Petrovska

Gardening in November is not for the faint hearted !

That said you have the entire winter ahead and there is no pressure to get things done as there is no growth and I enjoy wandering out with a spade , secateurs and a wheel barrow tidying up as I go along , cutting back , hacking into the brambles as the mood takes me … no pressure then !

But there is no getting away from it … Winter is dull and duller in the garden and I think this photo I took last week of a clump of lilies in the Lower Field sums it up perfectly … no joy …

And if you think that is dark and grey have a look at this clump of gunnerra I just cut down and tidied up for the winter … enticing what ?!!

And speaking of joy be careful of pretty things in the garden and two spring to mind immediately , bambi like deer who eat everything they fancy and the dainty looking parrot feather , an aquatic plant that looks great with lovely olive green feathery leaves but which spreads voraciously and quickly takes over any water surface it pushes into and today I did my usual monthly collection with barrow fulls of the stuff .

I saw a gardening article this week advising against removing fallen leaves as this can impact on sleeping hedgehogs which we as gardeners label as  “ nice ” animals and it always strikes me as how selective we are about animals we like and contrast this as to how we treat rats and mice … mice we are mildly OK with but rats are a no no but then I suppose hadgehogs don’t sneak into our  houses and eat the electricity cables … I am not making a case for rats , I regard them like everyone else as pests but they don’t harm us in the garden apart from a liking for birds eggs .

Now that winter is definitely with us and the garden is getting to look a little bare , this is the time when the evergreen shrubs such as eleagnus , the castor oil plant and the various viburnums come into their own together with the luminous bark of silver birch and every garden design no matter how small should have at least one of these .

I am often asked about  trees and shrubs for small gardens and my advice is always the same ,  a silver birch preferably a multi stemmed specimen for winter colour with a castor oil plant for all year round colour and for that tropical look however I wouldn’t plant a castor oil plant now until April as it won’t have hardened off properly and to these I would add a non invasive bamboo such as the black or golden variety .

This would be your back bone planting to which you could add a dwarf purple Japanese maple for added colour and structure and after that add in spring flowering daffodils , snow drops  and crocus .

My favourite ground cover perennial is always geranium which are not fussy about soil or position and really easy to propagate and  always before we go away for a few weeks from April onwards I take off shoots of my geraniums and pot them up and they will have rooted by the time I get back two or three weeks later and you have the feeling the garden isn’t asleep during the absence … in the winter no need to pot them up just plant straight into the soil and they will take .

We grow a lot of willows here at Old Spa Road mainly because the wet conditions suited them in the beginning when we were trying to get the garden established but also because I love willows , from the common to the exotic varieties , so when Susan at Clonmel Garden Centre told me a few weeks ago that she was ordering a new golden variety willow for her own wild life garden and asked did I want to be included in the order … and yesterday I took delivery of two “ Golden Sunshine ” willows in pots .

They look like small shrubs as the Dutch grower had pruned them back quite hard but they should thrive in the wild area of the Lower Field . I like to research a new plant and saw on the label Japanische Drachenweide  which Mr. Google told me was the Dragon Willow . Salix Sekka

“The dragon willow ‘Sekka’ is a large, easy-care shrub that immediately catches the eye of anyone who sees it. The growth of the branches constantly changes direction and is sometimes twisted, sometimes curved and sometimes straight. This creates an overall picture that seems a little bizarre. The young shoots of (bot.) Salix sachalinensis ‘Sekka’ are reddish in color, sometimes grow together and are reminiscent of dragon tails, which also explains the name of the plant ”

The dark red salix sekka has been a favourite of mine for forty years when I first planted it in Rosslare when I bought it from a Dutch grower who only sold willows and whose farm was at the end of a long laneway up on an exposed spot on the Wicklow mountains .

For some reason it is not a popular variety with Irish gardeners and consequently the garden centres rarely stock salix sekka or indeed  any willows these days and this is probably because willows thrive in our conditions , get huge very fast and can be difficult to control .

But growers are nothing if not inventive when producing product for garden centre shelves and there are hundreds of willow hybrids being bred in all sorts of colours both in leaf and in the bark colour from deep red to golden and this variety Golden Sunshine is also known as Japanese Fantail Willow and I am looking forward to growing it and seeing if it can be propagated .

