We failed utterly in our attempt to get the rose 'Fritz Nobis' upright again. The Systems Administrator tied a rope around its largest branches and pulled, and I crawled in underneath it, wearing goggles and heavy gauntlets and pushed, and the base of the plant did not budge one iota. It was as if it had grown at that angle for ever. This week I bit the bullet, and began to give it a drastic prune. I'm shortening new shoots, that are sticking out at an odd angle since the shrub capsized, and taking out some of the oldest branches entirely, that will never do any good now they are close to ground level with the rest of the plant on top of them. They don't look too healthy anyway. Blackspot has been a problem this summer, with the endless wet weather providing ideal conditions for fungal infection. High summer is not the generally recommended time to carry out renewal pruning on shrub roses, but needs must. It looked ridiculous as it was, and was looming over a good hellebore as well as my precious birds nest conifer, and if it responds by making new growth the fresh stems will still have a reasonable amount of time to harden off before winter. It may be that there is something badly wrong with it. The way that the bark is flaking off the lowest parts of the stems is rather ominous, on the other hand I have seen elderly rose specimens do this before. The bottom parts of the bush are not easy to get to with the pruning saw, and I am being extremely careful how I approach it, after the disaster with 'Meg' and the thorn that broke off in my knuckle. That is still slightly redder and lumpier than the other hand, even now.
'Fritz Nobis' tipping out of the way did open up dry shod access to the ailing winter cherry, so I asked the SA if it could come out now instead of waiting until the autumn. I've got plants in the greenhouse waiting to go into that area, including an acer that should make a small and elegant tree, and it would be a pity if three months after planting it came to a premature end because a piece of the cherry got dragged through it by mistake. It is a sad thing to have to cut a tree down that you planted, long before the end of its normal span, but the rising water table was killing the cherry by degrees, so that it looked horrible. Harold Nicolson told Vita Sackville-West that one of the things that made her a great gardener was that she had the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful plants. I don't claim greatness, but if a plant really isn't doing well then there's no point in sentimentally hanging on to it. I can't face trying to dig out the stump of the cherry at this moment, in the summer's heat. I won't plant any other woody thing close to it, and will wait until time and waterlogging have done their work more thoroughly before tackling it.
While I was at it I trimmed some long branches out of the boundary hedge, that were overhanging the border or growing into specimens in the garden. It is a bit early for that sort of thing, as the birds are still nesting, but birds make their nests in the secure insides of shrubs, not the outermost whippy branches that wave in the breeze. The Systems Administrator removed one large branch under instruction with the electric chain saw, since we had it out to do the cherry, and cut down a couple of self-sown pussy willows I don't want. I'm keeping one, which will be pollarded come winter. All of this chopping and clearing began to let more light into the lower end of the border, which will be all to the good.
The SA is slowly winning the war against the chickens in the dahlia bed. When I began muttering about buying pigeon netting it turned out that we had a lot of netting offcuts in the shed, left over from the fruit cage, and the SA fixed a run of it along the front of the bed. The mesh is black, and while the holes are quite small, a closer mesh than you would need for chickens, it scarcely shows from a distance. This kept them out of the bed entirely for about three chicken exercise sessions, which together with the days when it was raining and they weren't let out at all was long enough for the dahlias to start growing some new leaves and looking much more hopeful and as if I might still get a display this year. This evening the hens broke in at the end by the greenhouse, but the SA drove them off with the hose and shooed them back into their run. Tomorrow we will seal up the little gap between the end of the netting and the wall, where they squeezed through, and next year the netting will go up as soon as the shoots start emerging, and we should have no more nonsense. No previous generation of hens has been so fixated on dahlias, and it may be that by next spring they will have forgotten about them, but I wouldn't count on it.
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