It is now Thursday morning, and all the bits are assembling for our major hedge-planting frenzy on Saturday. Two 1-tonne bags of compost arrived yesterday, and our 12 new beech hedge trees arrived an hour ago.
Hobby blog
It is now Thursday morning, and all the bits are assembling for our major hedge-planting frenzy on Saturday. Two 1-tonne bags of compost arrived yesterday, and our 12 new beech hedge trees arrived an hour ago.
Obviously, it is nonsensical to speak of "The Garden Project". Gardens, like dependant relatives and tax returns, are with you forever; if at some point you find that you are thinking in terms of a new garden project, then in my experience what you mean is that the garden has got out of control, or something bad has happened, and what is now required is some special effort to get things back on track. It is still the same project really.
To chime with this concept of a continuing, ageless project, here is John Martyn with an echo from my long-gone hippy past.
Having established that what is going on here at Chateau Foy is yet another catching-up session, I'll try to explain what's been happening.
As a background theme we have the small matter of the actual gardeners.
(1) We had the same gardener for about 15 years - the bold George. He was good in the sense that he was reliable, and local, and he did a nice, tidy job of weeding the beds and pruning, but he had very little understanding of actual plants. There were some mistakes - occasionally serious - which became more problematic as the years passed. At one point he managed to weed out our prized edelweiss, which was all the more strange since he had carefully left it alone for the previous 10 years. Perhaps he forgot. Also, as he got older, he became less capable - it took him longer to do the same jobs, and I was often disappointed by what he had done. As the end of each gardening year approached, George would say to me:
"Well, this is all getting a bit much for me now - I'm thinking of retiring this winter - only trouble is that I need the cash, since my wife likes her 3 holidays a year"
And I would hear my own voice saying something like:
"No, no, George - we'd be very pleased to see you back here to help us around March time..."
Eventually, his dwindling effectiveness became a nagging problem. A worse irritant in some ways was his endless banter about keeping the bloody foreigners out - especially the brown ones, since they were just after our jobs and free health care and housing. George may have been the only Daily Mail reader in Dunbar, come to think of it, but I did reach the stage where I was thinking seriously that any foreign immigrant - especially a brown one - would be most welcome to come and replace him in my garden.
So, sometime in late Autumn 2022, the usual mention of George possibly retiring resulted in my wishing him well, and saying he deserved a good rest.
(2) We did some research and some trawling online, and we came up with a highly recommended local lady - ex local authority - who had set up in business as a gardener. She had a brand new van and posh tools and everything, and her background seemed very promising - she was a horticulturalist - in her youth she had trained at Kew, no less. So Spring 2023 we set off on a new journey, with our prestigious new garden maintenance lady. She seemed very promising, said a lot of the right things, but very quickly revealed herself as someone who liked to tinker with someone else's herbs and potted alpines, but was what I might privately refer to as a lazy bastard. On average she would turn up for about 2 scheduled visits in 5 - she was very unlucky with her health, and she seemed extraordinarily prone to freak accidents.
It transpired that she actually needed to take a lot of time off to do child minding for her son's family, so eventually we agreed that this wasn't a lot of help, and I wished her well too.
Thus from July 2023 we have done most of the gardening ourselves - not very well, and I have been getting more oppressed by my own lack of ability and the things which weren't getting done.
(3) I'll jump ahead now to the end of last year, when I made contact with an excellent young gardener who is actually the son of a good friend of mine. He has a lot of excellent experience, and is very knowledgeable. He works for a contract garden-maintenance firm in Edinburgh, but is happy to work for his own customers at weekends to earn extra cash to get him started in business on his own. It's all working very nicely at the moment, though we are in a period of working hard to get things into shape after the lengthy slide into ruin.
Changes to the garden have been running for a few years - usually because something had outgrown its space or because Nature interrupted the flow with some calamity or other. I now have a regular account with a local tree-surgeon firm, who shift trees and do maintenance on big hedges. So they do big fixes and emergencies, and they do a good job. Keeping the garden sensible and comfortable around these enforced changes is a challenge in itself.
I published some posts at the end of 2020, when we had some landscaping done - re-profiling our driveway and removing two old juniper trees which were out of control.
