A death in the garden

In last week’s post I quoted from Ecclesiastes about there being ‘a time to die’; and this week I’m looking at the latest death in the garden.  The apple trees are mostly in full flower – the cooking apple tree later than the cordons, which started flowering a couple of weeks ago – but the little eating apple tree, which has been declining gradually over the last few years, is now very definitely Dead.

Cooking apple tree - alive and in flower

Eating apple tree - quite dead

It’s not quite clear what the problem is (or was).  It and the cooker were planted by the previous owners of the garden, presumably at much the same time, but the little tree never really thrived and rarely fruited well.  Was it planted on the site of a previous apple tree (never a good idea)?  The bark has been shredded by woodpeckers, which would have hastened its demise, but the woodpeckers must have had a reason to do that (they haven’t wreaked the same destruction on the cooker or the plum tree); presumably they were finding some sort of insects in the bark, which might have been the root cause of the problem.  For the past couple of years the tree has really only been a place to hang the bird feeders, and even in death it might fulfil that function for a few more years before it rots away (or we lose patience and cut it down).  And since the RSPB is now advising that we shouldn’t feed birds in the summer, perhaps even that won’t be necessary all the time.

A good long time ago we visited Andrew and Bryony Lawson’s garden in Charlbury when it was open for the National Garden Scheme, and they had suffered the loss of an apple tree, in a prominent position in the garden, just before the opening day.  Their solution to this potential eyesore had been to paint the dead tree bright blue and make a focal point of it, and everyone said how unusual and wonderful it looked.  We’re considering doing something similar, although the state of the bark might make that impracticable.  And however wonderful a blue tree might look in a colourful flower bed, as a stand-alone feature in the middle of a lawn it might be a bit odd.  Decision still to be taken (and I suspect it will be put off indefinitely).

Possibly a death postponed is that of the big hellebore (is it argutifolius?  I can never remember) in the front garden.  It didn't flower this winter - and poorly the winter before that - and looked as though one of the nasty hellebore diseases had got it.  I cut off the leaves and disposed of them in the council green waste bin, but the other day I noticed a few new (healthy-looking, at least for the moment) leaves coming through.  We'll see.

Meanwhile the posh hellebore that dried out while we were away has been a poor-looking thing.  I repotted its shrivelled remains carefully and have been keeping them nicely watered – the weather has been very dry for a few weeks, with a cold drying wind much of the time – and I see that there is now the tiniest green shoot at the base of the stem.  So all may be well.

The pink pot

The wind knocked the tulips, now mostly faded, about a bit.  I’ve been pleased with them this year.  The ‘pink pot’ of ‘Margarita’, ‘Foxtrot’ and (dark purple) ‘Ronaldo’, with an exuberant underplanting of forget-me-nots, worked very well indeed; ‘Ronaldo’ was a little short, and later than the others (it is now the only variety in the pot still standing), but provided good contrast.  I really liked ‘Margarita’, a fine tall early tulip with a broad base and a strong pink colour - and scented to boot! - and smaller ‘Foxtrot’ was a good complement.  I had really wanted my old favourite ‘Angelique’, but none of the suppliers seemed to be stocking it any more.  I have one bulb of ‘Angelique’ planted out down at the bottom of the veg patch, where it is overrun by the lily-of-the-valley and goosegrass, and a couple planted last year in the patio bed, and am struck by the difference between them; the older bulb is a good strong pink-and-white, while the newer bulbs are very washed-out in colour.  I wonder if the strain has deteriorated over the years, and bulb merchants are now moving to other varieties?

The older 'Angelique'

The other big pot, down by the summerhouse, has Sarah Raven’s Ginger Snap collection, and is doing very well indeed, even despite the wind.  It’s a colour combination that I wouldn’t have put together myself, and although the darker tulips haven't been much in evidence (only one ‘Negrita Parrot’ came up - and the flowerhead snapped off very quickly! - and not too many ‘Queen of Night’), they serve to offset the mixed tawny orange and pinkish tones in the others (‘Cairo’, ‘Ridgedale’ and ‘Time Out’), not all of which I might have chosen individually.  As a mix, I would grow them again.

Ginger snap mix

Back on the patio, the pot of ‘Doll’s Minuet’ was less successful; the blooms didn’t last too long, and the underplanting with the pink felicia was too mimsy.

Now that the patio tulips are over, the main event there currently is the wisteria, which is in full flow, giving both colour and scent to the garden.

