Another tree bites the dust
On my curse of autumn falling trees, and how this one has unleashed an ornamental grass obsession.
August is a funny old time. After the madness of early summer (I’ve come to realise, for professional gardeners, April through to June is a mad whirl of garden shows and very heavy lifting) I was fully prepared to have a ‘relaxing’ few weeks balancing the six week summer holidays with my part time historic garden summer job. I forgot, in the madness of June, that six weeks of kids being off school is relentless, and expensive, and that no amount of snacks in the known universe would ever be enough to last until the next supermarket run.
We endured a week in the rain in Norfolk (that’s right, the only week it rained all summer) before returning home to juggle days at work and days with the kids and put in place time limits on YouTube (why do they want to watch other people playing Minecraft? Why??) My patience was doing ok. September was on the horizon and with it, five minutes of peace and some time to dig up some more lawn.
And then, with September just around the corner, another bloody tree fell down. Last year, it was the wet that killed off the laburnum. This year, I can only conclude it was the drought. And this wasn’t really a tree, at least not a discernible one; it had been swallowed by ivy so many years ago that it was really a huge ivy bush on a very thick stick, and while I regularly snipped berries off for Christmas wreaths, this doesn’t seem to have been enough to relieve the pressure.
Unlike last year’s conundrum, this tree had decided to fall not just into our garden but into the one at the end of ours, forcing us to awkwardly make friends with neighbours on another road who we had never spoken to before* to apologise for wrecking the fence and knocking down half of their laburnum hedge**.
To my shame, we opted for the guy who lives on our road who claims to be able to do ‘anything really - building, landscaping, clearance’ because he was the cheapest, claimed he’d bring a chipper, and had me dreaming of all the lovely woodchip I’d be able to use afterwards.
Reader, when the day to clear arrived, two blokes turned up with fags hanging out of their mouths, an hour late, and took another hour to park the van ‘because it’s harder to do when the wing mirror is smashed’. A full day later, the tree was still firmly lodged between our garden and the neighbours’. It took two full days for them to shift it, leaving us with a completely wrecked bottom of the garden and still various bits of ivy and tree lying all over the place. All of this would be a whole lot more manageable if my local authority hadn’t stopped collecting green waste last year because of a bin strike that still shows no sign of resolution. So now, for the second year in a row, I have a huge mess to look at and the garden which I have so tenderly been developing is now overshadowed by a whacking great hole in the fence.
However. I know that this mishap will eventually be the start of something new, and hopefully beautiful. Last year, when the tree fell down, I stared at it for quite some time and eventually decided that I would chop it up and turn it into a show garden.
I don’t think I have the emotional energy to attempt the same feat two years running but, necessity being the mother of invention, the disappearance of the tree has freed up quite a lot of rather ugly, exposed space which now, with no budget but a lot of imagination and a minor investment in a load of plants, I will have to turn into a garden.
The gap where the tree used to be has revealed a 2m square raised bed which is full sun until about 3pm. Half of it is, of course, smothered in weed membrane and gravel (the previous owner was a fan of keeping plants out and plastic in) so I will be removing the membrane, and finding a home for the gravel elsewhere.
Of course, with the kids back at school, I’ve immediately come down with a massive cold so instead of getting my hands dirty and my back sore I have been spending a lot of time in the bath poring over books about grass. I managed to find a copy of the wonderful Designing with Grasses by Neil Lucas, owner of Knoll Gardens, second hand at World of Books and have been pretty much obsessed with it ever since.
I have made a moodboard of the possibilities - giant Miscanthus, Panicum and a swaying sea of Hakonechloa. But which to choose? I think all of them.
As with all my mad garden projects, I promise to keep you posted but in the meantime, I need to go and get some new fence panels.
Gah! We've had the hassle of dealing with massive fallen trees before, which fortunately came down our side of the fence. Expensive business!
You are the right person to deal with a new empty space in the garden, though! Good luck, Alex!
Grasses are incredibly easy to split. So instead of buying them, first try to wring peaces of them out of the hands of garden owners. It’s the season and just say to them that their borders are getting clogged. Okay now I’m being to Dutch probably. Anyway good story with all the gardening and social drama in just the right amount. It’s recognizable and funny (for us readers) thanks Alex🙏🏻