A line of golden setae

The sun was sinking as the smoke from my small bonfire drifted up the garden and its rays shone through the  bright setae of the moss growing on the trunk of the fallen wild cherry tree.

It was high winds one night in December 2013 that brought the old wild cherry tree down. We knew it was affected by the parasitic fungus, Laetiporus sulphureu (Chicken of the woods), so its collapse was not totally surprising. One of its offspring is still holding part of it up. The same storm also brought down a tall eucalyptus which added some interest to the climbing frame.

Some of the eucalyptus wood is still in the woodshed. It burns well in the stove. Some day I might shuffle up the old cherry trunk and start sawing branches....

October Daughters

Two of my daughters were born in October, a few days short of eighteen years apart.

Up at the top of the garden where Middle Daughter sat caring for the fire, we watched the darkening sky while food for a joint birthday celebration was being prepared in the house, tasty layers of minced lamb with chopped onion, tomato and aubergine, all wrapped in foil to be cooked on the fire.

By the time the food was cooked and we were eating these lamb burgers inside rolls it was quite dark. I enjoyed my roll and shall try the same mixture again but maybe cooked in the house. We don't do enough cooking on open fires to be expert at it. Perhaps we should practise more!

Pear and chocolate pudding cake followed. This was a roaring success. I shall make it again with some tweaks to the topping. The chocolate I used this time was dairy free for the sake of Middle Daughter's partner and, even with  dollop of vegetable fat spread in place of the butter I usually use and a good squirt of golden syrup, the high concentration of cocoa solids still made it set quite hard. The cake itself was perfect in its variety of textures from gooey centre to just crisp edges, with the pears giving an interesting–and delicious–taste and texture contrast.

We tried to light cake candles but a wind had sprung up and blew them out straight away.

When the older generation (Toad and me) took ourselves to bed the October daughters and their friends spent another hour or so first by the bonfire and then in the warm kitchen.

 Pear and apple pudding without its topping (which can be cream, ice-cream or custard rather than (or as well as!) chocolate if you like) and then, below, with eyes!

pear eyes

I found the recipe on the website baldhiker.com. It is by someone called Sally Laker.

Ash dieback

Today Toad and I cut down two young ash trees and burned their foliage. They were diseased with the ash dieback fungus, Hymenoscyphus fraxineus. They were not badly affected yet but the first signs were there and since they were growing in a wrong place anyway (under the tall cypress we I call "Scrawny"; Toad does not give trees names) and would have to come down sooner or later, the finding of the disease symptoms was a good time to do it.

We have not burned the trunks. They can be cut into lengths and burned in the stove over the winter. Ash doesn't need to season to burn well, as we found even with the small branches and green leaves,

though I did help the fire along with some of the rhododendron and snowberry twigs that I cut in spring last year. It went well even with the finest of fine mizzle in the air.

The yellow beyond the fire, in what was an area full of meadow buttercups, is now that of greater bird's-foot trefoil. As the buttercups lost their petals and began to make seed the trefoil flowers began to open so we have had weeks and weeks of yellow meadowy lawn down in this bottom part of the garden.

Ridiculous fuchsia

Still hacking away, bit by bit, at the ridiculous fuchsia down by the front garden wall. I'm making dead hedges (or, as I like to call them tree tranmpolines; try standing on them to squash them down a bit: very springy) on the far side of the lane, using a few remaining uprights to stop them rolling down the hill. There are also some sycamore trunks  that would stop them further down but those are in someone else's garden.

The stems are about three metres long. My first fuschia dead hedge is actually a combination of two so it ended up five and a half metres long. Its props are young ash trees.

This morning, just as I was beginning to think it was time for a break, the chain came off my alligator saw. I'd been thinking it needed tightening a bit so that's a job for this evening.

There was no wind today.

fire is deliberately next to some overgrown
fuchsia and rhododendron–anything to discourage
the beasts!

Maybe with the fuchsia cut down to wall height, I'll be able to keep the live stuff like a trim hedge. Here's hoping.

Letting the light in

My view to the north from up in the top south corner, sipping tea before I started my bonfire a couple of days ago. I'm making the most of a spell of dry weather. Stuff in the house has to wait at times like this. Dry weather spells here remind me of having a baby in the house. Other than keeping the kitchen and bathroom hygienic and  feeding everybody, housework becomes even less important than usual while you drop everything and attend to baby needs. Tending to the Boggy Brae garden works a bit like that too.

Same principle as making hay while the sun shines, I guess.

It used to be very dark under the big cypress up there and if you weren't a chicken, it was difficult to get into the space underneath its low branches. When two of its several trunks began to keel over a couple of years ago some light got into the dark spaces. I decided to let in some more. Some of the low branches have been sending roots down. I don't really want any more of these trees so I'm cutting back the smaller low branches, burning the dead (and some not dead) foliage, and making a wood pile. Any excuse for a bonfire? Well, maybe ;)

Dead bracken stalks make good fire starters.

