grooming the gravel

I have been weeding the gravel.  There is a lot of gravel nowadays in the upper part of the garden in front of the house.  It was originally lawn, which did very badly, the soil being so sandy and poor, and was never used for any lawn-like purposes such as sunbathing or ball games, so it was glyphosated to death and several lorry loads of 10mm Birch gravel went down in its place.  It provides a good spot to grow things that like free drainage and disdain nutrition.  Unfortunately this includes sheep's sorrel, which creeps about with yellow underground stems and occassionally sends deep roots straight down.  It's impossible ever to extract all of it, and it regenerates inexorably from what remains.  It is a characteristic plant of light acid soils, and is said to have medicinal and anti-scorbutic properties.  I wouldn't care to eat it myself: I've seen what the cats do in that gravel.

Things seed joyously, some of which are allowed to stay.  The teasels are kept, except around the edges of the gravel where I want there to be a clear path.  This is a biennial so seedlings are needed to keep the display going.  The spiky remains of last year's stalks I shall leave standing for another month, as they are still handsome.  The flowers are attractive to insects, and the seeds to goldfinches.  I have seen flocks of finches on them, although not very often.  I found some viola seedlings.  I don't want those in the gravel simply because they don't fit with the spiky sunbaked aesthetic, but moved them to live under the Mahonia by the oil tank.  A small prickly seedling with piecrust edges to its leaves could be a Morina, which would be nice as I'd like more of those, but could be a Silybum that's strayed from its area of the garden.  I'll leave it and see what it turns into, if it survives.  It was looking a bit mashed up with cold.  There were a lot of seedlings of a biennual verbascum which I decided to leave this year.  It's fun to ring the changes.  I mused on getting some gazanias: I had them two years ago and enjoyed them.  They are almost hardy: given a mild winter and a seaside location you might get away with it.

I am not a fan of using mypex fabric under gravel to cut down on work.  This is quite often suggested in gardening magazines, but my experience of cutting holes in mypex is that bits of fabric always stick up out of the mulch and look a mess.  Anyway, you lose the self seeding element which is part of the fun of gravel gardening.  It is a labour intensive activity, and that kind of fingertip weeding is hard on the back and your gardening gloves.  I can't manage more than a half day of it, and try to alternate crawling and weeding with other jobs that involve walking about.