working off the pudding

So, the presents were exchanged, and we are both the happy possessors of some books that we were hoping for, and some that we didn't know existed but like them now we've seen them.  I think the Systems Administrator was genuinely amazed to receive a copy of Revolution and counterrevolution: Class struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory, but in a good way, and I am looking forward to reading The Prince of the Marshes and other occupational hazards of a year in Iraq, though I did start yesterday with Gardens of the World.  It looked a less demanding read, after all that lunch, and it has nice pictures.  The big tabby tried to eat the string from the gammon, and apart from that all passed off peacefully.

It feels slightly odd not being at work today, it being a Monday, but the plant centre is closed.  Not for us the frenzy of the Boxing Day sales.  Since it was warm, dry and fairly calm, I got on with raking up leaves from the young oak tree in the back garden.  It was planted by our predecessors, not long before we moved in, and we always call it 'the little oak tree', although 18 years on it is not very little.  The leaves hung on until not long before Christmas, then the strong winds took them off and blew a lot of them into the borders, which is slightly irritating as I want them to make leaf mould, and it is far quicker raking them off the lawn than picking them out from among the plants in the beds.

Raking is good post Christmas lunch exercise.  I have a plastic lawn rake with broad tines, that can't spear leaves on their tips.  The secret is to grasp the handle with your palms and the flat, palm side of your fingers, all those bits of the hand that naturally and easily form callous in response to manual work.  Avoid running it over the soft flap between thumb and index finger.  It's easily done without thinking, and at the end of the session you will have removed a disc of skin from your hand, which will sting like hell.  The same thing holds true for holding brushes if you are painting a wall or fence.

I also went on cutting the remains of the long grass at the edges of the daffodil lawn.  That's a job that I started and half finished about two months ago, then got sidetracked into doing other things.  Some of the clippings are green, but I'm hoping that they'll burn OK on the bonfire, mixed in with the brambles I've been cutting out of the wood, and other woody debris.  They look too weedy to put on the compost heap.  The eleagnus hedge has ballooned out over the lawn, and I'm taking that back as well.  I can't believe that one is supposed to cut Eleagnus x ebbingei in late December, and if we have a sudden cold spell (not unlikely in January and February) the hedge may suffer and I shall wish I'd done things more by the book.  With the mild autumn the hedge has just kept growing, and if I leave cutting it until the spring I'll trample on the daffodils.  I haven't seen any emerging daffodil leaves yet, but I expect they'll be through pretty soon, if the weather continues like this.

Blackbirds and robins were singing all around the garden.  It's easy to forget that the worst of the winter is probably still to come.

a (whole) day in the garden

Today I had a whole uninterrupted day to spend gardening.  It wasn't a working day.  I didn't have to get ready for a talk, or give a talk.  No dentist's appointment, no optician, no Pilates lesson, no haircut.  No calling around for coffee, or lunch, or tea.  No art galleries or garden visits.  No trip into Colchester to pick something up, or put up posters.  I didn't even go out on garden related errands, like a trip to the dump or to collect more mushroom compost.  It stayed dry so I could stay outside until it got dark.  It was wonderful.  It's not that I want to spend seven days a week gardening, hermit-like, and never see anybody or do anything else.  I should get bored, depressed and knackered.  But once in a while it is extremely nice to be able to get stuck in and put in a full day's work on the garden, at the end of which I feel I have made some progress.

I finished planting the new box cushion by the deck outside the conservatory.  I started last week after picking up some nice little box plants at work, but hadn't done the QS beforehand, and didn't buy enough.  Obviously it isn't a cushion yet, but it will be.  I think in landscape speak it might be foundation planting, a depressing term that conjures up visions of beige coloured support hose.  I am hoping the box will look good, in a sort of modernist garden goes romantic way.  That was a job ticked off the list in good faith.  I couldn't see anything needing doing to complete the initial phase of that project.

I picked up lots of leaves for the leaf bin.  It seems almost like a waste of effort when there are plenty more left to fall, but they rake up and pick out of other plants much better when they are still crisp and solid than when they have gone soft and slimy.  The 'Taihaku' has almost finished dropping its leaves, whereas the wild gean hasn't gone any redder than the last time I mentioned it, which was days ago.  The hazels at the edge of the wood are starting to shed.  Each big bucket of leaves tipped on to the leaf pile gives me a good feeling.  With any luck the Systems Administrator will have another go with the leaf vac later in the week.  Apparently if the leaves are wet the machine sprays water over the operator's legs and is not so fun to use.  Given how heavy the dew is at this time of the year, not to mention the risk of showers, a leaf vac that only works comfortably on dry leaves seems to me to incorporate a fundamental design error.

