14/08/2026
Gareth Austin - Weather and Wisterias ...
🕶️The Mark Patterson Show🕶️
"Yes Everyone ...
The August garden is changing....
There’s a big gardening story developing around heat, drought and water conservation. Monty Don has been advising gardeners to mulch now to retain soil moisture, while the RHS is reportedly looking at moving important plant collections further north as gardens in southern England come under increasing heat stress. But are we actually seeing the benefits of our cooler, wetter North-West climate — and should we be choosing plants differently as summers change?
Heavy rain?
The fascinating thing about this year is that Derry's garden has effectively experienced two different climates. We started the year exceptionally wet — January was one of the wettest on record in the county, February was also very wet, and June was 67% wetter than normal across Northern Ireland. Then July arrived and Northern Ireland received only 30% of its normal rainfall, making it the eighth-driest July on record. So if your garden looks simultaneously lush and stressed, there's a very good reason.
And don't forget what we're comparing it with. Last year was an extraordinary sunshine year. Magilligan recorded 301 hours of sunshine in May alone — a Northern Ireland record for any month. So 2025 wasn't a normal year either.
So a question for the gardeners out there - What in your garden has loved this year's weather — and what has hated it?
What's attracting the butterflies in your garden at the moment?
I’ve got a white buddleja in the garden at the moment and it is absolutely covered in butterflies. It’s one of those moments when you realise that a garden can be much more than something that looks pretty — it can actually be a little wildlife restaurant.
Buddleja is often called the butterfly bush for good reason. Those long flower spikes are packed with nectar, and in August they can be absolutely irresistible to butterflies. On mine, I'm seeing them moving from flower to flower, and if you stand quietly for a minute you can suddenly realise just how much is going on.
And I think there's a useful lesson here for gardeners: don't be too quick to tidy everything up. If you've got buddleja flowering, let it flower. Don't deadhead it just because a few individual flowers are fading — those blooms are providing food right now.
And white is particularly lovely because you can really see the butterflies against it.
And a little word of caution about buddleja. We call it the butterfly bush, and it's fantastic for nectar, but the familiar purple and white forms are generally varieties of the same species, Buddleja davidii. So changing from purple flowers to white doesn't suddenly make it non-invasive. It can produce enormous quantities of seed, and those seedlings can establish in cracks, walls, railway lines and disturbed ground.
So enjoy your buddleja, enjoy the butterflies, but keep an eye on it. Deadheading after flowering can reduce the amount of seed being produced, and don't let it escape into the wider environment.
Wisteria Care
If you've got a wisteria that's gone completely mad this summer, now is the moment to get the secateurs out. We're in the July–August summer-pruning window. Don't be frightened by it — find those long, whippy green shoots and cut them back to about five or six leaves. It sounds brutal, but you're actually helping next year's flowers. And given the dry spell we've had, don't forget to give it a really good drink if the soil is dry, because those precious flower buds for next spring are beginning to form now.
Mind your plums
If you've got a plum tree, now is actually a good time to get the secateurs out. Unlike an apple tree, you don't want to be doing your main pruning in winter. Plums are vulnerable to a nasty fungal disease called silver leaf, so we prune them in summer, when the cuts heal quickly and there are fewer spores around. So on a dry August day, take out dead and crossing branches, open up congested growth and keep the tree manageable — but don't butcher it
With a plum, don't automatically go along every new shoot with the secateurs. If it's a normal bush tree, you're mainly thinning and removing badly placed growth. But if you've got a plum trained against a wall or fence, that's different — you can shorten those long new side shoots to about five or six leaves.
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