Pushing up the daisies ...

Smithers and I have found it unbearably hot today, but we were fortunate enough to be able to stay indoors with a cooling fan moving the air around. 

Our gardener, Steve, on the other hand, spent the day in the sun in our back garden. He usually comes for a couple of hours on a Friday, but today he tackled the annual job of giving the box hedge parterre a hair cut. It seems to grow at a terrific rate, and I find it too high to climb over to get in to the urn at the centre of the parterre to dead head or water the the flowers when the hedge is very high. So in this heat the lovely man was working away with his battery operated hedge trimmer until the hedge was reduced to about 40% of its original height. He left the garden looking neat and tidy, all swept clear and the clippings taken away. He’s an absolute star and I don’t know what we’d do without him. 

A bald box hedge not being all that photogenic, I give you one of the day lilies in the wildflower area of the garden. I hadn't realised they were out because they were almost obliterated by a mass of rampant ox-eye daisies, but these too were given a bit of a trim today, which revealed the day lilies they’d been hiding.