August inner garden notes

All the flower pots, filled with petunias, geraniums, trailing lobelia etc, are still doing their thing and looking bright and cheerful, but in the little border the colour has quietened down a bit.  There are lavenders and the pale yellow daisy, the rose bushes are past their first flowering and their second flush is just beginning, the rudbeckia are shining like little suns amongst the greenery, and a rather unusual pink has just revealed herself.  I bought her, unseen, from an old chap in the village, who sells clumps of herbaceous plants over his garden wall for the princely sum of 50p a plant.  She turns out to be a bit of a beauty, in the most curious and understated way possible!

The flower below is living proof that miracles do happen.  Over the last three or four years I have had several large and extremely healthy rose geranium plants.  I tucked them up carefully at the beginning of last winter, reasonably happy that they would be fine.  I had no idea of the onslaught of endless, intense cold they were about to be plunged into and I lost the lot.  A friend in Yorkshire kindly furnished me with three cuttings from her plants (which had originated from mine) and I was happy that I would at least have these, plus one other straggly effort which was sitting on the window cill in the study.  The saga continues.  When I was tidying up the garden in the spring, getting ready for planting up the summertime flowerpots, I was incredulous to find the soil in a pot I had discarded in the corner of the garden, bright with green shoots.  Real green shoots - not the boring economic ones.  My rose geranium is made of sterner stuff and had weathered the winter, and despite all the indications that she was as dead as a dodo, had stayed healthy under the soil.  And not only that pot, I found pale green shoots four inches down in another 'dead' pot, so I unearthed that plant and now look - flowers!  Hooray, joy and hallelujah!