Hellebores: no pain, no gain

Tuesday 24 November

I arrived at Knightshayes to find Paul away for the morning, so Jude, Lucy, Alice, Dave and I headed down to the middle borders to cut back the perennials. We took down piles of Asters, Anaphalis and other dead-looking things, leaving everything looking much clearer. Next on the list was cutting back this year's growth on the Hellebores, so that the flowers and new leaves look their best. We also took down Japanese anemones at the same time. Unfortunately a lot of them were under a very low magnolia, so it involved a lot of crouching and balancing, which did for the backs of my thighs! We were joined by Maureen, who usually looks after one of the formal bits near the large pond, and made light work of the job. More hellebore trimming followed after lunch, and we then moved on to cutting back the Crocosmia. To say I was exhausted afterwards would be putting it mildly...

Jude asked how I'd got on at Eden last week, and I said what a fantastic time we'd had. It turns out she's done some arts-related work there and had had the opposite experience to mine - I said that the Green Team were a fount of knowledge and were patient with our inexperience, but it was interesting to hear another side of it - it also seems in the gardening world that opinion is divided over Eden's merit and I must say I felt somewhat defensive of it, or at least of our experience there, as it was fantastic. While several of Eden's Green Team had grumbles about working there, it seemed that most people thoroughly enjoyed working there. The main gripe (and probably Eden's main problem) was that it didn't seem to know whether it was an ecological experiment or a tourist attraction, and to be both is seemingly impossible. Perhaps a question for Mark in January...