It is the beekeepers' committee meeting tomorrow evening. What I should have done is write up my financial report of the Tendring Show and make out all the cheques due to members for sales of honey and expenses, then vacuum the hall and the sitting room. All I have actually done is make cakes. But it's a mammoth agenda so we might need plenty of cake. In fact, I wonder if I should get some emergency chocolate biscuits to be on the safe side.
In the afternoon I tidied up the front face of the eleagnus hedge. Most of it is shooting healthily after its major cut back last autumn, to my relief. There are a few holes, but I should be able to tie new stems across them as the growth lengthens. I managed to fill a couple by tying in long branches that had originally been tucked in place, and blown out during the gales, but didn't take much growth off, just tipped back some of the longer twigs and shortened those that were growing out into the drive. It looks ridiculously finicky, working your way down a hundred feet of hedge and snipping little three inch sections off the ends of the branches, but I am hoping that will encourage it to bush out. The terminal bud at the end of each shoot in many woody plants exercises what is called apical dominance, meaning that it sends a stream of hormones back down the twig that inhibits the development of the side buds. Remove the terminal bud and you remove the source of the hormone, allowing the side buds to break and grow into side branches. Result, bushy plants. I've never heard that Eleagnus x ebbingei is an exception to the general rule. And I've got the reduce the sideways growing twigs anyway, or the hedge will be back across the drive in no time.
Now I'm eyeing it up slightly nervously and wondering whether I can risk doing the other side this September. The books recommend staggering work over two years when you have to take a hedge hard back to reduce the shock to the plants, but the first side has still not fully recovered. However (and I still think Michael Gove is wrong about not starting sentences with However), the back of the hedge is bulging ludicrously over the patio and daffodil lawn. The bench on the patio has ended up being pushed a good five feet out from the edge, and is still shaded at tea time by high branches of eleagnus flopping over it, and I must have lost around a quarter of the daffodil lawn to the encroaching branches, and with it some of the daffodils. They won't grow inside the canopy of an evergreen shrub.
Meanwhile, along the section of the hedge furthest from the house, which went in slightly later than the rest and has never been as good due to competition with an oak tree, or the malign influence of the dead roots of the oak's predecessor, I have never decided which, the leaves on the final portion of the lower twigs are curling up. I can't see why they're doing so, and hope it's down to some kind of insect attack and not advance warning that the end of the hedge is about to die. I'm uncomfortably aware I'm living on borrowed time with that hedge. Eleagnus x ebbingei is not the longest lived shrub, and has a reputation (as I now know) for dying abruptly after twenty years or so.
If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have planted yew. Youth is wasted on the young, and the prospect of a few decades in the same garden on the inexperienced gardener.
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