a dry day in the garden (blimey)

Our Ginger caught a squirrel this morning.  He came stomping around the side of the house with the body in his jaws, looking as if he had captured the squirrel himself, rather than nicking it from the big tabby.  I put a box in front of the cat door so that he couldn't take it into the house, and he ate the head outside the front door.  He'll never lose weight if he goes eating squirrels between meals.

I did a garden talk last night, up in the Suffolk Sandlings.  The Orwell Bridge and A12 were clear, and the instructions on how to find the hall, which looked on the map as though it might be going to be difficult, turned out to be accurate and helpful, corresponding to the sort of detail on the ground that you can spot when driving by yourself at main road speeds, so it was an easy trip up there, and I had time to run through my talk in my head sitting in the car park, and look at the swallows perching on the telephone wires.  It is lovely countryside up beyond Woodbridge, and it was a fine evening, the light having the sort of fierce clarity that you get as you approach the North Sea on a sunny day.  Among the conifer plantations are little patches of broadleaf woodland, at this time of the year vivid with bluebells.

The audience seemed to like the talk, although what some of the ladies really wanted to know was where I got my sweater.  They were a little disappointed to learn that it was at least twelve years old, though the company I bought it from is still going, so they could have one if they wanted to, albeit not to the same design.  My vintage one is in a cheerful pattern of smallish squares in rich earth colours, which reminds me of a small Paul Klee painting I once saw, but might remind some other people of a Channel 4 garden show presenter circa 1998.  It is made out of alpaca, an excellent and hard wearing wool that doesn't pill and is a much better bargain than cashmere, looking nicely worn in after twelve years.

The instructions on how to find the hall warned me sternly to beware of deer in the forest, and I saw one on the way home, lurking in the verge.  Despite having read The Yearling at an impressionable age I'm not a great fan of deer.  I don't wish them individual suffering, and I know that in the right numbers they have their place in England's ecosystem, but I can't shake off their associations as destroyers of trees and gardens.  I can't perceive grey squirrels as cute for the same reason, hence my instant reaction on seeing Our Ginger this morning was not 'poor squirrel' but 'bother, the cat's found something to eat'.

In theory I now have the rest of the week to get on with working in the garden.  I don't have anything booked, and the forecast is for it to remain dry.  I spent today weeding the island bed, where great patches of weeds ran away from me in the wet weather before I could tackle them small and get the Strulch down.  After two late nights on the trot I felt slightly tired, and conscious that I must take particular care not to poke myself in the eye on the low branches of the Judas tree.  Fatigue breeds clumsiness, and pessimism, and I had a vague conviction all day that it couldn't last, and that presently it would start to rain, or I would stab myself on a plant and spend half tomorrow morning at the walk-in medical centre, or the phone would ring and I would have to leave the garden and go and do something else instead, but none of these things happened.

back in the gunnera bed

I had been thinking of going up to London today, to catch the polar expedition photos at the Royal Gallery before they end, and the Zoffany exhibition at the RA, and maybe finish up with the RHS show in Vincent Square, which didn’t shut until 7pm and would have seen me through until after the watershed for the cheap trains.  Yesterday when it was so grey and cold that seemed like a good plan.  This morning, with the sun shining enticingly on the garden and ‘Taihaku’ glowing in all its snowy glory, it seemed a less attractive way to spend the day.  When I discovered I’d lost the stamped ticket from my previous trip to the Royal Gallery, that would have let me in free today, I gave up on the whole plan, and decided to push on with clearing the gunnera bed instead.  (There is no gunnera in the gunnera bed at the moment.  It died.  I have a rather sorry looking little replacement in a pot in the greenhouse that needs planting out).

'Taihaku' turned out to be absolutely humming with bees working the flowers, and as I admired it against a blue sky I was glad I'd taken the time to look at it.  By lunchtime I’d almost cleared the nettles from the area where the new deck is supposed to go, so I told the Systems Administrator that it was virtually ready, and that soon after lunch I’d be ready to hand the site over, suggesting hopefully that work could start tomorrow, or even this afternoon.  So far the position of the deck is marked by four alder posts out of the wood banged into the ground.  Alder is supposed to be resistant to rot when in contact with wet soil, and we are going to test this empirically by using it for the deck uprights.  The SA came and measured the distance apart of the posts, remarked that they were not square but it didn’t matter, and disappeared into the workshop.  I heard the sound of a circular saw, but no further progress materialised on the ground.

