August: the summer’s last stand

August is a transitional month. It’s definitely part of summer – there’s sunshine and festivals and family holidays. 

For weeks after midsummer the long, light evenings seem the same and days aren’t noticeably shorter. But by August the sunset accelerates and it gets dark much earlier in the evening. 

There’s a sense that all this – the sunshine, the holidays, the daylight – will soon come to an end. In just a few weeks it will be back to school and back to work and faces set towards autumn.

In the garden, the rate of growth has slowed, but the chores have not. At least now it feels as though we are a bit more in control and can get on with some things that have been on our ‘to do’ list for months.

Is hiring an arboricultural consultant the most grown up thing ever?

You’ll be bored of hearing that we have a lot of trees at Woodridge. We need to make sure they are in good shape and don’t need any remedial work. This isn’t just for the trees’ benefit, but so that we can show we’ve acted reasonably in case we ever need to make a tree-related insurance claim.

Mark, the consultant, has been here before and knows the garden and its history. He did a full survey in 2013 when the original plans for renovating the house were being prepared. It’s familiar territory for him. 

It turns out that most of the trees are hale and hearty, with only a few problems here and there. A variegated maple (Acer platanoides ‘Drummondii’) is reverting to plain green in places. A Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) has a failing stem which might fall into the neighbour’s garden. A holly (Ilex aquifolium) is at risk of harming more interesting trees and landscape if it falls. The Handkerchief tree (Davidia involucrata) isn’t happy, with a bit of dieback and smaller leaves than usual.

All of this is fixable, subject to the council not slapping a tree preservation order on any of them. We’re in a conservation area so have to submit a section 211 notice. If there’s no objection in 6 weeks, we’re good to go.

We’ve also been worried about our beautiful blue Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica glauca). It started dropping loads of needles and looking a bit browner than before. Doctor Google suggested a fungus called ‘Sirococcus blight’, which turns the ends of branches pink and curved downwards like a shepherd’s crook. Naturally I felt sure I could see these things happening in our cedar (doesn’t that always happen when you  google symptoms).

Mark’s verdict is that the cedar is reacting to the weird weather earlier this year. April broke the record for frosts and sunshine, with hardly any rain and a nasty dump of snow. It’s dropping older needles to preserve the newer ones. Fingers crossed it will recover from the shock.

Mark planned to be here for about an hour but in the end he left after nearly 3 hours. I followed him around like a small child, asking lots and lots and lots of questions. I even stumbled on the topic of his dissertation – Churchyard Yews in Dorset – Pagan or Christian? – which was fascinating. The people in his office told me he’d enjoyed his visit. That makes two of us. 

The dahlias deliver

I planted dahlias in the failed vegetable garden and a couple of other spots. Those that I surrounded with an organic anti-slug fortress are starting to do really well. The others are barely limping along. 

The idea was to create a bed for cut flowers. It’s prolific – I’m running out of vases. But I think next year I will put them into borders, as they look wonderful growing as well as providing gorgeous cut flowers.

It’s not me, it’s yew

When we arrived we quite liked the stately, columnar yews (which are nothing like the venerable churchyard yews of Mark’s dissertation). I don’t think we would ever choose to plant them but they added a certain kind of elegance.

After living with them for a while we’ve noticed that some are out of place, either dominating a flower bed or growing up into overhanging trees. Or, in one case, virtually blocking the entrance to a path. 

A gradual campaign of yew removal has begun. And as with everything so far, each time we bite the bullet and remove something that isn’t doing its job properly, the garden gets a little bit better.

When is a box ball not a box ball?

When it’s a box blob.

It must be hard to maintain a perfectly round shape  over the years, but the box blobs still look pretty tidy. They don’t half grow a lot in a season though! August is the time for pruning them and Laura has done a great job of wrangling them back into decent shapes.

Pruning, digging, clearing

We are continuing with the clearance of other shrubs, while doing general maintenance. There’s a row of beech ‘lollipops’ – not quite a hedge and not quite trees. Apparently you prune them in August so they retain their leaves and add some bronzy colour variation throughout the winter. They certainly gave much-needed depth to our view of the garden on cold days, so let’s hope we’ve achieved it again this year.

Putting lipstick on a pig

We have a huge shed above the house. The roof leaks and it’s pretty dark inside since we disconnected the power. (The circuit box was full of water. Somehow that seemed dangerous.) It’s a mess – stuff lying where we threw it when we arrived; things in the way of other things; objects sworn at and shoved aside.

We also have the Crap Gazebo – a small summer house not far from the back door. Right now it can barely be seen as it’s surrounded by thick growth. It’s old and tired, the doors don’t quite shut and some of the glass roof has been replaced with a board.

We looked into demolishing both and replacing them with a decent shed. Then, after we got over the shock of how much that would cost, we decided to fix them up a bit and hope they don’t just suddenly collapse one day. 

As the Crap Gazebo will be more visible after the autumn leaves drop, I stained the wood to make it look neater. It seems silly to expend any effort on a miserable little thing like that, but we’ll use it for storing firewood and now it will at least look presentable from a distance. 

Just as long as you don’t peer around the back – I only stained the bits you see from the house. It’s lipstick, not a full face of makeup!

Compost is quiet magic

In my April Part 1 post I talked about how pleasing we’ve found our huge compost bins. Now, only 4 months later, we’ve filled one side to overflowing and have dug it over to the other side to aerate and mix it up. 

Amazingly, in that short time most of it has already cooked into proper, usable compost. It seems these bins are just about the optimal size for heat, moisture and crumbly compost. 

Then what? Well, of course we’ve already started loading the empty half with new material. And although I didn’t have ‘paint breeze block compost bins’ anywhere on my list of the things I would do when I moved to the country, here we are.

Junk. Lots of junk 

The previous owner seems not to have read the bit in the contract where you have to clear out everything not included in the sale. He left a lot of junk in and around the shed and crap gazebo. Old gates, a car top box, a sideboard, a garden bench, a traffic cone, a swimming pool cover (where’s the pool?) chopped firewood left to rot, broken outdoor furniture, lead piping, and approximately 8000 plastic plant pots.

It took a while to get around to it, but eventually we dragged it out and piled it up, then made a dozen trips to the tip with everything we could fit in the car. 

That still left quite a heap, so we had Jen from Salisbury come and take it all away, along with a mountain of prunings from the previous few months. It took her two trips in a massive Luton van to get it all clear. We felt much lighter once it was all done.

Other jobs for the month

• clear ground elder
• clear paths and general tidying
• prune climbing roses on pergola and in tree
• weed and clear a section of ground outside Simon’s study
• prune weigela
• weed borders

Away from the garden

I mentioned that August is the time for festivals. We enjoyed the Great Dorset Chilli Festival, the Gillingham and Shaftesbury Agricultural Show and the Shaftesbury Fringe this month. 

It has been great to dive into as many local events as possible and we’re starting to feel a bit more connected with the area. It can’t be all about the garden, all the time.