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Gardener's Diary - March
Things are starting to get a bit busier now, the herbaceous
plants are all showing through the soil and the trees are flowering
and coming in to leaf. There are some early flowers on a couple
of the Japanese cherries and many of the narcissus which have
looked stunning on the meadow this year are already going over.
It’s been quite useful to have some early frosts as
the ground had been hard and enabled us to drive the tractor
and trailer across the garden, so we have moved most of the
largest piles of chippings. There are a few smaller piles dotted
around but they will be moved shortly. We have put a lot of
chippings in the jungle which has made a nice soft and springy
path through there. We need about one more load of chippings
to finish that off.
A group of the Friends have finished weeding the Digitalis
and hope to get them all mulched soon. This will make them more
obvious amongst the other plants. We have also started mowing.
All areas have been cut with the ride-on mowers and the smaller
paths with a rotary mower. We will hopefully get some stripes
on the grass by using the cylinder mower in the formal areas
before the Open Day on April 13th, and have already started
edging and tidying up for that.
Finally, we had some unusual visitors on March 10th - a group
of wolves! They were part of a course on Exploitation arranged
by Dr. Paul Hatcher and the event was attended by approximately
100 students, who came out into the Harris Garden to meet our
visitors. The woman in charge gave a lecture of approx. 1 hour
to the students first and then they were split into 3 groups
so they could all see more easily and also so they didn't overwhelm
the wolves. She gave a 20 minute talk to each group individually
about the wolves which were there. The wolves are kept over
at Beenham; my colleague told me they take them out for "walks"
in the woods over there (I saw them on the Englefield Estate
one day when I was out for a walk). Each "pack" is
3 dogs so that was the maximum we were expecting, but it depends
on the number of handlers they have as to how many wolves they
bring (2 per wolf!). They brought 2 on the day and the weather
was awful, so they showed them to the first group under the
covered area where they do the teas on Open Days, then took
them round into the garden when it stopped raining. The weather
was foul. It was very wet and windy all over the country so
we got off comparatively lightly here. The wolves seemed to
enjoy the Garden and even found some fox droppings which they
took great delight in rolling around in!!!
Julia Wesley |
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