Category Archives: landscaping

How not to stake a tree

12 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by in design, landscaping

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

wp_20161103_11_59_41_pro
I’ve been working on an interesting little project lately in Dorset, looking after a newly-designed garden which is learning to settle back in to its landscape after some fairly major re-sculpting of a steep hillside into handsome stone-built terraces.

The (extremely nice) owners are keen gardeners but not knowledgeable, so it’s up to me to come up with solutions to the inevitable little problems that crop up when you drop a garden onto a hillside and leave the evolution into maturity till afterwards.

The owners mentioned to me that three little ornamental Japanese cherries planted on one of the terraces hadn’t been thriving this summer. We worked through the usual possible ailments: drought in this year’s relatively dry summer, lack of shelter (the prevailing wind blows directly onto this terrace), silverleaf disease.

But then I went and actually looked at them, close-up. And it was blindingly obvious what the problem was: the above (bar the silverleaf) may have played their part but the clincher was the way these trees have been staked.

wp_20161103_12_00_07_pro

It’s hard to know where to start.

Bamboo canes. Far too weak, flimsy and flexible to hold a growing tree steady against gales and the knocks and bumps of everyday life. They weren’t stuck into the ground all that deeply either – you could flap them about with one hand. No support whatsoever.

That flexitie. I have issues with this stuff for all sorts of reasons: but in this case, again, it’s far too stretchy for holding a young tree in position.  It’s also tied so loosely around the tree that it’s simply not doing its job.

All this meant these little trees might just as well have been planted without stakes at all. And you could see the damage: the root balls were clearly lifting out of the ground.

wp_20161103_12_00_24_pro

The reason you stake a tree while it’s getting established is to hold the rootball firmly in place. If you don’t, when the top of the tree whips about in the wind it will also pull at the rootball, which (because you haven’t staked it properly) is free to move within the soil. That rips away those delicate feeder roots a tree puts out to explore and colonise the surrounding soil, effectively repeatedly preventing the roots from anchoring the tree in the ground. This keeps the root ball loose, and because the tree can’t develop a better root system than it had in the pot, it cannot grow. That’s why these trees were suffering.

So here’s what I did:

wp_20161103_12_00_55_pro

This is a proper tree stake: around 7.5cm (3″) diameter, sturdy round wooden pole about 1.5m (5ft) long (you can use squared timber, as long as it’s good and robust). It dwarfs the tree trunk a little but that’s the point: it’s meant to be stronger.

I’ve driven it in to the ground with a mallet at a 45° angle, firmly enough that you can’t move it easily by hand. Opinion is divided about whether stakes should be parallel with the trunk to about halfway up, or like this: I’ve always favoured the 45° approach as it holds the rootball while letting the top of the tree move, and you’re driving it in a little way away from the rootball itself so you don’t have to damage any roots by sinking it closer to the trunk.

You’ll notice it’s pointing away from the wall, into the wind: this is deliberate. When the wind blows at this tree, the force is pushing the tree against the stake’s anchor, so it shouldn’t move. If I’d pointed it the other way (or straight upwards) the wind is effectively pulling at the tree rather than pushing it into the stake – much less stable.

And last but not least: a proper, collared tree tie. This holds snugly around the trunk and around the stake, the collar making sure the two don’t rub, and is stretchy enough to allow growth but not stretchy enough to give in to the wind. I’ll be checking that tie each summer as the trees grow and loosening it off if it’s needed: hopefully, in a couple of seasons’ time, this tree will be fully recovered from its bad start, well rooted and growing on so strongly I can pull the stake out and let it strike out on its own.

Problem solved!

 

How to make a compost bin #2

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in design, kitchen garden, landscaping, Painting Paradise, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,

(You can find part 1 here)

wp_20161007_11_37_46_pro

Clear and level the ground before you so much as lift a hammer

So – now you’ve got the upright bits: what’s next?

Well, time to bolt it all together.

Before you do anything, clear and level the ground you’re going to place your bins on until it’s a flat piece of ground: this will be your workbench too, so make sure it’s easy to use.

