It was another fine, dry morning, and I trundled off to the bottom of the back garden to resume operations with the last bag of mushroom compost, and the plants to go into the bog bed. First off I replanted the Iris graminea, which spent the night in a heap on the grass with a bucket over them. Having seen how many days it takes us to finish the potting at work, some of which has already travelled from the Netherlands, I am far more relaxed than I used to be about leaving herbaceous plants out of the ground for a while, especially species with fat rhizomes which have the reserves to produce new roots. I don't know if early August is the recommended time to move I. graminea, but July after flowering is a classic time to deal with bearded iris, and sometimes the right time to move something is when you need to. They got a generous helping of the mushroom compost, all that was left of it after planting the geranium and the Trachystemon yesterday.
I am almost out of miccorrhizal fungus, and should have bought some more the last time I was at work, or when I was passing the Clacton garden centre on my way back from the tip. This has only been available to the amateur market for a few years, though places like Kew were using it a while before that. The theory is that if you add the beneficial fungus to the planting hole, so that it is contact with the roots of your new plant, they strike up a symbiotic relationship, the plant providing the fungus with food, since it is able to photosynthesise, and the fungus greatly extending the reach of the plant's root system, so providing it with extra water and dissolved nutrients. The thinking is in nature most plants remain undisturbed and live in this way, but gardeners digging and fiddling about disrupt the normal soil structure including the beneficial fungus population. I have hummed and hawed about using it, since it isn't cheap at around ten quid for a bag that might only last me a week or two if I'm doing a lot of planting, but on balance I think plants dosed with it have generally established better and faster than those where I didn't bother.
I pulled a lot of weeds out of the bog. Most were still small, though each came up with a wet blob of soil attached, and I was pleased to see how the leaves of the Primula bulleyana, which have grown a lot, were largely shading out weed seedlings around them. I planted a white iris, I. sanguinea 'Snow Queen', which likes moist or wet soil and sun or partial shade, and if happy should be capable of indefinite spread. One of my other indefinitely spreading iris is starting to get altogether too big for its boots, or at least the bog bed, and the patch will need reducing at some stage, but in general spreading is what I want, since I don't have time to keep wading around up to my shins in mud, pulling up a lump of topsoil with every weed.
Weeding the mud is actually rather good fun. I'm not sure if it stirs up some ancient childhood memory of going for a walk through a wet wood during a holiday in Cornwall, or if it's the sheer novelty of having so much mud in a garden that is normally very dry, but I am enjoying mud gardening. When we finally manage to renew the gutter along the back of the house I should like to fit a rainwater interceptor into the downpipe, so that I could use the water from the roof to top up the bog in dry spells, and keep my new array of moisture loving plants going.
I planted a Viburnum opulus 'Xanthocarpum', which is said to like moist or even boggy soil, and pulled out the remains of a poor V. sargentii 'Onondaga'. This likes moist conditions, but definitely not standing in fifteen centimetres of liquid mud, and all of its roots had rotted in protest. Pity, as it was a nice shrub, before the waters rose. The boss's label says that the replacement grows to 4m tall and wide, which is far more than I want, but I'm sure I can prune it. Viburnum opulus have translucent berries, very pretty until the birds eat them, and those of 'Xanthocarpum' are yellow (Xanthocarpum from the Greek xanthos, meaning yellow, and carpus, -a, -um, meaning fruited).
Then it was lunch time and during lunch, quelle surprise, it began to rain, and I had to rush out and rescue my fleece and tub of 6X composted chicken manure (or stinkies). Rain showers lasted half the afternoon, sending me scuttling out and in again, so I nipped down the road to see if the Chatto Gardens had any bog primulas left, to fill in the gaps. They did, so I bought some, to help cover the mud before it can grow yet another crop of weeds. Having seen how well hairy bittercress copes in dust dry sand I should not have thought of it as a bog plant, but it seems to grow in liquid mud as well as anywhere else.
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