winter fragrance

I set to work today to finish cutting the eleagnus hedge.  For weeks the safe aluminium platform we keep for working at height has been sitting on the daffodil lawn, abandoned after the brief two day spell between Christmas and the New Year when I last got on with it.  Since then illness, wind and rain have intervened, and then it seemed more urgent to get the hellebores by the oil tank tidied up before they came into flower.  The view through the smart new giant window was not enhanced by having a Henchman platform, ladder and shredder full in the foreground, with a wheelbarrow, rake and two green buckets behind them in the middle distance, but that's where everything ended up. Finally, since it was calm and sunny and the daffodil leaves are starting to emerge, I thought it would be a good idea to finish the hedge, and move the scaffolding out of the way.

As I worked I realised to my delight that the garden was suffused with the scent of winter flowering shrubs.  I diligently grow witch hazel, sweet box and a form of Viburnum x bodnantense, that flowers on bare twigs for weeks on end in the winter, with daphnes to follow along a little later, and in the wet and windy weather we've had they might as well have been made of plastic for all the fragrance I could ever detect walking around.  At last, given a sunny and calm day, their smell hung on the air like it was supposed to.  It is a piecing smell, sharp, clean but heavy.

The first snowdrops are just open.  They are almost all the common Galanthus nivalis rather than any special early variety, so the fact that a few are almost full out when most of the others are still tight little spikes no more than a couple of inches high shows either the natural genetic variability in the population, or that some corners of the garden are particularly warm and favourable.  The timing of their flowering is always highly influenced by the weather.  Given a hard winter and they won't do anything until late February, which must make planning snowdrop open days in advance a nightmare.

Looking at the snowdrops coming through and the pulmonaria buds expanding reminded me that I needed to make the most of the calm weather to cut back the willows overhanging the ditch bed. Their trunks are on the far side of the ditch, and I am never entirely sure whether the trees belong to the neighbouring farmer or are ours.  They grow as fast as weeds, and send long branches out over the garden.  I have not always been so efficient as I should have been about keeping these in check, as some of the shrubs now bear witness, having grown lopsidedly forwards towards the light.

Willow wood is soft, as is often the way with fast growing trees, and it is fairly easy to cut through quite substantial branches with the bow saw.  To reach them I had to manoeuvre the platform into the bed, trying very hard not to put any of its saucer sized feet down on top of anything too precious.  I tackled some of the lower branches from the ladder, which lacking feet sank lopsidedly into the earth.  At the end of my pruning session I had a large pile of bonfire material and a wheelbarrow of sections large enough to count as firewood, once they've seasoned.  There is still some more willow to come out, though, once I can work out how to get at it, and we have agreed to take a large branch off the wild gean, but that needs the Systems Administrator and a chainsaw.