Back to Herefordshire after a few weeks away back in the Gulf, and the lists of jobs are multiplying fast. There has been plenty of rain and it has been mild, so both flowers and vegetables have continued growing apace. The mangetouts that I threw in hurriedly in late August are now a metre tall and collapsing their hazel stick supports; green beans and the beautiful violet beans are hanging like bunches of grapes off the obelisks; beetroot are now more pickle them in vinegar tennis balls than delicate little roast them with fresh thyme and scatter goats’ cheese on them golfballs. The young apple trees appear happy in their new positions and roses, dahlias, lobelias and verbenas are all putting on new buds still. All of which makes a delightful picture, overlooking the accompanying and inevitable eruption of weeds on every centimetre of open ground. Hey ho. Other areas to work on first.
This time, my focus is less on the formal gardens around the house and more on the wilder areas, and the week began with our tree experts pitching up to engage with the tangled mess near the old pond at the front of the grounds. Trees love our sandy red clay, and wherever you look along the old garden edges you find a host of baby sycamores, ash, maple, elder etc springing up.
We love trees, very much, but some of these striplings have been left to grow up into hulking great trees next to our garage, and the overhead power cables, and one impressively persistent twin trunked sycamore was squeezing out the Scots pine that presides over the pond. The ash behind the garage had dieback and we were advised to take it out before it took itself and possibly garage and power out with it. A team of four men spent a day climbing, sawing and angling ropes to deal with them; it is always fascinating to watch experts at work, but especially as they worked up in the pine in order to fell and pull away two large trees without any collateral damage. We had agreed that they would log the wood, and chip the brash, so we have a satisfying heap of wood chip with which to leaven compost heaps or base layer paths in the wood, and several sizeable stacks of wood that can season outside before being split and stored under cover.
The light coming through into that area now is beautiful; it looks east towards our neighbour’s wood, and I am keen to create the visual link with that here, close to the house, then to be underlined by the native hedge which will run from this point up to our own wood. This old pond rises and falls with the seasons, and its surround is choked with ivy and dead wood, but it is a haven for the blackcaps and our populations of newts and frogs, so with a little care and some new planting of alder and willow it will be a bookend to the larger wildlife pond we have planned.
In the wood, the tree team moved on to haloing the yew tree, who was groaning under three false acacias which had come down across its crown, and one of the more evil of the huge laurels which had twisted hydra-like up and across its southern side. A more straightforward job for the team, but still deeply satisfying to see the results. I am always guilty of anthropomorphising trees (too much Tolkien at a young age) but I’m damned if they don’t breathe a sigh of relief and stretch out when suddenly they have space and light around them again. Read @peterwohlleben “The Secret Life of Trees” if you think I’m wrong.
The paths through the wood are now a tapestry of brown and gold, with the Norway maples adding a flamboyant dash of orange. All the clearing done this summer by our sons is paying dividends: the birches are surrounded by foxgloves and woundwort seedlings, and I added a further 150 wild garlic bulbs to Neil’s previous work. The sweet chestnuts which we didn’t even know we had is dropping plentiful mast on the ground (previously I assume it was caught in the web of laurel) and I have seen nut debris all across the garden. The brambles are starting also to move in to the central cleared areas, and obviously we have not yet mechanically removed laurel stumps,so there is a fair amount of regrowth on them, but still - progress, little by little. Brambles are highly desirable for their flowers and fruit, as well as providing shelter for small birds and rodents - but without any large herbivores (or indeed porcine omnivores) keeping them under control, they can take over completely, and then you have a woodland floor effectively carpeted with green barbed wire, which is not great for hunting owls. We have both written in previous posts about the elation and despondency when you take on land like this, that sense on some days that you will never achieve the goals you have planned, and then the other times when a patch of primrose seedlings where previously was dank undergrowth, or butterflies on woodland plants we did not even see a year ago makes you accept that you cannot do everything all at once, but that even a small step forward makes a difference. I reflect on this after planting the wild garlic, as the wrens scold me again for my temerity in entering their domain, and I walk back to the house with renewed optimism. That evening, there was scuffling outside the back door and our younger son discovered a hedgehog doing the nightly rounds. His first time ever seeing one of these most threatened of little creatures, and more than reward enough for a hard afternoon’s digging.
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