My kingdom for a hose

We have avoided a hose pipe band in Surbiton so far, but it can’t be far away. Monty was talking on Gardener’s World about how anyone with a vegetable garden will have needed to be extra attentive with a watering can over the last few weeks. Make that the last seven weeks for us.

And not just for vegetables, anything in a pot exposed to unrestrained sunshine has proven to be vulnerable in the garden. I’m a sucker for a lovely hydrangea, and some of the recent hybrids they have had on sale at garden centres have been breathtakingly beautiful.

Hydrangea Miss Saori was plant of the show at Chelsea in 2014 and produces the kind of flowers you should be spreading on a lover’s bed instead of rose petals.

However the moment it is exposed to the smallest bit of sustained sunshine, it looks like you have attacked it with a blowtorch. So instead of being displayed in a prominent position in the garden, it is confined to the distant shade where only the slowly dipping evening sun can get to it.

Azaleas and some maples are known not to dislike direct sun, but I would say that some of the hydrangeas are worse. If you could buy Factor 50 and spray it on its leaves then maybe you could put it in a prominent position, but this summer, it’s like the wimpy ginger kid sat under a tree with a note excusing them from sports day.

We bought the house last year and one of the things that was already in place in the back garden was an automatic watering system. In theory this distributes a steady, even trickle of water from a long black ‘porous soakerhose’, along the length of the sinuous pipe as it snakes its way round the beds. You can turn it on, and go away and do something more constructive with your time – like unearthing slugs from underneath old piles of plant pots and shouting, “You’re so-o-o-o-o last summer!”

That’s the theory, anyway.

In practice the actual mechanism at the pipe junction with the tap looks like the Hozelock Niagara Falls as soon as the water is turned on, as the resistance from the soakerhose proves too much for the unit. The ground directly below the tap becomes like an impromptu bog garden.

Meanwhile, further round this 'leaky pipe’ some of the dribble holes have become enlarged and so there are four or five tiny spurts into the air at random points. Little gushers of pure H2O draining the rest of the system of its fair share. Trace the pipe round and even after two hours it doesn’t seem to have distributed much water to the plants along the route.

The ground looks as if it has a mild dampness spreading from underneath, like an unfortunate event when taking a small child to Alton Towers and failing to get to the conveniences in time, rather than a good meaningful soak. When I turned it on a couple of times, it seemed so wasteful and haphazard that it was back to the manual method.

And for the last seven weeks it’s been an almost daily ritual. However despite all this lack of rain, and absolutely no use of the sprinkler, my grass is still a consistent green. No-one can accuse me of wasting water thanks to Mr. Astroturf.

Yes, one more reason why “getting rid of that thing the moment we move in” was a promise worth breaking. Interestingly in warm weather walking on the grass in bare feed is like walking on hot sand, it’s an “ouch, ouch, ouch” experience, hopping from foot to foot down the garden. On grass. It’s like the beach scene from that movie 10 with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. Though with one big difference…