change of plan

Today I was going to meet an old colleague in London for an exhibition and some lunch.  I suggested this Tuesday partly because it was forecast to rain heavily all day here, but be dry in London.  None of these things came to pass.  My friend discovered that she had double booked herself, so we rearranged for next week.  It didn't start raining here until twenty past four, so I had virtually a full day in the garden.  There were showers in London, so if I'd gone there I'd have got wet.  I am quite happy to see last week's forecast for this week of virtually non-stop rain give way to the prospect of nothing wetter than overcast skies until Friday afternoon, but it reinforces the uselessness of the five day forecast as a method of planning when to do anything.

The black cat looked much better today than he did yesterday, when he seemed to be permanently terrified, running away from both of us and unable or unwilling to eat.  He will be fifteen in April, old enough to make me view any sudden change in his behaviour rather pessimistically, but this morning he was back to his usual amiable self, chirruping, purring, and eating.  He doesn't seem to have been sick either, unless he has done it somewhere very discreet.

I went on with weeding the long bed, dithering about whether to keep some rather small rhizomes of bearded iris and try and nurse them back to flowering size, or replace them with something else, that might flower this year.  Although iris dislike winter wet I think they do prefer a reasonably good soil.  On our sand they tend to dwindle away to a half-size, non-flowering state, even with top dressings of 6X manure, plus fish, blood and bone.  I had to lift them because they were infested with more roots of the wretched running grass, but they were scarcely worth replanting.  I think I'd better keep those parts of the bed empty and fallow for a couple of months so that I can treat the grass with glyphosate as it regrows, since I know I haven't managed to dig and tease all the roots out.

One of the nicest plants in the bed is a golden Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris 'Aurea'.  At this time of the year its foliage has gone a soft shade of dark yellow, which sounds as though it could look unhealthy, but doesn't.  In the summer it reverts to plain greyish green, and doesn't draw attention to itself.  It is a slow grower, with a dense, busy habit, but after seven years it is starting to develop into a good feature.  Alas, a twisty branched cherry bought to sit next to it, and give a little Japanese flavour to that part of the bed, has died.  I think a fierce spell of drought before it was established did for it.  I watered it, but evidently not enough.  Or perhaps it could never have coped in the sandy soil.  In my wilder moments I think that perhaps I should plant nothing but dwarf pines in the front garden, since they seem to like the soil so much more than most things.