I advanced up the bed, digging out nettle roots and chiselling away at more of the yellow bamboo.  Parts of the bed have water lying on the surface despite the drought, other parts are stickily damp, and patches are quite dry.  I think the original clump of Phyllostachys nigra died of excessive water at the root, since while bamboo likes reliable moisture, it is not a bog plant.  It managed to spread before dying, so there is some black bamboo growing on drier ground, though not nearly so much as there is of the yellow sort.  I got the two rolls of galvanised lawn edging back out of the garage, as I am determined to keep going this time until I’ve got the yellow monster contained.

The nettle roots have unfortunately worked in between the roots of the tree that isn’t a swamp cypress in places, which has meant I have caused some damage to the tree in the course of extracting the nettles.  They have run into the bamboo a little, but haven’t yet had time to delve deep, and I think I’m managing to pull most of them out.  I discovered the red leaves of an ornamental rhubarb emerging from one especially prominent lump of nettle roots, so it’s a stroke of luck I didn’t get round to removing them earlier in the season, when the rhubarb was dormant and I might not have realised what it was.

The tree that isn’t a swamp cypress was bought and planted under the impression that it was one, and referred to as The swamp cypress for years.  However, as I looked at it, and at trees in public gardens that had labels on them, and young trees for sale at work, I became more and more convinced that it was not a swamp cypress, Taxodium distichum, at all, but a Metasequoia glyptostroboides, or dawn redwood.  I haven’t found telling the two apart as cut and dried as the tree books make it sound it ought to be.  The arrangement of the leaves is supposed to be the clincher, opposite pairs in the case of the redwood, alternate for the swamp cypress, but labelled trees I looked at in public gardens, and our tree, seemed to exhibit both, and the length of the leaves also seemed intermediate between the two descriptions.  Our tree developed a marked flare at the base of the trunk, said to be characteristic of Metasequoia, but Taxodium sometimes does that too.  Deciding whether the bark was spongier and redder than that of a different species without being able to compare the two side by side was tricky.  Every time we visited a garden that had either, or both, I rushed up to them, checked whether they were labelled, and examined for diagnostic clues, but there seemed to be a wide range of different forms across both species.  However, our tree does look more and more like a Metasequoia, and so has come to be called The tree that isn’t a swamp cypress.   I don’t especially mind it being a dawn redwood, since it is a good looking tree, and the story of how they came into cultivation in the west is quite romantic.  They were known from fossil records, and thought to be extinct, until a small colony was found growing in China in 1943, and identified as the extinct tree in 1948.  The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University collected seed, and the species entered western cultivation.  It is critically endangered in the wild, so it’s just as well there are specimens scattered over the gardens of the western world.  According to my Collins Tree Guide it roots very easily from cuttings, though I haven’t tried.  One giant conifer is enough for the garden.

At twenty to six there was a clap of thunder, and it began to rain, suddenly and quite hard.  I put my tools back in the garage, and asked the SA through the front door whether the rain had driven the chickens in, or whether the SA was stuck in the porch.  The letterbox flap opened, and the SA looked at me through the slot.  ‘They haven’t gone to bed.  I think they’re in your greenhouse’.  The next thunderclap was almost instantaneous with the lightning, and tripped the switch on the fusebox.  From the porch the SA could smell the ozone off the strike.  Then the storm passed, and the chickens went to bed.

dreams of tender beauties

It might have been a tad ambitious, doing all that raking yesterday.  It felt OK at the time, which goes to show how much you can do when you care about the outcome.  I slept late this morning, and woke still feeling exhausted.  Sleeping in is no fun when you have animals, because you realise as soon as you come to that they should have been fed an hour ago, and that the chickens are still locked in a box.  When I did biology at school I was once marked down in an exam answer about how the lung is adapted to its function, because I had not explicitly said that it was hollow.  I'd mentioned the alveoli, and how they increase the surface area of the lung to facilitate oxygen exchange with the blood, but I hadn't actually said 'the lung is hollow'.  I suppose that I assumed that as a given, otherwise where would I start?  The lung is alive.  The lung is compatible with the immune system of the rest of the organism.  Or maybe I took the lung's hollowness as being implied by the rest of my answer.  Anyway, I dropped a point or two.  Today felt as though my lungs were not as hollow as they should have been, and it was tiring.

I weeded the gravel, as being a gentle task, not involving great physical effort, and worth doing before the bulbs come through any more than they have.  The shrubs in the Italian garden are still looking good.  It's the twelfth of January today, nearly half way through the month, and no really cold snap is forecast at the moment.  Anything could still happen between now and March, but it seems possible that we might get through to spring without a hard freezing spell to wreck them.  That would be a great boon.

