Finally, at long last, I have finished spreading the gravel from the bright green dump bag that's been sitting by the entrance all summer. It was never meant to be there for so long, but it's been a hot year, not conducive to barrowing gravel about the place, and although I kept taking the odd wheelbarrow load out of it, I never quite seemed to use it up. Actually, it was never meant to be there at all, but the lorry couldn't get any further inside the entrance. Once I've chopped back the Eleagnus hedge and the brambles, perhaps lorries will be able to get all the way in and unload their deliveries of gravel and mulch on to the concrete. We certainly won't be getting another load of heating oil until we've done something about the hedge.
It seemed a waste to throw the bag away, although there was no deposit on it, but as I got to the bottom I realised that there were two bags, one inside the other. That would explain why there seemed to be quite so many sets of handles flapping around and getting in the way as I tried to shovel the gravel out. The inner of the two bags had a rip in the bottom, so there was no point in trying to return it, and the outer bag looked pretty frayed in places. I decided that they had better both go to the tip, which gave me an extra twinge of environmental guilt about gardening, in addition to my guilt about what the gravel quarry is doing to the countryside on the other side of Colchester.
I have finished planting or potting all of the bulbs that came last week, other than the tulips which don't want to go into the ground until November, some crocus and fritillaries that can't be planted until we've cut the long grass on the bottom lawn, and a packet of Anemone coronaria which are still soaking in a bowl on the kitchen table, like some strange and wizened ingredient of a voodoo charm. I have no idea whether they're poisonous or not, but it would take a very perverse individual to want to eat them. They certainly don't look edible. I had to laugh at the media's recent hissy fit over the revelation that the highly poisonous corn cockle had been included in a wild flower mixture endorsed by Kew and the RHS. OK, so they are highly poisonous. So are foxgloves, and daffodil bulbs. I should say that the latter were more dangerous than corn cockles, since it is possible, if you have very poor sight, or extremely low powers of observation, to mistake daffodils for onions, whereas corn cockles don't look even vaguely like any kind of food I can think of.
Cutting the long grass is now rising rapidly up my list of things to do, along with cutting the Eleagnus hedge, cutting the hornbeam hedge which was supposed to be done in August and clearly isn't going to be, since there are only a couple of hours daylight left in the month, and I'm going out this evening. The same applies to the yew topiary. For the long grass to get done, however, cutting it has to rise up the Systems Administrator's list of things to do as well, since it is a joint effort. The SA's interest in the garden is heavily focused on the railway, and the long grass is about as far from the railway as you can get, so I shall have to appeal to the SA's better nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment