Horticultural hupdate

We mangled the garden good and proper this weekend, wreaking devastation on the buddleia in particular, in an attempt to get some light and water to the laburnum and the recently planted blackcurrant. We’re going to have to keep an eye on that buddleia, since the brutes are like horticultural hydra and the more you cut them back, the thicker they grow back. Unless, of course, you dig the brutes up in their entirety and we don’t want to do that. We are trying to foster a habitat that supports bees and they love the bud.

A secondary outcome of the massive pruning is the amount of light that is now getting to the middle and lower beds in the garden. We planted a couple of rows of shallots and red onions. Hopefully they will come on while the buddleia is licking its wounds, before it goes all Lost World on us again in the spring (assuming average amounts of rainfall and such).

I also re-threaded the vine on the front wall. The high winds of a few weeks ago brought it down but didn’t kill it. My attempts to put it back in place are a bit makeshift since most of the ties have worn through, but I can sort that out separately, once I’ve worked out what I need to tie it all off properly. A quick trim of the rosemary bush out front also means that people can walk down the street without ducking again. Should have done that weeks ago really, but hey.

I suspect that over the next few weeks we are going to have to try and find some winter flowering shrubs to stop the garden looking too dreary and sombre in the coming months. We have huge wads of daffodil and tulip bulbs out there, but need something to beautify the bare beds between now and spring, when we should have a riot of colour again.

Fingers crossed that nosey foxes don’t start digging everything up in the hopes that we have buried bones.

History Bluff

It occurs to me that while I have a reasonable acquaintance with English history, my knowledge of the past in Scotland, Wales and Ireland is defined only by how it intersects with England.

So: you’re an edumacated lot out there; recommendations would be appreciated for good books on the other three portions of our British Isles (by which I mean the geographical, not them political entity). I only ask that they are readable. Far too may historians manage to suck the joy out of their subject by making it drier than a pharaoh’s sock.

Vielen Dank.