Last winter a large limb dropped off our stunning yet very elderly copper beech. It took about a day to cut away the brash-wood and smaller diameter branches. Knowing that in a few months the floor beneath the tree canopy would be a wash with spanish bluebells, I cut the remaining limb into lengths and piled them below. Beech wood and blue bells just look so at home together.
As part of a five month break from the garden I’ve gone to spend some time at Great Dixter; a stunning and innovative institutional garden in East Sussex. Living on site, my days are spent working alongside the team, led by the world renowned head gardener, Fergus Garrett. I’ve created a separate header on this blog named ‘Dixter’, under which I will be keeping a short account of the things I’m getting up to here: Dixter
Bombus hypnorum scaling the hedge, like they do.
Given the success of last year’s annual meadow, despite sowing so late, I decided to repeat the process, however this time sowing either side of the central path up to the house.
The annual strips form new edges to the native and already-established perennial meadow through which the path cuts. My hope is that the annual flowers will add an extra dimension of interest, both by way of colour and the insects they will ideally attract.
To do this I began by measuring a 50cm death away from the path using a tape measure and scaffold plank, and then cut away the turf with a half moon. I then used a spade to lift the turf strips and stacked them over by the wild garden hedge.
Once again I used ‘Pictorial Meadows’ for wildflower seed. The quality was excellent last year so they are very much tried and tested. I went for their ‘standard mix’, incorporating a few handfuls of additional seed I’d collected such as poppy, musk mallow and cornflower. As with last year’s process, I mixed the seed with sand in a bucket and sowed as evenly as I could, having soaked the ground first. Rather than rolling this time however, I just trod the seed in by foot. Hopefully the timing of the sowing; early in the season and with good weather, will deliver some decent results by mid Summer.
There are celandines in flower, blue tits cleaning out a nest box and frogspawn in the pond, Spring is very much here and I haven’t even ordered my seeds yet..
(Iain Loasby in Furzefield Wood, Potters Bar)
During the first two months of the year I spent some time away from the garden indulging my long held interest in woodland management. Although most of the work I’m currently engaged with tends to align more closely with flowers, my first love has always been trees.
When studying at the botanical gardens of Wales some years ago I used to spend the hours before and after class shivering in the hillside Towy valley woods, doing my best to read branches for buds; learning my ash from sycamore in their exposed winter simplicity.
Trees of our more or less native, deciduous woodlands were, and still are, to me the most interesting and intriguing of all the multi-floral habitats; so much so for their repetition in coalition. For any inexperienced horticulturist the wood is a good place to begin learning as reoccurring identification material is so helpfully repeated; you quickly build up a reliable basis of character recognition in order to accurately differentiate between the species.
I have, therefore, a great envy of those who are fortunate enough to be able to give much of their attention to working in woodlands. During those months I spent time both reading up (Edward Thomas, John Collis, Richard Jefferies as well as a re-read of the hailed practical handbook by Cris Starr) and in the woods themselves with a handful of people to whom they are a livelihood or devoted hobby. Within woodland work in general, a particular dimension I was keen to experience more of was coppice management.
Iain Loasby is a coppice worker based in London. For some years now he has been spending his winters relieving borough councils of their public woodland ‘clearance’ responsibilities through managing hazel copses. Where good material, once cut, would usually have been chipped or burned, Iain is putting it to use, converting it into anything from fence poles and pea sticks to charcoal and firewood. Not only does this mean product in place of waste, but also a restoration of the ecologically supportive cycle that used to be carried out in woodlands for centuries.
I met Iain in Furzefield wood up near Potters Bar for a day’s coppicing in January. He showed me the process (in the most basic terms) from cutting to product sorting and cleaning. We were working in a sectioned-off corner of the wood; 1 part of a 7-section rotation Iain had mapped out. Hazel stools are coppiced once every 7 years and therefore once established and carefully managed, a rotation like this will supply a decent haul each year.
(Back in January – using a billhook to cut hazel poles away from the stool and sorting into products)
Now in spring and with vigorously shooting sweet peas and runner beans in the garden needing supporting, I went back to Furzefield to see how Iain had got on with the rest of the area. The timing couldn’t have been better; the bluebells were approaching their peak and everywhere above new leaves were emerging in light yellows and greens. You couldn’t doubt the positive ecological effect that the coppicing process brings to this particular environment. Removing the dense understory of hazel poles lets much needed light down onto the wood floor, allowing the exposed flora to once again proliferate. Rotating this action through the woodland therefore creates a diversity in habitat; moving from one area to the next over a slow succession of winters, new shoots re-growing from old stools. It’s an exciting and invigorating experience to have witnessed both ends of the spectrum on the same site, and to see first-hand how productive, above all else, this old practice still remains. Driving back down to the garden with my bean poles and pea sticks in the back of the truck I felt a great admiration for past generations of coppice workers. Much like farmers of the old wheat field meadows; their back-breaking practices often so entwined within nature as to forget the conservational qualities that result.
Iain’s coppice products are available from his website at: www.rivenwoodcoppice.com
As I came through the gates this morning, gravel and grass still wet from a heavy downpour in the early hours, I was struck by the remarkable change in colour the garden had taken on almost over night. After six seemingly lengthy days in dry, bright heat, a few hours of soaking had been gratefully received right across the board. Deep blue alkanet and tall white cow parsley suddenly appeared thick and heavy along the boundary edges and up through the wood, where they mingled with the celandine yellows and new-nettle green. Along the meadow floor, beneath the now deeper and dulling daffodils, a carpet of pink lamium had grown up, clashing purposefully with the wild Spanish bluebells that bow heads in white, pink and purple.
It was all a sudden reminder, as with the annual returning screech of swifts overhead; that the season has begun, or rather; the winter is gone now, and here begins the rapid run of successional bloom that keeps me busy and engaged long into autumn.
A couple of weeks back, during one of the last days of winter; a first day of sunshine, I took some photographs during the quiet afternoon, reflecting on the long and eventful Winter now ended.
Thought I’d sow basil direct into the large conservatory pot in the house this year.
The Orange Tip 