A very quick post just to celebrate the glorious golden leaf carpet in the Old Orchard Garden last week. Those large crunkly leaves – lined golden hands with their fingers spread – are from the Oriental Plane – or so my ‘Picture This’ app told me. They looked amazing and I am glad I snapped them right then as an hour later we hard working Heath Hands gardeners had swept them all up.
Meanwhile, down at the bottom of the garden on the log pile, the funghi were in full spate. Burnished bronze caps, huddled together like a crowd of Japanese sheltering under their umbrellas in a rain storm…
…and then paler crinkly edged tiny funghi battling with the moss to overrun the round ends to the greying logs piled down beside the willow tunnel.
The willow tunnel, along with the willow maze was in poor shape. Inevitably, during the two years of the pandemic, it got out of hand as no one was allowed to work in the garden. As a result it had grown only from the top with long shoots reaching for the sky while many of the ‘woven’ shoots which formed the panels had died off. The somewhat drastic decision was therefore made to all but start again. All the top growth was removed and anything which looked remotely dead was pulled out. You can see that we are already along way into the job here.
We then used any of the healthy longer shoots that we had cut off to thrust down into the earth in the gaps where, hopefully, it will do its rather miraculous thing and just root and shoot!
With any luck I will be able to post in a year’s time with an image of a healthily sprouting willow tunnel whose long shoots are intertwined overhead.
Slogging through the mud…..