 

Stand your ends up at each side (propped up on planks if you don’t have spare people to hold them) and then stand up the inserts too, measuring to make sure they are exactly 1.2m apart. Slipping a 1.2m plank across between the front slots helps.

wp_20161007_12_06_39_pro

Sides and inserts carefully positioned, and the first back board in place ready to cut to size

Once you’re happy, place your first 2.5m plank across the back of two of the bays. This is a really important stage to get right – so take your time.

 

Double-check the two bays are exactly 1.2m wide at the back, then cut the plank to fit so it runs across the back of both bays.

I find it all moves around too much if you try to nail it on while everything is still vertical, so at this point I prefer to tip the bays over onto their fronts so the backs are uppermost.

wp_20161007_13_25_19_pro

Bays tipped onto their fronts and the back starting to go on

Again, you’ll need to prop them upright using planks or people; and again, measure and re-measure to make sure they’re all 1.2m apart, and level (use a spirit level in both directions to make sure they’re absolutely upright, and also horizontal).

 

Now it’s much easier to line up the first plank across the back and nail it in place. Then cut a shorter length, a little over 1.2m, to fit across the back of the third bay, butting up nicely with the longer piece.

Once you’ve got those two pieces in place everything gets much easier. Work your way up the back, lining the planks up with the boards you used on the sides (you can use a spacer, but you usually don’t need to).

wp_20161007_13_25_46_pro

Stagger the joints between long and short back boards like bricks for extra strength

Stagger the joints like bricks, so the longer board starts on alternate sides – this gives the back a lot of strength. And if you’ve done the alternately overlapping boards thing on the sides, you fit one board so the end shows, and the next so it tucks in behind the side board (I didn’t take a pic of this so will add this after my next visit).

 

When you’re about halfway up, call in a couple of friends and get them to take a bay each, then tip the whole thing back upright (you’ll need one person in each bay as otherwise it can twist catastrophically out of shape).

Pause for a while to make sure absolutely everything is where it should be: your bins will be too heavy to move once you’ve finished, so make sure you’ve left access for maintenance all the way around, and that it’s all sitting level on the ground. Bricks under the corners can help the boards sit a little way off the ground so they don’t rot; they also help get everything level, too.

Once you’re happy that everything’s level and in the right place, you can finish off the back in situ (by now it’s all bolted firmly enough in place to be able to work upright).

Finally, slot the first board in to the front of each bay, and nail it in place through the back upright so that it’s fixed. This helps keep the bays square, and holds the compost in better, too.

wp_20161007_16_02_57_proAnd that’s it! As you fill each bay with compost, just slot another plank down the front until it’s full. Then start the next one. Remember to turn regularly, and in six months or so you’ll have your first wheelbarrows of lovely home-made soil improver to work its magic on your garden.

How to make a compost bin #1

10 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in design, kitchen garden, landscaping

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

wp_20161007_16_02_57_pro

The above set-up is all you will ever need by way of composting.

Three bins is the nirvana of perfect compost-making: you have one bay you’re filling (usually the one on the left), then the middle one is rotting down over six months or so, and the one on the end is rotted and ready to use.

Once you’ve used the compost on the right-hand side, you simply turn the compost from the middle bin into the right-hand bin, then empty your newest compost into the middle bin. Cover and leave to rot, and start a new heap in the left-hand bin. As you move it across you mix it all up, accelerating the rotting process and generally improving your compost making.

Each bay measures about 1.2m square and tall – it holds around a cubic metre of compost. I find this is about as much as an average veg garden (or allotment) can cope with, both because it takes up a fairly large chunk of garden (1.2m x about 4m altogether), and it’s as much as I can do to keep up with filling it even with my fairly hefty array of material including garden waste, kitchen waste and the, ahem, rear-end products from horses, sheep and chickens.

We gardeners are nothing if not multi-taskers, so I made one of my triple-bay compost bins for a client last week. This is the third set I’ve done now; if you don’t fancy the full three bins right away, just scale it down and make separate 1.2m x 1.2m boxes instead. Then you can build your compost empire at the pace and volume you wish to have it.

