The Systems Administrator went into the workshop with a heavy box of stuff, and was about to put it down when he saw a baby robin peering up at him from the bench. Looking down, he discovered one foot was approximately three inches from another robin. No wonder the RSPB estimates that only 57 per cent of eggs from completed clutches result in fledged youngsters. Some of the other 43 per cent must be trampled to death by remorseful householders. The SA retreated, being very careful where he trod, and the workshop is now off limits until the weekend, courtesy of the UK's favourite bird. It is rather a nuisance really since the SA wanted to use the circular saw.
I have been fishing bits of honeysuckle out of the Amelanchier below the rose bank. Sometimes I wonder whether it was a good idea introducing honeysuckle into the mix. The flowers are very pretty, and smell wonderful, and moths like them, but the plants do have thuggish tendencies. Honeysuckle is a twiner, climbing by dint of twisting its stems around the stems of other plants, but as it tightens its grip it will form deep grooves in the bark of its host in time, if not strangle it outright. And the varieties of Lonicera japonica and L. periclymenum I've used in the rose bank are so vigorous, they're almost smotherers as well. Part of my maintenance routine in the back garden is to snip back their questing new stems fairly regularly, to help keep them from engulfing the roses.
This kind of apparently relaxed and natural gardening, with plants allowed and encouraged to drift into their neighbours and self seed across beds, in reality takes a lot of tweaking, White bryony seeds itself through the borders, a native wild flower that climbs to twelve feet or more, using little coiled tendrils rather than the twining method. The hairy leaves are attractively lobed, and the white flowers pretty in an unostentatious way, and it produces some very artistic effects. I am particularly pleased with the one that has draped itself over the main trunk of the Metasequoia, its tendrils managing to grip the rough bark enough to cling on, and I like the swags hanging from the (rather floppy) yew lookalike Cephalotaxus harringtonia in the ditch bed. But it can be too much of a good thing. Plants are perennial, forming a big, knobbly white root that gradually increases in size, and mature plants send out a lot of stems, capable of squashing and smothering lesser hosts, and I'm regularly pulling off yards of unwanted growth, or grubbing out hopeful new roots while they're small enough to extract easily.
By now there's a lot of pruning. Like most gardeners keen to see a result in their early years, and plant lovers with less than a score of acres to play with, the garden is over planted. I am absolutely not a fan of the hedgehogs on stilts, trim everything to a neat controlled dome school of gardening. Clipped domes have their role, as a foil to the exuberant natural seeming growth of everything else, and to give structure in winter when most of the herbaceous stuff has disappeared (coloured hay, Russell Page called it). Why, I even have two pieces of topiary, fashioned freehand from yew plants that started off at less than two feet high. But the aim when trimming everything else, judiciously removing a branch here and there so that things don't oppress their neighbours, is to keep an open and apparently natural shape so that unless you looked carefully you wouldn't realise the plant had been pruned.
Likewise if you encourage self seeding you have to edit. The Strulch limits it nowadays in the back garden, and the fact that by now most of the borders have reached the state advocated by Stephen Lacey, where if you can see bare earth by June it means that something has died. But Verbena bonariensis still finds a way. And the gravel in the front garden there would be wall to wall Asphodeline lutea and evening primrose, if I didn't tweak out excess seedlings. It feels terribly wasteful putting young plants on the compost heap when garden centres are charging up to four pounds for them in three inch pots, but I don't know anybody who wants that much A. lutea, and evening primrose doesn't transplant well. If anybody wants some of that they'd do better to collect some seed.
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