Hogmanay - is it time to dump the posies of 2009?

Although the garden has just about gone to sleep with all this cold weather, we have plants inside that amuse us.  There is the posy of dahlias we have in the loo.  These were City of Rotterdam and they dried out gradually and were transformed into another phase - a dried posy with considerable attraction.  See for yourself below.  The question is: when to dump?

We have a Camellia in a pot which is early flowering and we take it in to enjoy it close up in the conservatory.  It is a cultivar bred by the Puddles at Bodnant  and has the name 'Hiraethlyn'. It is a lovely simple flower which retains a bell shape and often hangs downwards like a bell.  It does very well in a pot if the vine weevil leaves it alone.  We lost one that way before.

Have you tried Witch's Butter?

Boxing day was another nice day so Corbie collected some more Christmas decorations from the garden and driveway.

Rosa gentiliana syn multiflora var. cathayensis (I need to sort out its nomenclature) still has great swags of hips and R. 'Scintillation' has the orange and green ones.  'Cupid' provided the giant ones. Berries of Cotoneaster horizontalis were mostly taken by the blackbirds but enough were left to brighten the berry collection.  Added to the flower list were gorse, broom, osteospermum and periwinkle.

C and L are here for a few days so we went out for a walk round the circle from Tregarth to Cororion.  The holly growing out of the oak tree is still doing well and we encountered a nice bit of witch's butter, Tremella mesenterica, growing on gorse.

Christmas Day

A pet day today.  Full sun with nice clouds over Liverpool Bay and not a breath of wind. 

The annual Christmas Day garden flower hunt is over and I have bagged some amazing flowers despite the rotten weather we have had.

The photo shows:
Roses Windrush, Dainty Bess, Stanwell Perpetual, Old Blush China and Phllys Bide and hips on Cupid
Convolvulus cneorum, Schizostylis Mrs Haggerty and while; Nicotiana alata Sensation, Algerian Iris, Jasminum nudiflorum, Viburnum tomentosum, Erisimum cheiri (wallflower), Bergenia cordifolia.

Run down to Christmas

Corby managed to rescue the Dahlia tubers from the shed bed before the hard frost arrived.  They will be dried off a bit and stored in the shed until they produce cuttings in the Spring. Now 20 tulips have been planted, Mr Tesco's cheap mix of pastel and purple in a central array. Lily-flowered Burgundy will go in the back row, and multi-headed Antoinette in the front row. These should flower first, and be short.
                                                                                       
Corbie continues to pick the long spears of silver from the Iris under the kitchen window.  These open in the kitchen warmth into the most increadible helio and tiger striped flowers.

This is Iris unguicularis, the Algerian iris which is also found in Greece.  It likes a stoney site at the base of the south wall of the house.  I managed to track down the name unguicularis - it means shaped like a claw or narrow-shanked (the petals). It blooms from late October into Spring and produces a flush of flowers every week or two - hundreds in all.  The flowers look very delicate yet survive outdoors through the worst weather except that something eats them.  The buds are frequently eaten off at the tip and sometimes are completely shedded.  Mice or snails?  It is probably mice as the slug pellets don't seem to be the answer.  The plant must be 30 years old as mother Jean from Lesmahagow brought a bit down.  A couple of years back, the plant almost died off - disease? -but has grown back strongly more recently.

Stone wall risen again

Dave Grundy has done a fine job; the wall is good for another lifetime or two. Now everything else needs planning, especially how the levels will work. A lot of earth-shifting is on the cards. I want to make a level area that will keep the sun a little longer than the rest of the north-sloping garden. There is the potential to create a sheltered, sunny corner, something we've never had.

Surprise in the winter garden: flowering Christmas roses (Helleborus niger).  They were hiding so when the leaves were cut away, there were masses of flowers at every stage of development.  We will take the large pot into the conservatory to keep the flowers clean  and dry and sprinkle on a few slug pellets.  The plant is one that Jean from Lesmahagow (Corbie's mother) gave us maybe 40 years ago.  it has been divided a few times and top dressed with rich compost now and again.  They used to flower in January but because of global warming ..... 

The sun actually came out today and flooded through the top landing window to strike the Pelargonium there in a pot.  I got cuttings from Angharad this summer.  she says it is Lord Bute and I think she is right.  Just look at that rich colour!

Today was RAT day.  This is the time of year when rats arrive, maybe from the Little Chef, to cash in on our  potatoes stored in the garage/car-port.  Corby found a couple of tails sticking out of a drawer and told Corbie to get rid of them.  I am clearing all unwanted potatoes and baiting a trap with fresh potato and bacon and might even put out some poison to sort them out.  Chased one around the room with a broom handle but it got away. Watch this space.

Harvested some cherry tomato from the polytunnel.  They continue to ripen slowly in spite of getting a touch frosted last week.

