I realise that it is a long time since I logged any of our Heath Hands activities – but that certainly does not mean that we have been slacking. Indeed, I have just returned from the Hill Garden where the pieris to the east of the pond was in full and glorious flower.
I was trimming a golden small leaved hedge ( Ash did tell me what it was called but I don’t remember) which had suffered in a late frost after its previous pruning – a fiddly job trying to get the dead wood out to leave light and space for new growth without ruining the shape of the hedge.
Another fiddly but super satisfying morning (if you like pruning as I do) was spent in the rose beds in Golders Hill Park. Hopefully we will see the fruits of our labours in the next month or so.
However, if you want fiddly, the Hill Garden is the place to go – micro weeding a speciality! This is the parterre on the far side of the kitchen garden – a rather unwelcoming space which gets little in the way of sun, rain – or visitors. Traditionally it was gravelled and planted with small specimen shrubs – these are small ilex trees, miniature hollies – and they are miserable….
This is not the first time we have weeded the gravel around them and each time they get scrawnier. So I am delighted to say that a decision was made to take them all out and replant them somewhere more appealing to an ilex to see if they will recover. They will be replaced with a couple of super large pots.
Another hard work morning was spent doing battle with an encampment of geums which had moved into one of the Kitchen Garden flower beds. However beautiful cultivated geums may be with their waving, long stalked, delicate poppy colour blooms, the wild ones are horribly invasive and very reluctant to be dug out. The job was made considerably more painful on this occasion by the fact that they had colonised the area under some very prickly roses. However, all was made well that day by the site of a bed packed full of lillies of the valley just bursting to come into bloom…
….nestling under the Tibetan cherry whose trunk, ringed with irridescent burgundy colour bark, was positively glowing in the sun.
But just to prove that it is not all wine and roses in the Hill Garden, here we are on the pergola on one of the nastiest mornings that I have spent with Heath Hands. Jan’s face says it all – it was cold and it was chucking it down, the sort of rain that gets down inside the tightest collar. Not even the piping hot tea and three Hobnobs could dent our misery and we admitted defeat shortly afterwards and headed home.
But beyond the two gardens, (the Hill Garden and Golders Hill) there has also been plenty of activity.
We spent an interesting morning in the Old Orchard Garden in the willow maze. (Afraid I had forgotten my phone that day so no pics.) Sadly this has suffered from a bit of neglect and being in rather too dry a spot so a lot of the uprights have died. The theory is that if we pulled out all the dead wood we could start again and tend it a bit more closely.
However, we found some perfect willow territory on the other side of the heath where the rangers were keen to block off a small wildlife sanctuary area. First we collected young branches from the surrounding trees –
and then literally thrust them down into the super boggy earth in the sanctuary area. The theory is that they will just love all that boggy stuff and in no time those branches will have established and be forming a quite dense thicket.
The flip side to the boggy willow was a morning spent on on the gorse covered hillside over on the west of the heath.
This was, once again, all about regeneration. The gorse had got very leggy and overgrown (up to 3 meters high in places) so the rangers had brought in the big machinery and cut it right down to the ground. We were tasked with raking up the dead wood to be disposed of leaving the stumps to regenerate. And amazingly, the seemingly dead branches which were sticking out of the ground were already sprouting tiny green leaves of regrowth.
The other benefit of clearing the area was that we could dig terraces for our population of the rare Atypus affinis or purseweb spiders. They apparently like to live on discreet ledges where they can spin a tube like web. When an insect unwisely lands on or crawls into the tube, the spiders reel them in and munch them. Our ‘terraces’ were apparently perfect ‘des res’s for Atypus affinis.
And, of course, the bonus for me of any Heath Hands session is that I get to walk across the heath on my way there and back. Passing the forest schools, the dog walkers – and whatever is in flower. And this morning that was a particularly flamboyant flame azalea on the Kenwood lawns.
Early May garden