Summer saviours

After multiple heatwaves and endless watering, Ursula Buchan acknowledges the often disregarded yet surprisingly resilient plants that kept her garden going

- By Ursula Buchan

WELL, IT was quite a summer, wasn't it? My best garden memories are of clouds of butterflies and picturesque insects on the raspberries and sedums; my worst of watering – endless, tiring watering – which was somehow never quite enough for plants to do anything more than survive.

After the crash of butterfly numbers the year before, caused by the excessively wet and miserable weather, it was so heartening to see them revive and revel in the heat. Before their flowers went over, lavender bushes were almost obscured by dozens of peacock butterflies. And jostling them on the Verbena bonariensis were a myriad of different beetles, almost all quite beyond my power to identify but reminding me of what the prominent biologist JBS Haldane said about the Creator having a special preference for beetles. When swarms of ladybirds stopped play for a while on the first day of the Third Test at Lord's, they stopped work in my garden, too.