Two weeks in one

My college assignments have been relentless and so I'm afraid last week's post fell by the wayside. I'll attempt to remember what we did but it's probably been replaced with sheep prices or suchlike.

Tuesday 9/3/10
With the sun shining down, we started with sorting out a few tired-looking phormiums - chopping down old/dead leaves and clearing out other leaves that had become wedged in and underneath them. No small task, with considerable risk of losing an eye to a particularly vicious leaf spike. My secateurs were hopelessly blunt, as were the loppers, so I had to borrow someone else's to try to chop out the dead leaves. Old, rotten phormium leaves do not want to be cut. It's easy to see why the leaves were used for ropemaking... By this point the sun was shining down, with very little wind, and we all stripped off down to jeans and t-shirts - the first time this year!

Once renewed, the plants looked much better, and we continued with clearing leaves from nearby astelias and from the beds behind the phormiums. We uncovered large numbers of bulbs, including naturalised erythroniums, which Knightshayes is famous for. The bulbs' leaves were all pale from being hidden under leaf mould, but they should get going properly now. After lunch we tackled what we thought was the last lot of hydrangea pruning, but others appeared like triffids on the way back to the shed.

I gave Kay a lift down to the train station on the way home, and we had a very interesting chat. Her partner is the new head gardener at Overbeck's down in Salcombe, and they've both worked for the trust for 10 or so years. Both are career changers, however, which gives me great hope for the future, as they've held pretty senior roles. Kay was very complimentary about me, saying I could have gone for Paul's job (ha! ha! ha!) but that a lot of NT gardeners get in on the basis of enthusiasm rather than formal qualifications or masses of experience, which is encouraging. Hopefully my placement at Knightshayes will count for something in the future.

7.5 hours

16/3/10
Things are starting to get moving. The house and gardens reopened at the weekend, and so now is the time to sort everything out before it gets too busy. Our first task today was to clear out the area next to the gardeners' mess, which has become a general dumping area for everything that doesn't have a home anywhere else. It was prompted by a request from the nursery department to return all the air pots that had been acquired over the last year or so. In with the air pots were piles of plastic plant pots, the old statue covers, lots of random buckets of gravel and compost, plenty of bubble wrap and myriad other things besides. The plastic pots were all set to go to landfill, so I rescued them for my dad and for college (and anyone else who'd take them - there are hundreds), along with a load of bubblewrap (good for frostproofing?). The old statue covers revealed a few overwintering hornets, so we were lucky we didn't get stung.

Once the shed was cleared I was tasked with arranging hydrangea plants into transportable groups, making sure that they all stayed grouped by cultivar, as apparently it is nigh on impossible to tell them apart until they flower, at which point the difference can be embarrasingly obvious. I'm not much of a fan of the old-fashioned hydrangeas, but I'm partial to the odd white lacecap.

With an hour or so until lunch, we headed up to St John's to do some leafblowing, although I was tasked with finishing off the pruning of the aforementioned sly hydrangeas. Just downwind of the beautiful 'Pallida' witchhazel, it was a nice spot, although the bloody hydrangeas had got so overgrown that I was rapidly assimilated and got slapped in the face by last year's flowers on several occasions. I do wonder if I caused a couple of heart attacks in nearby visitors when I emerged from the undergrowth for lunch, hair everywhere and brandishing a pruning saw.

In the afternoon Kay and I decided to get on with righting a Cupressus sempervirens that had grown too big for its stake and which was growing along the ground (presumably from the weight of snow). I quickly discovered that the topsoil in that area is very shallow, and you hit stones very quickly. Thankfully Dave, Patrick and Richard were on hand to help bash the stake in with the help of a very large stump thumper (or whatever they're called), and hopefully the cupressus will be a bit happier now.

Patrick had his interview for the seasonal gardener position in the kitchen garden, so we're keeping our fingers crossed. However the other shortlisted applicants were two people who'd been made redundant from the BBC's Berryfields garden, so he's up against some strong competition. I think he's got a good chance though, as Lorraine, the area supervisor, thinks he's great.

I've been borrowing books from the garden office - they have a nice selection of pretty specialist books on a range of hortic subjects, so last week I borrowed some on shrubs, and this week some herbaceous border books, all to research my design for the Commodore's Garden in Dartmouth.

7 hours

National Trust strategy and fighter jets

Today was Knightshayes' pre-season meeting, but before that got under way we managed a fair bit of rose pruning (yes, again) - this time the rose in question was alive, which is better (or not, depending on your view of roses). I still don't have the knack of pruning and should probably read up on it, as I've either gone mad and reduced the poor plant down to a shadow of its former self, or it looks like I've not been near it. I get the whole reducing it by a third thing, that's fine, but it's the bits to reduce (outward facing buds? Old branches? Dead bits?) that are confusing. I have come to the conclusion that it's a dark art known to and practised by the chosen few, of which I am not one.

The purpose of the pre-season meeting is to apprise everyone of how the previous year went, and what plans the various managers have for the coming year. First we heard from John Longworth-Krafft, assistant director of operations for the south-west region, on how the Trust is aiming for a more local approach, both externally and internally - leadership and delegation (ie giving staff more direct responsibility) were the buzzwords there. There was also a fair bit of emphasis on taking risks and not being as rigid an organisation as has been the case in the past. Then we heard from various Knightshayes supervisors and staff members on their particular department. 2009 was a record year for Knightshayes in several ways, with more than 112,000 visitors, and budgets met and exceeded.

After lunch Lucy and I headed back into the woods to do some cutting back and clearing while the blokes went about putting manure down. On the way we were treated to a low-flying buzzard with what looked like a fish from the pond in its talons. We chopped back the remaining epimediums and cleared old leaves from around the aforementioned rose, though the job was made much harder by what looked like variegated nettle runners, which wove through everything and made gathering the leaves doubly difficult. This was soundtracked by the whoosh of fighter jets heading over the hills; on their return journey they seemed little higher than the treetops, which was rather unnerving, especially for the resident birds.

The spring plants are really going for it now - swathes of snowdrops and crocuses are round every corner, and the hellebores are in full swing too. A white azalea was covered in flowers, and the winter aconites are peeping out of the manure too. The camellias continue to brighten up various corners with flowers in various shades of white and red, and the sound of birdsong is everywhere during the morning, with one bird doing a passable impression of a car alarm...

7.5 hours