The wisteria

As mentioned above, the RSPB has modified its advice on bird feeding because of trichomonosis, the pigeon-borne disease that has decimated the finch population among others.  We used to have good numbers of chaffinches and greenfinches here, but in recent years they have been in decline.  I’ve been pleased to see a pair of each of them coming to the patio to drink, and have been more careful about changing the drinking water than in the past, in the hope of reducing the infection risk (there is no chance of keeping the pigeons away).  Apart from a few crumbs (which the sparrows and dunnocks clear up quickly), and the last few old cooking apples for the blackbirds, I’ve also reduced the food offerings; the other birds are around (the blackcap was singing at the bottom of the garden the other day) but not coming for food, which presumably they can find out in the fields and hedgerows around here.  Both the blackbirds and the great tits (the current residents in the nestbox) are feeding youngsters.

To every thing there is a season

“To every thing there is a season” says the Bible.  “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”  Wise words, but it has to be said that late April is not the time to pluck up camassias and re-plant them elsewhere.  But sometimes needs must.

A load of camassias

I planted both white and blue camassias long years ago, but the blue ones – admittedly in a less favourable location than the white ones – faded away some time back.  There are still some white ones flowering every spring, rather later than the blue ones did (different subspecies perhaps?).  The soil round here is drier than they like, which might be part of the problem.  I have occasionally considered buying some more blue ones - they're lovely flowers and good for cutting - but didn’t really have a good position available to put them in.  But when a neighbour was offering blue camassias that he was throwing out in order to redesign his garden, I readily accepted.  What I didn’t expect was a whole wheelbarrow-full of them.

New quarters

The plants were rather wilted, dug up a few days earlier I think; the weather has been warm and dry the past few days (now back to dull and with a chilly wind again).  They had already been in flower, and the flower-heads had to go to allow the bulbs to grow on; I also cut off the leaf-tops which were going to flop all over the place and get in the way.  I found room for some of the bulbs in the old herb patch, where they can fight it out with the symphyandra, and put a few more in a pot of old compost in case I find a place for them elsewhere.  I expect it will take a couple of years for the bulbs to recover from the shock, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.  The remainder of the plants went to the compost heap.

It is still the season for dandelions; I found a couple hiding among the cowslips in the lawn and dug them out.

Hiding among the cowslips

Observing garden wildlife is a never-ending lesson.  I’ve long been aware that there are seasons for certain butterflies; a few species overwinter here as adults and occasionally over winter a red admiral or small tortoiseshell turns up in the garage or even indoors, while others hatch out from their larval state in spring or in waves later on.  A few, such as painted ladies, are true migrants.  The earliest butterflies in these parts are always the brimstones, which have been on the wing since late March this year, and I had to rescue a comma from being trapped in the greenhouse earlier this month; we’re now in the season for orange-tips.  There has also been a good number of little blue butterflies fluttering around the garden; they rarely land anywhere for long and I’ve had difficulty getting a good look at them, though I’ve suspected that they are holly blues.  The other day I managed to take a photo of one resting on the red camellia, and it is indeed a holly blue; later in the year the common blues seem to be … well, more common – though again it can be hard to get a good view of them!

Holly blue

One thing that never seems to be out of season is the slug and snail population.  I took some sunflower seedlings out of the shelter of the propagator once they had germinated, and left them in the greenhouse to recover before I put them out in the cold frame, only to find the next day that the tips had been munched off.  Fortunately I have more sunflower seeds (and cosmos, which had suffered the same fate) and re-sowed; a lesson learnt!

Need to start again ....

Weed of the week

The current Weed of the Week is the dandelion.

At this time of year there’s always too much to do in the garden, and I tend to take a ‘last-minute’ approach to garden jobs.  I can’t remove all the weeds (ok, ‘plants in the wrong place’), so I focus on what’s in flower (and about to set seed) and home in on that, or at least take off the flower-heads; if I can’t dig the plant out at least I can stop it seeding around. 

Just now I’m doing a daily dandelion patrol around the garden, often at least twice a day.  The sight of a dot of yellow in the lawn sends me running for the daisy grubber (my preferred dandelion-removing tool) to do my best to dig the offending plant out.  Sometimes the base of the root stays in the soil, but at least it won’t re-flower until the autumn, when I’ll have more time to attend to it.

Verge across the lane

As weeds go, dandelions are fairly desirable plants (they’re good for insects, for example).  However there are lots and lots of dandelions in the fields and hedgerows around here for the insects to enjoy – the grass verge across the lane is full of them – and I don’t feel too bad about trying to eradicate them from my garden.  I’ve had some success over the years in reducing the number of them in the lawn, but they often appear around the edges, at the base of walls, along path edges and under the hedges; my pet peeve is those that hide among other yellow flowers, especially the doronicums, which have very similar-looking flowers that disguise the dandelions. 

