Autumn 5

To post or not to post . . . ?

Monday, 5th October, 2015.

It was one of those weeks when there didn’t seem to be much happening.  Well not much of interest anyway.  Perhaps a week’s silence would be preferable to boring waffle but it is a rainy Monday and waffling is more fun than doing housework.  If you don’t believe that gardening is a no-no today, here is the forecast “Strong winds with a risk of gales & heavy rain creating standing water in places“.

The garden is enjoying the rain.  It has been rather dry during the second half of September.  Tim heard on the regional news that last month was the second sunniest September on the Island since records began.  The sunniest September was back in 1991 - our first summer in the glen.

A more suitable title for this post could be “More of the Same” or simply “Ditto”.   Almost all of the gardening activity was a repeat of last week’s assault on the holly hedge.  I thought it would be a quick job to snip off the bits that I couldn’t reach from our side . . . then I hoped to finish by the end of September . . . but I ended up spending a few hours every day for ten days working on our neighbour’s side of the hedge.  

The final section was more like a holly thicket than a hedge. Even worse, it was a tangle of holly, bracken and brambles.   The only consolation was finding a few ripe blackberries.   Some of the holly stems were growing out at an angle and were so thick that I needed the electric saw to cut through them but I was determined to end up with something which was more or less the width of a normal hedge. It all looks rather bare now but holly shoots out vigorously after being pruned and it should look a lot greener in the spring.   I finished most of the pruning on Saturday, and on Sunday we cut up the last branches and took two car loads of holly out to the tip.  

The last bit (viewed from our side) - it doesn’t look much but it was the tip of a substantial iceberg.

The hedge has been tamed . . . all pruned down to a few inches above the wooden fence.

But it isn’t quite the end of the holly hedge saga.  The section in the front garden, which was cut  last autumn, still needs to be trimmed.  But it should be an easy task and can wait for a week or two..  

I think my next project will be to cut back the buddleia.  Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on the mainland) doesn’t approve of buddleia.  According to the BBC, “Defra says the highly-dispersible seed of what was originally a garden plant has resulted in extensive buddleia populations in the wild, where the shrub has often out-competed native vegetation and reduced biodiversity.

Gardeners are being asked by Defra to remove seed heads after flowering to prevent its spread before it becomes "ubiquitous".

The plant can cause damage to buildings, such as crumbling brickwork - its tiny wind-blown seeds can germinate in decaying mortar.”

It may be an invasive alien species - but I like to have it in the garden for the butterflies.  We have five bushes although I may remove one because it is growing in the shade and is ignored by the butterflies.  The usual advice is to prune buddleia in spring but that doesn’t work well in our garden because the winter gales tend to break off the long branches.  Our plants survive better if they are cut back before winter.  Early pruning also means that the seedheads are removed before they have a chance to ripen so there is no danger to the environment from my plants.  

Alien seedhead - preparing to invade!

The white buddleia which is more the size of a small tree than a shrub.  It would be impossible to reach the seedheads to cut them off before pruning . . . much better to do both at the same time.

There is a difference of opinions between some of our plants regarding the state of the seasons.  The azalea mollis has donned autumn colours before losing its leaves . . .

. . .but the roses refuse to believe that summer is over and have produced a late flush of flowers.

There is still some colour in the garden.  The colour of the hydrangea flowers becomes more intense as they age.  We usually say that old flowers are fading - but hydrangeas seem to unfade.

And the evergreen agapanthus, which usually refuses to flower, has three flowers this year.

The Japanese anemones are going over but there are still a few flowers on the deeper pink variety which usually gets overlooked because the dusky pink ones are much more vigorous.

And the tiny cyclamen are blushing almost unseen under the lilac.

Yesterday evening, when I was returning to the house after taking the photo of the buddleia and the “short back and sides” hedge, I noticed a strange moth feeding on the purple toadflax and centranthus.  My first thought was . . . hummingbird hawkmoth? - but it obviously wasn’t.  It was difficult to get a good photo because it kept flapping its wings while it was feeding and moved frequently from one flower to another.  It took me two days of searching on the internet and in my insect book until I discovered its identity.  I am almost certain that it is a Silver Y.  There are also two types of Golden Y but the colour of my moth looks too pale and the Silver Y is the only one, according to my book, which “continues to beat wings while feeding and appears as a grey blur”.  It is a migrant from the Mediterranean region and will have to return to warmer climes if it wants to survive the winter.

Some other internet research, which wasted even more time, started after one of my sessions of bird counting.  The title of a book that I read many years ago came into my mind while I was watching the birds dart around so fast that I couldn’t tell whether they were coming or going.  It was a book by Peter Tinniswood and was called “Except You’re a Bird”.  I vaguely remembered that the title was part of a quotation and resorted to the internet because I didn’t want to go up to the loft to sort through dusty boxes of books.  I found that the original quotation was by Sir Boyle Roche, an eighteenth century Irish politician - although Tinniswood apparently

mis-identified him in the book as Boyd Roche.  It is thought that Sir Boyle Roche may have been a model for Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop.  Anyway, Sir Boyle, who was excusing an absence in Parliament said “Mr Speaker, it is impossible I could have been in two places at once, unless I were a bird.”

The thought crossed my mind that the birds most likely to be in two places at once were my little favourites, the coal tits.

I carried on checking the quotation and discovered that it was a favourite example of “Irish Bull”.  I hadn’t come across this term before but found this explanation An Irish bull refers to a statement that defies logic or syntax in some manner, yet manages to be communicative. The word "Irish" was not always attached to utterances with apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes, but by the time Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth wrote her essay on Irish Bulls in 1802, the practice of declaring the bulls Irish was well established. One assumes that the Irish were targeted with prefixing bull due to their penchant to use colourful metaphors. The meaning of "bull" here is a "self-contradictory proposition," and the word may derive from the Old French boule or bole that referred to "deceit" or "fraud."

But that wasn’t the end of the story.  It turns out that the “unless I were a bird” quote by Sir Boyle is not an example of Irish Bull after all.  It was actually a quotation.  He was quoting from Thomas Jevon’s play The Devil of a Wife and the passage is:

Wife: I cannot be in two places at once.

Husband (Rowland): Surely no, unless thou wert a bird.

So it appears that there has been a long history of misquoting and mis-attribution of quotes although with the advent of the internet and the ubiquitous forwarded messages it has now been turned into an art form.  

A last thought on the subject.  It seems to have gone out of fashion in these politically correct times but I have a vague memory from the distant past of my mother saying “That sounds rather Irish” when I said something illogical.  In retrospect it occurs to me that it wasn’t very diplomatic of her because her mother in law’s father was Irish.

I missed seeing the blood moon last Monday morning.  We would only have seen the red colour after the eclipse (at about 4-30 in the morning) and I am almost certain that the moon would have been obscured by Skyhill by that time.  I would have set the alarm if I could have been sure to see it from the garden but it seemed too much of a hassle to get up and go out in the car.  Instead here is a photo of the morning star.  I was quite proud to get a circular image with a handheld camera.  Last time I tried to photograph this star it looked like a white tadpole.

And here is yet another sunrise, maybe the last.  I think I shall have to give up taking sunrise photos.  Both my daughters have posted sunrise/sunset photos on their Facebook pages recently - and they are far more spectacular than my photos.