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.