We had the first frost of the year. That's another thing that shortens the gardening day, since you can't weed frozen ground, and shouldn't walk on the frosted grass or your brown footprints will remain to haunt you for months. (That happens because frozen grass blades break instead of bending when you tread on them, and the broken bits turn brown, in case you were wondering. Gardeners will know this). The sun shone brightly, helping burn the frost off, and I was in business before ten.
I planted out a hybrid anemone, the variety 'Wild Swan', which I only bought yesterday. 'Wild Swan' was a big thing at Chelsea in May, and was all over the telly as various journalists including Carol Klein picked up on it. It looks like a normal Japanese anemone, with bowl shaped single white flowers held above typical lobed anemone foliage, but the backs of the three outer petals have a distinct blue stripe down them. I thought it was quite enormously pretty. We didn't get any in at work at the time, but a few pots appeared in the plant centre several weeks ago. I didn't snap one up immediately, since while I liked it very much I wasn't at all sure where I'd put it, and they were as expensive as new hybrids tend to be. I expected them to sell quickly, and consoled myself with the reflection that 'Blue Swan' would probably be around next year and I could pick one up later if I wanted to. However, admiring blue stripes on the reverse side of a flower must be an acquired gardening taste, and they didn't sell especially fast. Even when I took one along to a talk and pointed out how beautiful it was nobody bought it. Once I'd finished weeding the sloping bed just uphill of the new bog garden there seemed to be space for one anemone. They are supposed to like semi-shade, and it looks very natural in the artificial woodland edge conditions of a large mixed border. Let us hope it actually likes it there.
The Primula florindae that I puddled into the new bog are looking very happy. This is a Chinese species, flowering late for a primula, with yellow scented flowers, whose common name is the Tibetan cowslip. It felt counter-intuitive dropping my new plants into liquid mud, though after planting them I saw them growing happily in a stream (an artificial one) with other Asian plants at Edinburgh Botanic Garden, so had proof that they really did like sitting in water. Unless they are free with their scent I may not get the benefit, since I would need to paddle in 20 centimetres of mud to smell them. Once we revert to dry weather I fear I am committed to irrigating that corner occasionally, now I've planted so many moisture loving plants there. Trying to plant up areas where the water table is very unstable is a puzzle.
At quarter to one the Systems Administrator came out into the garden to warn me that the rain radar now suggested strongly that the rain would arrive by two o'clock, and ask whether I'd like to hold lunch back and keep on gardening until then. That sounded an excellent plan, since at this time of year when the days are so short I need to seize the moment when I can. By two I had finished excavating the usable compost from the second bin from the left, and was able to turn the contents of the first bin into it. That left me with a further supply of compost in the first bin, at the end of the row, and space in the second bin to fill up while I used the compost. The SA still needs to put a coat of timber preservative on the new bin at the right hand end, and then I'll be set up for weeks, able to turn every heap by shifting it one to the right, meaning I'll end up with two empty bins on the left to take this autumn's debris. I'm getting increasingly hard-hearted about starting to cut stems down before the New Year. Yes, they look very pretty rimed with frost, or spangled with dew with cobwebs strung between them. Yes, the seeds provide food for birds. But there simply isn't time to cut everything down in March, and experience teaches that February can be an almost total loss for gardening purposes, if we get a bit of snow.
By two I was getting hungry, and I imagined the SA must be wanting lunch too. By twenty past the rain had arrived, and that was my gardening done for the day, all four and a bit hours of it.
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