Week 29

A nursery visit; St Swithin's Day blues; wineberries

Hello! I hope you have had a lovely week. Here in the UK seems to be the only place in the northern hemisphere having a rainy and cool and, well, very British summer, and so it has continued this week. We grumble slightly, but we are all also looking in horror at the temperatures in southern Europe and the US and realising a bit of rain might not be a terrible thing. I hope you are all ok elsewhere.

This is my weekly post in which between us we keep a track of the seasons as they change. I tell you three things that I have seen/done/tasted/sniffed/whatever that felt particularly seasonal this week, and then you tell me yours. We begin with a roundup of your comments from last week, because I love them.

Here’s your Week 28:

The overpowering smell of tomato-i-ness on fingers after tending the plants; trapping and identifying moths in a dark wood late at night, faces lit up from our head torches; magnificent rainbows; staying indoors during summer doldrums under the heat dome in the Southern US; a dragon fly the length of my hand; a glass of wine by the Seine on a warm evening; picking and eating plump pods of peas in the garden; courgette flowers and the smell of rain; fox cubs in the garden; the flash of a kingfisher skimming the swollen river Rea; a clover-flower-filled lawn, humming with bees; a wedding in the pouring rain in a tranquil, deep green garden, with everyone under rainbow umbrellas; blackbirds and sparrows eating the tayberries and blackberries; swimming in a Norwegian alpine lake under an apricot sunset at 11pm; ladies mantle plants cupping water like iridescent pearls; a visit to a pick-your-own-fruit farm; into the sea with rolling waves and bodyboard and feeling so ALIVE; the first cicada song (in Florida); a dinner for friends served in the garden; eating banoffee ice cream; getting the houseplants out in a downpour for a good wash; watching the Royal Swan Uppers - in their new King Charles insignia - out on the Thames for the annual ancient ‘upping’ (counting and health checking) of the Kings swans; eating warm blueberries straight off the bush.

What brilliantly varied snippets of lives. I am transported. Thank you.

Here’s my Week 29:

A nursery visit

The last couple of weeks on these posts I have been slightly obsessing about the planting up of my border, newly freed from dead box plants. Well it isn’t over yet! I have ordered some plants from Knoll Gardens and a couple of others from elsewhere, but I was also passing Special Plants near Bath this week and thought… oh I could just pop in… and so I did, and what a treasure trove. Such beautiful, healthy plants, many in flower so I could see exactly what I was getting. Here is my hoard. The salvia at the front is perhaps the perfect distillation of the sort of colours I am looking for and is called ‘Strawberries and Cream’ though that is not a very good name, seeing as the red is much more raspberry than strawberry, and the cream is a very yellowy clotted cream. Excited to be planting soon. I will try to shut up about this now.

St Swithin’s Day blues

St Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain na mair.

Well it rained. The sun also shone, a lot, so who knows. There is some truth in this very old saying as I have written in previous editions of The Almanac, in that the weather that we have in mid-July tends to then ‘set in’ for the rest of the summer. So this would suggest an unsettled time for the next month, and lo and behold look what the Met Office’s long-range forecast says. Sorry to the campers. Perhaps we just look to the Mediterranean and be grateful.

Wineberries

The Japanese wineberries are ripe and I am out there picking them every day, mostly just straight into my mouth to be honest. They are an absolutely brilliant fruit that I bought years ago from Mark Diacono’s Otter Farm. They don’t mind shade, and produce these gorgeous sweet berries with absolutely no fuss, the birds ignore them, and look pretty in the garden too.

That’s it from me! Let me know what you have done/eaten/spotted this week that has felt particularly ‘this week’ in the comments below.