By Jodie Jones
This week at Great Dixter it was already hot when I arrived at quarter past seven (the roads were kind to me) and I floated around taking pictures before the sun bleached all depth out of the day.
The borders were looking astonishingly lush. There has been a little tactical watering but, by and large, I attribute this to decades of good soil management and the habit of planting so densely that every bed grows its own protective parasol.
The meadows, in contrast, were just as brown and crispy as they should be in August, and cutting was well under way. Half the front lawn had been scalped since I was last here, and the ‘Keep off the Long Grass’ sign lay redundant on the bench by the gate.
And where meadows have been cut, there will be clippings to clear and edges to detail. I joined a group raking the upper moat and managed to frighten a slow worm so badly that it shed its tail right in front of me – which frightened me pretty badly too, until I could be convinced that I hadn’t inadvertently cut it in half. Meanwhile the tail carried on twitching wildly as the slow worm made its stealthy exit stage left...
By this point it really was extremely hot, and most of the team retreated to the shady nursery potting benches where a gentle breeze took the edge off as we potted on quantities of Sinacalia tangutica and Matthiola sinuata.
At tea break we were joined outside the mess room by a visitor with heat stroke who lay limply on the hay bale sofa while we topped up his water bottle and fed him electrolyte tablets until his vital signs returned to normal.
Then we went back to the potting bench where Peter and I potted up a plug tray full of Symphyotrichum lateriflorum var horizontalis. With their widely branching stems, these have an irritatingly velcro-like tendency to stick themselves together, which made it tricky to set them out in the cold frame, but watering them in was deliciously refreshing.
When I got back in the car at the end of the day, the dashboard read 41 degrees, and I had to run the air conditioning for several minutes before the steering wheel cooled down enough for me to take hold of it and drive myself home.
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