Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Now that it is September we have been having hot, dry weather. I have made good progress on removing the two Leylandii. I have dug up the leftmost tree, so there are only five still standing.

One Leyandii completely gone and one reduced to half height

My friend Graham kindly came round and sawed through the trunk of the other tree to be removed (this is now the leftmost tree in the picture) while I held onto the top half. Then we carefully let go and it fell onto the tarpaulin, as you can see in the picture.

I have also done nearly all the shredding, and started to dig up the second tree. The first tree took about 3-4 hours to dig up, and I expect this one will take the same time.

I have eaten all my Discovery apples now. I am amused to see that Charles Ross has managed to do an apple, even though he never had any blossom. Obviously a virgin birth. It won’t be ready to eat for at least another month.

We have sunshine and showers forecast for the Bank Holiday weekend. Since it was doing sunshine this morning I decided it was time to start cutting bits off the two Leylandii trees that I am going to remove this autumn. They are at the left of the existing hedge. The job needs doing now because the other Leylandii need a trim, and it seems pointless to trim the two trees that I am going to remove. I intelligently ate a substantial piece of cake first to make sure I had enough fuel to complete the job.

The two left hand Leylandii will soon be removed

You can’t see all the branches that I removed in this picture, but I stacked them on the tarpaulin and there were a lot of them. I have made a start on shredding them, but this will be a two-hour job at least. Then I will have to dig up the roots. And then call in a tree surgeon to trim the remaining trees, all four of them. And then plant the new trees. I don’t know exactly how many I can fit in the space left, but at two feet apart, it should be about six.

I am pleased to announce that I did get an A star in my GCSE biology, despite not knowing how the plants under the tarpaulin were getting their carbon dioxide. I think there is nothing wrong with the difficulty of GCSEs – it’s just that the grade boundaries are very low. For Paper 2 in GCSE Biology, you only needed to get 69% to get an A star. And I don’t think any of the questions were unfair, so why have such a low boundary for the highest grade possible?

Today I bravely peeled back the tarpaulin and confronted the leafy subculture underneath.

The jungle under the tarpaulin

The dominant weed by miles is a form of umbrella grass which somebody kindly gave me several years ago. He omitted to tell me that it would take over the garden. (Why do people do this? I always tell my friends when I’m giving them something that will seed itself or do runners all over the place and which they will never ever be able to eradicate if they decide they don’t want it any more.) There was the occasional bittercress plant and some clover type stuff, but not much of it. As I pulled up the grass, I put the slugs under another part of the tarpaulin, hoping that they would get to work on whatever was under there.

I did not forget to stop and admire the garden a little. The hibiscus in the far left corner, in front of the huge blue-green conifer, is looking very pink at the moment. I don’t know whether it will get dug up and moved when the pond and lawn are built, but for now it’s staying and looking very pretty. The picture isn’t as good as it could be because the sun is too bright, but never mind. You get the idea.

Hibiscus in far left corner, looking very pink

As far as progress goes, I have cleared out the area of bare ground behind the bay tree and moved some slabs of paving foundation onto it. This will give me an additional place to put the plants when the works are carried out in the winter. But it’s still a big problem, working out where I am going to put them.

I wonder at what stage the garden achieves a maximum growth rate. It is over a month since the summer solstice, and the evenings are noticeably drawing in, but the ground is warmer now and the plants have plenty of energy from previous weeks. All I know is that at this time of year there is no time for Renovation and only time for Maintenance.

View from above

Quite a lot of time has to be spent watering my 157 pots. It may be only 156 now, because I think the lupin has died. I cut it back after flowering, but I think I cut it back too much. I will wait and see. I liked the lupin and was only cutting it back because I thought it might have a better chance if I took off some of its leaves to reduce transpiration. If it has died, maybe I will grow some more from seed when I finally reach the stage of being able to plant things.

As usual, the Willowherb Elimination Stakes were won by the willowherb. I am not sure if I ever really entered the competition this year. I am having trouble not just with the weeds I can see, but also the ones under the tarpaulin. It may be possible for you to see the bulges under the tarpaulin on the right hand side of the picture. The bulges are not gas from putrefying dead animals which got themselves trapped under the tarpaulin, but from the weeds that are happily growing in blue light and gobbling up the carbon dioxide from respiring animals and microorganisms in this cosy micro-climate. (In an earlier post I said I did not know where the plants were getting their carbon dioxide from. My mum kindly texted me while I was on holiday to explain that the carbon dioxide came from respiration. This is, of course, obvious. If it turns out that I still got an A star for my GCSE biology that I took last month, that will prove there is something wrong with the exams).

My biggest problem with the next stage of Renovation is going to be to work out where to put the plants while it is being carried out. Some of them can go in the greenhouse (they can’t go there at the moment, because it is too hot) and the perennials can go in the passage by the side of the house where the sheds are (they can’t go there at the moment because there’s not enough light for non-dormant plants). Perhaps I can even put the deciduous plants in the garage for a few days, since they won’t be photosynthesising.

