Last day of the merry month of May. Saturday 31st May, 2014 Last Monday morning I watched the great tit parents flying to and fro - frantically delivering small caterpillars to their brood in the nest box. Then I settled down at the far end of the living room to write about the week's events in the garden for the blog.
After finishing the post and clicking on "publish", I went to the window to check on them again and all the frenzied feeding had ceased. The birds had all gone. It was rather ironic that I was busy writing about how I hoped to see the babies launch themselves into the big wide world - at the exact time that they were busy leaving. It was disappointing to miss the excitement yet again, but I am glad that we no longer have to worry about predatory cats. Tim took the box down and removed the old nest. He will clean it and put it up again at the end of autumn. Sometimes the small birds use nest boxes for shelter during the cold winter nights. I took a photo of the discarded bedding . . .
. . . and then left the nest outside the kitchen under the bird feeder. I didn't want to bring it into the house. Years ago Tim brought in some old nest boxes which needed to be repaired and we found they were infested with fleas. Later we drove out to the Balladoole civic amenity site with garden refuse for recycling. The "green waste" is taken away and turned into compost - so I don't have to feel guilty about being too lazy to make my own compost. I was amused when we got home and I saw a little blue tit doing her own recycling. She was pulling carefully selected bits out of the old nest and flew off with her beak full of building supplies. It seems rather late for her to be starting on nest building. I wonder whether she is planning to have a second brood.
On damp mornings I have been wandering around the garden with a pair of sharp scissors hunting massive slugs. It is rather pointless because there must be another hundred lurking in the undergrowth for every one that I murder - but I am still in a bad mood about the red hot poker buds that are being destroyed before the flowers even have a chance to open. I admit that I am a hypocrite. I should treat all fauna with equal respect - not favour the cute furry and feathery things - but I will never be able to force myself to love slugs. I don't like to use poisons so I am following the advice (or rather the orders) of the Queen of Hearts and wandering around muttering "Off with their heads!" While I was checking that quote I came across a couple of other amusing quotes from Lewis Carroll which are rather apt for my approach to gardening.“She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)” and “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” I don't think I will ever "run" fast enough to catch up with everything that needs to be done in the garden. (Disclaimer: As they are taken from the internet those quotes may be a disneyfied version and not from the original text. Apologies may be due.) The hawthorn flowers have already lost their sparkle and are fading fast - appropriate really because it is the end of May. Hawthorn is sometimes called the May tree and I have read that it is the only British plant to be named after the month in which it flowers. I took a larger than life size photo of some of the first flowers to open in the garden on the 15th of May.
I find the scent of the hawthorn flowers rather oppressive. It seems to appeal to some people more than others. A neighbour told me that she likes the scent because it reminds her of her childhood when it signalled the approach of summer and the long school holidays. Apparently the scent is a mixture of sweet perfume to attract bees and an underlying odour similar to decaying flesh which attracts flies. The trees certainly are successful in attracting pollinators because they produce good crops of berries for the blackbirds.
The wild flowers of high summer - the foxgloves - are just starting to open. Tim thinks we have too many foxgloves he is right. They do self-seed wildly. Their seeds are tiny and there are vast numbers of them in seed cases all the way up the stem. By the time the last flowers at the top of the spike have opened - the seeds at the bottom have already ripened. The bumble-bees love them and I hate cutting back flowers while they are still being visited by the bees - so I usually leave them too long and end up spilling seed when I cut back the old flower spikes. They come up all over the garden. I deliberately left a lot of seedlings in the bed in front of the hawthorns after Tim built a low wooden retaining wall behind the bed a couple of years ago. That area dries out fast in summer and I needed something tough there. Foxgloves are biennials and those plants will all flower this summer. When they finish flowering, I will pull them out and replace them with something else that enjoys well-drained soil.
