first impressions

It has been a wet and a windy day.  I thought we must be at the forward edge of storm Abigail, but I gather the storm has not yet been officially named, and won't unless judged to have the capacity to cause medium or high wind impacts.  I feel there must be a more elegant way of expressing whatever it is that the weather pundits are trying to say than 'medium wind impact', but that's the Mirror for you.  It speaks volumes about the English weather obsession that when you Google storm Abigail a long list of newspaper headlines comes up well ahead of the Met Office home page. Sunday's forecast for Colchester is for gusts of no more than thirty-two miles per hour, and only a ten per cent chance of rain.  On that basis I should be able to get out into the garden, and Abigail will remain unnamed.  But maybe it is going to be worse further west.

I amused myself by sorting through some more of the piles of gardening magazines that had collected in heaps all around my desk, and are gradually being filed in date order in boxes in the garage.  I no longer subscribe to the Gardener's World magazine, but have my old copies dating back to the 1980s, and in total there's enough material to trace a detailed history of changing fashions in gardening over the past thirty years, should I ever want to.

I am rather abashed by Arne Maynard's warning in the November 2010 Gardens Illustrated that when someone visits your garden, their first impression starts right at the entrance.  The first thing anybody sees at our entrance is the dustbin, necessary to prevent foxes from ripping the bin bags open, and my brown garden wheelie bin.  I am too idle to carry the first up and down the drive every week when we put the bins out, and not prepared to drag the weight of the second a couple of hundred yards over gravel when it's full, so it lives close to the entrance and is filled in situ.  I have always hoped that anybody arriving at our garden would be so relieved to have finally found the place that they would not notice the bins.

At the moment the impression of having reached Rapunzel's castle is a little more realistic than I'd like because brambles are growing out over the single track lane that connects us to the farm.  I noticed them the other day, and thought I'd better go down the lane with secateurs and a big bucket and clear the way.  My car is quite small and very shabby, but I can see that not everybody likes to have bramble stems dragging along their paintwork.

The lane is gradually becoming enclosed by hedges which I suppose we will have to cut, since the lane only leads to our property and nobody else is going to.  On the lettuce field side there's a mixture of brambles, and oaks planted by the jays or squirrels.  The oaks are growing away much better than those put in by us or our neighbours, an indication of how little tap rooting trees like oaks enjoy being pot grown then transplanted.  On the other side our neighbours planted a mixed native hedge, to provide privacy to their field.  Or rather, they paid a contractor to plant it, but have not kept it clear of grass since, and it has struggled to get going, and died entirely in patches. I am quite relieved in a selfish way, since I don't suppose they'd have done much about keeping the side facing the lane clipped, and I already have enough hedges of my own to cut.