The rain was disappointing in the end, as it so often is. We were promised heavy rain all morning, tailing off to light rain in the afternoon, then the forecast was scaled back to a brief burst of heavy rain followed by light rain until lunchtime, but all that materialised were occasional light showers from a grey and blustery sky and sullen gusts of wind. I wouldn't say I was counting on that rain, because bitter experience has taught me not to trust the Met Office's forecasts for rain in the Clacton coastal strip, even if they do let you select the Beth Chatto gardens as your location and pretend it is different to the Colchester forecast. So often the rain seems to peter out the other side of Colchester. I could have done with it, though, for the vegetables and the bog bed.
I sauntered around the garden, in between light showers and to check that a couple of recently planted things weren't frazzling up in the absence of a solid downpour. The small Trollius looked fine, and as I was inspecting the bog bed (which is no longer a bog) I made a mental note that I needed to move a primula I planted last year, which is being totally overshadowed by a huge ornamental rhubarb leaf and doesn't look impressed.
The back garden has almost achieved my objective, which is for the borders to be completely covered by the end of May, taking a leaf from Stephen Lacey's comment that if by June you could see bare earth in his garden then something had died. There is some bare earth, or rather Strulch, in the island bed where several Cistus did die, and the theoretically evergreen Stipa gigantea died right back for reasons that I don't understand, though they are recovering now. Plus there are a lot of asters in that bed, and they are tightly clump forming and don't flower until autumn so are correspondingly late in developing their full canopy of foliage in the spring. You can see the ground between the Japanese anemones as well, though I make use of the space in the first part of the year for daffodils, which like to get some light on their leaves after flowering, and then alliums. Likewise I use the gaps between the clumps of perennial peas for a display of oriental poppies, before the peas engulf that part of the border entirely. The poppies have died down by then and don't seem to mind.
But overall the borders are pretty packed, foxgloves and Aquilegia springing up between the roses, many self sown, angelica looming up through the gaps, Astrantia, geraniums, Brunnera, violas, Camassia and Hemerocallis mingling and fighting it out with bulbous irises, Centaura montana, and Acanthus and Phlomis that will take more space than I want them to have, given half a chance. The roses have doubled in volume in a month, and are flopping over some of the peonies, while a herbaceous clematis that I never managed to buy a tripod for in the spring has disappeared into the maelstrom.
It isn't a garden for timorous plants that can't grab their space. I try to arbitrate, judiciously trimming, chopping back and grubbing out at the end of each growing season, but come the May rush it's slightly a case of every plant for himself. Sometimes I'm sorry to find that I've lost things, like a nice Alstroemeria that gradually got shaded out as rose 'Sally Holmes' grew and the territorial ambitions of the neighbouring Brunnera proved too much for it. But the effect by this time of the year is undoubtedly romantic, lush, colourful, and slightly alarmingly out of control, which is how I like gardens to be. It shouldn't seem too unlikely that round the next corner you could meet Pan.
And of course the great wall of planned vegetation helps keep the weeds down, which is why I have been working towards this point for years, even if by now I'm stuck for anywhere to plant new things I should like to grow. Strulch plus lawn-to-lawn greenery means there are not nearly so many seeding weeds as there were in the early years of the garden, or even five years ago. The odd tuft of goose grass or real grass gets through, and I hoick them out when I get round to it, but there aren't so many nowadays. I am still waging war on the entrenched dandelions, that bounce back each time from my efforts to dig them out or poison them. And of course there's the horsetail.
Horsetail is an eternal weed. The Equisetopsida grew in the Paleozoic forests for a hundred million years, and Equisetum arvense is not about to give up now. Forget digging it out, forget glyphosating it to death, forget covering your garden in black polythene for a couple of years and waiting for it to die out. It will not die, and you will have wasted good money on glyphosate or two years of gardening time. The best way to deal with horsetail is to learn to live with it.
The leaves don't start emerging until late spring, so you can enjoy whatever displays of spring bulbs and other small treasures you were planning without interference. Fortunately while horsetail when present can be a ubiquitous weed, it is not strongly competitive. Its thick, brittle black roots run straight down into the soil and other plants don't seem to mind it. What I do is pull the leaves off as I see them, in May and June, which is a bore because you know the task will have to be repeated indefinitely and if only you didn't have horsetail you could be spending the time on something constructive, but it isn't difficult. The leaves grow back but more weakly, and often flat against the soil instead of vertically. This is where the jungle of smothering ground cover plants comes into play, hiding the regrowth so that a casual observer might not spot the horsetail.
A keen and eagle eyed gardener would soon see it, but our eyes are tuned to such things. Just as the Zen motorcyclist registers the bike whose engine is out of tune or the cat lover the cat with a staring coat, the dedicated gardener will detect horsetail. It is there, but it need not be a big problem. The funny thing, it is not an intrinsically ugly plant. If it were difficult to grow we should be proud of it.
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