It takes about two days to do – a comfortable weekend’s work.

Day 1: Make your middle bits

First, cut your boards. I used 15cm planks (they’re about 2.2cm wide).

For the entire three-bay set of compost bins you will need:

12 x 1.2m boards for the two central dividers

6 x 1.2m boards and 6 x 1.22m boards for the two ends (all will become clear)

and 14 x 1m lengths of 5cm x 5cm uprights

6 x 2.5m boards plus 6 x 1.5m boards for the back

18 x 1.2m boards to slot into the front

You’ll also need a lot of 50cm (2″) nails, plus a few 75cm (3″) nails too; and a drill to pre-drill the holes and prevent the wood from splitting.

Make the two central dividers.

wp_20160923_12_48_38_pro

Boards nailed onto single uprights for the central dividers

Space two of the uprights 1.2m apart on the ground, then nail six of the boards to them, using a spacer to leave a gap between each board. This spacer can be any width you want as long as you use the same spacer throughout: I find a scrap bit of plank is ideal.

wp_20160923_12_38_30_pro

An offcut of board (approx 2cm) works well as a spacer

Next, nail another upright onto the other side of the planks at each end (you’ll need to use the 75cm nails for this bit). And finally, nail a second upright behind the first on each side at the front of your divide: the gap should be about 3cm (this is to slot the removable planks into).

wp_20160923_13_11_05_pro

Uprights in place (here for a divider – the ends only have the uprights on one side). The 3cm slots formed at the front will hold the removable boards.

Make the two ends.

wp_20160923_15_00_41_pro

End boards nailed into place, showing the ‘staggered’ effect of using different length boards – the back will be fitted onto here

These are made in just the same way as the central dividers, with a couple of little added extras.

First – you alternate between 1.2m boards fitting snugly to the uprights, and 1.22m boards to overlap by a couple of centimetres to allow the back to fit on neatly. If you find this a bit fancy, don’t worry: just make them all the same length and adjust the back accordingly in part 2.

Second: because they’re the ends, you don’t need to put uprights on both sides, just the ‘inside’. It helps to stand them up to work out which side to put the extra uprights on: one end should have the double uprights at the front on the right-hand side of the boards (looking at them end-on), while the other end should have them on the left-hand side. Both have an inside upright at the back as well.

Now you have your kit of parts, you can install your compost bins. For which you need…

Part 2!

Learning from the master

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in design, garden design, garden history, landscaping

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

IMG_4052

Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ catching the sunlight: note the silver-variegated shrub echoing the effect behind

This week I made something of a pilgrimage, to the garden of John Brookes OBE at Denmans in Sussex.

I have a personal debt of gratitude to pay to John Brookes as it was the 1970s edition of his classic book, The Small Garden, that formed my first ideas about garden design. In fact I shamelessly nicked (slightly adapted) one of the designs in that book for my first-ever garden in London, at a time when I was still feverishly taking notes while watching Gardeners’ World (I know, I know).

He has broken new ground in so many areas of garden design we now take for granted that his legacy can’t really be overstated. He was the first to come up with the idea of the ‘inside outside’, making garden rooms – as advocated by Lawrence Johnstone et al – an extension of the living room in the house they surround.

He was – astonishingly – the first British designer to take his inspiration from modern art, specifically Mondrian via his revolutionary geometric garden of interlocking squares for Penguin Books at Heathrow. And he was the first to create a design-focussed garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, at a time when everyone else was just creating showcases for plant nurseries.

Denmans is still his home, and where he runs his garden school. It’s looking a little tired these days, mainly I suspect because there’s just one heroic gardener looking after four acres of intensively-garden landscape and do lone battle with an encroaching army of ground elder. A garden of this stature deserves a few more staff.

