My friend Bean is a passionate if impatient gardener.  Vegetables are really her thing (probably because so many of them are sown and germinate before you get bored).

The same, unfortunately cannot be said of her prowess when it comes to a beech hedge she planted five years ago.  Her mistakes were as follows:

Tags: beech

An entirely random thought.

I stumbled on a site that has kept a record of the date on which a hazel bush has come into pollen each year. The theory is that the date a hazel produces pollen indicates whether spring will be early or late (for the sake of completeness, catkins came 9 days later this year than last).

Tags: beech

We were at a friend’s house for lunch today and on the way in, walking though his garden, I admired his beech hedge. It is not an old beech hedge, maybe 5 years (although I need to check).  What struck me about it were two things:

1.  It was very full – the lowest branched were ON the ground. No gaps or ugly legs at the bottom.

Tags: beech