The Cryptomeria has got to come out now. This morning the Systems Administrator took the chainsaw to it, and all that's left is a yard long stump. Conifers on the whole don't recover from such savage pruning. Yew might oblige: I have been round restored historic gardens where yews that had bulged hopelessly out of shape during the years of neglect had been sawn to the ground. Some regrew from ground level, and some died. I don't think the Cryptomeria is going to reshoot.
The SA dragged the top off to the the bonfire heap, while the side branches cut from the stump are still lying on the lawn. The area thus liberated in the sloping border is quite large, bigger than I was imagining, and there are several shrubs that will be happy not to have the conifer looming over them. One of the beauties of biting the bullet and taking out an unwanted shrub in a mature garden is that suddenly you have some space to play with. Indeed, it can be one consolation when things unexpectedly die (less so if they died of a pernicious garden disease like honey fungus instead of something non-catching like a hard winter).
Except that of course the Cryptomeria is not properly taken out yet. Sawing the top off was the work of a quarter of an hour, or maybe half an hour allowing for the time to get the electric cable out and put it away again. How long it will take to dig the stump out is another matter, but it will certainly be longer than half an hour. It will probably be more than half a day, and if it doesn't take more than a whole day I'll be pleased. If it comes out at all I'll be relieved. Faced with the stump of the first winter flowering cherry, that suffered when the water table suddenly rose and lingered on as an ugly specimen as full of dead twigs as it could be without actually being dead, I couldn't face digging it out but planted a damp loving fern next to it and hoped for the best. Fingers crossed it has not turned into a repository of honey fungus.
But I should like the Cryptomeria stump out. I want to dig mushroom compost into that part of the bed, which is dust dry and depleted from the conifer's years of residence, and then put new, interesting plants into invigorated soil, not scrape holes among the remains of the Cryptomeria's fibrous roots. Which means I have to dig it out. The Systems Administrator did not feel that strongly about the shrub. We agreed that it was no longer attractive, but getting rid of it would never have figured so highly in the SA's list of priorities, the SA having plenty of other more interesting things to be getting on with plus a chronically bad back. I am the one trying to crank the borders up a notch, and diligently practising Pilates exercises all the better to wield the pick axe. I had better make a start, very soon.
I actually spent the day at the other end of the gardening scale, weeding the gap between the garden railway and the hedge and planting seed raised pinks into the freshly cleaned earth. I fear it was not entirely clean, since two different forms of wild grass with running roots were growing along the strip, and both have got a foothold in the base of the hedge. The recent rain has made the ground marvellously soft, great conditions for weeding as long as you're on sand, and I got out quite a lot of the roots, but the SA will be dealing with odd bits of growth for years.
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