The first shag of the year

Bramble & Briar #117

Believe it or not, there’s a neat ball under all this new growth

Everything’s gotten¹ a little shaggy here. Wafty. Loose. Displaying a markedly relaxed attitude to line, or anything that might be considered an edge. I can bear this through May – even settle into it and enjoy the general frolic, but beneath the feeling of abandon I need to know there’s a crisply defined form, some structure just waiting for the gardener to give it permission to reassert itself. And while it’s true that you can reimpose such discipline on a garden, even when it’s all gone a bit too far, and secondary thickening is threatening to set in around last season’s opportunistic growth, it make life so much easier if you can manage to check things before they quite get to that stage.

In short, it’s June, and the garden needs a haircut.

Not the lawn, even though ‘lawn’ is a very loosely applied term here that really describes the vaguely green parts of the garden that are much trampled over and don’t appear to have been purposefully planted with anything much. Certainly not grass, though there’s more of that than I’d given the turf credit for, beginning to assert its presence after No Mow May, and No Mow April before that. I’m not sure I’ve a need for the mower just yet, though the month might yet turn out to be Vaguely Wave a Strimmer About June, which isn’t nearly so catchy. So, not the lawn, unless we’re talking about the edges, which are trimmed weekly whether or not the surrounding vegetation is flopping over them (again with that comforting, not-quite visible structure). But very definitely the hedge which, you may remember had a little attention as soon as we got back from Suffolk about a month ago, and certainly the pyracantha which is a little out of round on our side, and utterly bonkers on that of the neighbours.

The taxus balls are more blobby than spherical at the moment. Actually, ‘blobby’ might be a bit strong – I think ‘hazy’ might be more accurate, in that they’re currently presenting themselves in such a way that it’s quite difficult to detect quite where their form begins and ends. My difficulty with this stage is that I really love a piece of wafty yew topiary – there’s something about the contrast of the deep, dark, mature foliage with the fresh green of the feathery new growth that perfectly encapsulates what it is to garden, how we strive to create order, and structure, and maybe there’s a day in winter where we think we might have actually done the job, but nature comes along with her insistence on – oh, I don’t know – growing, and making everything look decidedly better, more dynamic, distinctly more wonderful, but in a way that’s not entirely respectful of the boundaries we’d set. Is, in fact, if we’re going to be honest about things, rather rudely dismissive about the boudaries we’d set, at which point we have no option but to go to the shed to fetch our snips and shears and attempt to re-establish some sense of order, which looks neater, but somehow also several degrees less fabulous, and leaves us wondering if next time, we might let things be wafty for a little longer.