I began work today on the hornbeam hedge by the compost bins. I am utterly confused about the whys and wherefores of when to cut hornbeam. By tradition it is done in August, but is that for the hornbeam's own good, or because it fitted in with the gardeners' other work? I wouldn't say August was a slack month, because there never seems to be such a thing, but it isn't a month for digging or sowing, it's too late for staking, too early for lifting and dividing. And growth is generally slowing so a hedge trimmed in August should stay trim until the following spring. I read somewhere, and I thought it was in the RHS magazine, that hornbeam was prone to bleed if cut in February, but then I read somewhere else, and again I thought it was the RHS magazine, that if a hornbeam hedge needed hard renewal pruning the time to do it was February. So I'm confused.
I am now fairly certain that the tradition of an August cut for yew is all about fitting it into the gardeners' calender of work, and not because yew will take harm if cut later, having read enough articles about gardens with extensive hedges and topiary where cutting starts in late summer and continues right through the winter because that's how long it takes to do it. Anyway, I have started cutting the hornbeam hedge now simply because I've been thinking about it since last August but not found time before, and it is not bleeding visibly, not like the vine stem I experimentally cut a couple of years back which ran like a tap.
By lunchtime my feet were getting chilly, so in the afternoon I switched to clearing the logs and coppice prunings from the back garden. Climbing up and down a flight of steps carrying a large lump of wood gets the blood flowing back into your feet pretty briskly. I wasn't sure I'd shift it all today, but as dusk approached the end was in sight, and the incentive was strong to lug the last, thickest logs into the wheelbarrow and heave them up the hill so that I could say I'd finished and tick that job off the list.
I heard a strange, harsh cry as I worked, which I'd heard before lunch, and looking up saw a pair of buzzards flying around a large hedgerow oak at the bottom of the neighbours' field. One repeatedly flew upwards then hurtled down again, and occasionally managed to hover for a few seconds, kestrel like. So perhaps they were kestrels, but they looked too large and too square winged. Maybe they are staking their claim to the oak tree and intend to nest there.
We make such value judgements when it comes to wildlife. I was pleased to see the buzzards, or kestrels or whatever they were, just as I welcome the robins and great tits to the bird table. They've been joined in recent days by a small buff coloured tit with an almond shaped black cap and a tiny dark smudge on its chest. Looking at the bird books it is either a willow tit or a marsh tit, neither of which are stunningly rare but nor are they especially common. Telling them apart seems to be a job for an expert. However I was not at all happy to go into the greenhouse and find that even with two mouse traps set some more pots of small bulbs had been destroyed. Song birds and raptors v. good, mice v.v. bad. There are rabbit pellets everywhere in the back garden, but the Systems Administrator was not enthusiastic about my suggestion that once it warmed up he could lie out at dusk under a camouflage net with the air rifle. Rabbits expletive deleted unspeakably bad.
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