Petrovska

December I always have mixed feelings about as I find it a month where there are so many distractions and so many things to do in the run up to Christmas that there is little time or even interest to so spend time in the garden .

We have had the shortest day of the year on 21^st December and from there on you have a little bit more light every evening and you realise those ancient people had their heads screwed on the right way when they invented a great festival around the time of the solistice , the shortest day of the year , a lot of eating and drinking and whatever else you fancy to take your mind off the dark winter nights and something to look forward to be it , Yule , Saturnalia , Nollaig or Christmas !

I was asked in town today by a friend what do you do in the garden at this time of year and my reply that I just stroll around a bit didn’t explain fully so as it happened I had just been in the garden earlier today and could list exactly what I had done … planted six hyacinth bulbs in a shaded area of the garden and planted fifteen allium purple sensation and then three ferns , harts tongue , that were on the back window of the car since I bought them two weeks and then finished off with half an hour on the leaf blower … all added up to a handy two hours of bulb planting and tidying up leaves  I had been putting off … and it got me out of the house and I felt a glow of satisfaction afterwards !

The most famous gardening piece of advice is “ right plant right  place ” but even then something might not gel and I always advise if a tree or shrub is not doing well and thriving after two years then move it as sometimes even moving a plant a metre can help … but of course the other important thing I find is to walk around and view the plant from every direction … of course giving advice and taking it is another thing and last week Snezana mentioned that a silver birch I planted a few years ago is not doing so well and I had planted that tree in the front garden so that when I parked the car in winter the silver birch which was right in front of it would look great … it would but the tree had not put on any growth and I had broken my own rule and left it there for four years thinking it would grow into the position … luckily I dug it up today and the roots were in a bad way as the soil is dry and not very nourishing in that area but of course because I wanted the silver birch in that position I had persisted however in a testament to the survival instinct of silver birches the tree had kept it’s leaves and had no rotten branches but it hadn’t thrived so today I moved it and fingers crossed it will do well in the new more open site in the front garden helped by a bucket of compost and a few scoops of osmacote a slow release fertiliser pellet .

Now is a good time to check garden pots and my normal routine is to top up with compost any pots where the soil has slumped a bit and I keep a tray of primulas to pop into any available space … always yellow as this is the natural colour of the old fashioned cow slip and I find the exotic colours of the modern hybrid primulas a bit jarring .

Basically this is as much as I do with pots at this time of year but I do have a check under each pot for any overwintering snails … you don’t need to know but you can take it I don’t tuck them up for a winter snooze as unless dealt with they will be ravenous as soon as the new growth of the hostas start again in late March !

If you want the latest on pots Sarah Raven has a new book out “ A Year full of Pots ” which I haven’t read yet but I have several of her previous books and she is a superb writer .

I am often asked for gardening advice on FB Forums and this one from December 23^rd deals with what to plant in a man made wood .

“My experience with a natural wood is to thin out as it grows first by creating walkways through it so you can at least push a wheel barrow through . As the canopy grows nature will bring in seedlings depending on the soil ie, wet or dry , some like astilbe and iris will be welcome but weeds like thistles and docks will need to be controlled before they get a hold also brambles so you need to be on top of this otherwise it will become overgrown . I introduced ground cover geraniums close to the paths also lamium ( dead nettle ) which are easy to propagate and then planted lots of bulbs , dwarf daffodils , wood anemone , which will spread slowly but is not invasive like some varieties of blue bells and has lovely white flowers in May and then the plant dies back completely , a real favourite woodlander  of mine  . Lamium chablis is a lovely evergreen almost white leave which comes into the garden centres when in flower in late April / May . Along the paths you could also introduce a few large pots as focal  points .”

I envy someone who gets to plant and design a wood from scratch but of course you have to wait at least fifteen years before it takes shape but in our case here when we moved in twenty four years ago we inherited a conifer wood planted for harvesting so the trees were just plain conifers , a horrible tree when planted en masse and to make matter worse they were planted too close to each other and almost abandoned afterwards … when we took the wood over there were no diversity with native Irish trees like birch or oak and the ground was too full of tangled conifer roots to be able to dig out planting holes in order to plant other trees .

We made the best of what we had , Snezana took it over , cleaned out the brambles  and we thinned and cut out on a yearly basis , made paths through it and gradually we now have an area with a design about it and there is bird and animal life coming in and out … still not what I would like a proper wood to be but you have to cut your cloth to what you have .

A round up of travels in 2024

In April we ticked a bucket list item of mine since the 1970’s and island hopped by ferry through the Cycladic islands where the highlight was the 14 km trek around the caldera at Santorini together with exploring Naxos , Mykonos and the sacred island of Delos .

I love this photo I took of wild goats while we were on a scooter trip around the Island of Naxos April 2024

Santorini was just as out of this world as they say it is

Throughout the summer we spent several periods in Croatia where the highlight there was our olive harvest in October .

In November we travelled around China , a mammoth trip with a special highlight of walking the Great Wall outside Beijing and seeing at first hand the Terracotta Warriors at Xian .

