Last week was the coldest I have experienced here. Overnight temperatures were down to -7, and the needle did not rise above zero in daytime with windchill making it feel much colder. Bitter easterly winds scoured the landscape, although we were not blanketed in snow like Kent and East Anglia. It was that kind of cold which makes your face ache when you step outside, and our increasingly frequent trips outside to replenish the bird feeders became awkward, fumbling races to manage food, feeders, gloves, and the critical anti-squirrel locating. Our efforts were repaid many times over: our greater spotted woodpeckers arrived several times a day, chaffinches turned up in greater numbers than I have seen before, and up to eight long tailed tits at a time could be seen dangling off the kitchen feeder. One day I managed to spot the marsh tit (we think it’s a marsh tit, but could be a willow tit - either would be very exciting given rarity, and who we feared we had evicted when the old pool house was demolished last year) coming right up close to the kitchen door to collect tiny crumbs of suet. Thankfully the squirrels do not dare come to the kitchen feeders, though they launch regular raids on those hanging in the sorbus tree on the lawn, prompting me to move the feeders onto smaller and whippier branches each time. I laugh at their acrobatics but I do loathe them for the quantities of eggs and baby birds they devour every year. If they looked more like rats people would launch outraged campaigns to control them, but instead they are enshrined in popular culture as the cheeky raiders of feeding tables up and down the country. Fluffy tails can get you a long way.
There was little I could do in the garden until the mercury rose, so I retreated to the wood and worked on the corner of a section cleared by our elder son last year as his lockdown project. There was a tangle of young holly saplings shooting up under their parents, mixed in with a few stray laurels which had escaped his saw, all netted over with brambles which were already putting on new growth. A couple of hours clearing brought light and space, and chance for swathes of etiolated bluebell shoots under the debris to come to full growth.
The mature hollies stay: they are attractive trees and covered in berries each autumn for the birds; we also always keep fallen deadwood to feed and shelter the multitude of less visible life at and below ground level. The brambles which are in the wood hardly fruit, possibly for lack of sunlight; there are also no rowans, no blackthorn and very few hawthorns, all of which make good mid-level wildlife support trees with their blossom and fruit. For me they also evoke memories of childhood, from the ever popular blackberrying walks, to the more esoteric, when my mum would screech to a halt in a narrow country lane and order us out of the car with bags, hats, any receptacle to hand to pick as many rowan berries as we possibly could. After what felt like days of cleaning, picking over, simmering, mushing, straining through muslin (the jelly stand would invariably get knocked over by careering dogs) two or three tiny pots of jewel coloured jelly would be proudly presented to accompany the next roast. Personally, I always preferred crab apple jelly but after the effort exerted on the rowan, never dared say that. Sloes from the blackthorn hedges in our fields were Dad’s area, and I would dread the day when he would cheerily announce that it was time to pick if we wanted to have sloe gin at Christmas. Our hedges were not neat cut and laid lines - the blackthorns rose over 2 metres, and were skirted by brambles, which made the whole endeavour even more perilous. Be thankful if you have never encountered blackthorn: long, hard thorns almost concealed by their closely clumped leaves, creating snares of steel around the blue black fruits. A blackthorn wound will lame human or animal for weeks, yet steeped in sugar and alcohol, a sloe gin is a one of the British winter’s great treats, and so we persisted, up and down the hedges, Dad cursing when he was caught on a thorn, me distracted by the dogs hoovering up late blackberries from the lower levels. In spring, however, you can forgive the blackthorn anything, as they are often the first hedgerow or woodland edge trees to blossom, a tide of white rippling across the country side. My favourite of all the semi-woodland natives remains the hawthorn: the green of its new leaves in early spring is like no other, and its frothy white blossom is another icing sugar veil over country fields and lanes. It was also the focus of my mother’s indefatigable foraging, but even she struggled to convince us that freshly picked young hawthorn leaves (more thorns, more pain) lived up to their old country name of “bread and cheese”.
This week brought an abrupt return to mild, wet days and occasional downpours. The ground is sodden - torrential rain on top of thawing clay means the rivulet in the wood is a metre wide channel, and some of the beds on the lower levels are squelching. My first big job is weeding the terrace beds, and when that is done, moving some plants around, planting in a few new orders, and then applying a mulch to condition the soil and suppress new weeds. Some of last year’s initial planting has not worked out, whether because it was so hot and dry when they were first put in last May, or because they just do not like the particular conditions or location I have given them, but in effect it means I lost some of my choices for height on both sides of the steps. Without permanent structure like this, the flowering plants have to do all the work, plus the design is just less interesting because you are looking at one level of growth rather than a range of ups and downs (and that applies even to steep inclines like this). So, out go the dogwoods and the moribund magnolia, and in come some tough specimens like viburnum davidii , buddleia “Empire Blue”, caryopteris “Dark Knight” and some hebes which claim to be hardier than most of their New Zealand kin. More dahlias may also have fallen into my online shopping trolley in the interest of balancing out too many pinks and red-black varieties last year.
The snowdrops are out, and crocus, daffodil and narcissus bulbs are all on their way, but it is that time of year when there is an awful lot of brown around. Part of this is old seedheads, which I will hang onto for a while longer having watched three goldfinches feeding on the old verbena heads last week, and also having discovered any number of ladybirds hibernating in amongst the dry stems. Part is also down simply to last week’s freeze - two climbing roses in the lower, more shaded area near the potting shed are sere (marvellous old English word meaning dry, withered - I include this as our younger son asked its meaning - or justifiably has little faith in my typing) and drooping.
Part also is the grass looking thatchy and dull. And part is just soil - those open spaces in the big beds which remind you of just how much growth will take place soon, to the point where you barely see the earth. And the see-sawing between freezing and mild (per my last post) is part of the meteorological gamble of late winter - for all the brown tips and damaged buds, I can also see new shoots emerging on the perennials like cardoon, artemisia, alchemilla and geraniums. Let’s hope March is kind.
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