Saturday 2 December 2017

something happened

Something happened this morning, only we don't know what it was.  We were sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast, when there was a sudden explosion of activity in the hall as cats rushed in all directions.  We found Mr Cool sitting on my desk in the study, staring fixedly towards the cat door.  Mr Fluffy had taken refuge at the top of the stairs, while Our Ginger sat paternally a few steps down.  Mr Fidget, who had been bouncing in and out of the house ever since we got up, had bounced back into the garden but climbed on the pot shed roof.  Mr Cool stayed looking at the cat door and would not come out of the study for a long time.

I took a handful of sultanas for the chickens and wandered out to collect the eggs.  The galvanised water container, that had been fine when the Systems Administrator let them into their run, was lying on its side, and two of the hens were in the hen house and did not come out even at the offer of sultanas.  Something had happened.  A fox walking past the house?  A sonic boom inaudible to us but frightening to animals?  I could believe that one of the cats took fright at nothing and spooked the others, but not the hens outside as well.

You can see how easy it would be to believe in the supernatural if you were that way inclined.  I assumed there must have been a passing predator I didn't see, or a noise I didn't hear, but I could just as easily have taken the upset as evidence for ghosts or poltergeists if I had wanted to.

Meanwhile, the gigantic bulb in the kitchen, which I have been referring to as an amaryllis though just to be clear it is a variety of Hippeastrum, is finally showing signs of life with the tip of a leaf appearing half an inch proud of the chopped off ends of last year's foliage.  I am pleased about that, since talking to a gardening friend who recounted how she was given one in a box for Christmas, and when she finally got round to potting it up in March it leaped into life immediately and grew at the rate of inches a day, I was beginning to think that mine must be dead.

I am making progress with the bramble stumps around the pond.  There are still a lot left to dig out, but it is beginning to look like a job that might be doable, rather than a hopeless task with no end in sight.  In the space I'd cleared previously I planted a Sarcococca confusa, horribly yellow after spending too many months in a small pot but the roots looked OK so it might pull round with the benefit of fresh soil and a sprinkling of 6X, the allegedly non-running comphrey Symphytum x uplandicum 'Moorland Heather', some more of the small hybrid hellebores, and one of last year's potted rambling roses, Rosa helenae.

The last is a beautiful thing.  I have seen it trained on a large iron frame at the excellent Millgate House garden in Richmond, north Yorkshire, and am planning to persuade ours to climb up an oak tree.  R. helenae has white, fragrant flowers that are attractive to insects, followed by orange hips.  It is certainly built for climbing.  The thorns are not very long, but backwards pointing, and I had to disentangle its stems from other plants and rescue my fleece hat several times in the course of transporting the rose from its quarters outside the greenhouse to its final planting hole.  The current year's growth is a soft red, and quite pretty in an understated way.  I did not give it any bonemeal on planting because I did not want to encourage the foxes to dig it up, but it had a sprinkle of 6X and can have more in the spring, and I might give it a bag of homemade compost as a mulch to encourage it.

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