Taming the wilderness

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A few years ago we had an enormous cedar removed from our garden. Planted as it was only 18 feet away from the back door, it must have looked very pretty when it was younger; when we moved to our home in late 1999 it had grown higher than the chimney pots on top of our four storey house! It had to go, the shadow it cast kept the rear of the house in almost darkness for much of the day and I dread to think where the roots of the beast had spread to. So John (an amazingly brave tree surgeon) did his magic and during the course of a single day, not only took the evergreen down to ground level but also used the chipping machine to produce a mamoth size pile of fir tree chippings for us to use in the garden. The wood has been stacked around the garden and is slowly being used on our open fire in the dining room ~ I suspect we will still be using it by the time we retire!

All down one side of the garden there is a flower bed which is about 5 feet wide (from front to back) and about 90 feet long. The day after the tree came down I weeded the flower bed, laid down a weedproof membrane and laid a 8 - 10 inch layer of the wood chippings over it. ' Job done!' I thought to myself, 'it will never need to be tackled again.' Now call me naive or optimistic (or both), but I truely imagined that I would never have to deal with an onslaught of bindweed again in that flower border ~ wrong!

Today I wandered out into the garden and thought I would tidy up the long flower bed a bit. Having been laid up in my bed for most of last summer (with this stupid recurring back injury), nothing was touched in the garden and it now resembles a truely wild place.

The local wildlife can't believe their luck and I know that the garden is home to at least 5 hedgehogs, too many frogs for it to be polite, at least one stoat (there may be more but we've only seen one) and today we think that a mole has moved in too. The local birds have feasted on seeds on the plants all winter, used dried seed heads and dried weeds to line their nests and now the summer visiting house martins have arrived too ~ at least they live under the eaves of the house for the summer, but they love all the midges and flying insects that also reside here. No doubt the bats are out and about, but I haven't spotted them yet this year.

My cats on the other hand have requested that I clear a space amongst the weeds so that they can dig a hole or two when they need to 'go'. Doing the necessary on tufty grass and stinging nettles can't be very nice, so I have listened to their pleas and will be tackling a small space at a time this year (being mindful of the aforementioned back issues).

Anyway, back to the long flower bed... clearing the few annual weeds that are starting to pop up all over the place, I pulled gently on a teeny weeny piece of bindweed that had managed to settle in the chippings. To my horror this teeny weeny stem was attached to a massive network of horrible white roots that resembled a plate full of spaghetti. How did that happen so quickly? The entire bed is covered in bindweed ~ above my weed suppressing membrane in the 'easy to push your roots through' chippings. Oh blow, I am back to square one!

So tomorrow, weather permitting, I will tackle a little more of the spaghetti problem and clear a few weeds. Once the garden is in a fit state to be seen I will post a few pictures.

Chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.