a gardening day

Suddenly the wind has swung round to the west, and it is warm enough to garden.  Indeed, by the middle of the day I was so warm that I had to take my scarf off as I continued working my way down the slope in the back, weeding, chopping down the remains of the herbaceous plants, sprinkling blood, fish and bone over the border, and topping up the Strulch.

The brambles would take over if they could.  From the few rootstocks tucked in close to the trunks of the mature shrubs, where I never had time to dig them out last year, they have sent long arms arching and scrambling forward across the bed.  Every time they touch down they root at the tip.  Here and there along the bed are irritating little mini-brambles, growing from the rooted tips of past incursions that I never got to in time to extract them completely.  I chisel them out with my trowel, but they don't wholly die, sending up new, spindly, irritating shoots from their remaining roots.  The shoots from the main roots are fatter and faster, much more visible now the leaves have dropped from the shrubs than they were in the summer.  I cleared arcs of bramble stem out of the flowering currants and the Exochorda x macrantha 'The Bride', disentangled them from the rose 'Fritz Nobis', and nipped a few in the bud that were just starting to think about exploring the golden yew.

I must make the time to work my way back uphill along the rear of the bed, and attack them at the root.  It is tempting, when time is limited, to focus your efforts on the fronts of the beds because they show more, but in the end you need to clear up behind the scenes as well.  There are great long shoots of bird-sown ivy running over the ground at the back of the bed and creeping outwards under the shrubs.  Give it another season and it will start climbing them.  It already had begun to loop its way through the yellow berried Cotoneaster 'Rothschildeanus'.

There is a patch of Allium triquetrum in the bed.  A native of the Mediterranean, this has become a fearsome weed in some parts of the world, and is regarded with suspicion by many British gardeners because it spreads so readily.  It is in fact listed on Schedule 9 of the Countryside Act, meaning that it is an offence to plant or otherwise cause to grow it in the wild.  That doesn't stop the RHS listing thirteen suppliers in their Plant Finder.  If I had known quite how rampant it was when I first planted it I might not have chosen to include it, on the other hand it copes valiantly in a rather nasty stretch of claggy soil and only spreads at the edges of the patch.  I have never found it coming up anywhere else in the garden or wood, or else I should worry.  The flowers are white and quite pretty in a small, wild way.  The foliage is dense and weed suppressing when it's out, which it is now, but it will disappear by the summer.