Garden news from my virtual compost heap

24 August 2011

I've been feeling a bit guilty about the lengthening gaps between updates to this website. On the other hand, ten years is a long time to keep a website going. And like most long-running personal websites, it drains finances rather than adds to them. Still, it's been going so long that in internet terms it's almost a historic document ... so I'll keep it online as long as I can.

I've just added a couple of photos of the garden, taken this summer, to show it's still blooming and thriving, and that I still work on it, perhaps not as much, and in a more relaxed kind of way. It's now what you'd call 'well-established', which means that the emphasis has shifted - from putting plants into it to taking plants out of it, perhaps. Climbers in particular that have done well and filled their space and then over-filled it, and become unmanageable, have been removed (after much agonising). When I started, other gardeners with established clumps of perennials gave me plants, now I'm sending large pieces of established plants to other gardens. Some of them came from nurseries no longer in business, but fondly remembered - like my daylily 'Sammy Russell', from Flaxton nurseries near York.

It's got a rhythm to it now. It always had a rhythm to it, probably, as anything governed by the laws of nature does, but now I've properly tuned in to it. I know when the swifts come and when they leave. I know when the garden birds are nesting and are focussed on the place of their nesting, and when they're dispersed, quiet. I know that in August I hear frogs croaking in and around the pond. And also that August brings mildew to the sweet peas, an inevitable blight. The football season starts, the swifts leave, the sweet peas get horribly disfigured with mildew. I never did like August ...

But there was a day earlier this summer, a perfect Sunday at the end of June, when I woke to church bells chiming and the swifts screeching about round the house, saw the first froglet in the pond and smelt the first sweet pea. These things are still happening here in a small garden in Yorkshire, and I'm sorry I don't report on them as often as I used to.

I'm planning a book - a print on demand publication - in recognition of 'ten years of Turning Earth', for publication in the spring.

6 March 2011

Spring at last. A pair of frogs are clasped together in the pond, and have been for days. There's already some frogspawn and perhaps more yet to appear. Robins are bobbing around, one singing sweetly most days from high perches in the tree branches. I've many jobs to do, despite having done many jobs already.

As it's been so long since I added any updates, some words about winter.

I tried, on 12 December 2010, to update this website - I've just re-read the one sentence I managed to compose. I remember sitting here for a long while at the computer, looking for a poem or inspirational quote about winter to put on the front page, and getting a photo together for it, of the bird bath with about a foot of snow on top of it. I was totally uninspired, hence the failure to finish the update, or even finish more than a sentence. I found a poem - I think it was by Longfellow - but actually I detest winter, and the cold, and the snow, and the lack of light, and have no positive thoughts about it whatsoever, so in the end I looked at the pictures on the front page of summer-ripened cherries and autumn colour and thought I preferred to leave it like that until the spring.

It was a very harsh winter, colder and snowier than any I remember. While some people can find beauty and charm in it, I just kept thinking about the birds and other creatures who were having such a struggle to find food, and of course also about the people surviving without shelter, those without the comfort of a warm home.

It started to snow in late November, and seemed to snow for most of December. December was dramatically cold, well below freezing for days on end. In the worst of it, I was defrosting the bird bath with hot water several times a day, and it would be frozen again within an hour or so.

A few plants have been lost, including the phormium my sister gave me. I've noticed all the other phormiums in gardens in the neighbourhood look dead too. The Clematis armandii had all its top growth killed, as I've realised more recently when it failed to produce new growth. I'm not sure if it's dead right down to the root, and have cut it back to the main stems, in hope of regrowth.

There are still many birds in the garden, so I'm hoping that the constant supply of bird food made a difference, and helped them. Also our large old apple tree had a fantastic crop, some of which we can't reach easily, so leave for the birds. It was definitely needed this winter, and the coldest days saw the branches full of blackbirds and starlings, pecking at the apples. Fieldfares passed through the garden too, briefly.

Probably most distressing was finding, when the ice began to thaw, two dead frogs in the pond. These were fully-grown, presumably male, as I believe the males often spend the winter in the mud at the bottom. I tried hard to keep a hole in the ice that formed on the pond, but I think in the end the ice was too deep, and my pond not deep enough. It was as deep as I could make it, but no match for that horrible, penetrating winter cold.

So this week, I was relieved to see that one pair of frogs had made it through the winter and found each other.

The first Iris reticulata has opened today, and in the centre of the garden a white hellebore which has formed a satisfyingly robust clump has produced many perfect and cheering blooms. These happy signs of spring meant I finally managed to get the ladders out and clear the leaves out of the gutter on Millennium Shed, then had to do a bit of digging, while the robin followed me, in search of worms.

6 March 2011 - ten years online

I should mention that www.turning-earth.co.uk, set up in January 2001, has now been on the web for 10 years. I wanted to celebrate this fact, but as it occurred while my brain was still in winter hibernation, I've only just got around to mentioning it.