It's not the heat, it's the humidity

       July has been hot! As a result the garden is burgeoning, especially the vegetable one. If I don't have tomatoes within a week I shall be very surprised.

    Unfortunately I have been *working* far too much - full-time this week! - and am so exhausted that I have no energy to work in the garden when I finally do get home. Anne and I went to the Honey Tree nursery and I bought a gingko tree and a Chinese wisteria, and then at the sell-off sale at the Sobeys garden centre (75% off!) I got another Chinese wisteria. Now I need a pergola. I also got some more thyme - I am determined to replace more of the grass with thyme. We saw some gorgeous thyme lawns in a recent visit to North Cape. I am spotting wooly thyme everywhere I go, hoping to dig up and transplant from the roadsides, etc. Now to gather some energy and plant them - except the wisteria and the gingko - I want to baby them on a bit (and plan for a pergola).
     I picked the first raspberries last night, just at dusk, so I may have missed some ripe ones.  There's enough to enliven the breakfast fodder, at least.
     Above is my clematis 'Niobe' - I also bought an 'Elsa Spath' but it didn't bloom yet. I got these at WalMart in the early spring and babied them along in the greenhouse for quite a while. In other clematis news, the mystery one in the flower bed by the lilacs turns out to be another 'Nelly Moser', like the ones I have in the bed by the door. I suppose this means that they are extremely hardy. The two new ones are in the lilac bed, one on either side of the opening between the lawn and the veg. There should be a pergola there too, but I don't think clematis can compete with wisteria.
      And speaking of lilacs, I have cut down the older part of the lilac hedge to half its size. It was getting too big to cut off the spent blooms, and shading the flower bed quite a lot. It looks terrible at the moment, but I am sure it will fill out again, and quite quickly.