English Bluebells

One of the many things I really miss from England is the seas of bluebells, that make such a spectacular sight in woods during the spring. I remember the first time I ever saw bluebells. It was possible to walk from my home, to some woodland where bluebells grow. It was an exciting walk and as we got nearer to the wood, we would start to find the odd bluebell flower, that somebody had picked and dropped on their way home. I don't know if we were allowed to pick bluebells that grew wild, but everybody did. Bluebells don't last long once picked so it's much better to leave them where they are or have some in your garden. I really wanted some bluebells in my garden in Sweden. All you get here is blue wood anemones and a small native bluebell, but they're just not in the same league! Somebody in England was going to send me some bluebell bulbs, but it never happened and as it turned out, they were Spanish bluebells. The Spanish bluebell is a menace that easily hybridises with the English bluebell and is slowly but surely eradicating the native plants. I definitely don't want Spanish bluebells. If seeds from any of mine were to find their way into the nearby forest, I want them to be pure English bluebells. I found loads to buy online, but I just couldn't be sure that if I ordered them, I was not going to get Spanish or hybrid bluebells. In the end, I ordered 40 bulbs from a small nursery here in Sweden.

#English #Bluebell #Bulbs

It was quite late in the year, the twenty-sixth of November. Luckily the snow that had come earlier in the month had melted away and the ground wasn't frozen. Some years it has snowed at the end of October and not melted until the next spring. Anyway, I got to work planting my 40 bulbs in the small 'woodland' area of my garden. It doesn't sound like many bulbs, but scrambling around in the cold, in amongst the tightly growing trees, it felt like a lot. I even planted a few in other areas of the garden, just to give a better chance of success. As far as I could see from what I'd read, English bluebells should be able to stand the winter here, but I wasn't sure, especially as I've not seen a single bluebell in Sweden. The long winter has finally ended and ever since the snow and ice disappeared, I've been examining the areas when I think I planted the bluebells. At last, the first leaves have started to appear.

This is the 2nd of May and you can just make out a couple of green shoots. Ten days later, I have found 16 bluebells in four different areas. The area above was the main part of the garden where I wanted to have bluebells. So far, I've found 9 here, but they are still coming through. I expect that within a week, all those that are alive will have come up. Time will tell....

Sweet Chestnut Tree

When I moved to Sweden, I noticed quite a difference in the plants that grow here in the wild, compared to in England. There are blueberry and Lingon plants everywhere, but not a blackberry in sight. I found blue and white wood anemones, but not a single bluebell anywhere. There are lots more pine trees, but the only horse chestnut trees are found in parks and roadsides. I haven't found one horse chestnut tree in the forests and not a sweet chestnut tree to be seen anywhere. When I asked why these plants and trees are not found in this part of Sweden (Borlänge, Dalarna), I was told that they didn't grow here. Well that's not true as I found out when I tried to grow these plants and trees in my garden. It might not be easy, but it can be done. The chestnut in the photo above (Oct 2011) was grown indoors from a nut that I had in my fridge. It was one of several that started to shoot and I potted up. I think I planted 3 or 4 outside when the spring came. This one is the only one still alive. What usually happened was that the top of the plant would either die back or be eaten by deer and new growth each spring would come from much lower down the stem. Had I protected the tree from the cold winters and deer, it probably would have done much better. Anyway, as the years went by, the roots got stronger and the tree grew more each year and now the top does not die back, but I do have to protect the tree from deer with wire netting.

This is how the tree looked at midsummer 2015 and as you can see, I don't have any protection around the tree during the summer. Unfortunately, the next summer, a deer decided to rub it's antlers against the tree, causing a lot of damage and almost completely removing the bark around the middle of the tree. There was just a thin strip of bark left at the back of the tree. All the information I could find about such damage said that the tree would die, at least above the stripped bark. The tree seemed ok and I hoped that the bark at the back of the tree would be enough to keep it alive, until I noticed that the bark had dried out and cracked in two. I read up about doing a bridge graft - grafting a small branch across the damaged area, but I didn't have a long enough branch to do it. In the end, I decided the only option was to tape over the damage and cross my fingers.



