winter tidy

The ground is rather soggy and today was quite windy, but given the flood chaos and misery going on in the north it would be churlish to mind.  The bottom of the garden is reasonably tucked out of the wind, and I crawled and crouched my way through the bog bed and up into the sloping bed, cutting down brown and faded stems, rooting out weeds and feeling quietly grateful that life and gardening in north Essex were able to continue as per normal.

The bog bed is currently no more than damp, and not really distinguishable from the other borders which are also damp.  After the very wet winter of three years ago it turned to almost knee deep mud soup, but the temporary spring has run dry again, and though it's odd to think about at a time of flooding, I'll probably need to water it once or twice in the summer.  In the meantime it makes it easier to tidy away the straw dry stems of Thalictrum, Ligularia, Osmunda and Filpendula.  The thalictrums are already sending up clumps of glaucous new shoots of extreme fragility, and not stepping on them is an exercise in mindfulness.  The bog primula have mostly disappeared without trace, which used to send me into a panic that they had died until I got used to it.

There are rather too many self sown seedlings of sweet rocket, Hesperis matronalis.  I was amused to read in an article about Tom Stuart-Smith that, liking it, he grows it in his own garden but doesn't specify it for clients because of its generous seeding habit.  The young plants pull up easily enough, so it is relatively easy to control, but needs a little of the gardener's time during the year if you aren't to end up with altogether too much of a good thing.

The Japanese anemones have died down, and now is the time to trim away the tatty remains of the basal foliage as well as the spent flower stalks, before the fresh crop of leaves comes through. Ours are mostly the white 'Honorine Jobert', apart from some pink at one end where I must have got in a muddle about what I was buying.  They might be 'September Charm'.  There are bulbs among the anemones to extend the season in that part of the bed, since the anemones don't do anything interesting until autumn but equally don't grow too tall in the first half of the year.  Bright yellow, fully double daffodils are followed by alliums.  Using the latter was a tip I gleaned from the writings of Graham Stuart Thomas.

The daffodils were my own idea.  They are another instance of less than perfect record keeping, as I think they are 'Pencrebar' but am not one hundred per cent sure.  The first lot I planted did so well I thought I'd like some more, at which point I discovered I hadn't written the variety down.  They looked like illustrations of 'Pencrebar' in the catalogues, so I added some and so far it hasn't looked as though I've got two different sorts mixed together.  The soil in that part of the bed is not terribly nice, a sort of claggy, stony clay overlaying a fairly impermeable clay sub layer, and the poor old Japanese anemones don't especially like it, though they cope.  The first lot of daffodils have positively thrived for years, so it is a pity not to be entirely sure what variety it is that will live so happily in such conditions.

I started trimming the leaves off the smart Ashwood hellebores, ready for the emerging flowers. Opinions vary about whether to defoliate hellebore hybrids as a matter of routine before flowering, or whether to only take off any leaves that look unhealthy.  The leaves this year didn't look too bad, but there were a few black blotches and a couple of years ago I had problems with the flower stems rotting, so nowadays to be on the safe side I clear away every leaf once I can see the buds. At the moment the clumps I've finished tidying each have one odd leaf stuck back into the soil, to mark them until I've finished working there so that I don't tread or kneel on them without noticing.