Weeds...

One of the advantages of balcony gardening is that you don't get weeds. Not having a garden means that, of necessity you're using bought - and sterilised - compost, and though the odd thing will float in on the wind, it's relatively rare. Tip the soil into your container, pop in your plants, and that's it for the season. So you get to be a bit ingenuous about weeds ...

One of the jobs I worked hardest on when I was in London in July and August was clearing and replanting the flowerbeds - I found them completely overgrown with grass and borage. I didn't even think of it as "weeding". The beds just had to be completely dug over and everything pulled out.

And then, I started planting. Bulbs galore went in, but I also scoured the local garden centres for special offers, so that I could get as much planted as possible on a budget that was rapidly being eaten up by the repairs that needed doing on the house.

So when I left at the end of August, the beds were looking - well, a bit bare, but I hoped the bulbs would take care of that. And there were new roses, pansies, lavender bushes and other things dotted around.

Two weeks later I was back. And walked into a sea of green - which certainly had nothing to do with the bulbs. The garden was covered with one particular weed, which try as I might I can't find the name of (?). I can't say I wasn't expecting it - but the speed with which it had sprung up was incredible. Plant seeds that you want to have in the garden, and after two weeks they're only just thinking of germinating. But these had just yelled Yippee! Bare soil and sprung up in their thousands. Helped along, of course, by a bit of grass and an entirely new crop of borage.

Luckily, they're a weed which is very easily dealt with. Grab a handful and pull, or hoe. They come out with no problem. So a few hours of hard work later, the beds were looking bare but pristine again. And even more luckily, they'd not had time to seed. I'm hoping that all the seeds that my August digging had brought to the surface had germinated immediately, so that I was able to get the lot in one fell swoop.

I can hear you laughing hysterically from here. No, I don't really believe it either. I'll be back in London in a few weeks time, and I'm sure I'll find the beds covered again. But if I get rid of that lot, and the next ones that come up are killed off by the winter weather, then maybe by next year things will be better. Please ...?

Berries

When I left England, there wasn't much in flower in the garden but it was full of berries. Red ones, orange ones, purple ones and white ones .... everywhere you turned there was a mass of colour. Folklore would have it that an abundance of berries in autumn heralds a hard winter, and if my garden is anything to go by, it's going to be a tough one ...

The purple ones were the elderberries. Strictly speaking these aren't in my garden, as the tree is actually in the park behind. But the branches have spread over my fence. In the spring the flowers must have been wonderful, and now there's a mass of berries. If I were there permanently, I'd have used them to make wine ... or a pie ... or a sauce. Just google elderberries recipe and see what comes up. I rather liked the look of this one from The Times Online.


Sadly, the elderberry tree is leaning on the fence so heavily that it's bringing the fence down, and I've had to ask the council to lop it. I did ask them to take away the minimum possible though ...


Then there are the snowberries. Snowberry is a scrubby little bush which has the extremely inflated name of Symphoricarpos albus - always sounds like something out of Harry Potter to me. Not a shrub I'd really recommend - invasive, and the leaves and small pink flowers are not desperately attractive. But the berries are nice in autumn. Mine self seeded years ago, and for years I toiled away trying to dig it up. But it always sprang straight back and in the end I gave up. However, it does have the virtue that it's just about the only thing which will grow in the shade of the cotoneaster tree.



Not sure what variety this is, and can't for the life of me remember what its flowers are like. Sadly, I've not seen the garden in spring for over twenty five years. But it's always covered in berries in the autumn.

There's another cotoneaster in the garden as well - cotoneaster horizontalis - a much smaller shrub, but if possible with even more berries.

Cotoneaster is a word I have a mental block about. I have to look it up every single time I want to talk about the plant. It's odd, because that it's not that I don't know what the plant itself is - I do. But the name that always comes to mind is pyrocantha, despite the fact that I know perfectly well that it's not. So that's what I tend to call it to myself : the not-pyrocantha plant.

I do have a real pyrocantha though as part of my front hedge, currently covered in yellowy-orange berries.

I curse it all summer when I have to cut the hedge - it's full of thorns which get through even the thickest gardening gloves. But the show in autumn makes it worthwhile.

So - if we are in for a hard winter, at least the birds will have something to eat. If you're trying to grow a wildlife garden, they're all plants to include. Different species feed off them all - though snowberries (which are poisonous to humans incidentally) are preferred by pheasants, grouse and other similar species. Not many of them in a London garden. But blackbirds are supposed to love the pyrocantha berries and the elderberries and cotoneaster seem generally popular. At the moment, with food abundant, they're being ignored. But once the fruit trees are bare, and there are fewer seeds and insects around, the situation will change. In particular, I suspect we'll soon be a favourite haunt of the rose-ringed parakeets.

Bright Spots in the Garden

I've been back in England for a week, thinking that we might finally get the finishing touches put to the house and get it ready for letting again. But it seems that every time we do one thing, another ten problems arise - and rather than finish off decorating the bathroom this week, we've had to strip it down to the bricks and start again. So I'm going to be coming back and forth for most of the autumn ..

But if the house is still a disaster, the good weather this week has given me time to get on with the garden, and it is very gradually coming into shape. But despite the jungle that I found in July, it wasn't all doom and gloom, even at the start. There were a number of plants which hadn't completely succumbed to neglect and were bravely flowering on, against the odds. Like the roses which, despite being covered in black spot, continued to put out the odd flower.

Then there was the hebe bush. It was already past its best when I got back in mid-July, but you could still see how glorious it had been. The bush self-seeded several years ago, in another part of the garden where I didn't want it. I transferred it when it was a tiny little twig, not sure if it would take. It's now five foot high and four foot wide, and was covered in blooms, much to the delight of the local butterflies.

Another bush of about the same size was the fuchsia by the front gate. It's been there for as long as I remember - at least thirty years, possibly longer. It's not my favourite fuchsia variety, but what it lacks in the quality of the blooms, it certainly makes up for in quantity.

A number of plants had self-seeded in awkward places, but were doing the best they could. These sweet peas had grabbed hold of the conifer to support them ...



while the cracks in the paths had provided a home for the alyssum.




Add to that the hydrangeas which I've already posted about, and there was at least a bit of relief from the weeds. More colour was provided by the berries, which are now glorious - but I'm going to save that for another post.