Today I finally got outside to work in the garden. Originally I said I was going to resume gardening on Boxing Day, but it was still very windy, wet, and uninviting, and I could not decide whether I was going down with a cold as well, so I spent the day on the sofa, reading Sinclair McKay's book The Secret Life of Bletchley Park. It was actually a birthday present, but I didn't get round to reading it immediately. Then yesterday it was still damp, so apart from my run to the dump I spent the day on the sofa reading Ursula Buchan's book A Green and Pleasant Land: how England's gardeners fought the second world war. That was a Christmas present from the SA. They were both very interesting, and made rather a good pair, dealing with the same period of history but from wildly differing viewpoints. The SA refuses to believe that the Nazis every dropped Colorado beetles on the Isle of Wight to sabotage the UK's wartime farming effort, though, even if a retired entomologist from the British Museum did tell Ursula Buchan so.
By this morning the wind had dropped and the sun had come out, I didn't appear to be developing a cold, and the outdoors seemed suddenly inviting. I raked up the fallen leaves from the young oak outside the dining room window, which should have been done weeks ago, but there wasn't time, and went on trimming the back of the eleagnus hedge. I am fairly sure this is not a job for December, but I didn't manage to get it finished in the autumn. Now the first daffodil leaves are emerging in the lawn, and this is an area I need to finish getting tidied up pronto, so that I can stop walking on it before the bulbs are too far advanced.
Then I need to work out a proper maintenance schedule. That sounds rather pompous, as most private gardeners probably don't consider that they have any such thing, but I need a plan for when to cut the lawn, and when to cut the hedge, given that the lawn can't be cut from early spring until mid June at the earliest because of the daffodil leaves, I can't cut the hedge while the grass is long because the lawn gets trampled down and looks unsightly, and the hedge grows jolly fast. I'm not even sure how many times a year we cut the front face, along the drive, but think we have a nibble at it several times a year, when it is starting to block the turning circle too badly, or if we are expecting an oil delivery.
My RHS book of pruning and training says that Eleagnus x ebbingei should be cut in late summer, but then you sacrifice the flowers, which come in autumn, and are unshowy but delightfully scented of clove carnations, besides being attractive to bees. I wonder whether the answer is to give the daffodil lawn two cuts, one in June when the oxeye daisies have finished, and again in the autumn, and to give the back of the hedge an annual fairly hard chop in mid summer. One to ponder upon.
While I was out there I tidied some of the lower branches from the young oak, using the new bow saw. There is a strange and terrible pleasure in cutting up wood with a sharp saw, and I can see how it would be easy to overdo it and remove more than you meant to. Though I have heard it said that most people are too timid when pruning. I cut up the thicker prunings for firewood, I was so pleased with the saw. I'll shred the lighter twigs to use as mulch round the compost bins, and have started shredding those eleagnus prunings that will go through the shredder, to add to the compost heap. It seemed no more trouble than carting them off to the bonfire, and the compost heap wants all the sustenance it can get.
The forecast for tomorrow is for more of the same, before the next storm blows in. I hope so. I was shocked, when I came to write up my gardening notebook, to see that today was apparently the first day I'd spent in the garden since December 7th, but having flicked through my diary I think it probably was. Seeing people, work, getting ready for Christmas and Christmas itself, seem to have used up three weeks without the garden getting a look-in. No wonder it is constantly a project in progress, and is never tidy.
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