Nobody told us what a gigantic slog the Great Wall of China is

Christmas away from home

I love Christmas , always have , the lights , the present buying , the kids excitement and anticipation , the christmas playlist all around the house and the non stop blasting out of umpteen versions of Mary’s Boy Child , I love it all even the tacky elements and the plastic Santas !

While working abroad for fifteen years with the EU I missed spending Christmas at home because of work commitments for many years . The first was in Skopje , Macedonia in 1994 , a mainly Christian Orthodox country so their Christmas is on January 6^th and our day of the 25^th December went largely unnoticed and it was work as usual . I remember it as a miserable time , my first christmas away from home and family and not being there when they opened their presents that morning .

The EU mission I worked for , the MacSam Mission in Skopje was run by the Canadians , lovely people and they tried their best to cheer everybody up but those of us on duty especially those with kids like myself were walking around missing home . One Canadian officer , Claude Lussier , was passing by a large toy shop in downtown Skopje on Christmas Day where he saw a little 6 year old gypsy child with her nose against the window looking in at a life size china doll she would never have and thinking of his own kids at home went in to the store and bought the doll and brought it out and gave it to the little girl , Claude said the look on her face made his Christmas .

I spent my first Christmas in a Muslim country in Sarajevo in 1996 where there was no mention of Christmas and not a piece of tinsel paper in a shop window which somehow made it easier to forget that it was Christmas at home . These were the days before internet , mobile phones , Skype or WhatsApp and phone calls home were always breaking down as Bosnia’s telephone system was trying to recover after four years of war .

Looking back it was a bit crass and a bit up yourself to be complaining about the lack of Christmas in Sarajevo in 1996 as the people had just come out of four years under siege from Serb forces with 7000 dead in the city and where trying to find food and water and avoid being shot by snipers was the main worry .

I spent the following Christmas in Montenegro stationed in Niksic on the Bosnian border , a real bandit town , the centre of all war time smuggling with 20 gang related murders every WEEK .

The IGFY Mission insisted we all stay in a local hotel for security reasons where all the local hotel staff and in fact the entire town hated us as we were trying to stop the smuggling . The Hotel was called the Onogast but we all referred to it as the Holocaust and most of my international colleagues cooked in their rooms as quite a few had got sick from the hotel food and believed we were being slowly poisoned – I have to say I never got sick but if I tell you that half board cost 25 euros while full board cost an extra euro that says it all about the quality of the food and it was also noticeable that none of our local staff would eat with us and had their own special table where they ate together with presumably better food !

Another memorable  Christmas abroad was in the Seychelles in 2006 where I spent two years with the Seychelles Customs Service and where Christmas day was spent on the beach in sweltering heat with almost 100 % humidity !

Now that I am retired I enjoy Christmas in Clonmel , my home town and while the street decorations are not up to 5^th Avenue or Oxford Street  standard they are wonderful !

When Snezana retired also from overseas work and had her first Christmas at home  and after all the christmas’s we spent abroad I thought great she can share the enjoyment of decorating the Christmas Tree … here I have to explain that I have a doctorate in Christmas tree decorating and absolutely love the preparation which can take all day … so I assembled all the boxes and explained that the best decorations went on first then the second ones and after that the lights but each decoration had to be positioned just right  then balanced with a similar type on the other side of the tree and then you build the tree until all the decorations were just right … and then dear reader … then the unsentimental Dane grabbed the box and said just throw them at the tree and if they fall they fall … almost no room at the inn for her that day !!

Diaries … how , where , why ?

My oldest son has given me a book for Christmas  titled “Dad I want to HEAR YOUR STORY ”which is a blank journal which you work your way through  and write down your life for reading afterwards by the family to chorus’s I presume of wasen’t he grand ?

But what goes into a diary , is it the unvarnished warts and all or is the mind numbingly boring bland version … I am going for the cover the children’s ears version !

Back in 1994 the Irish Customs Journal asked me to write a series of articles for their monthly magazine , nine in all to be called My Early Life in Customs .

My first article was published and all hell broke loose with lots of colleagues feeling a bit maligned and one former boss ,then retired , actually sued the magazine and myself jointly for 20,000 pounds in damages . The magazine flew me back from Macedonia for an interview with their lawyers to see how my anecdote / story would stand up in court to cross examination … they decided that there was no malice intended and in fact the piece was meant as an affectionate look back at a boss who was quite brutal to work under but who always had your back … so the case would be fought .

Needless to say after that bruising encounter the magazine decided that the remaining eight unpublished articles on my Early Life in Customs  would remain just that … unpublished !!

Funnily enough one of my former colleagues who had now risen to be the Irish Revenue Commissioner rang me to say he loved the piece about himself where I described him as a swordsman supreme which he claimed had given him new status among the  female clerk typists in Dublin Castle who no longer regarded him as a boringly safe auld fellow !

Colour in the Garden in December

December though sees the shortest day of the year on the 21^st and from now on it is onwards and upwards to longer evenings and new growth and from January , batteries recharged we are all ready to go again … Happy New Year to everyone or as they say in my favourite place , the Former Yugoslavia … Sretna Nova Godina !