Helen's Garden Renovation Project

We have been having gales in Scotland and along the east coast, but here in Hampshire the weather is beautiful. I went out and pulled up some more weeds and swept up some more leaves. I admired my winter flowering jasmine in the new border by the side fence, which has just started flowering. I am really pleased, as not much else is supposed to flower at this time of year.

I use the phrase “supposed to flower” advisedly, because my primula and primrose collection has decided to have a go even though it is November.

Then I went through my bulb collection, which includes crocuses, bluebells, grape hyacinths and snowdrops, and pulled the weeds off the top, and topped them up with compost and some sharp sand. Grape hyacinths often start to sprout at this time of year, so I wasn’t surprised to find them doing some shoots, but I also found that the other bulbs were waking up.

Finally I painted the kerria and some of my seedling blackberries with pink stuff, since glyphosate seems to have had no effect on the blackberries whatsoever.

Look at this! Two posts in one week! I wanted to get some photographs of autumn colour before it was too late. Opinions differ whether this autumn is a particularly good one for vibrant colours. My garden is not all that well set up for autumn colour, but the cherry tree out in the front (you remember, the one whose roots were fighting for nutrients among the washings out of the builders’ cement mixer) has not done badly.

However, it has nothing on the cherry tree down the road. Oh wow. (If you are wondering what took a bite out of the top of the conifer to the left of it, so am I. But a man went up a ladder and chopped the top off this afternoon, so it looks better now).

This one has double flowers, and it’s a lovely shape as well. This is what it looked like last spring.

If I were to find myself in the position of choosing a cherry tree for my garden in the future, this is the one I would have.

Apart from looking at trees, I have swept up a large number of leaves and put them in my large square compost bin to make into leaf mould. The bulk will come in handy because I will be short of soil when I finish renovating the garden. I also pulled up some more weeds, but there are still many more to deal with. At least I am not getting many new ones appearing at this time of year.

The trouble with gardening blogs is that if you don’t write any entries for a while, people complain. In summer it was my ex-manager, and you might think that there is no need to take any notice of ex-managers, but you never know; I might want a reference. Now it’s one of my aunties. So I think it’s about time I wrote about my excuses for not doing enough garden renovation.

Excuse Number 1 is that I have been involved in another renovation project. This involves the areas of grass and shrubs in among the development of six houses where I live. The good thing about this renovation project is that someone else is doing it, and not me (actually Alborough Garden Design, but don’t click on the website link if you are using Internet Explorer and Microsoft Vista, or Internet Explorer will shut down and you will have to start it up again. Firefox works). The bad thing is that I have the job of working with the landscapers to produce a planting plan that is low maintenance, won’t go over budget, and will be reasonably acceptable to everyone. I am taking the strategy of trying to get the neighbours to criticise the plan before it is implemented, rather than afterwards. None of this is as easy as it might sound.

Here is the evidence for Excuse Number 1.

Excuse Number 2 is that I have been doing Garden Renovation that is not in the Plan. This is poor project management and inevitably leads to slippage. But take a look at my side border, which now has climbers and things in it.

The climbers are, going away from you, trachlospermum jasminiodes, jasminum officinale, jasminum nudiflorum (winter flowering jasmine), lonicera x tellmaniana (honeysuckle) and hydrangea petiolaris (climbing hydrangea). I have also planted some blue crocuses, Queen of the Night tulips, and some bright purple tulips. I planted tulips years ago in the front garden, but they only lasted one or two years before they were never seen again. This time I have planted the tulips very deep. We shall see.

Excuse Number 3 is that I didn’t want to disturb the frogs.

However, I had to clear out the pond a bit because tomorrow the forecast is for very cold weather, and today isn’t too bad. This is what the pond looked like before I pulled out about 500 kg of pond weed. I am really looking forward to getting the new pond built because it will be well away from any deciduous trees, unlike the existing one, which is right under a silver birch.