I literally plant hundreds of willow cuttings each year as we prune hard all our existing willows every January / February however my success rate is poor and I have come to the conclusion that willow doesen’t take in wet ground and prefers a dry position and also here the deer eat every willow slip I plant thinking I am laying out snacks for them … in the past two years I have been trying to get stuff to grow in the wet field we are trying to rewild with rows and rows of golden willow cuttings about eighteen inches high … the deer ate every single one .

Over the years Susan has supplied me with a variety of rare willows including ones that prefer dry ground such as salix exigua , a North American plains native also known as the coyote willow … a lovely small tree with all year silver leaves which has died out on me here ten years ago but Susan who originally stocked it will research and order some for next spring .

Trip to China in November

We visited China in November and criss crossed the country from Beijing in the North to Shanghai in the South East in what was a memorable trip .

Apart from Beijing , Xian and Shanghai I knew very little about China beforehand having always found China’s history a bit overwhelming apart from the Great Wall , Terracotta Warriors , Yangtze River , black and white pandas and couldn’t tell one Ming Dynasty from the Tang but of course knew something about the Cultural revolution and Mao’s Great Leap forward of the 1960’s having read about these events at the time .

But we left China after two weeks with a greater appreciation of the culture , the cuisine and it’s amazing river gorge scenery after two internal flights and three bullet train journeys across the country from North to South .

A highly unusual country and people who for two thousand years have always wanted to remain isolated and cut off from the rest of the world and so they remain today … quite indifferent to the usual politics and happenings of the outside world as for example we were there during the US Presidential election where the rest of the world was concerned about Trump and what would happen if he got back in … not a bother on the Chinese and it was never a topic , they simply didn’t care !

A very connected and up to date society on the latest digital innovations and China is more or less a cashless society where even to buy an apple as I saw our local guide doing in a market , not even a shop , he just flashed his phone app and the trader just flashed her phone and bing apple paid for … while before we left Ireland we were obsessing at what currency , US dollar or Euro , to bring … all our usual bank cards worked like a dream .

Again we were obsessing and yes obsessing is the word , about the Chinese Firewall that prevents access to Google , Facebook or WhatsApp but the Chinese have their own equivalents and are doing quite well thank you and don’t miss any of our western apps … and when you see the mental destruction and hatred these bring into people’s lives through trolls , scams and the rabid anonymous keyboard warriors , who can blame them for exercising a high degree of control over content .

Eating odd animals such as Fido or your favourite cat and how would we know they are not on our daily dinner buffets and while it still goes on in rural areas , your educated young Chinese do not eat cats , dogs , rats  or snakes although they are partial to chicken feet which are available on every street corner along with rabbit’s heads  but we Irish eat crubeens after a few pints so what ?!!

The food was fabulous but then we had a guide who explained all the dishes as they arrived at the table …a lot of beef, chicken and pork  cooked in different ways with spices and sauces and each meal was generally served on a revolving table top , usually about twenty dishes in all … but eating out in Sichuan Province , the home of hot spicy food , was an experience with one spice known as “the tingling spice” especially to be avoided … the last time I felt such an effect was when a cathedrer was removed in Kilcreene Hospital !

Beijing as a city is obsessive about security and you can’t move around the centre , Tienamen Square and the Forbidden City without producing your passport at regular security check points to get into everything and definitely feels very repressive but the farther you move from Beijing the less oppressive and more normal everything is .

We went to see several gardens like The Emperor’s garden in the Forbidden City and the five hundred year old Yu garden in Shanghai which basically featured a lot of irregular shaped rock and bonsai trees but I am probably too shallow to appreciate the finer points and this style of garden never appealed to me … the place I really loved though and which made a huge impression on me was the walk through the Ming Tombs park outside Beijing where the peaceful air and beautiful landscaping with willow trees made me want to  stay for hours .

Some gorgeous garden statues and ornaments to die for  that would do very well in the garden here and as for pots well we were in a winery outside Shanghai called Jinfeng Wine  that is famous throughout Asia for rice wine and they ship it in hand made clay pots about a metre high which are then brought back to the factory and reused over and over again and we saw one vintage of 2003 … literally thousands of pots waiting in the warehouse to be reused and if these vintage pots were available in Europe they would sell out in hours .

Everyone knows about the Great Wall of China , the Terracotta Warriors and the Giant Pandas and they don’t disappoint in reality although the pandas are shy creatures and you really have to scrabble to get a usable photo … lazy out and pandas just sit or roll around eating bamboos … apparently the female has a window of about a week every year where she might be interested in sex however the males are so lazy that the zoo keepers have to show them the equivalent of panda porn to get them in the mood … little known fact while you are eating your cornflakes ?!

