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.