Excuse Number 4 is that I have had unbelievable demand for my services as a maths tutor. With the amount of work I feel I am doing, I should now be able to afford a greenhouse with gold-plated windows and bags of diamond-encrusted compost, but I just haven’t had time to get on with the preparation.

So today I have done a little bit of weeding, and some leaf gathering, and a bit of tidying up, and all I can do is to keep doing a little more, until eventually the garden goes to sleep for the winter and I can catch it unawares.

Before I sign off, just have another look at the annual border. It’s all long since dead now – except that wonderful alyssum that just does not know when to stop. And I for one am not telling it.

We have had another week with no rain and I have managed to finish digging the side border at the front. It now looks like this:

The fence faces southwest, so the part at the front gets loads of sun which gives me a lot of choice as to what I can grow there. As you can see from the photograph, the end of the fence is blocked from sunlight by the house. A climber up the fence may have a chance of some sunlight, but any perennial or shrub I grow on the ground is going to get very little sun or moisture.

Dave, my previously-mentioned very patient boyfriend, took me to Whitewater nursery again to choose some plants for my birthday present. I persuaded the following to come home with me:

Lonicera x Tellmaniana – happy in shade or part-shade, but apparently is not particularly fragrant. This is not a great drawback given that I am planting two fragrant plants along the border.

Jasminum officinale – wants a sunny spot.

Hebe Youngii Carl Flescher – looks quite compact and does purple flowers.

Elaeagnus x ebbingei – more of that later.

Pratia Pedunculata – my pocket-sized Plants for Places book says it can be invasive. It doesn’t mind a bit of shade, so if it gets too invasive I can just move it to somewhere even shadier.

Chaenorrhinum – I’ve never heard of this one before, but it looked pretty, and it likes sunny well-drained soil, so it can go at the sunny end of the strip and see how it likes it.

After several unsuccessful attempts to take cuttings of the elaeagnus from the plant at the edge of an estate I cycle past on my way to work, I gave in and acquired a plant of my own. This is definitely a foolish thing to do as I have no idea where I am going to put it. It isn’t going in my new border because it’s too vigorous and I would have to keep cutting bits off it so I could get past. I am reluctant to put it in the main front garden because it is shade-tolerant, and the front garden gets masses of sun. For now I am just going to put it in a great big pot and enjoy the heavenly scent of its flowers, which are just beginning to appear.

Apart from this, this week I dug up my photinia cutting that I successfully planted about ten years ago. It was possibly my most brutal operation so far, because the poor thing was right against the back fence and I couldn’t easily get at it to dig a reasonable sized hole around it. Also the roots of the silver birch tree in the garden behind kept getting in the way. But in the end I got a good chunk of root with the plant, and I have watered it well, so I shall just hope that my run of luck with digging up mature plants holds.

While I was digging the border along the fence at the front of the house, I thought of another maths problem for any gardeners who are not spending absolutely every minute they have making up for a lost summer.

Six gardeners dig a hole 36ft long by 1ft wide and 1ft deep in two hours. How long does it take four gardeners to dig the same hole?

After the wettest summer in 1800 years, the rain suddenly stopped. In time-honoured fashion, I checked that the floods had receded by first sending out a raven and then a dove, which returned with a bay tree stem in its beak, so I knew it was time to go out and do something about the weeds.

Sadly, very little renovation has taken place this summer. I am hoping we will have a dry September so that I can catch up with the maintenance that needs doing, and then when the garden goes to sleep in October I may have a chance of making some actual progress. In this entry, I am going to report on some of the things I have tried this year.

Firstly, the annual border. To be fair to the poor thing, it didn’t have much of a chance, being situated in quite a shady part of the garden and then being subjected to the least sunny summer for 2100 years. I wouldn’t bother with cornflowers and night-scented stocks again, unless, in the case of the cornflowers, I was making a wild-flower meadow. I might plant poppies in amongst a herbaceous border. The larkspur and the lavatera were lovely, and I would definitely sow them again. But the real winner has to be the alyssum (the white stuff). It was the first to open its flowers, and it has just gone on and on and on. What a hero.

