mission accomplished

I woke up this morning and hadn't lost my voice or developed a raging temperature in the night, so I set off to to do the talk, armed with my projector and trug of twigs, and a precautionary box of hankies.   It was a clear, glittering morning, and the thermometer in the car registered -0.5 C for most of the journey.  The preliminary signs when I arrived were not entirely encouraging.  My hosts had thought to save me a parking space near the door, which made unloading easier.  You'd be surprised how club organisers don't always think of that.  Somebody wanted to help me carry things inside, which was kind, but I find faintly nerve-racking, ever since the time I slammed the car door shut on somebody's thumb who was trying to help.  Inside the hall I discovered, firstly, that the temperature was not a great deal warmer than it had been outside, and secondly, that the seating for my talk was in the form of chairs set around tables already set with wine glasses and flowers.  Lunch evidently followed the formal proceedings, and I was not going to be able to persuade everyone to sit in the front three rows where they might be able to hear me if my voice packed up.

I apologised to my host that I had a cold, and she offered the use of a microphone, remarking that some of their speakers didn't like using it.  I'd rather not use one if it can be avoided, especially since there is never any opportunity for a sound check before the talk, so you only find out if it is working after you've started.  Also it was a hand held mike, not a lapel clip on, and I wave my arms around when I talk, particularly when illustrating the growth habits of different trees, and need to brandish twigs at the audience.  It became apparent in the first two minutes of my introduction that this sound system wasn't set up right, as I tried holding the mike at various distances from my mouth but all were greeted with cries of 'we can't hear you', so I had to revert to unamplified (but hands-free) and try very hard to project to the back of the hall.  By the time all the members had filed in and sat themselves at tables there must have been sixty of them, so it was a case of having to reach to the back.

After that it went fine, and people said afterwards that they'd enjoyed it, and someone asked for my details for a 2013 programme she was putting together, so that was OK.  Once we'd done the Q&A (not many Qs) it became clear that they wanted me out of the way, and that I wasn't going to get one of the glasses of fruit juice that were circulating at the other end of the room, so I packed up my stuff.  Somebody unplugged my projector before it was ready, since the bulb gets very hot during use and you are supposed to switch off the beam and leave it until the fan has finished cooling the machine before turning the power off.  I wish people wouldn't fiddle with other people's equipment.  I suppose whoever it was was trying to be helpful, or worried about somebody tripping over the cable.  Their donation to the charity came to approx 50p a head given the size of audience.  I leave you to decide for yourself if that is generous.  Anyway, I was mightily relieved to have done my duty and to be safely out of there.

In the porch at home was an amazingly tall box, which turned out to contain my Ashwood Nurseries hellebores.  The plants only came a quarter of the way up the box, and I can only presume that they had run out of shorter boxes.  The pots were very ingeniously anchored to the bottom of the box with some sort of transparent sticky tape, and it took me a long time standing out in the cold of the porch and cursing slightly to cut them free with a pair of kitchen scissors, working at absolute arms length (I am a short person with correspondingly little arms).  My complaint about the difficulty of unpacking them is my only grumble.  The plants themselves are absolutely sublime.  Three of the hellebores are in flower (only one flower stem each, but I can see what I'm getting), and are chunky plants in 3L deep pots.  The other two (which were cheaper) are younger and smaller plants that won't flower this year, but their leaves look wonderfully healthy.

I was especially relieved to get the black hellebore, since when I looked at their website again later on the day I placed the order, it had changed from 'Add to wheelbarrow' to say 'Out of stock' against the black one. Until the parcel arrived and I unwrapped it I wasn't 100% confident whether I had indeed bagged one of the last black flowered plants they had for this season, or whether I would find on the packing note that they were out of stock and my credit card had been refunded.  The black hellebore is of course very dark purple, as most black flowers are, but it has the most marvellous dusky bloom upon it, like a very lux Fritillaria persica 'Adiyaman', and a formal boss of yellow stamens within like a Tudor carving.  The young leaves on the flower stalk are also purple, and it promises to be a glamorous addition to the garden.  It is true that dark flowers don't show up well from a distance, but never mind that.  This is a secret beauty, something to come upon suddenly as you walk round.

