As the showers passed through today I felt like one of the little people in a weather house, coming out when the sun shone and scuttling back inside again when it rained (and for the greatest assemblage of kitsch I've seen for a long time have a look at the assembled images of weather houses on Google).
We went to collect another load of poplar logs, which had already lost moisture and were noticeably lighter than when the tree was first sectioned. So much for the theory that they have to be seasoned under cover. The last few wouldn't go on the truck, so it will take one more trip, but we've got most of it away. The remaining lumps in the spinney mainly consist of branch junctions, which are larger than the round sections of trunk, and heavy to lift, but won't split with the maul and hammer. They'll have to be lugged on to the truck, and cut up at the System Administrator's leisure with the chainsaw.
I pulled up weeds that had sprung up in the middle of the long bed in the front garden where I dug out a failing Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' (too dry) some months ago, and have not yet replanted the space, and stuck in some Cleome raised from seed. They've been sitting in their pots in the greenhouse for a long time, and lay down flat as soon as they were planted because it was so windy, so goodness knows if they'll come to anything. Unfortunately there was no net contribution to my aim of clearing out the greenhouse, as while I was there I potted up some tiny self-sown Alchemilla mollis seedlings, which I want to try as ground cover in the back garden where it is damper. The long bed is far too dry, but Alchemilla is a tough plant, which given less than ideal conditions of drought doesn't rapidly die out, but lives on in a shrivelled state of distress, looking miserable. I removed most of the old, woody clumps last winter, but would like the free new plants to try again elsewhere in the garden.
Then, between showers, I turned my attention to the gravel at the entrance, which is once again laced with tufts and intertwining roots of creeping sorrel. I have eight young Gazania plants to go in there, raised from seed and grown on in 9cm pots. Plants of that size retail at £3.50 or £3.75 at the plant centre, and having a tray of them ready to go out makes raising plants from seed feel like a worthwhile exercise (though not as much as the things that you can't easily buy. I get a real buzz from my seed raised Dicentra scandens, which I haven't seen offered as a growing plant, though I expect I could track it down by mail order if I didn't already have one). A couple of gazanias have survived the past three winters, so lived through months of almost constant freezing conditions and those two nights when the thermometer plummeted to minus 13 C, and are just coming into flower. It shows that they are almost hardy, given sharp drainage. If I kept growing new plants from seed, and hanging on to the ones that survive outside, and then started harvesting seed from those, I ought to be able to develop a winter hardy strain, if I felt like it (I don't).
The SA had a bonfire, hose laid out ready to hand as a precaution, and managed to get rid of quite a lot of the great pile of poplar brash and accumulated prunings. The wet weather has produced a prodigious volume of summer growth, some in places where it stops us moving around the garden or is threatening to overwhelm other plants. I had to cut quantities of hazel shoots back that were growing out into the crowns of my collection of potted witch hazel, since I don't know how much shading Hamamelis will take, and I didn't want to leave it and then discover that the back half of the witch hazels had died out. Some shrubs won't put up with other plants growing on top of them. Roses hate it, and branches engulfed by dense rival vegetation quickly die. I lost a large part of a 'Gruss an Aachen' which resented the evergreen embrace of an encroaching Cistus. Exochorda macrantha 'The Bride' behaves in the same way. The witch hazels were still leafy when I freed them, so that was fine.
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