Clearing monster fuchsia around a young hazel

In the north corner of the Boggy Brae garden there is a young hazel tree. It's surrounded by monster fuchsias that are hell bent on taking over the world. I decided the other day to give the hazel some space. If you click on the pic to enlarge it, you'll see a yellow leaf in the low centre and to the left of that a small patch of sunlight. That sunlight is on one of the hazel trunks; it has two.

Boggy Brae hazel may well have grown from a seed from this old hazel up the hill (see below) in the woods the trunks of which are horizontal.

photo from February 2015

There was a fair amount of dead wood that I could reach over the wall and the old fence wires before I needed to climb over the wall with my alligator saw, so I took the fire basket down with me.  When I did get round to climbing over the wall I grabbed one of the wire holder thingies to haul myself up. It came out in my hand! I think it was the only one whose anchorage was iffy.

Came out in my hand

So then I had a tangle of boingy fence wires to deal with whose ends I couldn't untangle. Out came the hacksaw. That pipe that the hacksaw is leaning on is our heating oil supply pipe which Toad has begun to repaint at the top end. Clearing vegetation from around the oil pipe so he can get at it was another reason to clear fuchsia from near the hazel.

After a couple of hours clearing monster fuchsia the young hazel had a bit more space to breathe and, with any luck, to produce filberts in due course. It has grown quite tall and there is more clearing to do down there but it was a good morning's work. The three and four metre long fuchsia branches I cut have been piled up by the lane to dry a bit. The lower ones will probably put down roots if I leave them too long.

Looking up under hazel

In front of the wall, along the lane, is a rough verge of Opposite-leaved Golden Saxifrage mixed with Wood Sorrel, Herb Bennet and a few other things. I found some of the saxifrage actually growing out of the wall, Wood Sorrel growing on top of it with ivy, and a tiny spruce tree also growing out of the wall. That got yanked out and chucked on the fire.

At the bottom of the wall was this small plant. I'm not sure what it is yet. Behind it, having grown through the wall is a fuchsia root. As has happened often when I'm regarding or dealing with rampant plant growth on the  Boggy Brae, I feel a sense of reassurance that Nature, given half a chance, is a good deal tougher than we think.