It’s been hot and dry for much of the sum­mer. That’s hard on the plants and I know that I’m going to have to move some things that haven’t han­dled the heat well come fall.

Mean­while I’ve been replac­ing some of the things that we lost in last winter’s deep freeze.

Rose­mary is some­thing that I regard as hardy around here. It rarely suf­fers until the temps fall into the teens. Sin­gle dig­its are too cold so I lost three sprawl­ing rose­marys that lived at the back of the herb gar­den tum­bling down the rock wall. I replaced two of them.

We also lost all of our cul­ti­vars of bud­dleia. Some of the wild­ings sur­vived but those have to be pulled out as they are now clasi­fied as inva­sive weeds. I can’t find any­more of the dark pur­ple one that I liked. sigh.

So in the place of the but­ter­fly bush that used to live in the cor­ner of the bed fac­ing the barn I put a smoke tree. Well actu­al­ly more of a shrub.

There may not have been much rain recent­ly but the sprin­klers run every cou­ple of days. This is the result of leav­ing your Fel­cos in the buck­et next to the bird bath.

The nice thing about Fel­cos is that you can buy parts. I’ll refurb these over the win­ter. mean­while to sup­pli­ment my old­er (thrice refurbed) Fel­cos I bought a pair of Fiskars pruners.

They have an inter­est­ing com­pound cut­ting action.

They are small­er and more agile that the Fel­cos. I don’t think they can han­dle as much of the brute force cut­ting work but they are sweet to use for dead­head­ing and oth­er more pre­cise tasks.

Not every­thing is suf­fer­ing in the heat. The lilies went nuts this year. The last of the Stargaz­ers are just now going over.