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.

the sweet delights of winter flowers

It was so murky this morning that I couldn't even see the wind turbine from the bathroom window, but the rain had passed.  The still, damp, not too cold air provided perfect conditions to actually be able to smell the witch hazels in the back garden.  On very cold days, or when there's a stiff breeze, their scent can be pretty elusive, but there was no missing it today.  Above the spicy tang of the Hamamelis drifted the insistent, sweet fragrance of Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill'.  The bush has thrown up more suckers since I potted the last lot up, and one of them is blooming.  I saw to my pleasure that the flowers were the same as on the rest of  the plant, meaning that the original wasn't grafted.  I didn't think it was, as I never saw any signs of the graft, and you usually can if you look closely, but it's nice to have confirmation that my two spare plants in pots in the greenhouse are 'Jacqueline Postill' and not a nameless and inferior rootstock.

I put canes along the edge of the wood to mark the spot where they will go in a month or so, once the risk of a freezing blast in February is over.  The parent plant has come through two severe winters here, but small, newly planted specimens can be vulnerable, and they have spent all winter in the greenhouse and never yet experienced a frost in their lives.  I planted the Oemleria cerasiformis, and surrounded it with a wire netting cage to try and keep the rabbits and muntjac off it until it has had time to get established.  It is a suckering shrub, and the boss gives its ultimate dimensions as 2.5m tall by 4m across, so once it gets going I don't think the rabbits will make much of an impact.  Surveying the small tuft of sticks that is all the Oemleria runs to at the moment, and the two bamboo canes standing in for the Daphne, I tried to visualise their full spread at maturity and wondered hopefully if there was space for the plum red flowering Hamamelis x intermedia 'Livia', which we have started stocking for the first time this year.  It is very handsome, and in a different part of the red spectrum to the others, and I should dearly like to grow it, but I had to admit that there probably wasn't room for one, or at least not anywhere where it would get enough light.  If we have any left at work come the weekend then I may yet talk myself into the contrary position.

Daphne bholua 'Alba' is out as well.  It is a pretty thing, which has only grown to half the height of 'Jacqueline Postill', and so far is not suckering at all, so could be a good choice for a small space.  The wintersweet, Chimonanthus praecox, is blooming.  I bought mine as the pure yellow form, but the flowers have a definite smudge of purple on the inside.  It has been quite slow growing in its early years.  The scent of Daphne bholua was so strong that it was difficult to detect whether the wintersweet smelt of anything or not.  It is certainly supposed to.  Further up the garden, Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori' has suddenly opened.  The flowers are single, about the size of a penny or a little larger, in a good, clear, strong shade of dark pink.  They have no scent, and nor has the lovely Lonicera 'Elisae', which is just opening its slender, tubular flowers in a delicate, tantalising shade of very pale melon pink.

After sorting out the Oemleria, I re-potted my three Acer palmatum.  One existing pot had fractured and partially delaminated due to frost.  I'd made temporary repairs with glue, but knew it was only a matter of time before I went out into the back garden and discovered the root ball of my poor Acer exposed to the elements, with bits of disintegrated pot scattered around it.  It needed more root space anyway.  I decided to re-pot the other two while I was at it, partly because they needed potting on, one badly so, and partly because I wanted to standardise on the same design of pot for purely aesthetic reasons.

I have seen the light when it comes to pot design.  After a flirtation with egg shaped pots, very trendy in the early part of the new century and now so horribly last decade, I have come to appreciate the enormous, practical virtues of the traditional flower pot shaped pot, one whose diameter expands steadily from the base upwards.  The design I have fixed on, with minor variations depending on the manufacturer, is the classic camellia pot, a thick walled, sloping sided pot with a couple of horizontal ribs round the outside.  I presume that these evolved to strengthen the walls of the pot, as well as for ornament.  The camellia pot is a design classic which has remained essentially unchanged since the Renaissance, because nobody has been able to improve on it in hundreds of years.  You can see the same pots scattered through the illustrations to Monty Don's Great Gardens of Italy.

