The fallen leaves of magnolias have to be their least attractive feature. They are a dull shade of brown, thick, and slow to decay, smothering the smaller plants beneath them in a garden setting. Peter Smithers in his engrossing memoir recounts how, as the magnolias in his Swiss garden matured, he had to adjust the planting around them, and abandon attempts to grow some woodland treasures, and I've noticed the same effect at home from 'Charles Rafill', not that I had any woodland treasures to start with. The old leaves of evergreen magnolias are even worse, collecting in great, stodgy, leathery heaps wherever the wind sends them.
They make every bit as much mess in a polytunnel in a nursery setting, so spending some time scooping them up from among the pots and off the path seemed a good idea. Magnolias mostly have largish leaves and twiggy, intricate systems of branches, so not all the old leaves make it to the ground, and you have to pick them out of the crowns, moving carefully to avoid knocking too many buds off. Some leaves refuse to fall, until you touch them, when they part from the twig at once and flutter down to add to the mess.
In general, leaves going brown and staying on the plant is a bad sign, since leaf drop in a healthy shrub is an active process. The plant withdraws food and minerals that it's planning to keep from the leaves, and seals off the leaf stem from the twig by forming what botanists call an abscission layer. The leaf then generally falls of its own accord, but failing that the lightest touch or puff of wind should detach it. If the leaves go brown, but remain firmly attached to the stem, it generally means something's amiss.
The buds on the magnolias are already swelling, and some are discarding their furry outer cases. The new buds beneath are themselves pretty hairy. It would be interesting to compare the progress of the ones in the polytunnel with other plants of the same variety growing in the open garden. Are they ahead due to the extra warmth? The vulnerability of their fat, swelling buds to frost is one of the things that makes spring flowering magnolias so nerve-wracking to grow, glorious triumph when it succeeds, but one unlucky night can ruin everything for another year.
After that I removed barrow load after barrow load of leaves from around the specimen trees, so that people wouldn't slip on them. In contrast to the magnolias, the fallen leaves of sorbus, lime, amelanchier, birch, thorn, beech and liquidambar are already turning to mush.
I was reminded of the perils of slipping as I got home to see two bags of purchased firewood outside the front door. Bought softwood logs are a bad sign, when you have several trees' worth of wood of your own. The Systems Administrator slipped on a wet step outside the workshop the other day, and cracked a rib. This is a home diagnosis, based on having done it before falling over on the boat so knowing what a cracked rib feels like, plus the resources of Dr Google. There is nothing to be done for a cracked rib. You can't strap it or help it, but just have to wait for it to recover. The SA has promised me that the rib definitely is not broken, because it isn't moving, and that the SA doesn't have any of the symptoms of internal bleeding or anything to indicate that the problem is worse than a simple cracked rib. Simple the rib may be, but overnight it became spectacularly painful, leaving the SA unable to chop wood.
I have said we had better staple chicken wire over the wooden steps where they get slippery. We are not getting any younger, but we can try and eliminate obvious hazards.
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