The wood is beginning to shut down for the winter. The bracken is already looking dusty rather than vivid, except when the sun is shining directly onto it. There are very few leaves left on anything other than a few birches. Contrary to what we read somewhere recently, the oaks actually lost their leaves before the birches. I hope this doesn’t mean something bad about their health
I am full of foreboding about the plants we got from Abriachan and put in with so much hope. The meconopses lasted for quite a while looking fresh; but they are now chewed. Some things seem to have completely disappeared; and although one expects this of herbaceous plants in the autumn, one does not expect it of azaleas. The olearia macrodonta has despairingly dropped all its leaves, which the bush in the St Andrews garden will hold until spring. (I hope you understand my subordinate clause.) But on the bright side, the sempervivums and the lavender planted in the scree appear to be untouched, although there is a clear deer path running along the top of the bank, just above them..
I am not sure whether it is deer or the condition of the soil that has done these things. The deer are easy to blame, and are clearly responsible for some of the havoc; but peat is a drowning medium and I now think I ought to have put more grit in with the plants. They may well have simply no oxygen around their roots.
So I now have two projects: to get a few tonnes of grit from the quarry and to fence the parts I am going to garden. This is not a large area: around Klarg; just beside the gravel outside the kitchen windows; and to the east behind where the shed will be.
Until our visit by the local fencer we were considering whether to electrify at least the bit near the house, and perhaps some small areas in the wood, for regeneration as suggested by Graham Tuley, as the wires are less visible than proper deer fences and much cheaper to erect. Apparently, electric fences can keep out red deer, unless they are galloping, in which case they simply run through the wires hardly noticing the shock. Roe deer, on the other hand, having smaller feet, do not earth the electricity so well; so the fences are not so good against them. We have mostly red deer, so we are willing to try electricity. But we have now been told by the fencer, who admits he doesn’t do the electric stuff, that it tends to short out with damp vegetation in these damp parts, and needs constant patrolling.
We are still thinking about the idea of herding the deer away from parts that are interesting to us, whilst allowing them through the wood so that they can shelter there in bad weather. One thing we are trying is discouraging them with roses. We have brought some rosa rugosa suckers that we dug out of our front garden, which they were invading from next door, last weekend. They have been planted in an artful snaky line roughly parallel to the drive, near the top end, across a deer track which I think is the way, or one of the ways, the deer get onto the drive. I have no idea if the roses will survive the move or even if they will survive experimental browsing, or whether the deer will simply sneer at them. They are pretty prickly, so eating may not be their fate. The fencer thinks nothing short of a full-blown deer fence will keep deer out, once they have a taste for being in.
He came at 8.30 on Saturday. There was a certain amount of shaking of the head about the terrain and the fact that what we want is a renovation job, essentially, with not much new work. We are agreed that we should have deer fence strainers put in wherever there is work to be done, even in ordinary stock fences. We need a proper pair of strainers at the new gap in the middle fence; a replacement strainer at the top fence where the middle fence joins it, and a good solid main entrance gate and strainers there to hoick up the twiddly collapsed wires that Ursula found so pretty in the air frost last New Year.
We may be able to afford a new fence running transversely just down the hill to the south of the house, and then turning and going back up to the road. This will slightly spoil ma’s favourite view; but it will help with the introduction of Alien Garden Plants from Abriachan into quite a wide area. Graham Tuley and the chaps at Scottish Native Woodlands will disapprove; but I will undertake not to introduce rhododendron ponticum, Japanese knotweed or Himalayan balsam.
There is not even the slightest chance that any serious fence person would get to grips with the idea of small exclusion areas to help little bits of regeneration. So will all members of the family and those who would like the odd holiday here now please start exercising their biceps. The priority is to do something to protect the knee high oaks.
As for grit: we went to Alexander Ross’s quarry at Daviot on Friday - quite a long drive along the road to the south and east of Loch Ness, almost as far as the A9. The quarry is staffed by lovely men with beautiful Highland accents but few words. One says, “Hello, I am the person who has been bothering you daily about horticultural grit. Can we have some?” And they smile sweetly and say not a word for several minutes until, not at all sure of the conversational rules, one ventures an enquiry about where one might find it. We were eventually directed, in an admittedly friendly silence, to a fairly small heap of 6mm grit beneath one of the pipes on legs amidst the muddy puddles in the middle of the quarry, with legions of lorry behemoths crashing past us through the puddles, carrying the really serious stuff off to seriously manly engineering operations; and were told we could take whatever the car could carry. Thank goodness it was a bashed up old Volvo and not something effete. It was assumed that we would not manage as much as a tonne, and we were charged the standard minimum price for anything less than that, which is laughably cheap. We felt very pleased that we had enough understanding of how these things work to have taken our own shovel and bulkbag.
With the grit, I have planted some narcissus lobularis up near where the gate will be. Yes, I know daffs are naff when planted in groups by gates; but there you are. It took me an hour to plant sixty of them before it got too dark to be sure if they were upside down or not. The rest were done the next morning in the rain. I have one of those natty bulb planters, with a nifty little lever thing that makes the circular cutter wider in order to let the plug of earth drop out, if the earth in question is not too sticky and full of roots and things. So it is really a machine, as Roy says. It works very well in places where the existence of grass shows that there is at least some earth; but I struggled foolishly in places that are essentially pure moraine and builders’ rubble. Still, I got it down to a routine: screw down hard on the planter to remove the plug; put in a little heap of grit, a bit of chicken shit and the bulb; and replace the plug.
The other project was planting 100 gladiolus byzantinus. Christopher Lloyd says they go well in rough grass but I think he had something different in mind from what we have here, so I planted them on the scree slope on the north front. This proves, in fact, to be an ingenious heap of rather large stones clothed variously in peat and scree and with, in places, a worrying core of what looks as if it might be unused building sand and the swillings from a concrete mixer. So I spent an hour scrambling around a forty five degree slope with a spade, hauling out boulders and digging out some of the rushes that had been imported with the peat. I got a couple of dozen bulbs planted in the afternoon before the rain became too insistent and the rest done the following morning. I wonder if they will come up, or if I should have paid more attention to the advice on one website which is that they should be lifted for the winter.
The other thing that happened was that Roy started digging over the area to the south and east of the decking, at the top of the slope there, that will become a sitting out lawn. I have only just been told that this is his plan; but I concur. Quite a lot more digging to do, and the incorporation of lots of grit and humus.
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