Another summer flower is the ox-eye daisy. I was given a few plants by a neighbour when we were living in a rented house in Ramsey and I brought them with me to the glen. They have been coming up in various parts of the garden ever since but are not as invasive as some of the other self-seeders. They are fairly tall and tend to flop over. Before mowing last Monday, I cut back a stem which had fallen across the lawn, rescued a flower and a bud, and put them in a small vase on the kitchen windowsill. They have lasted well and would make good cut flowers - but I prefer to see flowers in the garden.
For years I had a rather miserable sage plant in the shady front garden because I avoided planting culinary herbs in the back garden where the Schipperkes ran free and the boys lifted their legs against every convenient plant. Eventually the old plant blew over and I took cuttings from the remains and stuck them in the sunnier raised bed behind the kitchen. They were delighted and have grown so enthusiastically that they will have to be cut back - but I am waiting until the flowers fade.
Near the sage is a small clump of Snow-in-summer Cerastium tomentosum. It grows wild in SE Europe and is a popular rockery plant. I also have some growing at the side of the garage but it doesn't get enough sun to flower well. It likes to grow "in dry, sunny areas with poor soil" - so it might be a suitable replacement for some of the foxgloves.
I am rather embarrassed to admit that there is one more rhododendron in the garden - Rhododendron ponticum. This variety is frowned upon because it is one of the foreign plants that has escaped into the wild and become a pest. I don't think it is a problem on the Island although there are some old bushes next to the lower paths in the older section of Skyhill plantation. I haven't seen any seedlings amongst the trees near our garden - so I don't think our single plant behind the hawthorns poses a threat to the local environment. When we moved here, there was a huge specimen, the size of a small tree in the garden. Tim dug it out (with difficulty) when he built terraces at the south end of the house. Later I noticed the seedling and decided to keep it. Perhaps I made a mistake.
On Friday morning, after writing the previous paragraph, I did a bit of scary research on the internet and was nearly intimidated into going straight out into the garden to cut down the offending plant. But I decided to do the shopping in Ramsey first. I stopped on the glen road near Milntown (a local sort-of-stately home) to take a photo of the lovely laburnum.
Through the slats of the fence I could see a variety of different coloured azaleas and rhododendrons - and some of them looked exactly like my despised R. ponticum. Then I saw more specimens in every second garden as I drove down Lezayre Road. Driving back up the glen on my way home I could even glimpse the patches of mauve flowers along the edge of Skyhill plantation. They seemed to be more or less equally spaced, so I think they must have been deliberately planted. I calmed down and decided that my little plant, which was just one of many in the area, was unlikely to have any significant ecological impact. So it got a reprieve. We walked up the forestry path behind the house after I had unpacked the shopping and I took a photo across the Ballagarrow fields to the lower slopes of Skyhill.
I haven't seen the baby great tits yet but we have heard them - up in the trees in the next door garden. They chase their unfortunate parents around for a few weeks after leaving the nest - demanding food with continuous high-pitched shrieks.
The butterflies are still few and far between. The only ones prepared to pose for photographs are the little green veined whites.
Usually the birds distribute seed from our own shrubs and trees into various parts of the garden but occasionally they bring me a gift from a neighbouring garden. Some are not welcome - like the Himalayan honeysuckle (aka Pheasant berry) Leycesteria Formosa which is pretty but rather invasive. But I was very happy when I discovered a Japanese wineberry seedling (Rubus phoenicolasius) some years ago. A bird must have "deposited" a seed from a garden across the road. It is an attractive plant and is promising to get a small amount of fruit this summer.
While prowling around with the camera looking for an interesting flower to photograph, I found this white iris. I bought the rhizomes years ago and they haven't flourished - but every time that I think they have all died up pops a beautiful flower.
The oriental poppies have done well this year. Every time they are knocked around by the wind or weighed down by rain and look as though they are going to disintegrate into piles of soggy crepe paper . . . another batch of buds open!
