Casualties

There’s a weight of expectation I load upon the garden at the beginning of the year. The moment high summer arrives – and with it the realisation that my role has shifted quietly from growing new things to tending what I already have – I feel the inescapable urge to take stock. And while I will always view the process of gardening as a creative partnership with nature, rather than a war, there’s more than a suggestion of a general looking out across the fields of the fallen once the fury of the battle has died away. This is where they bravely fought, and fell. All those plants. All those resolutions, hopes and intentions.

All those frazzled seedlings.

The greenhouse has been the front line of the battle. It’s ironic that I made a concerted effort over winter to clear the encroaching tangle of damson and bramble (more delicious than it sounds) from around and above the structure. For weeks, me and the seedlings felt the benefit of a little extra light, and everything was going swimmingly, even throughout the first hot spell in May. Since then, the thermometer’s climbed regularly to over 50 degrees, even with the roof lights and door left open. Potting anything up has been an endurance test – the grittiest kind of sauna in the kind of atmosphere where you walk in and you feel your eyebrows immediately start to singe. If you’d told me back in April that I might want to keep a roll of shade netting to hand, I’d have laughed you out of town, but it looks like this is going to be a sensible and necessary precaution.

In spite of this, the greenhouse is still a favourite place to hang out, but this year’s not done a huge amount to disabuse me of the notion that growing from seed is not quite my comfort zone – not when I compare it to the ease of chopping bits off a plant, stripping off the lower leaves and poking them into the potting mix. This year, even strongly growing plants nurtured from cuttings were held back once the heat became more intense, or fried completely, and those I managed to save are only just now recovering. It’s been an accelerated learning curve – information held at a theoretical level suddenly hauled out from deep within the mental stacks, dusted off, and pressed into service. The tendency for plants to go into semi dormancy over a certain temperature means that the bottom watering that worked perfectly in milder weather soon became a direct problem. It’s entirely counter intuitive, but something to watch for as soon as temperatures tip over the 30 degree mark. Leaves closed their stomata to prevent water loss, and the process of transpiration temporarily ground to a halt, leaving roots saturated and at risk of rotting. It’s fascinating, but I wonder if growing on a bench will ever not feel like school. Perhaps that’s how it should be.