I've got a replacement Teucrium fruticans 'Azureum' sitting in its pot in the greenhouse, waiting until March to plant it out, just in case.  I'd like a small leaved myrtle in the Italian garden, and I might risk an Acca sellowiana.  This is what used to be known as Feijoa,and its common name is pineapple guava.  It has grey leaves, and red bottle-brush flowers.  It is reckoned to be hardy outdoors only in the milder regions, so I tried one tucked in between other shrubs in the long bed, and it amazed me by surviving the past two winters, which certainly weren't mild.  However, it is so hemmed in by its sheltering neighbours I'm not sure it will come to much, so I thought about risking one in the Italian garden, and giving it a bit more elbow room.

I'd like an Erythrina crista-galli as well.  This is a magnificent shrub, and really is tender.  The only good one I've seen was tucked into the corner of two walls at (I think) Wakehurst Place, with a heat-reflecting stone terrace in front of it.  It has grey leaves,ferocious spines, and huge red claw shaped flowers in late summer or autumn.  Its common name is the coral tree or cock's comb.  Probably our front garden is not warm enough.  But the drainage is superb, and Wakehurst Place must get quite parky in the winter, and Erythrina is deciduous, with the ability to behave herbaceously and throw new shoots from ground level, so it might not mind the cutting winter winds too much.  Chiltern Seeds are offering seed again this year.  I grew some once before, but attempted to keep the plants in pots, and found them difficult.  We've lost stock over the winter at work before now, and when I went to an RHS study day some years ago on the subject of growing Mediterranean climate plants in the UK, I took the chance of asking Wolfgang Bopp how I should look after it (he was curator of the Welsh Botanic Gardens, then head-hunted by the Harold Hillier Gardens, where as far I can tell he still is, and is as big a cheese as you will find to ask about the cultivation of Erythrina crista-galli).  He said it was difficult in a pot.  It needed to be dry in winter but wet and well-fed in summer with a generous root run, so ideally not in a pot.  It's tempting to try again.  I have nothing to lose except the cost of a packet of seed, and a little time.  I could buy one, if we get them again at work, but I'd sooner start from scratch.

And that was it.  You will notice that most of today's gardening took place in my head, but that's the way with gardening.  The R3 composer of the week was Couperin, which was nice.  

the wrong time to move iris

Yesterday's wind blew the camellia pots over, and ripped the staples holding the feet of the Zimbabwean recycled metal secretary bird clean out of the deck.  By this morning it had dropped, and I decided my cold didn't feel too bad, and I might as well get on in the garden.  This may have been a very silly decision, given that the temperature was below 8 degrees C at lunchtime, and there was still a brisk breeze.  If by tomorrow I am a lot worse I will have to blame myself for not taking more care, but I was very well wrapped up.  I generally take the view that if I feel like gardening, I'm OK to garden, and if I don't feel up to it, I'll stay inside by the stove and not force myself.  That is the luxury of doing gardening as a hobby rather than a job, and solely for your own private pleasure.  I don't have a Yellow Book opening date to meet, or an Open Gardens Weekend in six months' time to worry about, and I'm not trying to impress the neighbours.  In fact, I am reconciled to the fact that the garden will always be wild and weedy.  I have about three days a week maximum to devote to it, given everything else.  The Systems Administrator mows the lawns and weighs in with heavy pruning and construction projects, and bonfires, but doesn't get involved with the plants.  In all it gets four person days a week, tops, and it could easily do with double that, given its size and complexity.

I am still working my way down the long bed in the front garden.  The leaves of some of the grape hyacinths are showing in great tufts, and I tucked mushroom compost carefully around them.  I started replanting the bearded iris.  Early January is quite the wrong time to do this.  The books say July is the optimum time, after flowering, or that it may be done in March but will affect that year's flowering, but I decided to dig them up anyway.  In the first place, they were mixed up with the roots of that wretched running grass, and the only way to get the bed clean was to lift them, and I didn't want to leave odd weedy patches until July, or even March.  Secondly , I think beared iris are pretty tough.  Whenever I've divided them there have always been bits left over, and the scrappy rhizomes thrown on the compost heap, not even planted, cling to life for an extremely long time.  Also, the soil can't be that cold.  It has been a very mild winter, and we've scarcely had any penetrating frosts.  Finally, the drainage in that bed is so sharp I reckon I can get away with a lot when it comes to rhizomes.  If they all die, I'll have learnt something, and so will you, if I confess to it on the blog.  I'll have to get some more, or else decide that two to three weeks of sublime flowers and nothing else for the rest of the year is not a good use of the space, and plant something else.

