My latest thorn proof pruning gloves have dyed my fingers yellow, so that they look as though I had a severe smoking habit. I was afraid that was going to happen as I eyed up the bright ginger gauntlets that were the only pruning gloves on offer in the Clacton Garden Centre, but the seams had gone down the index fingers of my old ones, and I needed replacements at that moment. I wish somebody would take the issue of protective gloves for gardeners seriously. I look enviously at workwear sites on the web, where specialist gloves for various industries are numerically graded in terms of cut resistance. The most you can find out about most gardening gloves is Amazon user feedback along the lines of 'the lining came unstitched the first time I wore them'. Everyday green gardening gloves from supermarkets are a gamble when they sell them (in the summer months only, since nobody gardens in the winter). Some are fine, just as good as the branded ones in the garden centres but less than half the price, but others dye your fingers green. If having nicotine coloured fingers is bad then having green ones is worse, making you look vaguely gangrenous.
I borrowed the Systems Administrator's welding gauntlets recently, to deal with some particularly vicious brambles in the meadow. The trouble with most industrial workwear is that it only comes in large sizes. I take a size 7 in gloves, and wearing the SA's size 10s is like gardening dressed up as a flappy handed clown. I suppose that the market for people doing heavyweight garden work by hand is tiny. Field hedges are all cut with flails nowadays, and a farmer's or professional landscaper's response to an unwanted patch of brambles would be to petrol strim or bulldoze the lot. Only a few fanatical but disorganised gardeners end up dealing with problems like a fallen but still growing oak tree that has filled with brambles to a height of about fifteen feet, and need to remove the brambles by hand while keeping the oak.
They have gone now, and I have rounded up the straggling stems of the rambling rose that is supposed to be 'Ethel' and shoved them in the direction of the oak canopy. Whatever the rose is, it's a good clinger-on. It took me a long time to extract it from the other shrubs it had grown through instead of climbing the oak tree, as it clung tenaciously to the neighbouring shrub roses, a holly and the remaining litter of cut bramble stems on the ground. At times it seemed to have clasped its hands around its old companions, refusing to let go. If it can be persuaded to get going in the oak instead it should be secure up there, not like 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' which is a slippery beast.
Late in the afternoon I pollarded the pussy willow that seeded itself in the bog bed a few years ago. I felt rather mean chopping it now, partly because a few pussies hadn't quite gone over and a few bees were foraging on it, and partly because the leaf buds were swelling and about to break. But I can't work out when else to do it. I want it as a pollard, a neat lollipop like you see along rivers, because otherwise it will grow far too big and cast too much shade. It's not as though it's meant to be there at all, I already have an orange tinted alder in that bed. And I want the pussies, because otherwise what's the point of growing it at all. If I pollard in the winter when it's dormant I won't get the flowers, so the only time I can think of to do it is immediately after flowering, but it feels wrong to be removing all those swelling leaf buds. I told myself that willows were tough old things that would root from cuttings even when you stuck them in upside down.
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