Yesterday's wind blew the camellia pots over, and ripped the staples holding the feet of the Zimbabwean recycled metal secretary bird clean out of the deck. By this morning it had dropped, and I decided my cold didn't feel too bad, and I might as well get on in the garden. This may have been a very silly decision, given that the temperature was below 8 degrees C at lunchtime, and there was still a brisk breeze. If by tomorrow I am a lot worse I will have to blame myself for not taking more care, but I was very well wrapped up. I generally take the view that if I feel like gardening, I'm OK to garden, and if I don't feel up to it, I'll stay inside by the stove and not force myself. That is the luxury of doing gardening as a hobby rather than a job, and solely for your own private pleasure. I don't have a Yellow Book opening date to meet, or an Open Gardens Weekend in six months' time to worry about, and I'm not trying to impress the neighbours. In fact, I am reconciled to the fact that the garden will always be wild and weedy. I have about three days a week maximum to devote to it, given everything else. The Systems Administrator mows the lawns and weighs in with heavy pruning and construction projects, and bonfires, but doesn't get involved with the plants. In all it gets four person days a week, tops, and it could easily do with double that, given its size and complexity.
I am still working my way down the long bed in the front garden. The leaves of some of the grape hyacinths are showing in great tufts, and I tucked mushroom compost carefully around them. I started replanting the bearded iris. Early January is quite the wrong time to do this. The books say July is the optimum time, after flowering, or that it may be done in March but will affect that year's flowering, but I decided to dig them up anyway. In the first place, they were mixed up with the roots of that wretched running grass, and the only way to get the bed clean was to lift them, and I didn't want to leave odd weedy patches until July, or even March. Secondly , I think beared iris are pretty tough. Whenever I've divided them there have always been bits left over, and the scrappy rhizomes thrown on the compost heap, not even planted, cling to life for an extremely long time. Also, the soil can't be that cold. It has been a very mild winter, and we've scarcely had any penetrating frosts. Finally, the drainage in that bed is so sharp I reckon I can get away with a lot when it comes to rhizomes. If they all die, I'll have learnt something, and so will you, if I confess to it on the blog. I'll have to get some more, or else decide that two to three weeks of sublime flowers and nothing else for the rest of the year is not a good use of the space, and plant something else.
As I weeded I collected the stones I forked up. Irregular ones go on the path by the dustbins, which is making steady progress, and it no longer seems a ludicrous idea that I might collect enough stones to cover it completely. Round pebbles go in the middle of the turning circle, at the end loosely themed as beach. Flints go in the dry garden by the entrance, which I have decided needs to be much flintier. I know I have a cache of flints nestling under a hedge, where I put them after digging them up in the course of laying some paving, so I must go and retrieve some more of them. I found a beautiful very large one in the root plate of a tree that fell years ago in the wood, though sadly it has some chips. My cousin who is a retired geologist has a fine one, and so had a farmer I knew, which I think he found ploughing, so it seems to be a widespread interest. Henry Moore collected them.
I had a very nice day. I don't know how to explain that to anyone who is not themselves a keen gardener, since objectively speaking it ought to be miserable, forking roots out of wretched poor soil and spreading handfuls of wet and smelly straw and manure over it, on a cold windy day, stopping sometimes to stoop and pick up stones, with a chest cold. If it weren't my own garden and I'd been doing it as a job I'd have been counting the hours until it was time to pack up. And yet it is largely the process that I enjoy, since the product will never be perfect, or finished. It is a project. An idea. A dream. It is how I play.
No comments:
Post a Comment