I ended up spending today working in the top part of the garden. I had a few plants sitting in their plastic pots that would have been better off in the ground, and their intended site was ready for them, so it seemed sensible to get on and plant them. I had promised that I would start clearing the nettles and weeds in the bottom part of the garden where we are supposed to be building a new deck to make a sheltered, shady place to sit in the summer, but the work in the front took all day. Things planted this spring needed watering, as did things planted last autumn, and some planted longer ago than that.
The Strulch has been proving its worth, as there was a marked contrast in weediness between the areas I'd mulched (a few odd weeds) and the areas left bare pending further planting (a generous crop of groundsel, and sundry fat hen, chickweed, and sow thistle). I pulled these up, and planted the buckets of Muscari armenaicum bulbs that have been sitting in the woodshed since I dug them up a couple of months ago when I was forking the bed over. Some people hate this grape hyacinth, because it is weedy and ineradicable and spreads like hell, but I don't mind it spreading. It is pretty, and this is a self-seeding sort of garden anyway, and frankly I'm grateful to anything that really wants to grow and flower in the arid sand at the top of the slope (apart from the creeping sorrel). I strulched the gaps to avoid a fresh crop of weeds, and will push the mulch aside when I come to plant them up.
The olive tree still shows no signs of making new leaves, but is green under the bark, and has about two green leaves hanging on in the middle. I'll tidy up the thin twigs at some point soon which I'm sure are dead, but I cling to hope that there might be life further down. I have run the hose on it a couple of times. Something that has pleasantly surprised me by shooting from the base is the Colletia paradoxa. This is a strange shrub. The branchlets are reduced to flat, extremely sharp, triangular spines. The plant is greyish green, and carries sweetly scented small white flowers in autumn. Hillier's manual of trees and shrubs describes it as being rather slow growing, and it is, although mine speeded up appreciably after being put on a diet of 6X, fish blood and bone, and very occassional irrigation in dry spells, which make me think that despite its gaunt appearance it enjoys good living. By the end of winter the whole plant was burned and brown, and I though I had lost it, but today I found green shoots coming from below soil level. They were a fresh shade of green with little leaves, not very like the mature branches, and at first I wondered if they were some new weed, but identical shoots were growing from the base of the stem, just above ground level, so unless the plant was originally grafted, which I don't think it was, these must be the immature shoots. I haven't chopped off the dead top yet, partly because I was busy doing other things, and partly to protect the new shoots from accidents, principally me treading on them. The frail new shoots of a white Lespedeza, that had made it up to a few cm tall, seem to have disappeared without trace in the droughty vastness.
The wind had got quite a nip in it when the sun went in, and I stomped around the hall, garage and greenhouse searching for my fleece hat, and worrying that I must have left it in the garden somewhere, before finding it in the kitchen full of lumps of white quartz that I carried up from the conservatory in it about two weeks ago in order to wash them. It is fortunate that I share a house with somebody who thinks it's OK to keep a hat full of stones on the kitchen worktop for a fortnight.
No comments:
Post a Comment