I started cutting back the brambles at the end of the wood, which have grown up since we cut the Rhododendron ponticum down last winter, admitting light, which favours brambles.  This is preparatory to starting to pickaxe out the rhododendron roots.  Fired up by my success removing the hebes, I thought I could tackle them one at a time between other jobs, and so keep a balance between the big renovation projects that need doing, and the more genteel tidying up tasks.  One of the Writtle tutors said that garden restoration was a sign of failed maintenance in the past, which is true, but only up to a point.  Shrubs do succumb to old age or adverse weather conditions, and areas of planting that worked well for years cease to do so.  We never actually planted the rhododendrons.  We inherited some from the previous owners, and some of those must have reverted to the ponticum rootstock and then seeded themselves.  It is true that we should not have allowed them to do that, but we did have many other things to worry about as well at the time.  We will be left with one large one with deep red flowers, which I like very much, not sharing the current prejudice among chic designers against rhododendrons.  I wish I knew its name.

The other reason for wanting to clear out at least some of the rhododendron stumps is to make space to plant my Michelia doltsopa 'Silver Cloud' into the ground.  It is still in its pot, and has been much happier since being moved out of the conservatory, but I don't want it in a pot outdoors over the winter.  It may not prove winter hardy, which will be a shame, but it could be fine.  The boss says they are hardier than people give them credit.  It was going to die of red spider mite under glass, so it and  I have nothing to lose by trying.  If I manage to clear out several stumps I would have room for one of the lovely Oemleria cerasiformis we have at work at the moment.

I finished trimming the lawn around the slabs set in the grass.  That was a relatively lightweight tidying up job, but makes things look much sharper.  While I was at it I had another go at 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', which was once again trying to grow out across the steps to the lower garden, and trimmed some low branches from the birches and zelkova in the lower part of the garden, so that tall people can walk around it without ducking.  I'm short myself, so they didn't bother me, but I thought it would be nice for the SA, and any full size visitors, and actually having your entire garden designed for the convenience of people who are only 1.6m tall does give it a slightly hobbit-like air.

the autumn tidy up continues

I gave up waiting for frost to blacken the leaves of the dahlias, and started cutting them down.  After last night's rain, the ones in pots are as wet as they need to be before going into winter storage under the greenhouse staging, and it feels like time to put them away for this year.  Cutting the string off the supporting stakes, chopping down the dahlia stems and weeding the tops of the pots and the dahlia bed by the greenhouse, is another step towards winter.  Though it still doesn't feel like winter.  I'm trotting around the house with my bare feet shoved into a pair of clogs, and wandering outside to put the recycling out in a T shirt.

The Iris unguicularis are starting to put on a good show, not just the odd bloom but approaching a full display, so they are working by the calendar and not the thermometer.  Down by the septic tank, the ivy shaped leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium have expanded to almost cover the ground, another winter plant on the move.  The flowers have been and gone by now, but the leaves are a good feature in their own right.  I've bought a few more plants each year for over a decade to build up my stocks, always choosing ones with good leaf markings as well as selecting for flower colour, and they are starting to seed themselves around, so that while not there yet I'm getting closer to the sheet of cyclamen effect I've admired in various gardens open to the public.

We had 12mm rain last night, enough to soften the ground surface, though it has not penetrated very deep.  I've begun cutting the lawn edges around the paving slab path that leads across the back garden.  Over the course of the summer the grass has crept across the surface of the slabs, so that by now some of them are barely visible, just smudges of Marshalls Heritage in line across the turf.  Paving slabs dropped into lawns are somewhat retro, but a very practical way of getting hard access to the bottom of the back garden.  On frosty mornings I want to be able to go out there and look at the winter flowers without leaving footprints across the grass, to reproach me for my carelessness for weeks afterwards by going brown where my weight has damaged the frozen grass blades.  It's impossible to see where the edge of each slab is, so I make a rough guess, probing with the lawn edger, and shifting a centimetre further out if I touch concrete until the point where the blade slides down into the earth.  It looks smarter at the time not to cut too far away from the slab, though the lawn advances back quickly enough.

