in the garden

It was a beautiful morning, sunny and bright, and I had the whole day to spend in the garden.  I started off by weeding the gravel in the front.  That is, weeding part of the gravel.  There's a lot of it, and so keeping it free of weeds and leaf litter is an ongoing project.  I decided to devote some time to the gravel, despite the borders crying out to be weeded and the seeds needing to be sown, because a mostly used bright green dumpy bag of gravel had been sitting near the entrance for weeks, and it seemed to me that using it up and getting rid of the bag offered a favourable ratio of effort to visible cosmetic improvement.  There was no point in chucking perfectly good gravel on top of the weeds, hence the weeding.  Although it was sunny, the wind was keen and made my eyes water, with the irritating result that I kept crying on my glasses.  Once I'd cried on them I couldn't see properly, so kept having to stop weeding, take off my gloves, and rummage around under my fleece to find the hem of my cotton shirt to wipe them dry.  This is why I have a pair of glasses specifically for gardening.

After I'd cleared the green bag out of the way I returned to the climbers under the veranda.  I'm on the home straight (I tell myself), tackling a large honeysuckle that has grown up a huge elder.  The honeysuckle was full of dead twigs, and as I cleared those out the underlying structure of twining stems revealed itself.  I was able to tie quite a long section of honeysuckle and climbing rose into the trellis under the veranda, once I'd cleaned out all the debris.  I'm cutting down the elder, but not until I have tidied the honeysuckle that's hanging from the top of it.  That's a task that would be a hundred times more fiddly with the honeysuckle lying in a big collapsed heap around my knees.  As I picked up years' worth of fallen twigs I uncovered a mysterious disc of something that looked vaguely unpleasant, and as if it might once have been alive.  I wondered if the previous owners had ever had a tortoise, and if I had stumbled upon its shell, and then whether it was a gigantic hibernating toad.  Investigating it cautiously I discovered it was an old birds' nest, that had fallen to the ground and started to solidify as it decomposed.

The Trachelospermum jasminoides does not look at all happy, which is a shame since it was starting to look quite good by the end of last summer.  Its leaves have gone dull and hand down at the wrong angle.  I blame the very cold snap, but maybe I have let it get dry.  I put a can of water on it last week, just in case.  The Berberidopsis corallina has lost a lot of leaves and the ends of its shoots have died in the cold, but it is throwing a new stem from ground level that looks healthy, and I think it is minded to live.

As I feared, those two nights when the temperature plummeted to around minus 12 C have hit several plants.  The Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue' that had made good growth in its first season in the front garden has lost all the leaves from its upper branches.  I thought they were doomed just after the frost, when they had gone the wrong colour.  The branches at the very bottom of the bush look OK, so maybe it will sprout from the base.  I'm starting to get chary about using pittosporums as structural features, pretty as they are.  It is probably safer to regard them as ephemeral, charming while they last, but not to be depended on long term.  Some people are like that.

The hyacinths in pots are opening.  I tried a new (to me) variety, 'City of Bradford'.  They are a soft blue, with a definite flush of pink while in bud, extremely attractive, and I'm delighted with them.  Hyacinths are good bee plants, and today as well as the honeybees I saw a great queen bumble on one of the flowers.  One stem had flopped over, and I took a couple of minutes to fetch a slim stake and some string and tie it up.  It's worth making the effort, because hyacinth flowers last longer if not allowed to fall down.