Ashwood included care leaflets for the hellebores, and the three little Hepatica that I bought as well.  They recommend cutting off all old hellebore leaves in December, to prevent any leaf disease being carried on to the new season's emerging leaves in January.  Opinions on whether to remove old leaves as a matter of routine vary, with some growers saying it is better to leave them unless they look tatty or diseased, as they help strengthen the plant.  My existing plants have been suffering from a degree of leaf spot in recent years, so maybe I'll go over to the December cutting-off method and see how that does for me.  It might also be that removing the leaves to expose their burrows to predators will help deter the rodents currently living among the hellebores in the ditch bed.

In my mailbox at home was a message from Transport for London giving me tips on how I can reduce the delays I experience travelling during the Olympics.  I already have a plan for that, which is not to go anywhere near the place for the duration.

Addendum  In a way I got off quite lightly, doing the talk.  My original idea was to go to a lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes today where they were playing (I think) Brahms' clarinet quintet.  At any rate, it was something I wanted to hear, but then I discovered I was already booked to do something today, and the former colleague I'd suggested the trip to didn't reply to my e-mails anyway.  A lucky escape, as it turns out.

hellebores made me a killer

The phone went at half past nine this morning, and it was my Pilates teacher apologising that she was going to have to cancel this afternoon's lesson as she was ill.  While I wouldn't have wished her to be unwell I was quite happy to postpone, since my cold was getting snufflier by the hour.  There's a lot of it about.  A friend contacted us last night to rearrange supper booked for the weekend because our host had gone down with a cold so bad he was having to cancel his university lectures.  What's the old saying?  That a green winter makes a fat churchyard.  At least things are not that bad.  When the days begin to lengthen, then the cold begins to strengthen, that's another one, and true enough.

It didn't seem to be raining when I went out to release the chickens into their run, and I kidded myself that I would be able to get on with some gardening as long as I was well wrapped up and remained active.  As I carried my tools down the garden I had to admit that the dusting of fine white granules on the beds was snow, and that it was gently sleeting.  I put the tools back in the garage, and limited myself to resetting the mousetraps.

I'd caught one mouse.  I felt sorry for it, and wondered if the desire to create a garden justified killing it.  But I want flowers.  I'm not a vegetarian.  If I am willing to go on eating meat provided I don't have to participate in the animals being slaughtered or see the process at first hand, but refuse to deal with rodents that are spoiling my garden, that makes me some sort of squeamish hypocrite.  I don't have to grow hellebores, or crocus (whose bulbs were almost entirely stripped out of the borders in last year's cold winter), but I like them.  I feel much more strongly about gardening than meat eating, which apart from domestic considerations I could take or leave.  One doesn't have to eat meat, any more than grow hellebores.  The Systems Administrator is absolutely not a vegetarian, doesn't want to be one, and does most of the cooking, so I have what the SA's having.  If I hadn't caught the mouse, something else probably would have.  It is in the nature of mice to be caught.  If they weren't, the mouse population would explode until north Essex was laid bare like the Oklahoma dust bowl.  I tipped the little body over the fence and reset the traps, still feeling mean.  I'll see how this campaign goes.

I ordered some more hellebores on-line, from Ashwood Nurseries.  This is a small family firm in the Midlands, renowned in the world of hellebore breeding, and I have wanted to get some of their plants for a long time.  Ashwood Garden Hybrids are readily available as young plants, take pot luck on colour, but although all of them would probably be lovely I wanted the luxury of choosing my colours.  I stuck to single flowers, which are much cheaper than the elaborate doubles, but more to the point more graceful, and went for a black, a claret, a green, a pinkish green, and one described as slate, colours that should combine well in a display around the soon-to-be-planted Enkianthus.  In a couple of years I should start getting self sown seedlings, which will be worth growing on and trying in other parts of the garden, with parentage like that.  Ashwood sell various species hellebores, but after reading up on their comparatively weak constitutions, susceptibility to disease and fussiness about soil I stuck with the Garden Hybrids.  Very vigorous plants, tolerant of most soils.  That's what I want.

