Toilet roll etiquette - The Great Debate

I was struck by a philosophical question the other day, while gratefully using a Client's loo:

Why "grateful"? 

Because although I am perfectly competent at taking a discrete pee behind the shed (“Ladies! Get yourselves a P-style and never again have to drop your trousers when you have to pee outdoors!”), it is rather nice, on a cold and windy day, to be able to use the “house” loo.

Back in the days when Covid was striking us down en masse, it was not possible to go into someone else's house, so peeing behind the shed very much became the “thing” to do. Those days are gone, thank heavens, but the memory lingers on, so I am grateful on a regular basis, to be allowed to use the indoor loo again.

The debate - which might be philosophical, or might be moral - is what to do when this happens, as in the photo above: the perforations fail to tear neatly, and you are left with a ragged bit of loo paper.

“I can't leave it like that!” I say to myself, “What will the Client think?” .....

 

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Fuchsia - time for the spring cut-back

 Everyone is asking me about their Fuchsia - it must be that time of year again!

 

And the answer is Yes: it is time to cut back the hardy Fuchsia in your garden, the ones which have been bravely standing to attention all winter, and which are now just a collection of brown sticks, with maybe - if you are lucky - a hint of new shoots at the base.....

 

 

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“Help! My Clematis is flowering, but the leaves are going brown!”

This is the plea for advice which arrived last week - this lady has a clematis which, she said, is “currently flowering (early March) it seems healthy in terms of flowers but the leaves look like they are in poor health or dying. They don't drop to the floor. “

Here's the picture that came with the email:

Aha, I can see what the problem is!

Well, it's not a problem at all, it's just a question of......

 

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How to deal with a sodden bed...

No, this is not an advert for avoiding embarrassing nocturnal incidents, nor tips and hints on how to deal with a leaky roof (sorry, Linda!!) (my neighbour's roof needs replacing, and is dripping through her bedroom light fitting...), but a sodden herbaceous bed:

 

This is a problem that I'm encountering more and more, this year: apparently the February just gone (2024, for the benefit of future readers!) has been the wettest since records began, for several parts of the UK: and I would say that Oxfordshire is definitely one of those parts......

 

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How to work on really, really claggy soil...

 

Here's a border I planted recently:

Nothing special about that, you say?

What you can't see from this photo is that the soil is absolutely sodden, and “claggy” is the only suitable word I can use to describe it, even though I'm not from Yorkshire, or wherever that word comes from...

In fact, it's worse than it looks, because this was a border which sloped down towards the shingled area, and had desperately poor soil, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone, and bring in a large amount of topsoil which had just been generated by removing a lawn, elsewhere in the garden....

 

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My Hellebores are being drowned!

 We've been talking about Hellebores quite a lot - well, it's that time of year! - and I had a question from Linda the other day (“Hi, Linda!”) about her Helleborus orientalis, Oriental Hellebores:

 

She's lost nearly half of them, due to a thoughtless and unheeding neighbour whose gutter is leaking over her garden, turning her Hellebore bed into a quagmire.

The neighbour won't fix the gutter: and there is nowhere else for the Hellebores to move to, so what is Linda to do with them?

The short-term solution is going to be........

 

 

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The Strange Case of the Spinach on the Compost Heap

A  little while ago, I wrote about the Bucket of Shame, to do with opening up a new - or rather, an old! - compost pen, and I mentioned putting the tired old spinach plants onto the active - ie new! - compost pen.

Well, I out-clevered myself there, because when I returned to that garden, a week later, I found that the spinach was actively growing.... in the compost pens.

Just look at all those tender, blanched new leaves!!  Of course, they thought that they'd been “planted” in some heavenly, warm, moist, new location .....

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Compost - the Bucket of Shame

 I love opening a compost pen: such excitement!

We've been dutifully filling the pens in sequence, and at long last, it's time to open up the “oldest” one, pen number 3.

It's been left to rot down for months, getting quietly on with the job of recycling the garden's waste, via the dear little brandlings (those skinny red worms that you find in an active compost pen) who eat up everything and poop it out - yes, folks, home-made compost is basically......

