Freeing violets

 It has been a pleasant afternoon with no rain and a lessened wind force. I have been freeing violets from the oppression of tough grasses and a cotoneaster. The violets seeded themselves into the cracks and crevices of the steps leading up to the shed. This year they did not flower very well.









Happily, this afternoon, I discovered that they had been spreading themselves near young ferns and under the cotoneaster to the side of the steps. Perhaps there were more flowers than I realised, or perhaps the few flowers I saw were champion seed pingers. Whichever it was, I'm hoping for a violetty spring.



Before I came in for tea and biscuits I looked for daffodil and snowdrop leaves poking out of the ground. I usually see some during December but not this year.

Earthy grounding

The morning after the terrorist attack at Manchester Arena two lines from Tennyson's poem Tears, Idle Tears kept repeating themselves in my head:

Tears from the depth of some Divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes.

The poet says he knows not what the "idle tears" mean but I knew what mine meant: deep anguish and sympathy for what the families of the killed and injured must be suffering today and for many days to come. People driven to acts of such violence by mad ideologies are deluded.

People are saying that we need to do something in addition to just carrying on as normal, but certainly normal, or as normal as you can, is grounding. The gap I cut through the azaleas on the front bank was ready to be widened so I went at it with the hedge-cutter. Along the way I found myself talking to three tiny oak seedlings just erupting from their acorns: "You can't grow here, little tree. Not right under the big birch tree and so close to the house."

NW end of front bank with birch tree
and a gateway I've cut through the rhododendron hedge

It always feels sad to have to pull out little trees (well, not ash and sycamore! They are just weeds round here) but there are at least three more young oaks near the top of the garden where there is room for them to grow. Two of them are now taller than me and one actually produced two or three acorns last year.

I needed a nap after my gap-widening efforts but went out again afterwards to dig up some dock plants at the bottom of the same front bank. With the dock roots up came some of the creeping rhizomes of Sharp-flowered Rush that also grows down there. My hands got damply earthy but as they dried and even with soil on them, they felt clean in a smooth and quite different way from newly washed hands. This was the 'grounding' I needed after today's sad news. Perhaps it is something to do with being reminded that we are with the earth and of it, dust to dust, stardust even as Carl Sagan said.

Between the dock and rush patch and the drive hedge I found what I think is a Northern Marsh Orchid in pretty much the same place as there was one last year. Previously our single Southern Marsh Orchid, which grows at the top of the bank, has reappeared in the same spot for several years but the Northern Marsh Orchids, of which there are usually a few dotted about, always seem to come up in different places each year. It would be nice to think this one now has an established root. I marked where it is with a stick and a bit of ribbon so that it doesn't get any more trampled than it already is!

Orchid marker near the hedge

At the lower end of that hedge is my young hawthorn tree. It has flowered for the first time this year. Its parent is beyond on the far side of the lane. Massed ivy growth has weighed down its trunk to almost horizontal but it is thriving still. The light you can see beyond the trees is the loch. There are some houses down there before it but the drop from the hawthorn down to them is very steep so we look over their roofs.

I have two small hawthorns in pots to give to a friend. They were recently moved to the porch because, guess what!, the deer nibbled their tops. They are doing fine.

Moving bamboo

About eight years ago, when Toadlet was still at primary school, she wanted me to buy some plants at a school sale. One was a kind of spurge and one was a small pot of bamboo. I decided to make a kind of half basket for the steep bank up from the back terrace. The soil is thin there and is full of bits of old paint from before our time. I lined the basket with some leftover pond fleece and filled it with home-made compost. I planted the bamboo and the spurge in there. In this picture, taken in May 2014, you can see that the spurge did quite well. It has a lovely brightness about it, seeds profusely and spreads. There's some red campion behind it and also the bamboo, still small. It's actually quite hard to see in the photo but it is there. This is my one and only basket weaving effort and it stood the test of time. Until today.

I got Toad to help me dig the bamboo out. It had got somewhat taller and more robust-looking over the years and blocked a bit of the view up the garden. There were side shoots too. It needs more space to spread.

