the thorn beneath the rose

When I came downstairs this morning I discovered that one of the cats had been sick in the hall, and that the chicken's water was running out.  I cleared up the hall floor and refilled the galvanised drinker, but it was a bit of a scramble getting off to work, what with making my packed lunch, filling up the bird table and collecting the eggs (one egg, very small.  The mad old bat ancient lady chicken has decided that anything more than a pullet sized egg is too much for her nowadays, which is fair enough).

It was an absolutely beautiful morning, still and sunny.  The compost in most pots was still damp from the rain, but I ran the overhead irrigation in the shade tunnel for a few minutes, as the hydrangeas and rhododendrons are so leafy and dry out quickly.  The sun caught the fine spray of water and made the tunnel look like a scene from a tropical forest, and I thought how much more pleasant it was to be standing in a Victorian walled garden looking at a sunlit mist of water and listening to birdsong on a Monday morning than to be sitting in an office looking at a screen and worrying about the latest unfolding of the Greek debt tragedy.

The dog has been fitted with a little tinkly bell on her collar, in the latest battle against her urge to explore and abscond.  As the gardener and I were eating our lunch in the staffroom we heard a tiny metallic sound.  I opened the door and in came the dog, who knows that there is food in the tennis hut, besides being a sociable creature.  I called the boss on the radio to say that we had got the dog, and presently the woman who works in the office came to collect her.  (Staffroom makes it sound rather grand.  We call it the tennis hut because it was used to store tennis gear in the days when there was a tennis court on what is now the car park, but it was originally built as a cart shed.  You can tell this from the wide lintel over the bricked-up former door, before it was fitted with a bijou Edwardian porch.  That and the fact that the brick floor appears to have been laid directly on to the earth).

I was allowed to redo a couple of display tables, and enjoyed a mini-Oudolf moment with Stipa gigantea, Perovskia and Agapanthus, shading off into white hydrangeas and hostas.  I removed some ginger-brown Heuchera that were arguing with some pink flowers I think they were intended to complement, and put them around some terracotta balls with star shaped holes pierced in them, where they looked much more harmonious.  Somebody actually bought one, though as she bought several other Heuchera as well this may have down to prior intention, and not my finely honed merchandising abilities.

After lunch I volunteered to stake and tie in the climbing roses, as I knew that this was on the manager's list of things to do.  He seemed incredulous, and pathetically grateful, that anybody had actually offered to do this job without having to be cajoled into it.  Staking roses isn't so bad.  We use 3 foot canes (garden canes are still not metric.  Don't know why) and any whippy bits of growth that are long enough to be tied to the cane are attached with green tape using a tie-gun.  I don't begin to understand how a tie-gun works, and they are temperamental bits of kit that don't always work anyway.  You squeeze a handle, and two arms come together and jaws on one arm grab the end of the green tape that is fed down the other arm from a spool.  You release the handle and the jaws open, pulling out a length of tape.  You press the tape against whatever you are trying to tie up, in this case one or more rose stems to a cane.  You squeeze the handle again and the jaws close, staple the tape into a loop around the stems, and cut it.  Periodically you run out of tape, or you run out of staples, or the tape jams, or breaks, or piles up in multiple folds in the stapler and fails to cut through.  A customer who was once watching me coaxing a tie-gun into working said that he would have thrown it across the room several minutes previously, and that I must have the patience of a saint.  I don't, though there are times when it would be useful.

I suppose my colleagues don't like tying in the roses because of the tie-gun, and because the roses are prickly, but I only got slightly scratched.  One branch pricked me on the face, a tiny scratch that at home I would have ignored, but it bled for ages and I didn't think I could go on working in the plant centre with smears of blood on my cheek, so had to go and staunch the flow in private with a paper towel until it suddenly stopped.  Another rose caught me in the thumb as I was setting the pot down, quite deep.  That hurt for a minute and I went and found a plaster for it, before I could get compost in the cut.  But as ways of amassing brownie points go, tying in roses isn't too bad, and it probably made up for the fact that I had completely failed to grasp what I was supposed to be doing with the new guide to the gardens, which I should have finished ages ago.

growing roses up trees

I said I would return to the subject of roses grown up trees.  'Paul's Himalayan Musk' is currently in full bloom, so this seems the time.  'Paul's Himalayan Musk' is a rambler, with big clusters of small, soft pink flowers, normally coming out around the first week of June, but like most of the other roses it's early this year.  It is gently scented, though the smell is rather overpowered by a honeysuckle nearby.  The plant is extremely vigorous, and thorny.