As I weeded I collected the stones I forked up.  Irregular ones go on the path by the dustbins, which is making steady progress, and it no longer seems a ludicrous idea that I might collect enough stones to cover it completely.  Round pebbles go in the middle of the turning circle, at the end loosely themed as beach.  Flints go in the dry garden by the entrance, which I have decided needs to be much flintier.  I know I have a cache of flints nestling under a hedge, where I put them after digging them up in the course of laying some paving, so I must go and retrieve some more of them.  I found a beautiful very large one in the root plate of a tree that fell years ago in the wood, though sadly it has some chips.  My cousin who is a retired geologist has a fine one, and so had a farmer I knew, which I think he found ploughing, so it seems to be a widespread interest.  Henry Moore collected them.

I had a very nice day.  I don't know how to explain that to anyone who is not themselves a keen gardener, since objectively speaking it ought to be miserable, forking roots out of wretched poor soil and spreading handfuls of wet and smelly straw and manure over it, on a cold windy  day, stopping sometimes to stoop and pick up stones, with a chest cold.  If it weren't my own garden and I'd been doing it as a job I'd have been counting the hours until it was time to pack up.  And yet it is largely the process that I enjoy, since the product will never be perfect, or finished.  It is a project.  An idea.  A dream.  It is how I play.

in the teeth of the gale

Today I got on with weeding the bed on the way in to the garden, which is what I was doing yesterday.  I've never really got the planting in this corner to work.  When I started off I planted a couple of crab apples, wanting to link the edge of the garden visually to the residual apple orchard beyond.  I still believe it can help anchor a garden in its landscape to copy or echo plants from the broader view inside the garden.  Around them I planted epimediums and Vinca minor and other shade tolerant ground cover plants, having an idea of a little woodland planting.  I had overlooked the fact that until the trees grew the bed was nothing like a woodland, but sunny, windy, and with thin, sandy soil quite unlike the leaf mould enriched earth found in woodland.  Then rabbits ate the bark of one of the trees one cold winter, and I had to start again with a new tree.

The bed is backed by a mixed field hedge, which we had planted when we moved in.  It was a condition of the sale that we would mark our boundary within three months.  The hedge is a useful hiding place for birds, and breaks the force of the wind a little, but sends questing roots out far into the bed, making the problem of the dry, thin soil even worse.  I experimented with Phormium and dahlias, thinking that it would be fun as you drove in through the entrance to be greeted by a blaze of colour, and know that you had arrived, but it was too dry for the dahlias, and the Phormium weren't a great success either.  The group of three 'Jester' functioned as snail hotels, and one of them began to revert from drooping and pink stripey to upright, more vigorous and plain green.  I've seen other pink striped Phormium do this, and am now suspicious of them as a breed, though I've never read about it as a widespread problem.  'Jester' was removed, leaving one upright form which is going to have to come out as well, since the drought, rootiness and two cold winters have destroyed whatever charms it ever possessed.

A portugese laurel, Prunus lusitanicus, that the birds brought, is doing well, as is a bird sown holly.  A fine variegated holly that I planted is handsome, but desperately slow growing.  There is a mystery berberis, which I think is the rootstock of a very early planting of B. dictophylla dating from my commuting days.  A Viburmum tinus finds it too dry.  Olearia nummulifolia grows solidly, but incredibly slowly.  The moroccan broom, Cytisus battandieri, is a triumph.  I've fiddled around with bulbs in the past.  Two cold winters put paid to a couple of pittosporums and a restio, and the meagre soil and root competition from the hedge have pretty much finished off a Cornus kousa.  Lonicera tatarica, a shrubby honeysuckle with red flowers, no refinement but a cast iron constitution, battles along.  A colleague with a very dry garden says it does well for her.  A large Weigela florida 'Variegata' does OK, and a Philadelphus.  Due to poor record keeping I am not entirely sure which one.  One Scotch rose did well, as they are supposed to on sand, while the other died.  A yellow berried shrubby ivy was damaged by snow, but the propped up remains are sort of OK, though it isn't luxuriant, and a chunk of the ivy hedge is half dead.  The supposedly tender Ribes speciosa lives on, though on the small side, and a dwarf lilac close to the hedge does surprisingly well, as do a couple of old fashioned peonies.

