weeds and water

I have been tidying the Italian garden and beach themed garden in the middle of the turning circle. They weren't looking too bad to the casual glance.  Certainly our visitor yesterday thought they were pretty, but to the honed gardener's eye (mine) there were tufts of grass, strands of goose grass, the browning skeletons of poppies that had finished flowering, and the fading pink flower stems of Euphorbia myrsinites, plus a wind blown scattering of dead Eleagnus leaves, and a bramble that had cunningly tucked its roots down among some ornamental grasses, all waiting to be dealt with.  That kind of tidying doesn't leave anything looking drastically different, and a complete non-gardener might not register that anything had changed, but the end result is cleaner and crisper.

I decided to leave the brown pom poms of thrift in place for now.  They have a certain architectural quality, rippling gently in the wind, whereas the poppy stems just look dead.  Cutting them off the moment the flowers have faded would have the advantage that I could put them on the compost heap as they wouldn't have had time to ripen seed, whereas leaving them means that when the time comes to trim them off I'll have to find room for them in the brown bin, or a bag of weeds going to the dump.  I like thrift, but don't want seeds in the home made compost springing up all over the place.

I'm in two minds about a perennial sweet pea that has infiltrated the edge of the beach garden.  I tried to grow maritime peas a while back, as seen on the beach at Aldeburgh, but after limited success with germinating my (bought) seed, none of the plant survived out in the gravel.  The perennial pea is altogether heftier, and as I've already got more than enough in the back garden, maybe I should grub it out at the front.  I like different parts of the garden to have their own distinctive plant palettes and atmosphere, so that it doesn't just become one amorphous blob.  But the pea has tucked itself down next to the recycled breakwater where it is in scale with its surroundings, and the flowers are pretty, so maybe I should invoke the design principle of repetition and let it stay.  I probably will.  The beach garden starts to run out of colour by this stage of the summer, and the splash of bright pink pea flowers is cheerful.  The downside of leaving it is that unless I am scrupulous about dead heading it, which seems unlikely, further pea plants will start popping up around the gravel, and I definitely don't want more than one.

The gravel is horribly dry.  The leaves of the self sown Ashphodeline luteus are turning pinkish brown and shrivelling up.  They don't normally do that, and I hope the roots are OK.  There are so many plants, and they self seed so readily, that the death of some wouldn't be a disaster, but it would be a shame.  I always feel a mixture of amusement and amazement when I see plant nurseries wanting to charge the best part of four quid for one little plant in a nine centimetre pot, because here it functions as a weed.  An attractive weed, and one that's very poor at distributing its seeds far from the parent plant, but still a weed.

I ran the hose on first one miserable dry plant and then another as I weeded.  Indeed, that was the main impetus for spending the day tidying the turning circle when it wasn't that massively untidy to begin with.  I needed to be in the front garden so that I could keep an eye on the hose. A recently planted fig whose leaves were beginning to curl ominously got a good soaking, as did the struggling Watsonia and Julibrissin rosea, and even Eryngium maritimum, which have started to fall over just at the point of flowering.  The deciduous Berberis in the long bed, whose purple leaves had begun to curl and crip, got a proper long watering in contrast to the desperate quick splash last night, and some recently planted trees got a soaking.

I feel no guilt.  If water is explicitly rationed I'll obey the rules, and until then I'll buy what I need. We are on a water metre so pay for every drop.  As others might indulge in golf, meals out, beauty treatments, or whatever takes their fancy, I indulge in water.  There is no point in spending money and time on plants and then watching them die.

Addendum  The wasps in the workshop are no more.  The Systems Administrator read up on wasps on the internet, and decided they were definitely the common wasp.  I felt sorry for them, but the Systems Administrator uses the workshop every day in the summer while the garden railway is in full clatter, and really couldn't share it with a nest of wasps once they started turning nasty, as they would have done.  Spraying a wasp nest is not a nice thing to have to do, but safer when you happen to possess a full bee suit to wear while you do it.