Katy's Garden

Today I took in hand a corner of the new garden that we had not touched yet. It's the less visible from the house, but the first thing visitors see, so it had to be done soon or late. That corner is my despair; in a patch of ground the size of an average dining room there are: a grown walnut, a lilac, a forsythia, a large yew, two huge boxwood bushes, a leylandyi, a hazelnut and a large boulder. Everyone was growing on the head of its neighbours and brambles covered all. Under the brambles there were apparently also some kind of hypericum, and a lovely but slowly drowning clump of Lysimachia punctata, plus an ungodly amount of nettles and a kind of weed of the umbelliferae family that I have not identified, but that had set out for world domination long before I came here.

The hypericums are what made it so difficult to tackle. Weeding under large shrubs is a joke, one cuts everything to the ground until the place is tamed and that's it. But weeding among smaller plants is another thing entirely. You must do it selectively. So it was postponed again and again until it turned into a tangle that nothing short of napalm could sort out.

Today I was shyly nibbling at the edges of The Mess with my shears, just over the narrow line of short grass that we have carved around it, thinking I would just pull or cut some of the tallest things before they run to seed, when nibble after nibble, without really knowing how or when, I found myself crawling on all four among nettles and brambles, cutting, slashing and pulling right and left like a woman possesed, and in an hour or so of steady, sweaty, prickly work I cleared enough or the brambles and nettles to actually be able to tell friends from foes in the lower layers. In another hour the hypericum and the lysimachia saw the light of day for the first time this spring.
When I stepped back to contemplate the results of my efforts I realized that the shrubs looked amazingly shabby in this cleaned up context. The straggly hazelnut was downright squalid. I cannot remove it without the landlady permission but I can prune it, and prune it I did. I left only three green shoots waist high, the farthest away from the forsythia. Tis forsythia had ben butchered earlier in the year by a someone not me, in that ingenious cutting back tecnique aimed to turn a relatively graceful plant into a bright yellow lollipop. I cleared out some of the older, stiff branches and let only the straight young shoots. I want it to grow tall and bend over, like the fountain of gold that forsythias were meant to be before man invented shears and lollipops. I also trimmed the yew a bit on this side, and shortened the stemmy hypericum to encourage it to flesh out. We finally can see light!
Of the yew pruning I made cutlings (propagate propagate propagate!!), and I even discovered some straggling sprigs of variegated ivy buried deep in the tangle. These I digged up and removed to a pot, to grow on for winter display. I discovered a clump of Sedum spectabile as well, which was moved to one of the borders (it was either that or the lawn mower for him). I concluded the day breaking the ground with a hoe all around and in between the hypericum and giving some fertilizer.

This is not the time of year to do all this pruning and moving, but in such a tangled garden it must be done, and now is better than never.