Summer Solstice

     A sunny afternoon in Shropshire, and I've been sitting admiring the plethora of flowers on the honeysuckle trailing across the bower at the end of the garden. The fine display possibly being a result of an abundance of rainfall. Something which honeysuckles revel in.
    Of course, to bring out what many people consider to be the best feature of those flowers, a heavenly scent intended to attract the moths which have to seek them out to fertilise them at night, warm and balmy evenings are also called for, and they have been decidedly lacking this year. So, unfortunately, has the scent.
    If left to their own devices, as I've seen happen in more than one park, honeysuckles grow and grow, covering anything available for them to twine their way through, until their centres eventually become choked with dead growth, and require a great deal of remedial work to bring them back under control. Much better to prune those honeysuckles such as Lonicera periclymenum, common honeysuckle, which flower early in the season, back by a third immediately after flowering, and the later flowering types such as Lonicera japonica, Japanese honeysuckle, which flower on current year's growth, by simply trimming back any over long shoots in spring.
    Where we were staying in Spain last year they had made a hedge out of honeysuckles and had obviously cut it with hedgecutters as if it was a hedge. It had grown into a very effective barrier as a result of that treatment, but I don't know that it's a management regime I would risk trying out on my plants at home.
     In the garden, from now until long after the honeysuckle's flowering season has passed, look out for one of the Crane's Bills, Geranium endressii 'Wargrave Pink', a semi evergreen perennial with small, lobed leaves and cup-shaped rose-pink flowers borne throughout the summer.

Winter weather lingers on through April

   A day of heavy showers and wild winds in Shropshire, as the weather makes a mockery of the fact that this part of the country is officially considered to be suffering a drought. And so cold too! There have been as many night time frosts in April as there were in March, but with much lower day time temperatures than there were at the end of that month. No wonder seeds are struggling to germinate in the garden. The ground is simply too cold for them to grow.
    I've just been replacing the fibreglass tubs on my patio, which succombed to the extreme frosts of the past two winters. The half whisky barrels I've replaced them with might not look as good, but they ought to last longer.
    One of the advantages of raised beds of any sort is that they bring the garden to a height that is more workable for those amongst us who find it difficult  to stoop or bend over to a flat garden bed. Another advantage is that the soil in them tends to warm up more quickly, so seed sown in them germinates earlier in the season than seed sown in the garden around. Use of a light, well drained compost in the container adds to this quality, but its benefit is offset by the fact that containers, getting sun, heat and wind coming at them from all sides as they do, tend to dry out more speedily in consequence. Plants grown in them need to be watered more often as a result and, because more frequent watering leads to nutrients being leached from the soil with more frequency, more feeding too.
    In the garden look out for the locket-like pink and white flowers arching above deeply incised foliage of Dicentra spectabilis "Bleeding Heart" or "Dutchman's Breeches" which may be brightening up a container near you from May to July, if the weather ever warms up enough to allow it.

Patron Saints

   A pleasantly sunny day in Shropshire, and I’ve just been out in the garden enjoying the peace and quiet of a Sunday afternoon.

   Listening to all that was being said about it being St Patricks Day last weekend set me thinking about another Irish patron saint who gets very little recognition of any sort these days. Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners.

   Fiacre was born in Ireland during the latter part of the seventh century, and brought up in a monastery, where he specialised in the study of healing herbs before going off to France to set up a hermitage there.

    He asked the Bishop of Meaux for land for a garden where he could grow food and healing herbs for his followers, and was told he could have as much land as he could surround by a furrow in one day. The Bishop, of course, had expected Fiacre to use a plough, but the wily horticulturalist used the tip of his staff instead, and in that way was able to outline a far bigger plot for his purposes. The garden thus enclosed, became a place of pilgrimage for centuries for those seeking healing.

   Rather unexpectedly, Fiacre is also patron saint of haemorrhoids, making him doubly useful for gardeners who spent too much time sitting on the cold stone seats which used to be found in parks and gardens in days gone by.

   In the garden, if it isn’t too uncomfortable for you to walk there, look out for the large bright blue flowers, and glossy dark green leaves carried on trailing stems, of Vinca Major, the Greater Periwinkle, still used as a topical treatment for haemorrhoids to this day. 

Winter's Ending?

  Winter, which seemed to be slipping by quietly and peacefully, as if apologising for the bitter weather we've had to put up with for the last two years, has turned suddenly and unexpectedly to snow, as if to remind us that it is still only January as yet, and time for  a lot more wintery weather before spring eventually arrives.  

    Mind, turning as it has just before February 2nd, which is Candlemas, or Imbolc, depending on your beliefs, when nature begins to awaken from her winter's sleep, might be a good thing because, as the old rhyme tells us, if Candlemas brings snow and rain, winter is gone and won't come again. If Candlemas be clear and bright, winter will have another flight.

   A good thing I got on with digging compost into my garden whilst the weather still mild and dry enough to do it.

  Compost made from rotted down leaves and vegetable matter you've gathered in your garden is an example of what used to be known as bulky organic fertilizer when I was a young gardener. Farmyard manure or stable manure were the best if you could get them. Circus manure was better avoided, especially elephant dung. That was so acidic nothing would grow in it, and the mountain of the stuff we collected one winter from a circus appearing on a nearby common remained mouldering an unuseable in a corner of the yard for years.

