Beauty in Neglect

I broke my hip ten days ago and spent a week in hospital. Luckily it rained heavily while I was incarcerated so the outside plants were not short of water. I was amazed when I came out to find how beautiful my garden still was despite the lack of weeding. The dahlias have all come out giving a glorious display.
The back garden too is looking good. Again the dahlias add colour.

I am worried about my greenhouse which I can't get down to inspect. My daughter kindly took my aubergines home to look after and has brought them back. They are in the conservatory now looking fine. We are intending to have mousaka for dinner tonight,
I knew the cucumbers had developed stem rot before I fell over, and pulled them up but the melon, tomatoes and peppers were all doing fine. However while I was in hospital my son informed me that my tomatoes all had blight and he was going to dig them up. I suggested he left it to Chris, who helps me three hours a week but he was firm he would do it himself as 'EVERY leaf has to be picked up and disposed of properly, Mum.'
However when my son phoned me in hospital he said he hadn't cleared them himself and had asked Chris to do it after all but Chris had refused saying he hadn't time.

I detected a hint of trouble behind this and phoned Chris as soon as I was out of hospital. He was in a very aggrieved state.
'Your son asked me to clear the tomatoes because he said he didn't want to bring blight to his tomatoes, but what about my tomatoes! He wasn't bothered aboout those.'

I soothed him down as best I could but it din't occur to me that he hadn't watered the greenhouse as a result of my son's remarks.
The next day when my daughter and son-in-law went down they said the melon plant was completely frazzled, the peppers were just about surviving but the tomatoes although completely dry looked fine.
They watered the melon and next day they assured me it had perked up and the peppers were standing straight.
I just wish I could go and look at them myself, though.

Slinging my hammock

Last year I bought a simple brightly striped cloth hammock for £5 from a local supermarket and then had to hunt for a place to hang it.
I needed two trees about 3 metres appart with trunks that bifurcated into stout branches at shoulder height. The reason the trees needed to bifurcate at shoulder height was so that two iron bars slipped between the metal rings at each end of the hammock would press against the branches and keep the hammock in place without the need to screw strong hooks into the living wood.
I found two suitable trees, a hedge hawthorn and an aspen I planted about ten years ago after weeding it out of a vegetable bed, in my mini-wood,( i.e. two border beds one between a pebble path and the overgrown hawthorn hedge dividing my garden from next doors and one between the same path and a winding lawn so narrow that in garden professional vocabulary, it is known as a ride. Over the past fifteen years, I have planted up these two borders with trees and tall shrubs.)
By the way a garden here in the UK is what North Americans call their yard. Being British we usuallly surround our gardens with fences or hedges. My hedges once enclosed a tiny private field on the edge of one of the village's great common fields and may well be over 200 years old although my house is only just over 80.
We had such a bad summer last year that I didn't get much use out of the hammock until the autumn - but what magical moments I enjoyed then with the sun shining through chinks in a curtain of red and orange leaves created by a virginia creeper that had taken over the hedge.
I took the hammock down for the winter but when I went to sling it up again this May, I found the hard way that the hawthorn tree I had used last year had rotted.
It took me some time to find a safer hawthor suitably close to the aspen but now the hammock is back in use for the summer.
I wonder whether I find the hammock so much more relaxing an outdoor resting place than either recliners or those metal and overstuffed-cushion monstrosities that have usurped the title hammock, because of some remote tree dwelling ancestor who constructed a sleeping place out of branches. It could be though that it is because both i need to sleep with my legs rest higher than the base of my spine or else I wake with a stiff back. It could be also that the surrounding trees and the enclosing canvas keep off the chilly winds so I am warmer in my hammock den than I am out in the open on the lawn.
So far this late spring and early summer thre have been several days when I have been able to lie in my hammock reading. I prefer reading outdoors in summer as on a clear day I don't have to use spectacles. I just hope this summer is going to be better than last year's washout.

Early Butterflies and other Insects

It was a gorgeous day today so I spent most of it in the garden. Two species of butterfly showed themselves - the brimstone yellow and the tortoise shell. The garden was also full of bees, both bumble and honey. Midges abounded too, although I was not bitten. I hope the pear midge was not among them.

Daffs Galore

With February and the beginning of March so cold, the early daffodils and the late ones are flowering together. They make a wonderfuls spectacle in shades of yellow and white, strapping toughies clustered at the sides and rear of the back garden, dainty fairies on narrow stems with elegant foliage, dwarf tete a tete proliferating at the front of beds and arround the pond. The perfumed jonquils will wait for April as usual.
Daffodils and snowdrops, enduring all the cold and wet that is chucked at them, recovering quickly when struck prostrate by a fierce frost, proliferating by both splitting their bulbs and ripenening their seeds, these must be the best value bulbs in the British garden. All the gardener has to do is stand and admire while taking note of location so as not to dig up dormant clumps by mistake when planting fresh shrubs.

Lenten Rose

The weather has been milder these past few days. The snowdrops in my mini-wood are looking magnificent. I have been out doing a bit of tidying up. I cut back some ugly blotched leaves from a Lenten rose I had planted two years ago. When I bought it, it had five very pretty pale yellow flowers but last year it produced just one flower. This year, after the cold, I thought I would have no flowers at all but cutting back the leaves revealed eight perfect flowers in full bloom. Those ugly leaves had obviously protected the flowers from the vicious cold and damp.

Struggling out of Torpor

I took my camera into the garden earlier this week. Gradually I am shaking off sloth. Today I managed at least five jobs I have let slip for over a month.
This evening I started on the 2009 volume of my online garden journal which is now in its eleventh year. Only the January page works at the moment and I suspect the link to the 2008 volume is broken but as it 2.30am British time I am leaving it and going to bed.

Snowdrop time is here again

Snowdrops have been late to appear here in Leicestershire, but we have had some sun over the past week although our nights have been frosty. When I went into the back garden yesterday I noticed that the snowdrops in my mini wood were showing white although not exactly in full bloom. I have taken no garden pictures so far this January. I must remember to take my camera outside tomorrow

January ennui

I feel disenchanted with my camera. I suspect it is a case of the old cliché - A bad gardener blames her tools, but whatever the cause, I didn’t chase round the garden last December snapping every open flower, every tree glowing with gold in the low sun, every unseasonal event.

On the assumption that most gardeners who visit my online Garden Journal rarely look beyond the photos, I have bowed to another cliché, a picture is worth as many words as ships launched by Trojan Helen’s cockney boat, and usually use few words but several pictures in the monthly entries.

This proved awkward for the entry for December 2008, which I didn’t get round to creating until mid January 2009. The only half-way relevant photo I found on my camera was one of three branches pruned from my Beauty Pine and tied together as a Christmas tree substitute.

Not only did I have no more pictures but since I had spent the whole of December from the 1st onwards, involved with family and parties, with a slight interval for a stay in hospital, I had no gardening news either.
Now, if only I could shunt any gardener visiting the site over to a blog, I thought, as I surveyed the meagre page, they would: neither expect pictures nor expect the author to stick to a theme.

So I dug up a blog application I had purchased at least two years ago, but had never learnt to use, and as before found I still couldn’t get it to work so I hunted around for the commercial blogging host I thought I had once tried but had forgotten about after an episode of TGA (transient global amnesia a medical happening doctors diagnose but can't explain) and this is the result.

Next entry I hope will actually have something in it pertinent to gardening.