Acorns and walnuts are scattered across the meadow and driveway like battered Christmas baubles. Any thoughts that countless hazy days of summer still stretched in front of us have been blasted away by two storms in quick succession, the first bringing yellow flood warnings as typhoon-type rains lashed across the hilltop here, and the second powering up to amber, flexing its gale force winds through the wood and wreaking havoc amongst the flower beds. You are very much amongst the elements here in a storm: on a plateau amidst Herefordshire hills, the huge trees all around the garden boundary which shelter us from chilly gusts under normal conditions become banshees threatening destruction when wind speeds pick up. Little you can do but watch, wince and marvel. Our venerable triple trunked lime tree, over 250 years old and nearly 40m tall, is required to have an annual health check, and we listened intrigued last month as our tree expert Adrian Hope described the relative shallowness of a mature tree’s root plate, yet their flexibility allows them to move and respond to extreme weather and thereby survive. So, lime, oak and the pair of walnuts all shimmied through unscathed, while in our wood the old trees on the western edge have been shredded to matchsticks in places.
No bad thing - nature doing the clearing that we know we need to do sooner rather than later - but the accursed laurel (see previous posts) is so dense in that area that it makes stacking or removal of debris difficult, so we end up with hanging trees balancing on the huge canopies of hydra-headed laurels. The ash trees suffer: the storms strip their bunches of keys and outer twigs as the atrophying force of the ash dieback virus robs them of vigour and flexibility. More than half are infected, and nothing can be done to halt it. We look at our oaks and fret that they will be next to succumb to an alien pathogen. The wood is, as Neil comments philosophically, a long term project.
In the garden, the rain has almost compensated for the damage inflicted by high winds, with late summer growth speeding up dramatically. There is some damage to the now towering salvia “Amistad”, and the roses, optimistically launching into their second flowering, have had their blooms whipped to heaps of bruised tissue paper. The big group of large flowering dahlias are so densely grouped that, hedge-like, they provided their own protection, while on the edge of the terrace, single specimens were split and broken despite some robust support. As I write I am awaiting delivery of 500 allium bulbs for autumn planting; it is clear that substantial staking as well as some kind of screening will be required for next year if that planting plan has any chance of success. In the potager, only good news - the squash, the big, happy, greedy golden labradors of the vegetable world, are now romping around and across their neighbours’ homes, the lettuces are beautiful and amazingly still intact, and sweet corn and mangetout are growing before our eyes.
Every day here reinforces the point of how much you learn daily, weekly, monthly, and to what extent gardening and any kind of stewardship of nature instils patience and fosters curiosity, whether it is watching a big bumble bee trying to push a smaller carder bee out of a dahlia bloom to feed, currant bushes which were supposedly planted in their ideal conditions and which dropped their leaves within a fortnight in some kind of bizarre fruit strop, ten plants of the same variety and same age planted in the same bed which then all perform differently, or the carpet of foxglove and primrose seedlings rolling out into the newly cleared areas of the wood. Take care of nature and it will take care of you, the old adage reinforced every time we step outside here, and see the black fly on the globe artichokes being busily hoovered up by wasps, ladybirds and ladybird larvae, the white clover covering the old lawns a month ago now that they are not being mowed within an inch of their lives and which made the whole sward hum with the pollinators crowding onto it, and the toads which we encounter regularly and which help keep our mollusc population under control. Just a little space, a little thought, a little kindness in respect of the environment around us can mean the difference between a population surviving, possibly thriving or crashing, and that surely makes for some easy choices.
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