The ground in the back garden is so wet, it squelches when I walk on it, which makes me feel guilty about treading on the borders. It's an insoluble problem, since the only way that everything needing pruning, trimming, cutting down, tying in, leaf sweeping and weeding will get done at all is to keep at it through the winter. There simply isn't time to wait for the borders to dry out.
The rambler roses that are covering the bank between the top and bottom lawns, and making a pretty good job of it, are also trying to spread forwards across the border along the top of the bank. This contains some shrub roses, which are not strong enough to compete with the questing branches of the ramblers. I've been working along the back of the bed, disentangling pieces of rambler and honeysuckle from poor old 'Buff Beauty' and 'Gloire de Dijon' to give the shrubs airspace. Roses hate being shaded by other plants growing into them, and the shaded branches will often die. It isn't always obvious which stem originates from which plant, so pruning out the unwanted growths of the ramblers isn't a job to be hurried, or done in bad light. Dead stems have accumulated inside the bank, since the ramblers' growth habit is to pile new growth upon old, and I'm pulling those out where I come across them. So far I have avoided spiking myself, poking myself in the eye, or cutting though a stem and then realising that it supported a great mass of growth that I wanted to keep. I've been working into the bed from both ends, and have about a two metre section in the middle still to go.
I've started pruning the David Austin roses in that bed as I come to them. I don't know when the exact optimum time is to do that, but in our garden roses get pruned at any point between November and February when I have time to do it and weather conditions are suitable for me to get outside. I don't take the David Austin roses down hard, as I might with a floribunda or hybrid tea, but besides taking out the dead wood I reduce their height. They can be prone to wind rock, when the effect of the plant thrashing around in strong winds is to create a depression in the soil all around the base of the stem. This is liable to fill with water, and the water can easily freeze, none of which does the plant any good at all. By the end of the morning piles of prunings were collecting all over the lawn, waiting for the Systems Administrator to cart them off to the bonfire.
As a change from pruning I did a stint trimming the fading leaves of the Brunnera macrophylla from the opposite bed, together with shabby Acanthus leaves and the brown remains of peonies. I scraped up as many of the fallen rose leaves as I could without also scraping up all the straw mulch. I don't spray for blackspot, reasoning that if a rose can't live healthily without doses of fungicide then I'll get rid of it and find something that can, but I do try to help garden hygiene along by collecting the fallen rose leaves and taking them to the tip rather than putting them in the compost bin at home.
The first snouts of bulbs are already appearing here and there, and seedlings with long, thin seedling leaves like an emerging carrot, which experience teaches are baby Orlaya grandiflora. This is a delightful white umbellifer, used with great success by Tom Stuart Smith at Chelsea a few years ago, which does much better when allowed to self seed than if raised in pots and transplanted. The drawback to using an effective mulch is that while it cuts down weeding, it also reduces the scope for successful self-seeding, so I was anxious not to waste any of the emerging Orlaya. It is a desperately labour intensive form of gardening, doing the sort of hand weeding that requires you to be able to recognise plants and weeds at the seedling stage, but it is the only way of achieving a certain kind of garden effect. As the great and gracious lady gardener with whom I am now on lunching terms said, it takes a lot of work to achieve a relaxed and natural looking garden.
In the afternoon I went to visit a gardening friend who has gone down the opposite route, of wildflowers and native trees. She and her husband had the opportunity to buy the field next to their house a year ago, which has thrown their retirement plans into some disarray, but the opportunity was the flip side of a threat, since there was a risk that otherwise the land would be developed for housing. The centre of the field is still rented to a neighbouring farmer, who is growing turnips on it this winter, but she is establishing a wide wildlife strip around the edge, which the farmer kindly offered to sow for her if she bought the seeds, and she has planted bulbs of bluebells, snowdrops and fritillaries. There are some good oaks on the boundary, and she is planting further strips of hawthorn and yew in the corners. They have seen barn owls, tawnies and little owls. Plans are afoot to separate the field from the garden proper with a modern day ha-ha, the vertical face lined with sandbags instead of stonework, so that the view from the house will stretch unbroken to the horizon. Clearing dead elm out of the hedge she accidentally wacked herself in the eye last week, when a branch she was dragging to the bonfire site sprung up and hit her in the face, so she is on two different antibiotics and unable to drive for a fortnight, but she is undeterred. Once you have got the gardening bug then mud, rain, cold and the odd trip to accident and emergency are no reason to give up.
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