A day under the hazels

After weeks of mostly wet and miserable weather, at last three beautiful, sunny days – a chance to get out and get on with garden jobs, despite the frosty weather.  (It didn’t last long; today was foggy, damp and milder, and there’s more of the same in the forecast.)  The frost only melted where the sun got on to it, which limited access to some parts of the garden to avoid walking on frozen grass, and the soil was still wet and sticky after all the rain, so I spent time weeding the vegetable garden paths and tackling the bottom corner of the veg plot. 

Work in progress

The far end of the veg garden contains a shelter belt consisting of two big hazel bushes.  When we moved here, I brought several plants in pots with me, and two of the pots sprouted hazel plants – some of our squirrels had buried nuts in there as a farewell present.  I planted them on the edge of the veg plot, to protect it from the easterly winds, and they have grown into quite tall trees, which I have dismally failed to prune over the years.  As a result they not only cast shade in that corner, but also sprawled out over the path adjoining the corner bed, making access, and hence maintenance, difficult.  That bed currently contains a few aquilegia plants grown from seed and awaiting more suitable quarters (one reason I want to get on with clearing the shady area behind the front garden wall) and not much else; the space right in the corner has for some time served as a parking place for buddleja prunings used as bean poles and the like, and the strip under the hazels had been colonised by herb bennet (a wildflower, not edible) and damson suckers.  And the boards that are supposed to demarcate the bed edges had fallen over and were lying in the path, making access even more tricky.

Serious pruning of the hazels has been deferred to another day, but the first step was to clear proper access to the area by cutting back some of the lower branches, so that I didn’t poke myself in the eye while weeding.  Most of the damson suckers were dug out, although a couple have come up in the cluster of hazel trunks and nothing will get them out, so I’ll just have to keep an eye on them and rub off any shoots that appear.  An old and unproductive rhubarb plant was also dug out and thrown away.  Weeding the area was less of a struggle than I had expected, although there are a lot of weed seedlings appearing, so once I’ve tackled the hazel pruning I will mulch the area heavily and probably leave it for a year or so.  One legacy of the lack of attention given to the area is that fallen leaves have just been left there to rot, so I’ll pile up those leaves that haven’t yet made their way to the leaf mould bins and leave the worms to get on with it, with the mulch on top.

My gardening companion

At least there are quite a few worms in there, although some of them fell prey to the bottom-of-the-garden robin, a friendly and trusting little chap (or chapess) who pops up whenever I go down there and sings to me.  Much of the singing is territory-defending, directed at the other local robins, of which there are quite a few, but sometimes it’s a very quiet warbling clearly directed at me; I’m never sure whether it’s a ‘please go away so that I can safely come down and look for food’, a ‘please carry on and dig up more worms’ or just ‘this is really nice’.  Anyway, he had a very happy afternoon picking over where I had been working - and I thoroughly enjoyed his company.

New Year in bloom

Galanthus elwesii

A gardening journalist the other week wrote about flowers open at New Year; every year he counts how many types of plant, including weeds, in his garden have at least one flower on New Year’s Day.  His total this year was lower than usual, despite the continuing mild weather, probably because it has been (and still is) so miserably wet.  It prompted me to go out and take a look round our own plot, albeit a few days into January, and there were more flowers than I had first thought.  It does depend a bit on what you count as an ‘open flower’; I discounted a single bloom of each of Geum rivale and Welsh poppy (Meconopsis cambrica), both of which were really the sad half-mummified remains of autumn flowers rather than fresh blooms.  But it was interesting how many plants were actively flowering regardless of the mist and murk.  Of course there were the usual winter suspects: winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum), Mahonia ‘Winter Sun’ and Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ (also Viburnum tinus ‘Gwenllian’, which has lovely dark blue berries as well as flowers, but only one viburnum can be counted – we’re totalling general types of plant, not varieties).  There are also some isolated flowers on the winter honeysuckle (Lonicera purpusii), but fewer than usual thanks to the assiduous attentions of three bullfinches, a handsome male and two elegant females, who find the buds irresistible.  A little out of sight and out of mind are two other early bloomers, the rosemary and sarcococca (sweet box); I must find a better site for the latter where we can enjoy its scent.  The first snowdrops, Galanthus elwesii, are out, as are the primulas by the drive entrance, and at least one viola left over in a pot from last year’s plantings is still in flower; so too are a couple of stems on the senecio (now called something else by the botanists, I forget what) and two tiny blooms on the little red chrysanthemum in a patio pot.  More surprisingly, the ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ rose still has a few buds, one of which opened fairly satisfactorily when cut and put in a vase indoors.  There are flowers on several of the ‘Baron Solemacher’ alpine strawberries that are scattered around the garden, and let’s not forget all the daisies in the lawn, and clumps of meadow grass between the paving slabs (grass is a flowering plant too).  The hellebores are well in bud but not yet in flower, so weren’t counted.

Viburnum tinus 'Gwenllian'

Hellebore in bud

I make that 14; I must repeat the exercise next year for comparison.

What I did do on New Year’s morning was to count the number of bird species that put in an appearance over the course of a leisurely breakfast: 16, not counting the red kite that cruised by overhead.  I hope they stay around for the Big Garden Birdwatch later in the month, though the windfall apples are now all eaten and so the number of blackbirds – at least 15 at one point – has reduced substantially, and the regular skirmishes between the mistle thrush and his enemy the fieldfare have stopped.  But spring is in the air – two of the robins have paired up and a blackbird has been occasionally heard singing on dry afternoons.

Coriander, dill - and daffodil shoots

The weather hasn’t been good for gardening; even the greenhouse isn’t tempting me out much.  I have managed to get the shallots planted and broad beans sown (and covered up with fleece to prevent the squirrel from digging them up; he has a lot of hazelnuts buried in that area), and made a start on pruning the apple trees, doing a little out-of-season thinning on the cordons and tidying up the smaller tree before starting on the big tree – still more to do there.  Meanwhile the garden has little to offer on the edibles side other than the cooking apples in store, some remaining leeks and various herbs; the dill and coriander that I sowed in the big patio tubs, on top of the miniature daffodils, have produced a small but welcome harvest (and the daffodils are starting to push up between them).  With the weather as mild as it is, and not much cold in the medium-term forecast, I’m tempted to try sowing some seeds early, although that might really be pushing it; February is still to come, and anyway the ground is so wet that it might really not be a great idea.  On top of the rain we are now having a very windy week; not much sun forecast before the weekend.