Gardening is not so much fun when it's windy. It seems like no time at all that storm Clodagh was blowing through, and now Desmond is raging, though the north is getting the worse of it. Parts of Cumbria have had 150 millimetres of rain in one shot, that's nearly a third of our entire annual rainfall. I went outside today to hang up the latest four strings of stones with holes in, that I assembled during the last bout of foul weather and never got round to installing, and as the gusts buffeted me and upended the cardboard box containing offcuts of fishing line I thought that being in the front garden was really no fun.
Instead I went and worked at the bottom of the back garden, which is about as sheltered as it gets here, thanks to the lie of the land and the hedge and surrounding trees. There is quite a large space right in the far bottom corner, behind the not-a-swamp cypress and the Ent. It is dark and rooty, but a saxifrage I got from Beth Chatto is doing nicely there, as is a bird sown holly which I shall topiarise in due course. There might or might not be a patch of Cardamine quinquefolia. My first plant was doing well, so I bought a couple more, and the rabbits ate all of them. By summer it would be dormant anyway, so it's a question of wait and see whether they have the strength to come up again next year, and whether the rabbits eat them if they do. If I haven't managed to get rid of the rabbits by then.
Last summer I got as far as filling my shopping basket at shade specialists Long Acre Plants with varieties that should cope with that most challenging of conditions, deep dry shade, but then decided I had too many other things to be getting on with and never clicked on place your order. But next spring I shall. I have nearly finished pulling up the ivy stems that had run everywhere, and dug out the bramble roots and self sown elders. It is the only remaining blank plantable space out at the back in what is by now a crowded garden and it would be nice to grow something more exciting than ivy.
I've got another wild holly further up the slope, with a good straight stem, that I plan to turn into a lollipop. I've been trimming off the lowest side branches for a year or two to get a clean leg, and it's almost up to the height I want. Once it gets there I'll take the tip off the leader. It can't be very tall or I won't be able to reach to trim it. Looking at it today I suddenly realised it should be a double pompom, a small ball over a larger one. I like the idea of having the odd highly trained evergreen dropped in among what is otherwise fairly naturalistic planting, and of making use of plants that have just arrived by themselves.
There is a third self seeded holly dome uphill of the future lollipop that I originally tried to get rid of, but eventually gave up as it kept growing back. It is now trimmed to a dome, and I'm trying to persuade a Clematis orientalis to scramble over it, though the Clematis is being rather slow to make progress in the root infested clay infused with stones in which it finds itself growing. The holly, meanwhile, likes clay and stones so much that I couldn't quite reach the middle of the top the last time I was trimming it, and need to have another go using the step ladder. If I still can't reach it will have to be reduced to a size where I can. Thus does the garden reflect the person of the gardener. If only I were bigger my topiary could be a foot taller and wider.
I was too cowardly to carry the debris of my afternoon's work past the chicken run to the bonfire heap, because I did not want to have to ignore the hopeful faces of the hens as they thought I might be coming to let them out. They would only have sheltered from the wind in the Eleagnus hedge, and I've have been left crawling around the gravel in half a gale. Poor old chickens. I've said it before, it's pretty dismal being a hen in winter.
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