reclaiming the edges

As I was going through my pile of old gardening magazines the other day, I came upon an article by Anne Swithinbank, whose weekly gardening update informed readers that she had been reclaiming part of her garden where the edges, as she put it, had been slowly creeping inward and eating things.  Not just small things like bird baths or tools, but quite large items like garden tables.  I love Anne Swithinbank's column, as in between more rarefied tasks she admits to spending days hacking out brambles from her borders, or resuscitating unfortunate specimens that have spent far too long in their pots behind the greenhouse because nobody got round to finding them a permanent home in the soil.  When she writes about her large plot, limited time and finanes, marauding rabbits and deer, and unhelpful soil, I feel I am not alone.

I have been waging war on the edge of the wood, which is steadily encroaching on the path past the chicken run to the workshop, the vegetable patch, and the meadow and bees.  Ivy has been running about at ground level and brambles rooting, while overhanging branches regularly sweep the contents out of the trailer, and latterly the wheelbarrow, on their trip from the back garden to the bonfire heap.  The muddle is compounded by various useful pieces of potential firewood left outside the workshop to be sawn up, which vanished into the brambles and nettles before anything was done with them.  I have even found the leafless remains of two Christmas trees lurking in the undergrowth.

Ivy pulls up pretty readily, long satisfying strands coming up in your hand.  Any big clumps of roots are then dealt with using a pick axe.  That's by far the best way to get rid of it.  I was once quizzed on how to clear ground covered in ivy by a customer at the plant centre.  She had already asked the landscaper who helped the owner with tree planting demonstrations on open days and he had told her to use glyphosate.  She was very unwilling to believe me when I said that, speaking from personal experience, ivy's shiny leaves did not respond especially well to herbicide sprays, and that it was far more efficient to clear it manually.  I couldn't understand why, if she had already decided she was set on using weed killer, she was giving me such a hard time about it, but maybe she wanted a second opinion that agreed with the first one.

Bramble roots will sometimes pull up in the spongy ground of the wood, but on the edge of the track to the compost heap it takes a pick axe.  Half a dozen good chops normally lift them.  The real nuisance comes from the brambles just outside the rabbit wire, that have grown up through the six inches of netting bent outwards at the bottom of the fence.

Overhanging branches reaching into the track are straightforward.  You just cut or saw them off, depending on size.  Old pruning marks showed where one of us did the same exercise in the past. High branches are more problematic.  We've been here over twenty years, and trees that seemed safely confined to the wood then, or even five or six years ago when the Systems Administrator put up the second greenhouse next to the vegetable patch, are now looming out over the garden and shading greenhouse and vegetable beds for more of the day than is ideal.  But cutting them back would be a job for the local tree surgeon, and would not be cheap.  We had a couple of large ash trees drastically reduced for safety reasons after their neighbour collapsed spectacularly across the drive, taking out the phone lines to fifty houses and the lettuce farm in the process, but I don't think the big sweet chestnuts that are shading the SA's greenhouse are unsafe.  They are just large. And rather magnificent.

The SA chopped up most of the poles destined for firewood yesterday with a bench saw, leaving me to stack the bits.  I filled the woodshed, and all the log baskets, and have pretty much run out of space.  There turned out to be quite a few more pieces of wood tucked away among the undergrowth, so I cut them up with the bow saw, using the wheelbarrow as an impromptu saw bench.

I fondly hoped when I started that I'd get to the turning circle by the end of the day, but these jobs tend to take longer than you expect, and I still haven't even reached the great lump of mature ivy that sagged down out of a hawthorn tree recently and is half blocking the path.  Oh well, tomorrow is forecast to be dry.  One more day should surely be enough.  It isn't the sort of area of the garden one wants to spend too much time on, which is of course how it came to be such a mess in the first place.