I have been clearing away dead bits from the Eryngium pandanifolium. This is (when it has not been blasted by snow) a statuesque and imposing evergreen. I bought it as my 40th birthday present to me, when we visited Great Dixter for the first time on the actual day of the birthday. I had read Christopher Lloyd's books, most of them many times, starting with his Foliage Plants, which was one of the first gardening books I ever bought in my early twenties. I loved his style and philosophy, and his accounts of Great Dixter, and the garden in reality proved to be every bit as good as it sounded (things aren't always). I liked the Eryngium as we walked around the garden, and bought one to take home with me, without having a clear plan where I was going to put it.
It is one of the rosette forming members of the species, with long, strap-shaped, spiny-edged leaves, which throws up typical Eryngium flowers on long stems. What I had not grasped, even having seen it growing at Dixter, was how large it was going to get. I fitted mine into a gap among the roses, congratulating myself that it would introduce some useful architectural bones into a twiggy and formless area. It did that, but it grew prodigously. The tuft of leaves reached a good metre tall, and the flower stems twice that, and it divided and spread at the base to form multiple growing points until it was well over a metre wide. On one side it began it grow into a low box hedge, which became thin and skinny where the Eryngium pressed into it, and frequently too tall because it was such a spiny business reaching through the Eryngium to trim the top.
The box hedge was the saving of it last winter. Most of the leaves died, and most of the crown as well, but from the side closest to the hedge, where it got a modicum of protection from the cold and snow, new shoots have emerged. I cleared away the dead leaves, and was starting to remove the dead bits from the crown, while keeping an eye out for signs of life, when I heard a strange fizzing noise. I puzzled about this for a while, until bumble bees started to emerge from the crown, at which point I retreated hastily. Bumbles are normally gentle creatures, and I have only been stung once, when I was cutting long grass with shears and cut right over the entrance to their nest in an old mouse burrow, without knowing it was there. I can testify from personal experience that their stings are extremely painful. Fortunately this lot showed no desire to chase me across the garden, and after a while I ventured to retrieve my tools and my radio. I thought I'd better not push my luck any more for one day, and left mulching that bit of the border until another time, but I'll put some Strulch around them and over the remains of the crown at some point.
They will have finished nesting by the autumn, so I can then carry out my plan to lift what is left of the plant, and replace it in its original position further from the box. I suppose one advantage of doing a lot of cultivation by hand rather than machinery is that you are more likely to get advance warning when you are heading into danger. There are accounts of people being killed while strimming undergrowth, and hitting a wasps' nest.
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