I've been coaxing fallen leaves off the gravel too, a fingertip job to avoid picking up stones as well as leaves.  I've collected red leaves from the Japanese maples, yellow leaves from the field maples and hazels, and big brown leaves from the Malus tschonoskii.  This is a useful tree, with a vase shaped habit and an ability to tolerate vile soils and transplanting at a large size that make it ideal for public landscape schemes.  I bought it for its excellent autumn colour and because I needed a relatively narrow tree in that spot.  I've never met any gardener or tree enthusiast who raved about Malus tschoniskii.  It does a job, but doesn't seem to inspire love.  Poor tree.

The Systems Adminsistrator collected chestnut leaves using the leaf vac, and has promised to go after the leaves from the 'Tai Haku' over the weekend, when more have fallen off.  It's tricky knowing when to start with leaf collection.  Too early and you end up raking over every bit several times, but too late and they have blown away into inaccessible places.  If you just wanted them off the lawn that might be fine, but I want the leaf mould.

This will be a working weekend for me, so no more gardening until Tuesday.  We need more rain, but please let it rain in the night.  I lost half this morning to some heavy showers.  Tidying dahlias and leaves is all very well, but I need to get out the heavy equipment, and make a start on the hebes that need to come out, to be replaced by box, and the big bed along the boundary.

yellow and black and pale and hectic red

The leaves are turning, at last.  The hazels around the edge of the wood are going a subdued yellow, and the field maples in the hedge stand out as splodges the colour of butter, viewed from across the lettuce field.  The first cherry to change is 'Tai Haku', which is turning a soft plum red.  The wild gean, which I can see from my desk, is flushing an ever darker shade of green, and there is the first hint of red in the top branches.  Many cherries have superb autumn colour, a fact commonly overlooked by those garden writers who dismiss them as one season trees, since they fell out of fashion.

The birch trees turn yellow, and are doing it at different rates.  One of the bottom lawn trio of river birches, Betual nigra, has already changed colour and dropped most of its leaves, while another within the same group is still mostly green.  A wild seedling birch that placed itself in the spoil heap at the end of the conservatory is going a rusty brownish yellow.  It has a Vitis coignetiae growing up it, which is supposed to drape the birch in huge flaming vine leaves at this time of the year, but doesn't like the spoil heap as much as the birch, and is only making rather half-hearted growth.  I can see a few red leaves, but no glorious cascade.  With any luck it will get its roots down and really take off one of these years.  The Zelkova carpinifolia is a lovely strong yellow.  I like it, and I still think the boss is wrong about zelkovas.

The Amelanchier 'Ballerina' has gone a good shade of red, probably the best it has ever achieved.  I planted it partly for its autumn colour, which is supposed to be superb, but often it just goes a muddy shade of brown.  'Ballerina' has relatively large flowers, as amelanchier go, and sometimes I wonder if one of the species might have been a better choice.  Something wilder and more delicate.  But 'Ballerina' is a nice little tree.  It was selected in the Netherlands in the 1970s, and holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit.  In the front garden the Cotinus has gone a vivid deep red.  I cut out the pieces that died, and am hoping that was down to the drought in spring and that the rest of it will be fine.

Up in the meadow the Liriodendron tulipifera, or tulip tree, is turning a rich, soft yellow.  In the back garden I've planted a little ginkgo, which also goes a fabulous warm yellow, but little is the operative word.  It isn't happy, and is growing at a snail's pace.  I put it in horrid clay, hoping that as it grows well as a London street tree it might tolerate poor, heavy soil, but the ginkgo doesn't seem to see it that way.

The birds haven't yet started stripping the yellow berried Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus', which is putting on a splendid show.  This has made a big shrub, and it responds to more than the lightest pruning by throwing up vertical water shoots, which spoil its shape.  I wonder how people get on who buy them for screening in smallish gardens.  Prune them so hard they don't have any shape, I suppose.  The Malus 'Red Sentinel' are absolutely weighted down with fruit.  I met somebody at the Braintree talk who told me about a garden pest problem I'd never heard of before, thought she looked honest and sane and I believed her.  She has a 'Red Sentinel', which always used to hold on to its apples until the new year, as they do, then began to lose them in October.  She couldn't work out what was taking them for quite a long time, until she saw the culprit in the act.  She lives near a river, and the creature climbing her tree and eating the apples was a moorhen.

Addendum  Tonight's Choral Evensong on R3 (repeated from last Wednesday) was from the chapel of Merton College, Oxford.  I was christened there.  A punch bowl from the Senior Common Room had to be pressed into service as an improvised font, since college chapels don't normally have one.