This week I … That’s my new idea, actually writing about things I have actually done in the garden. I think it’s quite a good idea, but somehow I can’t start this week like that. There are too many mice running around inside my head. Mice. I was awake in the night worrying that nice little mice might eat the poison we have put down to kill the big horrible rat. I am growing a wildlife garden with lots of places for wildlife, and then a rat has the temerity to chew a hole under the bath in the first floor bathroom. Inevitably the rat man is called. I don’t have a solution to the conundrum in my head.

This week I pruned the rambling rose on top of the shed. The sparrows are annoyed. It is their secret haunt, just above the pond, and close to the laburnum tree, where they seem to find something good to eat. Each morning we sit and eat our breakfast and try to count the sparrows. For the weekly survey we do, we need the maximum number at any one time. They hide inside the rose, and thread themselves out in ones and twos, making a total count very hard. Now I have pruned the rose they are congregating on the roof next door, which is not in our garden, and where, strictly speaking, they can’t be counted.

My pruning activities also extended to the rose on the front of the house, another rambling rose I have written about before, Rosa banksiae ‘Lutescens’. It sulked when it was first planted, but it has now settled in and is very vigorous, reaching the eves of the house. It was clambering in through Judy’s bedroom window, a prompt for action, as well as the fact that I could borrow the builder’s ladder, which is longer than mine.

The weather is still depressingly hot, with no rain forecast. To improve the situation next year we have ordered a 1100 litre rainwater tank, and this morning I began to prepare a space for it. The builders are putting in a concrete base, and I wanted to keep the topsoil, so I have moved it into a heap under one of the cherry trees. The soil was disturbingly dry, and the organic matter I spread on top earlier in the year was also dry, and did not seem to be mixing in. I suppose the worms have gone deeper. I rather wish I could burrow down into a cooler and darker place.

Of course we watched the eclipse. We swam in the river as the moon moved across the sun and an eerie darkness fell. I looked at a tree that was illuminated by the fading light, a strange vision. I always think how weird it is that the sun and the moon as they appear from the earth are apparently the same size. It is an absurd happenstance. Swimming in the river under that whispering light is a moment for such reflections, a moment to believe in magic, or something like that.