The honeysuckle is recovering well after the slaughtering I gave it earlier this year.

There was nothing to discover on my Discovery apple tree, but Charles Ross has put in a good effort. The apples look a bit small to me, but perhaps they will grow enough to be worth eating. You might think that the wooden raspberry frame around the tree looks curved because of funny perspective, but it really is that wonky.

At the front of the garden, the grass that I sowed in April has taken well. I mowed the entire area to the same height about two weeks ago. The new grass has grown several centimetres, while the old grass has done virtually nothing. The moral of this is that if you don’t like mowing the lawn, don’t dig out the rubble under it. However, since I don’t mind mowing the lawn and would rather have healthy grass than sickly stuff and moss, I think I will try to renew another patch of the old lawn in the spring, and keep going until I have done it all.

My efforts to take cuttings of lavender, rosemary, elaeagnus x ebbingei and photinia have been a failure. That is, I am still in with a chance on the lavender and rosemary, as they haven’t all died or gone mouldy yet, but the elaeagnus and photinia are as dead as doornails. I know I tried to take them too early in the year at first, but I have kept trying since then at approximately monthly intervals. I have checked the books, and the only thing I have done wrong is not to use hormone rooting powder, so I could try that another year. I have nowhere to put the elaeagus so I am not sure I really want one – I just wanted to see if I could manage to grow one. Many years ago, I did succeed in taking a photinia cutting, and I am wondering whether it would be worth digging it up now, even though it is quite mature, since I seem to be quite a lot better at digging up plants than taking cuttings of them (see later in this post).

My poor tomato plants all died of blight. I got a few tomatoes from them, but it was another failure caused by the wettest summer for 2300 years. And the fact that I didn’t spray them with copper fungicide like I usually do. Well, it would have all washed off. The corner where they used to live is possibly the part of the garden that looks messiest, but never mind, because that’s where I am going to put the greenhouse.

However, the wettest summer for 2400 years has been just heaven for my portable herbaceous border, which looks absolutely fantastic.

The portable herbaceous border could well lose some of its members soon because I have been continuing with my digging of the side border to the front of the house. This is not on the Plan, since it is the front garden rather than the back garden, but I decided that I didn’t need a Plan for it because it is only about 1 foot wide and 33 feet long. I estimated the length by counting the fence panels, of which there are five and a half. One fence panel gets masses of sun, but then the border gets shadier and shadier until it is almost totally dark at the other end. I have a range of plants which could be put along the border, and I have been thinking, while cycling to work, which plants I should put where. Pulmonaria is a good bet for the dark end, and vinca minor would probably also do well, with ajuga reptans in the middle, while I have some geraniums and oriental poppies that might enjoy the sunnier end. I could put a hebe in the sunniest part, and that would look good as long as I remember to keep it trimmed and not just let it get all sprawly like I usually do.

I have been incredibly successful with digging shrubs up. Not one of my transplants has died. I am slightly worried about my Hibiscus Bluebird, which shows some signs of rotting at the base of the stem, but it’s still bravely produced a few flowers. The magnolia that I pruned hard and dug up is sitting proudly in its pot putting on new growth. I have had a near 100% success rate with perennials too. It just shows that if you have a plant you really like that is in the wrong place, it’s worth having a go at digging it up.

If you are wondering why there is such a big gap in my blog right in the middle of summer, when I ought to have been gardening like mad, it’s because we’ve had the wettest summer for about 600 years and I haven’t got any wellies. It stopped raining about a week and a half ago, and I have been putting in gardening overtime to try and undo the results of letting the garden do what it liked for a month. Although every scrap of soil that isn’t taken up by a plant is covered in weeds, the job of weeding is not as bad as it was in March because the weeds are much bigger, and hence there are fewer of them per unit acre. All the same, I have a long way to go, and that’s just maintenance, not garden renovation. For example, this corner has three tomato plants growing up sticks (Sungold, the world’s best-tasting cherry tomato) plus another tomato plant that saw the party and decided to gatecrash, so I let it stay, plus far too many weeds. I took this picture yesterday, and today I pulled up a lot of the weeds, so it looks better now.

