Garden news from my virtual compost heap

5 May 2010

A garden full of orange tulips

- and pink ones, and yellow ones, and deep purple ones, and blue and purple muscari, and white and yellow narcissi, and hyacinths just fading, and apple blossom just coming, and - well, too many things to mention. All suddenly bursting into blossom together after a long, particularly cold, winter. And between the flowers, many shades of beautiful and brilliant green. Leaves soft and fresh, perfect, and not yet marked by pests.

The swifts came too, the first one seen last Thursday, and several more heard and seen since. Along with the sight of the neighbour's cat seen snoozing on the front doorstep of his home, in the sunshine, for the first time this year, this is an eagerly awaited event, the arrival of the swifts. Ted Hughes said it better:

They've made it again,
Which means the globe's still working, the Creation's
Still waking refreshed, our summer's
Still all to come - And here they are, here they are again

9 February 2010

Birdy world

A robin that I noticed around the garden a lot in December disappeared for a while and I feared it had succumbed to the cold winter, or got caught by a cat or a sparrowhawk. Before its disappearance it had been behaving in a rather aggressive and territorial fashion. (I know that robins will fight aggressively with one another, but this robin kept chasing off the dunnocks.) The robin is back now, with another robin, and they appear to be a pair. So while I was pruning today in the garden I had not one but two pairs of beady birdy eyes looking down at me.

Feed the birds

I hope everyone who has a suitable garden space is remembering to feed the birds during the cold winter weather. I hope too that feeders are cleaned regularly, and the area around them, particularly if there's a build-up of old food. This is something I never worried much about until recent years, when I read about various disease outbreaks in garden birds, and noticed some rather wretched looking finches in my own garden. It's obvious, I guess, that if you're feeding birds in one area all the time, and a lot of them are visiting, and inevitably leaving their droppings in and around the feeding trays etc, that diseases will spread more quickly.

Internet research led me to: The Garden Bird Health Initiative

From the RSPCA: Feeding garden birds

From the RSPB: Cold comfort for garden birds

Cutting back

Despite a biting northerly breeze I managed, heroically, to get out in the garden again to do more pruning and attempt to tame the tangle.

I decided, towards the end of last year, that two well-established climbers needed to be removed entirely from the overcrowded wall. I hate removing healthy plants, but sometimes it's necessary. We all make mistakes, and one of the most common ones I guess is planting climbers in spaces not really big enough for their eventual size. So a huge jasmine is being removed altogether, after previous attempts to control its size have failed.

I'm also removing a rose that has been a disappointment for years. I kept hoping it was just having a bad year, when its mass of promising-looking buds rotted and never opened, but every year seemed to be a bad year, every year most of its buds went brown and fell off. And every year it was getting bigger, great long stems flailing about over the wall, and up in the tree, all studded with inevitably rotten brown blobs that I couldn't reach to remove.

I love the new growth of roses - always so healthy, fresh green. It would be hard to cut down and dig up the roots of a rose that had started to show its new leaves. So I had to seize the day, this moment in February, and take action before growth began again and had me doing what I've done every year, saying 'I'll just give it another chance'.

The rose, in case you're wondering, is 'Souvenir de la Malmaison'. I think I was seduced into buying it by its romantic and sophisticated-sounding name. Internet searches revealed that bud rot appears to be a common feature.

8 February 2010

This website is now nine years old. I've just renewed the hosting for another year, and spent the day looking over the website pages and wondering what to add and what to remove, as I'm running out of available webspace, and rather than buy some more, thought I'd look for obvious bits that could be pruned out. I got far too distracted by a) nostalgia and b) confusion, faced with so many pages, so many of them verbose. So instead, when the sun came out for about five minutes, I dashed outside and up a ladder and did some real pruning out in the garden, chopping ivy off the wall. Birds will be nesting soon, and I've a lot of pruning I need to do.

We've had unusually harsh winter weather, with snow in this area from before Christmas until well into the New Year, and more recently, cold clammy foggy days. Gardening has been impossible most of the time, and even when possible, not an attractive prospect at all. But yesterday and today I managed to do a bit, venturing out in many layers of clothing, looking like I was about to embark on an expedition to the Arctic.