picture this

Well, that's three stumps out.  The Hebe 'Great Orme', a Corokia and a Pittosporum.  They were all dead, and had been since last winter, which made the job much easier.  I watch with some incredulity when in Gardeners' World they make it look so simple to dig out the rootballs of large shrubs which are still alive.  Like on Blue Peter, with their 'Here's one I made before the programme', a trench has already been dug around the plant.  Rachel and the head gardener of whatever garden they are visiting that week give it one heave, and it plops out of the hole.  There is no clue to the blood, sweat, tears, skinned knuckles, bruised knees, wrenched backs and cursing that went into digging that trench, not to mention the impossible-to-get at taproot in the very centre of the rootball, which prevents you from tipping the thing more than 10cm either way, and doesn't give you a big enough gap to reach in and cut the final root.

I had the roots of a couple of self-sown roses out while I was at it.  Hips make splendid food for wild birds, as you can tell by the abandon with which rose seedlings spring up all over the garden.  I have left a few, where they aren't in the way, but these were growing up into other shrubs.

The other project of the day was to take a photograph of ourselves.  This is a rare event, and was only done by special request.  I am camera shy, so much so that if I had disappeared before this afternoon's photographic session, the only portrait photographs of me the Systems Administrator would have had to give to the police would have been ten years old.  I think we have a couple somewhere of me wearing a bee suit, which would not be any use since I am indistinguishable from all the other beekeepers, and one or two of me leading a group of people around the garden, taken only about three years ago.  They don't look as though they want to be led, and I look worried.  I don't really like taking photographs either, and the SA isn't keen on being snapped, so our pictures of the SA are about equally few and as out of date.

The need for a photograph came about because we have been asked to a wedding, and the request to RSVP included the instructions that we must send pictures of ourselves, and name our favourite dance music.  I suppose that to the Facebook generation, who have cameras on their phones and document their lives on-line, the idea that their middle aged relatives might not possess any pictures of themselves would not even occur.  It would seem as unlikely as that we lived without electricity, and communicated with the outside world by letters written with a quill pen.

As officer in charge of replying to invitations, the need to get hold of a photo and reply to the wedding invitation had been praying on my mind, but not being photographically minded, the last time we had friends around we completely forgot to ask whether they minded taking a quick snap.  Since then I have been reminding (or nagging, depending on your point of view) the SA about it, and we had got as far as the SA charging a camera up.  Then the SA had a cold, and looked like death barely warmed up, so the project was deferred again.  Anyway, today was the day.  The SA read up on how the camera timer worked and found a tripod in the spare bedroom wardrobe and I began to get quite excited that this was all very high tech, then the SA could not find the bit that is supposed to fit on top of the tripod to hold the camera, so we had to balance it on a wall and hope it wouldn't blow off.  Today was a grey day, and it took a lot of manipulation on photoshop to get us looking like two visible human beings, and not amorphous dark blobs.

They didn't tell us what they wanted the photos for, so we wimped out and are standing close together smiling and looking faintly bashful, like two people unaccustomed to being photographed.  I thought it might have been fun to take inspiration from art, and lie head to head on the ground as if it were a record sleeve, or stand side by side bolt upright and looking very serious like Gilbert and George, or hold up bits of cardboard under our chins with our names on, but we have stayed with conventional sheepish grins.  It's probably safer.

They haven't a hope with the favourite dance music.  The SA has never, ever been seen on the dance floor in the thirty-one years we have known each other, and I should be amazed if the habits of a lifetime were broken now, even for our nephew's wedding.

a (whole) day in the garden

Today I had a whole uninterrupted day to spend gardening.  It wasn't a working day.  I didn't have to get ready for a talk, or give a talk.  No dentist's appointment, no optician, no Pilates lesson, no haircut.  No calling around for coffee, or lunch, or tea.  No art galleries or garden visits.  No trip into Colchester to pick something up, or put up posters.  I didn't even go out on garden related errands, like a trip to the dump or to collect more mushroom compost.  It stayed dry so I could stay outside until it got dark.  It was wonderful.  It's not that I want to spend seven days a week gardening, hermit-like, and never see anybody or do anything else.  I should get bored, depressed and knackered.  But once in a while it is extremely nice to be able to get stuck in and put in a full day's work on the garden, at the end of which I feel I have made some progress.

I finished planting the new box cushion by the deck outside the conservatory.  I started last week after picking up some nice little box plants at work, but hadn't done the QS beforehand, and didn't buy enough.  Obviously it isn't a cushion yet, but it will be.  I think in landscape speak it might be foundation planting, a depressing term that conjures up visions of beige coloured support hose.  I am hoping the box will look good, in a sort of modernist garden goes romantic way.  That was a job ticked off the list in good faith.  I couldn't see anything needing doing to complete the initial phase of that project.

