Looking out of the bathroom window this morning I saw a robin and a great tit already standing on the empty bird table, so refilled it as soon as I'd had my shower and got dressed. Despite the rain of recent days (11mm in the past 24 hours) there must still be a shortage of natural food, as I don't normally need to feed the birds in June.
The view of the bird table from my desk is partially obscured by one of the potted camellias which stand in a row outside the study window. Next time I'm out there I must budge the pots along to give me a clear line of sight. I've been feeding the camellias in containers with a dilute liquid ericaceous feed, about one in every three times I water them (slightly dictated by when I can be bothered to carry the watering can around to the back of the house instead of using the hose) and they have been opening new leaves for a while now, and starting to look more respectable. They were very dishevelled and sad at the end of winter, with sparse discoloured leaves and some dead twigs. I realised quite how bad they had got when I compared them to the camellias growing in the ground, which apart from a couple of branches broken down by the weight of the snow were looking green and lush, and much more densely clothed with leaves. Among the container grown plants the smaller and younger specimens suffered more, and I lost one, 'J.C. Williams', a good early pale pink which was one of the first williamsii hybrids and named after one of the Williams family of Caerhayes in Cornwall.
The plants in the ground have not always been so happy. C. x williamsii 'Jury's Yellow' went into the bank between the house and the wood in April 2003. It was a well-grown young specimen just ready to plant out, root system nicely filling its pot without being pot-bound. The soil on the slope where it's planted is not great, being strange structureless stuff dumped there by builders in the 1970s, and the slope made it difficult to water the camellia, though I did try. Twigs kept dying back and I kept trimming them off and hoping, until the bush was reduced to no more than half of its original size. Then, at last, it established itself and began to grow. It is now a shining, healthy plant fully 1.5m wide and tall. I hope that the smallest of the remaining potted camellias is going to pull off the same trick. 'Donation' gave up on half of its top growth last winter, but in the past couple of weeks has started opening new leaves, and I think the corner has been turned. It is hard on them standing outside all winter, and I should bring them in, or at least the smaller ones. The trouble is that there is nowhere to put them. Over-cramming the conservatory with pots just leads to everything being neglected, as I can't see what I'm doing with the watering. (To a gardener in the south west of England the pace of growth of my Essex camellias must seem painfully slow. It is. That's what happens if you grow camellias on sand in an area with just over 500mm average annual rainfall. But they are perfectly healthy. Camellias are much more satisfactory than rhododendrons for dry sites).
The olive in the front garden is shooting from the main trunk, and some of the branches. I thought it was still alive. They do say you should wait until June before writing plants off. A third harsh winter will be too much for it, I fear, but that might well not happen. I'll give it a while longer, to see more clearly which of the branches still have life in them, and then trim out the dead wood.
The plum 'Marjories' Seedling', that I had doubts about at the time of planting, never came to anything good. It was watered, and threw a weak shoot from very low down, just above the graft. I could complain to the grower, but then I would be embroiled in an argument about whether or not I had watered it enough, given the weather we've had. I think I'll try again in the autumn with another supplier, and quietly not use the first lot again or recommend them to people. It is the second time I have had a failure with one of their plums. Odd, because their cherries have been fine. Maybe plums are difficult. Two is not a statistically valid sample, but I'm sure that 'Marjorie's Seedling' wasn't right when they sent it to me. Pity, because the grower has a long and interesting list, but life is too short to spend it on arguments with mail order suppliers of bare-rooted fruit.
Showing posts with label olive tree. Show all posts
Showing posts with label olive tree. Show all posts
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
revamping the gravel
I've been replanting the gravel in one half of what we call the Italian garden. The term long pre-dates Monty's excellent TV series, and in truth the resemblence to anything Italian isn't very marked. The Italian garden sits at one end of a largish turning circle, which was laid to grass when we moved in. It was weedy and pathetic turf on the thin soil, and we never used it for ball games (don't play them), sunbathing (why would you choose to sunbathe in your front garden when you have a much more private back garden?) or anything else. It required cutting and looked dull. So we gave up with grass entirely in the front garden, and turned it over to gravel. While we were at it we dug a square formal pond, and made a paved area by the pond, and a paved path across the turning circle. The path is carefully aligned with the front door and is the same width as the porch, an attempt to relate the geometry of the garden to the geometry of the house lifted straight out of the pages of John Brookes. It does work visually. Visitors occassionally notice it, and point it out to us as though it were a marvellous accident we might not have noticed.
