bunn

I have been terribly lazy about gardening this year, not least because our next-door neighbours, who had been making increasingly desperate attempts to sell their house for the last 6 years or so, finally sold it, making me feel that I no longer needed to feel guilty about the fact that our garden is wild, woolly (and apparently now infested with bunnies...)

Unfortunately it now turns out that the neighbours on the other side are starting to have difficulty getting past our hedge to their house, so action was required.  Never buy a house with a huge expanse of hazel hedging, oh gentle reader.  For hazel is a bounder and will begin as a a neat little thing, not much more than a living fence, and swiftly and with a single bound it will become a vast house-encircling tree.   Although, actually, the hazel is more tolerable than other trees in some respects : it saws very easily when green, and has no prickles.  Holly does not grow so fast, and occurs less often in the hedge, but it is a pain in the arse to cut, being prickly and made of a much more solid wood than hazel.  I personally find the hawthorn, with its long woody spikes, more annoying, but there's not very much of that.  Pp has formed a great loathing for holly,.
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Oak tree on top of Kit Hill, 1095ish feet up in the sky.  He is perhaps two feet tall, and has a definite air of clinging on by his toenails.  This must be at the limit of what an oak can survive


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I took a photo of this a few weeks ago because I didn't recognise it. I expect to recognise trees - at least, trees growing in a context that says 'I am a native tree!' like this one.  Later, I found the photo and thought 'what was that tree anyway?'  So I typed things vaguely into Google, but had no luck.  Then the word 'Alder'  came into my head, and then the word 'buckthorn'. And so it appears to be.   Yet I would have sworn I did not know that tree.

 Bad brain, no biscuit.

 There's an excellent letter in the Western Morning News from the secretary of http://www.orchardslive.org.uk/ (the organisation that I think is mostly behind my lovely North Devon Mazzards! )  extolling the virtues of 'traditional'  big apple trees with 10 foot stems in smaller gardens. 

Admittedly, mine isn't a particularly small garden, but none the less I think she has it spot on.  My garden would have a lot less room in it if I had pruned my trees  to keep their height restricted, as is often advised.  As it is, I can walk under the branches of most of the trees, and although I topped my cherry 'summer sun' last year, I now think this was something of a mistake - that tree only has a 5-foot stem, and it's too low, now the tree is maturing the branches are hanging down rather than reaching up, and you can't get past it.   I think this winter I shall have to go the other way and lift the crown!  

Fruit trees do not produce particularly dense shade, so you can still use the space underneath - and a bush tree that would entirely fill a small garden would be entirely manageable if the fruiting branches were up out of the way overhead.  And you can still harvest a lot of apples just by application of a children's fishing net.  Also, a bit of summer shade keeps the grass from growing quite so fast. And a good way of using lawn mowings is to dump them at the foot of a fruit tree, which will happily Slurp them up and use them to make more apples. 

I have a new cherry tree and a new pear tree!

( Cherry 'Birchenhayes' )
( Pear 'Morwellham' - they Mystery Pear with unknown reproductive habits!  )

Both of them came from the Endsleigh Gardens nursery just up the river.   They are both on 'vigorous' rootstocks, so they should be fairly robust trees.