I picked up lots of leaves for the leaf bin.  It seems almost like a waste of effort when there are plenty more left to fall, but they rake up and pick out of other plants much better when they are still crisp and solid than when they have gone soft and slimy.  The 'Taihaku' has almost finished dropping its leaves, whereas the wild gean hasn't gone any redder than the last time I mentioned it, which was days ago.  The hazels at the edge of the wood are starting to shed.  Each big bucket of leaves tipped on to the leaf pile gives me a good feeling.  With any luck the Systems Administrator will have another go with the leaf vac later in the week.  Apparently if the leaves are wet the machine sprays water over the operator's legs and is not so fun to use.  Given how heavy the dew is at this time of the year, not to mention the risk of showers, a leaf vac that only works comfortably on dry leaves seems to me to incorporate a fundamental design error.

I started cutting back the brambles at the end of the wood, which have grown up since we cut the Rhododendron ponticum down last winter, admitting light, which favours brambles.  This is preparatory to starting to pickaxe out the rhododendron roots.  Fired up by my success removing the hebes, I thought I could tackle them one at a time between other jobs, and so keep a balance between the big renovation projects that need doing, and the more genteel tidying up tasks.  One of the Writtle tutors said that garden restoration was a sign of failed maintenance in the past, which is true, but only up to a point.  Shrubs do succumb to old age or adverse weather conditions, and areas of planting that worked well for years cease to do so.  We never actually planted the rhododendrons.  We inherited some from the previous owners, and some of those must have reverted to the ponticum rootstock and then seeded themselves.  It is true that we should not have allowed them to do that, but we did have many other things to worry about as well at the time.  We will be left with one large one with deep red flowers, which I like very much, not sharing the current prejudice among chic designers against rhododendrons.  I wish I knew its name.

The other reason for wanting to clear out at least some of the rhododendron stumps is to make space to plant my Michelia doltsopa 'Silver Cloud' into the ground.  It is still in its pot, and has been much happier since being moved out of the conservatory, but I don't want it in a pot outdoors over the winter.  It may not prove winter hardy, which will be a shame, but it could be fine.  The boss says they are hardier than people give them credit.  It was going to die of red spider mite under glass, so it and  I have nothing to lose by trying.  If I manage to clear out several stumps I would have room for one of the lovely Oemleria cerasiformis we have at work at the moment.

I finished trimming the lawn around the slabs set in the grass.  That was a relatively lightweight tidying up job, but makes things look much sharper.  While I was at it I had another go at 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', which was once again trying to grow out across the steps to the lower garden, and trimmed some low branches from the birches and zelkova in the lower part of the garden, so that tall people can walk around it without ducking.  I'm short myself, so they didn't bother me, but I thought it would be nice for the SA, and any full size visitors, and actually having your entire garden designed for the convenience of people who are only 1.6m tall does give it a slightly hobbit-like air.

out with the hebe, in with the box

I'd been thinking that I'd better take a break from wafting around picking up leaves with my fingertips and cutting down herbaceous stems, and tackle one of the more strenuous jobs removing the remains of deceased (or mostly deceased) shrubs, so today I dug out the hebes from by the deck in front of the conservatory.  There were five of them, and they came out not exactly easily but with less difficulty than I was expecting, revealing the fact that they didn't have very good root systems.  There is a band of vile, heavy clay across the middle part of the back garden, partly because the clay does rise near to the surface in places here, but exacerbated by the landscaping done by the previous owners.  The chap who built the house was a farmer, so he must have heard of topsoil, but he and his wife don't seem to have been keen gardeners, and didn't consider that it mattered in a domestic setting.  The garden below the house was sliced off to form a level terrace, and laid entirely to grass.  When I began to lift the turf to make beds, I discovered that it sat directly on yellow clay.

The hebes had put up quite a good fight, all things considered.  They like decent drainage, but if you are going to plant them directly into clay subsoil leavened with some organic material, you are most likely to get away with it in a garden in the lowest rainfall area of the UK.  I wouldn't try it in Wales, or Cumbria.  These hebes remained fully clothed with leaves, and made tight, attractive mounds for several years, but began to fall apart, as hebes do, which was made worse by the snow.  I cut them down hard when the Systems Administrator rebuilt the deck, to get them out of the way, and they responded with some regrowth, but not enough to have any chance of looking even halfway decent again.

Work got off to a slow start because I couldn't find the pickaxe.  I looked in the pot shed where I keep the gardening tools not in current use, and couldn't see it where I thought it ought to be, so I looked in the long flowerbed, which was where I last remembered using it.  Then I looked by the bog bed, though I was fairly sure I'd had it since then.  Then I looked in the garage in case I'd tidied it away in there.  Then I looked again in the pot shed and found it where it ought to be, nestled down among the spare spades and forks, hidden behind a large flowerpot.

