I finished digging out the rhododendron stumps on Tuesday, but I didn't mention it at the time. I didn't feel like writing another blog post about stumps and witch hazel. Today it was the turn of the climbers on the veranda to start facing the chop.
There are at least two basic approaches to growing climbers up the side of a building. There is the RHS or National Trust house approach, where each branch is neatly tied in and pruned to within an inch of its life (nobody says 'within a centimetre of its life'. Makes you think English is still not metric at heart, even if we dutifully use metres and centimetres). The resulting wall shrub sticks out 30cm max from the face of the wall. Very tidy. Then there is the romantic profusion approach, where plants are tied to the wall and scramble into and over each other. Spasmodic efforts are made to remove forward facing growth, and the resulting tangle protrudes 1-2m from the supporting structure. Meanwhile birds nest in there, and it is all very naturalistic and charming. There are no prizes for guessing which category our garden falls into.
The jungle along the veranda has got to be reduced, so that we can get the scaffold in there to paint the barge boards and fit new guttering. And since there is a fair amount of dead wood mixed up among the live, it will look better for a good clean out. It is a complicated tangle. There are the remains of a Solanum crispum that was there when we bought the house. Most of it has died through old age, or the cold winters, or a combination of both. There is a climbing rose, also there when we moved in, which according to the label we found on it is 'New Dawn'. It has grown larger than some books say that 'New Dawn' would, but otherwise looks right. It is not so vigorous as it was, and could probably do with an intensive feeding regime to give it a boost. Also, I don't think it likes being overrun by the Clematic montana, another legacy of the previous owners (they had a Russian Vine as well, but I resorted to strong poison to get rid of that). There is a Clematis of the texensis type, yet another legacy, whose label I think said 'Duchess of Albany' I've added Trachelospermum jasminoides and Berberidopsis corallina, both refugees from the conservatory. Neither have formed much of a tangle yet, but the Trachelospermum looks happier about life than it did under glass. There is an inherited honeysuckle, species unknown, and I tucked in a Jasminum beesianum, which has finally grasped the idea that it is supposed to climb and not run about over the ground.
I thought I'd better start on this job fairly soon, partly because February is the target month for the last of the exterior decorating, and partly because I don't want to leave it until spring and then find birds nesting in there. I began by burrowing inside the mess, to cut and pull out any dead rose branches, bits of decayed Solanum, and so on. There was a fair amount. Then I cut down a large elder sapling that had seeded itself a pace out from the line of the trellis. This was performing a quasi-useful function acting as a prop for the climbers, but couldn't stay there given the need to get the scaffold in. Removing it had the predictable effect of causing a mass of Clematis montana to collapse on my head. Having cleaned what dead stuff I could from the inside, which reduced the bulk, I'm now working along the outside, cutting growth back and tying it in.
The Clematis montana is reluctant to grow along the bottom of the veranda, and keeps flopping forward and trying to set off across the rose bed. Clematis climbs by winding its leaf stalks around anything it touches, mainly other Clematis stems, and separating the branches enough to haul them back up to the top of the trellis means cutting through dozens of dry and tightly twisted leaf stalks. This is slow and fiddly, and there would be a quicker and more brutal way, which would be to reduce everything, accepting that there won't be any flowers this year, and assuming that all will grow back. I don't want to do that, as I would rather have some flowers this year than not, and I'm not keen on the scorched earth look. Some might see it as a symbol of humanity successfully subjugating nature, but I prefer to hang on to a bit of unsubjugated nature, wherever possible.
Last night I started a similar job on my desk, and finally cleared the last data off my old laptop. I got my current laptop last spring, when my previous one (an ancient hand-me-down from the Systems Administrator, but it worked well for years) and my moderately aged desktop both showed signs of becoming alarmingly unstable. I transferred essential files at once, and started scrubbing things I didn't really need to keep, but never completed the task. Since April of last year I've had two geriatric computers sitting on my desk, taking up so much room that I had to retreat to the kitchen, when I wanted to type and refer to a reference book at the same time. Before I resumed the clearance, the Systems Administrator disabled the laptop's connection to the net, so that it couldn't try and start collecting nine months worth of downloads.
It is rather poignant clearing an old laptop. All those letters relating to woodland talks going back to 2006. I don't need them. The talks are done and dusted, the donations handed over to the charity. I don't need a record of how many people were in the audience and which group asked the question about UK versus European provenance for tree seeds, in the light of climate change. And yet it is a little archive of my life. I chucked it out. I won't throw the computer away, even now, just in case. It will go and gather dust in the spare room for another decade or two. The last stage of the project will be to fire up the desktop and do the same final clear-out from that. And then I shall have so much space on my desk, I won't know what to do with it.
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