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.

two jobs done

Today I finished two of the garden jobs on my 'to do' list.  The first was to rig up an elaborate cat's cradle of string along the dahlia bed, to deter the chickens from scratching in there when they are let out for their evening constitutional.  Since the dahlia bed has been liberally dosed with organic mushroom compost, given a thick coating of Strulch, and watered, it presumably contains an above average quantity of worms and insects, and the chickens love it.  I was so surprised (in a good way) that any of the dahlias had survived the winter left in the ground, that I made an effort to get the bed into good heart earlier in the summer, and even managed to pick up a couple of young plants of the orange double variety 'David Howard', which together with a stray dark leaved plant that had overwintered in the greenhouse, will help plug the gaps.  Having got this far I should like to see some flowers, and not for the whole thing to be raked over and destroyed by chickens.

I leave the stakes in all year, as well as the dahlias.  They are square cross section tree stakes, as bamboo canes are utterly inadequate for the job.  In the past couple of seasons I've been upgrading to heavier gauge ones from the Clacton Garden Centre, as I found the slim Gardman brand ones stocked by B&Q rotted too quickly in the ground.  To make the array of stakes look more cheerful I paint them in red, yellow, and all shades in between, using acrylic paint.  While not marketed for outdoor use, it lasts remarkably well.  The string is at multiple levels from 8cm to over 30cm above the ground, weaving back and forth and diagonally across, to try and make the area look uninviting to a chicken's eyes, like a trap.  I'll see how it goes.

The other job was to finish cutting the elder bush that grows up the back of the veranda, and had reached the eaves.  I used to try and eliminate it entirely, as it had seeded itself there and wasn't part of the plan, but nowadays I look on it as a useful support for the climbing roses and honeysuckle, and only remove the branches that are blocking the view, or sticking out too far into the border at the back of the house.  I could reach some branches from the veranda with the long armed loppers, but the others had to be cut using the Wolf loppers on a pole.  I got these at the Hampton Court Flower Show years ago.  They consist of a heavy pair of sharp jaws on a two part metal extendable pole, which are pulled shut using a cord.  When I first saw the contraption I assumed it was a gimmick and could not possibly work, but the salesman on the stand used one to cut a stout twig, and I realised that I was wrong.  I bought one, and then began to wonder how I was going to get it back from Hampton Court to Colchester on the train.  It turned out that if collapsed to the shortest possible length of handle it would just fit upright in the train as long as I stayed in the middle of the carriage.  I didn't dare try and take it on the tube, and walked from Waterloo back to Liverpool Street.  It is a well-made piece of kit.  The jaws are rigged with a four to one mechanical advantage as regards the pull cord, and are very solidly constructed, so don't twist sideways instead of cutting like some cheap or badly adjusted loppers do.  I don't enjoy using it, though.  The pole extends to about 4m, and feels awfully heavy when held fully extended above my head for any length of time.  It is generally a struggle to see what I'm doing up there, and I always seem to get the cord wrapped around things.  However, it does the job, cutting up to 2.5cm in diameter if the wood is young and not too hard, and reaching to places I couldn't reach otherwise.

The boss at work has a chainsaw with the cutting blade on a long pole.  I've eyed this up covetously, but they are expensive, and he does have an arboretum to justify the investment.

still scrubbing

Washing the conservatory windows and floor is taking an extremely long time.  I looked at some patio cleaner for the floor, but when I read on the bottle that it contained strong disinfectant, and that I should wear gloves while applying it, and exclude pets until dry, and not get it directly on the leaves of plants, I left it where it was.  Instead the floor is getting a scrub with a stiff brush, and hot water with a tiny squeeze of Ecover washing-up liquid.  The conservatory faces west, and I have a dark suspicion that when we sit in there, looking at the sunset, the smears on the windows are going to show up like anything.  I think the answer will be to take a deep gulp of gin and tonic and steadfastedly ignore them.  I am sure nice people do not notice such things, as my father says.  He attributes the saying to George Bernard Shaw.  I can't find it in the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, but it sounds as though it could be from The Chocolate Soldier.

The roots of the poor Strelitzia were revolting, like giant tangled intestines.  It was lucky that Radio 4 were doing one of the early Father Brown stories as the afternoon play, which cheered me up.  The adaptation was very true to the original, keeping a lot of the dialogue as written.  I read all the Father Brown books rather a large number of times as a teenager, and The Man Who was Thursday, and retain a great fondness for Chesterton.

In the front garden the thrift and sea kale in the turning circle are blooming splendidly.  I planted one piece of Crambe maritima, and over the years it has either run by the root or seeded itself to form a good colony.  The new plants have all been close to the original one, with no outliers, so if it has spread by seeding then the seed dispersal mechanism isn't up to much.  The emerging leaves are wonderfully crinkly and purple tinged, and the flowers are clouds of tiny white stars.  They are carried only about 45cm above the ground, so in a conventional border it is one for the front.  I think people sometimes confuse it with Crambe cordifolia, and expect it to be taller.  It grew in Derek Jarman's garden at Dungeness, and he wrote that after violent storms, when the shingle had shifted, the exposted roots of the sea kale were at least twenty feet long.  It is an excellent plant for a dry site on light soil.  The thrift forms tussocks of dark green linear leaves, and is now carrying its pompom flowers in pink and white.  The old tussocks are apt to go brown and die in time, but it keeps going by seeding.

Also putting up a reasonable show is the sea campion, Silene maritima.  I raised it from seed, and it was slow to get going, to the point where I wondered if it disliked acid soil, but this year it is looking far happier and flowering well.  The flowers are single, with a typical campion style full calyx, and the leaves are mat-forming and silvery.  I have just seen on the Plantlife website that it should never be picked, for fear of tempting death.  I planted a few seed raised sea peas at the same time, but annoyingly the only one that is doing well is right at the edge of the turning circle, where it is liable to get run over by passing delivery vans.  If it manages to flower at all then maybe it will seed itself about, as the everlasting pea in the back garden is only too happy to do.  Its Latin name is Lathyrus japonicus ssp. maritimus, and it is not native to Britain, though it is found on shingle beaches here, especially on the east and south coasts.  I have seen it growing on the beach at Aldeburgh, and according to Wikipedia the seeds can remain viable while floating in the sea for up to five years.

Some of the dahlias that were left in the ground over the winter are shooting, much to my astonishment.  I had assumed that the winter had killed them all.  Now I know that at least some are alive, I am watering their bed, and will rig up some string to deter the chickens from dust bathing in it, and put out a very few slug pellets.  I use almost no pellets in the garden, in deference to the wildlife, but the new leaves of dahlias are peculiarly susceptible.  It will be interesting to see which varieties have come through.  In general the yellows and oranges seem more robust and vigorous than the dark reds.