It was a beautiful day, sunny, calm, and warm for the time of year. I went to rake leaves off the back lawns, now they have mostly fallen off the trees, and saw that the Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' was in bloom. I was at a friend's house the other day, and was envious that her 'Dawn' was already out, but she said it had been for a while. Maybe ours has been too. You can't really see it from the bathroom window.
The frosts have done for the top growth of the Dicentra scandens, which has turned brown and mushy. I'll now be able to clear the remains out of the Magnolia stellata it scrambles over, before the magnolia buds are too advanced. I'd better have a good look at how the shrub is doing, in case it resents its rather smothering summer companion. When I planted the Dicentra, I had not realised it was going to produce so much vigorous growth in the course of a season. I wish the various clematis I've planted to scramble over other shrubs would flourish half as well.
The huge leaves of Tetrapanax papyrifera 'Rex' have turned brown as well, and will soon fall. It is an exotic looking thing, which produces gigantic, slightly felted leaves similar to those of a truly enormous fig, on thick, club-like stems. Tetrapanax are very much at the tender end of what we can grow outside, and I was expecting mine to be cut to the ground in the past couple of winters, and sprout anew from the roots, but so far it has managed to bring its single stem through the winter, and I have noticed a sucker a little way from the base, exactly where I do not want another. They are used to great effect in the garden at East Ruston, and in Will Giles' exotic garden in Norwich, where I saw them sucker in just the same way. I'd better try lifting the offshoot in due course, but instinct tells me that is not a job for December.
After lunch I turned my attentions to the front garden, so that I could let the chickens out. They had very hopeful expressions (and if you want to know what a hopeful chicken looks like, you will have to try living with some, then you'll see), and they don't get out much in the winter. I groomed dead leaves and twigs out of the gravel in the turning circle, and pulled up weeds, while they fossicked in the bottom of the eleagnus hedge, then came to see what I was doing. The bronze leaved Libertia peregrinans is well named, peregrinans from the same root as peregrinate, or pilgrim. It travels determinedly, not running crazily like couch grass, but insisting on moving on to fresh soil, while the original plant disappears. In the gravel, mixed up with self seeding euphorbia and long term plantings of dwarf tulips, this is not a problem, but if I had been trying to get it to form a neat patch in a border, it would be.
Addendum I was worried that my spell checker did not like 'fossicked' and checked the spelling on Wikipedia. Turns out it is a mining term, found in Australia, New Zealand and Cornwall, and thought to come originally from the Cornish. It carries the connotation of very small scale prospecting, perhaps carried out as a recreational activity, rather than for financial gain. The equivalent term when searching for opals is noodling.
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