Race Against Spring

 Things are growing in my garden...

There is no big display of daffodils anywhere. Instead isolated clusters are scattered throughout the garden, so on a walk-through, you suddenly come across a splash of sunny yellow. 

A technicolour primrose path has sprouted under the pergola.

Anemones brave the detritus of the Wild Wood.

 

I believe this is a hellebore growing in the Emo Grove. 90% of the year, it's just spiky leaves lounging sulkily at ground-level, but for a few weeks in late winter, it makes a supreme effort and drags forth this weary dark red display.

The end of winter dormancy has caught me a little off-guard. Last year, it was colder for longer and a dry, frosty April thwarted the spring growth, so the garden didn't get going until May. This year, we've had a mild winter and a wet February. I might still be worrying about late frosts, but it seems the plants are prepared to risk it.

My time of poking around the landscaping is over! Spring is the best time to plant, to transplant, to prune and probably a hundred other verbs I haven't learned yet. It's also the time to make sure the weeds are cleared back so that the less aggressive plants have room to grow, and that's been my main focus over the past few weeks.

Last year, I didn't know what was and wasn't supposed to be growing in any one spot. Greatly intimidated by the whole process, I didn't tackle the weeds seriously until May. I made a fair bit of progress over the first half of summer, but then Trog got sick, and I spent most of August inside, cuddling my dying cat. By the time I got back to the garden, the flowerbeds had been overwhelmed.

This year, I can identify some of the things that are growing, but it's still mostly a process of: "This is growing all over the place, but I haven't seen That elsewhere, so let's clear This away from That."

At least I am armed with the knowledge of which plants have the most imperial mindset, laying claim to every bit of land they can get their roots into. I spent a fair bit of the winter pulling out grass, ivy and ferns from the borders. Now that spring is here, I'm also attempting to restrict the aquilegia and three cornered garlic to just one area of the garden.

Fortunately, aquilegia is very easy to identify: it sprouts as these purple rosettes, which unfurl into frilly green leaves. It's a really pretty plant at every stage... it's just not very good at sharing with its peers.

In this garden, weeding goes hand in hand with archaeology. February's discoveries: a double decker bus, a dinosaur and a dog.

It's been a lot of work, and I do worry that it's a lot of wasted effort, that everything will just regrow from the roots and sprouts that I missed. But there's some hope: the one thing that I did manage to keep on top of last year was the dry stone wall that is our boundary from the road. A year ago, it was covered in grass, and I spent hours teasing that grass out from the rambling roots of the other plants—then three months later, I was pulling out the root-network of the hawkweed that I had inadvertently allowed to spread.

Grass is still coming up all along the wall, but these isolated clumps are a fraction of what was there last year and I can see all the different alpine plants spreading out. (This time last year, I thought there were only two different species.) While all my flowerbeds look worse than they did a year ago, the dry stone wall looks better.

I've just got to repeat what I did with the wall on the front and rear lawn borders, on the Emo Grove, on the terrace, on the gravel paths, on... Maybe best not to get too carried away.

Unlike my fence panel which got carried away by Storm Eunice. (Appreciate that segue! How witty! How seamless!)

OK, so getting carried away is a stretch for what happened to the fence panel. A rotten support post broke, letting the panel blow into the border on its leeward side. 30 square feet of timber vs a buddleia and a honeysuckle? Flattened flora, right? Not in my border. The panel bounced off the shrubs and flopped forward onto the weedy hedge on that section of dry stone wall—which fortunately kept it from collapsing into the road.

The fence isn't capable of standing up to the Cornish winds on that exposed westward side and this would be the third time I've had to get it patched up since moving in. I'm better off spending my money on a stronger fence.

But if the fence is to be replaced, it'll have to be accessible along its full length. Even the rear third. The boundary to the Wild Wood...

 

The point of no return. This is where the fence disappears into the Wild Wood and beyond human intervention. I have three months to reclaim it. 

 

Technically, it's accessible from the road side, but I'm worried that if I leave it, the fencers will just bulldoze through our wood to make their job easier. I want it to be a recognisable patch of garden so they make the effort to leave it intact. I hate having to sacrifice the wild character or the overgrown patches that support the native environment, so this will be a balancing act. 

 

(Please note, although I keep referring to it as a wood, I don't have some immense plot of land. It's widest point is only a couple of metres. An utterly intractable couple of metres.)

I'm hesitant to start clearing it out just yet, because there may be wildlife using the undergrowth for winter hibernation, but I have made a start at reducing the holly and bay tree that dead-end the garden path. The holly in particular is at least three times the size it should be. 

 

Evergreens aren't supposed to be pruned until late spring, but I decided it was worth cutting away on one side and the top in order to let light through. This also meant I had a path through to beyond the holly.

For the first time since we moved in, I was able to look into the back corner of the garden. Behold:

 

Yes, predictably, it's just a tangle of overgrowth. There go my dreams of a monument to an ancient civilisation. There could at least have been a mystic oracle. Sigh.

I think the 'trees' there are actually buddleia, so they can be cut back readily enough and once I cut out the ferns and briars disputing the territory, perhaps I'll uncover some feature incorporated into the original layout. But that's going to be an expedition in itself. Wish me luck.

I'll leave you with the latest update to our ex-lawn section. I had got flower pots next to the temporary compost heap, but I figured that if the tulips were determined to naturalise, I might as well try putting them in the ground. I repurposed the edging that we dug up a few weeks ago, bought a bag of soil and, ta-da! A flowerbed! One too new to have weeds!

 

Joining the tulips are a rosemary plant and some poppies I'm trying to rescue from a too shady border. There are no guarantees any of them will survive the transition, but there's always plan B: Choose my favourite out of the weeds that inevitably invade.