It might have been a tad ambitious, doing all that raking yesterday. It felt OK at the time, which goes to show how much you can do when you care about the outcome. I slept late this morning, and woke still feeling exhausted. Sleeping in is no fun when you have animals, because you realise as soon as you come to that they should have been fed an hour ago, and that the chickens are still locked in a box. When I did biology at school I was once marked down in an exam answer about how the lung is adapted to its function, because I had not explicitly said that it was hollow. I'd mentioned the alveoli, and how they increase the surface area of the lung to facilitate oxygen exchange with the blood, but I hadn't actually said 'the lung is hollow'. I suppose that I assumed that as a given, otherwise where would I start? The lung is alive. The lung is compatible with the immune system of the rest of the organism. Or maybe I took the lung's hollowness as being implied by the rest of my answer. Anyway, I dropped a point or two. Today felt as though my lungs were not as hollow as they should have been, and it was tiring.
I weeded the gravel, as being a gentle task, not involving great physical effort, and worth doing before the bulbs come through any more than they have. The shrubs in the Italian garden are still looking good. It's the twelfth of January today, nearly half way through the month, and no really cold snap is forecast at the moment. Anything could still happen between now and March, but it seems possible that we might get through to spring without a hard freezing spell to wreck them. That would be a great boon.
I've got a replacement Teucrium fruticans 'Azureum' sitting in its pot in the greenhouse, waiting until March to plant it out, just in case. I'd like a small leaved myrtle in the Italian garden, and I might risk an Acca sellowiana. This is what used to be known as Feijoa,and its common name is pineapple guava. It has grey leaves, and red bottle-brush flowers. It is reckoned to be hardy outdoors only in the milder regions, so I tried one tucked in between other shrubs in the long bed, and it amazed me by surviving the past two winters, which certainly weren't mild. However, it is so hemmed in by its sheltering neighbours I'm not sure it will come to much, so I thought about risking one in the Italian garden, and giving it a bit more elbow room.
I'd like an Erythrina crista-galli as well. This is a magnificent shrub, and really is tender. The only good one I've seen was tucked into the corner of two walls at (I think) Wakehurst Place, with a heat-reflecting stone terrace in front of it. It has grey leaves,ferocious spines, and huge red claw shaped flowers in late summer or autumn. Its common name is the coral tree or cock's comb. Probably our front garden is not warm enough. But the drainage is superb, and Wakehurst Place must get quite parky in the winter, and Erythrina is deciduous, with the ability to behave herbaceously and throw new shoots from ground level, so it might not mind the cutting winter winds too much. Chiltern Seeds are offering seed again this year. I grew some once before, but attempted to keep the plants in pots, and found them difficult. We've lost stock over the winter at work before now, and when I went to an RHS study day some years ago on the subject of growing Mediterranean climate plants in the UK, I took the chance of asking Wolfgang Bopp how I should look after it (he was curator of the Welsh Botanic Gardens, then head-hunted by the Harold Hillier Gardens, where as far I can tell he still is, and is as big a cheese as you will find to ask about the cultivation of Erythrina crista-galli). He said it was difficult in a pot. It needed to be dry in winter but wet and well-fed in summer with a generous root run, so ideally not in a pot. It's tempting to try again. I have nothing to lose except the cost of a packet of seed, and a little time. I could buy one, if we get them again at work, but I'd sooner start from scratch.
And that was it. You will notice that most of today's gardening took place in my head, but that's the way with gardening. The R3 composer of the week was Couperin, which was nice.
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