I drove to Ramsey early this morning because the TT races start today and the roads close at ten o'clock. I stopped on the glen road to take another photo. Not the laburnum this time, just some "weeds". There was a pretty patch of cow parsley (aka Queen Anne's lace) Anthriscus sylvestris growing by the road. I have had a few plants coming up amongst the poppies and various wild flowers under the beech tree in previous years but haven't seen any in the garden this summer.
Ramsey has changed its character since yesterday. It is usually very quiet before nine in the morning but today there were queues at all the tills in the supermarket and at least half of the shoppers were wearing leathers. There were almost as many motorbikes as cars in the parking areas. I was hoping to get a photo of the crowds gathering in Parliament Square to watch the races but it was two hours before the first race was due to start and the fans were still riding around the circuit. I took this photo of a group of fans on their bikes turning into Parliament Square from Lezayre Road.
PS Parliament Square is not square and there has never been a parliament in Ramsey - but it is near the town hall. Perhaps that counts as a parliament.
Too many azaleas? Monday 26th May, 2014 Good news on the lawn mowing front. Google found an internet company called Mower Magic for me. I checked and found that they stocked the lawnmower that I wanted and they delivered to the Island. I ordered the machine on Monday and it arrived - all the way from Lincoln to our front door - by Friday. All I had to do was type in a few things on the computer. I prefer to support local business by shopping locally whenever possible but not everything is available in Ramsey . . . and internet shopping really is rather like magic. The azaleas and rhododendrons are continuing to come into bloom. There are two old rhododendrons down by the gate that have had difficult lives .
The crimson one was growing in a very dry spot near a large Lawson's cypress up by the house when we moved here. After we got permission to cut down another cypress near the road, we moved the rhododenron to its new home - with great difficulty! It was too heavy to carry but we managed to drag it down on a tarpaulin and drop it in the hole. It is much happier in the damper position but the old leaves are looking a bit anaemic and spotty after the wet winter. Luckily the new leaf shoots look healthy and the flowers are as lovely as ever.
Nearby is another old rhododendron. It was rather straggly and top heavy and blew over during the winter gales - pulling some of its roots out of the wet ground. It also has lovely flowers so we did our best to save it. I sawed off all the heavy branches and just left some lighter growth near the base of the trunks. Then we pushed it back into an upright position, tied it up to a stake and weighed down the roots with some heavy stones. It has survived (so far . . . fingers crossed) and has even flowered.
This little azalea is new. The label just said Azalea japonica pink. We bought it at the end of last summer - to plant on Leo's grave.
The wisteria is looking better every week. My only regret is that it gets rather leafy before the flowers are at their very best. I try to cut back the leaf shoots that really do "shoot" out - but they grow so fast that it is hard to keep up.
I hope we get out on some short walks soon because it is going to become increasingly difficult to find new flowers to photograph in the garden as we move into summer. But there will still be plenty of work to do. The foliage has already died back on the early bulbs like the snowdrops and daffodils - so I need to weed the beds now that I can walk on them without crushing the leaves. I still haven't finished trimming the hedge down by the road. I have been "pruning" it with secateurs because the road is narrow and the hedge has grown out rather far and needs to be cut back fairly severely. The hedge trimmer is quick but works best when the hedge doesn't need a very close shave. And, of course, there is the never-ending mowing and edging of the lawns. I was going to try out the new mower this morning but it was raining hard at about six o'clock. Perhaps the grass will dry out enough by this afternoon.
I have seen more signs of activity in the bird box. Yesterday - while the parents were out foraging for caterpillars - I caught a glimpse of a little baby face looking out of the hole and this morning I saw a tail. I am watching carefully - partly because Tim has twice seen one of the neighbours' cats tightrope walking along the top of our wooden fence in the direction of the nestbox. And partly because I would love to see the babies leave the box. In all the years that they have used the box, we have only once seen the great tit babies take their first flight into the unknown.
I love white flowers and always used to marvel at the way a patch of perennial candytuft lit up the front garden on a dull morning. I nearly lost the plant - due to neglect. I didn't clip it back after it flowered for years and finally it got so choked up that it lost the will to live. When I cleared the bed, I found that a few sprigs had survived. I mulched around them with leafmould and now the candytuft is beginning to spread again.