The figures are now out, and June 2007 is the wettest since detailed records began in 1914 (you would have thought they would be too busy fighting a war to be measuring rainfall) and the garden has taken full advantage of my non-interference. I was away on holiday last week, and today was the first chance I had to go and wrestle with Nature since my last post.

The annual border is almost at its peak. Everything has flowered now except the Larkspur. The order of flowering was: alyssum, night-scented stocks, cornflowers, poppies and lavatera.

I like the very dark purple poppies, but perhaps I didn’t need to have the very dark purple cornflowers too. Perhaps one or the other would have been better.

I was pleased to see that the Waldsteinia is not only still alive, but has produced the specified yellow flowers. Well done that plant.

The picture below shows the scale of the rearrangement I am doing. Most of the plants in the picture below will be replanted in the new garden. I have had very few losses. The magnolia I bought from Wilkinson is just a stalk, so I think that has probably had it. However, the climbing hydrangea is trying to, and the pieris looks good too, so Wilkinson’s plants are pretty good value overall. The one with the enormous pointy green leaves is Crocosmia Lucifer – you can see its flower. Mum gave me a few corns of it about ten years ago. I think I have a pretty good supply of it now.

As for what I spent my time doing today when I wasn’t taking pictures – well, it was spent on the ivy, mainly. It was totally out of control. I have cut back most of it now, but it is doing a lot of damage to my fence panels. I am wondering whether I can dig some of it out from between the fence panels and posts with a kitchen knife before the stalks get thicker and break the panels. Glyphosate would be better, but unfortunately it is not my ivy. I also cut the new grass again with shears, and cut off the side shoots of the tomatoes. I got slightly rained on a couple of times, but mainly it stayed dry.

It rained all morning, and now it is too soggy to mow the lawn, so here is the answer to the weed problem of 27 May 2007.

This is what the weed problem said:

A gardener has a patch of weeds. She pulls up 600 weeds every morning. Every afternoon the number of weeds goes up by 10%. After 10 days she has pulled up all the weeds (so she pulls up 6000 weeds altogether). How many were there to start with?

I received two solutions, both of which were different from my way of doing the problem, so you, lucky reader, get three solutions.

Solution 1: numerical
Sharon solved the problem by using Matlab code (Matlab is a specialist mathematical programming language) as follows:

D=zeros(10,1);
D(10)=600;
for n=9:-1:1, D(n)=D(n+1)/1.1+600; end

The solution is D(1). You can also do the same thing in a spreadsheet: put 600 in cell A1, then type “=A1/1.1+600” (without the quotes) into cell A2. Copy cell A2 to cells A3 to A10. Cell A10 then contains the answer, which is 4055.414, or 4055 to the nearest whole weed.

This solution would be accessible to the brightest GCSE maths students, as long as they realise that to increase something by 10% you multiply by 1.1, and therefore to undo the increase you divide by 1.1.

Solution 2: use of geometric progressions

For this solution you need knowledge of AS level maths (first year of sixth form). It is one of the harder geometric progressions problems. What you do is to write out the number of weeds at the end of each day, and spot the pattern.

Note that the number of weeds at the end of a day is given by 1.1(w-600) where w is the number of weeds at the end of the previous day. Also note that I am using the ^ sign to denote “to the power of” and * for “multiplied by”.

