Not dead. Yet.

Katherine Adele has given up the ghost. I really hope it’s not permanent.

It may just be that she’s shut up shop for the summer, fed up of the relentless heat. But whether it’s simply that, or something more final, her disappearance has grabbed my attention in a way that four heatwaves had not managed quite to do. Five heatwaves, on the other hand...

Last week I wrote of how resilient the garden had been up until the end of July, but how August had raised the stakes. The climate throwing on another coal, just to see how much we could all take together. I also wrote of how I’ve always found growing in the controlled environment of the greenhouse – or any form of container gardening – so much more demanding than growing in the ground, where I can rely upon the buffer of the soil and the weather. How ironic.

The buffer has gone, or at least, that’s how it feels just now. While deep down I believe in the ability of my garden to know what it’s doing, to shut itself down in a drought, bide its time and spring back into life when the rain returns, the partner I’ve come to rely upon in all my gardening endeavours – the one who has my back, covers up my mistakes and glosses over my failures to make me look good – has, for now, left the scene. Leaving me standing here looking at baked clay, and brown crispy things. Brown crispy things where there should be reliable stalwarts, whose only horticultural failing at this time of the year used to be a tendancy to be throwing out more leaf than flower.

I should have those kinds of problems.