autumn tidy

The great autumn shut down continues.  Yesterday I remembered to open the umbrella over the table in the back garden while the sun was out, so that it could dry, and then take it down and stow it in the garage before the dew could fall on it.  Today I brought in the stone with the hole in it, to symbolically mark having finished weeding and mulching the bed where it's mounted, and before I could forget until I found the frosts had crumbled it.

Although things are flagging now after three months of near drought, the wet June was enough to send some shrubs into a wild growth spurt.  They are growing into each other and across paths and attempting to annhilate their smaller neighbours, and some tactful editing is called for.  When we visited the marvellous garden at Millgate House in Richmond I noticed a small yew that had been pruned back to a stick, with a sign on it explaining that it had been hard pruned to control its size, something they did a lot in that garden.  On a larger scale I am going to have to do the same thing in the ditch bed.

The mophead hydrangea 'King George' has got much bigger than I want it to be.  It has achieved this partly by layering several of its branches to form a hydrangea thicket.  I've always shrunk from pick-axing its offspring up, since it seems such a waste of potential new plants, but I don't actually need or have room for more than one.  And it has simply grown, branches extending year by year, on one side  muscling into an azalea and on the other flopping over a choice hellebore, while at the front it was straggling out over the lawn.  The branches at the back were craning up for the light so that they overshadowed my last remaining Glendoick rhododendron ( I have to admit it to myself. This garden is for the most part too dry for rhododendrons).  If I were a better and more organised gardener I would have pruned it regularly.  Better late than never, I took out some of the longest and presumably oldest shoots at the base, including all the lowest growing ones that were jostling the hellebores and spotted leaf arums.  Hydrangea macrophylla flowers on old wood, so the theory of pruning it and controlling the size of the plants is that you should remove some old branches completely, not go over the entire bush shortening every shoot.  If you do that you will lose a year's flowering, while if you take away some of the old wood it should respond by sending up new shoots and so over the period of a few years you can renew the plant.

Pruning is different for the grandiflora and paniculata types, which is why before seeking or offering advice on hydrangea pruning you do need to know what sort of hydrangea you've got.

Near the hydrangea is a Magnolia stellata 'Waterlily', which has also made prodigious growth this year.  It spends the later part of the summer draped with the herbaceous climber Dicentra scandens, which I should now call Dactylicapnos scandens.  Changes to plant names feel like hard work sometimes, but I feel I ought to keep up.  Otherwise we'd all still insist on referring to hosta as funkia, in defiance of the botanists.  The Dactylicapnos is a climbing yellow version of the familiar cottage garden bleeding hearts.  While not very rare it is not enormously common, and I grew mine from seed and am rather proud of it.  When I set it to jazz up the magnolia at a time of year when its host wouldn't be doing anything interesting I had not grasped quite how big or vigorous it would grow.  From a zero start its stems have pretty much buried the magnolia by late summer, but fortunately the magnolia doesn't seem to mind.  They are fleshy and fragile, and I imagine this is one reason why you don't see it offered for sale as a growing plant very much. Something that quickly makes eight feet of growth, clings to all its neighbours and breaks when you touch it is not going to be easy to stock and sell in a nursery.

The slightly obscure yew relative and winter flowering viburnum have been busy as well, but since I am on chef duties this week and I need to go and check the rice they will have to wait to another day.

intimations of autumn

Autumn is here.  Two nights ago I put the electric blanket on.  Yesterday evening we lit a fire in the grate upstairs, to the consternation of the kittens who were not sure they liked a roaring conflagration inside their house.  Today I donned thermal leggings under my gardening trousers, and this evening we lit the stove in the study, which smelt dreadful as an entire summer's worth of dust burned off.  We haven't put the central heating on yet as you can't have central heating in only the second week of October, or until you've piled on the jumpers and sat shivering anyway for at least a couple of evenings.

Delightfully and unexpectedly and practically overnight, the autumn crocus have come out.  I was rather concerned on my visit to the delightful garden near Lavenham to see lots of different types of autumn crocus flowering, at which point I suddenly realised that I hadn't seen any signs of life from mine.  I scanned the gravel eagerly the next day, hoping to spot at least some emerging buds, but there was nothing and I began to fear the worse.  It had been too dry for them, or the ground was too infertile, or mice had eaten the corms, or they had been fatally weakened by the rabbits eating the foliage when they were still in full growth.  Then this morning there they were, insouciant violet blue goblets sprung from nowhere.  They are Crocus speciosus, which was not one of the types recommended to me by Rod Leeds as being really easy to grow, on the other hand I'm sure I chose them because the corms were relatively inexpensive.  Cost is not invariably but quite often a good indication of how easy and quick to bulk up different varieties of bulbs are, six  or eight pounds a bulb rarities generally being rare for a reason.

I had hoped that the showers would have started to moisten the soil, and I would be able to give up on watering the ditch bed, but when I went and stirred the earth with my finger it was still dry as dust.  Back went the hose to the bottom of the garden for another afternoon of drought relief.  At teatime the Systems Administrator warned me of a band of very heavy rain approaching from the north that was showing up on the rain radar, but it never reached us, dissipating over Ipswich and the remnants sliding off to the west.

The leaves of the river birches are beginning to turn yellow, and the amelanchier below the rose bank is turning red, though it never produces such a good display of autumn colour as its fans promise that it will.  The colour of the potted acers is starting to intensify.  Eddie Mair has not yet begun to flag his annual chat with the head gardener at Stourhead, so either the leaves there are not close to turning or the PM programme has decided to drop the topic.  Or perhaps I am not listening to PM so assiduously as I used to and I've missed it.

the music society season gets underway

I have been clearing the tomato plants out of the greenhouse.  Some of the pinkish tomatoes will probably ripen indoors, especially if I put a ripe banana with them, but it's no good expecting any more of the little ones to swell.  The forecast for the next week is still for night time temperatures comfortably above five degrees, but it can't last forever.  Very soon it will be time to start tucking the outside pots of tender things away for the winter.

I potted up the tulip bulbs as well while I was at it.  I hope they will be OK, since two varieties had shed their jackets in storage.  I have gone back to a hot colour scheme with four different varieties, fifty of each.  Those will just fill sixteen pots, allowing for a few duds, and fingers crossed that they will all flower at much the same time.  I'd like a decent splash rather than a longer spell during which four pots are looking good at any one time but the others aren't quite out or have already gone over.

I wasn't expecting it to start raining around lunchtime but it did, which put paid to my gardening for the day.  I was planning to pack up early anyway in order to get to the concert in good time, partly to help with anything that needed doing, and partly to bag a seat and save one for the friend who was coming with me.  I already felt mean that since it was the AGM after the concert I hadn't been able to give her a lift because then she'd have been lumbered with the AGM as well, and that the interval had been shrunk to ten minutes with no tea because the quartet had to catch a flight later this evening and wanted to get away promptly.

The Calder quartet were very, very good.  We were punching above our weight in booking them, but got them on the basis of asking their agent to fit us in if they were ever booking a European tour and were left with a gap.  After some months we heard back that they were.  An American quartet touring Europe scarcely wants to fly home for just a few days, so being put up in a very nice house in a very pretty village in a scenic part of the world not too far from London, and playing to a highly appreciative albeit small by their usual standards audience must have been judged an acceptable alternative.  Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl, Wigmore Hall, St Mary the Virgin in East Bergholt.  Apparently when they got there they liked the church so much they took to nipping over the road in odd moments just for the fun of playing in it.

