It’s been a busy month here at The Long House, what with dog walking, trying to count butterflies and chatting to passers-by. So as a little light relief I spent a few days giving the rambling rose Banksiae Lutea a damn good haircut. The poor old thing produced more dead wood than flowers this May, mainly, we suspect, because of the lack of water at crucial times over the past twelve months. We reckoned the only thing to do was to hack it back in the hope that it would induce substantial new growth during this autumn. As you can see from the left hand photos below, most years it flowers spectacularly but this year’s effort (the next one) was so feeble that drastic action was called for despite being the wrong time of year to do it. Kill or cure, just like Boris’s lockdown theory.
Talking of which, Rosie too needed a damn good haircut thanks to the banishing of hairdressers to outer darkness. It’s only fair to do a comparison job on her as well.
As for butterflies, it’s been a spectacular year for them though it baffles me how we are expected to sit for 15 minutes and count them. There are so many flitting hither and thither that trying to identify them is extremely tricky especially as they unhelpfully keep their wings together when they’re still. However, patience is my middle name and here are just a few of the many I’ve managed to photograph.
Dog walking of course is the perfect chance to admire the countryside around here and it would be remiss not make you envious. But it also provides a few surprises too: like the idiots that think a tinder-dry forest is a good place for a barbecue. And even more odd: the health and safety fiend who, out of the thousands of trees in the forest, chose to point out the dangers of a few saplings by labelling them with ‘fragile’ stickers. Mr Crawshaw would be proud.
But with the ending of lockdown certain things are beginning to return to normal: our aphidologist pals Bob and Bob came to the garden a couple of weeks ago to search for rare undiscovered species and left very excited but sadly their find turned out to be a mere Myzus langei. But I thought you might like to see it nonetheless.
The garden, meanwhile, is anything but normal: lack of rain has not only done for the Banksiae but for most of the things we’d expect to be flowering at the end of July. Still, here’s the best of what we’ve got:
