Saturday 23 July 2011

back in the back

I've moved my focus of operations to the back garden, and have finally started tackling the overgrown naturally damp bit.  It is called the gunnera bed, and used to contain a gunnera until that died a couple of years ago, from winter cold, winter damp, or being eaten from the inside by rodents, or maybe just old age or random failure to live.  The bed was enlarged to incorporate more of the lawn after we realised quite how wet it was one winter when the lawn tractor bogged down to the axles.

Naturally wet ground is a great asset, especially in a dry part of the country like this, allowing me to grow large leaved, lush looking plants needing reliable moisture, that I couldn't grow anywhere else.  It is not the easiest border to manage, however.  The weeds grow like stink, and so does a yellow stemmed bamboo that I introduced a few years ago not expecting it to be such a runner.  The water table fluctuates wildly, reflecting some mysterious underground flow and not just how much it has rained in the past couple of months, so areas that were previously dry occassionally turn to bog and drown things.  Weeding the bog bed in the garden at the place where I work turned out to be a never ending occupation for a colleague who used to work one day a week in the garden.  By the time she ever got to the bottom she needed to start again at the top.  My bog bed is much smaller than that, but I don't have anything like a day a week to devote to it, and it has turned into a knotted mess of grass, horsetail and Siberian purslane at the front, with nettles and thistles behind.  Meanwhile a yellow berried form of Viburnum opulus I bought to go in it ages ago is getting desperately potbound by the greenhouse.  I think that getting this sorted out is going to take some time.

I like to work on one part of the garden for a few days, and then switch to working somewhere else.  Spending several days in the front, I had plenty of time to look at what was in bloom, see what was doing well and what not so well, and make plans for things that might need to be changed or tackled at some point.  Now I'm doing the same in the back, and getting the benefit of the artworks we installed this spring.  Hydrangea aspera 'Mauvette' is looking great in the ditch bed, with big lacecap flowers consisting of pale pink sterile flowers surrounding the central plate of tiny fertile mauve (well, what colour did you think they'd be?) ones.  The leaves are large and hairy and the whole plant is very handsome, in a gaunt way.  I also noticed that a branch of the willow tree behind the ditch, already savagely pruned this spring, was hanging too low over the hydrangea and blocking too much light from it, so it needs another trim.

Addendum  I rang my hairdresser to book a haircut, having suddenly reached the P,G. Woodhouse stage ("For goodness sake why don't you get a haircut?  Your head looks like a chrysanthemum") and found to my consternation that the girl who has been cutting it for the last two or three years has left.  I try to avoid attachment when it comes to hairdressers, remembering that they always leave, things always change, and that to resist change is to be unhappy.  But it is nerve-wracking starting with a new one.  My hair is not easy to cut, being thick, curly and unruly, a legacy of the shtetl and the celtic fringes.  It has defeated some hairdressers utterly, while others have given me cuts that would have been very good, if only I had been prepared to spend half an hour blow drying it every morning and never gone out in the rain.  I tried my luck with the senior stylist the girl that answered the phone recommended, and fortunately the results are fine, so with any luck that is the hair question sorted for another two or three years. 

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