I'd been thinking that I'd better take a break from wafting around picking up leaves with my fingertips and cutting down herbaceous stems, and tackle one of the more strenuous jobs removing the remains of deceased (or mostly deceased) shrubs, so today I dug out the hebes from by the deck in front of the conservatory. There were five of them, and they came out not exactly easily but with less difficulty than I was expecting, revealing the fact that they didn't have very good root systems. There is a band of vile, heavy clay across the middle part of the back garden, partly because the clay does rise near to the surface in places here, but exacerbated by the landscaping done by the previous owners. The chap who built the house was a farmer, so he must have heard of topsoil, but he and his wife don't seem to have been keen gardeners, and didn't consider that it mattered in a domestic setting. The garden below the house was sliced off to form a level terrace, and laid entirely to grass. When I began to lift the turf to make beds, I discovered that it sat directly on yellow clay.
The hebes had put up quite a good fight, all things considered. They like decent drainage, but if you are going to plant them directly into clay subsoil leavened with some organic material, you are most likely to get away with it in a garden in the lowest rainfall area of the UK. I wouldn't try it in Wales, or Cumbria. These hebes remained fully clothed with leaves, and made tight, attractive mounds for several years, but began to fall apart, as hebes do, which was made worse by the snow. I cut them down hard when the Systems Administrator rebuilt the deck, to get them out of the way, and they responded with some regrowth, but not enough to have any chance of looking even halfway decent again.
Work got off to a slow start because I couldn't find the pickaxe. I looked in the pot shed where I keep the gardening tools not in current use, and couldn't see it where I thought it ought to be, so I looked in the long flowerbed, which was where I last remembered using it. Then I looked by the bog bed, though I was fairly sure I'd had it since then. Then I looked in the garage in case I'd tidied it away in there. Then I looked again in the pot shed and found it where it ought to be, nestled down among the spare spades and forks, hidden behind a large flowerpot.
When I originally planted the hebes I'd put landscape fabric around them, to try and suppress the horsetail. This was only partially successful, and the hebes had sent roots out over the top of the fabric, presumably using the debris of their own fallen leaves as soil, and telling me what they thought about clay subsoil. The landscape fabric was by no means pickaxe resistant, but did get in the way, and I had to cut bits out with scissors as I went, To extract the rootballs I swung the broad end of the pickaxe down towards the edge of the base of each plant, leant on it to lever the roots up as much as I could, and repeated, working my way round the rootball several times, until it broke free of the ground, I had to be careful not to hit the deck, which took a long time to build and is an object of some pride on the S.A.'s part.
As I said, the root plates levered up, not easily, but more easily than a healthy hebe should. By the time it got too dark to see what I was doing (at ten past four, for Pete's sake) I'd dug over the bed once, removing roots (to go to the dump), stones (to add to the path by the dustbins) and assorted bricks and bits of glass and rubble. The hebes had been mulched with a decorative layer of gravel on top of the landscape fabric, so that got dug in, and the next job will be to dig the bed over again, incorporating mushroom compost. Then I will plant some nice young box plants that I picked up at work yesterday, which will in due course be pruned in some artistic way I have not yet decided. Probably informal undulations, since I'm not very good at sharp geometry. Then that will be good for the rest of my gardening career, unless it gets box blight.
It was an incredibly grey day, and mostly alternated between very fine drizzle and something you might have just dignified with the title of rain. Not enough to do the ground (still dry when you go down more than a few centimetres) any good at all, but enough to turn the soil surface to a slick, that stuck to my tools, gloves and clothes. In the field the poor Lithuanians were harvesting lettuces.
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