Dandelion hiding beside the doronicums!

The first weed of the year is usually the hairy bittercress, a tiny plant that produces huge quantities of seed, often appearing in the compost of pots and the gravel of the drive; I pulled out some big rosettes of it back in late winter, and fortunately they're very shallow-rooted and easy to remove, but you never spot all of them.  I’ve also found some groundsel, a weed that I almost entirely eradicated in the garden some years ago but which reappeared last year and is still coming back this spring.  There’s always quite a few willowherb seedlings, especially in the veg patch for some reason, and I take them out whenever I see them; I often think I’ve got them all out, and then at the end of the growing season I find a few plants seeding merrily away in some corner or other.

Allium triquetrum

Some ‘weeds’ are of my own making.  The three-cornered leek, Allium triquetrum, that I found early on in the garden and, since the flowers are attractive and good for cutting, spread them around, have taken over in several places and keep cropping up ever more widely.  I’ve tried dead-heading them and then attacking them with the shears (the leaves make good compost!) as there are really too many to dig out en masse.  There just isn’t the time to deal with them.  And, talking of alliums, my chives are about to flower; I need to get the heads off those so that they don’t spread too widely.

I’ve found some rather nice-looking leaves in one of the beds – geranium?  Maybe it’s a weed too …..

Geranium?

Too much of a good thing

You can’t have too much of a good thing, the saying goes, but in the garden I think you definitely can.

Mind you, the dismal weather recently relented for a couple of days, with some warm sunshine on Wednesday, which was a really Good Thing, and we could do with more of it; but now we’re back to more normal temperatures, with mostly showery and breezy days in the forecast.  It has been quite dry for a week or so, and plants in pots are suffering, so some rain would actually be quite welcome!

At this time of year I’m always behind with the garden jobs, but having been away for much of March (and part of February before that) I have a lot of jobs to tackle.  One that should have been done in March and is still only partly done, is pruning the buddleja.  It’s a big old bush, woody and bare in the middle, with a fringe of new shoots round the edges, and I tend to allow as many of these new shoots to grow as possible; the result is that they tend to become rather congested, and there are now many more branches to prune than previously.  Pruning them is only part of the job; dealing with the prunings, many of them very long, is a time-consuming task.  It would be easier if I had a shredder and were prepared to use it on them, but I like to make use of at least some of them – the long poles for pea and bean wigwams, the sticky-out tops as supports for small plants and to guard seedbeds against intruding birds, and the old seedheads and new leaves for the compost heap.  Trimming all those prunings to suitable sizes takes time, and while the many growing shoots are a ‘Good Thing’, especially for the butterflies, the quantity of them is becoming a bit of a nuisance.  This year I’m being more prepared to rub some out, which will reduce flowering but will, I hope, also reduce the job next spring.

Half-pruned!

The bare middle

Some of the prunings have already been used as stakes for peony 'Sarah Bernhardt', and more have been earmarked to do the same job for the giant achillea.

Another ‘Good Thing’ that might be too much is the pink felicia that I’ve used to top some of the tulip pots and have potted up for growing on elsewhere.  As I rather suspected at the time and mentioned in a previous post last year, it’s pretty bomb-proof; not only has it now sailed through the winter unharmed, but the pots of it outside the greenhouse have been regularly disturbed and overturned by an inquisitive pheasant that seems determined to peck at them.  I’ve given up bothering; the felicia seems to grow undeterred even when upended.

Overturned felicia pots

Then there’s the symphyandra acquired from last year’s plant sale and planted rather haphazardly in very stony soil.  It doesn’t seem to mind, in fact it is already spreading rather worryingly.  It’s not invasive yet, but I can see that it might become so.  Note to self: keep an eye on it and cut it down to size if necessary!

Symphyandra among the stones

Some of my ‘too much of a Good Things’ are self-inflicted.  I can’t bring myself to trust that seeds will germinate, and tend to sow too many.  As a result I now have 18 lettuce seedlings.  How much lettuce will we be able to eat?!  I’ll try to give some away.

Lots of lettuce!

But sometimes plants increasing by themselves can be a genuinely Good Thing.  Some old tulip bulbs bedded out at the far end of the veg patch, for want of anywhere better to put them, have increased rather nicely, despite being overrun by the lily-of-the-valley.  I use them for cutting and am grateful for the colours that they bring to the house.