The books are very precise in their instructions on how to grow roses up trees.  We are told not to plant them too close to the trunk, where the ground will be very dry and rooty, but to plant them towards the edge of the canopy and lead them to the trunk along a cane or rope.  I have seen an old anchor chain used for this purpose in a garden in St. Osyth, which seemed a clever bit of recycling in a coastal area, and made a very nice catenary curve.  I don't mind that bit of the instructions.  The bit that bugs me is the received wisdom that we should plant the rose on the downwind side of the tree, so that the prevailing wind will blow it into the crown.

'Paul's Himalayan Musk' is planted to the east of the wild gean it is supposed to be growing up, because that's where there was space for the roots.  Prevailing winds in the UK are from the southwest, but if it had been to the southwest of the tree it would have been in the lawn.  The sun rises in the east, moves round through the south, and sets in the west.  The rose wants to reach out to the light, and this far outweighs any effect a bit of wind, or even the odd gale, has on its habit of growth.  It sends great long tentacles of growth out to the south, the east, and anywhere except the dark interior of the tree.  I really don't think the wind makes a smidgin of difference.  In fact I don't think the rose is particularly interested in going up the tree.  It would be perfectly happy just taking off across the lawn.

The effect of a large pink rose in a tree is pretty and extremely romantic, seen from a distance, as shown in these photos taken from the top lawn and the bottom lawn.  Encountered close up it is less romantic, as anyone getting within a couple of metres of it is likely to be clawed by one of the tentacles, and they are rampaging through the collection of potted Hamamelis and the recycled metal secretary bird.  When I looked out of the bathroom window this morning I had a moment of panic that the bird's head appeared to have fallen off, before realising that it had merely been engulfed by rose foliage.  The exuberant new growth is blocking the steps between the top and bottom lawns, which in my book is a no-no.  Good circulation is essential for any garden, besides which I need to get the hose up and down those steps.

After I'd taken the pictures, I twirled as many wandering stems as possible into the tree.  A couple broke in the process, and some unstuck themselves again, but some will catch with their prickles and consent to grow into the cherry.  There were a couple I couldn't reach, so I'll have a go at them later with a boathook we once bought in a second hand shop in a fit of retail excitement, and that now comes in useful for rose training.  The stems I couldn't persuade to grow into the tree were cut off, so the steps are just passable.  I'll take a bit more off once flowering has finished.  The steps were quite clear at the end of winter, which shows how much growth a rambler rose makes in a couple of months.

I love roses up trees, but they do seem to take a bit more organising than you would guess, looking at the tidy diagrams in the books.

working among the roses

The volume of trade is starting to ease at the plant centre.  I expect the dry weather has something to do with it, and I think the first exultant rush of glee that winter has finally gone and spring is on its way has worn off.  I had time to make good progress putting the latest delivery of roses out for sale, trimming back any dieback and tidying the existing rows while I was about it.  The rose grower doesn't bother pruning each stem to just above a node, but chops the plants off at one height, so the stem ends die above the highest node.  I suppose this is quicker for the grower, and means that they can use unskilled staff.

There was some much-trumpeted research a few years back that demonstrated that roses pruned with a chainsaw were as floriferous as those conventionally hand pruned to a growth bud.  However, whether or not the roses need their dead snags removing, the manager likes it done to make them look tidy, and I agree.  In my own garden I am a stickler for pruning to a growth point, and not leaving useless ends of stems sticking out at random.  With roses this doesn't always protect against dieback.  Our cluster-flowered roses were carefully pruned to outward facing buds by me, using the trusty Felcos, but still have some dieback, where the plant has decided to dispense with that stem or bit of a stem and just make a new one.  I like listening to music while pruning.  Anything too up-tempo is distracting, but the piano music of Eric Satie is just about perfect.  It has a wistful quality that matches one's mood as one decides which bits to take out, and which to retain.

spring is almost sprung

Spring seems to have almost, but not quite, arrived.  The boss was grumbling that the peacocks begin screaming at four in the morning, so they believe it's spring.  I've seen a few queen bumble bees about in the last few days, and some foraging honey bees on the flowers at work and in the garden at home, but they still aren't out in force.  I've been feeding mine for the past couple of weeks, as I was worried that winter had lasted for such a long time they might be running out of supplies, and they've only had one decent day when they were really flying in numbers to replenish their stores naturally.  I'm down to one tee shirt under my uniform shirt and fleece, but I'm not swopping the fleece trousers for the cotton water repellent ones just yet.  I did take my hat off for a bit.

The customers believe it's spring.  Today was the busiest I've seen yet.  In between helping people look for plants, and doing my stint on the till, I put labels on a lot of roses.  The way to avoid scratching yourself handling roses is to move slowly and carefully (rather like handling bees) but even so by the end of it I'd added to the network of light scratches on my hand and wrist collected pruning the roses at home.  Some of the roses had customers waiting for them to come into stock, some dating practically a year back.  It takes a certain nerve to ring up a list of strangers and explain that the rose they were asking for last April has finally arrived.  If they still want it, naturally.  An amazing proportion of them do still want the rose.  I don't know why they didn't just order them bare root from a rose grower last November.  Some people clearly don't like doing that.  Still, it helps our turnover.

