I'm hoping there are some Bob Flowerdews and Pippa Greenwoods among you out there because it's Gardener's Question Time today and our need is great as you will see for yourselves.
In the surgery and awaiting diagnosis, one hundred feet of evergreen Escallonia hedge, inherited with the house, possibly as out of keeping with a Devon lane as the Leylandii that we also inherited. The Leylandii dispatched with indecent haste when we first moved here but somehow the Escallonia has hung on.
Here's a glimpse of it in its heyday and usually like this year round.
For all its incongruity amongst beautiful Devon banks, the hedge does provide a welcome barrier between us and the copious traffic in the lane... three cars, two horses and one tractor per day, and then there's the one walker a month whilst also fending off a bit of weather etc, but you may recall the annual hedge-cutting row that would start brewing here in June. Trimming its sappy sticky growth was like a military campaign, ladders and extension leads, copious perspiration, jugs of lemonade out on the lane and much huffing (not me) plus deathly trampling of the flower beds in front, swiftly followed by a carpet of evergreen cuttings that refuse to die. All repeated three times in as many months in the summer each year that we have lived here as the hedge continued on its quest for the outer stratosphere... leave it too long and it was almost impossible to tame.
Here it is on the left earlier this summer, looks OK but certainly not growing at its usual rate.
Now look at it...
Looks as dead as a bishop on the landing. It was only realising that we hadn't had the hedge-trimming row that made us pay attention, in fact all one hundred feet transformed without us really noticing from a lush evergreen bit of a nuisance, to a bald as a coot skeletal mass of twigs and branches, a nice climbing frame for the birds but that's about all. We had quite thought it might perk up and would kid ourselves it was OK because the thought of grubbing it up and replacing just felt like a task too far. Then we noticed quite alarmingly that whenever the cows have been moved up and down the lane recently there would be great splintering noises and we'd go out and find big clumps of dead Escallonia on the ground, and huge bald patches leaving portholes in our hedge.
So, much as we hated the idea of the massacre that would ensue, we nabbed the hedge-trimmer from the farm when he was passing this week and have gone for the drastic option in the faint hope it might recover and regenerate. We're also well aware that the ivy in places won't be helping, but we typed 'escallonia hedge dying' into google and got worse news... we may not be alone, it could be a national disease. Spots on yellowing leaves, then no leaves, people complaining about the same symptoms over in Exmouth (definitely in our flight path) and people everywhere finding a white vein of fungus tracking up the middle of the branches.
Out we dashed and sure enough there it as plain as day, isn't that white fungus up the middle of our branches?
Branches that are normally so sappy you couldn't possibly break them now snapping like breadsticks, and the two remaining yellow leaves have spots on them.
The advice seems to be copious spraying with something nuclear that may or may not resolve the problem but that's not an option, so what do you Bobs and Pippas out there suggest, and if you could possibly desist from offering Bob's solution to all ills which is urine, I'd be grateful.
Might this week's drastic massacre aid a bit of regeneration?
Is it really dead or just pretending?
Does a hedge like this reach the end of its natural life?
In that case was eternal life and immortality too much to ask of an Escallonia hedge?
If it's fungus might that just run its course?
Should we pull all that ivy out to give the hedge a chance or leave it to hold the whole thing up... currently the ivy is the saving aesthetic grace and could continue to be so if we adopt the next suggestion.
Are we now left with a sort of natural trellis and we plant things up and through it?
Climbers perhaps? Honeysuckles? Wild roses?
Or should something that might be diseased be grubbed up (oh heck, all one hundred feet of it) and we start again with a beech hedge?
Bookhound has visibly paled at what may be coming next, we've already started thinking about a hedge fund, and the only saving grace might be that he'll need to hire a digger for a week or two.
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