The trouble with egg shaped pots is that the diameter at the top is narrower than the widest part of the root ball.  Getting an established shrub out, let alone one that has been allowed to become at all pot-bound, is a brutal job.  I had to get the Systems Administrator to pull from above at the Acer that was still in an egg pot, while I scrabbled at the edges of the root system, scraping off compost until I'd narrowed the root ball down enough for us to drag it out of the pot (the alternative is to smash the pot with a lump hammer).  Getting a shrub out of a flared flower pot is a comparative doddle.  Once you've broken the surface connection between the mass of roots and compost and the inside of the pot, and got the root ball to slide even a couple of millimetres, the rest is easy.  I did ask for help lifting a big Acer that was going from one camellia pot into a larger one, but that was a question of bulk and gravity, not pot design.

stumps (day two)

The forecast rain didn't arrive until after dark.  We do need rain.  Down in Sussex they have a drought order, but when  I read the tips on how to save water they were all the things that we do as a matter of course anyway.  Don't run the tap while you brush your teeth.  I haven't done that for about thirty years.  Take a shower instead of a bath.  Always do, and I turn off the shower after the initial wetting while I soap myself.  Don't wash your car with a hosepipe.  I go one up on that, which is not to wash my car.  Well, maybe once a year, at winter's end to get the salt off.

As it wasn't raining I returned to the stumps.  One big rhododendron finally came out, when I managed to find the last buried root that was holding it and saw through it.  It is a satisfying moment, when you work out why a stump won't shift, and conquer the last point of resistance.  A lesser stump came out fairly easily, but a large elder root is proving intractable.  I could leave that where it is, except that there is a great deal of elder in the wood in toto, and I want the space close to the house for exotics.  Don't tell the Essex Wildlife Trust.  One of the things I want to plant is a couple of pots of Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill', which are rooted suckers from my original plant.  Bees love it, and it flowers very early on in the season, so it has some benefits for wildlife even though it does come from the Himalayas.

I planted out the Michelia doltsopa 'Silver Cloud' that has been sitting in its pot by the entrance to the wood all summer since being evicted from the conservatory.  It was looking rather sorry for itself, and on tipping it carefully out of the pot the rootball was far from solid.  It ought to find the soil in the wood to its liking, and I hope it manages to get going.  I have no idea how the gardeners at The Savill Garden keep their plant under glass looking so healthy, as mine was a constant martyr to red spider mite no matter what I did.

There will be space for an Oemleria cerasiformis, a large suckering shrub from North America with scented white flowers in late winter, which I have long coveted but lacked anywhere suitable to put one.  I think I am far enough along with clearing the ground to be safe buying one the next time I'm at work.  I try nowadays not to buy things unless the site is ready, as it's so easy to believe that it will soon be clear, and then it isn't for one reason or another, and the plant sits around in its pot for months or even years, degenerating.  Burncoose rates Oemleria as hardy down to minus fifteen degrees celsius, so I'd probably be OK planting it now.  Its common names include Oso berry, Oregon plum and Indian plum, but to get the fruits you need male and female plants, and I don't have room for more than one, and plants offered for sale don't seem to be sexed anyway.  I don't mind about the fruit, it's the flowers that do it for me.

As the Oemleria, the Daphne and the Michelia will all be close under our bedroom window, I hope that their scents will drift in.  Behind them, eventually, we should see the gigantic pink flowers of  Magnolia campbellii 'Charles Rafill', but that is one of those magnolias that doesn't flower at a young age, and although mine was planted in November 2003 and must now be a good 4-5m tall, it is quite devoid of flower buds again this winter.  There is a story in the garden guide for Caerhayes (one of the very great Cornish gardens) that they bought a magnolia from the Hilliers nursery, waited many years for it to flower, and when it finally did it was the wrong variety.  Hilliers refunded the original purchase price.  I hope mine will not turn out to be the wrong thing.  If it is straight M. campbellii then it might not flower at all until about the time that we're ready to move to the retirement bungalow.  The ground drops away from the house to the wood, and if all goes according to plan then the huge pink flowers should be at the same height as the bedroom window.  There is a plant of flowering age at the Blakenham Woodland Gardens, and it is a beautiful thing, very exciting.