Another hour of weeding and tidying, and even though everything was damp from yesterday’s rain and I kept getting showered with drips, I would have stayed outside happily except for the light failing.
I dug up some brambles and lightly pruned the berberis because it was encroaching on exochorda - the bride, which is going to bloom in a fountain of foamy white blossom in a week or so. It is always a delight to see, worth sacrificing some of the riotously orange berberis blossom.
I also yanked a lot of passionflower out of the berberis, the exochorda, a yew and a buddleia. When I planted my first passionflower I believed the advice that it was a delicate exotic which needed cosseting. Now, although I still love the flowers, I know it can be a rampant thug so I try to stop it romping away too much.
I pruned a couple of the buddleias by two-thirds, and still have some more in the wild-ish section of garden to do. All the buddleias have self-seeded, though some have been transplanted to different parts of the garden. We used to have some beautiful buddleia cultivars but they all keeled over in one of the terrible heatwaves a couple of summers ago. The wild, self-seeded ones came through unscathed so we decided to plant them instead.
The Japanese cherry tree is so covered in pinkish-white buds that it looks like a giant sparkler standing in the lawn. It will be in full bloom any day now.