Although the prairie was absorbing that summer, the rest of the garden was not neglected.

Rick came for a week in May, and more than earned his keep, strimming, a task he seemed to enjoy more than Peter does, cleaning the pool lid, and clearing out two large and grossly overgrown iris clumps on the lower terrace.

Walnut terrace was beginning to look more like a flowerbed, at least on the north side,

and I continued with clearing the narrow border on the south side with a view to planting bulbs in the autumn.

Jan’s team also completed their work on the water feature, and we homed the ducks imported from Argyll.

The flaw only became apparent in later in the year when we hosted a party to celebrate John’s 50th birthday. I switched on the, until then barely used, cascade, to celebrate the event, and wandered off to work elsewhere in the garden. When I returned a few hours later the pond was all but empty. Clearly the water being pumped up to feed the cascade was not returning to refill it. Fabien nobly returned several times over the subsequent months, plugging all possible gaps with cement, and by autumn the problem seemed more or less resolved, although we still top the pond up when running the cascade for more than short bursts of time.

The flowerbed adjacent to the pond has also proved a challenge, south facing and dry, with limited soil cover, it remains a work in progress as I try various plants, a few succeed, but many fail.

Despite these problems, the water lilies bloomed in their first season.

The Iris were beginning to do well

and some at least of the roses were surviving the depredations of the deer.

Other tasks that summer included a gravel design to conceal the ugly stone basin around the base of the angellos,

and a start on clearing the loose rocks around the mouth of the lower cave, which proved to be slow work.

In September the amaryllis finally flowered and were worth waiting for

That month I planted bulbs and ever more iris, and decided not to replace the large clump which Rick had cleared in May, but to create a new flowerbed instead

I also tried out a few alpines on the bank below, some of which have survived.

Growth in the prairie was now holding its own against the weeds, evidenced in the “aerial” photos Fabien took at the end of the month.