Now all the tender exotics are out of the greenhouse and flourishing in their new situations it is a relief to not have the intensive hothouse watering to contend with. This was just bearable during the week but a real nuisance at the weekend when, if possible I try not to be on the estate. I have potted up all the plants, which were left over and they can be used for space fillers should there be any unfortunate deaths or unsightly gaps forming during the season. As usual my planned planting schemes went to pot when the time came to do the deed, this year I was using only my old favourites with no injection of garden centre splendours to ring the changes. As a series of gardens we are still only functioning at half speed until next year when all the building work will be completed and so there is no point in going mad, but just wait until 2004.

I don't want to give the impression that the summer plantings are poor, they are gorgeous but the trouble is that I have seen it all before and having a Gemini birth sign means I crave change and excitement. I will now blow my own trumpet again and say the beds and borders of the two gardens, which I have planted and designed over the past two years have this season taken my breath away. I have never seen such astonishing planting schemes. I grant, the roses have excelled themselves and all the plants have matured and thickened out but how on earth did I manage to get the heights and forms and colours so balanced and.......perfect. If they still look good in August I shall know it's time to ask for a big pay rise.

I have had one major disaster to do with box hedging. In my new fruit wall border each fan-trained peach, apricot or whatever has a semi circle of box at its base. I planted these in the spring, bare root and of quite a good size and they looked fine for a while and then one by one they went brown and slowly died and I am talking about one hundred and fifty plants here. I complained to the nursery as I wondered if they had been allowed to dry out prior to my buying them. I might as well have been talking to a brick wall, anyway they had no similar replacement plants but a quantity of second year bushes, small but healthy and in pots. We eventually struck a deal and I bought the lot. I have replaced the corpses and will pot on the spare eighty or so and use them in another scheme in the autumn. If anything fails I cannot rest until it has been replaced or changed and I can't bare it if I see the builders walk by sadly shaking their heads at my occasional failures.

All the areas I turfed in the spring have taken very well and have grown far more than established lawns, it must be all the dratted nutrients in the imported soil. I have been given two huge gardens at cottages on the estate, which have been restored and enlarged and the old gardens destroyed in the process. They are mainly going down to lawn, this time seeded. The preparation is the same only more care is taken to remove the smallest of stones and I hate doing it. It gives me blisters and pulls my back and makes me hot. The sooner I start the more miserable I shall become.

Daisy, my faithful Jack Russell terrier produced three sweet puppies last week, all girls. A big fat one like a Friesian cow call Poppy and a pair of Daisy look-alikes, half the size called Rosie and Fern. These will be the last of the line and unlike the last litter which was spirited away by my family these will be fattened up and sold in August and the proceeds added to my holiday fund. So there!