A stormy weekend

A stormy weekend here: wet and windy, though not as damaging as in some parts of the country.  But enough unfavourable weather to keep me inside. 

A dry day last week allowed me to get some gardening jobs done; garlic bulbs planted out, sweet pea, broad bean and pea seeds sown and put under cover in the greenhouse. 

Rosa dupontii, photographed in a previous year

I also managed to dispose of a pile of rose stems left from before we went away on holiday.  This was the result of some last-minute work before our departure, on Rosa dupontii.  I’ve been in two minds about R. dupontii for quite some time now.  I planted it, in the shrub bed along the side of the house, many years ago, having been taken by the catalogue photo of its flowers (single, pink and white with yellow stamens, delicate and pretty).  Unfortunately the reality of the plant (as opposed to its flowers) has been anything but delicate and pretty.  It throws up thick stems over 6ft (2m) tall, with the desirable flowers poised on the tips; like most wild or semi-wild roses it only flowers the once, in early summer, and after that doesn’t have much of interest to offer (it does produce hips, but they’re not really anything remarkable).  Its only other redeeming feature is that it doesn’t have many thorns, which at least makes the autumn cutting back relatively painless.  As its position makes it a little ‘out of sight and out of mind’, it often doesn’t get cut back until late (if at all!), but at the end of September this year the immediate necessity was to get it down to size; we had a decorator coming to paint the outside woodwork of the house, from a very tall ladder, and I could see that he was going to need to position said ladder in the shrub bed right where R. dupontii was growing.

So I got to work with secateurs and lopper.  And started reflecting on the foolishness of acquiring anything on the basis of its flowers alone, without regard for what it was like as a plant overall.  And the more I thought about it, the less inclined I felt to persevere with a rose that I probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place.  So, R. dupontii – or at least all of its top growth – was reduced to a pile of long stems on the ground; the roots had to be left to be tackled another day, when time permitted.  A lesson learnt, even if it has taken a long time for me to take it to heart.

Remains of Rosa dupontii

There is a lot of other plantlife in that border that needs attention – including cutting back and some digging out! – but that’s also something for another time, probably over a long period.  And I need to do some hard thinking about what that bed ought to look like when it’s finished.

The largest plant in that area is the big holly tree, which has a good crop of berries this year; but the Scandi-avians (fieldfares and redwings) have now arrived, so the berries may not last long!