Mar 11th 2005 - Well, I'm glad that's over with...
The exam is over, at last. What a relief. I haven’t done a formal exam for nearly 20 years and was horribly nervous about it. I wasn’t alone either; meeting up with the other class members outside the room, everyone seemed jittery. One or two complained of tummy upsets and everyone looked tired. There were even a couple of tears from one lady. You might have thought that as the average age of course members is 44, we might have been more composed but we weren’t.
"...I find that I have a long list of plant names scrolling through my mind."
Now that there is no more revision to do, I find that I have a long list of plant names scrolling through my mind, which now has no where to go. If the names stay there it’ll certainly be useful but at the moment it’s a bit irritating, like having a jingly tune stuck in your mind.
Tunes and plant names leads me to something I’ve been thinking about as far as learning goes. The RHS insists on botanical names, which seems very right and proper because so many common names apply to many plants, which can only lead to confusion.
Learning them does get easier as you get used to it, especially when the names are descriptive in some way, such as when they include descriptive words like ‘repens’ (creeping) or ‘spinosus’ (spiny). Learning a great many of them can be quite demanding, however, and I sought to find a method that would help.
It came about by a lucky chance; some names are tricky to pronounce and I’d started saying them slowly, syllable by syllable. This led me repeating the names over and over until I could say it. The name would then repeatedly pop into my mind unannounced, sometimes as many as 30 times a day.
Then it occurred to me that the way I was repeating the names was very similar to a chant, little song-like phrases. ‘Koelreuteria panniculata’ became ‘Ko-el-reut-er-i-a pann-ic-u-la-ta’. It sounds a bit silly, maybe pompous, if you do it out loud but it made it far easier to really articulate the words than simply muttering at speed through the lists.
I was quite pleased with myself for learning all these names and was expecting to have to use plenty of them in the exam, but very few were called for. There was only one question, as far as I can remember, that asked for a list of names and then only four were required. I’d been swotting up on some of the long ones, the ones that have ‘subsp.’ and ‘var.’ in them and contain five words, like Molinia caerulea subsp. caerulea 'Variegata' or Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii 'Goldsturm', It was ever so slightly disappointing; I could have shown off.
"..The recent cold spell has checked the spring flowerers a little, but little patches of colour are starting to appear."
So, to the garden. The recent cold spell has checked the spring flowerers a little, but little patches of colour are starting to appear. The Iris reticulata ‘Harmony’ bulbs that went in last autumn have nearly all opened and look so pretty. They are short plants, no more than about 10cm high, and have rich purple petals, above straight green leaves, with patches of bright yellow towards the throat. Some are growing outside the front door and some under the Rowan tree. You can’t help but smile at them.
The Eranthis hyemalis that went in about 12 months ago has also reappeared. I thought it was a goner but a tight little posy of yellow cup-shaped flowers has opened, looking very bright against the dark soil. I may move it to join the other early flowerers under the apple tree. If it goes in amongst the snowdrops it’ll be far enough from the pink Cyclamen coum not to look garish.
This Thursday – the 10th of March - was dry all day and so the lawn had its first cut of the year. So good to get outside again! Last year’s first cut was on the 30th of March so we’re a full 20 days early. I shouldn’t really call it a lawn. A lawn is an area of neatly kept grass and, as a neighbour recently commented, ours has been looking “a bit rugged” with tufts of grass at different lengths and rather a lot of clover. The clover is fine, the bees love it, it’s green and doesn’t have the same care requirements as grass.
What troubles me is the amount of moss that has grown over the winter. There is currently more moss than grass and this year it must be attended to, there is no getting away from it. I’ve been ignoring it for three years so it’s my own fault. There were all those borders to shape and plant, so much space to fill, that it got pushed to the background and has been sadly neglected.
Last year we got away with regular cutting and keeping the edges neat so it looked okay, if not all one shade of green. When I cut it yesterday I was shocked at the amount of moss; there seems to be a good deal more than at the beginning of winter. So, what to do?
"...This will strengthen the grass and reduce the vigour of the moss, which isn’t so keen on the higher nutrient level. "
The first thing is to remove some of the moss and any thatch that has built up. I can get stuck in with a spring-tined rake or borrow the neighbour’s scarifier and get it up that way. The scarifier is tempting but after all the hours of sitting revising I could do with the exercise. From the areas of lawn that we’ve removed so far, I suspect that the drainage may not be very good, as a lot of builder’s rubble has been buried in the past, so I’ll go over the whole lot and aerate it with a garden fork.
Once that’s done, it will need feeding with a specialised lawn food based on nitrogen. This will strengthen the grass and reduce the vigour of the moss, which isn’t so keen on the higher nutrient level. I’ve also noticed patches of Achillea coming up, which is another sign of a hungry lawn, so it really does need doing. After that, I think that quite a lot of reseeding will need to be done.
Last year we noticed that bits of moss had been flung onto the soil during lawn cutting and had started spreading there. Karl bought one of those flame thrower weed guns last year and I tried passing the flame over the moss, hoping to kill the spores and stop it growing any more. Comparing the amount of moss in the grass with what grows in the borders it seems to work pretty well and is definitely worth another go this year. The narrow flame is easy to direct, if you’re careful, and you can avoid setting fire to any prized plants.
The flame also works well to control the most pernicious weed in the garden, which I believe is Oxalis corniculata – a small, bronze-leaved oxalis with tiny yellow flowers, it seeds itself very fast and quickly forms a dense mat over any free surface. On a dry day a quick blast of fire will shrivel it right up and it won’t come back for some time. I have a fond hope that one day we’ll get rid of it all together.
"...Suddenly a strange robin appeared and the two residents put on a fine display of posturing"
More on the robins – sadly, the original resident robin has disappeared. Its mate was alone and rather confused looking for a few days until we noticed that a new robin had appeared to accompany her. We saw them out of the kitchen window one day, sitting together on the log pile, where they spend a surprising amount of time. Suddenly a strange robin appeared and the two residents put on a fine display of posturing, stretching their necks up to show their red breasts and swaying slowly from side to side.
The posturee just sat there not doing anything and eventually flew away. A neighbour told me that only male robins posture and that the robin being postured at was the female, who was waiting to see what happened, but since these two were standing side by side and both posturing towards the strange robin, I have to dispute this.
Karl has made and put up a sparrow terrace to make up for some mortar that we filled in under the tiles, where birds have nested in previous years. I don’t know if any will make a home in it this year, but we are hoping that they do.
© Copyright Miranda Hodgson 2005