What a blessing it is, absorbable rain, after weeks without it.
It soon stopped, but I had taken a ten second video, which I now find compulsive viewing. The London gardening friend to whom I sent it replied “only a dribble here”.
So sorry to crow, but surely, surely, by the time you read this, there will have been good gardening rain in London too?
A view of the rain falling on Ruth’s Somerset garden. (Image: Ruth Pavey) Looking at the photos I realise there are several connections with London. The purple Salvia amistad and the yellow rudbeckia both came from the summer Harington plant sale in Highgate as healthy young plants.
The pink dahlia has a longer back story but no widely recognised name. Laura Boothman, of Highgate Horticultural Society and Highgate Allotments, and I both know it as Michael Donagher’s, only because it was a gift from the late and fondly remembered Michael when age obliged him to give up his allotment.
Michael’s triangular plot was the first anyone would see on entering the site. It was a model of no-nonsense growing, with potatoes, beans and brassicas in rows put in in early spring, then harvested to leave it practically empty in the autumn.
The only sign of frivolity was a big patch of the pinkest of pink dahlias, which my friend Verity, when she shared my plot, would always look on with desire.
Then she moved to Oxford and an allotment that regularly floods, so although I have passed on several of the Michael Donagher tubers, she is frequently without it.
The dahlia in the photo was meant for her but instead of floods this year it was heatwaves that kept us from effecting a transfer. It grew very leggy in its pot, which turned out an advantage when I brought it to Somerset and it found its place by the back door.
The fig at the top of the photo is the child of the one I planted in 1976 at the end of my garden in Holloway to mark the day my father would have been 80, had he not died earlier that year.
A “Fig Brown Turkey”, it used to do brilliantly in the years before my neighbour planted a eucalyptus, now enormous, on the other side of the wall, and the squirrels and foxes arrived. Squirrels like unripe figs, foxes like digging. The fig survives, but no longer brilliantly.
PLANT SALES AND FLOWER SHOWS
Plant Heritage Grand Plant Fair, St Michael’s School, North Rd, Highgate. September 6, 9.30am to 2pm.
Highgate Horticultural Society Flower Show, Holly Lodge Community Centre, Makepeace Ave, Highgate. September 6, 2pm – 4.30pm.
Hampstead Garden Suburb Horticultural Society Flower Show with brass band, Free Church Hall, Northway, NW11. September 13, 3pm- 5pm.
Muswell Hill Horticultural Society Flower Show, North Bank, Pages Lane, N10. September 20 at 3pm.
