Snake Surgery

The size of the grounds of Chartwell fall into an in-between category. They are too small to be sub-divided into paddocks to hold livestock or to plant crops commercially, but are too big to maintain as a single continuous formal garden. Currently, we are busy with efforts to revitalise the long formal flower and shrub bed to the west of the house, which is called ‘The Snake’.

 
(Above): Aerial view of the ground, showing GH[in red] (the steep section called ‘Goat hill’), V/C[in blue] (veggie and composting), CC [in yellow] (area earmarked for a chicken coop), PJ[in orange] (area set aside for a BBQ and outdoor dining area, called the potager, a plant nursery and formal vegetable garden) and the formal flower garden areas in yellow marked SN (the ‘snake’) and 1, 2, 3 and 4. The south part (lower block) of the snake in front of the house is being tackled in conjunction with the planting Bianca is busy with in the L-shaped bed (marked ‘1’)

(Above): The refurbishment of this part of the garden, which I will refer to as ‘Snake Surgery’, started off a couple of weeks ago when Bianca removed all the border rocks from the south bed and placed them in temporary storage for re-location. Some of these specimens are real ‘monster’ boulders! What a job!

(Above): The yellow line indicates the approximate position of the front lawn edge along the snake. Her next move was to remove all weeds, ‘undesirable’ and overgrown plants and shrubs, with the exception of the few healthy developed shrubs. The trellis on the right separates the north snake from the south snake.

This weekend I learned a new expletive (swear-word): ‘crocosmia’. I am that sort of gardener who likes all the pretty flowers, and generally don’t take into account the effects a particular plant may have on its neighbours and the environment. I can now see that these masses of ‘pretty’ flowers were, in fact, invading the snake and have become invasive, throttling the performance of other neighbouring plants.

(Above): Some of the root-webs which we separated from the topsoil layer. There were approximately millions of crocosmia corms (bulbs) and tons of roots of varying thickness and strength, and the haul amount to a number of waste-wagons full of vermin.

(Above): The double-dig of Operation Crocosmia involves digging out one-spade depth in rows until the full bed-width (excluding existing healthy shrub-clad parts) has been dug out and placed on the treatment sheet on the lawn.

(Above): The excavated digging is then broken up by hand into clear soil and unwanted root mass and flower bulb components. This refurbished soil is then tipped back into the ‘clean’ area of the bed.

(Above): The refurbishment effort in the Snake starts taking shape, with the lawn edging to be defined by using these cement pavers seated on a bed of hardfill and possibly a bit of mortar filling. We will only tackle the final accurate edging job when processing of both snake beds has been completed and a well-defined outline can be determined.

Monday, after a relatively dry weekend, sees more rain falling, and consequently no further work is possible under the muddy conditions for the time being.

Crocosmia: They are commonly known in the United States as Coppertips or Falling Stars, and in the United Kingdom as Montbretia. Other names, for hybrids and cultivars, include antholyza, and curtonus. The genus name is derived from the Greek words krokos, meaning "saffron", and osme, meaning "odour" - from the fact that dried leaves of these plants emit a strong smell like that of saffron (a spice derived from Crocus - another genus belonging to the Iridaceae) - when immersed in hot water.