Border patrol

Having arrived to find nobody around, I went on a meander round the grounds and bumped into Dave on the way back. Paul joined us and organised the tasks for the day - my duties were cutting back and pruning in the border outside the house (with the alpines etc). Today I was on my own, as Jude and Lucy have swapped their days around and now do the veg garden on Tuesdays. I had just begun to tackle an unruly salvia when Paul came along and asked if I'd like to see what a NT tree survey involved, so off we went up to the woods (Michael's?) at the top of the gardens. The survey is undertaken every few years to assess potential risks from trees to garden visitors. Areas are generally rated from very low risk to very high risk, and the woodland is rated as high risk, mainly because Knightshayes has woodland staff who manage the trees throughout the year (presumably as a condition of being able to open to the public) and so potential dangers are identified long before they can become a problem (that said, there have been several large limbs lost on the estate during the recent gale-force winds). Certain species are assessed every six months, because they are known to be weak, while other, more reliable species are assessed every two to three years. Paul and Dave look for problems such as dead wood, evidence of rot/fruiting bodies (from fungus), weeping wounds (potentially a sign of phytophthera), damage to roots (for example from overzealous mowing) and so on. The beech we looked at had been badly pruned in its youth and so suffered from a weirdly split trunk where the bark had grown between the two main stems (I can't remember the term for this sort of bark growth). Because of the split and a crack in the lower bark from twisting (and a large, deep wound where a branch was removed long ago), this tree will be looked at again in six months to see if work needs to be carried out to reduce the crown. Apparently there are issues with waiting for next year's budgets and marrying this with getting the work done before the gardens open to the public again.

After a tea break, I set off (now with Alison) to do the cutting back. We chopped back salvias, thinned out hebes and spireas, cut down dead bits of romniyas, lifted Dahlias (cv 'Twynings After Eight') and put them in compost to overwinter. Dahlia tubers are remarkably potato-like, which is odd given that they are in the Asteraceae family. After lunch we moved on to the next border, and faced the formidable task of cutting back schizostylus without taking down dierama too. I *think* I managed to avoid the dieramas...

I'm not back at Knightshayes until January, and I will miss it!

5 hrs