Honey, Your Fungus Has Shrivelled The Privet
Coping in the Garden
When things in the Garden (and in life) get difficult, I find it helps to say to myself, ‘Just look at this little bit. Just concentrate on this part. You can do this little bit’.
As in:
Me: Gah! Absolutely over-run with couch-grass everywhere!
Universe: Yes, it’s monstrous and that’s my merry way…tra-laaa
Me: Oh bloody hell! I can’t get on top of all this! Everything’s going to rack and ruin!
Universe: Everything is simply as it is, tee-hee, and that’s the way I roll…
Me: Crikes! it’s all piling up on me!
Universe: Surely is. All time, all space, all dimensions, all possibilities. All the fates, all the outcomes and all the…
Me: Jane, ignore Universe and just do this little area here. Get down on your knees and concentrate!
Period of quiet concentration
Universe: Yes, look! A bee! I made her, how delightful, just look at that little creature, a bee, with her ginger fur stole…
Me: Looks like a little old lady out for an Art Gallery Opening
Google: It’s the Common Carder Bee
Me: Jane, put your phone away and get on with the weeding
Period of quiet concentration
Me: (an hour or two later) How lovely it is out here in the garden
Universe: All my own work, tah dah!
You can see from the photograph that I haven’t got down on my knees by this little bit of Front Garden, because there is couch grass emerging between those edging stones. I say ‘emerging’ but that is a fully formed clump - there will be half a kilo of plastic-strong, remorselessly inaccessible roots down under that stone.
But don’t mind that.
Let your gaze rest instead on Erigeron ‘Schneewittchen’. Oh goodness, the length of those eyelashes. Delightful. This is marvellous plant, easy to grow, long flowering, and with a clear, strong simplicity. I bought mine from Beth Chatto, and at the end of last summer was able to divide it ( or did I take cuttings?) and so now I have some in both Front and Back Gardens. Not easy to see in this photo but she can get to be 30 cms tall. She is being supported by small twiggy pea-sticks, got from Allotment.
What a restorative!
I’ve had to muster all my ‘just concentrate here’ resources this week as things are going wrong in multiple directions.
Man not available to help with finishing once-paved area in Back Garden - bigger job on hand, will have to wait until he’s finished that
Can’t mow Back Garden tiny lawn because giant umbrella, too heavy to move, waiting to be collected by its new owner
High winds spoiling the Papaver ‘Beauty of Livermere’ and Peony ‘Bowl of Beauty’.
Honey fungus confirmed in Privet
Pigeons defecating violently all over swing and brick path as they eat unripe cherries. (Poo not actually visible as have cleaned it up. Instead, please enjoy my new old wire work chair from local vintage shop. I’d never have painted it red, that was just how it came. But it looks wonderful against the clay pavers.)
I realise that Gardening is Art, not Life, so nothing in the above list is serious.
This week I met a woman over the compost heaps at Calderstones. Lovely meeting. I have so longed to find a fellow enthusiast, glad to be shown the intricacies of various heaps.
Compost Lover: And this is your leafmould? Do you just start another pile, then?
Later she introduced self and Dear Associate to her husband who was running a sculpting course at Calderstones.
He said, re sculpting, and the anxieties I had expressed about the visibility of it going wrong … it’s only clay, what does it matter? If I have hard day - it’s just clay. When she (Compost Lover, Psychotherapist) was doing midwifery and had a hard day…it was life and death.
Sculptor: It’s only clay
Dear Associate: Isn’t that what God said when he made Adam?
Psychotherapist: And you add layers of Cardboard?
Me: Yes, damp if possible
Universe: I brought these four people together. that’s one of the things I can do when I call myself ‘Chance’…
And yet, when we are doing our sculpting, playing our instruments, our writing, our gardening, I feel we best do it as if it was a matter of life and death, with all our hearts and minds, attentiveness, energy.
Which means that you/I also have to have a way of cutting out and saying - it’s only Clay! It’s only Couch grass! It’s only Honey Fungus!
But I’ve been gardening here for twenty five years and nothing has ever died from Honey Fungus before, so this feels quite frightening. Things can emerge and kill your garden!
I employ Hedgeman to come a couple of times a year and cut the hedges, and today was the day he was coming. We looked at the Privet. Yes, it’s tried to fight back, he said, but it’s not winning. We should take it out next time I come. Get something else ready to go in.
Hedgeman: Honey fungus is always with us, and it gets things that are susceptible to it when they are low.
Universe: Hehehe! That’s one of my ways, for sure.
Poor Privet. I grew that from a cutting twenty odd years ago. But I must admit, it is there in the hottest spot and I’ve never fed it, and I’ve never watered it. I said I’d go for more Griselinia, it being tough and beautiful and a good seaside survivor and not susceptible to Honey Fungus.
After Hedgeman had done his neatening work, I went out to Back Garden to dig up a Rosa Albertine cutting I wanted to give to a friend. With Albertine - perhaps the best scented of all roses - what I do is cut off a stem about pencil width, and 20-30cms long, and stick it in deeply so only about a third of it is above ground, somewhere it won’t get trodden on… and then a year later, I have a new plant. Magical. I had left this particular cutting in the big raised bed that has the Golden Bamboo in it, and I’d noticed a couple of days ago that it was flowering…time to be out of there, I thought.
I climbed in to the bed, thrust the spade in with all my might, and the spade bounced back, as if there was a tyre buried under the soil. I tried it again from a few angles but no… the soil around the base of the rose was impenetrable. I got down on my knees for closer look.
Top: R.Albertine blooming amidst the bamboo; then after I’d cut quite a lot of it down and made it into cuttings
Bottom: The stems I couldn’t dig out, and, near the secateurs, the emerging new shoots of bamboo; a closer view
The roots of the bamboo had spread and formed a thick mat around the area where the rose is growing. These roots were of two different sorts. A top surface root of short, brittle, almost succulent , white, crazy-paving matting. This was thick and layered that I had to make my way through it with a small saw-edge trowel.
Roots, shoots and Albertine stems in water, waiting to become cuttings
Nearby I found woody roots looking like bamboo bullets, cigar-fat and very much at ease. We’re here, they said, and we ain’t going nowhere. Unless we want to, in which case, try and stop us.
Universe: One of my very own creations, tee-hee
Oh my, I thought.
Because these roots were quite a way from the main plant. At least a metre. There is going to be a second clump. This golden bamboo is Phyllostachys Vivax Aureocaulis, a beauty, and a beast, too. In our life together so far, it has seemed confined to about a fifth of this huge raised bed, and it’s been there…hhhmm… check my old garden book…I planted it in Feb 2021.
Top Row: the original plant label in my old diary; the Phyllostachys Vivax Aureocaulis in the raised bed, now 4 and half years old.
Bottom Row: the new culms, as the label says, seeming to arise from nowhere are at least a metre away from the main plant, and much thicker. The thing I thought was woody root is in fact the lower part of the spreading culm.
Note in diary from year 2 - ‘I like the way the PVA shoots are so strong.’
Universe: You may come to regret that …
Me: It’s not the end of the world! It’s only Bamboo!
Universe: I always have the last word