A long gap since my last post, but I will blame a shire resident who drove into a telegraph post round here a while back, and while happily was unharmed, took out the fibre optic broadband for the entire area for over a week. A timely reminder as we jolt and stumble out of lockdown of how dependent we are on our digital arteries. It feels sometimes here as if I am being shunted steadily back into an earlier age, when jumping on and off a plane every other week was as unimaginable as space travel, and writing something with some pictures in it was just an everyday activity for a well-bound notebook rather than an aggregation of bytes which demands planet-heating server power and a fast upload speed.
I had also been busy (pre telegraph pole incident) completing an online gardening course titled “Planting the Piet Oudolf Way’. Oudolf is the laconic Dutchman who pioneered naturalistic, prairie-style planting for gardens and city green spaces and who is now deemed the master of that style. Anyone who has visited New York and walked along the High Line will have seen the flowing greenery which softens that quintessential urban setting; anyone who plants coneflowers and grasses in their home garden will be demonstrating his influence. The man is a genius, and interviewed for this course by the highly qualified Noel Kingsbury, students of the course see Piet’s home turf at Hummelo in the Netherlands at different stages through the year. You are then tasked with four assignments. This was my first experience of this kind of education, and while enjoyable and enlightening, with individual feedback on assignments coming from Dr Kingsbury, I do begin to understand some of the reservations our boys express about online teaching. It is a curiously joyless affair, yet under current circumstances also a much appreciated chance to widen horizons and step beyond your own environment.
Homework completed, I returned to the crazy sun and rain-fuelled explosion of growth outside. That green: it is that time of year, when the verdancy appears almost alive in its own right, from the lime tree shivering with new leaves to the perfect structures of the perennials’ foliage. The chlorophyll pulsates; everywhere there is life. I wonder sometimes if May is so captivating because it takes us back to childhood, and that feeling that perhaps something magical is happening in the garden, because why wouldn’t you believe in magic when plants appear to grow before your eyes and immense trees transform from stern skeletons to soft-leaved friends overnight? That sense of carelessness, and freedom, encapsulated in all those memories of lying on the grass under a tree and observing the clouds, or even better, being up the tree and invisible thanks to all those fresh new leaves.
More earthly, and earthy matters concern me now however, in order to complete the mulching while the ground is both warm and thoroughly drenched. The mineralised straw also covers up the mess I have made accommodating twenty-odd dahlias, which took advantage of the heat in their temporary conservatory accommodation and shot up, almost too fast for this early in the year. A stint outside reined them back in, and suitably hardened off, each one is now planted , and staked for support. They will flower from June to November, frosts allowing, and require only an occasional top up of food to do that. As last year’s new beds mature and fill out, any seasonal planting like this becomes a pastiche of an abstract ballet, as I twist and bend my way through and around the existing greenery to plant into gaps, trying desperately to avoid new growth, seedlings, bulbs which are yet to emerge and soft branches on young trees. And the alliums, elegant and immeasurably beautiful, but oh so very tall and snappable if you lose your footing while wending through the beds. No casualties so far, but it can only be a a matter of time.
Less dramatic but just as lovely are the shade lovers who are thriving in the rainy warmth at the east facing front of the house. Strawberries and alchemilla wander along the front of a low wall, and ferns and sweet woodruff fill out the least sunny corner near the porch. Yet again, I mentally thank the busy population of hedgehogs and toads whose appetite for slugs mean that hostas grow here untroubled by their usual enemies.
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