I did not expect to enjoy the opening Debussy, since I don't generally get on with Debussy.  As an escaped folkie I usually find his washes of musical colour rather dull, but I found his string quartet in G minor as played by the Calder really exciting, and was not the only one since another member remarked afterwards that she'd enjoyed the Debussy though she hadn't expected to.  The variations by a famous living Swedish composer that I hadn't heard of were about as hard work as I'd have expected them to be, but that was my fault for being an uneducated middlebrow and not the Swedish composer's or the Calder's.  The concluding Beethoven was marvellous.  I'm afraid us uneducated middlebrows like Beethoven, that's just how it is.

The AGM was mercifully brief and my notes should not take too long to write up in the morning.

the electrification of the conservatory

There is a limit beyond which safety features engineered into products can themselves become sources of hazard, as they make the product so inconvenient to use that the user will bodge up all sorts of unsafe shortcuts around the feature.  Lawnmowers that turn themselves off as soon as you release your grip on the dead man's handle, for example.  If you have a large area to cut and especially if the mower is difficult to start, the temptation to lash some string around the safety catch is pretty much irresistible.  Or heavily sprung fire resistant doors that start shutting themselves on you when you are only half way through and carrying a tray.  Stuff the fire safety, just put a stop in front of the door before somebody breaks their wrist or scalds themselves.  And in my case the water resistant sockets in the conservatory.

There are two sockets on the back wall of the conservatory, one either side of the central water feature.  That's handy, as I would like to plug in the water pump, and the electric heater on cold winter's nights, and the fairy lights around the windows for autumn evenings when we're having tea down there as dusk is falling.  Three appliances, two sockets.  That's all fine and dandy, I don't normally want to run the heater and the lights at the same time so I can unplug one and plug in the other.  Getting to the wall sockets isn't as easy as it was, since the plants have grown up, but that isn't the socket designer's fault.

The sockets are pigs to use, though.  The waterproof covers are incredibly stiff once clipped down shut, and it takes real effort to open them again, not the easiest thing especially when trying to do it in semi darkness and with branches of fuschsia and Canary island palm sticking in your face, because you've decided half way through the evening that the thermometer is plummeting and you'd better plug the heater in.  And it is not possible to plug the fairy lights in at all, because the transformer is integrated into the plug and the whole thing is too big to fit in the waterproof box.  I ended up doing what most people would do, and buying a normal three point trailing socket which I could leave permanently plugged in at the wall.  I put it right at the back in the corner so that it wouldn't get watered, and clambered laboriously past the palm each time I wanted to plug the lights in.

And of course the trailing socket got damp, even though it hadn't taken a direct hit from the watering, and one day when I was unplugging the fairy lights there was a bang and everything stopped working.  I couldn't tell without further investigation whether it was the trailing socket that had gone, or the wall plug, or if the switch had tripped on the fuse box in the garage, and the whole problem of the electricity supply to the conservatory along with the fact that the pump for the water feature had already stopped working got added to the list of Things To Do but never rose to the top of it.  With hindsight that was an error, as red spider mite was a real nuisance this year and running the water feature to raise the humidity would probably have helped.

Finally the conservatory electricity problem rose to the top of the Systems Administrator's list.  The SA tested things methodically and announced that the fuse had tripped but the wall socket was fine.  The trailing socket, however, was verboten, and the SA promised to buy a new waterproof one and did.  This has the triple advantages of a lid that opens without requiring the application of brute force, a long enough lead that it can sit where I can reach it without scrambling through the palm and the fuchsia, and individual switches for each socket so things can stay plugged in under the waterproof cover even when not in use.  Unfortunately, the fairy light plug still won't fit inside, so the SA will have to fix the lights into a short lead with a conventional plug, bag up the join in waterproof fashion and put the bag at the back in the corner where it won't get watered.  (And the trailing socket only takes two plugs when I have three electrical appliances).

Meanwhile I was galvanised by the SA's progress into investigating the small pump I found sitting in its original box down in the garage the last time I tidied up, instructions only slightly eaten by snails.  I think I originally bought it for the pond in the front garden and then never installed it.  I even managed to find a spare plug with a thirteen amp fuse and wire it in, blue to neutral and brown to live, but when I tested it in a bowl of water in the kitchen while the engine made a whirring noise no water came out of the exit pipe.  The Systems Administrator came and looked at it too but there was no magic solution that I'd failed to spot, it simply didn't work.  It must have been very old so maybe some part had crumbled away in storage.

Small straightforward pond pumps are not too expensive and I have ordered another one from a Google Certified Shop.  All I need now is for it to arrive, and me to work out how to plumb it in, and the SA to fix up the waterproof connection for the fairy lights, and I shall be able to strike Sort out conservatory electrics off the list of Things To Do, a mere six months or so after adding it to the list.

stage hands

I made a special extra trip today to East Bergholt to help transport the stage over to the church ready for Sunday's concert.  The stage has been the subject of much debate, research and hand wringing by the committee over the past several years.  It is very old, made out of massive sheets of wood supported on a slot together steel frame, and heavy.  The community in the former convent opposite the church, which is quite possibly the most upmarket commune in England, kindly stores it, and one of their members has for years masterminded getting it over the road to the church, putting it up, and then reversing the whole process after the concert.  But he is now in his mid eighties, and although fit and healthy he no longer feels like manhandling enormous pieces of wood about.

Various attempts were made to recruit some younger and fitter helpers for him, but none proved reliable.  The committee are not as young as they used to be, as is the nature of committees, and once we'd resolved the question of whether modern modular stages could support the weight of a grand piano it was generally felt that a new stage, a lightweight system made out of much smaller individual components, suitable for being assembled and disassembled by a party of pensioners and (ahem) ladies would be more suitable.  If we had to have a stage, that is.  Discussions in committee went round and round the houses about whether we really needed one and which other local music events had a stage or managed without, at the end of which we were back where we started, which was that we wanted to have a stage.  I certainly did.  Part of the fun of going to a live concert is being able to see the musicians, otherwise you are getting perilously close to thinking that you might as well save yourself a drive and a chilly evening in a not very comfortable pew and the risk of other people coughing, and just buy the CD (or the download if you are a young person).

However, after all the debates about which stage system to get we have not bought any of them in time for the start of the season, so for Sunday's concert we are stuck with the monster timbers. The Chairman was worried about whether there would be enough people to help the guardian of the stage with transporting and erecting it, since she and her husband might be busy looking after the musicians.  I told her I would help if required, since I was quite strong although small and quamquam est femina, though if not needed I'd as soon save myself the hour's round trip to East Bergholt.  I thought I detected some scepticism on the Treasurer's face during the last committee meeting when she said I'd offered to help.  Humping large wooden stage panels about was clearly man's work.  I got the call, and to be on the safe side persuaded the Systems Administrator to come and help as well, which was very good of the SA since the music society is really nothing to do with him.

