December vanished in a cloud of cooking and consuming, yet kept us on our toes in the garden with a helter-skelter of temperatures ranging from pleasant spring day to proper northern hemisphere winter. Having lived abroad for over a decade, I never know what to expect from a British winter, but it appears that goes for most of the UK too. While we are consistently a degree or so colder up on the Herefordshire plateau than down around the river meadows of Leominster, Knightwick and Hereford, I was still struck by lupins and leucanthemums in flower, salvias and geums hanging on, and self-seeded calendula actively growing when I got back in early December. The feverfew which merrily marches around the garden was also springing up everywhere - a plant I had hitherto welcomed until I read that its scent is so strong it deters pollinators from plants in its vicinity (with no effect on its own proliferation as it can self pollinate). Nasturtiums had climbed the walls, and the winter salads were overflowing.
The cardoons - ordered as borage plants but very clearly demonstrating their true identity (above) had also shot up, confirming that a space that would have been fine for borage was never going to be a suitable home for these giants. There were often mild spells in winter when I was growing up - a late rose in a bud vase on the Christmas table was not uncommon - but lengthy periods of 8-10’C in midwinter still feels so wrong. In the UK we do not have the immense visual shock of climate crisis in melting glaciers or greening Alps, but in our small island way, summer flowers blooming consistently at Christmas are unsettling. There are far wider consequences than a few floral surprises: for gardeners and farmers, the effects of a springlike December or January can mean disaster for plants and pollinators. Many perennial plants and annual crops depend on a process known as vernalisation to regulate their growth seasons - essentially if you are plant or seed, you get really, really cold, then you know when it stops being cold that you are safe to start growing again because it must be spring. Now, you might start uncurling in one of those mild December weeks, poke your head above ground, and then get hit by sub-zero February - and that’s it, your annual regeneration or growth cycle spoiled. Pollinators may also emerge, anticipating springtime treats, but there are few, and thus the cycles of growth and dormancy we have come to rely upon unravel a little further. This year, the cold snap for us came just after Christmas, and with it the bee and butterfly mortalities in the conservatory and the outside sheds. You just have to keep planting, keep hoping, and keep extending the range of food source plants in the garden through late autumn and winter.
Winter is a time of recovery and preparation, according to Paul Theroux. For gardeners, it is typically the time for taking stock, moving plants while they are dormant, planning the new year’s developments, and browsing beautiful seed and plant catalogues while curled up in the warm. Not quite the way it went at Oaklands this year. The mild weather before the festive season was taken up with Christmas preparations, and as I emerged from the fug after Boxing Day, temperatures had dropped and the ground had turned to iron, rendering even weeding let alone transplanting impossible. I cursed myself for not having made more time for outside work, conscious that the next phase of landscaping redevelopment was due to begin in Feb 2021, with the beds either side of the house due to be completely reworked. This would necessitate removing anything I wanted to save from the old beds before the guys got started, but with temperatures under zero, movement now would be a death sentence. However, a week or so after confirming plans with the contractors, a combination of the latest lockdown and personal reasons for the head of the company resulted in the start date being deferred until late May, so transplant pressure was off. My evacuees-in-waiting are not rare or unusual, but established roses and hydrangeas are definitely worth keeping, and geraniums and lupins also are mainstays of the next round of plans, so will avoid the bulldozer. The unforeseen delay means as well that the mess of old plants and untended borders which I had gleefully left untouched last autumn in the belief that they would be upended in the new year now means I have an odd no-man’s land at the front of the house, neither tended nor tackled, caught in soggy limbo. I need the old borders dug out - as with all the areas around the house they are a challenging combination of our underlying sandstone plateau, layered with local clay and topped with plentiful sprinkles of building debris so there is no benefit to leaving the older areas untouched and simply extending out from them.
Time during the holiday was not entirely wasted: as Neil described in an earlier post, we planted up the apple avenue, noting then that during our absence in November the bunnies had made a proper, full-on land grab of the hoggin paths around the potager, with neat heaps of droppings marking out every corner, and mild damp weather then turning every heap into a little seed propagator. Instead of Mr C’s beloved red sandstone grit, we now had paths resembling those spiky grass growing kits for kids. While I appreciate grass and its verdant tenacity, picking out tiny seedlings 10-15mms long from ice cold hoggin ranks low on my list of favourite garden activities, not least because the sound of rabbit laughter must have echoed through our wood when I returned the next day to find fresh contributions on the newly cleared areas. I primed our younger son (fresh from his crack marksman’s training in the school’s Marines corps) for a decisive response, but teenagers’ timeframes and the bunnies’ pre dawn schedules made for an easy win for the hoggin despoilers. Need to recruit some regular help.
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