planting in the wood

I finally planted my beautiful new Hamamelis x intermedia 'Livia' in the wood, and enclosed it in a circle of wire netting stapled on to a stake, and held with a couple of bamboo canes.  It doesn't look a very strong defence against a determined browsing or nibbling animal, but seems to be enough.  The Oemleria cerasiformis is sending up hopeful looking suckers inside its wire cage, and growing up above it, but one stray shoot that ventured to poke through the netting has been bitten off.  I planted out my two remaining potted up suckers of Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill' as well, and circled those with more wire.  It doesn't look at all elegant at the moment, but is necessary.  As they get to be larger and stronger plants (if they do) they should have the resources to withstand the odd bite taken out of them.  I have a very vague feeling that daphnes might be poisonous, but maybe that is just the seeds.  They are so expensive to buy that nobody would risk recommending them as rabbit proof shrubs.

I added a few primroses.  They aren't enough by themselves to make much of a show, but should spread themselves around in years to come.  I bought some at work, and work got them from the travelling plant grotto in the van.  They were nice chunky plants, and I could have split them if I'd been minded to, but didn't.  The others came from the farm shop, and looked a bargain when I bought the tray of six, but then two went mouldy and died before I got to the stage of planting them out.  I felt rather pathetic buying foxgloves, when they are not difficult from seed and I need a lot to make any sort of an impact, but I don't have any home raised plants coming on at the moment, and I wanted some foxgloves this year just to give me a taster, after the effort I have gone to clearing the area.  I bought three plain white and three giant spotted, and they should seed themselves usefully about and give me many more plants to bloom in 2014, if I can keep the nettles under control between now and then.  Finally I planted a group of three ferns, Dryopteris erythrosora, which have coloured spore cases that give the undersides of their fronds a reddish tinge.  Ferns do well nearby, and I fancy a change from broad leaved buckler fern.

The snowdrop company has just e-mailed to say that the snowdrops in the green should be with me on Thursday.  Unfortunately I won't be able to plant them before Saturday, when it is forecast to rain, and I will be out for the first part of Thursday morning, so I hope the delivery company will leave them without a signature if they turn up while I'm not here.  I'll have to stick a note to the front door and hope for the best.  I always ask bulb companies to leave parcels in the porch, if there is a space on the order form to let me make any sort of comment, and it is a sad fact that instructions given to the vendor are almost never passed on to the firm making the delivery, be it requests to leave parcels or instructions on how to find the house.

There is a crop of young self sown Helleborus foetidus as thick as cress at the bottom of the garden, under the Zelkova carpinifolia, so I'll move some of those into this newly planted area.  This hellebore is a native of the British Isles, though if you were being picky you could complain that my plants are not necessarily from a UK genetic strain, being garden plants.  I am not going to let that worry me unduly.  Helleborus foetidus has elegant, narrow, evergreen leaflets and smallish pale yellow-green flowers.  The bees love it, and it will look very smart and help cover the ground, which needs covering, since its present ambition is clearly to revert to nettles, brambles, ivy and goose grass.

The two cold nights have hit the Arbutus x andrachnoides hard.  This is a shame, as it was just recovering from the previous two cold winters and starting to look quite handsome again, with a crop of white flowers.  I expect it will pull through, as it did before, but it has lost most of its leaves, the others are spotted black and discoloured, and it will take months before it looks half way respectable.  Once I can see which twigs have been killed I'll have to spend some time pruning them out.  Only the cinnamon coloured bark remains for now out of its former beauties.  It didn't look so bad in the immediate aftermath of the cold snap, but hard freezes are treacherous, and it can take days or weeks for their full impact to become apparent.

I planted a little cottage garden pink primrose, of the sort that used to be called 'Quaker's Bonnet' and we must now call 'Lilacina Plena'.  As I wrote this down in my gardening book I realised I had probably put it in the wrong place, tucking it at the very front of the bed along the ditch when it would prefer more shade.  I must remember to move it tomorrow.

more winter flowers

A month into the blog I had another look around the garden to see what flowers were out.  That could be a regular posting for the first of each month, unless I'm on holiday, or ill.  There's not a lot of progress to report since the first of January.  The snowdrops are showing white, but still not fully out.  I think this is about the point that I worry each year that something has happened to them, and they have dwindled instead of making increase, then in a few more days they're properly out.  There are a few small cyclamen, but they look rather overwhelmed by the cold damp greyness of it all.  The witch hazels are great, glowing with colour and spicily scented, though I don't find they throw their fragrance across the garden so well as the Sarcocca confusa.  I wonder if that was flowering on New Year's day and got unfairly overlooked when I walked round the garden.  It was drizzling.  The buds on Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill' look promising.  She has lost nearly all her leaves whereas she normally doesn't, but I think she'll be OK, given some other D. bholua forms are deciduous.  The buds on Ribes laurifolium are looking good too.  I'll return to the topic of those once they're fully out, as it is a good shrub that deserves its own post.  Viburnum bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' has opened some flowers, though the brown remains of failed earlier attempts slightly marr the overall effect.  Iris unguicularis is still not really performing, another subject to be returned to in a future post.  The Helleborus foetidus under the shrub roses have pulled themselves together in the past month and look much stouter and more cheerful, with greenish yellow flowers.  I hope these will start seeding about, as H. foetidus is wont to do, and start a colony in the gloom.  The catkins on the hazel along the edge of the wood and in the boundary hedge are looking really good.  We should prize our native Corylus avellanus much more if only it came from the Himalayas, and was expensive to buy and fiendishly difficult to grow.  The catkins provide an excellent pollen supply for early flying bees.

Overall the garden is looking rather beaten down and sad, with squashed patches where the snow has lain on evergreens and some of the twiggy deciduous shrubs, and the odd broken branch.  I'll just have to keep working my way round with pruning tools and string.

new year flowers

I had planned to make my inaugural New Year's Day post an account of the flowers out in the garden on 1st January.  There is normally a scattering of winter stalwarts and a few summer stragglers.  This year, practically nothing.  Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' had made a valiant effort, but the open petals were browned by cold.  At least there'll be some more along later.  Viburnum tinus opposite the dustbins managed a scattering.  It is never very floriferous.  Maybe it resents the mundane aspect.  Elsewhere a blank apart from one rather weedy Helleborus foetidus sporting a small tuft of green flowers on top of its single stem.  Among the leaves of Iris unguicularis I counted three tight buds, one nibbled by snails and one collapsed at the neck due to the weather. I haven't seen any flowers yet on the winter flowering cherry since winter began.  Some shrubs were 'showing colour', as plant nurseries' availibility lists would put it, but don't count for the purposes of today's survey.  Happy New Year.