Since then we had a non-routine situation in October 2023 when our huge (and much-hated) leylandii hedge was partly flattened by Storm Babet, and we had to get the wreckage removed and disposed of by the tree surgeons.
By the end of last year, we had a developing problem with the last surviving juniper, which was becoming an obstruction in the lane past our house and which was starting to push over an ancient stone wall. On 12th December the tree surgeons appeared yet again, gave our big beech hedge its regular haircut and removed the last juniper. Gone.
Next stage is to rebuild the garden around all this strategic clearance. The new gardener (Matty) is a great help with this, and next weekend he will plant a 6-metre extension to the beech hedge to plug the gap in our defences left by the missing juniper. I am expecting delivery of 2 tons of soil-improver and twelve 8-foot beech plants in rootballs during next week. On the 15th March it will all happen. If all goes well, I'll record progress here.
After that the next priority is to get some new shrubs planted where the leylandii used to be, but we'll get to that. There are other jobs getting done, but the big targets are the ones I am concentrating on. Once again, much of my evening reading matter is about hedge management, or lawn restoration, or flowering shrubs. You may think this is a little sad - that's OK - it is a little sad, but I'm enjoying the sense of momentum!
There is nothing I wish to discuss further about that unbelievable kindergarten show, and - reluctantly - I now feel that my previous post was both ill-considered and inappropriate. With apologies, and my thanks to everyone who contributed, I've decided to pull it. My personal boycott will quietly continue, but I do not wish to dignify what is going on over there by paying attention.
Good luck to you all.
Something a little different this morning. I like to make small collections of music appropriate to the historic periods which I wargame - nothing overly serious, just mood-setting stuff.
This started about 10 years ago, when I put together a couple of CDs of Napoleonic marches (a stirring addition to tabletop warfare, though you have to stand ready with the off switch when it begins to do your head in). This is an interesting way to unnerve an opponent...
I tried to extend the idea to the War of the Spanish Succession, but was immediately challenged by the fact that bands didn't actually march in step at this period, so any formal "military" music is mostly music containing sound effects which parody warfare - typically composed by Lully and Delalande and similar, for the entertainment of Louis XIV and his guests at gala dinners. There were regimental bands, but their main duties involved playing concerts or festive music.
Thus it is no surprise that the ECW presents the same problem. There is contemporary "soldier" music available on record, much of which consists of ribald drinking songs. I was pleased to come across the work of William Lawes, a native of Salisbury, in Wiltshire, who spent most of his adult life in the service of Charles I. William was a composer, lutenist and viol player who produced an impressive portfolio of sacred and courtly works.
Here is a sample of his music for small groups - if you are interested, there is a fair amount online, much of which is very pleasing. This has been one of this week's better surprises.
Naturally I am not clever enough to understand this stuff, but a friend sent me this idea. No prizes, it goes without saying...
Which of the following places is the odd one out?
* SUDETENLAND
* UKRAINE
* GREENLAND
* PANAMA
* GAZA
There are probably various different answers, but as far as I know Gaza is the only one which has been considered for annexation as a theme park
While I had my head in eBay I also spotted a Tey Potteries building from my old wish list, so I bought that as well - very cheap - these must not be trending now.
This one is Oliver Cromwell's house, which I believe is in Ely (is that Cambridgeshire?).
I don't buy many of these now, but I have a soft spot for ceramic buildings - especially churches. To make certain there is no misunderstanding here, I happily confirm that these are ornaments, such as you might find on your grandmother's bookcase; I like them because they have a nice, rather rough charm, and introduce a welcome organic touch into my battlefields, with their eternal silly hexes. They appear to me, in fact, as being like real buildings, an impression I do not get from plastic or MDF kits.
This new one is not another Tey Potteries creation (I have quite a few of those, but I find their churches are generally disappointing); it is by Sulley Ceramics, and it is the church of St Michael and All Angels, Brantham, Suffolk. Sulley are fairly hard to come by at reasonable prices - the principal potter/artist was Marjorie Barton, who passed away in 2021 - an interesting listing of her churches is here, if you are a collector or simply a resident of Suffolk. There is an interesting history of Sulley's here.
Each of my 20mm toy soldiers represents 33 real men anyway, so the whole set up is just a massive compromise!