YEWLOGISING MY HEDGE FUND

Primroses in the garden, photographed at twilight today with my swanky new camera which shoots well, even at ferocious film speeds.  (Today's subject ain't exactly photogenic, hence some totally  irrelevant pictures.)

First a question:

What is the difference between my 6 year old granddaughter and the Governor of the Bank of England?

Answer:  My granddaughter understood, finally, why I couldn't just draw a postage stamp, instead using of a real one, because it didn't really count as a true stamp.   

The other bod doesn't seem to understand that you can't just print lots of paper money when it isn't backed up by reality and expect it to have any true value, even if you give the activity a ridiculously euphemistic name like Quantitative Easing. 

I mean really!!  Honestly!  For cripesakes - this is just a step away from wheelbarrows full of Reichmarks.   Zimbabwe here we come - huzzah!!   A pint of bitter - that's ale, for those of you on the opposite shore -  might cost more than a Volkswagen in a couple of years time.  To hell with the bloody banks, I suggest.  Let's all have a bit of deflation.  It's Lent, after all, and we're all supposed to be tightening our belts.

Now then, enough of all that hooey.   To the serious stuff:  Concentrate!  Think!  Focus!

I'm minded to plant an - not 'a' but 'an' - hedge.  Our back garden, you see, is really our front garden, and vice versa.  It's all a bit complicated, and you really don't want the details but the main bit of our plot is reached through a rather low, head-banging tunnel squished between crook-back outbuildings and our house.  Once you've got through that obstacle, you find yourself rubbing the bump on your bonce in a private, secluded garden.

My Yew Hedge!  The string and sticks are real.  The rest has to be imagined.

But the aforementioned psg is bordered by the  village road and protected from it by a thick shelter-belt or screen of evergreens and deciduous trees.  Without that living screen, people could peep in to see what an absolute horlicks I'm making of the garden.  And one wouldn't want that.  I mean, think what would happen to the tatters of my reputation.  (He who steals my purse steals trash etc.  - by the way, refer back to the top of this post to be reminded that the contents of all our purses will be trash within a year or two.  But I digress and mustn't.)

For some time, now, we've been increasingly concerned that some of the ugly conifers in the shelter belt are ailing.  There seems to a national conifer malaise, and I'm profoundly in favour of that, since they were horribly over-planted in past decades.  But that isn't the point. 

These lugubrious evergreens, if dead and gone, would leave horrid gaps.  Hence my decision, over the week-end when yet more brown dead areas manifested themselves in yet another sad cypress, to take affirmative action.   And another thing.  My garden design is intrinsically mediocre as it is, but the whole thing is made a zillion times worse by having too much visible all at once.  

 

Scilla bifolia tiny, short-lived, but first spotted by me on Mount Parnassos, coming up through the melting snow.  

It's a little sweetie and seeds prolifically.    Shot at a ridiculously high film speed - 4,000 iso, hence the unreal blue.

So, I've ordered up my yews – the only possible choice, in this case – and over the next couple of weeks, just in time for the beginning of the growing season, I'll be lifting turf to pile up and make into super humus rich stuff for soil improvement else

where.  

And if we live long enough, and the Phytophthera keeps away, there will be a symmetrically sculpted, cuboidal, neat, lovely, formal hedge.  A backdrop for the herbaceous pretties to the west; a shelter from east winds and a sight screen for the more intimate parts of the garden.  That will enable us to partake of tea on the Tea Lawn, in peace and privacy.

The true wild daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, still 

my favourite, bless its little heart and blooming in my garden.

I'm listening to Beethoven's 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet, Op74, 3rd movement which keeps saying 'tickety-boo.'

I'm Still Reading Martin Chuzzlewit. 

This time last year I was in Malaysia, trekking with my wife and younger daughter in the Taman Negara.  Hot, steamy, leech-ridden and absolute heaven on legs my dears!

Bye Bye!!