The wind is roaring round the house as I write this. The good news is the house roof is back on and fully restored. Ace builder Alan finished it off today, up there on the scaffold top, in the teeth of gale and squall, painting the gable tops, realigning a dodgy gutter. He said it was freezing up there. What a hero.
The re-laid slates are looking pretty smart, but the grand reveal will have to wait till the scaffolding comes down at the end of the week. In the meantime, it’s good to know that the weather will now stay outside the house and the fragile gables stop crumbling into the bedrooms.
In the garden, spring is happening despite the perishing wind. Our gnarled little apple tree by the compost bin has dared to open three buds, but you can tell they’re shivering. I think it’s a Crispin. We had a few good apples from it last year. The other two apple trees that came with the garden, had to be hard pruned, as in eight feet of top growth removed, so we’re not expecting much from them for a while.
*
In between rainstorms, and wrapped up in sweaters, padded parka, fleecy pants and woolly hat, I’ve been a) digging up the lawn to create more vegetable growing space; b) attempting to dig out and unpick ground elder, Spanish bluebell and Mexican cigar plant colonies*; and c) continuing to disengage the hedge from chicken wire and the ivy overburden. This last activity is proving slow going. My presence causes the sparrows to dive from the hedge-side feeding post and into the hedge, where they shout loudly until I go away.
*Now for the plant pest and a note of caution, as in beware of letting Mexican cigar plant (Cuphea) loose on your property. In our garden, it’s like ground elder on steroids. Even the tiniest root fragment will turn into a shrub; the new roots spreading several feet in fleshy festoons, thick as macaroni – under paths, into lawns. When in flower, it has a trillion tube-like blooms that also make seeds. Only if you have the chance of entertaining humming birds should you have it in the garden, and only then in a container.
Needless to say, we do not have humming birds in Bishops Castle. It’s also astonishing that a tropical plant should make itself so at home in this rather draughty, frost-prone corner of Shropshire, although I gather there is at least one variety of the the 250 that is winter hardy.
When we moved into the house last August, this promiscuous entity was sprawling out of our garden, admittedly from a very sheltered, sunny bed, and up over next door’s garage roof, i.e. two metres taller than it’s supposed to grow. Though it did occur to me that perhaps it had found some ancient long-drop W.C. to root itself in. It was also giving itself a leg up along the length of a pine tree that was growing horizontally across the back of the flower bed. But I keep wondering if I’ve misidentified it; maligning an otherwise innocent shrub.
Any thoughts, gardeners? The serrated leaves are puzzling me, but when in flower, it looks like THIS. And descriptions of the swift growing/spreading roots/long flowering season fits.
