Cold garden

More thinking and looking - and not enough gardening.

Saturday 2nd May, 2015

One of the benefits of blogging is that it makes me more observant.  I wander around with a camera and see things that I wouldn’t normally notice and the camera captures the image.  I also spend a lot of time thinking about the things that I see . . . but my thoughts tend to be more elusive.  One of our teachers at school used to say that information went in one of our ears and out the other and my thoughts still behave in the same way.  I would need a mental butterfly net to capture them all for the blog because most of them vanish into thin air  . . . just as well really!

Sunday was sunny with bright blue skies but a chill in the air again.  Some of the plants seem to be confused by the weather.  I thought there were only going to be a handful of flowers on the azalea mollis this year  but the flowers which are opening now are just a small first flush - there are still plenty of flower buds which are nowhere near opening.  

And I saw one bud on an oriental poppy by the front steps which is already showing colour.  The other buds are still quite small.  This bud is beating the first one from 2014 by two weeks.

After visiting the Co-op to get the Sunday newspaper, we walked down to visit the swans.  It was low tide so they were all down near the market square and the harbour entrance.  Their usual haunt in the old harbour area was just exposed mud.  Conditions weren’t ideal for feeding them because the stiff breeze blew the bread back onto the pavement when Tim tried to throw it into the water.  Then the breeze caught the packet of bread and turned it upside down - depositing all the contents onto the pavement.  The swans loss was the herring gulls gain.  They cleaned up the unexpected bonanza in less than half a minute.

I was still thinking about the changes to the old harbour mouth that I wrote about last week.  The Market Square, in front of St Paul’s church, used to be part of the “old lake” before it was filled in.  It is said that the water was six feet deep at high tide.   When the church was completed in 1822 there was a landing place in front of the church.  Constance Radcliffe wrote “This ceased to exist when the Market Place was filled in from 1835, but its comparatively short period of use was long remembered in stories of how ships used to moor immediately in front of St Paul’s.”   Now the square is used as a car park.  I doubt whether anyone will feel nostalgic about it in future.

On our way back to the car we passed the statue representing two of our our early Viking kings -  Godred Crovan (King Orry) and his son Olaf playing chess - under a flowering cherry tree outside the Old Courthouse.

Everything changes so fast at this time of year that it is easy to miss things even if you are trying to be observant.  I wasn’t aware of the new leaves opening on the hawthorns and suddenly they were green.

When we got up on Monday morning the temperature had dropped to zero.  The day alternated between sunny spells and showers.  I tried to remain optimistic and told myself that one good thing about a cold spell is that it should slow down the growth of the weeds and grass so I can spend more time on my pet projects like the redevelopment of the sandpit.  I am already planning the planting but haven’t even finished digging out the stones yet. . .  or started on the fence.

Tuesday was sunny most of the time but the warmth of the sun was no match for the stiff breeze that was bitterly cold and felt as though it was coming directly from the Arctic.  The rest of the week has remained too cold for comfortable gardening except in sunny, sheltered corners of the garden.  So work has almost ground to a halt this week apart from an afternoon devoted to mowing.  I did achieve a bit of weeding, some more work on the sandpit and the inevitable edging.   It is annoying that grass grows so much more vigorously at the edges of the lawns. Edging is worse than painting the Sydney bridge - I need to start again before I have even finished.

I didn’t pick a good year for my daffodil recording project.  For some reason the flowers were more sparse than usual and some varieties didn’t flower at all.  The clumps may be too congested but I think I will put off dividing them for another year in case they are just “resting”.  To add to the problem I got confused about some of the flowers.  The colours seemed to fade as the flowers aged and I couldn’t be sure whether some of the paler ones were a different variety or just older flowers.  Here is a collage of some of the better photos.

I prowled around with my camera on Tuesday and managed to get a good photo of a bumblebee enjoying the bugle flowers on the wildflower bank.

The cold weather seems to deter the butterflies and I only saw one all week.  It was a green veined white and flitted around the back garden on Wednesday morning, visiting a series of wild violets.

While I was chasing the butterfly I noticed that the first bluebell had opened . . .

. . . and that the buds on the apple tree were on the verge of opening.

A few days ago I picked up these oak galls.  They had fallen onto the path at the top of the garden from an overhanging oak branch.  I had always assumed that they were oak apples but after checking on the net, I am not sure.  They look more like a different type of wasp gall - oak marbles, also known as oak nuts (the galls formed by another tiny gall wasp, Andricus kollari).

There have been two mysteries that have been haunting me and I think I may have the answers.  The first concerned an oak seedling which was growing in the back garden.  It wasn’t in a place where an acorn from one of the oaks in the plantation could have landed.  Then it occurred to me that Alexander, the smallest of our Schipperke boys, used to collect toys - like feathers and small stones - and carry them around with him.  Anything small and plastic and left lying around by visiting grandchildren was also considered fair game.  So it is quite possible that he picked up an acorn and carried it around the garden before accidentally planting it near the big white buddleia.  Tim dug out the little oak tree and planted it in a more appropriate place near one of the streams in the plantation.

The other mystery was the identity of a small evergreen tree near a path in the plantation.  I picked a sprig a few years ago in an attempt to identify it and took occasional photos of the tree but it didn’t seem to have any special features - just ordinary leaves and small clusters of insignificant white flowers.  I put the sprig in a glass of water and it decided to grow so I moved it to a pot of compost.  It is doing well and the colour of the new shoots makes me think that it could be a type of photinia.

Another plant with colourful new shoots is the pieris.  Unfortunately it didn’t enjoy the frost at the beginning of the week.  The before and after photos show that only a few of the more sheltered shoots survived.

Our feathered friends have also been feeling the cold.  The early birds at the feeder have their feathers so fluffed out that they look as though they are wearing puffa jackets.

But even if it is on the chilly side, the garden is a riot of colour.  The view from the kitchen window is a combination of gold and various shades of green . . .

. . . . and the front garden is dominated by the pink and white of the flowering cherry blossom . . . .

. . .  with the early morning sky joining in the colour scheme.