Santolinas in summer

Happy Sunday to you all. Or in the case of those reading this in Australia – happy Monday. You must have hoped that I would be back to my routine after the jaunts. But that deadline just oozed away.

Sunday afternoon here in London (yes, yes). And it’s time to show you the amazing resurgence of the santolinas this year.

I was going to write I Hate Santolinas Part 4. But they are amazing for once. This is dry, heatwave hot early summer, no rain for weeks and weeks and what rewards me when I walk up to the potting shed?

This.

A stonking great bank of rosemaries and santolinas all madly doing their thing.

Perhaps the missing lush rain of early spring meant that the growth was checked on these troublesome shrubs and they just didn’t produce so much growth and flop about.

About as floppy as the teenager who sat next to me on the train to London this week. I rashly booked a window seat and my path to any sort of exit was blocked by a lad who sat down, plugged in and then all the bones in his body seemed to disappear and he oozed about and I was trapped.

Not only had he nabbed the only power circuit in the seat front, but he then amazed me by being able to listen to something in his ears, watch something on a tablet and work on one other screen. All at the same time.

Actually I was impressed. It made me feel old. I can listen to my MP3 player and weed at the same time, but that’s pushing it.

And when you study these pictures of my barn garden you might think that I may have been listening to improving podcasts, but weeding I wasn’t.

Even the weeds are slow in this heat.

No doubt when I stagger back later this week I’ll have to get the secateurs out and be off with the flowering buttons of each and every santolina shrub. The weight is just too great for the plants.

But it might give me a few weeks respite from expiring plant sights.