In summary, it is a dog's dinner.  A mess.  A memorial to unrealistic ideas, changing plans, and general lack of coherent thought.  It is a peripheral part of the garden, in the sense that one isn't going to go and sit by it, but it is part of the garden that everybody who comes in or out sees.  What it needs is some ground covering, weed smothering, possibly evergreen planting, so that it looks like a well-furnished background to the rest of the garden and I don't spend too much time on it.  My current aim is to remove every dead shrub (I didn't mention Hebe 'Great Orme', another martyr to cold) including the roots (oh goody, more work with the pickaxe) and pick out all the weeds I can find.  Then I will apply a thick coat of mushroom compost and a topping of strulch.  Then I'll wait for the roots of grass I missed to reshoot, and zap them with glyphosate.  Next spring I'll replant.  That's the plan.

Today was extremely windy.  One reason for getting on with the entrance bed, apart from the fact that it needs doing and I hadn't touched it so far this autumn, was that I didn't fancy being under any of the trees, in case bits fell off.  It was a cold wind.  I was wearing a cotton vest.  Then two thermal vests designed to be the base layer of a multi-layered outdoor clothing system, one with a polo neck and the other inherited from the Systems Administrator when it got too small.  Then three cotton t-shirts, one with a collar.  Then the new Millets fleece, with a funnel neck.  Also a fleece neck scarf with drawstring top, and fleece hat.  On my lower half I had cotton trousers over thermal leggings.  Customers who (kindly) ask me at work if I don't get cold have no idea how many layers you can wear, and still move.  But it was very, very windy.  The whizzer stopped turning for a while in the middle of the day.  Presumably it had to be turned off, in case it whizzed too vigorously and broke itself.

I went to the dump first thing, and saw a pied wagtail.  I only ever seem to see them on roads and in car parks.  When I was a child I used to see them on the porch roof.  I am convinced they must eat asphalt.

gravel today

I spent today weeding the gravel in the front garden.  It's a gentle task that doesn't involve any very strenuous activity with the left hand (given I am right handed) or the risk of banging my knuckles into anything hard.  There is something satisfying about pulling out the roots of sheeps sorrel.  You curl your fingers under the tuft of leaves, trying to find the long running yellow root, then lift that, seeing how long a piece you can extract in one go, and trying to get it to break leaving a visible end protruding from the soil, so that you can have another bite at the same cherry.

This part of the garden is infested with a fine leaved, clump forming grass.  I don't know what species.  It isn't Poa annua, annual meadow grass, though it is an annual.  There are also patches of a perennial weed grass with a running root, but not couch grass.  The root curls more than couch grass roots.  That one dives deep as well as running near the surface, and buries itself in the bases of shrubs and hedges where it is impossible to dig all of it out, so I should be vigilant with the spot weedkiller in the spring.  I am not very good at the names of weeds, though I can recognise them.  There is another annual, a little yellow flowered member of the pea family, and an annual spurge.  Then various plants spill out of the border which suddenly count as weeds when they seed in the gravel, including Geranium sanguineum and Lychnis coronaria.  Actually, the Lychnis has proved such a smotherer that nowadays I don't want it in the border either.  This just goes to prove that a weed is indeed any plant in the wrong place.

The ivy hedge never recovered over the summer, so I've been pruning the dead branches out.  Bits are still alive, but there are many leafless branches which are now visibly dry and dead.  I was honestly expecting it to shoot again, given how indestructible ivy normally is, but there's been very little regrowth since winter.  I presume it was the winter that killed out patches of it, and that it hasn't had the strength to regrow because the soil is so poor and the rainfall overall has been low.  I'll sprinkle bone meal along the base of it for now, then give it a higher nitrogen boost next spring, and see if that kick-starts it into action.  If it fails to regenerate then maybe it is time to start taking box cuttings.  I liked that ivy hedge.  The variety has smallish, crinkly leaves in a pleasant shade of greyish green, and a graceful, branching growth habit.  I lost track of what cultivar I settled for, which is irritating, but it made a very neat hedge up until last year, and didn't run across the ground as manically as the other hedge in a different (unknown) cultivar does.  Which does suggest it is not an especially strong grower.

There is one seedling which is quite definitely Morina longifolia, so I carefully avoided weeding it out.  I was pleased when I found it, but now I've read John Hoyland's article for the Telegraph I feel a little miffed to have only got the one.  There again, conditions in north Essex are far from those he describes as ideal for Morina, and a pretty poor substitute for 9,800 feet in the Himalayas, so I should be grateful the plants consent to grow at all.

One of the surviving Gazania still has a flower and two buds on it, an incongruous sight on 22 November.  I shall definitely add some more next year, sowing seed if I get round to it, or splashing out on a garden centre pack of plugs if I don't, or if the seeds don't germinate, or damp off.

