Oh yes? Oh no!
Another cool winter's morning - just about to crow about yesterday's gardening efforts. Oh yes! Me! Wasn't I good! Seeing what needed doing, stopping, and simply doing it. Oh no! Left my camera outside to spend the night on the garden bench...
Bee in the Hellebores
So now the dogs and I are off to inspect the good (a new path route in front of the glasshouse) and the bad (a frosty, dead camera? Please no!)
Start of New Path
Mature marvels...
Aha! The marvels of the mature, instinctively responsible mind - found the camera inside the glasshouse. Yesterday I'd wandered past it with the dogs to peep at the big rugosa roses planted below. Should I prune them? Noticed that things were generally not looking good. The existing path was impassable, a Cotinus with a huge trunk had died (ditto a red Cordyline). The big rugosa roses looked dreadful - impossible to see where the wood was still alive.
So I grabbed my tools and started remodelling the garden then and there. I shifted some Toad Lilies to make a new path route. I pulled out some creeping Charlie (who will creep back, for sure) and other general weeds. I dug out a couple of smaller roses - one an Abraham Darby that I'd proudly grown from a cutting years ago. Not the sturdiest of roses - there's a reason why such beauties are grafted onto rootstock.
Flowering now - Toad Lilies
I replanted all the Toad lilies to fill up spaces where the old path had been. I love Toad Lilies (Tricyrtis) - their flower faces in autumn are beautiful in detail. They spread themselves around a bit, so they suit my big scale gardening. And they seem to cope with a bit of shade. Photograph above.
Flowering Wattle
Wattle trees flowering...
Now all I need are more edging stones, and some liberal applications of horse manure and organic matter - suspect that the overhead Wattle trees 'use up' the nutrients in the soil. They're in flower now - glowing bright yellow in the winter sunshine. This garden is a small part of the area that I call the Wattle Woods. Beautiful trees, though their wood is rather brittle.
A host of pretty Camellias grow by the end of the glasshouse (the early ones are flowering now), and the red rhododendrons (not flowering yet) lower down the slope are looking very buddy. These shrubs would enjoy some manure, I'm sure. Is it the right time? Don't know and don't really mind if it isn't. I have some bags of rotted, wormy horse manure ready and waiting. Great idea! The right time it the time that I remember to do it, hee hee.
Just hope that, like my camera, some of those rugosas are still alive. Alice! Please be there for me later this spring...