     Plants need adequate amounts of sixteen essential elements if they are to flourish. All of the elements, apart from carbon and oxygen, have to be absorbed from the soil. In the days before compound fertilizers made everything much less hit and miss nitrogen could be added by digging in shoddy (a by-product of woollen and textile factories), bone meal or hoof and horn, all of which contained anything from 1% to 12% of the element though, in those days, the latter two sometimes also carried the threat of the user contracting anthrax from them as a bonus. Phosphorus could be added by digging in basic slag. Not the body of a low life character done away with in an episode of The Bill in the days when it was still on, but a by-product from the steel industry containing anything from 10% – 19% of phosphorus.

     In the garden, beyond the compost heap you hope won't wear its covering of snow for long, look out for Viburnum tinus (Laurustinus), a bushy evergreen shrub bearing flat heads of small, white flowers opening from pink buds during late winter and early spring.

Twelfth Night

    A pouring wet day in Shropshire, as the weather continues to make up for all those dry days in early autumn by raining incessantly from dawn to dusk. Despite that, however, I'm not sure the amount we've had so far has been enough to raise ground water levels to what they ought to be.

     It's certainly been a milder winter so far than last year's was. And no need yet to "look to your stored fruit" as The English Husbandman  advised its readers to do during frosty weather in 1635. Adding that, covering their apples all over with fine hay, barley chaff, or salt, would serve readers better than hanging the apples in nets in warm air, which would "render them dry and withered".  For myself, I find that wrapping apples in sheets of newspaper, and placing them in shallow trays, as the Royal Horticultural Society's Fruit Garden Displayed advices, keeps those I've harvested edible well into the New Year.

     The RHS, of course, confines itself to practical gardening, so doesn't give any advice on whether or not there is any point in wassailing your apple trees on Twelfth Night in order to increase their crop.

     It is a practice dating back at least to the Vikings, by way of the Saxons. Was Hail, in their language, meaning Good Health. Wishes which were directed at both the apple trees and the cider drinkers.

     Details of how the wassailing was actually carried out varied from region to region around the country, but it generally involved placing toast soaked in cider in the fork of each tree, pouring a libation of cider around its trunk, and directing a loud noise of some sort into the tree's branches by means of a gun, a firework, or banging on a can, to awaken the spirit of the tree from its winter slumber.

     In the garden, quietly, so as not to awaken the tree if you're doing it before Twelfth Night, look out for the showy scarlet fruit of Malus x robusta, one of the flowering Crab Apples, which has attractive pink and white blossom in April, and keeps its crabs dangling on long stalks until February and beyond.

                   Photograph Malus x robusta Red Sentinel  Rasbak at nl.wikipedia

Season of good will

    Picking apples a few weeks ago I noticed that an old cider apple tree, which invariably puts the other  trees in my garden to shame by the size of the crop it bears, was sprouting growths of mistletoe on some of its branches.

    When I was young having a sprig of mistletoe hanging up in your house at Christmas was as essential a part of the yuletide decorations as the tree itself, and although people don't really need a sprig of it hanging from the ceiling to give them the excuse to kiss friends, neighbours, colleagues, and anyone else they might not get away with kissing under any other circumstances anymore, it's still a big enough part of a lot of people's yuletide celebrations for there to be a market held in Worcestershire every year where they sell nothing but mistletoe.

     The ancient Celts called mistletoe All-heal,and believed that the leafy green growths and viscous white berries of clumps of mistletoe were potent symbols of fertility and everlasting life when seen in winter, growing on the naked branches of deciduous trees which had lost their own leaves in autumn. Especially if that tree was an oak tree.

    To the Celts mistletoe was symbolically related to male sperm by its colour and by the consistency of the juice of its berries. Being airborne for its entire life cycle - the seeds are lodged in cracks and crevices of the branches of potential hosts by birds cleaning their beaks of the tacky pulp after eating berries - the plant also symbolised a god not yet incarnate on earth. The harvesting of it representing the union between male and female principles as well as those of the sun and moon.

    They were not beliefs shared by the Germanic people the  Celts were frequently at war with. They regarded mistletoe in a much less favourable light. According to  norse mythology Frigg, wife of Odin, chief of the gods,  had been so fearful for the safety of her son, Balder, that she rendered him impervious to wounds by taking pledges from all the plants, trees and metals he might come into contact with that they wouldn't harm him if turned into weapons of war.

    One plant she had overlooked, however. Something which didn't go unnoticed by another god, Loki, who was always out to make trouble whenever he could. He fashioned a dart from a sprig of mistletoe, then suggested to Balder's brother, the blind god Holder, that he threw it at Balder in sport.

     The gods enjoyed throwing weapons at Balder because they knew he couldn't be harmed by them, but the mistletoe pieced Balder like a spear and he fell down dead.

     So if the person who's trying to kiss you under the mistletoe at the office party looks more as if their ancestors might have beenVikings than Celts, perhaps it would be best to give it a miss.

(Photograph - mistletoe in silver birch, taken by Andrew Dunn. Published by Wikipedia)