making space

It's not just Cryptomeria japonica 'Elegans' that makes a nicer plant when it's younger.  Thinking back to our previous garden, I planted a Chamaecyparis pisifera 'Boulevard' which started off as an engaging mound of fluffy grey foliage, only to become lanky and gappy with unattractive brown patches by the time it hit the five foot mark.  As far as I can remember I left that gardening problem behind me when we moved for the people who bought the house to deal with.  I'm sure it was soon gone.  I revisited just once, because they rang to say that a parcel for the Systems Administrator had been delivered in error to our former address, and a nice fastigiate yew that was just getting going and the row of 'Little White Pet' roses that used to line the path to the front door had both gone, so I don't suppose 'Boulevard' was allowed to linger.

I have finished digging over the gap in the bed where the conifer was.  Spurred on by the space opened up by the conifer's departure I have also removed three fuchsias, a spindly F. riccartonii with a sapling ash growing up through its heart, a sad specimen of F. genii, which makes a plump thicket of golden leaves that clash slightly with its pink flowers if it's happy, though mine wasn't, and a stunted bush of the variegated F. magellanica 'Versicolor' that had half reverted to plain green.  The looming presence of the conifer didn't help, but the top of the bed is really too dry for fuchsias.  It was probably too dry for the Cryptomeria too.

I dug up a lot of seedlings of Geranium phaeum 'Samobar', keeping the ones that retained the dark blotch on the leaves and binning the others.  I thought I could pot them up, and they might be useful for filling in odd gaps at the back later on.  G. phaeum is a good shade plant.  The flowers, dark maroon in the case of 'Samobar', are on the small side and come in late spring.  Bees love them.  If you trim the plant over soon after flowering it will produce a fresh crop of basal leaves and look quite tidy for the rest of the season.  If you don't remove the spent flower stalks you'll end up with a lot of seedlings, which may be as nice as the parent plant, or they may not be.

The dreaded Euphorbia robbiae has been lurking hard up against the hedge in semi-darkness at the back of the bed, and is starting to spread outwards.  I once planted it on purpose, then a few years later spent several days digging out as much of it as I could, because it was such an inveterate spreader.  It still gets recommended in books and articles, so other people don't seem to have found it as aggressive as I did.  I chiselled out the growths nearest the front of the bed, while wondering whether to leave the growth nearest the hedge, as after all it is providing ground cover in a very inhospitable spot, or whether to eradicate every last piece I can see before it can invade the new planting I'll soon be making in the empty spot.

A couple of starved looking foxgloves that had flowered this summer but without dying outright afterwards as Digitalis purpurea is prone to do were hoiked out as well, and some very weedy honesty seedlings.  There is a shrub rose, 'Anne of Gierstein', in the upper part of the area where I'm working, and I can't dig the bed over too close to the rose for fear of damaging its roots, but as far as possible I wanted a clean sweep for planting.  I began to spread home made compost over the gap, before being sidetracked by the imploring faces of the chickens wanting to be let out.  I released them for an hour's run before chicken bedtime, but then had to stay with them while they poked around in the newly dug earth.

They were very good about flocking together and not disappearing down to the bottom of the garden.  When they behave well and stay in one group, instead of all charging off in different directions with the independent one heading for the isolation of the bottom of the garden, we are more likely to let them out again the next day.  Afternoons spent walking round in small circles looking for a hen can be very frustrating, and we end up less willing to go to the trouble of letting them out the next day.  Whether chickens are capable of forming associations on that time scale, or require a more immediate connection between behaviour and reward, I do not know.