Rainbow Dust
Sunday 13th September, 2015.
This week I read a review of a book about butterflies. The title was Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies. I thought that Rainbow Dust was an inspired description of these delightful creatures and wished I had thought of it. Then I discovered that there is a brand of edible cake decoration glitter with the same name and it lost some of its appeal.
According to the review, butterflies are pointless . . . “Ecologically, they are fairly useless. Bees are better at pollinating; no other animal would become extinct if butterflies did.” But their ethereal beauty seems more than enough to justify their existence.
During the second week of autumn our garden was still adorned with Rainbow Dust. I haven’t spent much time watching them and didn’t see a comma this week but speckled woods and occasional whites are still around as well as these old faithfuls.
There was virtually no rain during the first ten days of September and I wondered whether we were going to have a repetition on last year when the total rainfall for the month was just 13mm - barely over half an inch. A tiny spider even set up home in the empty rain gauge. But this isn’t going to be another record dry month because we had an inch and a half of rain on Friday night and early Saturday morning. The spider is still there. Its little web is above water level but it may have to move soon because more rain is forecast for the coming week.
My main garden task this week (and next week and probably the week after and the week after that!) is cutting the holly hedge on our southern boundary down to an “easier to manage” height. I started on the hedge last autumn and finished the section in the front garden and at the side of the house. I couldn’t continue in the back garden because the new leaves of the daffodils and snowdrops by the fence started to emerge towards the end of November and I didn’t want to tread on them while I was working.
The ground is hard and fairly dry now and the birds have finished nesting so it is the ideal time to work on the hedge. Cutting holly is one of my least favourite jobs but I am trying to be more efficient and do things in the right order even though I would far rather be sitting in the warm sunshine on the wildflower bank, cutting down the meadowsweet and the ferns.
I often wonder what the future holds in store. The time will eventually come when I can no longer cope with the work required to maintain this property and we need to move to an easier to manage home. The alternative would be to stay here and employ help in the house and garden but I am a DIY sort of person - no good at giving or taking orders - so that option doesn’t appeal to me. If I decide, in years to come, to wade through this blog reliving these garden memories will I be sad to have moved on to a different life? . . . or will I think “I must have been mad. Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about mowing and weeding and pruning and cleaning ditches, etc., etc. any more.”? One thing is certain - I won’t feel the slightest bit nostalgic about being up a wobbly ladder cutting holly!
I have been using quite an assortment of tools including a rachet lopper for the thickest stems, a rachet pruner and some snips for most of the thinner easier to reach stuff and a Snapper for the thinner but harder to reach stuff. The Snapper has blades like an anvil pruner on the end of an eighteen inch shaft. My snips are heavier duty than normal garden snips because I buy them from the Farmers’ Combine and they are actually meant to be used on sheep for removing hoof rot. Other bits of essential kit are thornproof gloves and a light ladder which can rest against the fence and be propped up on a stone because of the sloping ground..
By the time I have cut up three muck buckets of holly clippings, I am usually so tired that Tim has to carry them down to the garage and transfer the holly into tarpaulins before taking it to the tip.
I read an article in the Guardian recently about the short list for a possible new flag for New Zealand. The spiral pattern on some of the designs caught my attention and I wondered what it signified. Google as usual helped. It is a Maori symbol - the Koru - and is based on the shape of a new unfurling silver fern frond. It symbolises new life, growth, strength and peace. I filed the information away in my memory and intending to search for it (probably in vain) when the new bracken fronds unfurled in spring but when I was picking up holly clippings I saw that one of the ferns which I had trimmed recently had produced some new leaf growth and there was a perfect little autumn Koru!
Some of the other ferns by the stream also thought they had been cut back too early!
I hadn’t taken a single photo during the first half of the week, so I went out with the camera on Thursday in search of material. There wasn’t much in the way of flowers that I haven’t photographed already but I did find a few fuchsia flowers and some cyclamen in the terraces at the side of the house.
And there was a cluster of late flowers on the climbing rose by the summerhouse.
No late flowers on the rosa rubrifolia but it does have elegantly beautiful hips!
The sedum spectabile flowers are just starting to open. I bought a couple of plants some years ago because I had read that they are popular with butterflies. The only problem seems to be that they tend to flower so late that most of the butterflies have departed before the nectar is available. This one is Autumn Joy and is being ignored by the ungrateful butterflies but at least the bees appreciate the pollen.
The other sedum is a paler pink with more open clusters of flowers. It may be Brilliant. One year I saw about two dozen red admiral and small tortoiseshells on a row of these sedums near the white buddleia. Those plants are looking rather miserable this year because their spot is now too shady. I moved one to a sunnier position and will have to move the others as well. The plants need a sunny spot and so do the butterflies. They don’t like to feed in the shade. The bricks are to stop cats from digging too close to the plant and have the dual purpose of being convenient sunbeds for the butterflies.
And another Victorian fruit - the Victoria plum which tastes even better than it looks as long as the fruit is sufficiently thinned out. I don’t usually manage to do this, but this year the late frost meant that the tree didn’t produce such a heavy crop and the plums taste wonderful.
This is not really a fruit, just a seed case. If I am not careful we will end up with a forest of Chilean lantern trees.
And this is the downside of the wild angelica. These prolific seed heads need to be removed before too much of the seed drops.
PS A friend commented on our recent dishwasher saga and I sent her this reply “The dishwasher may (or may not) have recovered. It is working fine on the quick program now (fingers crossed, etc.) but I haven't got up the courage to try it on one of the other programs yet. I think its problems could have been caused by an air bubble in the system which interfered with the water supply. We did have a burst pipe in the glen a few days before the problems started and there was a lot of air in the pipes after that. Cleaning the in-line filters may have helped but I did get an error message on the eco program once after cleaning them. Then I tried the quick program and it worked - so I have kept on using it. I am rather paranoid about rinsing the dishes and they are virtually clean before they go in the dishwasher so the quick program is really all they need."
Stop Press: While I was compiling the post there was an ominous thud from the back of the house. There must have been a bird panic and a little siskin had flown into the dining room window. She was lying on her back and appeared to be lifeless but then I noticed one foot twitching. I picked her up and brought her inside to keep her warm.
She seemed to be recovering gradually so I took her out and put her in the mesh bowl on the bird feeder. I thought she might be less stressed with the other birds around. I keep going out to check on her and she is sitting up with her eyes open so it looks as though she should recover from the concussion.
Last Minute Update: Good news. The bowl is empty and there is no sign of the little bird on the ground so she must have lived to fly another day.
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