We painted the back of the house pink this week. It’s technically red, but to me it is the colour of raspberry ice cream, fleshy and deep. The ferns are cast anew against it. The garden remains in the realm of to-do list land, reeling in a hangover from landscaping and heatwave that seems difficult to shift. But I have transplanted most things that need it - there’s a fernery situation going on where the plum tree used to stand - and most of the new plants are in. The clematis, cut back to the ground, is romping away faster than I can re-wire the fence for it to climb upon. Sometimes the baby allows me 40 minutes of polite bouncing and I grasp the time hungrily. More often, this week especially, he has not. I have found myself mentally writing off this summer and fantasising about next year, instead, when the new plants will have bedded in and the seeds will have set down roots and there will be growth where there is currently bare earth. Gardeners are terribly skilled and terribly bad at rushing away time.

The aforementioned red pelargoniums shouldn’t technically fit with the colour scheme (soft pinks! white! yellow!) but in a terracotta planter they’re too good to resist and, much as a raspberry gelato is very good wandering through the backstreets of an Italian hilltop town, they seem to go with the paint. They’ve been blooming all week. In the mornings I take the last of the glass of water from M’s bedside and pour it into the soil as everything else looks on thirstily. They are, undoubtedly, the most cosseted plants in the place.

Other good things this week:...