By Jodie Jones
This week at Great Dixter, a cacophony of bird song accompanied me around the garden. For once, the M25 wasn’t clogged with traffic, so I arrived early enough to have it all to myself for an indulgent half hour before the day really began.
The beds were a mass of primroses, hellebores, narcissi, fritillaries and crocus, together with the last of the snowdrops and the very first of the tulips. After a winter of hard work, it all looked as good as I have ever seen it at this time of year.
Then I started work and my first job was… a walk around the garden – this time with the whole team, taking stock.
There were more annuals to pot up and, unusually, some turf to lay, but my group was sent to the banks of the Horse Pond, where a lot of dogwoods and willows needed attention.
These Cornus alba grow in competitive grassland, so Fergus asked us to remove only old, flowered wood and leave any first year stems to help the plants regenerate. The willows got a standard pollarding.
At coffee break, everyone lined their chairs up just outside the Mess Room thatch to bask in the sunshine, and then I wriggled into a pair of waders and climbed into the Horse Pond! Another Dixter first!!
After a somewhat nervous start, I loved standing thigh deep in slightly smelly water to get at the rest of the willows. There was the odd ‘exciting’ moment when I stumbled into a hole or my foot got stuck in the mud, but snipping away in the warm sun was blissful.
Georgie joined me in the water, on her last day of a month in the gardens, while George and Andrew kindly did the boring tidying up, and it all looked satisfyingly smart by the time we finished.
Getting out of the water, and then out of the waders, wasn’t my most elegant five minutes but everyone pretended not to notice, and allowed me to take the willow stems home to weave into pot toppers, so it really was a perfect day.
Dixter has now reopened to visitors after the winter closure, so why not come and see what we have been up to?
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