There was another tale of damaged bay trees, this time twenty standards, a painful loss for anybody.  The bark is peeling off their trunks, so it sounds as though the top growth really has had it.  They will probably regrow from ground level, but the customer wants standards.  I thought she should maybe have put pipe lagging round the trunks for the winter when she saw it was turning into a really nasty one, but it seemed tactless to say so now.

The local authority is mending the potholes on the route to work with glacial slowness.  A really nasty one on the main road has finally been filled in, but the back lane I use to cut across country has some huge and evil holes.

into the rose garden

Having gone to all that trouble to get the mushroom compost with the firm intention of getting on with the border in the front garden where I removed the hebe, I ended up spending today working on a completely different bed in the back garden.  This started because it was suggested that I needed to do something about the roses that were hanging out over the lawn in preparation for the first cut of the season.  It was true, they did need sorting out.  A couple right at the front are supported by iron hoops (very nice but made by a company whose prices subsequently went so high they departed into footballers' and bankers' territory, and I haven't bought any more.  Pity).  Unfortunately I planted the roses first then retro-fitted the hoops to try and stop them flopping over the lawn, and as they are old roses I didn't like to cut them down to stumps to fit the hoops.  The result is that the legs of the hoops are not buried so deep as they should be and so they are not awfully stable, and lean over in the same direction as the roses.  We solved the problem pro-tem with a wooden peg and wire guy ropes.

Lawn cutting apart, it is just the right time to finish tidying up the old roses.  The buds are breaking, the new stems are glowing a reassuring shade of green, and it is very clear which bits of the plant are dead and can be removed.  But then it also turned out to be just the right time to weed and mulch the bed the roses are in.  The back garden slopes downhill from the house, and the people before us, who built the house, had this terraced at some point (not very competently as their builder buried the access to key parts of the septic tank system.  We discovered this when a blockage occured, and the drains engineer, who was a very cheerful Irishman and appeared to truly like drains, told us that there had to be another manhole cover uphill of the one we knew about.  There was.  It took a lot of digging to find it).  The terracing had the effect of exposing the clay subsoil, so the roses live in ugly yellow gunk, slightly improved by adding organic material, that turns to wet slime in winter and sets like concrete in summer.  In between there is a brief period when it is quite pleasant to work, and possible to weed.  That period is now, as there hasn't been any rain for several days and it's been windy which has dried the surface out.  So I have been weeding and mulching like mad, in between snipping dead bits off the roses.  Some of them, including 'Madame Hardy' and 'de Rescht' have the annoying habit that they neither form hips nor drop their old flowers, so require laborious dead-heading.  I suppose it is only once a year, and it is about the only attention they get, but it is a fiddly job.

After weeding I sprinkle around each plant with blood, fish and bone, and 6X.  The latter is a composted chicken manure based fertiliser which has been around for donkey's years.  My late father-in-law swore by it, and called it stinkies, a name that has stuck.  It does smell as though it ought to be doing the plants a world of good.  The mulch is a more recent product, brand name of Strulch.  It is made of chopped straw, treated with minerals so that it takes a good couple of years to rot down fully, and was developed by a scientist at the University of Bradford.  It comes in plastic bags, smells a bit strange when first opened, but shakes down around the emerging foliage of the bulbs and violets quite nicely.  You apply it about 5cm deep, and then water it, at which point it goes dark brown in colour and sticks together pretty well so the wind doesn't dislodge it.  I first read about it in a newspaper article by Bunny Guinness, who was very enthusiastic, and I thought she wasn't going to lend her name to any old tat and it could be worth a try, so I tried it.  I found it very effective in stopping annual weed seeds germinating, and thought it looked OK, so when the first lot ran out I bought some more.  I've seen it being trialled at Ness Botanic Garden, and the bags say 'as used at the Eden project'.  It is available from shops like Crocus, but it is far cheaper per bag to go direct to the manufacturer and buy a pallet.  The bags do leak a bit in the rain, and then the Strulch goes lumpy in the bag, so ideally they would be stored under cover, but I don't have anywhere under cover.  The main disadvantage we've found is that it sticks as if by magic to one of our cats.  Just the one, the grey tabby.  I don't know if that's because of her particular fur, which is very finely crimped and always has a static charge, or if it's just that she likes rolling in the stuff, prior to coming and shedding Strulch around the kitchen.  Anyway, for anybody who would like to give Strulch a go you will find them here.