gravel today

I spent today weeding the gravel in the front garden.  It's a gentle task that doesn't involve any very strenuous activity with the left hand (given I am right handed) or the risk of banging my knuckles into anything hard.  There is something satisfying about pulling out the roots of sheeps sorrel.  You curl your fingers under the tuft of leaves, trying to find the long running yellow root, then lift that, seeing how long a piece you can extract in one go, and trying to get it to break leaving a visible end protruding from the soil, so that you can have another bite at the same cherry.

This part of the garden is infested with a fine leaved, clump forming grass.  I don't know what species.  It isn't Poa annua, annual meadow grass, though it is an annual.  There are also patches of a perennial weed grass with a running root, but not couch grass.  The root curls more than couch grass roots.  That one dives deep as well as running near the surface, and buries itself in the bases of shrubs and hedges where it is impossible to dig all of it out, so I should be vigilant with the spot weedkiller in the spring.  I am not very good at the names of weeds, though I can recognise them.  There is another annual, a little yellow flowered member of the pea family, and an annual spurge.  Then various plants spill out of the border which suddenly count as weeds when they seed in the gravel, including Geranium sanguineum and Lychnis coronaria.  Actually, the Lychnis has proved such a smotherer that nowadays I don't want it in the border either.  This just goes to prove that a weed is indeed any plant in the wrong place.

The ivy hedge never recovered over the summer, so I've been pruning the dead branches out.  Bits are still alive, but there are many leafless branches which are now visibly dry and dead.  I was honestly expecting it to shoot again, given how indestructible ivy normally is, but there's been very little regrowth since winter.  I presume it was the winter that killed out patches of it, and that it hasn't had the strength to regrow because the soil is so poor and the rainfall overall has been low.  I'll sprinkle bone meal along the base of it for now, then give it a higher nitrogen boost next spring, and see if that kick-starts it into action.  If it fails to regenerate then maybe it is time to start taking box cuttings.  I liked that ivy hedge.  The variety has smallish, crinkly leaves in a pleasant shade of greyish green, and a graceful, branching growth habit.  I lost track of what cultivar I settled for, which is irritating, but it made a very neat hedge up until last year, and didn't run across the ground as manically as the other hedge in a different (unknown) cultivar does.  Which does suggest it is not an especially strong grower.

There is one seedling which is quite definitely Morina longifolia, so I carefully avoided weeding it out.  I was pleased when I found it, but now I've read John Hoyland's article for the Telegraph I feel a little miffed to have only got the one.  There again, conditions in north Essex are far from those he describes as ideal for Morina, and a pretty poor substitute for 9,800 feet in the Himalayas, so I should be grateful the plants consent to grow at all.

One of the surviving Gazania still has a flower and two buds on it, an incongruous sight on 22 November.  I shall definitely add some more next year, sowing seed if I get round to it, or splashing out on a garden centre pack of plugs if I don't, or if the seeds don't germinate, or damp off.

By ten past four it was too dark to see what I was doing weeding, and I had to come in.  I was listening to a Radio 4 programme about the brain, which said that the most rewarding activities, defining rewarding as producing the most dopamine, were those were the outcome was not assured and there was an element of uncertainty.  That makes gardening a very rewarding activity, I thought.  I dream and plan, plant and prune, and have an idea of what could happen.  Flowers.  A profusion of tulips.  The ivy hedge restored to health.  A glittering array of south African daisies in the gravel.  But nothing is guaranteed.  Voles.  A long cold winter.  That amount of uncertain reward should get the dopamine flowing all right.