It has been beautiful autumn weather for the past couple of days, and I've been weeding the big sloping bed in the back garden and tidying the shrubs down its back. Some dead wood has accumulated in a large and fine yellow berried cotoneaster, which needs to come out, and an escallonia has grown larger than I ever envisaged and is looming over other things, so several of its more wayward branches have gone as well. It is probably not the right time of year to prune escallonia, but this one is such a brute, I'm sure it won't miss the odd piece here and there.
Under the shrubs is a mini-forest of holly and ivy seedlings, with the odd ash and hazel thrown in, plus a few hopeful young brambles and nettles. Most pull up as easily as cress after the rain, but some of the larger ones need prising up with a trowel or even the border fork. There's a good crop of stones as well, which go into three pots, round pebbles for the beach garden in the turning circle, rough pebbles for the utility path by the dustbins, and larger flints to cover some landscape fabric at the foot of the bank near the septic tank. The plan to mulch the path by the bins with home collected stones is coming on apace. If I'd thought of it when we first moved in, nearly twenty years ago, I could have done oodles of paths by now. Admittedly, we do have very stony soil.
I'm planting seed raised foxgloves at the base of the shrubs, where they'll be in moderate shade, and trying an experiment towards the front of the bed. I have three trays, so two dozen plants, of oriental poppies in mixed colours, raised from a packet of seed that came free with a magazine and which it seemed churlish to throw away. This is not the best basis on which to acquire twenty-four plants of anything, and I wasn't entirely sure what to do with them. Looking at the expanse of space left bare as I cleared out the tangle of perennial sweet peas and geraniums which have been cheerful and weed-smothering over the summer, I thought that maybe the poppies could occupy the gaps. They leaf up and flower in the late spring, and after flowering their leaves largely die down, leaving a gap in the border which it can be a puzzle to fill. Perhaps they wouldn't mind being over-run by perennial pea for the later part of the growing season? The way to find out is to try.
I'm mulching the bed with spent mushroom compost, but it is going to take quite a few trips to the garden centre up the road to get enough, and I've just run out again. The areas I've done look very smart and cared for. Unfortunately, as I work my way down the bed I know I am getting closer to a large ash stump, which seeded itself inside a Jerusalem sage and grew un-noticed until it was too large to pull up. I managed for years by cutting the growth back at intervals, but now the sage has gone and I want to do the job properly and plant something else in the space. A session with the pickaxe looms. I started on this stump in the spring, but didn't manage to cut through the tap root, and to judge from the amount of regrowth over the summer it is still going strong.
Meanwhile, while I was having a nice peaceful time in my corner of north Essex, trouble was brewing down the road at Wrabness. Grayson Perry has been given planning permission for his holiday house. The row about it has even made the Telegraph. I saw in the local paper a while back that he wanted to replace a singularly unprepossessing small farm cottage with a modern building, in which he planned to hold artistic events from time to time, and hoped it went ahead. I am a fan of Grayson Perry, and feel that life in the Tendring peninsular would probably be more entertaining if he were around. I gathered then that there was some local opposition.
There still is. I must admit I was startled by the picture of the proposed building, which does indeed look rather like a Disney version of an Indian gingerbread house in the artist's impression in the Telegraph. But I have faith in Grayson Perry, and I expect it will be fine. I can't really believe it is going to 'spoil the area forever'. The inhabitants of Wrabness seem an ungrateful lot. Grayson Perry can come and live in my small village any time, though I fear a view of the lettuce farm and a wind turbine would not be so appealing as the Stour estuary and surrounding area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
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