 

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Hellebore Gold Collection: plants to avoid

 I don't usually do “plant reviews” as such, but back in April 2021 I posted an article entitled "Gold Collection" Hellebores: are they worth the money?  

I pointed out that these plants, gorgeous though they are, do not seem to thrive in our gardens, so they don't represent good value for money. In my opinion, they are not fully hardy - which is ludicrous for a garden plant in the UK! - and I am firmly convinced.....

 

 

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Pruning of a Silver Pear

Pruning of trees with a “weeping” habit is never as simple as pruning a “normal” tree, but it's actually not that difficult to do, it's just rather time consuming. 

 

Instead of merely shortening/removing certain branches, you have to think about the overall shape of the tree, and where the individual branches are going, and you have to remove branches and twigs carefully, one by one. 

The photo above is of the annual trim of a small, but quite mature Weeping Pear....

 

 

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“What do you gardeners do, in winter?”

 This always makes me laugh, and it's one of those questions which just never stops appearing: just yesterday, someone said to me “I suppose you're off work now, until spring.”

 

They must have realised, from the Look which I gave them, that they'd said the wrong thing, but they ploughed on, regardless: “I mean,” they said “there's nothing to do in the garden now, right?”

Wrong.

Oh, so wrong!

 

 

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I've just had a question from Paula (*waves*), about a Bay tree in a pot:

She says:

“I have inherited a bay tree lollipop growing in a pot. It's about 1.5m in height and has been neglected. The top has become quite sparse, and the tree has developed a secondary crown, so that above the crown, where several branches grow out to form the lollipop, one of the branches has become much stronger than the others, and about 20 cm higher it has formed another crown where branches grow out, and another 10-15 cm above that a third crown is already forming.

My question is, should I prune this stronger branch right back to the main crown, so that the lollipop can bush out properly? Doing this would create a hollow where that branch came out. Would I be better off just pruning the secondary crown right back to where it forms?"

 

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Epimedium: why is it so under-rated?

There are some garden plants that simply everyone has in their garden... what you might call the "usual suspects" which may sound a bit disparaging, but actually it's a compliment: it means they thrive in that particular area, are easy to grow, don't suffer from excessive pests and diseases, and are pleasing to the eye.

Then there are some which are quite rare, but usually for good reason, ie they're difficult to grow, or they're not fully hardy  (which means they need to be cossetted over the winter, which is a bit of a faff, and dispiriting if “one” accidentally forgets, and the plant in question expires in the frost...), or they're slow-growing....

 

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Wisteria: flowers, pruning, and other myths

Some time ago, I had a question from a lady in London: it was about her Wisteria, which had failed to flower for the past 20 years. This is quite a common question, along with "How and when do I prune it?" so I thought I'd repeat and expand my answer to her. 

 

Firstly, there are three reasons why Wisteria refuse to flower: lack of sun, incorrect pruning, and lack of nutrition. 

Well, four, if you include........

 

 

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Now is the season... to plan!

Well, the holidays are over, the shortest day is over, and we are heading uphill to spring - Yay! - and this is the time to reflect on how the previous year went, and what new projects we plan to tackle this year. 

I always encourage my Clients (and students) to take photos of their gardens at intervals, and to make notes in their Garden Journal about what worked well, what was a bit of a flop, any noticeable gaps in the garden and so on, on the grounds that.....

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Winter cut-back:

Also known as "Autumn Slaughter". 

 

This is my name for the early-winter tidy-up of the garden. I try not to use this expression in front of Clients, but sometimes it just slips out, oops! 

They usually say things like “putting the garden to bed for the winter,” but in my head, it's always Autumn Slaughter... It refers to that time of year when we are cutting down all the deal perennials, clearing away the debris, taking the opportunity to remove weeds which are thereby revealed (those cunning little devils are often to be found hiding underneath a sheltering blanket of dead foliage), and generally making the garden look tidy for the winter. ....

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Walnuts and Weirdness

Walnuts - I know, not a subject that normally lends itself to weirdness - but a while back, I received an email from Howard (*waves*), along with a photo of a double walnut which he had found:

Cute, eh?

He reminded me that some years back, I'd written an article about malformed walnuts.

This led to me wondering.....

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