out with the hebe, in with the box

I'd been thinking that I'd better take a break from wafting around picking up leaves with my fingertips and cutting down herbaceous stems, and tackle one of the more strenuous jobs removing the remains of deceased (or mostly deceased) shrubs, so today I dug out the hebes from by the deck in front of the conservatory.  There were five of them, and they came out not exactly easily but with less difficulty than I was expecting, revealing the fact that they didn't have very good root systems.  There is a band of vile, heavy clay across the middle part of the back garden, partly because the clay does rise near to the surface in places here, but exacerbated by the landscaping done by the previous owners.  The chap who built the house was a farmer, so he must have heard of topsoil, but he and his wife don't seem to have been keen gardeners, and didn't consider that it mattered in a domestic setting.  The garden below the house was sliced off to form a level terrace, and laid entirely to grass.  When I began to lift the turf to make beds, I discovered that it sat directly on yellow clay.

The hebes had put up quite a good fight, all things considered.  They like decent drainage, but if you are going to plant them directly into clay subsoil leavened with some organic material, you are most likely to get away with it in a garden in the lowest rainfall area of the UK.  I wouldn't try it in Wales, or Cumbria.  These hebes remained fully clothed with leaves, and made tight, attractive mounds for several years, but began to fall apart, as hebes do, which was made worse by the snow.  I cut them down hard when the Systems Administrator rebuilt the deck, to get them out of the way, and they responded with some regrowth, but not enough to have any chance of looking even halfway decent again.

Work got off to a slow start because I couldn't find the pickaxe.  I looked in the pot shed where I keep the gardening tools not in current use, and couldn't see it where I thought it ought to be, so I looked in the long flowerbed, which was where I last remembered using it.  Then I looked by the bog bed, though I was fairly sure I'd had it since then.  Then I looked in the garage in case I'd tidied it away in there.  Then I looked again in the pot shed and found it where it ought to be, nestled down among the spare spades and forks, hidden behind a large flowerpot.

When I originally planted the hebes I'd put landscape fabric around them, to try and suppress the horsetail.  This was only partially successful, and the hebes had sent roots out over the top of the fabric, presumably using the debris of their own fallen leaves as soil, and telling me what they thought about clay subsoil.  The landscape fabric was by no means pickaxe resistant, but did get in the way, and I had to cut bits out with scissors as I went,  To extract the rootballs I swung the broad end of the pickaxe down towards the edge of the base of each plant, leant on it to lever the roots up as much as I could, and repeated, working my way round the rootball several times, until it broke free of the ground,  I had to be careful not to hit the deck, which took a long time to build and is an object of some pride on the S.A.'s part.

As I said, the root plates levered up, not easily, but more easily than a healthy hebe should.  By the time it got too dark to see what I was doing (at ten past four, for Pete's sake) I'd dug over the bed once, removing roots (to go to the dump), stones (to add to the path by the dustbins) and assorted bricks and bits of glass and rubble.  The hebes had been mulched with a decorative layer of gravel on top of the landscape fabric, so that got dug in, and the next job will be to dig the bed over again, incorporating mushroom compost.  Then I will plant some nice young box plants that I picked up at work yesterday, which will in due course be pruned in some artistic way I have not yet decided.  Probably informal undulations, since I'm not very good at sharp geometry.  Then that will be good for the rest of my gardening career, unless it gets box blight.

It was an incredibly grey day, and mostly alternated between very fine drizzle and something you might have just dignified with the title of rain.  Not enough to do the ground (still dry when you go down more than a few centimetres) any good at all, but enough to turn the soil surface to a slick, that stuck to my tools, gloves and clothes.  In the field the poor Lithuanians were harvesting lettuces.

a long deferred job finally accomplished

Today I finished digging out the rootball of a defunct Hebe salicifolia.  That one sentence describes how I spent an entire day of my life.  It was a large shrub, that must have grown to reach 3m high and wide over the years.  I was beginning to think that it was not looking so comely as it had, and that it was time to start thinking about a replacement, when the 2009-10 winter killed a lot of the branches without killing the entire plant outright.  I lopped most of them off, but in the mass of clearing up required after that winter never got round to tackling the roots (about my least favourite gardening task).  Last winter damaged it some more, but still without killing it.  Yesterday and today I ceased to put off the dread deed any longer.  The hebe was in an open border with nothing large or precious too close to it, and room to swing a pickaxe, but even so after the first hour I thought the job was going to take the rest of the season.  When I finally chopped through the bottom of the rootball I was left with a lump of soil and roots approximately 1m by 60cm by 40cm, and had to summon help to heave it out of the hole.  It took the rest of the afternoon to chisel soil off the rootball, so that I wouldn't be left with a hole in the ground 1m by 60cm by 40cm, and so that the great ball of roots had some hope of burning on the bonfire.

