revamping the long bed

I've been making progress replanting the section of the long bed I've been working on.  The remains of a Hebe 'Mrs Winder' have gone the same way as the H. salicifolia.  That had not made such a large rootball, because it is a smaller shrub, but over the years it had layered itself to form subsidiary rooting points, and was in fact dead in the middle but very firmly attached to the ground at each end.  My Pilates teacher does not really approve of pickaxes.  Or digging.

The Berberis thunbergii 'Orange Rocket' and the three 'Hot Chocolate' roses have gone in.  The label of the 'Orange Rocket' says that the leaves turn green later in the season, so I hope they stay orange long enough to overlap with at least some of the roses' period of flowering.  I hadn't thought of that when I imagined the scheme originally.  I've added Euonymus planipes to the mix, which I'd been wanting to fit in somewhere for a long time.  The winter buds are attractive, being long and pointed like little cigars, but the main reason for growing it is the autumn colour.  It turns early, to wonderful shades of pink and red.  It is one of those plants whose name I kept writing down in my garden visiting notebook over and over again.  If the same thing catches my eye repeatedly at different gardens I take that as a clue that I really like it.  I've also added a Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue', which has smallish and slightly wavy leaves in a pleasant shade of bluish-green.  Something glaucous should tone down the orange nicely.  Of course if we have another cold winter it could die, but only experience will tell.  My 'Arundel Green' is absolutely fine, but some (admittedly recently planted) 'Tom Thumb' are looking very poorly.  I'd like a bit more of an evergreen spine along the bed, to make the garden feel more enclosed in the winter, when the field hedge is pretty much see-through.

I replanted the best of the iris rhizomes I lifted some days ago.  Since then they have been in a box in the woodshed, and in an ideal world they would have been replanted before now, but having seen how tenacious of life left-over rhizomes are, that have been thrown on the compost heap, I think they'll be OK.

I've dug in all but three of the bags of mushroom compost.  It disappears into the sand with disconcerting ease, and we're going to need to go and get some more next week.  A customer at work recently came up with a great phrase when I asked him what his soil was like.  'Hungry.  Put your coat down on it and it'll vanish'.