We are having pot-roast pheasant with celeriac and Blue Danube mash tonight.  This is inspired by Nigel Slater's new book, Tender.  This is his newest one on vegetables and is really sumptuous in its presentation. Slight problem with the celeriac.  It was sown very late but grew fast and the tops got very large in the new bed by the garden shed.  Well, when I dug up the first one just now, it had a tiny root.  So I had to save all the rootlets to get enough to cook.  We had no Marsala so substituted white wine and Futyulos (dry apricot brandy from Hungary).  Corby is doing a damson and Charles Ross crumble.

This is a picture of the Charles Ross apple, with the tree still laden with its biggest-ever crop in mid-November. Behind it is the old hut, which is now cleared away.  This apple must have been planted by Vic Smith around 50 years ago.  We get good harvests every few years.  The flesh texture is turnippy but the flavour is good - citrussy - and sweet.  Birds have been pecking the fruits and seem to play a game of "see how many fruits we can put a tiny peck into".  So we picked them all and use them chipped to go with our meusli and also to make fresh juice.  Fortunately the squirrels have left them alone this year otherwise they would have gone ages ago.
This shows the best side of the old hut, given  that most of the roof, front and other long side had gone the way of all corrugated. The ivy was holding up the remainder.

A walk on the wild side

While walking down the driveway to buy the weekend FT (Robin Lane Fox has that excellent Garden column) I noted lots of things to be done. The tree plantings that Lorna did ten years or so ago have matured and lots of volunteer seedlings of ash have also grown up. Now single trees are competing with neighbours for light and the canopy is shading out the shrubs under the trees.

We need to thin and fell lots of small trees during the winter to preserve and encourage the shrub layer which includes wild and semi-wild roses and Viburnum tomentosum. There are plenty of suckers on roses (lots on Rosa gentiliana, R. californica plena and R. pimpinellifolia Altaica) and on the viburnums. I need to get some of these potted and grown on for sale at the Spring Plant Sale for the Friends of Treboth Botanic Garden. The hips on the left are from R. gentiliana which is probably a selection of R. multiflora Cathayensis.  Rose Scintillation, also on the drive has nice bunches of orange and green hips.

The white birch (seeded when drive was constructed) and conifers (particularly Abies concolor and sitka ) are looking good and the small beeches near the summit of the road provide welcome winter colour from their persistent rust-red leaves.

The mountains as seen over the back hedge have their first real cover of snow for this year.

Dave Grundy making it all good again

Looks like a kind day: it's not raining at all. The great roots of the ash tree are under the wall again.

Stone wall needing some attention

Here's a picture of the top of the garden where the Hut used to be. The Hut was a 10 by 20 foot structure built by Vic Smith in the 60's, and clearing it away was the work of some months.

Stone wall

Dave had a whole short winter day of uninterrupted work, a miracle. He built a bridge (a thick plank of slate) over the ash tree root that was able to support the big stones above, so the wall should not move in the next few decades.

Summer summary: not, but we still got a few things done.

Back in March 2009 I decided to make some raised beds in the veg garden, using bits of old timber, some of which had been resting behind a corrugated shed for 30 years. This eventually led to buying sleepers and paving slabs, and a lot of hands-and-knees work in the veg garden area. At the same time, I decided to clear away our old duck enclosure and put in a shed up there.

Mid-June 2009. This is the site for the new shed, up in the top corner of the vegetable garden. I had already taken away a willow and an elder tree and the remains of the old chain-link enclosure for the duck-run. That enclosure was Vic Smith's work: he converted the ty bach into a kennel and added an enclosed dog run. The foundations of the posts were deep and heavy. Vic didn't do things by halves.  You can see that part of the stone wall at the back had been whitewashed, at the time when it was the inside wall of the ty bach of No 1 Siambra Gwynion. On the left you see the edge of the ty bach that belonged to No 2 Siambra Gwynion, that was home to our chickens and ducks for many years.

 

Here is the old Albertine flowering over the duck house (as we still call it). In this picture, I've made the dahlia bed using stone dug up in this patch, and established the level for the new shed, a foot below the previous ground level. Lying on the ground are several large heavy slates. These were the floor of the ty bach at No 1 Siambra Gwynion. I found them well below ground level.

August. The dahlias are flowering away and the shed is shipshape. The best dahlia of this first batch of four was City of Rotterdam, high-voltage orange and full of flowers all season.

Part Two

In September, I started on a part of the garden we had never done anything to: the old corrugated hut almost hidden under ivy, cherry laurel, and elm suckers. Dave Grundy took down the remains of the building, and we got the heap of rusty corrugated sheets picked up by the recyclers from Port Penrhyn.

The stone wall by the woods side of the garden was shorn of its ivy. David chainsawed the elm suckers (trees 15' high) and hawthorns which had also attained the status of trees. There's a mountain of brushwood and a heap of firewood which will take a couple of years to dry. I have been wheelbarrowing it out to the woods when the rain lets up. We have 6 woodpiles now. Now collecting for winter 2011-12.

 He's coming tomorrow, if the rain lets up. This must be the wettest and stormiest November ever.



Dave G is going to rebuild that wall. He has taken down the semi-collapsed end that didn't support the gate, and dug down about 8" to the base of a very big ash tree. The base of the trunk is 4' wide. No surprise that the wall was collapsing.