And that was it.  I know it's a dull day when I'm reduced to doing the ironing.  I listened to a new CD of Norweigan folk songs by Trio Mediaeval and the first part of Pandolfi's violin sonatas, which made it more interesting, but I could have listened to them while gardening, if it hadn't been such miserable weather and I hadn't had a cold.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator updated the wireless driver on my laptop last Friday, and since then it has been connecting to the internet without problems, like a normal machine, which is provisionally encouraging.  The new wireless transmitter ordered at the same time, to see if fitting that would help, still hasn't arrived, and nor have any of the various concert, museum and theatre tickets I ordered last week.  If it's not BT it's the post office, out here in the boondocks.  

the war of the rodents

Something has been eating the flower buds of my hellebores.  I was picking up dead hydrangea leaves from around them as I tidied the bed by the ditch, and cutting off any blackened and unhealthy looking hellebore leaves, when I found the mangled remains of petals on the ground.  On first seeing a damaged flower shoot I thought I must have inadvertently trodden on the crown of the plant, but I soon realised that there was much too much damage for that (besides which, I am generally fairly careful where I put my feet and I didn't think I had stepped on them).  The pink and white fragments were in little piles, and I am pretty sure that rodents were the culprits.  I found the entrances to burrows among the plants, and as I knelt scooping up leaves and ruined flowers, I put weight on my left hand and the ground crumbled beneath it.  I temporarily wondered if pheasants were to blame, as they will eat flowers, but given the remains of the buds were piled under the hydrangea leaves it clearly wasn't them.

I felt rather stricken with disappointment, though not yet crushed.  Stuff happens when gardening, and plants that you like and were looking forward to have off years.  I don't know if the loss of their buds at an early stage before the flowers were pollinated and started to set seed will trigger the plants to make more buds, or if hellebore metabolism doesn't work like that and I've had my lot, or rather the rodents have.  It will be interesting, in a purely scientific way, to see what happens next.

Then I felt irritated that with five cats on the payroll, plus Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat having the run of the garden, my flowers should suffer in this way.  The sad truth is that the cats are quite useless as rodent operatives, preferring to spend their evenings in front of the fire.  Or at least, the boys sit with us by whatever fire we've got lit at the time.  The two females don't often bother, the grey tabby spending her time in the hall and the fat indignant tabby in whichever room we're not in, away from it all.

I considered my options.  I could sigh and take it lying down.  That was an option, although not a palatable one.  Using poison in the open garden was not an option.  I have in desperation resorted to it under cover, in sheds, but not outside.  We have a thriving owl population, not to mention the cats.  I couldn't risk them eating poisoned rodents.  Research by The Barn Owl Trust shows that 40% of dead barn owls brought in to them contained some rat or mouse poison.  That's not to say rodenticide was the immediate cause of death, since many barn owls are killed in collisions with road traffic, but it can't be good for their health having poison in their systems.  The blue poison pellets were out.

That left trapping.  The manager uses mousetraps at work in the polytunnels.  Small rodents will unearth and eat bulbs in pots, and gnaw off the bark at the base of shrubs, and cause a great deal of damage.  One of our suppliers lost a substantial part of an entire crop of daphnes, when rodents got to work in the greenhouse.  Trapping mice is not pleasant, but sometimes it has to be done.   I called at B&Q, where I found various live-catch-and-release traps, and some traditional snap-and-kill ones.  I went for the lethal variety.  Live trapping, unless you are going to check your traps several times a day, seems to me very cruel indeed.  I set one of the traps on the kitchen table, and cautiously triggered it with a pencil.  It snapped shut with such ferocity that it leaped into the air.  I found it deeply alarming.  Still, it needs to be powerful to kill the mouse instantly.  I baited my pair of traps with peanuts, set them, and carried them carefully down the garden.  There I put them inside a length of drainpipe that the Systems Administrator conveniently had left over from some project, poking them well in with a stick.  I don't want to risk catching birds, and indeed as it said on the mousetrap packaging it would be an offence to do so.  Nor do I want them snapping shut on the foot of a passing cat.