The guardian of the stage thought there might be a gaggle of helpers from the primary school who have arranged to use the stage after us, but in the event nobody else turned up and it was just the three of us.  It wasn't really very difficult.  The stage turned out to be stored in the convent's former chapel, along with a remarkable quantity of other bits and pieces, and it took us three runs up the road with a four wheeled trailer, only holding up the traffic slightly.  The boards were heavy, but not so heavy I felt nervous trying to carry them in case something ruptured.  It turned out the verger allowed the keeper of the stage to wheel the trailer right into the church, which is a considerable honour when I think of the trouble the music society got into after dropping cheese crumbs on the vestry carpet a couple of years ago.  The turns were pretty tight, but we made it up the aisle and thankfully the SA did not ping his back in the course of obeying the instruction to heave the trailer over a bit.  The whole process only took three quarters of an hour with three people, and by the end of it the SA and I were beginning to rediscover the partnership that used to let the two of us put a ten metre long-keeled yacht into a marina berth without once needing to speak to each other, once we'd agreed which slot we were going into.

It is impossible to do anything in a village without being spotted.  When I got home I found a message on my phone from a friend who lives in East Bergholt.  I saw you outside the church!

watering and pruning

The plants that got watered yesterday look immeasurably happier.  The mottled, green and silver leaves of the Chinese wild ginger Asarum splendens are once again standing up perkily, when previously they were flopping on the soil, colour muted to a dull grey.  This species makes attractive ground cover in shade, though it is rather prone to being nibbled by snails.  Or slugs, or something.  The leaves that have not been eaten echo the shape and colour of the emerging leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium, and the two make a good combination.

Accordingly I went on watering today, shuttling back and forth across the lawn to keep moving the hose along.  I have weeded half the bog bed, which is shamefully, miserably dry, the days of knee deep mud soup being but a distant memory.  I hope that most of the inhabitants are merely prematurely dormant, and not actually dead.

Eventually, to save so much trotting about, I cut down the stems of the Gillenia trifoliata in the birch bed by the next section of the ditch bed that was in line for emergency water.  Gillenia, or Bowman's root, is a lovely thing.  Originally from Eastern north America, it carries starry white flowers on wiry stems in the latter half of summer.  Although I'm sure it would prefer a moister and more woodlandy soil it copes remarkably well around the river birches in the lower lawn.  The autumn foliage can colour quite attractively, and in a normal year I'd leave it to die down naturally, but in this drought it had begun to scrunch and go a dirty shade of brown, and being pragmatic about it I can't sort out every bed at once and wanted something to be getting on with in that corner of the garden while minding the hose.  Gillenia seeds itself in a modest way, and by now I have a fair sized patch of it around the birches without ever having found plants in other parts of the garden, like I do with Hesperis matronalis.

Once I'd finished tidying the birch bed, which is ready for winter now save watering and a light mulch of mushroom compost, I turned my attentions to the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' which has been blocking the wooden steps down to the bottom lawn all summer.  This annoying state of affairs came about because I was much too timid about pruning it last time.  The half-hearted little passage way down the steps I cleared last winter soon closed up again as new growth shot out in all directions, and the old growth sagged further out of the supporting tree, and one reason why the beds around the bottom lawn haven't been better watered this summer is that with the steps blocked off it was such a performance getting a hose down there.

The steps were left blocked for so long partly because I can't do everything at once, and partly because I was putting off the awful day when I would have to cut great branches out of the rose, but also because the steps themselves had rotted through and it was quite handy having them obstructed by a plant so vast and so prickly that visitors would not be tempted to try and use them. But today I took my new pruning saw and cut through one large branch near ground level, that had sagged out by degrees until it protruded a couple of feet across the steps, and began to tug out the top growth supported by that branch.  Thankfully it didn't account for nearly as much of the bush as I was afraid it was going to.  There's plenty more wood to come out yet, and then I have to persuade the Systems Administrator to rebuild the steps.  The SA has known for some time that this task was outstanding, without displaying any conspicuous signs of enthusiasm.

There is still a very long way to go along the ditch bed with the hose.  When I've finished the rose then for my next act it might be time to try and dig the nettles out of the lawn below the rose bank.

drought

The chat at last night's garden club meeting was of how dry it was.  Certainly our garden is horribly dry.  Things aren't so bad at the base of the rose bank, where there seems to be something approaching a spring line and moisture is still working its way through even after three months of very little rain.  That's the flip side of the ground below the bank turning to quicksand and killing shrubs through waterlogging after prolonged wet spells.

But the whole of the ditch bed is dry.  The display of autumn flowering Cyclamen hederifolium is pitiful, not a patch on the garden I visited last week.  Thankfully the tubers are still alive, as I can tell now that the leaves are coming through, but the majority didn't flower.  The ferns have collapsed into sad piles of broken fronds.  The hellebores and hydrangea are wilting.  The bed around the river birches is no better, or rather even worse, and the bog bed is dry as a bone.

Out came the hose again, and hang the cost of water.  The Systems Administrator had removed the last section of hose back in the spring, claiming that the friction caused by that long a flow reduced pressure too far for the pressure jet to work properly.  I don't know if it was really down to the length of the hose, or the fact that the old pressure jet was on its last legs.  Either way, today I reattached the missing section so that the hose would comfortably reach to all parts of the lower lawn even by the roundabout route missing out the steps which are (a) broken and (b) blocked by 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', and started watering.

After that my day's gardening was determined by what else needed doing that was compatible with moving the hose every ten minutes.  I cleared away a lot of prunings, and began weeding the bog bed that's not a bog, and finished pollarding the self sown willow with my new sharp pruning saw, plus the bow saw for the biggest branches.  I need to work out when the right time is to do that job, so that the willow never gets too big but still produces catkins.  The answer is quite possibly not October, but the willow was getting much too big and casting too much shade.  There are two kinds of undone gardening tasks, those that you know you should have done but haven't managed to get round to, and those that you don't even have a plan for doing.  Pollarding the willow currently belongs in the latter category.

The Systems Administrator was greatly taken with the red flowers of the Mandevilla, and we have agreed that for now it might as well live on the telephone table on an experimental and temporary basis as a house plant.  It is within two feet of a glass door, which might or might not give it enough light.  Remembering what the Tynings ladies said about being able to control the size of Mandevilla through regular pruning I snipped off the last six inches of the longest and most wavering shoot, taking it back to a pair of leaves.  In theory that should stimulate the production of side shoots. The Mandevilla mourned its loss with the production of a bead of white latex like sap over its severed end.  The flowers are truly gorgeous, a vivid, deep but not purplish shade of red, with five slightly pointed petals arranged in an open funnel shape.  It occurred to me that if it lasted a fortnight on the hall table it would have done better than most bunches of flowers, but of course because I have bought it as a conservatory plant I should be quite miffed if my seven pounds didn't buy me at least a couple of years of pleasure.

an evening of climbers

This evening I went to the garden club meeting, it being the first Tuesday of the month.  The speakers, Chelsea Gold medal winners Tynings Climbers, had come all the way from Somerset to talk to us.  I was impressed.  I don't know how the committee do it, other than that they are very persuasive and strong minded ladies.

My notebook now has a couple of pages of densely scribbled advice about a variety of climbing plants, from the bone hardy to those needing a higher minimum winter temperature than they are going to get in my conservatory.  The overarching theme seemed to be to prune vigorous species regularly to keep them compact and with plenty of new growth, rather than waiting until they had got massively out of control and then hacking them back hard so removing every scrap of flowering growth in the process.  Also to avoid over watering, especially in the winter, which I already knew, and not to over feed perennial varieties.