The tree grew as if nothing had happened. The tape provided a warm, damp environment, which allowed the tiny strip of cambium layer to quickly increase in size and almost grew halfway around the tree. When I removed the tape, this is what I found...

The cambium growth looked very thick and healthy, but where the new growth hadn't reached, the bare wood had a bit of black mold. I decided that it would be best to leave the tape off over the winter. I wrapped some wire netting around the trunk and at the top of the tree to protect it from deer and waited for winter.

Grafting Fruit Trees and Grafting Wax Recipe

Earlier this year, while surfing the net, I found an article about growing an English hedgerow and a link to a company selling cheap bare root hedging plants. This idea appealed to me because you could buy a hedge called a fruit and nut hedge. It had blackthorn for sloes, cornelian cherry, damsons, crab apple, dog rose, hazel and more. It was a hedge to help feed birds and other wildlife and at the same time it had useful fruits for jam, cider, wine etc. I remembered how I'd seen some of these the last time I was in England, how lovely they looked and so typically English. I wanted that hedge for down one side of my garden, but that company and all the others I found selling similar plants, would only send to England. I toyed with various schemes to get the plants sent to Sweden, but the cost put me off and I began to look at other ways to get my hedge. Somewhere along the line, I became interested in grafting and managed to find some damson scion wood on ebay. I have a lot of self set plum trees and I intend to graft the damson onto some of these. At the moment my trees are just about still dormant so the damson wood is still in the fridge. I'm not going to go into how grafting is done, but there are some very interesting videos on youtube by a chap called Steven Hayes. One of the grafts he shows is a cleft graft, very good for grafting wood of different diameters together. Busting to try grafting, I grafted some apple scion wood from one of my trees onto another, but to do it I needed grafting wax. I can't afford to buy it so I had a look for recipes online. I found several, but some had resin in them. I don't have a clue what that might be or where I might get it. Some had charcoal powder or even pine tar. The smell of pine tar has a half life of at least a year. Can you imagine mixing that stuff in a kitchen? Don't go there! A lot of the recipes had tallow in them, which is beef fat. In the end, I made up my own simple recipe using equal weights of beeswax (cheap on ebay) and fat which I removed from minced beef when I made a chilli con carne. I put the two together in a jar and heated it in a saucepan of boiling water. The mixture solidified at above room temperature, but could be spread like butter by keeping the jar in warm water.

I was really surprised at how easy this wax was to make and it performed really well. It was very easy to spread into the crack of the graft and around the join, making a perfect watertight seal. For the cost of the beeswax, less than £1, I made enough grafting wax to cover many more grafts than I will be making. Most of the grafts I will be doing on my plum trees will not need wax, but if I need to use grafting wax, I've got some.

As I said, I'm not going to explain how to perform the graft, but this is the graft before waxing.

And this is how it looked after waxing. As you can see, the wax did an excellent job of covering and making watertight all the exposed wood and the split made in the tree.

This is the finished graft after taping with makeshift grafting tape made from strips of freezer bags.

It looks good enough, but time will tell.....

About This Blog

I moved to Sweden from England in 2005 and had a house built the next year. Once the house was built, the garden, apart from a group of small trees, was basically a blank canvas or so I thought. I didn't have much money left then and have even less now, so everything I do in the garden has to cost as little as possible or better still be free. It's a much bigger garden than anything I've had before with lots of new possibilities. This blog is about my efforts to establish a garden in a country where I have known the temperature to sink as low as -30 C in the winter and +30 C in the summer, the winter is long (4 months minimum) and the growing season short. It's also about my desire to make my garden into a little piece of England despite people telling me this plant or that tree doesn't grow in Sweden. Some projects are nearly finished, some are just beginning and some things are general gardening jobs. I want to put my experiences here to maybe help others or at least make an interesting read.