Head Gardener's Diary - February
It has felt positively spring-like these past few days. The milder weather is causing everything to shoot and as I wander round the garden I notice changes every day now. The most noticeable is probably the Orchard where all the spring bulbs are through. The snowdrops started to flower before the snow but were stopped by the cold weather for a couple of weeks, they are now flowering fully. The Narcissus covering the rest of the area are all now showing as green shoots getting taller day by day and many of them also have buds showing.
We haven’t done much in the new woods this year apart from clearing brambles and taking a few cherries down. A group of students are due to come out in April to do some clearing so our intention is to fell a few trees now - cherries, birches and pines mostly - in each of the wooded areas and they can cut them up and stack them to form “wildlife shelters” then. We can’t wait until April to do the felling as most birds will be nesting by then. Hopefully they will nest in the bird boxes which have been placed on a lot of the trees around the Garden by Environmental Biology students. They have also been surveying the garden wildlife again and additionally to last years impressive list have also included a nuthatch and a sparrow-hawk, field and bank voles.
As we haven’t been in the woods very much we have spent the time having a good clear out through the borders and cutting back areas which have not been touched for a while. By January we had got as far as the pond and we have now reached the end of the Autumn bank. I have a mountain of material to put through our chipper/shredder and at the moment I am just spreading this back over the areas we have cleared as a mulch. This is fairly satisfactory but as the shrubs all have different coloured wood it is creating a multicoloured carpet rather than a uniform mulch! We have also ‘pruned’ the Gold Garden to give some of the more interesting specimens, such as the golden pine, more space to flourish.
The volunteer “Friends” have been busy weeding and forking through the mixed border, stream and Digitalis areas. We have started mulching the Digitalis groups which have been weeded through, to make them stand out more. The new green(?) labels have arrived for the Digitalis collection and we will hopefully have them all printed by the first Open Day in April. I want everyone to know that I didn’t choose the colour and when they arrived asked if they could be changed, but apparently they have been cut to size for us so we are going to have to use them.
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