The twin horrors of mealy bug and red spider mite are apparently unavoidable under glass, so apart from keeping ventilation and humidity up their advice was to spray early in the year and several times to break the egg laying cycle, rather than waiting until August when there was a visible problem and trying to get on top of it after the event.  Provado was said to be very good, but I noticed that natural controls didn't get a mention.  In the past I've spent quite a lot on various predatory wasps and things that were supposed to devour my woolly aphids and mites, but they never seemed to get close to solving the problem.

I could not resist buying a plant, a red flowered Mandevilla.  It wasn't very big and didn't have a label, and when I asked about it, as in what its name was and whether it would take some shade and what minimum winter temperature it required and how much is was, I was told that it was simply a Mandevilla hybrid.  Some shade would be perfectly acceptable given that in the wild they grew under the canopy of other plants (though that doesn't always work, because the UK is quite far north and the sun is weaker at the best of times than in the tropics, or even the Canaries). It would like a minimum of three degrees, and it was seven pounds.  In the coldest weather the conservatory might dip below three degrees, on the other hand I could keep the Mandevilla good and dry.  For seven pounds I thought it was worth a punt, and bought it with a promise not to repot it until spring.  You never quite know with minimum winter temperatures until you try.

an evening of comedy

We went this evening to see Miles Jupp at the Mercury Theatre and he was very, very funny.  I like Miles Jupp, which is to say that I find him engaging, or rather find his stage persona engaging since you don't really know what any performer is like merely from seeing them perform.  The public face of Miles Jupp the comic, considered, polite, inwardly enraged at his own politeness in circumstances where he would be justified in being furious, frequently thwarted by technology, and detesting games, seems an uncanny reflection of my own world view, apart from the fact that he has five children and I am practically old enough to be his mother.  The show was virtually sold out and from the volume of laughter and happy buzz as everybody left at the end I should say there were a lot of Miles Jupp fans around Colchester.

I was sorry to read the story in the Guardian that Jon Holmes had been sacked from Radio 4's The Now Show, to put it his way, or that his contract had not been renewed, to put it the BBC's way. Apparently the programme makers want more women and minorities.  I am all in favour of women and minorities being given a fair shout on the BBC but I wish the management could manage it without messing around with the lineup of perfectly good shows that used to be funny.  Most of the comedy on R4 at the moment is absolutely dire, so couldn't that be replaced by some women and minorities who were actually funny, instead of discriminating against Jon Holmes on the grounds that he is white and male?  I don't generally bother with the Now Show any more, having lost patience with most of their new crop of guests.  Comedy needs some wit.  Merely insulting the Tories is not enough.

We got home to find Mr Fluffy in the hall looking as if he hoped for more food, and Mr Fidget sitting on the stairs looking pathetic.  Mr Cool was nowhere to be seen.  Mr Fidget came and sat with me on the sofa once he'd been fed, and burrowed vigorously into my fleece before settling down in unusually unfidgety mode and purring a good deal.  They are not used to both of us being out in the evenings, and while Mr Fidget ignores us half the time when we're at home it seems he misses us when we're gone.

an afternoon with the bees

Now it's October I thought I really had better get the bees ready for the winter, fed, snugged down, not too much surplus space in their hives to waste valuable heat.  Some books and magazine articles would have had me start in August as soon as I'd finished taking the honey off, since the rate at which the queen lays eggs has peaked by then and colonies are decreasing rather than increasing in size.

I didn't, for all sorts of reasons.  It was jolly hot, for starters, and I thought the bees would be grateful for some surplus space.  If you try to cram them in too densely during hot weather they have to come out and sit all over the front of the beehive, and the thermometer hit thirty as recently as a couple of weeks ago, while we were on holiday.

Also they had half finished supers of honey they were still messing around with.  Last year I took these, using clearer boards to get the bees out, and the mixed bucket of odds and ends of honey fermented in storage and was wasted, no use to me and no good to the bees either.  I thought that this year I'd leave it on the beehives until it was well and truly ready, capped with wax and sealed, rather than following the hopeful rule that if the combs didn't drip when I shook them then the honey was ready to harvest.  I tried that last year, and it wasn't.

And then there was the rush to get ready to go away and I was frankly knackered, and then we got back and I was busy, and it was still warm and forecast to be warm and the bees I saw around and about in the garden seemed happy enough.  But the weather will turn, sooner or later, and I don't want to be still messing around with supers and buckets of sugar syrup when that happens.  So yesterday I dissolved a couple of big bags of granulated sugar in four and a half pints of water, and once it had warmed up today I suited up and set off for the beehives with some feeding buckets containing syrup,  an extra clearing board, and secateurs for the brambles.

The first hive I looked at still had two supers on, both with quite a lot of bees in, and one full of honey.  I wasn't really expecting that.  I have already taken more honey than I am likely to eat, give away or sell, so I didn't really want any more, and besides the bees have been on the ivy flowers by now and ivy honey tastes completely disgusting.  I decided to leave the full super on the hive for the winter and try overwintering them with their own stores.  I swapped the supers over so that the full one was next to the brood box with the empty one on top, separated by a clearer board.  Give it a day or two and that should be empty of bees so that I can put it away in the garage for the winter.

I never have tried leaving the bees with a full super of their own honey before.  There never seemed to be that much honey to spare, and I had an anxious feeling that the winter stores should be down in the brood box with the queen.  Which said, last autumn half the colonies were extremely dilatory about taking sugar syrup down into the brood nest.  Bees have evolved to live off their own stores, and this year I am going to trust them to know what they're doing and leave them to get on with doing it.

The next hive had only one super left, and again it was absolutely full of honey.  That was easy, I left it there.  Then came my star performers of 2016, and I found that while I had left them with two supers to make space for all the bees, they had moved what little honey was left in the supers down to the brood chamber, though again there were still lots of bees up top.  I thought about this for a while, the bees getting gradually buzzier.  A strong work ethic in bees often goes with a shorter temper, and so it has been with this lot, though where they got the work ethic from is a mystery because that same colony never did a thing in 2015.  I ended up putting an eke and a bucket of syrup directly over the brood chamber, which is unorthodox, then a clearer board above the eke, then the two supers with the bees in, and hoped that by tomorrow the bees would be out of the supers and I could tidy the whole thing up.

That was the end of my operations because I'd run out of clearer boards, so there was no point in disturbing the last two hives.  I took the two spare buckets of syrup back to the house and returned to scooping dead leaves out from under the eleagnus hedge, until the Systems Administrator came rushing up to tell me that the bees were coming into the house.  They had discovered the syrup in the kitchen.  I shut the front door, and rounded up the half dozen bees that were bouncing off the inside of the kitchen window, and the SA caught the ones in the sitting room and put them out. They all made off in the direction of my apiary so I can't even argue that they weren't mine.  We left the doors shut and thankfully we now have a cat flap so they couldn't come in again, and by tomorrow I expect they'll have forgotten all about it, though I put the spare syrup back in the stock pot which has a close fitting lid, just to be on the safe side.  It is very fortunate that the Systems Administrator does not get upset when I accidentally begin to fill the house up with bees.

if at first you don't succeed

It was forecast to rain heavily in the early afternoon, followed by showers and thunderstorms. Accordingly, as the morning greyed over and I felt the first drops of rain I packed up my kit and shut the garage, awaiting the deluge.  I wasn't too fussed.  The garden needs rain very badly, and I was all set to spend a happy afternoon working out my bare root rose order from Trevor White.