By ten past four it was too dark to see what I was doing weeding, and I had to come in.  I was listening to a Radio 4 programme about the brain, which said that the most rewarding activities, defining rewarding as producing the most dopamine, were those were the outcome was not assured and there was an element of uncertainty.  That makes gardening a very rewarding activity, I thought.  I dream and plan, plant and prune, and have an idea of what could happen.  Flowers.  A profusion of tulips.  The ivy hedge restored to health.  A glittering array of south African daisies in the gravel.  But nothing is guaranteed.  Voles.  A long cold winter.  That amount of uncertain reward should get the dopamine flowing all right.

et in arcadia ego

It was a very beautiful day, with strong light that made the Verbena bonariensis look almost fluorescent, and virtually no wind, and I made the most of it, crawling around weeding.  I realised how low the sun sits in the sky at this time of year, as for a large part of the morning it never made it above the little oak tree and the hedge, and I was in shadow as I pulled creeping sorrel and goose grass seedlings out of the island bed in the back garden.  There was a heavy dew last night, and my gloves were soon soaked.  The BBC keeps reporting that various newspapers are carrying stories of cold weather to come, and even snow by Monday.  I find that unlikely, but am aware of how valuable each day working outside is.  There have been years when I've been able to carry on right up until the New Year, but the Systems Administrator has warned me that the recent warm and settled weather is linked to jet stream patterns that could bring another cold winter if they persist.

As we were sitting in the kitchen eating lunch we heard a strange barking sound, and our ginger came rushing away from the sitting room and scuttled out of the cat flap.  This was odd enough to make us go through and check what was going on, but there was no strange creature to be seen from the sitting room windows, only the big rangy tabby sitting on the window sill, dribbling and looking anxious.  As he often dribbles and looks worried this wasn't a clear sign of anything, but we went outside and had a quick look in the garden.  Nothing.  Not even the neighbours' airedale, which has a wandering tendency.  Maybe it was a dog.  Maybe a fox?  A muntjac?  We both heard it, and it got an odd reaction from the cats.

As I weeded, a small bird or birds flitted about, sometimes very close to me, but never in my direct line of sight.  I presume a robin or robins, since they are the boldest around people and understand weeding and worms.  The strong sideways light is beautiful but also casts a sinister aspect over the landscape, and I don't think it's any coincidence that Halloween, All Hallows Eve, and the mythology of dead souls walking the earth falls at the end of October.

Later on I moved to weed in the front garden so that I could supervise the chickens.  I pulled up a half-dead lump of thrift to find a small toad, which began to back away from me, blinking.  I admired it for a moment, then moved it to sit beneath a large clump of ornamental grass, where it might feel safe and I wouldn't accidentally kneel on it.  A toad, a familiar, a very appropriate find for such a day.

Addendum   I found one person who liked Autumnwatch, a twenty-something journalist writing for the Telegraph, who regarded it as an acceptable substitute for the now axed Top of the Pops.  The Systems Administrator and I have given up, and bought a boxed set of all six series of The Sopranos, which should keep us going.  After episode one I'm hooked, and there are 85 to go.

after the party

When I arrived at work my colleagues and the boss were already gathered in the office.  As is the British way when something has been a less than resounding success, they were not talking about the open weekend but about ash trees.  They hailed me, and asked where the ash tree got its name.  I replied that it came from an old northern European language word for spear (hedging my bets as to exactly which language).  I looked it up in Archie Miles' book Silva when I got home, and it is Anglo Saxon.  Aesc was their word for spear.  I retain this nugget because I use it in my woodland talks, but that's the only time I've ever been asked.

My first task, after a little bit of watering in the tunnels, was to make use of the newly tidy greenhouse and turn some pieces of Aeonium given to us by a customer into cuttings.  There were three different varieties, one green, one green with pinkish tips and one bronze, rather nice.  I've taken them at home with a good strike rate, but never this late in the season.  You just cut the rosettes off with some stem, strip off some of the lower leaves, and put them into compost.  Around the edges of the pot is advised by some experts because it gives better drainage.  I've never used hormone rooting powder on succulents.  If they take, I shall ascribe it to my superior propagation technique, while if they fail I shall blame the manager for watering them incorrectly.  I made two pots of each, and negotiated to take the remains home to try my luck at rooting the leftovers.