But the mark of good design is that it holds up even a slightly woolly garden and gives it bones and structure. And so it is with Denman’s: it’s a softer garden than John Brookes’s usual designs in any case, and the fluid, sinuous curves and gentle naturalism are deceptive as underneath it all lies the solid, well thought out geometry and subtle design touches which are a John Brookes hallmark. Here are a few tips from my notebook I’ll be trying out once I get home.
IMG_4059
1: Don’t ignore the buildings. Reflect the materials used in the buildings in hard landscaping; and echo architectural features in the planting. Here a tall fastigiate yew emphasises the strong verticals in the Clock Tower.

IMG_4048
2. Don’t get too hung up about giving beds clear edges. At Denmans plants flow over the edges of curving gravel paths, sometimes spilling over into the hard landscaping and self-seeding into the edges, giving a soft, organic, very natural look that also, incidentally, evokes the Sussex coastline of the wider environment.

IMG_4045
3. Always be aware of the picture you are creating, and use sculpture to complete the scene. This sitting boy was delightful and added a focal point and a little vignette to an otherwise nice-but-ordinary wildlife pond.

IMG_4046

4. Create a sense of mystery and intrigue by cutting curving (not straight) paths through the planting, giving a glimpse of another part of the garden beyond but not revealing it all at once. It makes it all but impossible to resist following the path to explore further.

IMG_4044

5. Lawns are intrinsically boring. So make them more interesting (and save yourself some hours behind the mower) by only cutting the middle bits once a month. The outer paths you mow once a week – creating a contrast in texture and keeping the sensuous curves of the design at the fore.

IMG_4050

6. Remember your backgrounds – in every direction. This Achillea ‘Moonshine’ shone out in contrast with the dark purple smokebush (Cotinus coggygria) against the wall behind it: what a combination. But turn around, put the smoke bush behind you, and the brooding effect is completely gone to be replaced by airy woodland:

IMG_4053

Same plant, completely different effect. So as you compose your perfect combination looking one way, don’t forget to turn around and look at it the other way, too – and seize the chance to create a wholly new scene.

 

A very capable man

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in garden design, garden history, landscaping

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

capabilitybrown

© Portrait of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, c.1770-75, Cosway, Richard (1742-1821)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

Think of the English countryside, and it’s my guess it’ll be pretty green. There will be fields, and hedgerows, and picturesque little villages nestled in valleys: perhaps a steeple peeping up above a copse of trees.

All very artistic. And not, one shred of it, natural.

Our countryside has been shaped, sculpted, created by people. Whether you live, as I do, in an ancient landscape where the fields still show the lines of old pre-enclosure strips and the hedgerows go back centuries; or whether you’re in rolling acres of emerald green, there is little left of how England was before people arrived.

So all the fuss about what Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown did to the English countryside seems a little unfair to me. He was only, after all, doing what the monks and farmers and squires had done before him, only prettier.

More of a crime to be laid at his door in my opinion is his cavalier way of erasing hundreds of years of garden history, not to mention some spectacularly beautiful formal gardens, in a supremely arrogant gesture that simply assumed people wouldn’t want that. Ever again.

The only English renaissance gardens to escape Capability’s shovels and picks were those whose owners had no truck with this modern claptrap of serpentine paths and copses and ha-has and focal points: the owners of Westbury Court, Powis Castle and Hanbury Court, we salute you.

So few have survived the Brown tsunami, and so much has been lost: I’d have loved to have seen the 17th century water gardens by de Caus (complete with joke fountains in the Italian style) and parterres which were once the glory of Wilton House in Wiltshire. But Capability saw to it that such vulgar spectacles never survived beyond the 18th century and they only exist, sketchily, on paper now.

I think part of my problem with him is that I don’t trust ‘gardeners’ who don’t do plants. Landscapers tend to talk in broad sweeps: I’m a detail person, the turn of a petal, the contrast of purple against lilac, the simple glory of an opening daisy. I don’t think Lancelot had much time for all that. And that’s why I instinctively don’t respond well to his style of doing things.

Of course, there’s no escaping Mr Brown at the moment, and it’ll get worse next year when the tercentenary starts: the 300th anniversary of his birth is as good an excuse as any to reassess his life and legacy. Carved into the hillsides of England as it is, you can’t ignore it.

