After the Storms – Ciara and Dennis

Two terrible storms hit the UK during February, both named storms  – Storm Ciara and Dennis. We are always in the line of such storms and get battered by gale force winds and heavy precipitation, rain, hail, sleet and snow and both our house and our garden suffered badly. Our roof lost part of the ridge and a length of fascia board and in the garden we lost fence panels, a gate, trellises complete with their climbing plants and two rare specimen trees.

Our back gate was torn from its hinges and the fence either side is no longer fixed to many of its posts. It is held up be faith awaiting the next storm to finish it off. The right hand photo shows the mangled tangle of trellis that was a T-shaped structure which had a Clematis Bill MacKenzie, a bright yellow flowered ‘tangutica’ variety, and a honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum, our native honeysuckle also known as Old Man’s Beard. We had to prune so much growth out just to rescue the plants and dismantle the broken trellis.

Our favourite tree was flattened but its roots remain in the ground – fingers crossed we may be able to rescue with the help of a woodsman friend. This is the second this has happened to this beautiful specimen of Cercis siliquastrum which delights with its pink spring flowers and later its ruby red pods. The right hand picture shows how most of the tree is now over the fence into the neighbouring garden.

The second beautiful unusual specimen tree to be blown over was our yellow-berried cotoneaster, Cotoneaster rothschildiana. We managed to get it back up and used tree ties to secure it against a larger tree stake, as seen in the left hand picture below.

Sadly during the next storm it came out again and we had to put it back up and fix it with tree ties to two tree stakes.

Our recently acquired corten steel screens were blown backwards and are now all asquew, so we will have to refit them with tougher supports.