Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Sunday 1 November 2020

New Troops and Old Trees

I have a couple of new units for my WSS collection - very kindly painted by Goya and much appreciated. I based and flagged them yesterday. They are both grenadier battalions for the Bavarian army.

These are the "red grenadiers" which fought at the Schellenberg - the Boismorel Grenadiers, a (supposedly) French emigré unit donated by Louis XIV to the Elector's forces. The Colonel/Owner of the unit was one Monseigneur Boismorel, who was very well-connected, and seems to have spent his brief military service in the cafés of Munich. The man on the horse, then, must be Lt.Col De La Colonie, whose memoirs I am currently reading. Fascinating book, though Colonie may be the biggest braggart before Marbot - he's a wow with the ladies, his military achievements are breathtaking, he is slighted and wronged by all sorts of people - particularly his colonel - he is constantly arranging or threatening duels. Very exciting. The figures are Les Higgins 20mm, from long ago. These are fresh painted bare-metal castings, not my usual refurb efforts. The Boismorels (yes - "forest mushrooms") were originally planned as a 3-battalion unit, two of fusiliers and one of grenadiers, based on the organisation of the Bavarian Leibregiment, but only one battalion was raised. That's probably why they had a mixture of hats.

And here are the grenadier battalion of the aforementioned Leibregiment. Thus we have red grenadiers and blue grenadiers. That's fine - I can understand that. Nice, eh? Thanks again, Goya!

One thing I don't really understand (though I suppose I could find out quite easily) is why the Bavarians had formal grenadier battalions as early as 1703 - I don't know who else did. The British, French and Austrians all had grenadier companies as part of each fusilier battalion, and sometimes on the battlefield such companies might be combined for some special task or assault, but the practice of keeping these converged groupings of grenadiers together on a semi-permanent basis doesn't seem to have caught on, though it obviously did later. Certainly I don't know of any named grenadier battalions elsewhere. I would have expected the Bavarian army to be very like the Austrian or French model, but not in this instance. Prussian?

Topic 2: Landscaping

You know how gardens are - you see problems gradually taking shape, keep putting off the moment, and one day your hand is forced and you have to get something done. Nothing desperate, but it has to be done.

(1) Our driveway is curved - negotiating it in the sort of darkness you don't get in cities is made much more difficult by having to bypass a chicane of sorts - a border which once upon a time (before my days here) was a rhododendron bed. Now it is just a mess and a nuisance. We'll straighten out the driveway, then. If we change our minds in the future, we can always add potted shrubs or something.

(2) By the garden path, we have two juniper "shrubs" which never understood when they were supposed to stop growing. They have already been shortened a few years ago (to prevent their interfering with the radio transmission which brings our broadband service, and to stop their shading the neighbour's garden in the afternoon), and it made them extremely ugly. Now they are blocking the path, encroaching on the driveway and (potentially) threatening the septic tank. The problem with junipers is that they cannot be cut back - they are black beneath the skin and will not grow back or green up. If you have a look online you will find a great many people asking, "what can I do with my overgrown juniper?", and the answer from the experts is invariably, "get rid of it and plant a new tree".

Righto - the time has come. Work starts tomorrow. We are thinking what sort of tree would be a good replacement. I have not mentioned it to anyone yet, but it has occurred to me that a couple of new juniper shrubs would take 25 years to get back to this state...


While I had my camera in the garden, I took a photo of the lane past our front gate, which a week or so ago was flooded - the way it slopes stops the water coming into our garden, but the lane itself gave a very good impersonation of a shallow river heading down the hill at the height of the rainstorm. The square which you can just see the entrance to in the distance is equipped with very big storm drains - it's obvious why this is so!


 



22 comments:

  1. Very nice brush work from Goya but are you really making him use gloss varnish?

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    1. Nay - I do the gloss varnish, paint the figure bases in the regulation Pea Soup Green, stick em on the MDF and paint, label them up, add flags and magnetic sheet. It would not be appropriate at all to ask Goya to use gloss - something to do with his being a Wee Free? They are pleasing though - I'll have to set up a battle to let them have a run about.

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  2. Lovely toys Tony...

    The Red Grenadiers are a a unit I would like to add to my own WSS collection...

    How well do you think Junipers take to topiary?...
    Your two favourite generals guarding your gate maybe...

    All the best. Aly

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    1. Thank you Aly. Because of the strange characteristics of junipers, my generals of choice would have to be Brunswickers.

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  3. A more open-foliage 'municiple' veriety like white birch or Acer 'Liquid Amber' would allow the signal through and produce a less intrusive dappled shade in summer, none in winter?

    H

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    1. Thanks Hugh - I am pondering this topic as I write.

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  4. Those Les Higgins come up beautifully. The units look simply superb. Looking forward to some epic battles.

    There's also a car hiding behind those Junipers...and they are 'mahossive'.