I was assigned for the rest of the day to help the longest standing employee weed the pots of herbaceous plants over on The Other Side.  Weeds have germinated at a ferocious rate, which is rather disheartening for her, when she has weeded them all already this season, so recently that she can clearly remember doing it.  In an ideal world we wouldn't have pots sitting around for long enough to have time to grow weeds, but it can't be avoided given the range of varieties we offer.  They come in at the start of the season, some we pot up ourselves to grow on, and they stay with us until sold.  If a designer has specified a dozen of a given plant that can absorb half of our stock for the year in one fell swoop, but we can easily get to October and find we still have several pots left.  Weeding is more fun with a bench at the right height to work at, and when I don't have to worry about dropping compost on the gravel, and I charged along at a fine rate.  I did end the day with a large black disc of compost on my uniform shirt.  The fastest way to clean a pot that is covered in weeds, rather than just having the odd hairy bittercress, is to knock the rootball out of the pot so that you can get your thumbs into the sides just below the surface.  The whole weedy top layer then falls away, to be replaced with fresh compost, but to get the old compost to fall straight into a bin I go back to the effective but shirt-destroying technique of resting the rootball against my stomach.

It was due to be a busy week for deliveries, Cambridge this morning, and Norwich on Friday, with less distant places from Tuesday to Thursday.  The older gardener who doubles as a delivery driver was despatched with the van, loaded with olive trees, standard bays and phormiums.  Mid morning, word came that the fan belt on the van had broken and it was in a service station near the M11.  This was not a good start to the gardener's week, or ours, given that we need the business and he was saddled with the task of getting the van repaired.  Apparently the customer was extremely cross at the delay and gave the owner a hard time over the phone.  By late afternoon we were starting to get worried, given that the gardener is an insulin dependent diabetic, and we feared he set off without his lunch or his insulin, not expecting to be all day.  He told us that he had somebody coming to fix the van but not until mid afternoon, and that the battery on his phone was running flat.  By close of play he still wasn't back, and we hadn't heard any more.  The manager and the owner will see the story through to its conclusion.  The rest of us went home, lucky us.

spotting healthy plants, and National Collections

A digger arrived in the car park at work, and began to remove the large heap of earth piled up at one edge, which has been there longer than I have.  I think it is topsoil from when the old tennis court was dug out to put down hardcore to make the car park.  We have dumped old potting compost and prunings there since, but it couldn't all be potting compost.  We can't have bought that much compost in the entire history of the business.  I had previously suggested that we should carve it into a piece of land art, maybe a giant recumbent crocodile, but the boss never sounded very keen on that idea.  The earth is being deposited on bits of the farm where it will be useful.  They needed the whole centre of the car park to turn the tractor and farm trailer being used to cart the earth away, so it's fortunate we weren't too busy, and the customers all chose to park around the edge.

I spent part of the day trimming old flower stalks and dead leaves from the iris and day lilies (Hemerocallis), and pulling out any weeds from the pots.  Advice to novice gardeners sometimes includes the warning never to buy any plant with weeds or liverwort in the pot, as it will be old and pot-bound.  This is based on a kernel of good sense, but oversimplified.  Liverwort, hairy bittercress and annual grass can all grow very quickly in the comfortable environs of a pot which is regularly watered.  If you shop anywhere with a reasonably broad range of stock, their stockturn is not going to be so rapid that everything is sold before it has time to grow a few weeds or an odd patch of liverwort.  If every pot is clean that tells you that they employ a lot of staff and that the manager or owner is hot on pot-cleaning.  A pot with a fresh surface of pristine compost may contain a geriatric plant, that has recently had the top weedy layer of compost scraped off and a new sprinkle added.  Or in a good establishment (like ours, most of the time) it may contain a perfectly good plant which has nonetheless been weeded and tidied up fairly recently.

What you need to learn to detect are the old, tired, potbound plants, that will not grow away well when planted out, but that is harder to do and more difficult to explain than saying 'don't buy the ones with liverwort'.  If the leaves are too small and too pale, and if there is no extension growth on woody plants in spring and summer, that's a bad sign.  But then you need to know what colour and size the leaves ought to be, and how to recognise new growth.  If the plant is significantly cheaper than others of a similar type and same sized pot then it may be last year's, or the year before.  And if the label is badly weathered, faded and cracked or broken, that's a sign of age, as are rusty staples holding the label to the pot.  Staples do rust outside, but at a slower pace than liverwort grows.  Helpful garden journalists also tell you to tip the plant out of its pot and inspect the roots, which is a good idea, except that most customers don't come shopping with a pair of gardening gloves, and don't seem to want to risk tipping compost down their clothes, or are afraid of dropping or breaking the plant.  These same garden writers advise that a good garden centre won't mind if you do this.  Actually, if you try it with something freshly potted and get great piles of compost on our gravel paths we probably will mind, only we will be too polite to say so.