Except that it didn't rain properly at all.  There was one fierce downpour just as the Systems Administrator returned from a model railway exhibition in Sudbury and remarked that there'd been some sharp showers on the way back, and that was pretty much it.  It was grey, it spat a bit from time to time and I wasn't sure whether to go back into the garden, but there was nothing like the slab of rain I'd been looking forward to from the forecast.

I put the rose order together anyway.  Trevor White's delivery charge is a very reasonable £6.90 per order, so I might put in a second order during the winter if I find I have space for any shrub roses, but I wanted to get the next lot of ramblers sorted out.  Dispatch starts in November (the exact date presumably depending on how cold the autumn is) and I'd like to get my plants as soon as possible after that.  Perversely, I am going to pot several of them, or maybe even all of them if I haven't cleared the undergrowth along the edge of the wood by then.

A couple are replacements for plants that only went in this February.  The failures were not Trevor White's fault but mine, since the roses looked healthy when they arrived and the rest of them grew away perfectly well.  'Blushing Lucy' tucked away behind the oil tank made lots of growth for her first year, but two plants I tried to grow up into trees behind one of the decks were not so lucky.  I am pretty sure the problem was that it was too dark for them.  Chicken and egg, if they had reached up into the tree they'd have been in sun for most of the day and been fine, just as 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' in the next door tree is fine, but in order to see the sun they had to make five or six feet of growth first, and as newly planted specimens they weren't up to making that initial effort.

I have a plan, which is to pot them into deep pots with six foot canes, and next year feed them very well and tie the resulting growth into the canes instead of pruning it off for ease of handling like they did at the plant centre.  Then when I plant them out they will already have some leaves in sight of the sun, and that should give them the strength to keep on growing into the light.  That is the idea.  For it to work I have to be able to persuade the roses to make that much extension growth in their pots.  It has to be admitted that a rooted cutting of 'Albertine' given to me by a friend never did nearly as well as that all the time she was in a pot and even when I moved her into a bigger container, then promptly quadrupled in size the moment she was planted out in the open ground as if making up for lost time.  I know that the former manager at the plant centre had experience of potting up Trevor White roses at the place he moved to when he left the plant centre, and was hoping he'd be at the Plant Heritage meeting so that I could pick his brains, but he wasn't there.

I have already cut down some of the wild holly that was shading the luckless ramblers from the side, in a belated attempt to rescue the original plants.  It will grow back, though if only the roses can gain some height first that won't be a problem and the holly will actually provide rather a nice background.  You can cut plain green Ilex aquifolium down hard if you need to, and it will shoot up again.  A tall though still slender and youngish holly tree just inside the gate from the back lawn to the wood was toppled to a crazy angle by a freak wind a couple of years ago.  Tutting to myself I sawed it off at ground level, since there was no way of righting it securely, and I noticed this morning how a dense cluster of new shoots was springing up around the stump of the original trunk.  I was pleased to see them, since I'd spent several years painstakingly clipping the self sown hollies at the wood entrance into a sort of green tunnel which was just shaping up nicely when some kind of mini tornado blew half of it over.

a garden visit

I went this afternoon on the garden society's last garden visit of the year.  Places on the visit were limited to twenty, mainly because the garden is not very big, and possibly also (having seen it) because parking in the lanes nearby is pretty limited.  A clipboard was going round at the dahlia visit for interested people to put their names down for the grand draw for places, lucky winners to be announced at the next garden club meeting.  I wasn't at the last talk, but assumed the friendly and energetic visits organiser would email if I'd won a golden ticket.  She didn't, so I assumed I hadn't got lucky this time and rubbed the visit out of my diary.

When I saw her at last Saturday's Plant Heritage meeting she cheerfully said You are coming on Friday, aren't you?  I said that sadly I hadn't drawn a place and she said No, they hadn't had to do the draw as they hadn't had more than twenty members apply, probably because a lot of them had seen the garden before. perhaps she had better email the other people who'd put their names on the list to let them know.  I thought that would be a good idea, but it just goes to show the value of cheerful conversation.  If she hadn't happened to mention it I would have spent the afternoon clipping my yew, and would have missed out on a really good garden tour.

Missed out fairly terminally, it turns out, because the owners have decided to stop opening to groups.  One of their specialities is snowdrops, and after one garden club visit they discovered that a clump of a rare named form was missing.  That is deeply depressing.  I mean, it is depressing when people damage or nick things at all, but especially when they have got access to a private garden through their membership of a society, when you would hope people would know and be able to trust each other.  So we were on the last group visit ever, unless the owners change their minds and relent.

It was a cottage garden near Lavenham, not huge though not tiny, on a south facing slope and what looked like stiff soil, though that can always be overcome for small and precious bulbs with raised beds and added grit.  Fairly sheltered, south facing slope but near the bottom of the hill so cold air tends to roll downhill and settle in the garden.  They have lost some things during the winter that have survived with us.  Lavenham is significantly further inland than here and I'd guess winters are on average slightly colder.

The owners aim to make it a three hundred and sixty five days of the year garden, which is as gardens should be.  On the last day of September after a very wet June and three extremely dry months there were asters, all varieties with small and dainty flowers, many colchicums, some true autumn flowering crocus, the last of the Amaryllis and Nerine, lots and lots of cyclamen (much better than mine), some tender salvias in pots (all varieties I grow here so I awarded myself one point for plant connoisseurship), some cheerful annuals though our host did apologise (needlessly in my view) for the brashness of the Tibouchina (tall and orange, and the other annual I asked about was grown from seed supplied by Derry Watkins' Special Plants Nursery, none of your Thompson and Morgan came-free-with-a-magazine happenstance).

The owners were very knowledgeable and very kind, answering questions, offering advice without the slightest hint of patronising, and scooping seed into tiny envelopes for those who asked or simply looked wistful.  After being given tea and a very nice piece of home made sponge cake I found myself looking on while our hostess scooped seed of the uncommon and expensive Tulipa sprengeri into an envelope for me, and then marched off to fetch a long handled trowel with which she dug up half a dozen bulbs.  The seeds she suggested scattering now where I want them to flower, and I am under instructions to see how the bulbs compare with the ones I have just bought. They don't look anything like them, and I know the ones she gave me must be the true thing, because I saw them being dug up by an expert right in front of me.

music society

The first part of the morning was taken up with the minutes of yesterday afternoon's music society committee meeting.  I always like to write them up the next day if possible while my notes remind me of discussions I still remember rather than being the only thing I have to go on, and events are equally fresh in everybody else's minds in case anyone wants to query anything.  And there's a certain theatrical flourish to producing and circulating the minutes the next day.  To my mild annoyance someone has spotted a typo this time.  Oh well.  As long as you understand what I mean it doesn't matter how I say it, Discuss.

You will see periodic bouts of hand wringing in the newspapers about how the British do not have the same attitude to philanthropy as the Americans and do not support the arts to the same extent. It may be true that hedge fund managers aren't queueing up to bail out the ENO or pay for extensions to the V&A or do whatever it that arts editors and politicians would like them to do on a grand scale, but in the little world of chamber music in the provinces sponsorship is a vital part of keeping the show on the road.  I for one am immensely grateful to the local retired professionals and business owners, by no means mega rich, who quietly write out cheques for three and occasionally four figures, not multi millions but which make all the difference to societies like ours being able to sometimes book the sort of artists who play at the Wigmore Hall and feature in the Radio 3 lunchtime concerts.

