field and garden

This morning I drove over to Great Cornard to see a friend.  Great Cornard is an extremely spread-out village outside Sudbury.  I think non-nucleated is the term.  It doesn't have a centre, and the church and village hall are about two miles apart, though despite its diffuse geography it seems to have a thriving social life.  My friend and I met when we were both mature students at Writtle, though her's was the more demanding task, as she spread a full degree over six years rather than three, while holding down a full time job, and with the youngest of her three children still in her early teens and living at home.  Six years ago she was able to fulfil her dream of moving to a place in a rural setting with a large garden, and six months ago when the field next to their house came on the market she and her husband bought it, for fear of it being bought for development.  They are not rich people and buying the field was a bigger deal for them than it would be for many of our customers at the plant centre, who probably own several fields as a matter of course, but they now own the view from their kitchen window to the horizon.

We walked around the edge of the field.  We couldn't go in the middle because it is currently covered in somebody else's crop of wheat.  Deciding what to do with the field in the longer term will be a major decision.  Her husband would prefer for it to be farmed so that he doesn't have the responsibility of looking after it.  She would like more insect life than you get with a wheat field, and having counted the sprayer go round six times since they bought the land is starting to think that she would prefer fewer agrochemicals next to her garden, on her land.  The walk round the perimeter is half a mile, and she goes round it twice daily, still giggling at what they have done.  My suggestion was to lay it to permanent pasture, plant some trees in places, and let the grazing.  They would have to fence it, but after that sheep could keep the grass down, and they wouldn't be responsible for the livestock, except to rush up the hill and turn it over if they saw a sheep on its back.

My other suggestion was that they needed an obelisk at the top of the hill, as an eye catcher, and in reference to the English landscape movement, making the point that all the land between the kitchen window and the top of the hill was hers.  They get pallets from the local silk mill to burn on their log stove, and after digesting the idea of an obelisk, she got into the spirit of things and suggested that the obelisk could be made out of pallets.  She and her husband have just plumbed and tiled two bathrooms themselves, making a neater job of it than I have seen done by some professional tilers, and making an obelisk would not be beyond them.  If the planners get funny, you put it on wheels and trundle it around, so that it is not a permanent structure.  I'm not sure she really wants one, though.  They have installed a garden bench at the top of the field, which has vast views far out over the Suffolk countryside.

I returned home rather late in the afternoon and too full of lunch to start work on our own garden, though goodness knows there is enough that needs doing.  I wandered about, seeing what was new since last week.  Cow parsley is shooting up.  It's been growing around the statue of the Buddha at the edge of the wood for a few years now, and I have to edit it ruthlessly in the spring, and is starting to spread out into the areas of long grass.  I love cow parsley, so I'm happy with that, although strictly speaking it should not be allowed in the garden, and I am condemning myself to removing ever more of those albino carrot-like roots from the borders.

The Stylophorum in front of the Buddha has two yellow flowers.  It looks like a yellow poppy, though it's happy in shade, and it was the only one of a packet of seeds to germinate, but I can't remember whether I have the Chinese or the north American species, and their photographs on Google images look jolly similar.  I'll have to dig back through my gardening notes, and maybe while I'm at it I should remove the cow parsley that's growing right on top of it, since I don't know what it feels about competition, or if it requires its own space.

The lawn has grown like crazy, and is going to be a beastly job to cut.  One for the Systems Administrator.  Goose grass has sprung up in a fresh wave in the borders, and needs pulling out again, and the horsetail is starting to come up in earnest.  The leaves of the Edgeworthia chrysantha are shrivelled in places, and I think a cold night nipped it at a crucial point when they were opening.  I hope that's the explanation, since Edgeworthia suckers lavishly from the base, and can afford to lose some top growth, whereas if the dodgy leaves are a warning of a problem at the roots then that's more serious.  A wintersweet nearby has no leaves at all, and the twigs don't look good either.  In fact, it looks remarkably dead, yet it flowered last winter.  I didn't investigate the ground beneath, since I wasn't dressed for gardening, but I hope this doesn't mean that the water table has risen below it and killed it.  That happened to the previous Edgeworthia, and the pattern of random springs at the bottom of the garden is destructively variable.  I once lost a fairly well established Corylopsis from a corner of the back garden, and an ash tree along the ditch suddenly died, and I think there are probably some fungal root diseases around in the soil, that strike periodically, especially in wet weather.

Still, the birds were singing like crazy, and while the garden was more leafy than floriferous (a common lament from people I've met who are committed to opening their gardens in the next couple of weeks), the view across from the new deck was very pretty, in an infinite number of shades of green.  The ground at the back of the gunnera bed, that I'd mostly weeded before the heaviest of the rain, is liquid mud, peppered with tiny weed seedlings.  I'm going to have to get in there and start planting soon, as the weeds are already planning their come-back.