But for now, I shall just continue to weed, cut back, mow and water until the relentless pace of growth relents a bit.

The law of the jungle is not what Rudyard Kipling said it was. The law of the jungle is that at a certain time of the year, everything in the garden grows so fast that I cannot keep up with it and it turns into a jungle. I had to move some of my plant pots off the patio because the plants were getting too big to fit them all on there. Meanwhile the marjoram and campanula are having a ball. And I really should have pruned that apple tree in the winter.

Plants doing exactly what they want at the bottom left of my garden

Exactly a year ago I took a picture of the side border (see this post). I carefully left the lychnis to grow, and this is what I got.

Side border with lychnis (and other jungle plants)

But there are compensations. The evening air is redolent with the scent of jasmine from my non-dead plant. (In fact, the air is redolent all day long, but it sounds even nicer when it’s the evening air). And I can feel pleased with myself over how nice I am being to the bees by letting all these flowers take over my garden.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but I think there are more hellebore seedlings around this year than usual. The statistical significance of my observation may be slightly reduced by the confounding variable that, until my mum told me three weeks ago, I didn’t know what hellebore seedlings looked like. But I am sure I would have noticed them because they don’t look like any of my usual weeds.

You can recognise hellebore seedlings by the fact that they have three leaves with feathered edges. I don’t know how long one of these takes to get big enough to flower, but I expect it’ll manage it before I complete the Garden Renovation Project.

I have also discovered that the tarpaulin does not keep weeds out. If the tarpaulin were green, then I should think the plants wouldn’t do as well, because green light is not as good for photosynthesis. (Are you surprised? Think about it – a plant’s leaves are green because it reflects green light and absorbs the other colours. It doesn’t want green!) But blue light is obviously delicious. I have no idea how the plants are managing to get enough carbon dioxide, though.

So the weeds are growing happily under the tarpaulin, but they’ll have a hard time producing seeds, and not many new seeds will make it under there, so I am still better off than if I didn’t have the tarpaulin at all. And of course, it discourages the few cats that wander into my garden these days (now that I have the fabulous cat repellent, with its batteries still on their first charge).

I haven’t been in the garden much this week because I have been busy with other things. Fortunately it is quite low maintenance at the moment, given that the tarpaulin covers a large proportion of the ground. I had better mow the lawn soon because it has too much bittercress in it.

I couldn’t help noticing that while one of my apple trees (Discovery) is covered in fragrant blossom, the other one (Charles Ross) is refusing to play.

My two apple trees: one (right) with lots of blossom and leaves, and the other (left) with some leaves but no blossom

It seems to have plenty of new leaves coming, with no sign of anything suspicious crawling up it, so maybe it’s gone biennial. Perhaps when I dig it up and move it, that will bring it to its senses.

The magnolia in a pot still hasn’t died and is flowering again. It has only four flowers this year, but I am not complaining. I am just glad that it survived the hard winter.

One of four flowers from the magnolia growing in a pot

We have had an exceptionally long period without rain. I haven’t been able to do as much gardening as I would like because I have been busy with other things, but I have been keeping the pots weeded and well watered. They will get their late spring dose of vine weevil killer at the beginning of May. It will be lovely when I finally get the pond and lawn constructed and I can at last plant my potted plants in open ground, so they will need less feeding and no de-weevilling.

With the sudden change to dry and slightly warm weather, I have been spending a lot of time in the garden this week. I have finished breaking up the concrete foundation into manageable pieces. The chunks that I had before I did this were too heavy to lift safely, which was a nuisance. So I broke them up into two. Each chunk probably weighs about 5 – 7 kg, which is easily manageable. I now need to get all the fragments of concrete off the lawn so I can mow it without damaging the mower blade.

I also rearranged my pots. I had put some near the pond for the winter, thinking that I would get the landscaping works done in January, but I had to move them because the plants got their first feed on Monday morning, and it would have been very bad to have let the run-off from the fertiliser drip into the pond. I don’t think the newts would enjoy vine weevil killer either, which is what the plants can look forward to getting at the end of the month.

The current arrangement of tarpaulins

I saw my first brimstone butterfly on 10 April 2010, but not in my garden. It was fluttering above the junction of the A3 and the M25. I think that’s quite late in the year for a first sighting, but I am not surprised about this.

After last week’s sunshine bonanza, we have had a week of water. I managed to get out on Friday to tidy up a bit. I replaced the tarpaulin in the middle left of the garden with a bigger one and used the original tarpaulin to put on top of the area in the centre, where the viburnum used to be. I couldn’t lay them out very neatly because it was windy and they kept billowing out when I tried to fold them. I have also stacked up some of the chunks of path foundation out of the way (see the pile at the right-hand edge of the picture). I need to chop some of them up with my pickaxe because they are so very heavy to lift.

Deployment of another tarpaulin

I still have not seen a single cat in my garden. I found some droppings in the middle of the path of the cat repeller a week ago, but I think they were from a fox. The battery hasn’t run down yet, despite me forgetting to turn off the device on the day Graham the window cleaner visited.