the joy of the happy commoner

When I tried to log in earlier Blogspot was unavailable.  Now it will let me post, but seems to have lost Wednesday and Thursday's entries.  I hope they reappear.  Yesterday's had photos of the new sculpture at the bottom of the garden, and it took me ages.

I am disappointed with the giant Echium.  They have got blue flowers, which are attractive to bees, but they are not bonny, thriving plants.  Instead they are flowering with an air of 'let's get this over with, then'.  I fear that if grown in a container they need a larger pot than I can provide.  I also think they need a different background to appreciate the flowers, as  blue flowers against a bright blue East Anglian sky don't show up.  If I had a walled garden I could admire them against mellow red brick.  That would be nice.

The cut-leaved elder by the oil tank is a joy.  The leaves are are a fresh, cool green, and seem not one jot troubled by the drought.  The flat plates of tiny white flowers are just opening, hovering over the shrub like ethereal flying saucers.  It has made a large shrub, easily 3m by 3m, and at this time of year wraps itself companionably around the Mahonia x media next to it.  Fortunately the Mahonia doesn't seem to mind.  The elder is clothed in leaves to the ground, so maybe I have got the pruning regime right.  Each winter I reduce around a quarter of the stems to 1m in height, to stimulate new growth low down while keeping some height.  Last winter it got some supplementary pruning when my partner chopped off the branches deemed to be in the way of the oil delivery man.  Its Latin name is Sambucus nigra f. laciniata, and I see from my records that it was planted in March 2005.  Sambucus nigra is our native wild elder, the flowers of which make delicious cordial, though the trouble with making your own cordial instead of buying a bottle is that you have to face up to quite how much sugar it has in it.  A customer at work told me that if you include a pink flowerhead, from one of the dark leaved forms, it colours the cordial a brilliant pink.

The longer I garden, the more I think that there is much more pleasure to be had from common plants that are growing well and exuding good health than from exotic rarities of which the main thing that can be said is that they are alive.  The Sambucus is a glorious emblem of spring, while the Echium just looks very tired.

I was weeding the gravel, while keeping an eye on the chickens and moving the hose every few minutes between recent plantings in the border.  The flowers of the Crambe maritima are strongly scented of honey, another good reason to grow it.  We'll see if we get this forecast rain in the night, though.  I've been putting lard cakes out for the blackbirds, since I don't see how they are to find worms in this weather.