3 March: some trimming and some telly

Wednesday, 3 March 2021

at home

We woke up at the usual time on day one after the Pfizer Covid jab. I have felt no particular side effects as I write this 27 hours after the jab. I’m a little tired but that could just be normal 66 year old tiredness. Allan has a sore arm and feels achy but has been puttering, vacuuming the house and fixing a pipe under a sink. The sun was rather faint today so I felt it was safe enough to do some gardening.

I decided to finally cut down my own ornamental grasses in the bed that runs along Alicia’s house and our garage.

The end result looked better when Allan blew off Alicia’s driveway.

I made my way through the gardens front and back trimming epimediums and sword ferns and just letting the debris stay…because I must admit my energy for clean up was low. I was thrilled to find that I do have a deer fern hidden away in a corner of the front garden. I’ve been brooding about not having one.

Have a look at this black on black hellebore (and please ignore the accursed celandine).

I only had my phone with me for photos.

More hellebores

and an early tulip

We had lost our mermaid birdbath under a rampant Helichrysum petiolare.

It came out of a pail that I found a couple of years ago, dry and discarded with just a few leaves alive, and put in the garden to see if it would revive.

I’d like switch the mermaid birdbath with the one by the greenhouse so that it shows better.

As I made my way through the Bogsy Wood clipping ferns, I wondered why two big branches were lying by the salmon berry tunnel, right where I have a fuchsia start to plant.

I put them back where I want a twiggy fence look. I am using scraps of old string to tie them on, clearly not strong enough.

These primroses have been blooming for over a month.

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Narcissi by the fire circle.

Crocuses in the center bed

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Allan’s garden

I was glad to get indoors to watch (as soon as I finish writing this) more episodes of the gardening show Recreating Eden.

Several years ago, I read about a superb Canadian gardening show that at the time, I couldn’t find anywhere. All I wrote on my list of gardening shows was “find the Canadian one”. It wasn’t David Tarrant’s Canadian Gardener show, which I used to watch on telly in Seattle.

I easily found the title and then found a multitude of 22 minute long episodes on YouTube.

The first episode is about Sandra and Nori Pope and their garden at Hadspen Court and includes interviews with Penelope Hobhouse, the former garden there.

It saddened me to learn that Nori, in his later years back in Canada, suffered from dementia and had recently died. What happened to the garden also made me sad, but I’m still delighted to have watched the show.

From episode four, I learned about two Canadian poets and gardeners and a battle with addiction. The story of alcoholism and of finding bottles in the garden when one’s partner says they aren’t drinking was familiar to me from two decades ago. Because the show is almost 20 years old, again I found that the gardener who had bested his addiction had recently died. His wife wrote this beautiful essay since then. I will be reading her memoir.

The fifth episode thrilled me; it’s about Des Kennedy, author of one of my favorite gardening memoirs, the very funny Crazy About Gardening. I did not know he was a bright and glowing ginger and an environmental activist, nor did I know he has at least two books that I haven’t read.

What an enormous treat that is. The minute I get this post proofread, I am on to episode six.