Veg patch tulips - definitely a Good Thing

BST

The clocks have gone forward, and we’re now in British Summer Time (BST).  Not that you would know it from the weather.  Magnolias and cherry trees in other gardens are in splendid flower, and the birds are nesting, but the weather is still fickle.  We had a good, dry week towards the end of the month – we were away and enjoyed the fine days – but then it turned chilly and showery, with occasional hail, again.  In our absence a pot of fancy Hellebore (Helleborus x glandorfensis 'Red Snow'), brought as a present by a visitor and left outside while I considered what to do with it, dried out a little too much and is looking very sad.  If it recovers, I need to find a suitable spot for it; the modern hybrids, I read, like more sun than the older varieties, and tend to be a little short-lived.  (This one might be very short-lived indeed, though I’ll try to revive it!)

Narcissus 'Thalia'

Tulip 'Exotic Emperor'

Tulip 'Orange Emperor' - and a calendula!

The little daffodils in the two big tubs are now mostly over, with just a few of the later varieties still coming through; most of the daffs in the ground are still going strong, and the clump of Narcissus ‘Thalia’ by the patio is flowering strongly.  The first tulips are in bloom – white ‘Exotic Emperor’ (syn. ‘White Valley’) and its orange cousin ‘Orange Emperor’; these are now a few years old, left in their pots with a top-dressing of fresh compost each year, and seem to be doing really well and bulking up.  Good value bulbs.  I’m not sure whether to top-dress them this year; last year I sowed annuals in the pots to make use of them during the summer, and a lone calendula is flowering gamely alongside ‘Orange Emperor’, but the second generation of seeds might not germinate if covered with too much compost.   I might try scooping out the top couple of centimetres of compost, with any self-sown seeds, and put that somewhere in the garden, to give me a wildflower-look effect. 

Camellia williamsii 'Donation'

The cowslips are shyly poking through the grass in the lawn, and there are primulas (self-set) under the apple cordons.  The older camellia, C. williamsii ‘Donation’, is flowering superbly, and even the newer one, C. ‘Ruby Wedding’, which has never flowered before, has a couple of buds just breaking.  This is interesting; the usual advice about non-flowering camellias is to water them well in June and July when the buds are being formed, but last year those months were hot and dry and I’m sure the camellias didn’t get their necessary soak.  I bought ‘Ruby Wedding’ a number of years ago, looking for a red-flowered one (so as not to clash with the daffodils), but at the garden centre I noticed that several different varieties had the same photo on their label; unsure whether any of them were red-flowered, I plumped for ‘Ruby Wedding’, reckoning that there was a good chance it would be red – and finally, after several years, it turns out that indeed it is.

C. 'Ruby Wedding' - and yes, it is red!

I had planned to split the Bergenia ‘Bressingham White’ as it’s starting to look in need of division, but in fact it has flowered better than it ever has.  I used to worry that the white was too white alongside the pale cream Narcissus ‘Jenny’, but it doesn’t look too bad.  I’ll split it if I can find the time, but otherwise shall leave well alone.  In my last garden I had B. ‘Silberlicht’, but while the flowers were white when in full bloom the buds and the fading flowers were pinkish, which wasn’t what I wanted; ‘Bressingham White’ is much whiter.

Bergenia 'Bressingham White' - and Narcissus 'Jenny'

On the veg front, some lettuce seeds sown before we went away in the middle of the month are sprouting nicely, and the first of the broad bean ‘Imperial Green Longpod’ are starting to push through their compost.  The netting over the two purple sprouting broccoli plants has successfully kept the pigeons at bay, and the plants are producing a good crop of greens. 

The birds don’t seem to be much in evidence since our return from abroad – a few sparrows, dunnocks and blue tits, the two robins and a couple of blackbirds, and of course the woodpigeons and pheasants.  But they seem to be shunning the fatball container.  I’ve seen the sparrowhawk a few times – I wonder if she has been attacking the little birds?  I suppose she’s nesting too, and looking to feed herself up.  I moved the fatball container to a spot close to the shrubs, to allow birds to hide quickly if needed, and that seems to have worked; a pair of bluetits were feeding there today.  Perhaps the pair spotted a couple of weeks back staking out the nestbox and now apparently setting up home there.

Not sure what this is ....

Despite the chill, it hasn’t been a particularly cold winter, but the catmint (nepeta) seems to have died.  I wonder why?  And I wonder what is this plant nearby – not something I recognise?  I’ll leave it and see what it does; if it’s a nasty thug, I can heave it out before it does too much damage, and otherwise I’ll hope for some nice flowers!

March weather, March jobs

After the snowy landscape of Norway, where we’ve been these past weeks, the garden looks green and springlike, even though the weather is still very variable.  In the past few days we’ve had sun, rain, hail and wind; on the one sunny day there was a little warmth in the air, but otherwise the wind is keeping things rather chilly.  However it’s still only March, and this is all par for the course.  Spring is on the way.