When I originally planted the hebes I'd put landscape fabric around them, to try and suppress the horsetail.  This was only partially successful, and the hebes had sent roots out over the top of the fabric, presumably using the debris of their own fallen leaves as soil, and telling me what they thought about clay subsoil.  The landscape fabric was by no means pickaxe resistant, but did get in the way, and I had to cut bits out with scissors as I went,  To extract the rootballs I swung the broad end of the pickaxe down towards the edge of the base of each plant, leant on it to lever the roots up as much as I could, and repeated, working my way round the rootball several times, until it broke free of the ground,  I had to be careful not to hit the deck, which took a long time to build and is an object of some pride on the S.A.'s part.

As I said, the root plates levered up, not easily, but more easily than a healthy hebe should.  By the time it got too dark to see what I was doing (at ten past four, for Pete's sake) I'd dug over the bed once, removing roots (to go to the dump), stones (to add to the path by the dustbins) and assorted bricks and bits of glass and rubble.  The hebes had been mulched with a decorative layer of gravel on top of the landscape fabric, so that got dug in, and the next job will be to dig the bed over again, incorporating mushroom compost.  Then I will plant some nice young box plants that I picked up at work yesterday, which will in due course be pruned in some artistic way I have not yet decided.  Probably informal undulations, since I'm not very good at sharp geometry.  Then that will be good for the rest of my gardening career, unless it gets box blight.

It was an incredibly grey day, and mostly alternated between very fine drizzle and something you might have just dignified with the title of rain.  Not enough to do the ground (still dry when you go down more than a few centimetres) any good at all, but enough to turn the soil surface to a slick, that stuck to my tools, gloves and clothes.  In the field the poor Lithuanians were harvesting lettuces.

starting to dig

I went to see if the wire I renewed on Tuesday was still there, and it hasn't been torn down by militant wildlife yet.  So far, so good.

I spent most of the day digging over the area where the Hebe salicifolia used to be.  This is one case where my normal no-dig policy doesn't apply, as the ground is full of hebe roots, a creeping weed grass species that's got in there, self-seeded geraniums, Muscari and other small bulbs, and the roots of the ivy hedge that surrounds the bed.  The ivy is a mixed blessing.  The bed when first planted didn't have a hedge, or anything else, surrounding it, but the rabbits ate so many plants I realised that wire netting was a must.  This did the job of keeping the rabbits out, but looked hideous itself.  The solution seemed to be to hide it inside a hedge, but I balked at the cost of buying that much box and the ongoing labour of clipping it, so I settled on ivy.  The ivy was terribly slow to get going, which was partly because ivy generally takes a season to settle, and partly because the soil was so terrible that everything took a long time to start moving.  It did eventually grow, and continues to do so.  The downside is that it wants to run out across the surrounding soil as much as it wants to climb, and cutting back ivy running and rooting into the ground is probably as big a job as trimming a box hedge would be.  The bed is long although relatively narrow, curving around the side of the drive, so although I haven't measured it (I suppose I must have done when I ordered the ivy but have since forgotten the answer) I guess it is at least 30m all the way round.  That's an awful lot of cutting back, which has to be done several times a year.  When clipped it looks rather fun, in a quirky way, bulging gently like a cloud-pruned hedge, and bits of it have now matured and want to flower, which adds character.  In fact I like the look of it.  But it is a lot of work.  I smile inwardly when I hear Bunny Guinness advocating ivy on wire netting as a good narrow evergreen hedge, and wonder if she has ever tried maintaining one.  The ivy roots do go out a considerable way from the hedge, and are sucking water and nutrition from the already poor soil.  I dug quite a lot out to give the new planting a sporting chance.  I don't want to kill the hedge, but previous attempts at eradicating ivy have made me think it doesn't give up that easily.  Running roots are one drawback of hedges.  Privet is the notorious species, but yew roots are dense and far-travelling too.

I often listen to the radio while gardening, especially for maintenance tasks like weeding.  For setting out new planting and tricky bits of pruning it is too distracting, like having the radio on in the car while trying to do a difficult stretch of navigation.  One of the advantages of the next door neighbours being a two minute walk down the lane is that I can listen on a proper radio, instead of earphones, which I detest wearing, and there is always a catastrophe at some point with the cord between the radio and the headphones.  This does mean that bits of the garden get associated with particular events on the news, or a piece of music, or a play.  I'll now be associating the middle of the long bed with the Japanese nuclear power station emergency, and the row about the possible Libyan no-fly zone.  That bit of border must have a strange resonance with world events, as it is also associated with the BBC's wall to wall coverage of the death of Princess Diana.

I heard from my Japanese gardening friend, who told me that she was extremely safe, and they must now think how to help the victims of the earthquake and tsunami.  I greatly admire her fortitude.