The Cyclamen cilicium (if that's what they are) along the front of the house have started to push their first, tentative flowers and tiny leaves through the gravel, which made me think I had better weed and tidy around them. The area near the house is plagued by the wretched purple leaved weedy Oxalis, and as I prised up one long section with the hand weeding fork I found myself levering a cyclamen tuber out of the ground. Hastily, I stopped, telling myself that anything with a growth habit like a cyclamen must be adapted to cope with a degree of disturbance, but I did notice that the tuber was larger than when I planted them.
I was also prompted to remove the piece of Pileostegia viburnoides that had died over the past few weeks. This is a self-clinging relation of the climbing hydrangea, very beautiful if grown well as seen at Bodnant (I'm pretty sure) the last time I was there, but not easy to grow well. My first plant died. My second plant, treated with more consideration and watered in summer when I was watering the pots, began to grow up its allotted section of wall and I was very happy with it, then allowed it to be swamped by the Boston ivy that had grown all the way round from the back of the house. The Pileostegia did not like being covered in summer by rampant Boston ivy foliage, and the stems on the house wall mostly died again, while the low growing branches made a break for freedom across the gravel.
The Systems Administrator removed the Boston ivy from the end of the house, where it had got under the plastic base of the big window in the sitting room and lifted it so that it leaked, staining the wooden floor. I managed to twiddle one Pileostegia branch around so that it was pointing back at the house, and weighted it down with a stone to keep it going that way. They are brittle stems and it was not easy. Freed of the embrace of the Boston ivy it began to climb again. Meanwhile what was left of the original stem had given up holding on to the wall, and I had to tie it in to a nail and the bottom of the stove pipe. Perhaps it could sense that it was no longer firmly attached to anything, but this summer it didn't bother growing, and in the past few weeks the leaves paled, browned, and fell off.
The rest of the Pileostegia is looking rather pale. I have fed it a couple of times over the summer with fish, blood and bone, and watered it. Maybe I should feed it more. Maybe sprinkles of fish, blood and bone are not enough to make it want to live in sand. Or perhaps something more sinister is going on. A Podocarpus that used to live in that spot flourished until suddenly the needles turned dull, and it died very quickly. On exhumation the roots were soft and smelled of mushrooms. I dug out every last scrap I could find, but maybe some nasty fungal disease lurks in the bed.
The Cyclamen cilicium looked better without their surround of dead Pileostegia leaves. My final act in tidying this section of border will be to trim the box domes along the front of the house. All have been grown from quite small box plants bought and planted at different times, with the result that all three are of visibly different types of box. I am trying to keep them as smooth, elegant domes, but am not awfully good at shaping freehand curves. Lumpy mound and cloud pruning would be much easier.
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