Not quite so little daffodils

The car headlights, on our return, lit up the display of daffodils in the hedgerow opposite the house – a bit of guerilla gardening on my part a few years back, and now bearing fruit (or more precisely flowers).  The daffodils in the sunny areas of the garden are out, as are the mixed little daffs in the two old patio tubs – the latter seem taller than in past years, I wonder why?  Tulips are in bud, and the violets at the bottom of the garden are making a fine and scented carpet.

A violet carpet

There’s also more insect activity than when we left; several bees buzzing around, especially on the pulmonaria flowers in the weedy areas by the wall.  A blackbird has been singing very quietly somewhere, just trying out his voice before mating begins in earnest.

Pulmonaria (with bees)

So it’s back to all the March jobs that need doing.  The hotbin, which runs cold over winter and doesn’t like being left unattended while we’re away, has been emptied, cleaned out and a fresh start made with a load of Allium triquetrum leaves (sheared over in the hope of keeping on top of the plants).  A start has been made on pruning the buddleja, and to accommodate all the trimmings, one of the dalek compost bins has been cleared out.  The old, half-composted contents of the hotbin and dalek have been used to clear a weedy bed in the veg patch that needs reclaiming, with cardboard and a covering of black plastic; I hope that bed will be usable by next year. 

The dahlia tubers have been taken out of the garage, picked over, dusted down and potted up in the greenhouse, to get them started for late summer colour.  The broad bean seedlings from the cold frame have gone into the veg plot, and some maincrop bean seeds sown in the cold frame for succession; a few lettuce seeds have also been started.  The main seed-sowing business can wait a week or two until temperatures are a little more clement!

Forty days and forty nights

 

Some primulas are flowering despite the rain!

The weather, as is well known, is a favourite topic of conversation among us Brits.  However, in a day or two we shall be 40 days into 2026, and the Met Office reports that it has rained every day this year in some parts of the south and south-west of the country.  Not far off the biblical ‘forty days and forty nights’ that supposedly triggered the Flood; although admittedly it hasn’t actually been raining all the time, it has been very wet and there is a lot of flooding in the usual (and some not-so-usual) places.  Our garden is pretty soggy.  There has been hardly any sun for days – just mist and dull drizzle.  Needless to say, there has been a lot of weather-related moaning going on!  To make matters worse, the forecast is for more of the same for most of the foreseeable future.  Apparently there’s a ‘blocking high’ over Scandinavia, which is keeping low-pressure systems over us (and other parts of Europe – parts of Spain and Portugal are also suffering and eastern Europe is very cold). 

With a long holiday coming up, I had been worrying about getting the apple tree pruned before it bursts into leaf.  However, last week there were a couple of isolated dry spells long enough to allow me to get out with the secateurs, loppers and pruning saw.  I even managed to do the wisteria (which didn’t take long) while I was at it.

The big apple tree had finally shed nearly all its fruit; there were a few rotten ones which I pulled off.  This year I shortened some of the branches leaning over the veg plot (so that I can get to the entrance without having to bend down too much!) and took out a large branch that was crowding the canopy on that side.  There were a few broken and crossing stems to remove, and I also managed to shorten some of the old water shoots that were heading heaven-wards, so that I could reach them in future years.  There are a couple of downward-facing branches that I would have liked to cut off – one is too close to other branches, and the other is low down and makes mowing of the lawn difficult – but I’ve left them for next year; photos here to remind me!

Two branches to remove next year!

Cordon fruit trees are supposed to be pruned in summer, but I’ve found that doing this when the trees are in full leaf (and fruiting) results in a lot of shoots being missed and therefore becoming too long.  Several of the cordons are a mess, with excessive growth outwards and upwards.  So I tackled them too, taking out some of the worst bits and trying not to cut out too much – the old saying about ‘growth follows the knife’ is true and particularly applicable to fruit trees; take away too many branches and you end up with lots of unwanted water shoots.  Again, more to do next year.

Rather a mess

Despite the dismal weather, late winter flowers are starting to emerge; the snowdrops are making a fine show, there are a few winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) and the odd primula that has self-seeded into corners, and a pot of yellow crocuses is starting to put on colour.  The tubs of little mixed daffodils – now several years old and still going strong – are in bud, just sitting the rain out and waiting for some sun to get going!

The first winter aconites (with snowdrop and cyclamen leaves)

First crocus

And I managed to produce a home-grown green salad (lettuce from the cold frame, lamb's lettuce and a few little beet leaves from the veg plot) this week - not bad for February.