Following, for example the activities recorded on 20th July 2009 and 14th October 2010 in the other place, I decided yesterday to do something proper about the lonicera pileata starting to get in the way of putting compost in the compost bin. I had tried holding it up with a length of old washing line but this was both unsatisfactory and unsightly.
Yesterday's efforts go some way to addressing both defects. One four feet post of four by two and one three feet, both possibly from stud work from a partition wall. One cross beam of three by two, that rounded edge green treated stuff that today's timber yards are so keen on. Cross beam held onto posts by a couple of six inch nails from north London, drilled rather than nailed in for ease of maintenance. We now have an embryo compost arbour, with the lonicera growing over the cross beam in summers to come, for occasional trimming. Notice the relic of washing line acting as a stay for the left hand post.
It took a little while to find out what the bush I am calling lonicera was called and I still don't have a common name. I tried Google, who turned out to be weak on bush identification and I was unable to find the sort of decision tree needed for such a task, only turning up the very inferior substitutes being offered by people who sell plants. RHS site unhelpful, not even up to the poor standard of bird identification on the RSPB site. Couldn't spot anything likely in our bush book by Dr. Hessayon, so we were reduced to going to Chessington Garden Centre, the place which does the fine Christmas Grotto (see 30th December last). It turns out that, at this time of year at least, they have a fine display of shrubs, bushes and trees, including quite a lot of exotics likes palms and olives, not to mention the odd araucaria. I also lighted upon a member of staff who knew all about plants and who was able to tell me that there were three bushes along the general lines of the sample we had taken in, members of the box, holly and honeysuckle families, incidentally a fine example of convergent evolution. Our sample was a honeysuckle and the Garden Centre offered half a dozen or more honeysuckle bushes, none of them, as it happened, being our particular one. The staffer also observed that our particular one was often called box in error, an error into which I used to fall until I got to know boxes better at Box Hill. But armed with the family name for honeysuckles, Google was able to do the business and we now find that the bush growing over the compost bin is actually lonicera pileata.
We paid our way by buying a few plants to bring on against the summer.
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