Wet and windswept

British gardens need to be resilient, if for no other reason than to cope with the vagaries of the British summer. This British summer – technically only just into its second week – has been mercurial from the off. From before the off, in fact, since it decided to lay claim to the end of spring, blasting the final fortnight of May with a record breaking heatwave.

Sure as eggs is eggs, the garden responded to the heat with a prodigious crop of weeds and by moving up the first flush of the roses which meant, for a glorious few days, the borders were full of both peonies and the full complement of roses together. The gardener responded with watering cans, unseasonable deadheading and muttered oaths. June arrived and flicked the switch – the heat departed, leaving thundery showers to occupy the vacancy, with predictable results.

I can’t pretend I wasn’t glad to see the rain. The sky had played chicken with drought just long enough, and come away the victor – a dry spring following a wet winter, and capped off with fortnight of roasting had pushed the water reserves of the May soil to the limit, but the garden managed not to show any signs of heat stress. I snorted lungfuls of petrichor, let the bacteria have its wicked way with my parasympathetic nervous system and imagined it doing something similar to everyone and everything in the garden. Even the water butt seemed pleased to be full again.

The rain-walloped blooms? Well, they looked sorry, of course – bowed low, petals tumbling to the ground below. But flowers possess a tenacity that belies their size, and a storm must be ferocious if it’s to rip healthy petals from the grip of the bloom that’s yet to finish with them. Anything surrendered to the elements would have been surplus to requirements – there’s a period between pollination and the inescapable need for deadheading where the gardener gets to live for a while in denial, until gravity firmly makes them face up to reality. Unless the wind and rain intervene, to hurry things along a little.

So, this is where we are. Picking up the pieces of summer come too soon, in a lull between the heat.

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Remedy for ageing

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May 31

Tomorrow it’s June, and May has been a basket case. The year is turning faster than it has any right to do. It’s an established phenomenon that time appears to pass more quickly the older you get, and ironically, I’ve just spent far too long reminding myself of why this might happen. There are several theories. Paul Janet proposed in 1877 that our experiece of time varies proportionally to our longevity – as a child, summer seemed to last for ever because it was far more significant relative to our age than a few weeks in July and August will be to someone in their fifities. More recent research suggests that our brains encode new experiences in greater detail than routine experiences; that increasingly familiar events and seasons demand less mental space than does novelty, and that the relative lack of novelty as we age explains the perception of time passing more quickly than when everything we experience feels like uncharted territory.