Gardening roundup

Great excitement this evening with a silver and opalescent monsoon closing the recent heatwave. The naivest waves of cherry and apple blossom have long spent their weightless beauty and the once fearless lilacs have forgotten themselves and gone to seed. An embarrassment of popcorn white mayflowers quickly turned and fell, blushing pink speckles onto the grass.



Our camera crew rushed to capture the drama of a ladybird steeplejack patrolling the dawn white sprays of elderflower in the arboretum. The rampant and fecund elder has conjured these flowers from elaborate multi-candelabra podworks, and its show has only just begun.



The wild rose is everywhere tangled in the tall hedgerow of lilac, holly, forsythia, may and firethorn. And how could I omit forsythia, spring's first resplendent harbinger, from the chronology of inflorescence? Its yellow petals have been collected and made into languid catkins by the genteel laburnum, but-*

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Ganache

* I'm sorry to have to tell you that Ganache has been rushed to hospital with head injuries, after falling victim to a ten kilo soursop from the same tree in the greenhouse that nearly killed Prof. Kronk (causing him to forget the proof of his theorem, the law of the conservation of beauty). As much as we like it, I fear that either the soursop will have to be felled, or the bench relocated. Our best wishes for a speedy recovery go out to Ganache and his long time companion Velvan. Ed