering rootstock to dig up, and a couple of places to replant where roses were lost, but on the whole, the roses look pretty good. Happy. Also the hedge backing up the roses is doing fairly well. It's still uneven, with several plants too young to fulfil their function, but many are thriving. I was admiring the symphoricarpos and winter shrub honeysuckle in particular the other day: both growing like gangbusters and healthy as can be. Also, I'll be able to leave wild herbaceous plants to grow in the hedge that I might not want in the rose beds: they'll look right there and be beneficial for nature.

This spring during the period when the once-blooming old roses were blooming, for example in the Serbian beds, I hardly saw them because the garden was such a mess. This was before my helper started working. The grass paths and roads were paths no more, the grass was so high; the beds were full of roses, but also full of wild herbaceous plants, i.e. weeds. The grass was the worst, but there was little pleasure in seeing the roses in the middle of such disorder, such a lack of definition.

Now that the grass has been mowed, the paths can't be called beautiful, but at least I can walk on them. I hope that my helper will stay around long enough that he can continue routine maintenance through to next year, so that I can actually enjoy the roses when they bloom. They are wonderful--thick; madly invasive!--when cleared of the worst encumbrances.

All right; that's all.