I'll see how it goes.  I may not catch anything, or the supply of hellebore-eating rodents in that part of the garden may be inexhaustible.  It's nature red in tooth and claw.  At least I am not yet as mad as Michael Pollan, who poured gasoline down a woodchuck's burrow and set fire to it.

some March flowers

I've just taken a stroll round the garden to see what's blooming.  It's drizzling and 4.0 degrees C outside, and most of them look as if they wish they hadn't bothered.

The display of Hamamelis x intermedia is coming to an end.  The red ones are lasting later than the orange and yellow, having opened after them, with the variety 'Rubin' the last.  The hazels are showing what genetic variation there is in the wild population, as some still have bright yellow catkins while others are going brown and shrivelled.  Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill' still has plenty of buds, and the white form hasn't really got going at all yet.  The Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' has flowers open, but the overall effect is a bit pink and brown.  The Ribes laurifolium is still blooming, but I think that whatever animal is terrorising the back garden has had a chew at it.  Mahonia japonica is flowering quietly in its corner.  It got rather overshadowed last year by a rambling rose that is supposed to be growing up a tree, but instead flopped around and over the mahonia.  I have a feeling I shall be returning to the question of training roses up trees.

Shrubs that are new blog entries for March include Corylopsis sinensis var. sinensis, whose yellow flowers are just opening.  This suffered dieback last winter, but seems untouched so far this one, despite it being colder.  Maybe the fact that the deepest frosts came before Christmas this winter helped, if it is less vulnerable to cold damage when still tightly in bud than when the sap is rising.  I think it is going to be far too large for the space where I have put it, and I wonder if I can trim the tips back after flowering.  I don't think the books recommend this treatment, but Chris Lane says it works for witch hazels, which are not supposed to like being pruned.  We visited Cornwall a few years ago, and I noticed how many of the gardens had terribly tall specimens of  Corylopsis, with bare trunks at eye level and the flowers carried way above our heads, so some pruning to keep new growth coming low down might be a good idea.

There are a few flowers on the winter flowering cherry, but I'm sure that when it comes into leaf there will be a mass of dieback.  The water table has risen under it and it's sitting far too wet.  I've been eyeing up possible spaces for a replacement in the front garden.  Pieris 'Katsura' is opening its dusky pink buds like giant heather bells as if nothing had happened, which is surprising and delightful after the winter weather.  I've a feeling the frost danger for pieris is to the emerging leaves more than the flowers, and the flowers were still in very tight bud when the worst of the weather came.  No flowers on the Edgeworthia, though.

At ground level the hellebores are looking good, the Lady series and their offspring in the front garden and assorted hybridus forms and their seedlings in the back.  A yellow form that has not been so vigorous is doing quite well this year, with several nice solid butter-yellow flowers.  H. x ericsmithii is flowering profusely, with petals of yellowish cream with pale plum backs.  'Pirouette' was a new purchase last year, and has made a chunky plant so perhaps it is a good doer.  It is a pinky plum with a formal double centre, and I planted it partly for its own sake, because it is very pretty, and in the hopes of some exotic babies in that part of the garden.  It got rather shaded last summer as a shrub rose leant all over it, but seems none the worse for the experience.  New hellebore varieties are so tempting, but not cheap, so I tend to try just one the first year and see whether they seem to have a robust constitution in a garden setting.

The primroses and polyanthus are starting to get going.  I love the wild yellow primroses, but like the pink ones too, and the more highly bred polyanthus, which I have in soft and strong yellow, and all shades of pink from pale and grubby to magenta and purple.  Some were from an alleged woodland walk seed mix, which came less true to description than any other seed I've grown, and some particularly vigorous yellow ones in a good clean shade of dark lemon were half price at B&Q.  The violets are starting bloom under the roses, my ambition being to cover the ground entirely with them and other ground cover so that there's no room for weed seedlings at all.  The white bergenia has two flowers on it, and not as many leaves as it should have, so something is eating it.  Driving back from Colchester today we passed a mass of a pink flowered variety, which reminded me how full and lush bergenia should be looking at this time of the year, if it is happy.  There are a few pulmonaria flowers out, in mid blue, bricky red, and a good red-blue with bright violet and purple overtones.  The pulmonarias started out as named varieties, but over the years self-seeding and the destructive effects of birds and animals on stick-in labels means that I don't know what most of them are.

