Weather has been the usual rain and more rain for all of December. The newly-planted garlic is showing through and looks promising, also many of the flowering bulbs are getting started. The polytunnel still has cavolo nero growing and some of the herbs are still useable. The heater in there seems to have kept the temperatures above freezing so far, but we’ll see how it fares when it does get colder in the new year.

One fine day allowed us to remove the last tree - a twisted willow - that had been planted underneath the fern-leaf beech. After suffering competition from three other trees and one large shrub it is now in splendid isolation. The hardest job was removing the layer of plastic membrane that covered the whole bed, put in presumably to control weeds, but as the leaves and other materials accumulated on top it did quite the reverse. Also the poor trees tried putting out roots above the membrane. Some ornamental grasses may now be planted here as well as erythronium bulbs. Rabbits please leave them alone.