Lots of work to catch up on… but there was a break in the weather; dry, sunny and mild. I could spend all day at the computer ensuring fatbirder.com was updated… or take a break to refresh the spirit. Obviously I needed refreshing… but that still left a quandary… birding locally or paying some overdue attention to the garden.
The garden won, who knows how many winter days will allow us to potter? There was plenty to do, but two jobs couldn’t wait… cut back the globe buddleia and radically prune the lilac. The globe buddleia has suddenly spurted throwing up lots of flowers and too much growth. We can’t let it choke the air conditioning unit and, in any event, flowering just as the insects are hibernating or the majority of workers are dying off makes no sense. I know with the common variety of buddleia, one can cut back practically to the root and it will be six foot tall by the end of the next growing season. What I don’t know is whether the Globe variety is the same… I hope so as I decided to be radical!
The globe buddleia stump
The Lilac is a sprawling tree that has grown sideways for decades. It can be splendid but it was blocking the path to the back gate and tapping against the bedroom window in the wind (which really got up today while we were gardening). A honeysuckle had become a burden and when we cut it away earlier in the year it revealed that some parts of the lilac had died. So today we severed several limbs… hoping the the new growth coming up from the roots will once more give us a healthy tree.
The lilac branches don’t go to waste but form the wood pile in the corner where all sorts of insects and invertebrates can prosper as the wood rots. We know the frogs love that corner too.