But it is upstaged by the white saxifrage on either side of the steps which is spreading rather aggressively. It looks rather like mossy saxifrage "Saxifrage hypnoides", a wild flower, but is probably a garden hybrid. I dug out a huge patch last year and gave some to friends but it hasn't been deterred.
I waded through some wet plants to take a photo of yet another azalea down on the bottom terrace of the garden (often referred to rather pretentiously as "the shrubbery") . . .
. . . and stopped to take a photo of the rain drops on the new foliage of the lady's mantle "alchemilla mollis" below the retaining wall. The RHS site says that these plants are "Prone to self-seeding" and they are not kidding.
Lady's mantle is a wild flower which has been adopted as a garden plant. The centranthus ruber (commonly known as red valerian even though it is not a valerian) has moved in the other direction from our gardens into the wild. It grows wild in the Mediterranean countries and was brought to Britain as a garden plant but has escaped. It is also prone to self-seeding and can be a nuisance - but the butterlies love the nectar so I keep more than I need. The first flowers are just starting to open. There are three colours . . . pink, white and this one which is almost red.
Two of Tim's favourite plants in the garden are ones which he bought. One is a skimmia japonica "rubella". It has panicles of red buds which open into small starry white flowers in April and attracts a lot of bees. The other was a present for me. It came home from the garden centre in Tynwald Mills in a little pot. We thought it was a shrub but now it is as tall as the double storey house next door! It is a Crinodendron hookerianum - a Chilean lantern tree. This photo was taken from the patio above the garage . . .
. . . and this is a close-up of the flowers.
While I was up on the patio I noticed yet another azalea in flower at the side of the house. It is deciduous and may be a type of azalea mollis. The bush used to be a combination of two plants - half yellow and half orange but the orange half died.
The oriental poppies have been knocked about by the wind and weighed down by their wet petals - and have turned into the usual mess of poppies.
And finally, proof that procrastination pays off in the end! I wanted to screen the wheelie bins down by the gate but couldn't decide how to do it. The ground is very hard under the trees, full of roots and not ideal for planting a short hedge or digging holes for fence posts. But a few years ago some seedlings came up. They look rather like wild broom but may be seed from a garden variety that has reverted to an earlier form. They are rather straggly and not dense enough to be a really effective screen but I am happy - and they should be happier now that one of the beeches has been cut down and they are getting some morning sun.
Late Spring/Early Summer Monday 19th May, 2014 No garden projects during the past week - just a lot of medical appointments, a quick trip to the Curraghs and a fair amount of weeding and mowing. I woke early this morning - well before five and it was already light although there is still another month until the longest day. I got up just before five and took a photo of the morning sky. It was lovely outside. There was just a gentle breeze, the air was scented by the clematis and the wood pigeons were cooing.
I don't know what is going on with the nesting wood pigeons. I didn't see them flying into the conifer for days and thought their babies must have fledged - but recently the adults have been back again. I wonder whether they are thinking about a second brood already. They just seem to be visiting the nest occasionally at present and sometimes one perches on the power line nearby.
It is still all go in the tit box. When I got up this morning the parents were already flying in and out with tiny caterpillars for their brood - and they will keep on working until the light fades this evening.
A week ago I received a message from Dorothy - "Just been to the Curraghs and saw some bogbean". I was excited because I have never been to the Curraghs at the right time to see a bogbean flower. We couldn't fit in a trip until Friday and it wasn't entirely successful - but I did see a few flowers as well as masses of orange tip butterflies. They seem to be having a good year as I have even seen a couple in the garden. The drive to the Curraghs was rather hair-raising as the only route is along a narrow back road which is actually more pothole than road and, to add to the excitement, there are deep ditches on either side of the road in places. But back to the bogbeans . . . we parked near the grassy path into the Curraghs but there wasn't a single bogbean flower in sight from the path. So I walked a few yards along the road to the beginning of the boardwalk. It is a lot drier than it was in February and the new fronds on the Royal ferns are already almost shoulder height.
