Chris Palmer
It was said with a voice that bore a strong resemblance to that of Hattie Jacques in Doctor in the House.
“Fifteen minutes of walking AND NO MORE.”
I’d had a small procedure on my right shin, excising a suspicious mole for a biopsy, and leaving an open wound requiring four stitches. To my dismay I was told by the nurse, as she finished her skilful work, that due to its site in front of my shin bone, with very little spare tissue, I had to be extremely careful and do what I was told. My protestations about my need for hiking, golf and gardening were met with a steely response. Failing to do so would result in long term damage to my leg.
On my return from Crosshouse Hospital, I looked out at the garden, fresh from a week away on Arran, the lawn needing a mow, the vegetable patch needing weeding, dahlias to be moved into the border, the greenhouse requiring daily attention, and bedding plants to be transferred to pots, and sank into a trough of despondency. That night I had a nightmare of a future life on one leg, with a wooden crutch and a squawking parrot on my shoulder.
You learn a lot about yourself in these circumstances. For example, I quite enjoy delegating (but I feel that the adjective ‘bossy’ is unfair). I don’t really miss weeding. Maybe cutting the grass is not the herculean task I’ve considered it to be. Pottering in the greenhouse for a few minutes, listening to sport on the radio is quite good fun. The garden survived my enforced absence.
Three recent episodes demonstrated the constant interaction with nature in the garden that gives me both pleasure and pain. Let’s deal with the pain first. Eighteen months ago, I planted a lilac shrub in a border near our house. It was too late to produce flowers last year, but new growth emerged. In the middle of the summer, I looked out to see a pigeon nonchalantly sitting on the top of the shrub, tearing strips off the new growth as if it had been offered a tasty new meal. I chased it away, but it was too late. A new branch had been broken and all the top growth had been shredded. I tidied it up and hung an old CD on a stick nearby hoping to deter it.
This summer the pesky pigeon was back again. More shredded new growth. It seems to be a perfect height for it to land and eat the tasty new leaves. Am I imagining that it looks towards the house with a smug look of triumph? It knows it’s a battle I have lost. In the autumn I will dig the shrub up and move it.
We have put up two tit boxes in different areas of our garden. In one a pair of coal tits has reared a family. By the time they would have been fledging and learning to fly, the leaves on the tree had grown and were obscuring the entrance. We assume that at some stage the family safely departed.
On another tree we discovered that the box had become the home of a colony of bees. There was a constant flow of bees to and from their new residence. This was encouraging news. So many flowers in both the ornamental areas and the vegetable patch will benefit. In fact, there appeared to be an obvious connection with a large tub of a Purple Rain alliums where at one stage we counted a dozen bees enjoying the abundant pollen.
Have you seen ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’? It was a Disney film released in 1989. The special effects might be dated now but I remember taking the children to it in the nineties and they loved it – as did I. An inventor creates a machine that accidentally shrinks his and his neigh bour’s children to a height of a quarter of an inch. They have a scary challenge in a garden with a lawn mower. It came to mind as I was strimming a patch of grass between two vegetable beds. I had allowed the grass to grow far too tall. The strimmer is powerful and very noisy. I paused for a minute to check on my progress, and I was about to resume, my hand on the trigger, when a tiny frog hopped out of the grass I was about to reduce to shreds. The din must have been horrendous. The fortunate frog had escaped near certain death by seconds. It seemed unperturbed, and with two hops had disappeared into the runner beans.
A few years ago, a friend gave me a shrub for my birthday. It has turned out to be the garden equivalent of an indoor spider plant. Who hasn’t had one of those ubiquitous plants in their home, or possibly in an office, on a windowsill, thriving on neglect, uncomplaining, given some water when it is noticed, otherwise, just there? The shrub I was gifted is Nepeta, and in early autumn it is still flowering. Its less glamorous name is Catmint, but don’t let that put you off. To me it is the Ben Stokes of the garden world – a great all-rounder, reliable, adaptable, bounces back from setbacks and performs well in most conditions. Every garden should have one.
Rather like the spider plant, Nepeta seems to enjoy being left alone to get on with it.
If that is the type of plant you need for your garden, I strongly recommend it. As a bonus, it is loved by bees, is happy in poor soil and has a long flowering season. What’s not to like?
September can be a very rewarding month in the garden. With luck, and if you kept watering during the July heatwave, there will be raspberries, courgettes, pumpkin, runner and French beans to harvest through the month. Later in the month and into October, apples should be ready.
Garden centres and catalogues will be tempting you to buy bulbs ready to plant in readiness for next spring. I resist buying online. As the cost of bulbs has risen, I want to see and feel every single one before I buy it. It has to be firm, plump and with no hint of squishiness.
If you have a stretch of lawn, and are short of space, why not plant bulbs in it. Known as naturalising, it can provide colour for many years. Online gardening sites demonstrate the technique.
As the days shorten and heavy dew glistens in the morning, make the most of these autumnal days in your garden.