That's not to say we don't support young artists as well.  The fact that they are cheaper helps balance the books, but there's always the exciting prospect of finding somebody really good at the beginning of their career who is going to be famous.  The glory of having booked Alison Balsom when she was just starting out has barely faded in the minds of those committee members who were there at the time, along with the fact that they once had the Belcea Quartet.  This time round we are trying to get a young accordionist.  I was one of those vociferously in favour, my argument being that as he was further on in his career than most of the other young artists on the scheme he might be better, and it was a chance to try something different to our usual fare at low financial expense.  My closest friend and natural ally on the committee agreed, without any prior collaboration, and I could see that the Chairman was itching to discover what the classical accordion was about, so we carried the day.

Colchester's annual music festival had Nicola Benedetti last night.  I have heard from two sources that she was very, very good but alas, I don't pay a sub to entitle me to priority booking, and as I don't volunteer for them either I never got a sniff of tickets for that concert.  Never mind.  The music society has a highly distinguished American string quartet visiting the weekend after next. We are one stop on their European tour which otherwise runs Frankfurt, London, Paris.  I said we should have t-shirts printed.

trimming and cutting back

All five compost bins are full.  This is a problem, since there will be loads more to come off the garden.  The Systems Administrator could not understand why they were so full.  Had stuff not rotted down?  Was there more woody material going on the heaps than of yore?  I thought there probably was.  The garden is pretty mature after more than two decades, and there are a lot of woody plants, bits of which get pruned out or trimmed off every year.  I suggested hopefully that it would be nice if the SA could build another bin, but I'm afraid there isn't any wood going spare to build an extra bin out of.  The old decking kept things going for a while, but that's all used up now.

Meanwhile the latest pieces of ivy I cut off the hedge around the long bed are destined for the bonfire.  Most of the section I was working on this morning was truly woody, since the ivy has run up to flower.  Parts of it looked very bald and bare, not to say dead in places, by the time I'd finished cutting it, but it's no good, it has got to come down.  I wondered briefly though not for the first time if I should have used box, while knowing that I could never, ever organise myself to cut that much box hedging, besides which large scale use of box is a slightly hazardous enterprise now that box blight is endemic.

About five plants in the box hedge in the neighbour's front garden have died entirely, though the cause of death is a slight mystery to me because one bush remains resolutely green and healthy in the middle of the dead section.  That doesn't look like blight, though I haven't stopped the car and stepped into her garden to take a closer look.  But blight generally leaves a widespread impression of unhealthiness from what I've seen, with brown patches, dead leaves, bare twigs and a generally sickly aspect.  It doesn't seem to pick off some plants entirely while leaving their neighbours untouched.  When the first plant failed I assumed it must have been undermined by ants.  Now several have gone at that end of the row I'm not so sure.

I had to stop cutting ivy for the day because I'd filled up the trailer, and anyway the stems are quite tough and as I've mused previously it's better to spread these jobs out.  I switched to trimming the bottom layer of one of the two topiary yews.  Our visit to Levens Hall confirmed my belief that I would never want to own a large scale topiary garden, since they seem to me to be gardens to look at and to employ somebody else to maintain.  There must be people whose idea of garden bliss is managing acreages of clipped evergreens, but I'm not one of them.  Two topiary yews are sufficient.  I quite enjoy doing the two, and noticing each time how different in character they are.  The plant at the south end of the bed which I was doing today has a much softer and laxer growth habit than the one to the north, which holds its twigs more stiffly.  Both made prodigious quantities of growth this year and it was quite difficult at first working out where the solid shape of the topiary was supposed to be under all the fresh twigs.  I suppose I did feed the bed back in the spring, and then we had that wet June.

It's handy that they've grown well this year as I want to merge the top two tiers of the northern one.  I am not vastly imaginative when it comes to topiary shapes, and they are both classic forms with a big, slightly domed cylinder at the bottom and a layered cake stand above, overall height limited by how far I can reach from the step ladder.  The tree at the north end of the bed annoyed me as I looked at it from the kitchen window.  Something about the top of the cake stand looked mere and twitty.  Looking at a magazine article about Arne Maynard's own garden where he uses topiary to great effect I suddenly realised that the top dome needed to be much bigger, wider and deeper and more solid.  Given the overall height is fixed the answer was to fuse the top two sections into one properly large and substantial dome, and allow the sides to grow out a bit.

I have yet to tackle the upper tiers of either tree, being well behind the Levens Hall gardeners. Cutting the tops is more of a fiddle because you have to find the space to wriggle the step ladder into the bed, and then keep coming down and looking at the shape from a distance to check what you're doing.  It's on the list, though.

mending and breaking

I am going to have to resume watering the borders.  As I was weeding this morning I snapped the middle tine out of my hand weeding fork in the hard earth under the crown of a large cotoneaster. I think it failed along an existing line of weakness where I bent it previously catching it on a root and the Systems Administrator had to straighten it.  This time it's gone, broken as easily as snapping a multipack of yogurt cartons apart.  Welding stainless steel is not a skill either of us have mastered.

As part of her talk on Saturday Marina Christopher brought some Asian garden tools.  She cuts down her herbaceous stems with a very sharp, short bladed slasher rather than using secateurs, and says it's as quick as strimming by the time you've factored in the clearing up time.  She contracted carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists in the course of barrowing multiple loads of grit when she set up her nursery, and post surgery can no longer use secateurs all day.  It was another reminder of how easy it is to do oneself a permanent mischief gardening, not from any spectacular accident but simply from overworking joints and muscles and tendons in the push to get things done.  It was forecast to rain hard on Thursday but that's been downgraded to a light shower in the middle of the day, meanwhile soil so hard it snaps tools can't be doing my wrists any good either.  Time to reach for the hose again.  I don't fancy myself using a very sharp cutting blade in the open borders, though.  It feels too much like an accident waiting to happen, possibly involving a cat, or else my legs.

The Systems Administrator did buy me a new pruning saw for my birthday.  I was touched that the SA had registered my grumbling about the old saw.  The new one is marvellous in the way of new saws, much, much sharper, and today I chopped through a great lump of elder that was sticking up behind the veranda without a second thought.  I shall keep the old saw for dealing with roots and those old or dead stems at ground level that it's very difficult to cut through without jabbing the end of the blade into the soil.

Today we patched up the greenhouse as the sheet of replacement acrylic from a different plastics supplier arrived.  It turned out that the reason why one pane of glass fell half way out until it broke and two more were slipping was that some of the roof timbers had become detached from the sides.  The SA screwed the woodwork back together and seemed very bullish that the greenhouse could be kept limping along for a good few years yet.  The frame of one of windows in the roof had pulled itself apart as well in the wind, but the SA was able to repair it with a spare piece of teak that was lurking in the workshop.  I am afraid the truth is that the greenhouse is getting old.  I bought it not long after we moved here, and that's quite a long time ago.

kittens grow up to be cats

After four and a half months of litter trays we have reclaimed the study.  It is no longer kitty city: the trays have been cleared away and the kittens are now being fed in the hall where the cats have always been fed since we've lived here.  When we got back from holiday we looked at Mr Fluffy and Mr Fidget and realised that they had grown, and were in some intangible way young cats rather than baby kitties.  Their serious brother Mr Cool had started staying out at night anyway, because he would not come in for the house sitters, and it was time to steel our nerves and give them all access to the cat flap twenty-four seven.  This, I suppose, is one reason why Colchester Cat Rescue would not let me have any of their kittens.  They guessed that I was lying when I ticked the boxes on their form to say that my cats would always have access to an indoor litter tray and would always be kept in at night.

