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A Dried up Riverbed

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Palustris:
The Dried up River Bed.

   There are not many people who can claim that their latest alpine plant growing area came about because they always wanted a Yew hedge.  I have spent many hours in various National Trust properties admiring and envying the beautiful Yew hedges. Up to the beginning of last year, there was nowhere in the garden where we could put one, so it remained a dream. However, while visiting a local nursery we discovered that they were selling off 3  feet tall yew plants at £15 for ten plants. Now that was just too good an opportunity to miss, we bought 10.
   At the northern corner of our garden we have a small wood. The trees are actually Damson and the ground under them is full of a Galanthus nivalis form. I wanted to extend the area in which the snowdrops grew so I spent part of the winter clearing away the brambles and ivy from the section nearest the boundary. This opened up the wood to the strong winds which cause a lot of damage to our garden in spring. The clearance also left us with a length of fence with nothing growing up it. It was just about the right length for the yew trees! I fastened windbreak material to the wire netting which is the boundary fence to give the trees chance to establish before they had to brave the icy blast.

Palustris:
Now those who have read about our gardening here in other articles will perhaps remember that the soil in this part of the garden is best described as a mixture of broken glass brick rubble and leaf mould with a sprinkling of scrap metal. Therefore, I had expected to have to do a fair amount of work to clean it up before planting. In went the fork, spades are no use in this kind of soil. Clang!  Every where I pushed in the fork, after about 6 inches depth, I hit something solid. I cleared away the 'soil' removing as much of the nasty stuff as I could while doing it. Just below the surface I came across rocks.
   That is not unusual in this garden, almost everywhere we have dug we have found 'rocks'.    They are almost all the rounded pebbles one finds on beaches or in river beds. The area was once a glacial lake and the fields round us are full of this material. We think that as the fields have been cultivated, any unwanted material has been dumped on the waste land which is now our garden. Mind I always worry that we have found something of archaeological interest, until the ubiquitous HP sauce bottle turns up, below the pebble layer. So, after a weeks digging and removing this is what I had. There were also a large number of broken house bricks, slates and other such material. This was taken to the local Recycling  yard.

Palustris:
   The rocks themselves I stored behind the compost heap until I had decided what to do with them.

Palustris:
   Fortunately/sadly, early on in the winter we had something of a disaster. The temperature dropped from plus 8c. in a rain storm to minus 8c, in something around two hours. To show what effect that kind of weather can have, we lost all our sprouts (vegetables in an Alpine article! Heresy! } and cabbages. The plants simply exploded. When spring arrived we also discovered that the weather had wiped out all the hebes in part of the garden. That was quite a blow as they were all grown from wild collected seeds and thus irreplaceable. However, it did leave us with an area where we needed to do something to fill the empty space. The area faces south east and is well sheltered from every other direction by plant covered trellises

Palustris:
   The other side of the path from this was already an area of gravel, which has to be kept that way to allow access to the Septic tank when it needs emptying. It also was a useful place to put the rocks before placing them in situ.

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