uneasy thoughts of drought

The garden is beginning to look ominously dry.  I did the watering by hand using cans, including the recently planted things in the end of the wood, and the area down the side of the back garden where I removed the Rosa rugosa 'Alba', and I remembered to go and water the 'Quaker's Bonnet' primula in the ditch bed, that I am now meant to call 'Lilacina Plena'.  It took a good hour, and that was without soaking the conservatory.  Tomorrow I am going to have to investigate the hoses, and find the spray end fittings that I removed last autumn so that they wouldn't freeze and split, and see if they still work, or at least can be persuaded to work, or if I'm going to have to buy new ones.  They do have a tendency to stick and choke up with age and use.

I'm going to have to start watering all the trees and shrubs planted last year.  They won't yet have large or well-established enough root systems to cope with this weather, and spring, when the new leaves are bursting, is a key time for them.  Likewise all herbaceous plants set out last autumn, the newly purchased, those raised from seed, and existing garden stock that was lifted and divided.  I renovated one end of a big border, and had to replace a large number of winter casualties, so it's going to be a lot of watering.  I don't use sprinklers, which apply water over too wide and indiscriminate an area, and on plants' foliage rather than their roots.  Instead I'll go around with the hose, plant by plant, and spray every root zone in turn, counting to thirty, fifty or sixty for each one, depending on how large the plant is and how dry it looks.  I'll do one bed one evening, another the next, and so work my way round the garden over the course of a week.

At one level it's not an unpleasant task.  It gives me a chance to stand looking at the garden, appreciating individual plants at close quarters, and picking up on aspects of planting that could do with improvement.  I can listen to the radio while I'm doing it, and the intensive watering regime only lasts while the weather's warm.  If we go back to an apparently endless cycle of low pressure systems sweeping in from the west, like we have in recent summers, then the need for emergency watering will fall right back.  It does take time, though.  The normal decorative pots plus my propagation efforts in the greenhouse can take an hour by themselves in the summer, so add in extra for the borders, and it can be getting on for a quarter of the gardening day just spent watering.  It's time spent that will keep plants alive (on which I have expended much effort and expense getting them in the ground) but it doesn't progress the garden.  Weeding, mulching, dead-heading, pruning, planting, laying paths, installing ornaments, bringing out pots for the summer, all of these make the garden better groomed or furnished than it was before.  Spending hours watering it just to keep it from dying doesn't.

The damage done by those two cold nights in February continues to reveal itself.  The regrowth on the Olearia macrodonta and the various Callistemon has been clobbered, and I'm not sure they will have the energy to regenerate again.  The top parts of last year's Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue' have defoliated, and hard pruning will probably be required.  Every leaf on the Michelia doltsopa is brown and shrivelled, which is galling when the one tucked into the corner between two walls at work is fine.  Temperatures there went down to minus 13 in the open, showing what protection a wall can afford, and how narrow the margin is between receiving a clobbering and escaping unscathed.  Arbutus x andrachnoides has lost most of its leaves, and although I don't think the whole tree is dead, there are quite a few dead twigs in the crown, which are going to spoil the look of it even when (or if) it leafs up again.

The spring weather is very beautiful, and the flowers of spring.  Primroses, magnolias, little yellow Iris bucharica, pasque flowers, cherries, Muscari, over fifteen years' worth of hyacinths in a myriad of colours (though not pink) planted into the borders after doing duty in pots, species tulips, daffodils, violets, lesser periwinkle.  The grass is still fresh and green, the leaf buds are bursting by the day, and the birds are singing from every bush and tree.  Most of the time I enjoy it while it lasts.  But the garden is beginning to look ominously dry.  In years when by July things are flagging I can console myself that I only have to keep them going for another month or six weeks, and then it will cool down, even if there isn't much rain in September.  Now it's still only March.  Keeping things going for six months could be very hard work.

