A new month and a new year, January 2025. Let us hope that we gardeners and our gardens are dealt a better hand weatherwise than in 2023 and 2024.
I began this new year by writing, “January, a new month and a new year as well as we move into 2025. We hope this will be a kinder time for our garden and us looking after it.”
Then I considered some of the garden jobs for the month. “We tidied up the roof garden on the wood store” and then “We planted some new hellebores and revamped the planting beneath the stepover apples. Carex ‘Ice Dance’ became too invasive so we removed them and instead planted different carex cultivars to give variety.”
Onto the next double page spread I consider Birches and tree barks. I noted that, “I think Betulas, birches, are possibly the best tree for a smallish garden and so we have several specimens in both our front and back gardens. In winter on a sunny day they come to life. Their bark colour is accentuated and peeling bark turns orange.”
Still on the theme of trees my next page is all about variations of the properties of the bark of some of our trees, the colours, textures and patterns. Concerning this I wrote, “I wandered around our garden, camera in hand, to look at the trunks of our many trees and to compare their textures, colours and patterns. There were many worth photographing.”
Here I share nine of my photographs taken on that day.
The next double pages I looked at cloud pruning on the left page and opposite I showed a couple more garden jobs we completed in January.
“We have long admired cloud pruning of conifers often seen in Japanese gardens. In our garden we have cloud pruned a box hedge.Up until now we have never attempted to work with a conifer. We recently bought a cloud pruned pine, a Pinus nigra ‘Marie Bregeon’ and a Pinus nigra ‘Nana’ to cloud prune ourselves.”
Pinus nigra ‘Marie Bregeon’. Pinus nigra ‘Nana’
Tools of the trade Needle clump
Nearly there! All done!
On the opposite page I wrote that, “After too many days of frozen solid soil, when we passed mid-month the temperature shot up from -5C to +7C. So maybe we can get a fork or trowel in the soil.
We have now completed the planting of a variety of Carex plants beneath the stepover apples.”
“I fixed a solar light in the toolshed.”
Opposite the page about a couple of tasks is a more colourful page about Rose hips. I noted that, “Roses give us colourful blooms for many months starting late May flowering on into December. But roses don’t stop then. Several of ours give colourful hips in shades of red and orange and various shapes and sizes.”
My pencil crayon sketches below show the hips of Rosa ‘Summer Wine’ a climber and Rosa ‘Bobby James’ a rambler. The actual pencil crayons used were Derwent Inktense Crayons.
It is good to finish this month with some cheerful colours. We can now look forward to what February brings!
greenbenchramblings 