A STRATAGEM, A DISEASE

Now back from Scotland and still 
remembering the sheer scale of the redwoods in Drumlanrig Castle gardens, the strangeness of the formations at the Crawick Multiverse including these rocks from the bed of the river Nith - from the Permian period - a bit before my time I think.

Sunday and I change the sunflower seed feeder to try and reduce the seed on the ground underneath - the great tits are the worst casting aside one after another until it gets the one it likes best. So I wire a plastic plant dish underneath - an old one with a hole in so it will drain - and the bullfinches come back!
Unfortunately the grey squirrel returns also.
I move the feeder until it hangs from a wire but this does not deter the tree rat.
Time for a squirrel trap baited with peanuts.
First arrival a jay which does not set the trap off - then the tree rat and voila!
  Now we wait to see if there are more greys around - there are - I am at my desk watching two cavorting in the old ash tree outside my window.
  Out to Langholm Mill at Lowick and the garden open under the National Gardens Scheme for charities. A stream lined with azaleas and rhododendrons. It was created by Dr Walter Gill who succeeded my father as GP in Penny Bridge. (Many years ago).
  Home, plug in charger cable to car. Fall over cable and land on right shoulder. No break but it is seizing up already - ten minutes later. The older I get the more adept I have become at falling.😕  
 Monday to Abi and Tom's at Halecat, Witherslack, and bought 4 perennial plants for new bed - a garden centre well worth visiting.
  Back home the garden is looking not bad. 

The asparagus is almost over and the May blossom is starting to recede. The trees turning one green instead of all shades. 

The weeping silver pear I assassinated - raising its canopy, is looking a bit sad - but will recover. And it rains a lot, I grasp handsful (or is it handfuls?) (probably) of goosegrass and bindweed from the big scabious, cut the very last of the asparagus, watch yet more grey squirrels arrive on the feeders, expand the list of must dos and plod on, shoulder a nuisance.

Quick stroll around the garden and find we have been attacked by pocket plum disease - all the damsons are affected, about 70% of the fruit - distorted, no stone in the middle - struck down by Taphrina pruni, and they say it will always affect our trees. 😧
Advice uselesss - like removing and burning all affected fruit - up a twenty foot tree (and we have eight trees)(and I have a dodgy shoulder)(and I would probably fall out of the tree).

Sigh!!

SELF SEEDERS, SUN, SCOTLAND

There are some plants in the garden that sow themselves year on year - orange and yellow welsh poppies, forgetmenots, aquilegias, honesty, white hesperis, camassias, fritillaries - that are welcome. There are others not so welcome depending where they are - wild garlic, bluebells - and some positively not welcome - goosegrass or cleavers, bindweed, horsetails etc etc etc.
 

 There are some that spread relentlessly unless culled like the geranium on the left and white rosebay willow herb.

So, lawns mown, a walk up the garden and a tawny owl floats silently from the bottom hedge. The ducks are back on the shed roof, the garden is so dry and the pond low - so three cheers for a borehole and a top up. Nevertheless the bogbean and water lilies are doing well (as is the blanket weed.)

R has found a recipe for what she calls jam but I feel is more of a conserve or something -
Rhubarb and Strawberry Jam - 600g rhubarb chopped, 300g hulled and quartered strawberries, 450g sugar, juice of half a lemon.
Mix and leave overnight to extract juice.
Boil 5 to 10 min.
If any scum - add knob of butter.
Put in hot sterilised jars - or - we put some into the freezer as it only keeps up to  a month in the fridge.

I have added petunias to the wallflowers in the pots by the back door and put in the erigeron, anthriscus and perennial wallflowers from Sarah Raven. A few seedlings are appearing, reluctantly, in the veg beds. Put in some flat leaved parsley and sweet peas. We continue to gorge on the asparagus.

Elsewhere in the garden the hedge parsley flowers as do the azaleas. In the leaf litter under one of the rhododendrons hoverflies seem to be gathering.

The new extension and paved area (hate the word patio) give new seating areas but we have yet to get into our heads that we can just walk out from the living room instead of round from the other doors. The orange gerbera which has lived and flowered all winter in the kitchen is now in the new bed.

And the fruit - abundance this year, mildewed gooseberries (but no sawfly (yet)), and the pear tree will fall over when the fruit get to full size. The strawberries I dug out last year had sent out runners around the edge of the bed, so I left them, and now we have fruit coming with no loving tender care.

We are not long back from Scotland, cliffs laden with sea pink (thrift), campion, tormentil and gorse at Balcary Point on the footpath to Rascarrel. We have seen a dolphin from the cliffs in the past but not on that day.

