There was a frost this morning. Belatedly, I realised that I still had not brought in the spray heads from the ends of the hoses. I tried to disconnect the one from the hose that leads to the greenhouse when I went to open the greenhouse door, and found I could not release it because the connector was frozen. I laid it on the concrete where the sun could shine on it, and remembered to remove it later on, along with the spray head from the hose that lives coiled in a pot outside the conservatory, and the one snaked up to the meadow. The hose for the greenhouse went away for the winter, curled in big loops on the ground behind the woodshed, and I retrieved the hose from the meadow, which broke but fortunately only a few inches from an existing join. All watering from now on will be done by hand from a can, unless I get to the point of being ready to refill the wildlife pond.
Frosts do shorten the gardening day. The sun did not burn the ice off the grass enough for me to be happy walking on it until mid morning. That is the trouble with having access to large parts of a garden via grass paths: in winter you are limited as to when you can walk on them, unless you want to risk leaving a trail of black footprints. In the meantime I finished cutting down the dahlia stems in the dahlia bed, and weeded some of the gravel outside the Systems Administrator's blue shed. It was not a very deep or penetrating frost, as the gravel and the ground beneath it were not frozen.
The Chaenomeles speciosa 'Apple Blossom' (also called 'Moerloosei' but 'Apple Blossom is more descriptive as well as being easier to spell) in the sloping border had several dead branches in it. I planted it in March 1994, so it has been in place for over twenty years, which is not a bad age. It has taken to suckering, and has managed to establish quite a convincing subsidiary centre on the downhill side, which was looking healthier than the original plant last summer, while there are still young shoots in among the dead branches growing from the old centre. I surmise that it is neither naturally short lived nor diseased, but that perhaps and especially on poor soil it likes to spread, and renews itself by abandoning some of its oldest wood. A growth habit, in fact, not unlike the shrub and old roses, and Chaenomeles is a member of the rose family.
Some of the dead branches were infected with coral spot, which doesn't normally attack living wood but is still better on the bonfire than lying around the garden. I am in the process of removing all the dead, and shaping the sprawling bulk to something roughly dome shaped. Nobody could ever make a convincing case that the Japanese quinces were architectural, for they all seem desperately twiggy and heading in every direction at once, and while I like 'Appleblossom' I don't want to devote a twelve foot width of the border to it, and I should like to be able to see the plants behind it. As it will flower on old wood it is a prime candidate for a touch of very light topiary.
I had to vacate the back garden before I'd finished renovating the shrub because the Systems Administrator needed to mow the lawn, so I needed to move all my buckets and tools and bags of Strulch and collected debris out of the way. Instead I went and raked leaves up in the meadow until I had filled the leaf bin, and it got dark. With a measly eight hours and twenty-one minutes of daylight today it's no wonder I notice the loss when frost takes a big dent out of the usable hours.
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