Day 57 - A weed is a plant that somebody else chose

We had to mow our chalk pit all that first year, however bad it looked, and I did work in there on the weed problem. What I hadn't realised till the growing season started was that in keeping with many other misguided gardens of the early part of the 20th century, the craving inherited from the Victorians for collecting plants had reached this little backwater too. Somebody had obviously said that if you had a large area to fill and were looking for material with statement foliage, then you couldn't go wrong with Japanese Knotweed. Now it doesn't matter how many times they tried to change the Latin names of these confused genera of Polygonum/Persicaria/Fallopia over the years, there was no escape from the fact that whereas a rose by any other name and all that, a lager lout is always a lager lout. Japanese Knotweed had been on a bender in this part of the garden for around forty or fifty years and was giving it a bit of a hangover. There was no alternative but to use chemicals to fix the problem. There, I've said it, and I'm not going to repeat it. It was done. It had to be done, and now my environmental credentials have shown themselves up to be wanting, or at the very least, opportunistic. Pragmatic I would prefer to call the solution. Nevertheless, for old time's sake, I elected to keep the other dubious feature plant which was one of the few that remained from the original concept - Giant Hogweed. The difference now would be that I would maintain it. No longer would it be allowed to seed freely, but I would retain one small clump of plants, at the back of the border where they could do no mischief, and I would rigorously dead-head them before there was any chance of them propagating themselves. I would also keep them nearer the top of the banks where they were less likely to damage anyone with their blister-inducing poison. Other than kids straying off the straight and narrow, of course. If we hadn't managed to confine those in the cattle grids, they certainly deserved the sharp sting of admonition the hogweed could provide. OK. I go too far, but you know what I mean.

A whole summer of that, and I was ready to consider what to do next. Discussions with the Gardens Adviser suggested that we should be working towards a theme which was strong on foliage, and that seemed a reasonable starting-point, given the past choices described above.  Let's stick with history. Nobody seemed inclined to be prescriptive about what should go where, or even about what should be chosen, so it appeared as if I could plan this myself. Well, that was a relief, but there was still a long haul before it would be ready for planting. The whole huge space had to be double-dug, with manure incorporated, and some of the slopes were precipitous. We also had a big job to do elsewhere in an inaccessible part of the south side of the garden, which involved grubbing out by hand three fully-grown lime trees with trunks about eighteen inches in diameter. This had to be done by hand, as it was inaccessible to machinery. I wasn't daunted by this. You may remember if you have been with this from the start, that one of my first gardening experiences was digging out a 100 year old pear tree. (See Day 4 - Respect 2 for a good photograph of my initiation into the practice https://bigbillygoatgruff.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/respect-2.html). My solution to the best use of manpower was that I should grub up the trees with the assistance of the cheeky chappie on the team, who could tell me stories as we worked, while the digging in the chalk pit should be done by the senior man. I had already established that he did not seem to be there for the social aspects of the job, and that he preferred to work alone, which is why his favourite pastime was his part-time gamekeeping position. This couldn't have worked better. I kept a regular eye on what he was doing, mostly to ensure that he didn't think I was abusing him by putting him out there by himself. In fact there was no such problem, and he worked at a steady rhythm for weeks, walking the manure one heavy wooden barrowload at a time from where he tipped it from the mini-tractor down the far bank. To reach this he had cut a gap in the fence and gone via the public footpath in the farmer's field. In the end he had done an absolutely brilliant job, and I have to say, I was filled with admiration for what he had achieved. I had seen very few younger men with a similar work ethic, and even fewer with the doggedness to plug away at such a tedious and repetitive task for so long.

When he had finished, there remained a couple of tweaks still to be made. Firstly I had to decide what final shape I wanted for the lawns in order to eradicate all evidence of hosepipe mania. For some reason, my boss, who wasn't a gardener, but a Land Agent, wanted to get in on the act and suggested various wiggles based on the existing lie of the land, which would be little better than what we started with. I managed to ignore these pointless modifications reasonably successfully in arriving at the final shape, which was a fairly smooth couple of curves running down the north side, and swinging round in a single sweep to meet back at the entrance on the south side. This involved cutting away some of the existing grass, and adding in turf in other places. The one thing I wasn't prepared to do was to substantially remodel the banks, so the final result was an acceptable compromise, with the left-hand side having a couple of longer, shallower curves instead of several shorter ones.

The second remaining task was the one I intend to describe to you tomorrow - attending to the need for irrigation.