The Great Wall of China is over twelve thousand miles built along it’s northern border with the first construction started in 200 BC as a defence against invasion and it follows a line on the map climbing over mountains and any geographical obstacle in it’s way .

What no one tells you is that because it basically goes up and down mountains that cross it’s route it is steep and very difficult to climb and some of the steps are the size of small benches and almost straight up in some sections … we spent about three hours on it and about three days recovering from the effort !

Xian is a flight of two hours south of Beijing and is famous since 1974 when the first tomb of the Terracotta Warriors was discovered by a farmer digging in his fields …  immediate world wide fame followed as these were seven thousand life size hand carved statues two thousand years old all with individual features so no one face is the same buried alongside their emperor to guard him in the after life .

I saw an exhibition of about thirty of the statues in 1985 as part of a world tour when they came to Dublin and kept the poster on my office wall later and now forty years later I finally made it to the actual excavation .

Of course you don’t get to see the Terracotta Warriors on your own and have to jostle for space with a daily fifty thousand Chinese visitors … not an easy task as Chinese are not good to queue and have absolutely no manners when trying to get the best view …ordinarily very polite people but queuing brings out the worst in Chinese people and they think nothing of barging across you  however I have history when it comes to queueing in museums and am no slouch myself with my elbows !

The Chinese river scenery is amazing and we did a half day cruise on the Li river and a three day cruise on the Yangtze river where the gorge and river scenery was just unbelievably gorgeous .

It amazed me was how little I knew about chinese cities apart from the obvious Beijing , Wuhan and Shanghai and here’s a statistic that may shock you as it did me

“ China has 10 cities with over 10 million people, 21 cities with over 5 million inhabitants, and an astonishing 145 cities with over a million people. The most populous cities by urban area population are: Shanghai: 24.5 million. Beijing: 22.5 million.”

Take Chengdu , no me either , it has been the capital city of Sichuan Province since the 4^th century BC , has a population of 22 million and in the city centre you could mistake it for Fifth Avenue in New York , lined as it is with luxury stores of Chanel , Tiffaney’s , Prada , Louis Vutton and I reckon nobody there cares for the EU or the US and they are quite happy to ignore the world outside China .

Usually on holidays abroad especially around the mediterranean we are used to seeing fake and counterfeit goods especially clothing in street markets , all made in China … not in China itself though as this is strictly regulated and tourist goods are sold in official shops attached to the site , not expensive but not cheap either and the quality is excellent but the chinese are a small people and what is large or extra large at home will need to be 3 or four XL … or as a street trader lady in Saigon once assured me that her t shirt would fit me as it was “ hippo size ”!

Shanghai is of course famous for it’s Bund which is right on the river with it’s cutting edge modernity and high tech look and is a classy place , a river port at the mouth of the Yangtze leading out to the East China Sea and of course I knew all this from the famous photos but what I wasen’t anticipating is that south of Shanghai in the delta area there are some beautiful river towns dating from 600 AD to the present day full of canals and bridges predating Venice and it’s canals by more than a thousand years … Shanghai itself is about two hundred years old and when we visited Fenggang Town , a classic river town , it put Shanghai and all it’s modern skyscrapers in perspective … we loved our time walking the bridges and canals . 

Of course what we saw was a very superficial view of a complex country and as part of a small group we were accompanied at all times by a government regulated chinese Guide which I am sure meant we were steered away from anything contentious or that might show China in a bad light .

And speaking of guides I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to navigate and travel around China on your own , NO ONE speaks a word of English even in major hotels where they use Google Translate App to talk to you  and all signs are in Chinese … airports and train stations are a nightmare to find your way about so God bless Jack , our guide !

That said as you can gather we loved our entire trip to China , a fascinating place and a fascinating people .

Would I go back again … no been there saw what I was interested in seeing and perhaps because our trip being so tightly packed and on the go all the time , it was more of an expedition than a holiday !

But living in a country where communication and reading in a language other than Chinese is so limited and alien and of course streaming TV or the internet is controlled and having to do everything through a translation App is not easy and ultimately not for me .

In my opinion China is a major destination to visit just to get a feel of what the other great world superpower is about so overall a fabulous experience .

Colour in the Garden in November