Giant Scabious (Cephalaria gigantea) attracts a multitude of pollinators: bumblebees, honeybees, solitary bees, hoverflies, butterflies and moths. 

 This Red Admiral was very interested in my potting table, or rather the splashes of water I made as I worked. It was a hot day and butterflies need to drink; note the long tongue supping...

Mellow yellow.

 

Love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena)

 

 Summer daze.

 

 Wild Clary (Salvia vebenaca) in the wildflower meadow at the music school. This is a seeded meadow (before my time) and I imagine it must have been a mix of generalists e.g. Ox-Eye Daisy and chalk specialists like the Clary.

 Curiously I have noted the absence of S. vebenaca in past years and considered trying to introduce it. And suddenly here it is! Then again the meadow is usually a mass of Ox-Eye Daisies yet they are sparse this year. Wild flowers are tenacious but highly variable in their growth from one year to the next. Weather is key: no doubt the warm dry spring has favoured some species, others less so.

 

 As mentioned recently I transformed a neglected former veg patch at the music school into a herb/kitchen garden. [see entry dated 16th. April] 

 This included transplanting a row of Rosemary bushes running East-West into an informal hedge/screen running North-South. Robust as it is Rosemary does not like root disturbance and is prone to 'transplant shock'. Nonetheless I decided to risk it: the key is to lift a large enough root ball of soil thereby minimising damage to the root system. 

 I wouldn't attempt it with knarly old specimens but these were only planted a couple of years ago (though they are already quite tall and woody). As a precaution I took 14 stem tip cuttings the day before I lifted them to propagate more plants if replacement is required. I got them going two to a pot; now they have started to develop tiny roots I carefully teased out each one to go into single pots to grow on. 

 Time will tell if the transplants prosper, if not I will replace them with new ones. In fact I might do that anyway. I have enough for a closer spacing and can prune them to be more hedge-like from the outset.