I’ve already moved on from midsummer. With characteristic prescience, I felt its approach, marked its significance, and ploughed straight on through – a little previous, since at the time I started writing this, the solstice was still 24 hours away. I’ve been mildly reproaching myself for not making more of a fuss – though it seems that the whole of social media has that covered, so the sun should be appeased – but I’ve realised it’s just me. It’s what I do with people’s birthdays, which I have an uncanny knack for remembering a week or so before the event, mentally flagging, and then forgetting on the actual day. It’s not that I’m in a particular rush to get anywhere – quite the contrary. I’d rather we just hit the pause button and stay here for a while, milking the moment for every last sensory drop. And while my favourite day of the year is always whatever day it is today, my favourite time in the garden is very much not midsummer which, to my mind, is the week or so right before everything, including the gardener, starts to look more than a bit knackered, and in need of a long, cool drink.
But thankfully, it’s today, and the garden is incredible, if teetering slightly on the edge of something. I’d lived on this Earth for half a hundred years before discovering that a female octopus gives birth only once, and then begins the process of pulling herself to bits for the sake of her offspring, and there’s something of that kind of deeply matrescent distress about high summer in the garden. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s coming. Today things almost exclusively still green, without even a hint of biscuit to behold. I can sit comfortably back and review the various garden failures from the bench in the shade of the hedge. That’s actually quite a tricky proposition for me, adept as I am at helping people reframe their garden failures into successes that haven’t quite yet happened, a Pollyanna-ish take that’s hard not to catch yourself (and yes, it’s immensely amusing to use that expression when you really do have a friend called Pollyanna who you know will probably find it highly annoying). Take the annual rudbeckias (hirta something or other – Sahara, I think?) I sowed too late last year. They did nothing, overwintered in pots with no shelter, and are only now coming into flower. Imagine if I’d given up on them. Apart from anything, it would have been daft to abandon a plant that masquerades as an annual, but which is really a biennial or short-lived perennial that just happens to have a habit of blooming in its first season. Had I sat with this for a few considered moments, I’d have known better than to have expected first-year flowers from a garden that loves nothing more than to grow leaves and prickles. Unless you’re a dock or a bramble or a nettle, in which case, flowers agogo.
