DROUGHT

It is Sunday 27th May, 26C, a bit humid and the garden is bone dry. We had a little rain on Friday but none is forecast for a fortnight.
Thank heavens for a borehole - I am out reviving collapsed rhubarb and lovage, watering the transplanted roses and seed beds.

Sitting outside on the bench in a cloud of self sown aquilegia, under a whirl of house martins wings, is bliss. I am with a beer (R glass of wine) and some black pepper crisps looking across Morecambe Bay to the Ashton Memorial at Lancaster, at least eighteen miles away as the crow flies (40 miles by road).

The watering is done for the day (we had a shower of rain two hours later)(of course) and I did a bit of grass cutting (to reveal the glory of the Viburnum plicatum Mariesii) and trimming of the beech hedge so we can walk through to the top garden (wood)   now a carpet of campion and pignut.
  

Asparagus continues and the new plants thrive, germination of seeds is slow except for the courgettes and butternut squash in the shed. I have bought six new plants to fill in gaps.
The boggy bit of lawn has been tined with a fork and a small trench dug to the ditch from the new spring by the eucalyptus. 
This tree does not look too happy and I wonder if it is the very cold winter or the ground in which it stands becoming soggy.

Come Monday and by midday it is 27C here in cold damp Cumbria. Five pounds of rhubarb put in the freezer and asparagus for lunch again.

Everything is growing so much in the warm weather - the sweet cicely is 5 feet tall! Must buy some fish - hake great covered in chopped lovage and sweet cicely in melted butter.

Found an old wren's nest in a honeysuckle by the wood shed, a ball of moss with a narrow entrance hole.

Down by the pond the candelabra primulas are fine - I decided not to weed this bed this year and see how they went - and they are okay though the thug pendulous sedge is making a comeback.

There are poppies everywhere.

And a lot of white - the lilac is so white, and scented

and the two viburnum on the banking splendid, Mariesii left, wild Guelder Rose right.

Some people suggest I talk a lot of rhubarb so here it is. 

Having called this blog drought it has just started raining (Wednesday evening).

My good friend Neil Curry has just presented me with his latest collection of poetry - On Keeping Company With Mrs Woolf published by Shoestring Press - I cannot compete with that.