I’ve been weeding in the little break between rain, keeping at it in the lighter falls running indoors for the heavier showers and the, ahem, hail. A silly cold snap here on the surf coast, with temperatures down into single digits.
The central bed between the Japanese maple and the pagoda had a spattered carpet of oxalis, a job of weeding I’ve been ignoring thanks perhaps to the pressure of other things to do. But today’s the day, and perhaps tomorrow. It’s such a persistent little plant. When we first cleared things out here it was a thick covering. We’ve dug and added compost and mulched, but still the plucky oxalis returns.
I know as I shuffle along on hands and knees, loosening with my trowel then pinching to slide the long white root from the earth, I know that it will come back. I know it grows from the little corm buried deep down there somewhere, and I know it will regrow from any of these little tendrils of white root left in the soil, but this seems the best I can do. I know I’m getting it wrong, but also hope this must be some kind of interruption to the life cycle. In the places where I’ve sprayed it the oxalis is very satisfyingly dead. Perhaps more spray is needed round the garden, but that will be fine work for a still and sunny day.
Today is cold, a sudden snap back to winter, with showers scudding along the coast running west to east.
I bend to my work, shuffling my bucket in front of me, rain catching the gap of bare back between waist of slightly soggy pants and the hem of this fleecy top. The best part of this doomed oxalis extraction is the nose to leaf familiarity with the other plants. Right now there is so much new, bright growth. That vivid fresh green of spring. Leaves uncurling in ferns, bright blushes of fresh pelargoniums. I’ve so happy with the various pelargonium clumps I’ve scattered about this space. The dogwoods we shifted in autumn are happy and flushed with new leaf and the silvery threads of fresh limb growth.
There are lovely bright tufts at the heart of the two Japanese laurel. The Japanese maple is a lovely show of delicate new leaves. All the dogwoods are in nice leaf, the hellebores are very happy and the new ones (bunnings bargains) are doing ok, though a little lost in the leaves of daffodils for the moment. Silver spurflower cuttings are taking nicely around the back of the pond, ditto the Swedish ivy.
I keep shuffling. Plucking. Tweaking.
Weeding is the core of gardening I think ... especially if you define gardening as some kind of ordered selection of plants and shapes in a space. Weeding, as much as planting, is a declaration of preference. The process of doing it takes you into the core of what is being made, and takes you face to face with the small evolving miracle of this little patch of abundance.