Day 109 - A wilderness of drabness

Three days a week, I had a workmate. He turned out to be all right, once we got used to each other. and once it began to dawn on me that I didn't care enough to disturb his routine of the last 20 years. I got on with making the small changes I needed to keep my sanity, and he carried on doing exactly what he had always done. The other two days, I was either on my own, which I liked, or I had the boss for company. Long treks through the swamp with him dictating what he wanted done, and now and then stopping to make rapturous declarations about his Rhodies. Just look at the farina on the reverse of that leaf! The Rhododendrons had all finished flowering when I started work there, so the best he had to offer was the backside of the foliage, which excited him immeasurably. Needless to say, I did not share this. They were boring. They were also the worst possible habitat for the encouragement of any other kind of organic life, whether animal or vegetable. Brightly coloured landscape killers, briefly flourishing in your face for a couple of weeks, then stripping your life of all joy for the next 50.

Anyway, I did make some changes for the better. The tool store and potting shed were an unfathomable shambles until I rearranged everything. I got it all ship shape so I could practice my dark horticultural arts, and the boss immediately complained that he couldn't find anything. I figured that was for the best, because if he couldn't find the equipment, then he couldn't ruin anything I had started fixing. And I made some maintenance improvements to the limited ornamental plantings around the house, without having any influence on the very boring content of the borders. The kitchen garden, too, benefited from my input, although I did not get the chance to rearrange the layout to get rid of the long beds. Normally I would have come up with a way to do that within a few weeks of starting, but somehow, I must have developed a defeatist attitude, and realised that I would not be staying long enough to waste my energy on planning it. The hedges got the first stage of a makeover, though, and I pruned the wall fruit which was in a state of dereliction. But before long my first priority was going to be planning my escape, to prevent my own descent into a state of disrepair.

By carefully throwing plants out and replacing with new ones, I managed to get the glasshouses back on track. This, combined with the work I was doing on pruning and controlling pests and diseases on the citrus and vines, made me only slightly happier with the effect, as there seemed no chance of any money being spent on making the structure safe or replacing the rotting benches. The last photographs I have of the interiors were taken a month after the first ones, and don't show the whole scope of what I did by the time I left a further three months down the line, but I believe they demonstrate a slightly more orderly hand at work. The lemon on the left was now clean, better pruned and tied back to the wires on the wall, which nevertheless still needed cleaning and repainting, so infested had it been with sooty mould -

The benches were now crowded with Streptocarpus and Pelargoniums which I had propagated, the parent plants having been discarded together with their associated pests. I would have introduced biological controls if I could have figured out how to beg for the money in advance, so I didn't have to dip into my own pocket to pay for them -

Under the bench we had some quite large Christmas Cactuses, and there were all sorts of other bits and pieces, such as Mandevillas, Bird of Paradise plants, and a whole polytunnel of Clivias in a typical state of disrepair. All of these had to be rescued before being fit for use in the house, although they had been doing perfectly well transporting a jungle full of insect life in and out of the house every weekend up to now. Apart from that, I really have nothing to show for my five months there. Other than a few shots of the hedges in the kitchen garden after their first stage of recovery. I showed you yesterday the misshapen Copper Beech arches, and the switchback, round-topped box hedges of varying heights. Here is how they looked after a first severe cut -

The arches looked better for the initial work, but more was needed to allow some parts to grow up to fill space at the top where they did not have any purposeful shape -

I still couldn't cure old habits of leaving the netting of the fruit cages draped over the hedges, where the birds could find their way in! The rose beds were not only struggling to provide any rose flowers, but they were utterly wonky as far as the heights of the hedges went as well -

Even after a hard cut back, it still looked weird. The extent to which I had to cut some of them back can be seen below, where parts have been stripped of foliage completely -

The whole place was still overrun with weeds, as it was impossible to do any regular cultivation in the soaking conditions, and short of spraying everything if I ever got a dry day, which I was reluctant to do, I couldn't see a cure. Or rather, I didn't want to, as my mind was already elsewhere, even if I didn't know where yet. And I suppose if this had been my first garden, I might have been bamboozled by the excitement of the Rhododendron-fancier, and the quiet rural setting. I might just have been convinced that this was what gardens were about -

But what looks like woods is in fact a forestry sitka monoculture, what passes for a garden is an unkempt wilderness of drabness. I would be glad to make my exit, which will begin tomorrow with an interview.