I have raked four or five big builder's buckets of leaves off the back lawns, along with some grass and moss. It's a sad state of affairs to still be leaf raking in the last week of January, but the little oak tree in the back garden took an age to drop its leaves. 'Tai-haku' went, and then the wild gean, and the double gean rather surreptitiously, but the little oak clung on grimly. It shed its leaves eventually, but by then it was Christmas, and before I could get round to doing anything about them along came my cold, which you have heard quite enough about by now.
By now quite a few of the oak leaves have blown into the flower beds, and the grass has grown on the daffodil lawn, along with the daffodils, so collecting fallen leaves had become rather a fiddle. Those that have blown right into the middle of the borders and aren't smothering anything small and precious will probably stay there. But I wanted to tidy up the worst of them as the snowdrops get going, to give them a slightly more groomed and kempt setting.
After dealing with the worst of the more accessible oak leaves I started weeding the bed around the oil tank. This contains mostly shrubs, but there's a good scattering of hellebores beneath them, which have seeded from my original planting to give quite a dense cover. The soil is a bit light and mere, and they aren't the bushiest Helleborus x hybridus ever, but their leaves actually remain healthier and less prone to black spotting than the ones in the back garden. They are just coming into bloom, and would look better when not mixed with the dry stems of last year's hedge garlic and a lot of dead Mahonia leaves. In an ideal world I'd have done this job before any signs of this year's flowers, to avoid the risk of breaking them, and better still last November as the dead hedge garlic stalks haven't done a lot for the coloured stem dogwoods in that bed either. But as we know, the world and gardening are frequently not ideal.
The other reason for tackling this corner is that if I want to order bare root rambling roses to go up the trees at the edge of the wood I need to get on and do it, and there is no point in having a bag of bare root plants arrive if none of the planting sites are ready. I've had this corner ear-marked for ramblers for a couple of years without getting round to doing anything about it, but before I can plant roses or anything else I have to dig out the nettles that have been making themselves at home. Meanwhile the gigantic stump of a huge multi-stem ash that collapsed spectacularly several years ago has been rotting down, and I feel the time could be right to plant.
A friend gave me a rooted cutting of 'Albertine', which has been sitting in a pot by the greenhouse for some time while I tried to work out where to put it. Actually, I did move it into a bigger pot to give it something to do, but I'm sure it would rather be in the ground. I thought 'Albertine' could go up a large holly tree, where it can meet Clematis 'Broughton Star' which I have already set to climb the holly from the other side. Then for a hawthorn that arches its way over towards the chicken run I'm thinking of something wilder looking and with hips.
Tucked away in that corner of the wood is a young Eucryphia x nymansensis 'Nymansay'. These make beautiful, fairly narrow, upright, evergreen trees, which in summer are a mass of white flowers that are intensely attractive to bees. They are supposed to like an organic, woodland type soil and to have their feet in the shade but their heads in the sun, with some protection from cold winds. I had a great desire to grow one, because they are so lovely and because late summer flowering shrubs are not so thick on the ground. This corner looked my best bet, since it has actual woodland soil and the Eucryphia would have the protection of other trees from the north wind. However, the ground drops away so steeply at that point that until it grows a few more feet it won't really see the sun, a slightly chicken and egg situation as without the sun it isn't so keen to grow. I cut down some wild elder last autumn that was shading it, but must make sure it doesn't get smothered if the rose experiment takes off.
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