Maybe a little late to wish a happy new year, but I will anyway. The year still has that hopeful feeling to it, a long time before we start to ask where the year went and what are we eating for Christmas dinner? Aubergine moussaka this year. Even the cat refused turkey scraps by the time Boxing Day dawned.
We cleared out the bay in the woodshed that housed wood from trees cut down during 2022 and swept it clear of leaves and bark and twigs. Tidiness that won’t last long. We’d already felled a dead elm along the hedge line during our Christmas garden work, and we still have a big pile of ash wood from the tree trimming a year ago. It will need to be cut to size before it can fit into the stove, but that’s a good job to do in the winter. As both sets of wood come from trees that have been dead for at least five years, they’ll need little drying in the woodshed before they can go onto the stove.
I paint the signs to mark the year the wood was cut, and this year for the first time, I needed to paint over a previous year. I’d painted the ‘2022’ sign as a pair of gold dragons with faces and red outlines; I overpainted the 202 and sanded off enough of the final ‘2’ to replace it with a ‘6’. This year’s choice is black and silver, but I’ve still given the figures dragon faces. It was easier than having to sand off half of the ‘2018’ on the other side of the block.
The Christmas task is a tradition we began while we were both at work. While he was able to take the whole of Christmas week as holiday, I had to negotiate with colleagues to get time off, and often they’d play their ‘Ah! But we have children’ card to get priority. Which I do understand when the child is still young enough to believe in Santa. When your child is nineteen and bringing his laundry home from university, pull the other one. My husband is my family, just as much as your adult kids are yours. Whatever time together we could spare, we got out into the garden (unless it was severely naff weather) and got on with one job. One year it was planting the final fifty trees in the hedge; another year, we finished building the compost bins. Our compost bays hold roughly five cubic metres of material each, so that was a serious job.
This year, we made a good start on our dead hedge. We saw a huge dead hedge at Sutton Hoo a few years ago and thought it was a good idea but too wide and sprawling for our garden; this year, we saw another at Beth Chatto’s garden and decided to follow their pattern. Progress so far – we’ve cleared the short stretch of fence where nothing grows except elm (briefly) and honeysuckle, repaired the neatly cut fence wire and hammered in the stakes we need to strengthen the fence posts that were installed over twenty years ago and to create the parallel line of posts to contain the cut branches. The wire fencing forms a retaining wall on the footpath side, while a series of very long cuttings from an overgrown section of beech hedging form a trellis to hold any shorter cuttings from spilling out onto the garden.
I’m on my way home from a week away with friends today and tomorrow (weather permitting) I hope to be back at work in the garden, filling in the rest of the dead hedge before the snowdrops are out in flower. I’m hoping this year will be happy and full of quiet achievements. It’s started well, at any rate.
Happy New Year.
Julia Chalkley 