Here is where we dug. Yes, those are bricks at the back. Apparently there used to be a shed or garage of some sort on  what had been made into a flat concrete ledge. There isn't very much flat ground on the Boggy Brae. We used to park the Rattletrap on what we presume had been the floor of the garage. We found what Toad said was an old spark plug, some bits of broken glass, and another hard rusted and crusted bit of metal that was unidentifiable.

old spark plug and some broken glass

After that I wheelbarrowed the bamboo down to the Boggy Bottom of the garden, on the Scrawny the Tree side, and dug a hole. I dug out a couple of bricks here too. I think we'd start to worry if we didn't find bricks or bits of bricks every time we dug anywhere! Anyway, that hole is deeper than it looks and the bamboo went in just fine. I carefully avoided treading on the iris that has planted itself there.

Bamboo in its new place

From the Boggy Bottom it was nice to look up to wild cherry trees that are flowering away just now.

Toad is going to sell that Topaz dinghy. This is why I've changed from Boat Bog to Boggy Bottom. When that boat is sold, we'll be boatless.

Gardening Boggy Brae style when I'm not hacking overgrown hedges

Today I have been putting more plants in cages. This Roseroot among the mosses and grasses on the retaining wall at the back of the house was quite small ten years ago. It has gradually spread and there is another clump of it along from this. When I caged the Orpine last year, the roe deer just ate this instead (can you hear the gnashing of teeth (mine)?). They also nibbled the Reflexed Stonecrop that grows on the dry stone wall at the top of the front bank (cue more gnashing of teeth and growling) but that did flower in a few places and is now spreading, I notice, to the bank below the wall, among the Tamarisk moss and Hairy Wood-rushes.

I've also beeen pushing sticks into the ground (see right >>). On a trip to Oban in August three years ago, I passed a field of Wild Angelica and Purple Loosestrife. My plan to obtain a similar effect on the Boggy Brae is taking shape, at least as far as the angelica is concerned. The initial leaves are beginnng to show and I'm marking where they are so that I don't tread on them or mow them by mistake. There are about ten, so far, in the Boggy Bottom (aka front garden), including some at the edges of the yellow flag patch, and another ten or a dozen in the pond triangle.

wild angelica and purple loosestrife near Oban

My other task has been what seems to be an annual one of removing a queen wasp's nest from the shed. Some years I've done it more than once. The thing is to notice them when there is only the queen involved. I was in the shed today looking for something and thinking that this was about the time of year when a wasp nest would appear. Then I turned around and there one was! I use a jam jar to cover the nest and the edge of a postcard to scrape it off the roof. Then it's a case of put it down, flip the postcard off the top and run. The queens always seem a bit cross! As I would be, no doubt, if some giant scraped my house up!

The queens are welcome to build their nests elsewhere, just not in the shed. One year we had one in the back terrace retaining wall that's only three metres from the back door; it wasn't a problem.

Monster fuchsia work continues

The question was what to do with the remaining (still loads!)  of monster fuchsia stems now that space to stack them on the far side of the lane as dead hedging (fourth photo in this post; I live in hope that they will actually die!) is running out. I thought I could do a neat stacking between some of the stems I've left by the pond. Trouble is, if you lie cut fuchsia on the wet ground here (the ground is mostly wet) it will send down roots. Then I remembered two pieces of breeze block so I've placed them to hold the stems (trunks really) off the ground. This is what it looked like yesterday. I wonder how visible the stacked stems (there will be a lot more) will be when the still rooted, upright trunks are in full leaf?

This pile → that Toad cut out of the ridiculous rhododendron hedge back in December I stuffed into the back of the Rattletrap to take to the municipal dump, either just on a tarpaulin or, the smaller bits anyway, into an old coal sack that fell of the back of a lorry.

coal sack for garden waste

It really did fall off a lorry! And there were about half a dozen others stuffed into it. When we get our next delivery of coal I'll give them back to the coal merchant. The day they blew off was very windy and the lump in the road was making drivers nervous so I stopped, investigated and picked them up. They'd only have landed in the sea else. Might as well use them. I might hang them on a line to get rained on and cleaned up a bit. The others are all muckier than that one.

Working on the northwestern side of the pond (onto which I'd never got before because of the fuchsia-brambly undergrowth), making myself a path around it, hacking back fuchsia and yanking out trip wires of ivy, I came across the edge of what at first I thought was a stone. It turned out to be a lid of some kind about ten inches wide. It had clearly had a spongey lining so my guess was that it was the lid of a make-up box or something. The first word I found hard to make out but I think the whole thing is Amway La Collection Classique, Paris. According to that link, Amway made expensive perfumes and after shaves. So my guess wasn't far out.

