Blog
Now to the gardening
At last, after what seems like months, but with most of the energy concentrated in the past fortnight the programme of the Festival of Country Gardens has been compiled by yours truly, ie Peta Townsing, who is the Festival coordinator till the end of this year and chair of Blackwood Country Gardens Inc which is the association that stages the Festival.
In the past five days the programme for the Festival has been organized into a brochure using such software as Quark Express, Adobe Illustrator (a bit mysterious), Photoshop (good fun) and the more mundane office software such as Exel for creating tables and then converting most of this to pdf.
The whole document is then converted from Quark into a pdf for sending to the Prepress people for creating film to send to the printers in the four colours used: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.
By the end of September we will be collecting 5000 copies of a DL sized brochure which will contain the main details of the Festival of Country Gardens for spring.
Meantime it is available as a low resolution form with a smaller file size that can be viewed on line and then printed if desired. This form comes as a "spread" as though the pages are opened out for easy printing on A4 sized sheets of paper.
Of course in the past couple of weeks we have had both warm weather and some rain which the weeds, knowing that I am busy, have been making the most of my not being amongst them and have grown exceeding well. So it will be out with the mower, the gardening gloves, the mulching, damp newspapers and the mini-pick to get on top of the weeds before they get on top of me!
Hope you enjoy the programme brochure and that there are not too many typos. There is an error on the map in finding the Equinox garden in Donnybrook - Google is not always accurate and that will be remedied on line at least.
The wisteria is out in the front garden of the Cottage. It seems a bit early, but maybe the warm days of recent weeks have brought on the flowering.
Happy gardening.
Spring energies
"Spring has sprung"
Warming sun, longer days then sudden squalls, blossom covering trees, becoming bedraggled - all these are typically characteristics of spring. Not at all like autumn which is much more mellow.
Perhaps the weather has something to do with the equinox and the equinoxial gales. In any case it is a busy time in the garden with much happening and lots to do.
From bare trees last week, the Simon's Poplars are springing into leaf and in a couple more days will be well covered and providing shade and shelter to passing or sheltering birds and other animals.
I have mixed feelings about the Simon's Poplars. They are reputed not to sucker, but as with all poplars they have an aggressive root system, and if roots are damaged new growth will spring from them. The roots will seek out water and will, I suspect, compete very successfully with other plants to the extent that any newcomers will be crowded out and will not succeed against the assertive poplar.
In fact, I am about to move several roses which even with a root barrier in place are no match against these poplars. The moral of this story is to be very careful about siting Simon's Poplars because not much else will get a look in if anywhere in the vicinity.
Simon's Poplars in mid May with most of their leaves fallen. Roses just inside the fence are not thriving with the fierce competition from the poplars' roots.