18 St Johns Avenue, Brentwood
Essex, CM14 5DF, England.
E-mail: roger@themagnolias.co.uk

We persevered with garden open days during 2007, again barely breaking even due to poor visitor numbers, as in recent, previous years. However the great enthusiasm and appreciation of the visitors we did have has encouraged us to open again in 2008.

The exciting news of the year was the purchase of the bottom of our left hand neighbour’s garden, a plot approximately 33ft by 90ft. Much of our original garden has now become a woodland garden, with many of the earlier planted trees now approaching forty years old. Due to the increasing shade it has become more of a spring garden than any other season. With this in mind we have decided to open the garden as normal in the spring, but to possibly close for the summer months to work on the new plot. We will be happy to open the garden by appointment to groups of six or more though.

The idea with the new piece which has a fairly open aspect will be to keep it that way, and concentrate on summer flowering plants in particular.  

There is an existing small vegetable garden, which will be kept and hopefully utilised fully. A new 10’ x 8’ shed has been erected, where our neighbour’s smaller shed had been. Guttering has been fitted on both back and front halves of the roof. Each drains into a water butt. The taps from these are joined by a flexible pipe, in the centre of which is a T joiner with another pipe leading to a plastic loft tank with a ball cock.

This will be a very convenient dip-tank for can watering, especially for plants which prefer rain water. We have already planted five varieties of Blueberry on the vegetable plot in front of the shed, which will benefit from rain water irrigation in dry weather.

We hope eventually to have a reasonable sized water lily pond. This will take us a while to create, due to the problems of disposing of the diggings. The levels of all the surrounding area will have to be raised and levelled, as it is impractical to remove excavated soil outside the new garden.

We hope to see you this spring.

A garden which is full up and has been for some years gives little scope for new projects and only major plant deaths or planned removals give scope for significant new plantings or the installation of new paths or artefacts. There were a couple of significant plant deaths, the Edgeworthia chrysantha ‘Red Form’ and the Arbutus x andrachnoides, but neither left a planting space of any significance. However we did decide to remove our Abies koreana which had become less attractive with size and the removal of its lower branches, to keep paths open. This did give us a square yard or two for the planting of some new numbered only species of Chinese Epimedium. We hope some of them may flower this spring, which will be exciting.

We decided to mark 30 happy years of marriage as we did at 25, with a piece of granite statuary. Early in the year we had been admiring a rather expensive and impressive, multi tiered stone pagoda in our local koi dealers, Koi Logic. We couldn’t really find a justification for a quite significant outlay, until we thought of our impending 30th wedding anniversary. We negotiated a saving by transporting it home ourselves and a couple of journeys and strained backs later, it was home and resplendent in our ‘oriental flavoured garden’.

Visitor numbers were low again but we were able to recoup our costs. We are opening again this year, but if we fail to reach that target it will be the last year.

Koi Pond report Early 2006.

Last autumn before we were able to cover the pond with the polythene sheet we needed to make new stressed arch supports. The previous ones constructed of our own home grown Chusquea bamboo had finally become unserviceable, as the humid conditions under the polythene and outdoor storage for the rest of the year had caused them to rot. We used plastic waste pipe, from the local plumbing shop, and wires, to make excellent new support arches for the cover.

Our koi pond of probably less than 2500 gallons is grossly overstocked with around 60 fish, some of are over 18 inches long. We find it hard to part with our fishy pets, although over the years a few have gone into our koi club’s (Crouch Valley) excellent koi auction.

Worrying about a fairly regular need to add medication to the pond for parasite infections, made us decide to make a considerable investment in a protein skimmer and ozone system this winter. This has been installed and running for only a few weeks, but the yellowing and cloudy ness of the water has been reduced dramatically.
I fully expect the growth rate of the fish to now accelerate and create new environmental pressures on the system, but for the moment at least it looks very promising.

We have also recently purchased and installed an inexpensive automatic feeder to do midday and afternoon feeds for us. This leaves an early morning, and sometime after the clocks change, an evening feed for us to do, when we can inspect and enjoy the koi.. It may even make it possible for us to get a few days away, without needing to ask our neighbours and children to feed the koi. We have only had about ten nights away from home in our nearly 31 year marriage. On the first night after programming it with the two feeds we did manage to miss a spurious midnight on with no off in the programming. This resulted in a massive pellet slick in the morning, to be netted out, and a lowering in the redox potential of the water. The system recovered after a few days, with no apparent harm to the fish. The water was cold at the time at about 13.5°C, or things might have been worse.

Old News