A little light laceration

I love pyracantha. Fabulous berries in autumn. Well behaved shrub for the rest of the year. But oh those spikes.

It’s death by a thousand papercuts when you try to weed around them.

I decided that the hedge above the potting shed needed a jolly good weed this autumn. It’s a job I ought to have done over the summer.  But things slipped away from me.  And the hedge is fine. Plump plants. A few shurbs a bit stricken, one or two dying. But the photinia, eleagnus, cotoneaster, hornbeams, laurels and cotinus are fine.

The acer campestre (field maple) and acer ginola were doing brilliantly early in the year. They had a lovely summer.

But the usual curse of the mole and then the little mole rat scuttling on behind have been responsible for undermining some of the roots in these trees.  There isn’t a lot I can do as I can’t move the hedge. And Artur seems to have retired from mole or mole rat hunting.  So I just have to nurture them as much as I can.

Hence the weeding.  Plus I want to plant some more narcissus (daffodil) bulbs around this part of the garden next month. So a bit of bare soil for a bit won’t hurt.

Maybe that’s why I love autumn so much. You can pretty much guarantee that if you weed at this time of year you can be reassured that the darn things won’t pop back up when your back is turned.

I didn’t finish the whole hedge. I’m about halfway through. But I need to give my lacerated hands a rest.

I have those lovely pyracanthas all throughout the hedge. And there are random brambles that have snuck into the area.  I tried weeding
with gloves. But frankly, they just don’t feel as good as being able to pick out a thin straggly grass root from in between the branches of the rosa rugosas.

Oh, that’s my complaint of the day.  Rosa rugosas. Their branches die badly.  Or they do for me. I have been pruning out at least two dead branches on each of the plants. And then gingerly removing them to the weed pile. And then sitting in the sun picking the thorns out of my fingers.

I have a beauty right in the middle of my middle finger as I type. Which makes me think of wretched rosa rugosas a bit more than I do all year. They do flower marvellously. But once. And who stands right beside a hedge at the exact moment the flower is open for its one week of existence?  Give me repeat flowering roses any day.