I'm reading Orwell's Roses. It's a book of essays about George Orwell, who aside from writing polemic, prophetic dystopias, and the brilliant Animal Farm, was also an avid gardener. When he wasn't battling totalitarianism, he was whacking weeds and nurturing rose bushes.
I always knew that about him though, that heart was in the bucolic English countryside of meadow and dale rather than the trenches of revolutionary class war. Sadly he did die young of TB which might have been from the infections he picked up in the damp muddy battlefields. Every gardener longs to have an ideal spot where they can garden, and over and over and over it's always stated most plants don't like wet feet, they must have good drainage, and air circulation.
Rebecca Solnit writes that she visits Orwell's former garden out of curiosity and the Albertine roses he planted are still there. It's hard to kill a rose once its found it's sweet spot though, as I found with the flower carpet roses my brothers planted in the buxus beds. The buxus may be getting blight, so I've decided I must trim it right back and give it a chance to grow again. I can't face digging the whole lot out.
I'll have to do the whole row on a dry day so it doesn't look like a toothless smile with plants missing here and there. Tip, don't plant buxus hedges in Auckland. The humidity will not be it's friend. I'd go for corokia, or manuka or totara or pittorsporum going for a fine leaved hedge that will hold up. Or if you like wavy forms with little effort, muehlenbeckia or low hummocks of coprosma. I've seen attempts at griselenia fail big time and gardenias don't like to be hedged either, they'll be attacked with thrips.
It's just the low buxus though that needs to go and I wonder if I will get away with leaving a very minimal ankle high hedge just enough to define a border.
The other thing I've done is harvest the yacon, by digging it out as the leaves are turning. It's now 2:50 in the afternoon and the sky has turned so dark that it almost feels like it's night time. I may have never entered the military but I too engage in battle right in my own backyard defining territory and crossing borders, martialling my army of worms and sharpening my swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, marching in my gardening boots for bread and roses, digging for victory.