Somebody rang to ask whether we had a particular iris in stock that we were listed in the RHS Plant Finder as selling.  We hadn't, but she and I had an interesting conversation while waiting to see if the manager would become free so that I could ask him when we were likely to get any (he didn't, so I never discovered the answer to that one).  It turned out that she was trying to track down enough varieties to qualify as a National Collection holder for this type of iris.  The National Collections scheme is run by Plant Heritage, formerly the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens, a name which did not exactly trip off the tongue.  The idea is that keen gardeners amass different species or varieties of whatever plant has grabbed them, thus helping to ensure that the species and varieties are not lost to cultivation as fashions change.  Obviously an idle would-be collection holder would go for something where there aren't many different sorts, like Gunnera, and not hardy Geranium or Hemerocallis where there are umpteen thousand varieties, many of which are distressingly similar.  I don't have any desire to join in myself, lacking the collector's instinct and being quite happy with mongrel seedlings if they are healthy and attractive garden plants, but I can see that it is a worthy exercise.

According to the iris collector, the rules are that (among other things) you must hold at least three-quarters of the varieties listed in the Plant Finder.  She was frustrated that she had rung many named stockists, only to find that they didn't physically have the plants.  I explained to her a little about the seasonal stocking patterns of retail plant centres, and that places like us that didn't do much of our own propagating tended to buy in herbaceous stock in spring and summer, and not hold too much of it over the winter, given that plants like iris need to come inside under cover if they are in plastic pots, and we don't have that much covered space.  Also, growers raise plants in batches, and sometimes don't have a batch ready for sale, maybe not until the next growing season once they have sold what they've got.  The Plant Finder is updated annually, so doesn't reflect seasonal variations in availability, and the garden centre owner has to predict in advance what they will have succeeded in propagating, or sourcing.  Unexpected hitches can then occur, as crops fail, suppliers go bust, or sterling tanks against the euro and they decide to skip the order from that grower in Boskoop.  I did think, and suggested, that maybe the top people in Plant Heritage and the top people in the RHS should discuss the issue, with the aim of trying to discourage plant retailers from continuing to claim to stock plants that they have little realistic chance of getting.  If the plant selling trade artificially inflates the stated number of varieties in commerce this does have the effect of raising the bar for National Collection holders, and inhibiting a conservation effort which I'm sure the RHS supports in principle.

bittercress and peacocks

The boss announced that we must tackle the hairy bittercress in the herbaceous tunnel, before it ripened and shed its seeds everywhere.  He added generously that the manager could use one of the plant centre staff up until 10.00am.  As we were both watering until gone twenty past nine this was a slightly symbolic gesture, but I managed to spend an hour and a quarter over there before it got too busy in the plant centre.  Hairy bittercress grown in a nice, warm, irrigated tunnel displays a vigour not possessed by the starvelings that try to colonise my gravel, and make huge, plump plants fully 20cm tall.  I think we may have missed the boat slightly with the seed shedding, though.

We had to hose dollops of peacock ordure off the ramp up to the back of the shop.  My colleague believes that at this time of the year they like to look at themselves reflected in the glass of the door.  At least they don't show any interest in the parked cars:  I have heard of peacocks attacking their reflections in the panels of a well-polished motor.  Mine will be quite safe anyway, as it hasn't been washed since winter, and not for quite a long time before that.  I keep thinking that I really must wash it, but it would be a great excuse to be able to say that you would have a clean car, except that then it might be attacked by peacocks.

One of the hens made repeated forays into the shop, presumably looking for cake crumbs after yesterday's Yellow Book festivities.  Another hen, or maybe the same one, managed to get locked into the staff room.  Chickens and carpets don't mix.  The carpet is an unfortunate shade of pink, donated by a former staff member who had a mate who was refurbishing a pub, and was already pretty grubby, but it is marginally worse now.

Most of the customers were delightful, though I did get one peeved and self-righteous one who was not very happy that we hadn't rung her to warn her that the cistus she had been told would be arriving in around three weeks when she ordered it about three weeks ago was still expected in three weeks as of today.  I apologised for that and explained that ordering in plants from small suppliers wasn't as straightforward as ordering baked beans, and that unfortunately as it was a very busy time of year and the list of people waiting for plants ran to 12 pages of A4, we didn't have the resources to call each of them to keep them updated on progress obtaining their plants.  Actually, I've never tried ordering baked beans, and for all I know it is fiendishly complicated.  How do you explain politely to querulous and possibly rather dim people that the level of personal service they are expecting for their nineteen quid is wildly unrealistic?