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.

in the garden

It was a beautiful morning, sunny and bright, and I had the whole day to spend in the garden.  I started off by weeding the gravel in the front.  That is, weeding part of the gravel.  There's a lot of it, and so keeping it free of weeds and leaf litter is an ongoing project.  I decided to devote some time to the gravel, despite the borders crying out to be weeded and the seeds needing to be sown, because a mostly used bright green dumpy bag of gravel had been sitting near the entrance for weeks, and it seemed to me that using it up and getting rid of the bag offered a favourable ratio of effort to visible cosmetic improvement.  There was no point in chucking perfectly good gravel on top of the weeds, hence the weeding.  Although it was sunny, the wind was keen and made my eyes water, with the irritating result that I kept crying on my glasses.  Once I'd cried on them I couldn't see properly, so kept having to stop weeding, take off my gloves, and rummage around under my fleece to find the hem of my cotton shirt to wipe them dry.  This is why I have a pair of glasses specifically for gardening.

After I'd cleared the green bag out of the way I returned to the climbers under the veranda.  I'm on the home straight (I tell myself), tackling a large honeysuckle that has grown up a huge elder.  The honeysuckle was full of dead twigs, and as I cleared those out the underlying structure of twining stems revealed itself.  I was able to tie quite a long section of honeysuckle and climbing rose into the trellis under the veranda, once I'd cleaned out all the debris.  I'm cutting down the elder, but not until I have tidied the honeysuckle that's hanging from the top of it.  That's a task that would be a hundred times more fiddly with the honeysuckle lying in a big collapsed heap around my knees.  As I picked up years' worth of fallen twigs I uncovered a mysterious disc of something that looked vaguely unpleasant, and as if it might once have been alive.  I wondered if the previous owners had ever had a tortoise, and if I had stumbled upon its shell, and then whether it was a gigantic hibernating toad.  Investigating it cautiously I discovered it was an old birds' nest, that had fallen to the ground and started to solidify as it decomposed.

The Trachelospermum jasminoides does not look at all happy, which is a shame since it was starting to look quite good by the end of last summer.  Its leaves have gone dull and hand down at the wrong angle.  I blame the very cold snap, but maybe I have let it get dry.  I put a can of water on it last week, just in case.  The Berberidopsis corallina has lost a lot of leaves and the ends of its shoots have died in the cold, but it is throwing a new stem from ground level that looks healthy, and I think it is minded to live.

As I feared, those two nights when the temperature plummeted to around minus 12 C have hit several plants.  The Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue' that had made good growth in its first season in the front garden has lost all the leaves from its upper branches.  I thought they were doomed just after the frost, when they had gone the wrong colour.  The branches at the very bottom of the bush look OK, so maybe it will sprout from the base.  I'm starting to get chary about using pittosporums as structural features, pretty as they are.  It is probably safer to regard them as ephemeral, charming while they last, but not to be depended on long term.  Some people are like that.

The hyacinths in pots are opening.  I tried a new (to me) variety, 'City of Bradford'.  They are a soft blue, with a definite flush of pink while in bud, extremely attractive, and I'm delighted with them.  Hyacinths are good bee plants, and today as well as the honeybees I saw a great queen bumble on one of the flowers.  One stem had flopped over, and I took a couple of minutes to fetch a slim stake and some string and tie it up.  It's worth making the effort, because hyacinth flowers last longer if not allowed to fall down.

if you open they will come (not)

The owners of the plant centre where I work decided to open today, which suited me.  I didn't expect we'd get lots of customers, but I thought some people might want to get out of the house and look at plants after the Christmas and New Year festivities, or have made New Year's resolutions to get to grips with their gardens.  And it was a nice day.  OK, there was a flurry of snow first thing, but after that it was dry and quite sunny and it must have got up to at least three degrees C.  Practically nobody came.  In the summer on a warm day customers say to me 'what a marvellous place to work, I'd love to have your job', but where are they now?  Come Easter they'll be back, and the place will be heaving until the end of June.  The trouble is, the English are such a nation of fair-weather gardeners.