The space vacated by the hebe will provide a new home for a replacement Prunus x subhirtella 'Autumnalis'.  Then I've got plans for a burnt orange colour scheme.  Burnt orange doesn't especially go with palest pink cherry flowers, but that's fine because they'll happen in different seasons.  There is a berberis called 'Orange Rocket' that has completely fabulous dark orange new leaves, which I fell for as soon as I saw it, and think will go very well next to the purple leaved cotinus that is finally starting to make some size, after a painfully slow start.  Then there is a modern rose called 'Hot Chocolate', with burnt orange flowers which I find completely delightful.  The name is a pity, and it was declared novelty rose of the year a while back, which is a bit embarassing.  The soil in that bed is so light and sandy and lacking in structure that I feel a bit optimistic asking the poor rose to grow in it, but I can apply loads of organic material.  Every year, for the rest of our mutual existence.  A rose grower at the Hampton Court Flower Show last year told me that 'Hot Chocolate' was a good doer, which may be the case, or he may have been hoping to sell me some.  Then there are some Alchemilla mollis to come out, which I feel sad about as I originally raised them from seed, but I have seen how they look when they are growing well and mine don't look like that.  It really is too dry for them.  Also some Lychnis coronaria, which has committed the opposite crime of doing too well.  It seeds like the devil in that bed, and forms choking mats of leaf and root that seem to starve and suffocate all  neighbouring plants.  Truly gardeners are never satisfied.

time to get on with the winter pruning

The outstanding winter pruning has begun to feel more urgent.  I've been working my way round the garden, but suddenly buds are swelling and breaking and I want to get it finished.  I'm quite a lot of the way round the roses.  Many of them are shrub or species roses, because I like them, they look right in a fairly wild country garden, and they seem to cope well with light soil or a degree of shade so are versatile plants.  With them all I do is remove dead wood and the old, much flowered and branching oldest branches.  The plants pretty much tell you what needs to come out.  I've learnt to treat the modern shrub roses with a degree of respect.  I took 'Sally Holmes' down by a half a few years back, as she'd got much larger than I was expecting, and rather straggly.  She hated it, responding with weak regrowth and some dieback, and recovery was slow.

I've taken a badly placed internally crossing branch out of the Zelkova carpinifolia which grows in the lowest part of the garden.  I was smitten by the beauty of the bark on a wet day at Wisley years ago, and got one out of a packet of seeds to germinate (which was enough as I only wanted one tree).  It was planted out as a youngster in late summer 2001 (not the most obvious time of the year to plant a tree but that must have been when I was doing that part of the garden) and is now about 4m high and wide.  From when it was a few cm high it has never wanted to grow vertically, or limit itself to a single trunk, and the books do say that in cultivation they tend to have a very bushy habit.  Mine has two main trunks, which are sinuous and a nice shade of amber, plus a third smaller trunk which I think needs to come off, but want to be absolutely sure before making the cut.  As they say, you can't put it back afterwards.  The badly placed branch snaked around between the two principle ones, and I could see it exerting pressure in all the wrong places and making the crown mechanically unstable as it grew, so it has already come off.  The tree should be long lived (unless it succumbs to Dutch elm disease.  They are in the elm family and can catch it) but its bushy shape can make it vulnerable to windthrow.  I hope ours is sheltered enough to survive.  The leaves are toothed and turn a pleasant yellow in the autumn.  The gardener at work tells me that our employer doesn't rate zelkovas, dismissively calling them 'bio plants' because they just have green leaves and no exciting features.  I can't decide whether on this occasion my tastes are more rarified than those of my boss, or if I'm a sad person to be happy with a dull plant!

I started on the Buddleia davidii today, but didn't finish them.  Their leaves are growing by the day, so I don't want them wasting any more energy breaking buds on bits I'm about to prune off.  Buddleia davidii are such useful plants.  They are fast growing and while not evergreen are in leaf for much of the year, so are good for fast screening, though that's not why I grow them.  The butterflies love them, of course.  Every now and then customers come into work who have read some magazine or newspaper article about which cultivars are especially attractive to insects, but the butterflies here don't seem that fussy.  We have 'Black Knight' below the veranda, which one customer told me was not a good one, but ours were covered in Painted Ladies last year.  Buddleia davidii does not seem the most root-firm plant, and I have known them blow out of the ground in very severe gales, but they do also have an amazing capacity to regenerate from the roots.

I had to tackle a row of Hebe topiaria earlier than I would have chosen to.  These run in front of one of the decks, and we needed access to the front of the deck to replace it.  The reason for having shrubs by the deck was to use foundation planting to anchor the house to the garden, and to cover an awkward sloping bit of lawn that was a pig to mow, and that I was too idle to level.  The hebe looked good for about seven years, but had begun to get open and spreading with age, while snow landing on them two winters running hastened their decline.  I'm fairly confident that if I feed them up they will reclothe themselves completely from the base.  I've done this in the past with Hebe 'Mrs Winder' and it worked OK, though if it hadn't been for the decking I'd have left it another month in case of frosts.  I haven't bothered taking cuttings.  I went through a period of being very keen on hebes, but am not so enthusiastic as I was seven years ago.  I think it's the long slow decline in the shape of the bush from a perfect dome to something less perfect.  Nowadays I'd rather have clipped box if I wanted a dome.  Some hebes are good bee plants, but H. topiaria is not very floriferous.  Given I sound so unenthusiastic about it maybe I ought to take them out!  But the roots of a healthy hebe are extremely hard work to shift, and I'm saving my energies for the Rhododendron ponticum in the end of the wood.  When those are gone I can have a nice Eucryphia in their place.