Suppose the initial number of weeds is n.
At the end of Day 1, there are 1.1(n-600) weeds which is 1.1n – 1.1 * 600
At the end of Day 2, there are 1.1(1.1n – 1.1 * 600 – 600) weeds, which is (1.1^2)n – 1.1^2 * 600 – 1.1 * 600
At the end of Day 3, there are 1.1((1.1^2)n – 1.1^2 * 600 – 1.1 * 600 – 600) weeds, which is (1.1^3)n – 1.1^3 * 600 – 1.1^2 * 600 – 1.1 * 600
At the end of Day 4, there are 1.1(1.1^3)n – 1.1^3 * 600 – 1.1^2 * 600 – 1.1 * 600 – 600) weeds, which is
(1.1^4)n – 1.1^4 * 600 – 1.1^3 * 600 1.1^2 * 600 – 1.1 * 600
Rearranging a little bit, this becomes
(1.1^4)n-600(1.1+1.1^2+1.1^3+1.1^4)

By now the astute AS level student will have recognised the last bracket as the sum of a geometric progression, and will replace it with the formula. This gives
Number of weeds at the end of Day 4 = (1.1^4)n – 600*1.1*(1.1^4-1)/(1.1-1)
which, believe it or not, simplifies to (1.1^4)n – 6600*1.1^4 + 6600.
By following the pattern, the number of weeds at the end of Day 10 is
(1.1^10)n – 6600*1.1^10 + 6600.
This, of course, is equal to 0, and therefore
n = 6600 – 6600/1.1^10
which also comes to 4055 to the nearest weed.

Solution 3: use of recurrence relations.
This solution was sent in by Dave. It requires undergraduate level maths. I reproduce his solution below.

I did the weeds problem by initially thinking of it as a continuous (rather than discrete) system i.e. the weeds are pulled up steadily at a rate of 600 per day (including all night) while simultaneously reproducing at an exponential rate of 10% per day. Although this is not quite the same problem (and therefore won’t have the same answer) it gives a clue as to the type of general solution that the discrete problem will have. The continuous problem can be expressed as:

Dw/dt = 0.1*w – 600 where w is number of weeds and t is time.

This has a solution of the form w = a*exp(0.1*t) + b where a and b are constants. The exact values of a and b can be found but are not important as it’s the type of solution that matters. For the discrete system, instead of a differential equation we have a recursive equation i.e.

A(n+1) = 1.1*(a(n) – 600)

In this the index n is equivalent to time t in the continuous system, so we can look for a solution of the form a(n) = c*d^n + f, where c, d and f are constants. Shoving this in the difference equation gives

C*d^(n+1) + f = 1.1*(c*d^n + f – 600)

Equating everything, d must be 1.1, and f = 1.1*(f – 600) giving f = 6600. So we have

A(n) = c*(1.1)^n + 6600

Also we know that a(9) = 600 = c*(1.1)^9 + 6600 giving c = -6000/(1.1)^9, so we end up with

A(n) = -6000*(1.1)^n/(1.1)^9 + 6600

The answer to the problem is the value of A(0), so substitute n=0 into the above equation and once again you get 4055 weeds.

So there you have it: three solutions to the weed problem. If you have got this far, I bet you really wish I’d mowed the lawn instead.

This morning, at about seven o’clock, just after my weekly forty-minute run, I looked despairingly at the weed in my lawn that does small yellow flowers and spotted a rather high-quality moth.

Thanks to http://www.butterflygarden.co.uk/moths.htm I can fairly confidently identify it as Tyria jacobaeae or Cinnabar moth. At least something likes the weed that does small yellow flowers.

The peony decided that procreation was more important than retribution, and did the following:

I spent a couple of hours pulling out more weeds and planting my tomatoes. I left it a bit late this year. One of the tomatoes keeled over just as I was about to plant it and broke its stem, but that still leaves me three plants, which is plenty.

The campanula portensclagiana has started making the most of having a pot to itself and is producing leaf and flower shoots with a fair amount of verve. I was worried that it might not be vigorous enough to hold its own in my garden, but I think it will do just fine.

I forgot to mention that on Wednesday I took some more cuttings from the lavender and rosemary at work. My first attempt, earlier this year, didn’t work at all. I suspect it is still too early for semi-ripe cuttings but I decided to try anyway. I also took some cuttings from the elaeagnus. So far they are not at all droopy or brown round the edges, but it is early days.