Fortunately it’s to be neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job: just an honest reappraisal of the man who left us Stowe, Chatsworth, Blenheim, Alnwick, Hampton Court, Badminton… the list goes on (there are more than 250 of them).

There are to be learned conferences at Bath and Sheffield Universities, and at Hampton Court Palace (where Capability had his office) looking at everything from his management of historic gardens to his impact on the British landscape.

Lots of gardens are restoring Brown-designed chapels (Compton Verney, Warwickshire), re-envisioning Brown’s landscapes (Moccas Park, Herefordshire), or rolling back later growth to reveal Brown’s landscapes as he would have wanted them seen (Trentham Park, Staffordshire).

And already there’s lots of thought-provoking stuff out there about Brown, his legacy, his genius.

This Channel 4 programme was a real eye-opener: there’s a brilliant bit where John Phipps, who knows more about Brown than pretty much anyone, walks Alan Titchmarsh through Belvoir Castle explaining how to ‘read’ a Capability landscape.

Mr Phipps also pens a fantastic blog, The Brown Advisor: you can write in and put any question you like to him. Recent gems include ‘Where are Brown’s conkers?’ and ‘Did Brown sing in the bath?’

It all amounts to a lot of work and a lot of thinking about the man who had a longer-lasting and more profound effect on the English landscape than anyone before or since. It’s no more than he deserves: you can see his influence in everything from Prince Charles’s views on architecture to Dan Pearson’s advocacy of a sense of place in design. Like him or loathe him, there aren’t many people you can say are still making an impact 300 years after they came into the world and changed it forever.

October garden: Greenhouses and fruit garden

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in garden design, greenhouse, landscaping, my garden

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

octgarden_greenhousecukes

It’s amazing what you can fit into an 8×6 greenhouse: here be melons, cucumbers, chilli ‘Razzmatazz’, okra, sweet peppers and my amazing tree chilli, now taller than me

The slow dying of the greenhouses is the swansong of my year. They’re the last to go: long after the veg beds outside are brown with dead foliage and slimy with rot, the cucumbers are still challenging me to find new recipes and the chilli peppers are suffusing with colour from green to orange to red.

octgarden_greenhousecukes2

Smaller but perfectly formed: ‘Sweet Crunch’ cucumbers, still going strong

It’s been a good year: and a bad. I have two greenhouses, facing each other in the lee of a hedge across the coldframe I made for my old garden (it’s falling to pieces now – a combination of age and a blackthorn tree just above which keeps dropping branches at inconvenient moments).

In one greenhouse I plant cucumbers, melons, peppers and anything else I fancy growing that year: in the other are my tomatoes.

I always start the year so optimistically with my toms: I love to try new varieties or revisit old ones. This year it’s been Gardeners’ Delight, Costoluto Fiorentino (quite the best beefsteak for flavour bar, perhaps, Brandywine) and the plum tomatoes Rio Grande.

octgarden_greenhousetoms

Not so successful. The other greenhouse has been sick with blight for months: nothing will grow in there but the marigolds. Pretty as they are, you can’t eat them.

But despite the dry weather, despite the perfect growing conditions of this blissfully warm summer, the blight got in.

I mulched with compost from the bins outside: mistake no. 1, as it no doubt carried blight spores. Then a pane of glass in the roof lost a corner, so the rain – laden, too, with spores – could spatter the Costolutos with fatally infected water. And the bush tomatoes I had in the corner – ‘The Amateur’ – turned out to be the most blight-prone tomatoes I’ve ever grown, finishing off my other plants by incubating and then spreading the plague.

octgarden_greenhouseaubergine

This was meant to be a ‘Black Beauty’ aubergine: but it’s turned out more like a ‘Pinstripe’. Duff seeds – veg which haven’t grown into what they said on the packet – have been a bit of a feature this year.

Well: it’s a lesson learned. This winter’s to-do list includes changing the soil in this greenhouse; replacing the broken panes; and fumigating with a sulphur candle. Then next year I shall use nothing but the cleanest compost and water with tap water. I’m considering growing only blight-resistant varieties, too: ‘Losetto’, ‘Ferline’ and ‘Fantasio’, perhaps.

octgarden_fruitgarden

My fruit garden: the only ‘finished’ bit of the garden (and even then it needs a netting cage, quite a few more plants and a bit of extra path put in). My little still small place of calm.

