I found it too distracting to listen to the radio while cutting the hedge, a pretty sure indication that it had got beyond needing a simple trim to a case of serious pruning. In much the same way as I have to flick the car radio off when approaching a complicated junction, some gardening tasks need enough brain power that I can't cope with distractions. Weeding, even quite elaborate weeding when I want to keep the self sown seedlings of some things, is fine with the radio on. Seed sowing, pricking out, and potting on are all an absolute doddle. Cutting the edges, no sweat. But setting out a new planting scheme requires concentration, and so does all except simple pruning.
It was a very beautiful morning, with soft, slightly hazy sunshine and little wind, ideal for working with a pruning saw from the top of a ladder. The view from the top of the Henchmean platform across the fields at the back of the house was wonderful, our trees and hedge and the neighbour's developing copse somehow managing to hide the wind turbine, solar farm, and other signs of modern countryside living that I can see out of the bathroom window. Only if I looked closely at one birch tree could I just make out the blade of the wind turbine at the top of its sweep.
As I chopped out great sections from the side of the hedge, and the space that used to be part of the lawn until it was engulfed by the hedge opened up, the proportions began to look much better, even though the ragged side of the hedge looked a complete mess, and I began to muse about masses and voids in the garden. Masses and voids, as I explained a couple of times to our friend who is just starting off with her blank square of grass after moving house, are the key to garden design. The masses are all those things that you cannot see through, hedges, trees, flower beds, sheds, sculptures. Big stuff. The voids are the things you can see over, lawns, paving, gravel, ponds, low planting. The main circulation of people around the garden occurs through the voids, though not all voids are designed to be walked on. Ponds, for example, or the grass of some Oxford colleges.
A garden needs the right balance of masses and voids to feel comfortable. Ah, but what is comfortable? Well, that depends partly on where the garden is and what you want to use it for, but a very open garden may not feel like a place you want to linger, while a garden stuffed mainly with mass can feel claustrophobic. I think that probably lies at the heart of why the Systems Administrator didn't like Hidcote on either of our visits. It is a garden of rooms, the rooms filled with planting, quite overpowering. Part of the power of Great Dixter lies in the contrast between the dense planting close to the house, and the open expanse of meadow running right up to the main border.
Our hedge had got too massive, making the void of the daffodil lawn too pinched and the patio feel hemmed in. Less hedge and more daffodil lawn should restore the balance. There is some new growth coming from the heart of the hedge, so I am reasonably optimistic it will recover from its severe hack. The cats, on the other hand, are aghast that I am opening up and destroying their climbing frame, and I'm afraid that come next spring the blackbirds won't be too impressed either.
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