Suffolk Oaks

The Suffolk countryside is liberally dotted with oaks - ooaks, in the vernacular. Most of them are thriving, though it's an unusual lane, hedgerow or field that doesn't have its dead one. Bone white and chiseled, they stand as stark reminders of mortality. Sometimes a heavy bough comes crashing down in the wind, but otherwise they seem as strong in death as in life. Oak hardens as it ages, which makes it such an ideal wood for house- or ship-building. I've been reading about the Staverton Thicks, a "dense primeval woodland" with the oldest oaks in East Anglia. It's not far from me and deserves a visit. A study of my own nearby specimens reveals great antiquity, though probably not in the half millennium bracket. Once I started looking I realised I was surrounded by them, their great limbs reaching out to the light or curled protectively inwards. Though in other parts of Suffolk the hedgerows around and through the fields were often hacked down in the last century to make way for the huge farm machinery, these lanes are still lined with them, and the oak is a constant presence. Deo gratias.

Protecting the church lychgate

Massive oak in a field of equals

Skeletal oaks

 In my improving physical condition I've been fighting with the front garden. It's completely overgrown so that I was dwarfed by 8-foot tall monsters when I fought my way into the centre to begin reducing things. One plant in particular, identified for me as heuchera, has gone crazy. If it is indeed heuchera the RHS needs to hear about it: they have its ultimate height and spread as half a metre. Ha! Dozens and dozens of the things have shot up and their tiny, mean little flowers are just beginning to cast their seed to the air, helped by me shaking and yanking them. They have gone now, but the roots are still there and will have to be dug out. Euphorbia too has spread itself extravagantly, and I made short shrift of them with my new long-armed pruners. The poisonous milk oozed nastily in my direction as I cut their stems, but I was prepared for their aggression. Under this forest of shrubs I discovered a single, brave, desperate crocosmia, flame-coloured petals struggling to reach the light.

Heuchera?

What has happened to my beautiful front garden, my pride and joy? It has shown no restraint in the early good weather and flung its greenery - abundant flowers too - ever upwards and outwards uncontrolled by she who would be their gardener. It could have waited for me, but five weeks is a long time to a garden too vigorously untamed to ask, childlike, "Are we there yet?".