The paved area wasn't really used for anything for years. I bought four cube shape lead planters, and a terracotta greyhound couchant from the Whichford pottery, which lounged alongside the pond, and that was about it. We had a small fountain for a couple of years, until it broke down. They always do. The grounds of Writtle College were littered with defunct water features when I studied there. At one point we divided the turning circle in two with a breakwater made out of reclaimed timber, and the other end began to develop a character as a seaside garden, but the end with the pond remained mainly an area that we walked through to get to cars parked on the other side of the drive. It was planted with rosemary, lavender, and a curry plant that spread hugely, plus some self-seeding Euphorbia characias and agapanthus, but it wasn't very interesting. Eventually I got round to buying a cafe table and a couple of chairs, and started putting out pots of geraniums and things for the summer and, based on the mediterranean planting and collection of hardware, it became the Italian garden, or when I'm feeling long-winded, 'the mad decayed Italian garden'. The paving, which was only laid on sand and not hardcore, has become uneven over the years, and poppies and blue Nigella damascena seed freely into the cracks, as do weeds.
I had begun to resent the amount of space that the curry plant took up, and realised I didn't really like the smell, which made me worry that the chicken house needed cleaning out, so I was quite glad that last winter did for it. Removing the remains of that, and the rosemary bushes, which were dying off in patches, has cleared a large space. Some new rosemary and lavender plants went in today, and an Aloysia triphylla, the wonderful lemon scented verbena, which may or may not survive a winter outside. I'd like to add an extra-blue, extra-tender teucrium, when they turn up at work, and some different euphorbias. This scheme was cooked up months ago, when I was tidying the hot tunnel at work, but it's amazing that it is actually happening the same year I thought of it. The winter killing so many of the incumbent shrubs forced my hand rather.
I'm waiting to see if the olive tree will sprout again, or if last winter really was a step too far for it. It made it through the previous one, just, so I don't know whether, if it is dead, to risk another olive and hope we don't have another winter quite so severe for a good while, or whether to substitute with something like Eleagnus 'Quicksilver'. Olives do have such a distinctive habit. Van Gogh captured it exactly in one of the drawings shown in the Royal Academy's exhibition a while back (which was so good that I am prepared to forgive them Modern British Sculpture, as long as they don't do anything else like that for a long time). The deciduous eleagnus are pretty and graceful and have silver leaves, but they don't honestly look a lot like olives.
I feel a bit hypocritical buying the gravel. It came from a local builders' merchants who did a leaflet campaign, and I saw I could buy it by the bulk bag, delivery charge included in the price of the bag. Of course delivery is not actually free, as the gravel costs more, but it does mean I can buy a single bag and not feel I ought to get more to make the delivery cost more economic. After today's efforts I'm about two-thirds through the bag, and wondering if I should have got two bags, except that after the experience with the left-over sand I was trying not to repeat that error. Getting the delivery lorry up the drive was slightly traumatic and I'd rather not order a second bag for a bit, until we've trimmed the hedge along the drive. The new gravel is a perfect match for the existing stuff, which came from the Birch quarry, and I suspect that it came from the same place.
The reason why I feel hypocritical is that there is a planning application in the offing for a large gravel quarry in our parish. I don't honestly want a gravel quarry up the road, and my partner lodged an objection against it on behalf of our household. If the quarry happens it will probably not be a disaster for us. I expect there will be a bit of extra background noise and dust on top of what we get anyway, from the roads and planes and lettuce farm, but when we go for walks past the other quarries in the area they aren't that awful. Until the application is settled one way or the other we would probably find it difficult to sell our house, but fortunately we weren't planning to move at the moment. If the application goes through the house will probably be worth a bit less than it would be otherwise, though if we can stick it out for twenty years or so we have been promised a nature reserve at the end of it, which would be nice. I expect we'll survive the quarry if it happens. But on the whole I would rather it didn't, so I feel mean buying bags of gravel from Birch, where the locals don't want a quarry either. But not so mean I won't buy the gravel.