A visit to Crawick Multiverse, still a work in progress, just adults behaving like small boys damming streams? And a walk around Drumlanrig Gardens through the azalea scent where the most interesting thing was a remote control mower for steep bankings - love one - but £10,000 and then some, so no go.

So much to do and so little sense of urgency, cuppa and a sit in the garden.

IT'S THE BEST TIME OF THE YEAR

May is the best month of the year - you have my word for it - at least here in England. There are tits nesting in the boxes in the wood and a blackbird in the logshed - 

The molecatcher has been and gone - we are three moles less and hopefully that is the lot - we shall see.

The house is looking good as is the garden though I have had to cut down the dead Eucryphia and Hammamelis.

The bed here used to be part of the old rose bed before the building and I have now deposited and dug in two trailer loads of well rotted horse manure. The big grey plant is a cardoon.

Up in the wood all is glorious, woodland flowers at their best bathed in sunshine and birdsong.

The scent from the three yellow azaleas is heady - I planted them by a path out of the wood deliberately. Unfortunately the hawthorn covered in May blossom smell of rotten meat to attract flies - not so pleasant. At least we are (not yet) inundated with the St. Mark's flies (or hawthorn flies) - small and black they fly with their legs hanging down. They are harmless.


We have been to Gresgarth Hall, the home of Arabella Lennox-Boyd the famous garden designer and it 

was a perfect day. 

After a picnic by the car we walked through the glorious gardens and past the pond. There is a magnificent Crab apple - Malus baccata var. Mandshurica, below, and now T wants one. We have a John Downie, on the right,  but that is clearly second rate.
  

And there was a peony to die for -

I mean the photo says it all.

In the walled kitchen garden there were beautiful stone images by Maggy Howarth - at maggyhowarth.co.uk.

Up in the wood by the river there was a stand of white birches - which is where I got the idea for our small plantation, here on the right. Being me I could not resist messing about with photoshop and produced an image of the Gresgarth Hall ones in infrared.

I have sown yet more carrots and hope these will germinate as the first sowing, and those of parsnips, did nothing. I have also pruned hard the weeping silver pear to raise the canopy away from the grass and tidied the willows.

R is in the kitchen making a compote of rhubarb and strawberries - our rhubarb, bought strawberries - the rhubarb is struggling with the dry weather and will need dividing and spacing out in the autumn - too crowded.

It is May and the best time of the year - how do we get through the winter?

A JOURNEY UP THE GARDEN PATH

Beautiful morning, a walk from the pond up to the new extension. That's all.

THE HUMAN PLAGUE

At last we hear that there are too many people on this planet. All the ecology problems are due to that and human greed - we need urgently to protect large areas of the natural world from human predation.  We need to reduce the world population drastically but there is no political will do do anything much.

Then, at home, it is all go with the fauna including there is the problem of moles and RATS. 

The mole lady has come out and set ten traps - we finally got fed up having more soil than grass on the lawns. And - the mole lady is a actually the daughter of RP who used to run the farm I grew up on on Torver for Dad. He still lives in Torver, gardens and is in his late 80s - titchy world.

 Meanwhile back on the shed roof we have a duck-in, a break from a ducking in the pond, perhaps waiting for the horses next door to be fed?

The pond itself is not looking too bad though muddy and churned after each duck visit.

We are still somewhat short of water despite rain and the pond is a bit low.

The lilac is in full flower and from below the new extension is looking good. 

There is almost nothing so alarming as treading on a hen pheasant but Mr Pheas just struts about squawking chunnering to himself.

Elsewhere the viburnums are getting going, the wild guelder rose and the horizontal flowers of Mariesii.

Knapweed is doing okay in virtually no soil and though we have the white hedge parsley around us I think I prefer this pink version - less aggressive and grows lower.

Going back to rats - should we have the great eco debacle and humanity snuffs it - are rats our natural successors. Their cars would be much smaller and less polluting, their buildings less destructive of the natural world - ??

To Mecanopsis cambrica the Welsh Poppy which sows itself freely, the yellow is the wild one abut we also have the orange and the hybridise a bit. Is that good or bad? 
Pick and boils stem ends for a minute to make them last in a vase.

And the wood is just getting going - campion and pignut en masse.

Off to Gresgarth Hall Gardens tomorrow - the home of Arabella Lennox-Boyd in search of some ideas.

Meanwhile back to trailer loads of manure and breaking up the concrete left by the builders. A new bed on its way but what to put in it?