On the plus side, my fruit garden is looking wonderful. I planted it just last winter with two maiden cherries, a redcurrant, a couple of blackcurrants raised from cuttings taken from plants I had on my allotment, and a slew of raspberries. Oh, and a bed of strawberries, of course.

You’re not supposed to grow fruit on chalk, and my soil is grey with the stuff. But as a gardener to the core, I’m going to try anyway. So far I’m encouraged: the raspberries have not turned yellow as I expected them to (though three canes have turned up their toes for reasons unknown); the cherries are thriving; and the blackcurrants have had their first fruits already.

Here’s how it looked in 2010:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Of triumph and tribulations

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in design, landscaping

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

The other day, very quietly and without fuss, I triumphed.

The natty blue traffic cones aren’t part of the design (honest)

This is the Bible Garden, formerly a patch of scruffy grass outside the Key Stage One area with some wonky benches plonked on top, at my kids’ school. And it is, at long last, finished.

The school is a Church of England school, so they wanted a Bible Garden in which the plants reference passages in the Bible. It’s a popular concept in the States but less so here – in fact I struggled to find any in the UK.

The whole thing was made even more complicated by the fact that the site was in part shade, and most plants mentioned in the Bible are of course Middle Eastern – so very much sun-lovers. Added to which this is Somerset, so damp (and last year, even damper than usual) and I had to be pretty inventive with what I put in there.

biblegarden4

Playing fast and loose: an olive in the raised bed (Garden of Gethsemane and all that) is a risk in part shade, but it is sheltered. And that’s Mentha longifolia underneath.

There was already a brick-built hexagonal raised bed around 1.2m high, so I based the design around that and created two connected hexagons. The teachers wanted it to feel enclosed, but still open enough that they could see in: and they wanted turf seats, and some reeds (for Moses and his basket).

biblegarden5

Bay lollipops marching around the edges (must move that rubbish bin…)

We ended up edging the whole thing with a low box hedge, but punctuated with bay ‘lollipops’. I steered everyone away from turf seats – too rustic, too scruffy, too much maintenance – and towards raised seats with the tops planted with spreading Thymus serpyllum (I was going to have chamomile but it needs sun). Once small bottoms have sat on them often enough, they should make a lovely dense, fragrant mat.

biblegarden1

Raised bed seating planted with Thymus serpyllum

I’m still not quite sure about the practicalities: after all, it rains quite a lot here so those seats will be damp a lot of the time. But I have a plan B in my back pocket, to replace some of the thyme with small 30cm square paving slabs so the children can sit down but still be surrounded by herbs.

It looks a bit bare at the moment but last week I spent a happy hour or two seeding it with the wildflowers of the field: Agrostemma (corncockle), Nigella (love-in-a-mist) and, slightly incongruously, broad beans, the closest I could get to tares. Actually, I’ve had to interpret the Bible verses fairly loosely: in the back corner, for example, I’ve taken Job’s verse:

“If I have stolen the land I farm and taken it from its rightful owners, if I have eaten the food that grew there but let the farmers that grew it starve, then instead of wheat and barley may weeds and thistles grow.”

…and replaced the thistles with purple Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’ (loves damp, happy in part shade) and the wheat and barley with Hordeum jubatum, an annual grass sown pretty easily from seed and with suitably ear-like flowerheads. Should look lovely.

biblegarden3

I wasn’t too sure about the colour of those raised seats at first, but I’m warming – it sets off the daffs beautifully.

And the reeds? A pond was out of the question with small children about, so I’ve done a little bog garden in the corner lined with black plastic. In it I’ve buried a couple of ‘mini-ponds’ – basically plastic flower pots with the holes bunged up – for the real water lovers, Cyperus papyrus and Typha minima. Around them are little marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris) – no Bible mention, just a bit of spring colour.