Eventually, I found a bogbean flower which was close enough to the path to photograph without getting my feet wet. It was slightly past its best - the lower blossoms on the flower spike had already shrivelled. I only found two more. Tim was waiting in the car so I didn't want to spend too long searching.
Sadly, the bluebells are nearly over for the year but I took a last set of photos about a week ago. I have trouble getting the right shade of blue as blue flowers often look too close to the green end of the blue spectrum in photographs but these bluebells in the late afternoon sun are just about right.
I wondered whether the same light conditions would work with the intense blue of the tiny germander speedwell flowers (Veronica chamaedrys) - but they still look a bit too anaemic.
Germander speedwell is related to a very pretty pale mauve spiked veronica which was given to me by a friend. It isn't native to Britain. If I have identified it right, it is Veronica gentianoides, a wild flower from the middle east.
The garden flowers seem to be taking over from the wild plants now - but the hawthorns are looking pretty. We have a group of in the back garden. Two are covered with blossom but the other poor tree is almost smothered by a wild rose which should be flowering in a few weeks.
The first bud on the climbing rose by the summerhouse opened last week. I love the perfect little miniature blooms on the Cécile Brunner- partly because they remind me of happy holidays on my aunt's farm. She used to make Victorian posies with the little roses and sweetly scented violets.
Last week's mowing marked the sad demise of my trusty Flymo. It just refused to start again after a brief stop when I was half way through mowing the back lawn. Tim says it is only good for the scrap heap - so I finished the back with my little reserve mower. The little mower cuts well but it is really meant to be used on a smaller lawn so I will have to get a new mower. It isn't easy because I want an electric mower without a grass catcher and a lot of the internet garden equipment suppliers don't deliver to the Island. At least I don't have to avoid stepping on the occasional "dog mess" when I am mowing the back lawn now - but I still have to concentrate. We have a lot of bumblebees in the garden and they sometimes enjoy a stroll on the grass. They can get quite cross when I rescue them from the mower.
The shrubs are all doing well this year. In fact everything seems to be thriving after the mild winter. Near the drive we have an old lilac - not a lilac lilac but an almost wine red lilac!
And near it is a rather pretty weigela. I don't know its name. I grew it from a cutting from an old plant which was already in the garden.
And almost last but not least (as they say), the apricot azalea mollis glowing in the early morning sun.
But the big news is that it must be almost summer because the first oriental poppy opened three days ago!
The next morning there were five flowers and today I have given up counting.
And there is more pleasure to come. The wisteria flowers are starting to open.
How not to create a perfect garden. Monday 12th May 2014. If you have read the previous two posts you will know that this is not a "how to create a perfect garden like mine" blog. I cannot understand people who write self-help books. How can anyone be so arrogant that they think they are qualified to tell everyone else how to live their lives? Maybe I am wrong. Perhaps they not arrogant . . . just greedy and the books are a cynical way of ripping off the gullible. Anyway, back to my "how not to create a perfect garden" blog. I do have some advice - about what not to do. 1. Don't waste valuable gardening time trying to photograph wood pigeons with a nest in a neighbouring garden. The parent birds kept landing near the top of the dense conifer in the centre of the photo and disappearing into the heart of the tree - obviously feeding babies.
