weeding and mulching

Forecasts for the rain that was threatened or promised. depending on your point of view, have been continually scaled back over the past twenty-four hours, and today stayed dry, allowing me to continue weeding, feeding and Strulching along the base of the veranda.  Weeding was slow and fiddly work as I untangled a lattice of interlocking roots and rooted stems belonging to one wanted and two unwanted species.  They don't teach root identification as a specific skill at horticultural college, but it's something you learn on the job if you have the kind of complex garden where hand weeding and mulch are the order of the day, rather than hoeing, and if ambition outstrips resources so that there always are weeds.

The wanted plant was Jasminum beesianum, an agreeable if unspectacular climber with small pink flowers and a faint scent, definitely not one of those jasmines to make you swoon.  The Bluebell Arboretum consider it garden worthy enough to stock it, and I quite like it without feeling very strongly about it.  It climbs by twining, like other jasmines, and suffers from an amount of dieback each year without any apparent ill effect, again like other jasmines.  My plant is not totally sold on the twining, climbing idea, and tries to run across the ground with almost equal enthusiasm.  Quite a lot of climbers do, many honeysuckles and ivy for starters.  I chop it off when it gets to the path across the back of the rose bed, and allow it to form a frondy mass of ground cover along the bottom of the veranda if that's what it wants to do.

Unfortunately a couple of stinging nettles had got a toehold at the bottom of the decaying trellis under the veranda.  It doesn't matter that the trellis is getting a bit shabby, at least until the point when it collapses completely, since it is totally hidden by a rampaging Clematis montana, variety unknown as it was already here when we moved in, plus climbing roses 'New Dawn' and 'Climbing Etoile Holland', and a honeysuckle, another legacy from the previous owners and variety likewise unknown.  There used to be a Russian vine, which was so rampant I resorted to strong poison fairly early on, and a blue flowered potato vine that I was quite fond of until it fell to bits, probably from old age.  There used to be an inherited Clematis texensis 'Duchy of Albany'.  I knew the variety, because the previous owners had left the label on and it was still legible, but I haven't seen her yet this year.  Trachelospermum jasminoides would have smelt lovely if it hadn't died, twice, but I think Dregea sinensis might still be alive.  It is another climber with an almost cloyingly gorgeous scent, plus milky sap that brings me up in a rash, though not everybody, so I may yet regret planting it.  But I always garden in long sleeves anyway.

Stinging nettles have bright yellow underground roots, that don't look too much like many other things, and also send stems running along the ground that root where they touch.  They are initially reddish and mature to a dull buff.  Neither looks too much like the stems and roots of the Jasminum beesianum, but disentangling two interlaced sets of horizontal stems and running roots while keeping one of them reasonably intact is a fiddle.

I recognised the other unwanted plant without knowing its name.  It is a wildflower with dull little spikes of flowers that the bees like, and I wouldn't have minded leaving one or two in the back of the bed if it hadn't had running roots.  A runner that you don't even like is a no-no in a border.  Fat, white, and mercifully not too brittle underground stems ran from one stalk to the rest, and took some pulling out because they kept ducking under the jasmine.

There were ivy seedlings as well, and yet more Geum urbanum or Herb Bennet, which is another dull wildflower that I don't mind in the wood but don't want all over the borders.  And there was a bit of goosegrass or cleavers.  Goosegrass, like the poor, ye have always with ye.  But they were quick to root out in comparison.  Once I reached the box hedge surrounding the hybrid tea roses there were unwanted seedlings of Campanula lactiflora, demonstrating that a weed is in part a plant in the wrong place, since I am perfectly happy with 'Loddon Anna' elsewhere in the bed, I just don't want a monoculture of her seedlings.

One more push tomorrow should do it, unless the forecast for rain is resurrected, and then it's on to the island bed, where several cistus that were looking perfectly good until those sharp late overnight frosts have now died, and Coronilla varia needs yanking out by the handful.