In hindsight, I could have sowed half the amount of white cosmos as I did. I sprinkled 10 packets of the stuff around the lawn. It’s such a great gap filler, but I’ll be out there dead-heading for hours this weekend (nipping off the old flowers makes all the difference if you want your plants to keep producing new buds).

The other problem that’s just starting to show its head is mildew: because I’ve sown it so thick, and because I foolishly fed it at Christmas with Nitrophoska Blue to speed up its growth (it was so puny back then that I panicked), it’s now getting the floral equivalent of athlete’s foot. I’ll give it a blast with Yates Fungus Gun tonight and then just keep my fingers crossed that it hangs on for another week without all dying out in the middle. It’s rather lovely, even so.

(I especially like the contrast of the ferny foliage and delicate daisies in front of this barbed wire ball sculpture from Wire Art. I bought this as a gift for the Hunk back when we first met and it was sitting outside our garage, still wrapped in black plastic, when the garage burnt down last May. The plastic melted and stuck to the wire, so every time I walk past it I pick a few more bits off it. It’s quite a novel form of stress relief.)