I kept grabbing my camera but never managed to focus and press the shutter in time. I tried leaning out of the window with the camera, ready focused and pointed at the right spot, until my arms ached but the birds never appeared until I had given up. I haven't seen them for a couple of days now so the babies must have left the nest already. 2. Don't waste even more valuable gardening time searching for wellies that are not lost. There used to be three pairs of wellies that lived in the conservatory, two pairs of mine and one of Tim's. On Friday there were only two pairs. We assumed (wrongly) that the green pair belonged to Tim and my green ones had been mislaid. I spent hours searching for the missing wellies before the penny dropped and I realised that both pairs were mine. I vaguely remembered Tim complaining last autumn that his wellies leaked. We decided that he must have put them out with the rubbish, intending to buy a new pair, and then forgotten. Of course, the day after we stopped looking for them he found his wellies in the boot of the blue Golf. 3. Don't get side-tracked by clearing a path around a fallen tree in a neighbouring plantation. A huge dead sycamore, on the boundary between the plantation and our neighbour's garden, fell during the winter gales and blocked our favourite path up to the track to the top of Skyhill. It fell across the bed of a little stream which is dry for most of the year but can come gushing down after a heavy rainfall in winter. Tim likes to keep the stream clear of fallen branches and leaves because it became blocked once in the past and the water was diverted down our bank behind the summerhouse. In March some men from the forestry department came to work on the tree. They sliced up two of the main trunks and all the smaller branches and most of the ivy but must have decided that it would be impossible to cut up the last trunk without dropping the huge stump into the stream. So our path was still blocked.
We couldn't get under or over the remaining trunk so I spent a whole afternoon moving all the debris which was piled up around the end of the trunk and cleared a path so that we could walk up that way again.
I haven't trimmed the side of the hedge by the road yet, but I did manage to complete my "Project number 2". The dog path is no more.
When I removed the paving slabs, I felt some slightly absurd pangs of guilt about destroying a memory of our dearly departed little Schipperke family but comforted myself by thoughts that the whole garden is full of memories. For instance, there is the kniphofia (red hot poker) that I bought as a joke Mothers Day present for Alice from her sons. Tim's sister had sent us a beautiful calendar with photos of South African flowers and one month featured a picture of kniphofia with a caption explaining that they were often planted around the traditional homes in Lesotho because the local people thought they would protect their houses from lightning. Alice was terrified of thunderstorms. She tried to dig a hole in the carpet under a chair in our bedroom in a vain attempt to hide whenever there was even the slightest rumble of thunder. Unfortunately her fears didn't diminish after we bought the plant.
So far this year the plant has only managed to produce that one flower. I had a close look because I remembered seeing a second flower shoot. It was lying on the ground - probably chewed off by a slug. There were other stems that looked as though they had suffered the same fate. I don't think our damp, slug-infested garden is suitable for these heat loving African plants. Maybe I should just grow weeds. I was weeding out most of the Herb-Robert (Geranium robertianum) until I noticed its name on the RHS perfect for pollinators wildflower list. Now it has been given a reprieve. The tiny pink flowers are pretty but the leaves have an unpleasant odour when crushed. In some areas it is called Stinking Bob.
A relative of Herb-Robert is the perennial geranium "Johnson's Blue". I bought a plant a few years ago mainly because it looked rather like a more colourful version of the wild meadow crane's-bill. It flowers in summer but the first bud has just opened.
I also bought a packet of Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs (Ornithogalum umbellatum) ages ago and planted them under the beech tree near the house. Only one survived and I didn't see it last year so I was delighted when I found it yesterday. I was trying to get in a good position to photograph a white bluebell and nearly trod on the little plant.
I have been trying to get a good photo of the pignut flowers (Conopodium majus). They are the daintiest of the white umbellifers and in my opinion the prettiest. This is my best effort so far.
I was reading about the common names of the aquilegea vulgaris while preparing the last post on the blog and found out the significance of the name columbine (columba = dove). The spurs above the drooping petals are said to look rather like five doves sitting around a feeder.
The clematis montana rubens is looking good still - above a bed filled with a froth of London Pride mixed with oriental poppy buds waiting to burst open.
The first bud to show colour.
The earlier azaleas and rhododendrons are providing a lot of colour. I don't know their names. Some were here when we bought the property and this one was an impulse item when we were filling the car with petrol years ago. We just refer to it as the "Laxey Garage rhododendron". The buds are pink but turn cream when the flowers open.
And finally, you can't overlook this little azalea. If there was an award for brightness it would win.
