Diary entries

27th August 2013
Another hot day. Freak British weather which cannot last.
It’s probably too hot to work in the garden. Solution? Find a shady spot to tend. There are plenty of such places in the jungle. Resort to attacking bracken (yes, I’m ashamed to tell you that there is bracken growing in the jungle), brambles and dratted ground elder by the stone wall.
Decide to break for lunch after only a short spell of this, preferring to eat homemade bread and blackberry jam instead. No staying power! The blackberries incidentally were picked by the handful from a housing estate in Didcot, underneath the shadows of the iconic power station cooling towers.. They grew in profusion, lush and juicy yet there was very little sign of anybody else trying to plunder this cache of autumnal fruits.
Whilst munching though my bread and jam I survey the jungle. Do I try and tame it in a very much cultivated way, or let the jungle have a say in what goes where?

Take the rose bay willow herb, for example. Each year it sprouts its violet pink spears from within the marguerite daisies. Each year I attempt to pull it out, concerned that it will take over that section of the garden and yet…on a warm sunny day, it does look quite elegant, it’s fluffy seeds gently floating on the breeze.

A profusion of seeds floating on the breeze.

I’m not sure whether to curtail the rose bay  or let it happen.

(one hour later)

I have just returned from the village shop and spotted plants for sale in aid of Gwent Wildlife Trust, all for 50p.  Remind self to  join them… Then I buy a sage plant to replaced the one I bought just a few weeks ago which sadly died whilst waiting to be planted out. I tried resuscitating it but I think it was drowned by too much water. I marvel at the value of buying a small bay tree sapling for the same price.  Should I create a dedicated herbal area in the jungle, or try and find a site which I think the plants might enjoy and then forget where I put them?

The bay sapling is part of a bigger project.  There is a healthy and vigorous growing bay bush directly in front of the kitchen window but it has been suggested by my other half that it blocks all potential views of the jungle and needs to be moved.  Yet if I do this the bush will surely die?  It lives quite happily with a Wisteria which is part of the same problem. I daren’t move them.  Can I move them?