cutting back

The scene of my gardening operations has returned to the rose bed below the veranda.  It is referred to as the near rose bed in my garden diary, and does contain quite a lot of roses, but some other things as well, including a clump of Paulownia tomentosa and a patch of Helianthus salicifolius.  Both were included to add some height and some foliage interest to the roses, and are suckering with enthusiasm.  The perennial sunflower makes tall, largely unbranching stems with narrow, willow-like leaves, which are quite intriguing.  It has small yellow flowers in autumn, but they aren't really the point.  There are a couple of rusted metal tripods with clematis up them, and an Eryngium pandanifolium bought at Great Dixter, which grew far larger than I ever envisaged before being cut down by the cold of last winter.  That has since started making a good recovery, and I should really be brave and try and move some of its rosettes, since in the course of regenerating from the remains of the old clump it has migrated from its original position, which was already too close to a box hedge.  There's an Astelia chatamica too, which made a fine specimen before being mostly destroyed by last winter's cold.  It is regrowing from a couple of points, but doesn't look totally convinced about making the effort.  And there's a dome of box, included to give some evergreen volume, and a narrow leaved bay, which keeps growing larger than I should really like it, and is a pig to prune, since it is on a slope and all hemmed in with roses.

The near rose bed loomed back into my consciousness because the Systems Administrator began to murmur that I really needed to finish cutting back the climbers on the veranda before the birds started nesting.  They have to be cut back to give access for the SA to paint the barge boards and replace the gutter along the back of the house, and the desirability of finishing this job before the sailing and cricket seasons start has been looming in the SA's consciousness.  They need tidying up anyway, as a great mass of dead twigs and branches has built up beneath the outer living layer.  And when we're sitting in our steamer chairs on the veranda in the evenings, it would be nice to look out at the view, and not straight into the side of a mass of honeysuckle.  I spotted one old birds' nest in the tangle, confirming that it has been used as a nesting site in the past, though it probably won't be so appealing once it's tidier.

I managed to neither stab myself on a thorn nor poke myself in the eye today, and as the afternoon wore on switched to hand weeding for the last part of the day.  When I think about the times when I've scratched myself gardening badly enough to need a trip to the doctor, most of the accidents do seem to have occurred in the last couple of hours before the light goes.  It could be coincidence, but I suspect that increasing tiredness and decreasing visibility have something to do with it.

I'm not even cutting back the climbers very hard, and it may be that when we try to get the scaffolding in, everything will have to suffer another, more severe chop.  They are yielding up an extraordinary volume of debris as it is.  The old lawn tractor, which is used minus its cutting deck to haul the garden trailer, disgraced itself yesterday by breaking down in a place where it was blocking the drive, and the trailer was hanging behind it on a slope.  What should have been a ten minute job for the SA, emptying the trailer by the bonfire and putting it back by the veranda, took most of the afternoon, working out how to detach the trailer, pushing the tractor out of the way, and investigating the cause of the breakdown.  That turned out to be the catastrophic failure of a component in the starter motor.  A new part has been ordered (from Amazon.  They sell everything) but in the meantime we are without the tractor.  The current lawnmower will haul the trailer at a pinch, but as it is new, expensive, and not really up to the job, the SA is reluctant to use it for that purpose, and once I've filled the trailer again that may be my lot until the spare part arrives.

If I run out of space in the trailer then I will be free to return to my primary objective, which is to confine the yellow stemmed bamboo in the gunnera bed within the two rolls of galvanised lawn edging.  It's got personal between me and that bamboo.