It’s been a lot of fun, incredibly frustrating (I was building this, on and very off, through the wettest summer, autumn and winter we’ve ever had) and absorbingly interesting: in all, quite the most challenging design I’ve ever done despite its diminutive size. The willow arches, made by a local Somerset willow weaver, have absolutely been the finishing touch, and I’m so pleased with the result. It’s being Officially Opened on Friday, too – I don’t think I’ve ever had anything of mine officially opened before. I hope there will be ribbons!

This week in the garden…

07 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in landscaping

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

stumplong

Introducing the patient: big, ivy-wrapped, and determined to stay put

…I was digging out stumps.

Big stumps: massive ones, in fact. The kind that make you have fantasies about acquiring a large John Deere tractor at short notice equipped with towbar and strong rope. The sort that halfway through, when it’s still not budging so much as an inch, you begin to wonder whether this is the one which will defeat you and stay, stubbornly, in the ground until you can come up with a more imaginative (and probably expensive) way of getting rid of it.

Midwinter is a time I find myself doing all the grunt work in the garden: the fencing, the path laying, the reconfiguring and extending and general shifting about. Not, in fact, gardening at all.

The two stumps in question are a massive Cotoneaster horizontalis on the top terrace of our stepped garden leading from the side of the house to the garage. This has been gradually getting bigger and more thuggish ever since we’ve been here: it recently acquired a topknot of brambles and this year made the decision even easier by refusing to produce more than one or two berries, which made my previous excuse that it was helping the birds entirely redundant.

The other stump – the one in the pictures – was a large hazel bole (the multistemmed bit at the bottom when you coppice it). It wasn’t unattractive, particularly: just in entirely the wrong place, being right in front of the gate that leads into my veg garden. I’ve been eyeing it with a view to obliteration for a couple of years now. But since the extension of the veg garden by another 60ft or so is now gathering pace, the compost bins had to shift up a bit: and the hazel stump was right in their way. It had to go.

Shifting stumps involves several essential pieces of kit:

  • border spade for the fiddly bits
  • fencer’s graft: a single-cast, long-handled and narrow metal spade used by fencers to dig a straight hole. Ours has been one of the most useful tools in our armoury for years now and is rarely out of commission.
  • crowbar: another essential in the toolbox
  • bowsaw and loppers: for cutting away the surface roots (and a few underneath once you’ve got that far).

The general approach is as follows.

1: Cut away all top growth so your stump looks like a stump. Mine, being hazel, was nice and straight – next year’s wigwams, I think.

2: Gingerly dig a trench right round the stump with the border spade, cutting away surface roots as you go: anything up to an inch, with the loppers, anything larger, with the bowsaw.

3: Have a cup of coffee and congratulate yourself on making a start.

4: Start work with the fencer’s graft, deepening and widening the trench and going in as close to the actual wood of the stump as you can. At this point it helps to rope in one’s spouse, if only so you can surreptitiously take a break under the guise of chopping out a few more roots.

5: As you get deeper, start sloping in your cuts so they’re going under the stump. The idea is to destabilise the whole thing by removing all soil, cutting any anchoring wood and generally working it free. This takes absolutely ages and since by now you’re completely knackered, it’s the most painful bit of all. Added to which, the stump is still refusing to move, and your language is getting worse and worse.

stumplong2

Conquered at last. Ouch.

6: Eventually, if you keep at it long enough, the stump starts to rock, imperceptibly at first, then more and more until it is undeniably loose. This is my favourite bit of the whole process: you get a whole new injection of energy and start doing embarrassing things like punching the air and shouting, ‘Gotcha, ya b*****d!’ at an inanimate lump of wood. It is best not to let anyone observe you at this point.

7: Shove the stump over as far as you can get it and cut away the remnants of any roots holding it in place one by one, until you’ve worked it free and can roll it out of the hole.

8: Fill the hole back in, go in and brew yourself a strong coffee, and sink into a nice hot bath. Do not plan to do anything at all the following day as your muscles will be in such spasm you will be unable to move. Return to view your handiwork with that warm glow of satisfaction that comes with a job well (if painfully) done.