Ready for winter

After all the designing and re-designing and searching for the materials and cussing and working… we have a woodshed. Anyone who thinks it’s too large needs to think that we have to have a roof over it, and a roof high enough off the floor that we don’t have to crouch when we go inside – and the roof does have to slope, to let the rain roll off.

The wood from previous years is waiting under cover – old tarpaulin, bits of plastic, scraps of pond liner – to be moved in. We’ll be painting the outside of the shed tomorrow, as we have rain forecast and we want to take the chance of decent weather to get the wood weather-proofed. We’ve had a cold, damp, miserable August and the few good days recently have been a late reprieve before the weather can justifiably turn to cold and wet again. A cloudburst dumping six weeks’ worth of rain in two hours earlier this week was a fair warning of what’s to come.

Ironic, really, that we’ve been working on storing dead trees while I’ve been writing flash fiction on the subject of trees for the Planet Shaftesbury Tree Festival. I didn’t realise there was such a festival, but it looks like fun – we could even have planned to go to it if we’d known.

We got another job done today as well. Finally, we have finished filling the raised beds with compost and today we planted the last of the roses in it. These are the surviving rose cuttings from my late father’s garden, and it’s an interesting mix. From about 180 cuttings, we have 50 survivors, and about a third are from the spindly Margaret Merrill rose he had; the sturdy Papa Meilland yielded two rose bushes from the twenty or so cuttings I took from it. The Peace rose cuttings all died. My eldest brother has one of the Papa Meillands – my other brother wanted a Peace rose, but I’m pretty sure he’ll be disappointed. A neighbour who helped Dad with his hedge was given a white rose bush grown from a cutting, from the rose that he’d admired, and no-one else wanted any. So I have two raised beds full of roses in various colours to remind me of my dad.

We took cuttings all summer and into autumn of both years of trying to sell my father’s house, seeing that the Blue Moon and Margaret Merrill roses rooted like chickweed and turned into small rose bushes but the Papa Meillands and Peace cuttings died every time. By the time we found a buyer who was willing to make an offer and honour it right to the last minute, we realised that any buyer would uproot all the roses in the back garden to extend the tiny kitchen and uproot all the roses in the front garden to pave it over for car parking spaces. The Papa Meilland Dad was so proud of was nearly forty years old, nine feet tall and had thorns as big as cats’ claws, so I didn’t try to dig it up for my own safety – plus, I didn’t think it would survive. I did manage to uproot six others, smaller and less ferocious. Two died; my younger brother has two of the survivors (a Harry Wheatcroft and an unidentified pink rose) and I have the last two (an orange rose that I think is a Whiskey Mac, and a younger Papa Meilland). Seeing them stretch their branches, I wish I had asked the new owner if he intended to remove the others, and would he mind if I dug them up before he took over the place. Moral of the story is – if you have plants that have meaning for you beyond their financial worth, be cheeky and ask if you can keep them. The roses we have now were worth the effort, and I’m looking forward to seeing them bloom next summer.