back in the garden

I've allowed my gardening diary to get behind.  Since we moved here and I started the garden I've kept a series of cloth bound, A4 notebooks in which I've scribbled down roughly what I was doing, when I was doing it, and the names of what I planted, with a note of where I planted them.  I knew I'd forgotten to record my last session, and the day's outdoor work in the week before Christmas, but I was shocked when I opened up the diary to discover no entries since 4 December.  However, when I looked at my pocket diary to see what else I might have been doing, and my December blog entries for whatever they might reveal on the subject, I realised that there were only three days in December when I did any gardening at all, apart from checking the watering in the glasshouses.  I had a day in the lower garden the Tuesday before Christmas, and could be sure about the date of that since I listened to Rumpole of the Bailey broadcast on Radio 4 while pruning the edge of the rose bank, and another stint in the garden on Boxing Day, and that was it from 4 December.  The blog confirmed that it snowed after that, and a combination of poor weather and other things to do kept me out of the garden for two weeks until 18 December, then Christmas preparations followed by Christmas itself took up another eight days.  In the eight days since Boxing Day we've seen people and been for a couple of walks, and it has rained some of the time.

Today I got out there.  It's all been happening without me.  The first of the witch hazels have suddenly burst into bloom in the past couple of days.  The fat snouts of miniature iris have appeared in the gravel of the turning circle.  Some strappy leaves which I never noticed until today are already 30 centimetres long.  It took me some moments to remember that they were the widow iris, Hermodactylus tuberosus.  I started the bulbs off the autumn before last in pots in the greenhouse, and they managed to almost finish flowering tucked away on a middle shelf of the greenhouse rack before I discovered that they had come out at all, at which point I planted them out in the garden.  I hope they will manage to bloom again this year, and that I'll manage to look at them properly.  I saw this plant flowering in gravel at Cambridge University Botanic Garden a few years ago, and was quietly charmed.

The back garden is very wet.  I knew that it would be, and apart from loading the trailer with prunings left over from December didn't try to do anything useful round there.  Instead I went on weeding the gravel in the front and trimming the ivy hedge round the long bed.  The gravel provides a picture of what the birds have been eating, and where they have been perching, with large numbers of tiny rose and ivy seedlings around the 'Red Sentinel' crab apples.  There were also several species of grass, an annual member of the pea family whose name I don't know, goose grass seedlings, groundsel, chickweed, bittercress, scarlet pimpernel and some sort of coltsfoot-like plant.  Again I don't know its name, but you can pull up the whole root, unlike dandelions which always break.

After lunch I let the chickens out for a run.  They hadn't been out for goodness knows how long, what with the weather and Christmas.  Christmas is not much fun for hens, even if they don't end up as part of dinner.  They did get the leftover vegetables after our friends came to lunch, dished up in an old and past-it baking tray, and I discovered that chickens like boiled carrot, roast parsnip and mashed potato, but are not so keen on red cabbage cooked with sugar and vinegar.  Today they behaved themselves beautifully, and stayed with me in the front garden fussing about in the gravel for things to eat, while I listened to Radio 4 exploring the fishing traditions of Hastings.