"Mid-August was a dull time in my garden."

Two for the River and Other Stories (1961) by L. P. Hartley

I love the way Hartley relishes the plant names in paragraph 2:

Mid-August was a dull time in my garden —the drought had seen to that. Flowers there were, but even the hardiest were only half their normal size; the Japanese anemones looked like shillings, not half-crowns. Because the garden lay beside the river, and sometimes, in wet seasons, under it, people thought the subsoil must be moist, but it was not; the rain ran off the steep slope without sinking in, the river drained the ground without irrigating it. 

But the river-banks had just been in full glory, two interminable winding borders on which grew willow-weed and loosestrife, the lilac clusters of hemp agrimony, deep yellow ragwort, lemon-yellow chick-weed, the peeping purple of the woody nightshade, the orange drops of the ranunculus, the youthful, tender teazle-cones of palest pink contrasting with their hard, brown, dried-up predecessors of the year before — and, a newcomer to the district but very much at home, the tall white balsam....