Getting preprandial with privet

The brilliant forecast for this weekend turned into a gorgeous reality, and after months of being cooped up in the house and the almost endless decorating it was good to be outside, making a start with the traditional first gardening jobs of Spring.

But our small lawn takes less than 15 minute to mow, so it wasn't long before I was casting around for something else to do.

The remnants of next door's raspberry canes were starting to make themselves known again around the roots of our copper beech hedge, in various parts of the border, and popping up in the middle of the lawn, so I spent an hour or so trying to tease their roots out from around all the other roots. I managed accidentally to bring up a chunk of the lupin that had become totally enveloped by raspberry tendrils, but 80% of the lupin remained, so not too much damage done.

I was in the mood for a larger challenge than this though. Like digging up the privet in the front garden. I'd cut this back in late summer last year as it was up to about 15 feet, and starving all the trees of light. Cutting them back revealed the size of the main stumps. Comparing them to the trunks that I'd helped my Dad pull out of the front garden in Nottingham 30 years ago, I reckon that hedge must have been there as long as the house. But, you know, privet? It's a bit 1950s isn't it? So we wanted rid.

I didn't feel like breaking my back on the privet trunks back then, but I was up for the task now. It's funny how those jobs that you dread tackling, and put off for the longest time, usually turn out to be nowhere near as bad as you expect. The first three stumps were so shallowly rooted that all I had to do was grab them and pull, and they came up in my hand. Admittedly it began to get tougher after that. The further away the privet stretched towards the road, the deeper the soil in the bed, and consequently the deeper the roots. Some of them even headed off under the wall, requiring the application of a bow saw.

Even so the whole job took a lot less time than I'd expected, and left behind quite a wide bed, filled with lovely rich loam, that I'll be able to fill with some nice dwarf rhododendrons once I've dug in a few bags of peat.