bean tree – Garden Gate Flowers

More rain for the garden at the end of August meant the flowers were looking battered and the veg bedraggled too. So we did some more structural maintenance on the trees and larger shrubs in between the downpours.

The boomerang bed came in for some trimming, as – quite randomly it seems – a whole branch of the Indian Bean Tree (Catalpa) simply died for no apparent reason. One day it was healthy, with flowers just blooming – the next day it just withered. Amputation of the dead limb was the clear solution. While I was at it I gave the shrubs underneath it a hair cut too as they were beginning to overcome the Catalpa – although I don’t think the branch died through overcrowding from some jumped up shrubs.

Elsewhere I tidied up other stuff in the drive and I even managed to get JB Jr to hack and prune the Cotoneaster at the front so we still have a room with a view. He loathes the task, but I reckon his youth and height qualify him far better to do the job than his slipped-disc-cartilage-deficient father.

Down the veg patch the battle still rages with the caterpillars. An acquaintance the other day proudly announced that she did not believe in killing the Brassica browsing thugs, and said that her plants would survive intact with happy butterfly larvae. We do not hold with such do goody good liberal-minded hippy shit. Mrs B takes it as personal affront that anyone other ourselves is eating our plants so the other day we donned the gloves of doom and squished caterpillars till we had both broken the three dart maximum of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIGHTEEE! We thought our cabbages, purple sprouting and brussels would be much better off without nearly four hundred predators munching their leaves. The only misjudgment we think we made was Mrs B wearing a white shirt to squish green caterpillars.

(I can see this being the next washing powder commercial….Anguished housewife to camera: “but how can I get squashed caterpillar stains out of my husband’s white t-shirt?”).

Giving the Bean Tree more room to breathe

Back in mid June I suffered the ultimate gardening injury – a slipped disc. Well, strictly speaking I understand it to be a herniated disc. I wasn’t even gardening – I had simply been doing some house work in the flat, leaned across a table to straighten a piece of paper on the mantle piece and it felt like a piece of my back simply tore. It was agony, though the next day it was not the back that hurt as much as my leg which felt like it had been hit repeatedly with a rounders bat. I never realised this was what sciatica felt like.

So I was off gardening duties, but the same week the annual open day for Galhampton gardens took place. We paid our monies and took our choice of the horticultural delights that the villagers wanted to display. It was an interesting meander through gardens which ranged from little more than one herbaceous border and a lot of grass to others that had every last square centimetre prepped and planted with complimentary veg and flowers. Others were open seemingly just to display their birds or their model railway. It was an eclectic mix.

The one recurring theme that seemed to cause angst with Mrs B was the size of most people’s tomatoes. Paddi’s already had good-sized fruit in June, while ours were only just ready to planted out, and other gardeners were seemingly about harvest a bumper crop when we made our grand tour. Beware gardening envy – it is the green fingered monster that doth mock the peat on which it feeds. Covetousness enveloped us as we viewed other tomatoes and devoured our horticultural self-respect as we ambled through in the warm June sunshine.

But when we got back to the garden we realised (or rather Mrs B accepted) that there were still plenty of good things in our patch that commended our piece of ground to us. Like the mature trees such as the amelanchier and the bean tree, or the established herbaceous borders that we love so much or the more recent extension to the boomerang bed which we were hoping would come up strong with a range of perennials

Husband and wife back together again – with a tentative hug of unity (careful with the back dear).