My project to tidy the lawn edges is progressing but slowly, due to mission creep. It started with picking up leaves. It seemed stupid to crawl straight over the ones that had settled close to the lawn edge, and downright silly to pick up those lying in the gully at the edge of the border only to drop them back in the border or on the grass. Then I thought I might as well rake up the drift of leaves from 'Tai-haku' before they could blow across the full width of the garden. That's partly to keep things tidy, but mainly because I wanted the leaves for compost. There are still a gazillion leaves to come off the wild gean and the oaks, and no way the top lawn is going to remain clear of leaves without some more serious raking, but while this lot were still almost in a heap it seemed a shame to waste them.
Then I got to some shrub roses that were suckering, and cut the suckers away that were impinging on the edge of the lawn, followed by the others because I'd got into a sucker-cutting rhythm. I removed an old branch that was drooping across my face and that was it, I was into pruning as well. By now the roses in the bed below the veranda fall into two broad categories, those which have got much larger than any of the books say they're going to, and those that have dwindled to a single stalk if they haven't died completely. The plants in the too big for their boots category need reducing because the bed has become congested, and my theory is that the best way to do it is to remove a lot of the old branches at ground level. I feel pretty safe starting to do that now. OK, it's unseasonably warm but I do not believe the bushes are going to respond by suddenly starting to make lots of new growth. If I'm wrong I'll let you know. Once I'd made a large pile of prunings in the middle of the lawn I thought I'd better take them to the bonfire heap, which meant several trips with the barrow.
It seemed a waste not to pull out any horsetail strands and accessible weeds from the front of the bed as I was passing, so they went in my bucket along with the grass clippings and any bulges of lawn I felt the need to shave off with the half moon edger. Then when I got to a box dome I clipped the whiskery bits of that, or at least the two thirds of it that I could get at easily without crawling into the bed. The roses have partly defoliated but not finished dropping their leaves, so I scooped up the piles of old rose leaves that were easy to reach without being too fussy about collecting every last one.
The acers in pots have almost entirely dropped their leaves, so it seemed sensible to pick the fallen leaves up off the gravel before they could turn to mush. Rather irritatingly the wild hazel behind them has not finished defoliating, meaning I'll need to go over that corner again. I wish the trees in the garden could be more coordinated about when they think autumn is. It would make maintenance much easier. Since I was fossicking about in the area with a pair of secateurs I thought I might as well trim the whiskery ends of golden yew poking out over the lawn, and the wayward strands of cotoneaster that don't understand they are supposed to be providing ground cover.
By this stage I was stopping to dig out any especially large rosettes of weeds from the lawn. Our lawn is full of all sorts of weeds, clover, self-heal, creeping buttercup, moss, if it's a lawn weed we've probably got it somewhere in the garden. I have no ambitions to maintain fine turf, and the weeds with small leaves like clover don't honestly bother me, but I would like the lawn to be more or less even in texture. Its role, apart from being walked on, is to act as a visual blank and foil for the surrounding planting. Big patches of daisies, coltsfoot, plantain, and the odd thistle, spoil the effect of plain green blankness. Sometimes they even annoy me enough for me to zap the largest and most noticeable rosettes with lawn weed killer. It provides a certain cathartic relief when after a few days the treated weeds go brown, but there always seem to be more of them, so today I took the organic (and low cost) route and prised them out. The ground is so wet, their roots slid through the clay as if through butter, but I confidently predict they'll be back.
It doesn't matter that I haven't stuck rigidly to the task of edging. If I had I'd probably have finished by now, but it would not have been nearly so amusing, and anyway that's how one picks up repetitive strain injuries in the garden, or an enduring hatred of the job or plant that was the subject of the endless task. I'm baffled when I read interviews with gardeners in senior positions with the RHS or National Trust, and they recount how in their first week they were given umpteen thousand snowdrops or primroses to plant, and hated snowdrops or primroses for years in consequence. Why treat your junior staff like that, instead of breaking the task up a bit? Presumably because the supervisors suffered in their youth, and wished their trainees to suffer in turn. Anyway, last December I managed to knacker my right forearm for a month through over-enthusiastic sustained chopping with the shears. Much better for muscles and mind to treat gardening as a kind of sustained pottering.
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