The paved area wasn't really used for anything for years. I bought four cube shape lead planters, and a terracotta greyhound couchant from the Whichford pottery, which lounged alongside the pond, and that was about it. We had a small fountain for a couple of years, until it broke down. They always do. The grounds of Writtle College were littered with defunct water features when I studied there. At one point we divided the turning circle in two with a breakwater made out of reclaimed timber, and the other end began to develop a character as a seaside garden, but the end with the pond remained mainly an area that we walked through to get to cars parked on the other side of the drive. It was planted with rosemary, lavender, and a curry plant that spread hugely, plus some self-seeding Euphorbia characias and agapanthus, but it wasn't very interesting. Eventually I got round to buying a cafe table and a couple of chairs, and started putting out pots of geraniums and things for the summer and, based on the mediterranean planting and collection of hardware, it became the Italian garden, or when I'm feeling long-winded, 'the mad decayed Italian garden'. The paving, which was only laid on sand and not hardcore, has become uneven over the years, and poppies and blue Nigella damascena seed freely into the cracks, as do weeds.
I had begun to resent the amount of space that the curry plant took up, and realised I didn't really like the smell, which made me worry that the chicken house needed cleaning out, so I was quite glad that last winter did for it. Removing the remains of that, and the rosemary bushes, which were dying off in patches, has cleared a large space. Some new rosemary and lavender plants went in today, and an Aloysia triphylla, the wonderful lemon scented verbena, which may or may not survive a winter outside. I'd like to add an extra-blue, extra-tender teucrium, when they turn up at work, and some different euphorbias. This scheme was cooked up months ago, when I was tidying the hot tunnel at work, but it's amazing that it is actually happening the same year I thought of it. The winter killing so many of the incumbent shrubs forced my hand rather.
I'm waiting to see if the olive tree will sprout again, or if last winter really was a step too far for it. It made it through the previous one, just, so I don't know whether, if it is dead, to risk another olive and hope we don't have another winter quite so severe for a good while, or whether to substitute with something like Eleagnus 'Quicksilver'. Olives do have such a distinctive habit. Van Gogh captured it exactly in one of the drawings shown in the Royal Academy's exhibition a while back (which was so good that I am prepared to forgive them Modern British Sculpture, as long as they don't do anything else like that for a long time). The deciduous eleagnus are pretty and graceful and have silver leaves, but they don't honestly look a lot like olives.
I feel a bit hypocritical buying the gravel. It came from a local builders' merchants who did a leaflet campaign, and I saw I could buy it by the bulk bag, delivery charge included in the price of the bag. Of course delivery is not actually free, as the gravel costs more, but it does mean I can buy a single bag and not feel I ought to get more to make the delivery cost more economic. After today's efforts I'm about two-thirds through the bag, and wondering if I should have got two bags, except that after the experience with the left-over sand I was trying not to repeat that error. Getting the delivery lorry up the drive was slightly traumatic and I'd rather not order a second bag for a bit, until we've trimmed the hedge along the drive. The new gravel is a perfect match for the existing stuff, which came from the Birch quarry, and I suspect that it came from the same place.
The reason why I feel hypocritical is that there is a planning application in the offing for a large gravel quarry in our parish. I don't honestly want a gravel quarry up the road, and my partner lodged an objection against it on behalf of our household. If the quarry happens it will probably not be a disaster for us. I expect there will be a bit of extra background noise and dust on top of what we get anyway, from the roads and planes and lettuce farm, but when we go for walks past the other quarries in the area they aren't that awful. Until the application is settled one way or the other we would probably find it difficult to sell our house, but fortunately we weren't planning to move at the moment. If the application goes through the house will probably be worth a bit less than it would be otherwise, though if we can stick it out for twenty years or so we have been promised a nature reserve at the end of it, which would be nice. I expect we'll survive the quarry if it happens. But on the whole I would rather it didn't, so I feel mean buying bags of gravel from Birch, where the locals don't want a quarry either. But not so mean I won't buy the gravel.
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