gravel gardening

Storm Clodagh blew through in the night, leaving behind a soggy garden but a remarkably warm day, so I got on with weeding the gravel.  One advantage of gardening on light soil is that you can walk on it with relative impunity almost as soon as the rain passes, while on the clay and silt of the back garden I could feel my heels dig into the lawn with every step as I went to collect my buckets from by the ditch where I'd left them.  Of course if I'd religiously put everything away after my previous gardening session then I wouldn't have needed to tread on the back garden at all.

The railway garden wasn't too weedy.  I went over it at some point in the autumn, and not too many fresh weeds have come up since then.  The ever persistent shoots of sheep's sorrel, some late seedlings of annual spurge and scarlet pimpernel, a little grass and the tiny annual miniature clover with yellow flowers whose name I have never discovered.  Weeds went in one bucket and fallen leaves for the compost heap in the other.

The damp, mild autumn has suited some of the alpines, along with the dose of fish, blood and bone I gave them when I weeded them last time.  Some are struggling or have quietly died from drought and starvation, and some have been nibbled down by rabbits, to my acute irritation, but the Parahebe have suddenly filled out and made lovely bushy plants, the Antennaria dioica are making steadily spreading mats, and the dwarf thrift Armeria juniperifolia 'Bevan's Variety' are fatter than they were the last time I looked at them, while a Hebe that had gone almost bald in the middle is filling with new foliage at ground level.  Grand gardening this is most definitely not, and none of them are varieties you'd exhibit with pride at a meeting of the Alpine Garden Society, but they are getting a little closer to my aim of having continuous foliage cover around the garden railway, where seeding weeds will find it hard to get a foothold and creeping weeds will not be so obtrusive. And everything has perfectly nice flowers at some point.

In the small exotic gravel garden by the entrance, the bulbs are already starting to come through, the vivid green rosettes of Scilla peruviana, fat snouts of fritillaries and the long thin leaves of widow iris.  Fingers crossed the rabbits don't graze them all down.  That's one drawback of a mild autumn, it creates a mad scramble to get areas with naturalised bulbs tidied and mulched before the bulb foliage is too far advanced.

It was very pleasant being able to spend the day outside and I enjoyed poking about in the gravel, though it reminded me why having the whole of the front garden done as a gravel garden with Mediterranean plants, colourful South African sun loving exotics and dwarf pines would not really be a good idea because I could never maintain that much gravel planting.  By lunchtime there was a gleam of winter sun, and I let the hens out at two for a run.  Good and excellent chickens, they flocked together under the Eleagnus hedge scratching around in the fallen leaves and allowing me to get on with weeding, glancing up now and then to check I could still see the flash of a red comb or flicker of movement, and only occasionally going over to do a head count and check that none had wandered off alone into the back garden.  At ten past three they started heading back towards the hen house, and stayed in view while I weeded by the formal pond, and at four they went to bed.  They were burbling to each other on their perch as I shut the house, which is generally a sign they've had a good day.  The fact they behaved so nicely makes me more likely to let them out again on the next dry afternoon, but there is no way of explaining that to them.