The day dawned bright and calm. Actually, I don't know whether it did or not, because I didn't get up that early, but the rooster was cock-a-doodling away in his chicken house, which he doesn't bother to do on dismal mornings, and when I looked out of the bathroom window over the back garden it was calm and bright at about half past seven.
After sorting out the cats' breakfast (clean dishes, tin of cat food) and the chickens' breakfast (left over brown roll broken into small bits) and collecting a couple of eggs (one on the floor of the house but I know it was fresh because it wasn't there yesterday when I filled their food up) and my breakfast (the usual), and clearing up a bit of cat sick that had appeared in the night, and tidying up the kitchen, I set out into the wood to plant the Eucryphia.
As I began to prepare the site I started to worry about the wisdom of the exercise. The wood is such an established entity. There were already roots crossing the spot where I planned to put the Eucryphia. Would it cope with the competition? Suppose the fungal disease that felled the ash tree (extremely spectacularly) is infectious? I planted it, tied to a stout stake which is currently far heavier than it needs, but won't be if it succeeds, and stapled a cylinder of wire netting around it to deter the deer and rabbits. They seem especially drawn to anything new, so once it has been there for a while they probably won't be interested, unless it turns out that Eucryphia taste especially delicious, and once it grows it will be less vulnerable to having its entire top taken out in one careless munch.
Planting shrubs into the end of the wood has worked in the past. The tree magnolia, M. campbellii 'Charles Raffill', has put on a tremendous amount of growth this year with all the rain. Who knows, by next year it might even be ready to produce a flower. It was planted in November 2003 (not the optimal time of the year to plant magnolias, in fact diametrically the opposite since the boss says May is best) and must have been at least a couple of years old then. 'Charles Raffill' does not flower when young, but ten it is not an unreasonable age to start hoping for a flower. Some of the other tree magnolias don't start until they are fifteen or twenty.
Then I did a little careful gardening of the sort which is intended to be invisible, trimming twigs off the Arbutus x andrachnoides which had been killed by the cold snap in February or shaded out by the growth of the plant, and cutting out branches of a hazel that were growing into the Arbutus. The aim was to end up with two distinct but completely natural looking crowns, so that the Arbutus had its own space, light and air and I could see its beautiful cinnamon coloured trunk, but the hazel didn't look chopped about. The pole lopper came into play for this task. The trick is not to try and do it at a time of day when you would have to look up into the sun, since you won't see a thing.
Then it began to rain. The same old story. If I were a professional gardener I would have put on my waterproofs and carried on, but since I am a small middle aged person doing this for fun, and I didn't want to catch a cold, I retreated to the house until the rain had passed, which it did, mid afternoon. Back in the garden I lifted a struggling patch of Iris graminea, originally raised from seed, which has never done well but clung to life in the spot where I put it. It is supposed to like a moist soil, but the place I chose seems to be too damp, cold, clayey and claggy. The leaves of the poor iris never reached even half their expected height of 30cm, and I have not had one plum scented purple flower, which is the point of growing it. I'll replant it tomorrow further up the slope, where the soil is a bit drier, and dig in a generous helping of mushroom compost. I tried a vigorous looking geranium and a Trachystemon orientalis instead in the claggy patch. Both were described by the boss as liking moisture, and they seemed like robust plants that might cope with rather heavy and revolting soil. I will tell you all about them if they succeed in doing anything. The Trachystemon is described as a rhizomatous spreader and good ground cover, so it may be that if it does anything it ends up doing rather too much.
I'm sorry if you aren't very interested in ornamental gardening, but that's what I have been mainly doing this week.
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