Mahonia

Mahonia is a large genus of woody evergreen shrubs named by British botanist Thomas Nuttall to honour Bernard McMahon, a colonial nurseryman from Philadelphia who was Thomas Jefferson's gardening mentor. It is also one of the many gifts left to us by the previous owners of our new house.

Like others in the Berberidaceae order this plant has shiny leaves which are spiky, rather like holly, and we have several massive bushes in our garden which have not been pruned or cut back for many years. Pruning them, however, means braving not just the spikyness of their leaves but also another invader which hides itself in an impossible-to-reach spot amongst the cluster of stems at ground level. The green stems from this plant rise up within the bush until they reach the daylight nearly three metres above then continue growing to drape themselves downwards around those spiky leaves until eventually they reach the ground again. Here they grow into the long uncut grass surrounding the tree where sooner or later they will decide it is time to send out new roots into the soil. By this time their spiky stems have grown to some six or seven metres. No amount of pulling on the exposed stems will break them; they are strong. Only by cutting off the stems from within the bush can they be removed, torn away with with every ounce of strength as each spike tries to hold on for its life. But to do this you must get inside the bush, braving those spiky mahonia leaves again. I am, of course, referring to bramble, often named after its fruit, the blackberry.

Suitably protected by my boiler suit, with thick leather gloves tightly fastened on each hand and armed with some long handled loppers I attack the shrub from the outside first, nipping off each cluster of leaves until I can see deeper in to where the bramble is hiding. I am ruthless, this is not an exercise in prettiness. The aim here is to reduce the whole thing to a size which enables us to walk around this part of the garden.

I soon notice, however, something quite surprising. The flesh inside a mahonia branch is bright yellow, thicker stems also having an internal ring of white with more yellow inside that. This takes me by surprise as I apologise to the plant for any harm I might be causing. Then eventually I can see the bramble stems deep inside rising from the ground and I push the loppers in to cut them off as close as possible to the ground.

I have nothing personal against the bramble (I would be the first to eat jam made from its fruit) but we have just bought a house with a garden completely overrun by this plant, to such an extent that normal gardening cannot even begin until the long trailing stems are cut out. By their nature the strength of those stems and the roots that feed them is quite remarkable, impressively so. Human strength alone will not break them. Instead each stem must be traced across the ground or through whatever plant it has invaded until it disappears into the soil where it can be cut so that the whole stem can then be ripped free. Inevitably during the process of doing this the spikes will find your flesh, usually the wrists, but eyes and ears are equally vulnerable unless great care is taken. So far we have filled our trailer three times with bramble stems, each time jumping on the load to squash it flat before taking it to the local tip. Then, realising the futility of wasting fuel by driving, we began to pile the material up in the garden, awaiting the next dry spell when we will have a massive bonfire.

Changing the subject a little...I believe I may have mentioned before the 'stuff' we have been (un)fortunate enough to have purchased along with our new house. The quantity of garden tools alone, particularly small trowels and forks stashed in both sheds, in the greenhouse, or just lying about in the garden, is hard to comprehend. Someone who once lived here clearly had a fetish about nails and screws too. These come in all sizes and are invariably in little packets, carefully wrapped then placed in larger bags or boxes or rusted tins. The space beneath the house (we call this the understory although this normally refers to the area beneath a woodland tree canopy) is the best place to find screws although on each visit down there something else is discovered. There was a considerable collection of long playing records, most of which date back to the 1960s and were welcomed in our local charity shop, an elderly knitting machine, a wooden table and two benches lay dismantled alongside a box of hinges and a bagged up gazebo. It is clear from the layer of dust that none of these items have been touched for years; they were forgotten long before the last owner chose to forget to take them away when she moved out.

A tasteful cluster of tiny drawers was fixed to the wall high up in a kitchen cupboard, not the sort of place where one might expect to keep a ragged assortment of screws, small electrical bits, hooks, tiny nuts and bolts, a random collection of washers, assorted nails, plastic wall plugs and 11p in coin (that is if you ignore the Belgian francs). The sheer randomness of each little drawer's contents speaks volumes about the mind of the person who put together this collection, a level of disorderliness to which I can only aspire. Indeed it has made me recognise one aspect of my own make up which results in my recoiling in horror when faced with having to deal with something like this, casting over 90% of what is before me into the rubbish bin. Each item was clearly manufactured with a particular purpose in mind, a destination which it should have shared with others of its kind or indeed a role which it might have uniquely held for many years. All that is now lost.

But I have gone on long enough here about the discoveries in and around our new home and since for some days rain has discouraged further play out in the wilder areas of our garden we now indulge in some indoor relaxation by planning how we might change the inside spaces to suit our tastes. Lots of thinking and months of decorating lie ahead.