What is baffling is how it got into the mud at the bottom of the Boggy Brae garden! Maybe it blew in; maybe someone threw it there in a hissy fit; maybe the lid was used by kids as a frisbee. 😀

So now, looking southeastwards from the boggy bottom north corner, this is what the pond triangle is looking like. Those fern stumps don't look much just now but they will explode into great cones over the spring and summer. You can see how raggy the Ridiculous Rhodo hedge is on this its lower side. I've managed to keep the upper side, that edges the drive, reasonably under control. My big project this year is to cut back some of this side. I'll need to hold back if I find nesting birds are using it, though this part isn't the thickest.
Further to the right, it's like a dark cave! If Rhododendron ponticum weren't such a savage invader, I'd leave the hedge messy, but at the very least I want to yank out the bridging, rooting shoots. There's also our oil supply pipe to get at, that Toad's going to scrub with a wire brush and paint sometime. Aye, right! 😉

cave of rhododendron, snowberry, unwanted ash seedlings, brambles, etc

Here's Scrawny (Scrawny has fans!), which is in the boggy bottom east corner, reflected yesterday in the pond:

The year's first scything

Tootling down our steep garden with my scythe over my shoulder and a rake in my other hand, I was pleased to see that crocuses are actually opening a bit. They had stayed shut until today's wee bit of sunshine. Primroses are getting under way. By early to mid April there should be well over a thousand in flower: on 12 April 2012 I counted 685, and on 11 April 2014, 1254.

I was going to scythe the patches of boggy front lawn where I had not mowed last year since spring because I was letting Wild Angelica and Black Knapweed set seed. There is another patch to do another day where the main group of Devil's-bit Scabious grows. Pignut leaves are showing up everywhere as usual and so are the leaves of Lesser Celandines.

Young Pignut leaves

The pond is full after some heavy rains and on its lower edge where it sometimes spills over there is a 'lawn' of Opposite-leaved Golden-saxifrage that is beginning to flower. The pond is about half full of frogspawn. I usually find frogs everwhere except near the pond but a heron comes to hunt there quite often so I guess they are there sometimes.

frogspawn

There were sheep in the field for a few weeks over mid-winter. They departed a couple of weeks ago and since then we have been having regular visits from roe deer. They have begun their chomping of monbretia leaves. I shall have to keep my tulips well-protected. Lovely big, colourful flowers like that are like cake to roe deer–a real treat after winter hard rations!

The Honeysuckle Stump

When we first came here, there were two large stumps of spruce trees on the south-east slope. They had been Christmas trees that a long ago Boggy Brae family had not wanted to part with. Clearly they had been left to grow rather large and must have prevented a lot of light from getting to the house and garden. The photo to the left shows the upper stump which became the honeysuckle stump as honeysuckle began, of its own accord, to grow over it. At first I encouraged this. Some string I tied around the stump to hold up the honeysuckle shoots is visible in the snowy photo below from March 2008.

Gradually the amount of honeysuckle growing over the stump increased until the stump was hidden. A birch tree seeded next to the stump and ferns, including bracken. By last year there was a lot of plant but not a lot of flowering. This year I thought I'd let the birch tree grow so that the honeysuckle could grow up it but it still didn't flower much...

June 2015

...and this month I decided it needed a haircut. It was all getting a bit messy and just large–we'd be having reduced light problems again at this rate.

December 2016

So I backed the rattletrap, which already had fence wire from the fuchsia hacking down at the front (not finished yet), closer in to where I was working.

fence wire for the dump

Underneath all the honeysuckle stems I found two fungi growing on the stump–a lot of the pale yellow lumpy fungus and a hoof-type bracket fungus.

I shoved all the stems, the birch tree and various other gunk into Rattletrap, went inside to eat two rock buns and drink some tea, and then set off to the dump. A condenser (I think) that the boiler service man took out of the boiler went too.

Something tells me I'll be tidying up around this stump for a while yet.

The dark stuff among the honeysuckle stems is ivy.

Something also tells me that mudguard on the rattletrap needs a new piece of gaffer tape! 

The lower spruce stump is a whole nother story for another time. (I know 'nother' isn't officially a word; I think it needs to be; a whole other doesn't feel right!).

lower, or Lophocolea, spruce stump

After I'd returned from the dump and was eating lunch, I saw a wren troglodyting about in the debris left by the stump's haircut. That was nice.