GARDENING NEWS

There was a huge, sprawling, lopsided purple hebe, six or eight feet high, in the centre of this picture. I had looked at it for years, thinking, it spoils the sea view, then thinking, Fuck the seaview, no shortage of them, on an island,  but there is a shortage of hedges and so I left it.  This year, however, most of it was dead, so I have sawn it back to a couple of feet, it may come back but in the meantime the view of the sound, out towards the ocean, is nice.  We had some old friends, staying,  both widowed gardeners from suburbia.  I handed one of them an AEG reciprocating saw, it's for construction timbers, really, but it's very good on trees and hedges.  Here y'are, this is what you need, secateurs aren't any good for this job;  she got right into it.  It's not tools you need, on this scale, it's machinery. I don't know what's happened, maybe it's a matter of him having settled-in now but for a long time it was impossible to take a decent snap of the blog-dog.

Now it's not. He looks as though he belongs here, perhaps more a case that here belongs to him.  He's got everything he needs.

There has been unprecedented growth this year,  these whitebeam, knee-high when we came, seem to have put-on about thirty per cent,  the canopy is high yet the side branches race out, 

threatening to strangle one.

 

 The sycamore border, on the far side also seems to be twice what it was, as does the fennel.

Last year, we planted a thousand daffodils in the lower part of the meadow and hoped that they'll proliferate as have all the other clumps;  there were  a few score in the whole place when we came,  there are now thousands upon thousands, Life, tumbling over itself.  After the new ones  had bloomed we allowed the meadow grasses to grow, the flowers are gorgeous and who knows what's alive in there, feeding and fed-upon. We mowed paths through the meadow to give access to the sections which are daffied-up.

Visitors have commented on the profusion of bees and butterflies, and the   birds are thicker than ever. The nearest trees and hedges are some miles away and you can bet your arse that they will have been  cultivated by incomers. Arboriculture is frowned upon by locals, some locals, gets in the way of the tractors,  there shouldn't be trees in this lane, whined one local delivery driver, rip Hell out of the lorry, they will, just shouldn't be here, trees.  I wanted to grab him by the throat and say to him Do you know what trees do,  you fucking imbecile?  And anyway, I've driven seven-ton lorries round Birmingham where there is solid brick or concrete  an inch on either side of your mirrors, you'd shit yourself.  Instead, I asked him to show me the damage which my hedges and wee trees had caused to his HGV.  There wasn't any but he still went off muttering.  I recounted this to a nurse and she told me a tale of a younger woman she had known, who, in her twenties, when her mother was going into  hospital, had to be moved to another house because she was frightened by the trees,  a handful of scrawny, wizened old things about six feet high.  She couldn't see through them or around them and it frightened her; if my oil deliveryman has that condition he shouldn't be driving.  

 The willow aren't so good, too much dead, dry wood, they are thick with weeds and I haven't been well enough to clear them out, I have a big fuck-off petrol strimmer-brushcutter but not the strength in my neck and shoulders to pull the wretched starter cord.   I hate those fucking things, neuro-surgery due in ten days, hope that works.

 Despite the odd growing season, I think these firs have to go, although mrs ishmael resists the removal of anything, dead or alive,  there's growth at the top, she protests.
I shouldn't grumble, ongoing plastic surgery on my foot and the need to keep off it,  have, for a year,  now, seen me in a wheel chair, a really clever knee-scooter or, while in the garden, on the big Honda mower; mrs ishmael, it is, who has maintained things this past while. 

We eat the peashoots as salad, double-shell the broadbeans and freeze them; potatoes and herbs  I grow in tubs of compost, nobody can grow potatoes here that are not watery, insipid abominations.

 The entire lower garden, half an acre, was a ploughed field, filled with rubbish,when we came.

Difficult to recall, now, what a shitheap it was.


In the 'sixties the neighbouring farmer had owned the place briefly, ploughed-up the garden  and grew turnips for his cattle; there was  a walled kitchen garden for the clergymen who lived here with six servants and fertilised it for centuries with seaweed, horse, chicken and cattle manure, we add to it, today, as much as we can. 

After we had cleared the rubbish out - loads of barbed wire, glass and rusty corrugated iron - I brought the new farmer in, with his tractor.  He levelled the place and with a digger uprooted the random willow clumps and - after we had installed a seephose beneath - planted them in a more or less straight line, as a wind barrier and a border. He then seeded the whole place with a pasture mix, he did it in a day, charged me ninety quid and forty of that was for the seed.  It would have taken us years. 'Swhat I mean about machinery.

I built six massive compost bins, years ago and they have delivered very well;  we also buy lots of compost from Lidl, maybe fifty, a hundred bags a year, one way and another, sometimes we get horse manure and when I'm up to it I collect, must be tons by now, of soil enricher - rough, woody  compost - from the local tip,where it's free.  All the white junkmail, all the Amazon cardboard goes in along with some of the grass cuttings - can't use them all - and all the kitchen waste and the sawdust from the workshop,  the fallen leaves, the rhubarb leaves.  Even so,  there's never enough.  I wish I could be like Monty Don and just seem to have absolutely unlimited supplies of fine, beautiful, home-produced compost. But I can't. No more than can he;  the PBC lying and misrepresenting, even in its horticultural outposts.  In another couple of years the Pampas grass will screen the compost  bins, even so, I'll have to remake them, only had twelve years from them.  Dunno what Monty'd say, perhaps have one of his theatrical  nervous breakdowns.

 The rhubarb,  this, we figure is ancient, we eat a bit of it,  give away loads of it and compost the trimmings, it has been heavily picked but it can look strikingly large and colourful, architectural, isn't that what they call it, the Montys?

Earlier in the year, I slashed an old willow back by about half but there's no stopping it, when it hits the wall the branches just do a ninety degree turn in another direction,  there are right-angled branches in there that must be forty years old.

I keep the comfrey - and a house full of scented geraniums - in memory of my late brother.  Despite a life spent avoiding paid employment and a professor's knowledge of the Child Poverty Action Group's Welfare Benefits Handbook, Joe toiled hard in his allotment.  Forty years ago he was an organic grower, a student of Lawrence Hills and the Henry Doubleday methods.  In a terribly troubled and angry life, growing spuds and carrots brought him more comfort, I think, than anything else.  Even that wouldn't last though, wouldn't escape his self-destruction; he fiddled the allotment society's accounts, pocketing a few quid and was asked to leave.  He raved about comfrey as a green manure;  we just grow it;  the bees love it.

I made a bench - piously re-cycled, from a scaffold board and a telegraph pole.  I made the mistake of using a spirit level and not my eye, so it looks crooked, even though it's everything else that's out-of true.

I quite like the darkening arch and what used to be bright, sunny, lawned enclosures, are now dark, spooky, woody places. They need a wolf or two, or a bear, a unicorn, maybe,  but you can't always get what you want.

 It's not for everyone, gardening, it requires time, space and stability and often we have none of these, much less a full house.  It came late to me and so haphazard are my efforts that some would say it has yet to arrive,  I prefer, in any event, to think of my doings as projects,  rather than as any innate or cultivated green-fingeredness, many of them are heavy duty work, clipping the hundred metre hedge in the lane, however,  that is a meditation.  I wish, I wish, I wish in vain that I had several more energetic decades to plant woods and see them grow woody.  If you are going to take it up,  this nurturing thing, don't leave it too long for, as we hymn here, occasionally, who knows where the time goes?