June Gardening
I got back to the cottage last night to a scary message on my phone machine. You may remember, if I poke you with a sharp stick, that about three months ago there was an ad in The Ringing World* for a set of handbells for sale, which was duly brought to my attention by Niall**. I havered for a while before I phoned up about them and fortunately I had shillyshallied long enough and someone else had already bought them. Probably. The person buying them wanted to save driving to the other side of the country when both the seller and himself would be meeting in the middle at the ringing council’s AGM in May. The seller did nonetheless thriftily take my phone number just in case this fell through.
It fell through.
I’ve spent all day today not returning his phone call. Hey, procrastinating worked out great the last time.
So let’s have a few soothing garden photos.
This is the time of year when I go from the spring frenzy of tamping tiny things in pots which they will promptly riot out of through a whiplash-brief hiatus of thinking that this year I may finally be going to be more or less on top of things. . . .
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, oh gods, I’m so funny I kill myself. I do this every year. Some years are worse than other years. At least this year I don’t have 400 dahlias.*** I do, however, have Fantin Latour, who is clearly challenging Souvenir de la Malmaison in the takeover stakes on that side of the garden. I knew I was being a complete twit putting Souvenir in a garden the size of a pocket handkerchief, but at least I put her against a wall where I can kind of pin her against it (to greater or lesser effect). Fantin is out in the middle. And yes, actually, it was complete twit-hood putting Fantin in the middle of a pocket-handkerchief garden; she gets to four or five foot. She was a nice rounded five foot in my old, two and half acre† garden. SHE’S EIGHT FOOT AND GOING STRONG in the cottage garden.
Peter got the meconopsis this year. I am so jealous. I think all of mine have died.††
And you may recognise the OBE in the doorway. The rose is Cooper’s Burmese, who is tender, and how the hell she got through this last winter has us both baffled. She is, however, when happy, a rioter. She should meet my Fantin.†††
All right, look at that word count, this is getting silly. This was supposed to be a photo post. To Be Dranglefrabbingly Continued. . . .
* * *
* sic: http://www.ringingworld.co.uk/
** aka The Rotten Ratbag. Although I’m sorry to report service ring went off this morning without anything worth turning into a story of madness and despair. Except possibly that Niall mentioned he rang a wedding at Gallowglass yesterday where someone cancelled at the last minute so there were only five of them for six bells. And that Vicky and I instantly exchanged a look of the highest of dudgeons, because we had been ringing a late-afternoon wedding at Ditherington yesterday and either of us could easily have destroyed the rest of our Saturday afternoon by ringing at Gallowglass too. The honour of a regular ringer-for-events is easily impugned. We may have to go over there and hang Gallowglass’ tower captain out his tower window on one of his own ropes. By the ankles, of course, and carefully. We don’t want to do him any permanent damage. Tower captains are hard enough to come by. But an example must be made.
*** All right, it wasn’t really 400. It felt like 400.
† And 500-plus roses. I was thinking about this today. I absolutely don’t learn. Having been riven of the garden that was the joy of my heart, even if I didn’t anything like keep up with my end of it . . . I’m busy turning the cottage’s tiny garden into something so overstuffed and layered and wedged and plaited and so on that I can’t keep up with it either . . . not to mention Third House, which at the moment is just the untidy garden of someone who likes plants and Has Ambitions but hasn’t really got to grips with it yet. Give me a few more years to turn it into Obsessive’s Delight, Chapter Two.
†† I didn’t have a single snake’s-head fritillary http://www.djsphotography.co.uk/images/Plants/Snakes-Head-Fritillary-23.jpg
http://mygarden.rhs.org.uk/photos/wisleyplantcentre/images/33025/319×425.aspx
this year either. Waaaaah. I’m going to have to declare a Snake’s-head Fritillary year and do whatever it takes. It worked with Patty’s Frelling Plum http://www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/perennials/unusual-plants/classid.78339/
which we’d had at the old house. We saw her when she was new and hot, bought and slapped her into the bed right in front of the house and she grew like a mad thing. Never occurred to me she might be fussy. But I’ve lost three in three years at the cottage so this year I put her in a pot where I could fiddle with feeding and drainage, and put one of my copper rings around her in case slugs were a problem^ and this year I have had Patty’s Frelling Plum. —I am also totally failing to find my photo of my Patty’s Plum, but I’ll cut her down now and stuff her full of food and maybe she’ll do it again.
But fritillaries are wild flowers, for pity’s sake—you ought to be able to poke them in the ground and watch them spread. Repeat: spread. We had swathes of them at the old house, in spite of the pheasants eating them like jujubes. But here in town what the slugs^^ don’t get the lily beetles do. I have now banned lilies from the cottage garden (I still have a few at Third House, where I can Isolate and Squash. Squashing the beetles is just standard disgusting^^^ but squashing the larvae is really really really disgusting) and, sigh, so next year I will put copper rings around them. I have a fortune invested in copper rings^^^^ . . . and then I suppose I’ll find out that the wood pigeons or the frelling blackbirds eat them like jujubes too.
^ Slugs should not be a problem with Oriental poppies, but slugs don’t always read the directions.
^^ Hedgehog. Longing for. Toxic slug death on little spiky legs.
^^^Aside from the fact that they’re always humping. Always. Which does of course explain the population explosion.
^^^^ And am about to buy yet more. I am only barely going to make it through the end of my 399 dahlias with the ones I’ve got. Dahlias are Green & Black’s to slugs.
††† And my Souvenir, and my Mme Alfred Carriere, and my Mme Gregoire de Staechlin, the latter two of whom are battling it out on the opposite side of the cottage garden. Peter has Treasure Trove, who will have swallowed the mews in a few years, but at least Treasure Trove is a known inhaler of small countries.
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