Wisteria, hedges, and the long wait for rain
August is a working month dressed up as a quiet one. The borders have peaked, the growth has slowed, and it is tempting to sit in it. But this is the month the structural jobs come due, and the month you set up next spring. Do it now and September feels calm. Leave it and you spend autumn catching up.
The dry spell has not broken. Cambridge Water's hosepipe restrictions came in on the ninth of July and became enforceable on the seventeenth, the first here in thirty years, and everything I wrote last month still stands. New planting, containers and anything under a year old go to the front of the queue. Established shrubs and trees can wait. The lawns are brown and that is fine, they are dormant rather than dead and will come back within a fortnight of proper rain.
If you are anywhere in the south east, keep going with the watering. Once or twice a week, a proper soak from a can or stored water, at the base of the plant, early or late. A daily splash does more harm than good because it trains roots to sit at the surface where they cook. That advice does not change in a drought. It matters more.
Summer prune the wisteria
This is the August job people skip, and it is the reason so many wisterias give leaf instead of flower. All those whippy green shoots thrown out since June are the plant putting its energy into reach rather than reproduction. Cut them back to five or six leaves from the main framework. It looks brutal for a fortnight and then it looks right.
What you are doing is redirecting the plant into forming flower buds along the older wood, which is where next May's display comes from. Then in January you go back over the same growth and shorten it again to two or three buds. Two cuts a year, six months apart. Skip the summer one and the winter one has far less to work with.
The same principle applies to trained apples and pears. Summer prune this month, taking this year's side shoots back to three leaves above the basal cluster. It keeps the shape honest and puts light onto the fruit.
Hedges, now the nests are empty
The main nesting season runs from March to the end of August, and by now the great majority of birds have fledged and moved on. This is the window when hedge work opens back up, and it is why so much of it lands in the diary from now through to early autumn.
That said, check before you cut. Every time. Wood pigeons and collared doves will happily go again into September, and it is an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act to damage an active nest whatever the date on the calendar. Ninety seconds walking the line with your eyes open is not a formality, it is the difference between a professional job and a careless one.
Yew, box, hornbeam and beech all take a late summer cut well and hold that crisp edge right through to spring. Cut them too early in the season and they push soft growth that goes shapeless by September. Late summer is not a compromise on timing, it is the better timing.
One caution in a dry year. A hedge under water stress will be slower to recover from a hard cut, so on anything that looks genuinely tired, take a lighter pass this year and do the proper job next season. Nothing is gained by pushing a plant that is already struggling.
Order your bulbs now
The good cultivars sell out in August, not October. If there is a particular narcissus or a specific tulip you have your eye on, order it this month and let it sit in the shed. Waiting until you feel like planting is how people end up with whatever is left.
Planting is a separate question. Daffodils and alliums can go in from September, but hold the tulips back until late October or November, once the soil has properly cooled. Planting tulips warm invites tulip fire, and a bulb sitting dry in a paper bag comes to no harm at all in the meantime.
The quieter jobs
Trim lavender once it has finished flowering, taking it back to just above the woody base but never into bare wood, because it will not come back from there. Take semi-ripe cuttings while the growth is right, this is the best month of the year for it. Collect seed from anything you want more of, on a dry day, into paper rather than plastic. Keep deadheading anything you want to carry on flowering, and leave alone anything you want seedheads from through the winter.
And start looking at September. It is the best planting month in the calendar, the soil still warm and the rain, we hope, on its way. Decide now what is going where, so that when the ground finally softens you are planting rather than deciding.
The gardens under our care are walked weekly through the summer, and August is when that pays. Not because there is more to do, but because the jobs that matter this month are the ones with a twelve month lag on them. The wisteria you prune now flowers next May. The bulbs you order this week come up in March. The hedge you cut properly this month holds its line until spring.
Thinking in decades starts with getting August right.