It is nerve racking, with the foxes, but I have to tell myself that we have never had a kitten or young cat disappear overnight in all our years of cat ownership, and the fox problem is probably no greater than it was before, it's just that in my attempts to work out what the rabbits were doing I obtained more photographic evidence of the foxes.  The trouble is, cats like to go out.  By their nature they are crepuscular animals, and trying to stop them slipping out each time we want to open the door after dark, to shut the chickens or fetch in wood, is going to get on everybody's nerves.  And Our Ginger is used to coming and going as he pleases so the kittens can't just be kept in the house overnight, they have to be shut in the study.  And while modern cat litter is pretty good, still we don't want to live with trays of it full time for the next fifteen years, and most cats (apart from possibly Mr Fidget) would far rather go outside anyway (the late and still sadly missed grey tabby, who had problems with her pads, insisted on plodding outside on her post operative bandaged feet to go to the loo rather than use the tray provided for her in the house).

So after our holiday we stopped shutting the kittens in the study, and reduced the three litter trays down to one.  That was scarcely being used, and yesterday the Systems Administrator cleared away the final tray, removed the layers of newspaper and vacuumed the room.  There have been no accidents or dirty protests yet.  With any luck the withdrawal of the indoor lavatory facilities was so gradual that the transition will be seamless.

The kittens took to being fed in the hall like ducks to the proverbial water.  Actually, they are such greedy animals they would be happy being fed pretty much anywhere.  I put down some paper in the hall, and when they saw the familiar dishes descending they were there.  So was Our Ginger, who sat determinedly in the middle of the paper and did not seem to want to go and have his supper alone in the kitchen as he's been doing since the arrival of the kittens.  A fourth dish was set down, and Our Ginger ate his supper down with the kids, the only difficulty being that they eat much faster than he does.  They are used to rushing into the kitchen once we open the door to see what, if anything, is left on his plate, and I wasn't sure how they would behave being fed alongside him. With quite good manners turned out to be the answer, as they all eyed up his remaining food but didn't push him bodily off it.  Instead Mr Cool advanced cautiously, and for a minute they both ate from opposite sides of the same dish.  That is not something I'd have expected to see back in May, when we first tried to show the kittens to Our Ginger and he howled and tried to escape from the room.

So there we have it.  It will be some weeks before I don't feel a certain sense of relief each morning when I come downstairs and find all three black and white cats still alive and well, but as far as introducing kittens to an existing adult cat goes I should say we have cracked it.

new concert season

Hot on the heels of the resumption of the Plant Heritage garden lectures comes the new concert season.  I am trying a new series this year in addition to the concerts at East Bergholt.  New to me, that is, for Studio Music is now in its twenty-sixth year.  I've been meaning to go without ever quite getting round to it for about the past three of those years, and this time I've finally organised myself and joined.

You do literally have to join, if you want to go to more than one concert.  Membership will set you back the princely sum of ten pounds, and is a requirement of the planning regulations, since the concerts are held in somebody's house, or rather the art studio attached to his house, right at the bottom of Brightlingsea overlooking the marshes and the creek.  The ticket desk is in the kitchen, and the audience files through into the double height room that forms the studio, where there's a choice between an eclectic collection of chairs downstairs, or an upstairs landing, or a little room off the landing with a restricted view.  Some folk who wanted to see opted to sit on the stairs, and those who arrived in time to bag front row seats were no more than six feet from the performers.

Today's guests were a German piano trio, the Klaviertrio Wurzburg, who had driven all the way from Wurzburg in Bavaria and then caught the ferry in order to perform in Brightlingsea, along with the pianist's husband and their three month old baby.  It was there in the list of gigs on their website, Wittlich, Grossbritannien, Neustadt (that's where Emil of Emil and the Detectives came from), Wurzburg, Rheinburg, Wurzburg again.  Grosbritannien was Brightlingsea.

I liked the concert very much.  I liked the repertoire, Schubert, Saint-Saens and Brahms, and I liked them.  That doesn't count for a much in that I don't have a great ear, let alone an educated one, but they sounded pretty good to me.  And they were very serious and charming, and never spoke once through the whole proceedings.  The pianist, who was very tall, darted a dashing and intense smile from under her fringe at sister on the violin each time they were ready to begin a new movement, while the cellist reminded me of John Singer Sergeant's portrait of the young Gabriel Faure.

The society has a new piano.  Their old one was on its last legs, to the point where 2016-17 was going to have to be the last season with a piano because it had got so bad it was embarrassing asking professional musicians to play it, then one of their supporters bought a small grand piano for them to use as long as they needed it.  Really classical music outside the big urban centres totters along on a wing and a prayer plus the kindness of strangers.  I don't understand how it's possible to bring three musicians all the way from Bavaria just to play to such a small audience, though clearly it is because Studio Music has been doing it for a quarter of a century already.  Long may it continue.

autumn lecture season

Now it's September the Plant Heritage lectures in Suffolk have started again.  I like the Plant Heritage talks.  They get speakers of national stature, and with gossip, plants for sale and the opportunity to eat home made cake, really what's not to like?  The car park is the answer, which is barely large enough to accommodate a hall full of plant enthusiasts' cars, let alone on days when the sports field behind the village hall is in use as it was today.  Stowupland is a very linear village with a moderately busy road running through it, and if there isn't space in the hall car park it's not immediately obvious where else you could leave your car, short of trespassing on the high school's drive.  I got a space, though.

The lecture was by Marina Christopher, author of a book on late summer flowering perennials which I have read, though today she was talking specifically about choosing plants to attract insects.  She had driven all the way from her nursery in Hampshire in her van full of plants, and didn't arrive until two thirty when the meeting was due to start, after a bad passage round the M25.  The organisers must have nerves of steel to have looked so outwardly calm as the minutes ticked away with still no speaker, though the blank space at the front of the room was a giveaway that something was wrong.  It seems to me that the traffic in the south east is so unpredictable and potentially so bad that the only way to reliably commit to doing a talk in Suffolk when you live in Hampshire (or vice versa) is to aim to be several hours early and fill the time doing something else when you arrive if you aren't caught in a jam, but I suppose busy people don't have the time to spare to keep being that early for things.

I was heartened by her view that many of the new varieties of Echinacea released in the past decade with flowers in exotic shades of pink or yellow were inherently unreliable and apt to die during their first winter, and to hear this view echoed by the voices of other people around the hall.  It's not just me, then.  Granted, our soil is meagre and our rainfall pitiful, but the consensus is that most of them are not good doers.  Apparently the RHS is now conducting a five year trial aimed purely at assessing longevity, before even starting to worry about how pretty or garden worthy any of them are.  One promising red variety died in its pot before ever making it into the trial ground. They like their own space too.  Enough of Echinacea.  Life is too short to keep buying (at vast expense) and planting things that will go into a decline and die if any of their neighbours lean on them, then probably die anyway come the winter.

