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.
