Gardening

Although the weather here is cold and cloudy, it's been dry and I've been busy in the garden. The secret to winter gardening is wrap up warm and stay moving. It's a good time to do some of the heavy work that is just too hot in summer.
     Chris the tree guy came by on Friday looking for some work, so I decided to take the bull by the horns and get him to cut down the cabbage trees in the back garden. I know they are a NZ icon, but they are a messy nuisance really. Other than giving Thomas some climbing exercise, and providing ecologically sound plant ties they don't really have much to recommend them.  The flowers give me hay fever in  early summer, and I spend the rest of the year picking the dead leaves out of the camellia. Chris got the trees down in about 45 minutes and took the stuff away too - it was really heavy, full of water. So now I'm hoping my Golden Delicious apple will be more productive, with the light and lack of competition from the matty root system of the cabbage trees, and there's an old grapevine behind it that should be better too. I can fill in the space underneath the apple with hostas, ajuga and iris stylosa, I've got some needing a home from another place in the garden.
      To celebrate my holiday I took myself off to Oderings nursery and bought some plants, new seasons dahlias for the front garden (I've managed to tidy and cut out a lot of dross from there), some more polyanthus for filling gaps and a delphinium that was flowering - hey it's winter, dude! - a pretty lavender colour. And I bought a large terracotta pot for my bay tree, which has been languishing for some time now. I've been lopping off the side branches, to turn it into a standard. So now it's all potted up, with strawberries for summer and some polyanthus in lemon shades to make it look good now.
  So I'm well pleased with myself. The garden has never looked so tidy, and spring flowers seem to look better in a tidy garden - you can see them properly against a neatly edged lawn and weed-free soil. It seems like we may have an early spring, (hope, hope) and we're all ready for it.