The Plant Heritage organisers are looking for people to grow rare breeds of daffodil, to keep them in cultivation, but I didn't volunteer.  Our garden isn't ideal for daffodils, being dry, crowded, rooty and with shifting patterns of gradually increasing shade as the trees grow.  By a process of experiment and winnowing I have ended up with some areas where a limited number of daffodil varieties cope, and even those are topped up every other year, while my spreadsheet of things planted in the garden bears painful witness to the many types of Narcissus and locations that have not made the cut.  You would not want to entrust rarities to my doubtful keeping.

Instead I answered the appeal for somebody to arrive in time to put the chairs out at the start of the meeting.  I thought it would be friendly to make myself mildly useful, and getting there an extra quarter of an hour early should guarantee me a parking space.

a lightly shady corner

On the last Friday of our holiday a scant inch of rain fell at home.  I have this from three sources, our rain gauge, which is not great at picking up really small amounts but not bad by the time you get to an inch, a Guardian blog by somebody who works at a garden not far from here and mentioned it, and a local weather enthusiast who publishes data for his house at Elmstead Market. Unfortunately there must be an error in whatever software package he's using to aggregate his data, since his historic rainfall records show a total metre and a half over the past year, which is roughly three times what it should be, but his daily readings generally sound sensible.

There is no direct evidence of the scant inch, since the borders are dry and hard as ever.  Next year if we have a dry end to the summer I think I will splash out financially as well as literally and water the beds a few times.  This year I only did the areas where I'd planted new things earlier in the summer, plus the driest section of the long bed when I thought the occupants were actually going to die, and one soaking of the ditch bed after all the hydrangeas had collapsed.  It's tough on the plants, and leaves the garden looking pretty rough.

Today I watered the top end of the sloping bed in the back garden as I pruned and weeded, prior to filling in the gaps from last spring's revamp with more Kalimeris incisa and some Digitalis x mertonensis that are languishing in a cold frame.  I grew them both from seed.  The Kalimeris is a sort of small flowered daisy, and why the botanists decided it was a Kalimeris and not an Aster beats me, though three quarters of the asters are no longer Aster either after the last burst of reclassification.  I planted a patch of several, and only one came up.  I don't know what happened to the others, and suspect them of having been grazed to death by rabbits, since the one that's taken looks reasonably happy.  It would probably be happier if I'd watered it a couple of times over the summer, but it seems to be intent on living rather than toying with the idea of dying.

It makes a nice partner for my rare Aster 'Vasterival', bought from the plant stall at the Plant Heritage monthly meeting.  Lectures resume tomorrow, so I must tell one of the organisers their efforts to get this variety into wider cultivation are bearing fruit.  It is showing me what it thinks of the drought by not getting anywhere near the one metre to 1.2 metres that Knoll Gardens' website tells me it should achieve, but it looks quite cheerful.  I think it might even have started to spread at the root.  The flowers are dainty in construction and a soft pink, held on darkish stems, very tasteful.

Digitalis x mertonensis is a foxglove of medium height and moderate longevity, with flowers the same shade of pink as crushed strawberries.  It is a hybrid, but comes true from seed, which is confusing when you start thinking about it.  I am planning to put it next to the pink flowered sweet briar rose 'Anne of Geierstein', and if they can manage to both flower at the same time that will be highly satisfactory.  The rose ended up on its own roots by a slightly peculiar method, in that I bought a grafted plant in the normal way from Peter Beales, and after a few years the original plant became very sad and sick and died in short order, but meanwhile a low growing branch had layered itself and grew away like mad.  Years later it lives on, but six feet away from where I originally put it.

competition issues

Today I started sorting out the far rose bed in the back garden.  I have still not finished the eleagnus hedge, or the herb bed, or tidying under the kitchen window, but fancied a change of scenery from all that gravel, and since there are various things flowering in the back garden I thought I might as well spend some time in their presence.

One regular job is to remove the tentacles of rambler rose that advance through the bed from the rose bank.  I am not sure the rose bank is so good as it was a few years back, as the most rampant of the ramblers, all with white flowers, have overwhelmed the other roses to varying degrees.  I'm not entirely sure adding honeysuckle into the mix was an entirely good idea as it tends to overwhelm everything as well.  On the other hand, the flowers are so pretty and it smells wonderful.  It is the way of gardens to simplify themselves as the most vigorous and spreading species and those most suited to the site gradually squeeze out their less robust neighbours.  For inveterate plant collectors, especially those subjected to the temptation of working in the business of selling plants, this is not necessarily a bad thing, up to a point.  It is easy to end up with a garden that looks bitty, when you love plants, and bitty is not generally a good look.

A one-off job this autumn is to remove some of the non-flowering Baptisia australis.  Having preached the virtues of repetition and unity in design, here am I wanting to make the far rose bed bittier by taking out two of the three clumps of Baptisia so that I can replace them with something different, probably Geranium 'Rozanne'.  There are two problems with the Baptisia, firstly its refusal to flower, and secondly the fact that it grows too big and muscles its way all over the roses, the late flowering Aconitum, and everything else at that end of the bed that is still trying to do anything by late summer.  The non floweringness is a bit of a mystery, since it used to flower perfectly well and I used to like it.  I tried asking Rosy Hardy at the Great Dixter Plant Fair, and she hazarded a guess that it might have used up all the nutrients in the vicinity and need feeding, but she didn't look totally convinced as if this was an issue she had encountered personally and overcome.  I haven't come across any mention of it in any book or article I've read either.  I fed the whole bed in the spring with fish, blood and bone, but it hasn't made any difference to the Baptisia.

I started off by cutting down the patches of Baptisia I thought I didn't want, so that I could see how open the bed looked without them.  Much more open and much better, was the answer, and the roses and aconites looked glad to be relieved of their late neighbour and as if they were hoping it wouldn't be back any time soon.  I decided to leave one large patch at one end towards the back, where it wasn't crowding anything, slightly out of sentiment because I grew it myself from seed and would be sad to junk all of it, and out of pique to see if I could discover how to get that clump to start flowering again.  Then I ran the hose on the chopped down patches to soften the soil so that I could get a fork into the ground, loosened the edge of the first patch of roots, and pressed down on the handle of the fork, which promptly snapped.

I dug the rest of the clump out with a pick axe.  I have noticed that pick axes seem to feature more often in my gardening efforts than they do in most published accounts or on TV (my favourite ever non pick axe television moment was Monty Don and Joe Swift digging with spades through the last root of an enormous evergreen shrub they were going to move, that had already had a trench dug 99 per cent of the way round it, presumably by the production team and almost certainly not just using a border spade).  The Baptisia had formed a very dense, almost woody crown and I wondered whether simple old age was responsible for the lack of flowers.  In that case, though, wouldn't you expect it to still flower from the younger growth around the edges of the clump?  I also wondered whether it would prove to be one of those plants that is adept at regenerating from any remaining roots.  My hunch was that it wouldn't, but what is that worth, when I don't even know why it isn't flowering?

The ground cover of plain blue Viola cornuta has entirely died down with the drought, so I hope the roots are still alive.  I was heartened to see some low shoots of sweet woodruff reappearing.  That put on a lovely display about two years ago, but in more recent times has been grazed down to nothing by rabbits, so I was not sure if it had survived.  I have not seen a rabbit on the top lawn for some weeks now, and am beginning to hope in a very cautious sort of way that the Systems Administrator's sniping out of the bedroom window might have finally cleared the colony that used to live under the far deck, or that the presence of the new and energetic young cats is starting to act as a deterrent.