Six on Saturday – 25/7/2026

I have about 6000 litres of water storage in various tanks around the garden and have used probably around 75% of it. The days are getting shorter, maybe we’ll get a little bit of respite from the heat, maybe there’ll be enough rainfall to add a few days supply, or maybe not. I’ve not used tap water to water anything so far and don’t intend to if it can be helped but there are a lot of plants that are really suffering now. Opening the garden creates a dilemma, do I have a lush garden because I’ve been profligate with drinking water or do I hope that visitors will forgive the frazzled look. To judge from our visitor numbers last week, a lot of them simply stay away, perhaps assuming it will either be too frazzled to be worth seeing or so lush as to enrage them with my irresponsible use of water.

Things have deteriorated markedly in the last week, it seems that whatever last reserves of water were in the soil are now largely exhausted. I have watered a few things just to keep them from dying. It’s wearisome.

Six on Saturday is a weekend snapshot of the garden which can focus on the good or the bad, or even go down the deeply unfashionable road of conveying a measure of balance. Six things from your garden, illustrated and annotated, posted online and linked in my comments below. That’s the brief, lets get to it.

One.
Some things don’t care. Allium senescens is exactly the same whatever the weather. That’s beginning to seem a highly desirable quality and maybe I should be looking at spreading it around and perhaps looking for similar things with the same qualities.

Two.
I thought I was on to another out and out winner with Eryngium ‘Tetra Petra’, grow from seed sent me by Noelle some years back. Until this year they had been going from strength to strength but this season has seen a few not reappearing and I didn’t have much luck with the seed I collected last year either. That said, I will definitely persevere with it, having snapped its picture with 9, perhaps 10, gatekeeper butterflies in the shot.

Three.
The Dahlias up in the top corner are miserable. They made good growth early on but are crying out for water now and the flowers are half the size they should be and lasting half as long, all of which makes the performance of the Canna just behind them the more extraordinary. Bought from Desert to Jungle at one of the Tregrehan plant fairs, it was labelled Henlade seedling, Henlade being the location of the nursery. The flower stems are 1.8m tall. Fittingly, the cider I was drinking while seated on the bench from where I took the Canna picture also came from Zummerzet.

Four.
Most of my lilies have finished flowering and I shall take those in pots back up to the allotment where I can water them more easily. Lilium auratum ‘Gold Band’ is still going, pot grown and plunged into the garden it is only half the height it should be but still beautiful and strongly perfumed. It is my intention to plant more of them into the ground next year and see if I can keep the slugs at bay. Hopefully they will then need far less watering.

Five.
The bed where Chrysanthemum maximum and Crocosmia ‘Carmin Brilliant’ are currently in full flower will be at its best between last week’s opening and the next in two weeks time. The way things are going, not much will be at its best for the next one. Crocosmia ‘Paul’s Best Yellow’ has burned to orange in the background.

Six.
Maurandya barklayana was something I grew from Plant World seed a few years back. I didn’t sow any this year but there are still one or two about. It self sows and very occasionally an odd plant will survive the winter. Once it gets going it grows extremely quickly and is pretty in flower if not especially prolific.

Just underneath the Maurandya was a Cyclamen hederifolium with two flowers open, it was what led me to discover the Maurandya above it. I’m probably guilty of seeing them around this time every year for at least the last decade and saying they seem very early. August to October is what my Cyclamen book says. I’m getting wildly excited by the forecast of perhaps as much as a millimetre of rain on Sunday morning. Might lay the dust. They had started to tease us with the possibility of rain in a weeks time but have since gone back on it.