I scraped the last couple of buckets out leaf mould out of the wire bin today, wondering regretfully how such a huge pile of leaves could have rotted down to such a small volume of soil improver. The wild gean in the back garden has suddenly dropped almost all of its leaves in the last couple of days, and I began raking those into piles on the top lawn, but they aren't nearly going to fill up the leaf bin. I must have worked assiduously last year collecting chestnut leaves from the meadow. It could be time to capture some more tomorrow, before these gale force north easterlies arrive, and blow them all into the wood.
The leaf mould went on the long bed, where under the encroaching ivy and Lychnis coronaria I've found some sorry-looking dwarf bearded iris. They could do with lifting, the old portions chopping off, and the newer rhizomes replanting in refreshed soil, but though I generally follow the adage that the right time to do most jobs is when you have time to do them, even my enthusiasm faltered at the prospect of splitting bearded iris in December. I cleaned and mulched that part of the bed, and decided to return to that particular task in the spring. I think the correct time for lifting iris is after flowering, but I don't think these are going to flower without some attention.
Lychnis coronaria grows so well in the long bed that it has become a faintly terrifying weed. Not completely nightmarish, because the seedlings pull up easily. They are quite cute little grey rosettes, whereas the adult plants become tatty, with old dead leaves stuffed in among the new, and a bulging habit. The flowers, pinkish white singles held clear of the foliage, are moderately pretty. I should be grateful to it for growing in that bed with generosity and enthusiasm,instead of persecuting it, when normally I grumble about how hard it is to get things to grow, but Lychnis coronaria is not an especially lovely plant, and left unchecked forms great mats so dense and rampant that they compete with the shrubs they were supposed to be ground covering around. As I weed I am regarding it as a weed, and removing every plant, but I know it will be back for years to come.
I have mixed feelings about ivy as a hedge. I planted it originally to hide the wire netting I found necessary to stop rabbits from destroying half the plants in the bed. An alternative would have been box, but I couldn't afford enough box, and worried about the long-term maintenance commitment of keeping it trimmed. I can't remember the circumference of the long bed, and am not going to pace it out in the dark, but it must be well over two hundred feet. The ivy covered the wire, though it took a few years, and looks quite pretty at times, but has its drawbacks. Professional designers occasionally recommend ivy on wire for places where a narrow evergreen hedge is needed. They never mention its more roguish habits, though. The ivy will go up the wire, but what it really, really wants is to set out across the ground. Ground is good. Ivy running across border soil can root as it grows, creating new plants independent of the original potful of roots you planted out. Ivy likes that.
It will climb up the wire as well, and with diligent clipping you can keep it tight in, but after a few years of this treatment it will get the message and start forming mature, flowering growths. I find mature ivy quite attractive, and even have a shrub of the yellow berried sort, planted deliberately, though it has never been the same since the snow of two or three years ago broke it open. However, flowering ivy leaves are different to the juvenile, climbing form, rounder and less markedly lobed, so you end up with a two-tone hedge, bits of it flowering and fruiting and bits not. The flowers and fruit are quite attractive, but the mature parts will need trimming, or the hedge is going to become taller over time and wider at the top. It is difficult to trim mature ivy back without ending up with a lot of bare stems on display, and not much leaf.
The Ceanothus 'Puget Blue' at one end of the bed, by the unfortunately placed telegraph pole, surprised me by coming into bloom. The whole shrub has a good scattering of flowers, just opening, with a slightly pinched air, as if they were beginning to realise there had been a mistake. It's interesting that a ceanothus is flowering now, but I'm not thrilled with the result. It looks incongruous. I've never been a fan of the How many flowers are blooming on Christmas Day? game, apart from the curiosity value. Garden impact is provided by things doing well in their season. The bright red crabs on Malus x robusta 'Red Sentinel' are beautiful, and look exactly appropriate for now. I've been enjoying the Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun' which is just starting to go over, having flowered abundantly at its proper time. The intense, pure blue flowers of 'Puget Blue' are in their element under a summer sky, but look out of place in grey December.
The robin watched everything with keen attention, perching on the aerial of my garden radio, and on the far side of the chicken house roof while I cleaned their roosting board. As it was a nice afternoon (in the sense of being calm, not raining, and not unbearably cold) I let the chickens out for a run for a couple of hours when I'd cleaned the house, because they were looking at me with such hopeful expressions. They ate a lot of grass and foraged busily in the dahlia bed and the turning circle, and were slow going back into their run after tasting freedom for the first time in several weeks. It's lucky I remembered to go and shut their house as it got properly dark, because I found them queuing outside the pop hole, as I'd shut them out while I was cleaning it, then forgotten to open the door again. They are bedded on rather posh, vaguely scented chopped hay stuff meant for horses at the moment, because that's all that Marriages had the last time I was there. Normally I just buy basic wood shavings.
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