After I'd put away tools yesterday, tramping up and down between the shed, the house and up top, I spotted this drowsy deer just a few yards from the back door. I think she might be quite a young one. She seemed unconcerned by my presence.

Burnt out rowan

After torrential rain and ferocious winds yesterday the stillness of this silver morning enticed me out for a welly wander. This photo is from the top of the garden looking east.
Below is a photo of the birch, cypress and rowan clump in the middle of which is my fire basket. The wee shed in the front was once a goose house and then henhouse; now it acts as small woodshed.  The top corner is behind all that.

Oops!

It seems a spark must have got into the hollow trunk of the old rowan and, without noticeable smoke and through the drenching rain, it has burnt out the rotting wood. It must have been incredibly dry in there! The remaining part of that tree, seen above the goose house, still looks fine. It will be interesting to see what happens next spring.

So my unsmothering of the rowans under the cypress will continue over the winter. Not that the boggy brae is short of rowans; I've lost count of the number of rowan seedlings all over the place. Left to go wild the garden would soon turn into a forest of birch, rowan, holly, sallow, oak, wild cherry and beech. I find that a reassuring thought even if there were rhododendrons in the mix. I read somewhere that before the last ice age there were native rhododendrons in Britain anyway. Nothing stays the same for long.

More bonfires

Continuing the bonfire theme, I'm also lighting fires under the big cypress in the top south corner. A big chunk of it, a couple of heavy trunks' worth, has keeled over without any help from me but from Root Rot, sometimes known as Root Fomes (Heterobasidion annosum), which is also attacking the old rowan up there.

Root Rot fungus

I've felt tempted a few times to just light a fire under some of the low branches where detritus has fallen and collected over a number of years as you can see here. But I thought such a fire might quickly get huge and out of control and anyway part of the job is sort of about rescuing some half smothered rowan trees. The light-coloured branch on the ground is a rowan trunk, believe it or not. Most of the tree emerges on the field side of the fence.

birch, rowan, dying cypress from the field

There is another rowan trunk in among these rooting cypress branches.

So instead of setting a tree on fire, I'm lopping off small bits at a time and keeping the fire, more or less, within the confines of the fire basket that's visible in the first photo.

In moments between feeding the fire I've been enjoying small details: the redness of the cypress under bark, small fans of feather moss, and baby ferns growing in bark depressions.

Just in case someone happening to wander up the hill (likelihood close to zero, actually) to where the fire is (another close to zero likelihood) without noticing the smoke, I have my warning sign – a beachcombed part of a "Warning! forest operations" sign.

Actually, I use it as a bellows for the fire.

At some point I suppose I might get someone with a chainsaw to chop up the big branches but there's a lot of bonfiring fun to have before that.

In which I decide to protect Sedum telephium with chicken wire...

...from being eaten by deer, and end up rescuing a fuchsia from under my neighbour's overhanging rhododendron and having a bonfire.

It was perfect spring bonfire weather today. After four hot-for-here days of strong sunshine and shade temperatures reaching the low 20sºC, today was overcast but dry and a pleasant cool maximum of 12º.

The sedum had already had parts bitten off by roe deer so it is now behind chicken wire. Hopefully it will flower more profusely than last year, and perhaps the flowers will even last more than a day!

Just down from the sedum is where the pale flowered fuchsia grows close to our neighbour's garden wall, so close that in some places it has even put roots into the wall. Other stems were lying almost flat to the ground because of overhanging rhododendron ponticum. I cut that back and decided to have a bonfire.

Gathering dead wood from around the garden, I gave one of the dead branches of the old rowan a bit of a tug and it came away in my hand. The hole at the bottom of the trunk is getting bigger too.

boot for scale
the bracket fungus is Root Fomes

There is still one live branch growing from low down on the trunk, which you can just see in the bottom left corner of the photo to the left. This has leaves on it. The tree is not giving up easily.

dead eucalyptus roots

Some other dead wood was provided by the now well dried roots of the eucalyptus tree that fell over in a gale in December 2013. There is sufficient overhang to keep a good deal of rain off. The bare soil is proving very attractive to fern spores. There are lots of tiny new ferns growing there.

In the area where the roots were when the tree was upright a clump of beech seedlings have grown. This–well, one of them–could be a keeper. Time will tell.



So the bonfire went well on a new patch of ground behind the apple tree. Meanwhile creeping buttercup is recolonising the bonfire site of autumn 2014, and the bonfire moss is looking tawny.

bonfire moss and creeping buttercup

Also colonising the old bonfire site is thyme-leaved speedwell, ribwort plantain, and mouse-ear.

ribwort plantain

thyme-leaved speedwell

mouse-ear, not yet flowering

And finally, I discovered yesterday that the May-flowering narcissus that I have been calling "My Sister's Narcissus" because it is always in flower on her birthday, 12 May, is officially called Pheasant's-eye daffodil. Here is a juxtaposition photo of the largest clump near where Toad stores his dinghy.