Almost there...

The gardens at Heale are closing in just over a week and it is quieter than usual. The weather was very atmospheric this week, misty and really humid, thunder and lightning, heavy rain followed by sticky soil. Being in a valley, the garden often seems secretive and hidden, like the world is turning on the outside but not for us.

I spent a lot of time with the veggies again, getting to know the plots, hoeing and weeding and tidying up. I transplanted some more salad and we cropped veg for the house: Onions, Courgettes, Radishes and Mooli (white roots bit like a radish kind of carrot length), also Chinese artichokes, a member of the Stachys family and really weird looking, tiny maggot-like white roots.

When the rain came we did some pricking out of Digitalis seedlings and read up on plants, checking names and habits.

Michael named a reed for me that is in the river in the Japanese garden, it is huge and has spiky female seed pods: Bur-reed, quite a pretty structural plant but hidden unless you go and look closely at it.

I love a purple plant in the borders in the veg garden which is just flowering now with pretty tall white and fragrant spires: Actea simplex Atropurpurea. It likes moist ground so this one has got a bit dry and the colour is fading from the leaf.

I took time to have a peek at Kevin Hughes Plant Nursery a bit this week, otherwise we just walk past it week after week and plants come and go. Kevin has a really old Greenhouse full of stuff which I love! I don't think it will be standing for much longer so I finally took a photograph of it! I have always loved it, even when I visited before I worked here.

During Summer everything seems frantic and as soon as we work and weed and cut, plants grow back again but as the season turns, Michael is mowing a notch higher, the weeds are slowing down a bit, work becomes a bit more focused with time to think about where we are headed.