By this morning the wallflowers I potted up yesterday were looking a bit happier. Not standing up like soldiers exactly, but less limp and a better shade of green than they were yesterday afternoon. I had to go and buy some more compost before I could finish planting the final bundles, and the second lot looked worse than the first. If they don't revive then I'll reuse the compost for the tulips, since the wallflowers won't have had any goodness out of it. Still, they might surprise me. It will be a little moment of revelation tomorrow morning, skipping across the concrete and seeing whether they have perked up or collapsed entirely.
Back in August I placed an experimental order for some Martagon lilies, fired up by my Plant Heritage lily study day and remembering how nice they had looked under trees at the Green Island garden we visited last year. They were due to be delivered in September, and for the past few days I've been vaguely wondering where they had got to, while reminding myself that I was probably at the end of the list as somebody who'd ordered my lilies very late in the day. This morning I got an email to say they had been despatched and were now in transit, so I thought I'd better get on with clearing the brambles out of the end of the wood where I want to put them.
It was quite dark in the wood, darker than I remembered or imagined. That's the thing about clearing small gaps in woodland cover, the surrounding trees go rushing in to the new patch of light and soon fill it. Magnolia campbellii 'Charles Raffill' has grown a lot, and I allowed myself to indulge in a brief, wistful hope that maybe next spring it would finally flower. It was planted in 2003 and was not a tiny twig then, so must be fourteen or fifteen years old by now. Isn't that old enough to hope for one or two flowers? Apart from anything else, I'd like confirmation that I've got the right thing, since muddles with magnolia varieties can and do happen in the trade.
The alder and hazel coppice have been busily growing as well, and an entire elder bush had sprung up where I didn't remember there being one at all. That soon went with the aid of the pick axe. I made a mental note of which hazel stems needed to come out this winter once it gets to the right season for coppicing, but I might mark them tomorrow with a dab of red paint rather than believing that I'll remember until the New Year. Things always look so different once the leaves are off, it can be difficult to remember how ruthless you meant to be.
I removed the protective wire circles from some of the shrubs while I was at it. Oemleria cerasiformis had started to sucker as it's supposed to, and was growing outside and through its wire guard without anything eating it as far as I could see, and I think Daphne might be toxic to browsing animals anyway. I partly put the wire surrounds on when they were very small young plants partly to remind myself where they were.
The Eucryphia x nymansensis was looking green and healthy inside its protective circle of netting, but hadn't grown very much. I never got round to cutting down an elder bush I meant to remove because it was shading the Eucryphia, so must do that tomorrow. I stopped work in the wood after tea, since fiddling around with brambles in fading light is a sovereign recipe for scratching oneself in the eye, but ended up crawling around weeding under a large Cotoneaster in the back garden instead, because that was where the chickens insisted on going. It will soon be too cold to sit out with them, so we thought we'd better make the most of the last warmish days and let them out for a run.
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