The snowdrops still look good from a distance, but close up you see that they are starting to go over.  There are some flowers of Cyclamen coum, but not great sheets as I would like.  I plant a few more each year and they gradually spread and bulk up.  Something has dug up the majority of the crocus bulbs from the borders, though not so far from the grass.  I need to go over the borders and smooth down every last hole and scuffled area, then inspect them daily for fresh signs of digging to work out how often whatever it is comes.  We tried the trail camera on one badly affected bit of border one night, but didn't photograph anything.  It has been set up on that area again for tonight, and we'll see what we get.

The dwarf iris have just gone over, but Iris unguicularis is still sending up new flowers.

another busy day at the plant centre

Today was another busy day, despite the weather having turned grey and a tad drizzly.  Hamamelis are going well, which is fair enough.  They do look very pretty, and choosing your plant when they are all in flower and you can see which you like best seems sensible.  Fast growing evergreens for screening were in demand yet again (I can't warm to Photinia  x fraseri 'Red Robin'.  That's a pity, because it is a useful plant, but there is something soulless about it).

I succumbed to the buying mood, and got myself a Helleborus x sternii Blackthorn Group.  It is a plant of rare beauty and I had been lusting after one ever since they arrived last Monday.    It would almost be worth growing just for the leaves, which are trifoliate (three leaflets), thick and glossy, with red stalks and huge wonderful teeth around the margins.  The flowers are a strange pale green, pale plum on the reverse with a prominent boss of stamens.  It holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit.  Our label says it would prefer neutral to alkaline soil, so I had better plant it with a dusting of lime.  It is a hybrid between H. argutifolius and H. lividus, and according to my Gardener's Guide to growing hellebores by Graham Rice and Elizabeth Strangman should be easy to grow in full sun and seed itself about.  I did once have the Boughton Beauty strain of the same hybrid, which did not last with me, but maybe it was in too much shade.  At any rate the plant is so beautiful that I'm willing to try again.

Addendum  Having marshalled my failing energies to write a post after a day at work, and my mind running on hellebores, I sat down in front of the fire to read more of the hellebores book.  The very first photo at the start of chapter one is of H. x sternii 'Boughton Beauty', and I see that while it is lovely the leaves just have plain margins and not the fabulous teeth of the Blackthorn strain.

the plant centre is getting busier

Things are starting to get busier at the plant centre.  People are beginning to think about replacing the things in their gardens that have died over the winter, and favourite questions are coming up like ideas for quick growing evergreens to screen views to/from the neighbours' windows (not as easy as you'd think).  There was a spectacularly scorched piece of sweet bay (yes, it was almost certainly due to cold, no, I wouldn't cut it back quite yet in case we have another cold spell.  It's only the first half of February).  A new one, which I didn't know the answer to, was the identity of some wriggly grubs in a jam jar that a chap had found in his homemade compost.  He wanted to know, not unreasonably, if he could use the compost or if they would eat living as well as dead plant material.  I offered to show them to the manager on Monday, which he was very happy about, except that he wanted his jam jar back, and I had to find something else to put them in (an empty milk bottle but I'm sure the dairy company will wash it thoroughly).  It would have been an even better day if we hadn't realised, at 5.00pm when it was time to go home, that the paraffin heater needed filling.  Jerome K Jerome had the measure of paraffin when he said that it started at one end of the boat, and moved down the boat until everything smelt of paraffin.  The same is true when you get it on your trousers.

There are some nice hellebores about.  'Walberton's Rosemary' is a recent introduction with largish single pink flowers held upright so that you can look into their faces.  I bought one last year, which was the first year we'd stocked it, and am interested to see if it is long-lived with me.  The H. orientalis forms seem very perennial here, but some of the glamorous recent hybrids have not lasted so well.