    Though having seen my garden, you'll appreciate that its lack of greenery (apart from the grass) indicates that I'm as far from being a gardening expert as it's possible to be.

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    1. Thank you DdG. OMG - you're right - there's a car behind there! It amuses me to contemplate doing a like for like replacement, new Junipers for old...

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  5. Both units are very handsome, especially the "mushrooms".
    Like le Duc, I am a poor one to ask about landscaping or gardening matters!

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    1. Thank you sir. The mushrooms also send their thanks. Trees - hmmm. Have to do this right, I think.

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  6. Your new regiments look fab, Tony. I especially like the Bavarians. Goya took care of the fun brushwork, now, you get to tackle the more onerous brushwork in the garden.

    You are faced with an interesting gardening dilemma wrt your overgrown junipers. Interestingly from your photos, your junipers look very much like the trees we call arborvitae out west. Arborvitae are quite common in my part of the world as screens or hedges. I have several in my garden and two massive ones flanking the house. They grow tall and fast. Rather than digging your two beauties up and replanting, another option that my neighbor successfully employed was to simply cut the overgrown trees off at the ground. From these ground-level stumps, new grow emerged. After three years, the arborvitae are back to about eight feet in height but more manageable.

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    1. Thanks Jon. Ideally I need a conifer or evergreen of some sort, but I've had bad experience of the uncontrollable habits of juniper bushes and leylandii hedges, so I'm looking around for ideas. Cutting them down and trying to get new growth from the stump is interesting, but the root systems of these chaps are already likely to damage the septic tank, so I think the plan is to grind the stumps down to below ground level and start with some new plants. I'm actually reading gardening books for my bedtime reading at present - how sad is that?

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    2. Reading gardening books at bedtime? For me, that would be sad indeed!

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    3. You have to admit, they aren't going to get me over-excited before sleeping time.

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    4. ...I've just seen an absolutely beautiful evergreen which would be perfect - one either side of the path. Bad news is they would take 40 years to reach a decent size. That might be a problem. Back to the books. Have to say I'm astonished that some of these plant descriptions do not mention how big (or quickly) they grow. They must have another book with that stuff in.

      Ex-IT men might be driven crazy by poor descriptions in gardening books - what's the matter with these people? Not uptight enough?

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    5. Sounds like you ARE getting a little excited about your bedtime reading. Having written much technical documentation during my career, the poor documentation found in most works (no, not mine!) is astounding.

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    6. Absolutely - I can't understand that people list stuff on eBay, for example, without giving basic information like dimensions!

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  7. Gardening books at bedtime. I'm astonished by your rock and roll lifestyle Tony.

    I like the grenadiers. Can we look forward to them storming a covered way or ravelin?

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    1. I confess they are hardly a right riveting read - I have been impressing myself with the extent of my recall of the proper names of quite a few plants - this is all because there was a period when I was about 12 when my mother spoke of little else - my parents were devout gardeners. Something to do with having no friends, I think.

      Grenadiers - yes - such an assault role would be admirable. My WSS-period siege games will have to wait until I've painted up a lot of hardware - my field armies are supplied with, well, field artillery thus far - there will be great scope for howitzers and mortars and all that - not to mention sappers - as time passes - assuming someone makes such things in 20mm. The first working appearance of the grenadiers is likely to be in some more test games of my Prinz Eugen rules - by the way, the Leib Grenadieren will have Status 4 in PE, which is as good as you can get, but the Boismorels will only be Status 3, since it will annoy that conceited git De La Colonie.

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  8. You have the classic red and the blue there Tony! They look excellent.
    A shrrrrrrubbery; filled with juniper bushes, no less. It's a miracle, it's a miracle!
    Regards, James

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    1. Yes, a most fortunate little twist of fate - a uniform system that still falls within my shrinking grasp.

      The Shrubbery is looking nervous - I have an ex-Iraq army vet here, working on the landscaping, and he is taking no prisoners - he got about a third of the way through the unwanted rhododendron bed yesterday, including shifting rocks weighing up to 150lb each - all this before the arrival of the digging machine, which is due to get here this afternoon. This chap is maybe worth a (respectful) post - see how it goes. For getting work done, he is first class; for remembering just what it was he set out to do, that requires a bit more supervision. Nice chap - rough as ****.

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  9. Martin S, who is a bit of a gardener (a bit more than I am, certainly), emailed to ask what is the pale-coloured "hedge" around the bottom of the left hand juniper, and why is it there?

    Good question. I believe it is a Brachyglottis (what my mum would have called Senecio), and I think it was once a little shrub which used to be near to the juniper, but it has subsequently been squeezed into this configuration. It must be a tough beggar, because it gets precious little light and water in that position! It produces a nice show of yellow flowers right through the summer, and requires no attention at all, apart from cutting it back to preserve what little driveway we still have!

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