Monday 22 July 2013

a little work and two gardens

On days when I've been to work I blog about work.  That's the usual rule.  Maybe I shouldn't, since most people are bored by other people's work.  Today work was very hot, and there weren't many customers, but you can't blame them, given that when I planted out my Silene fimbriata on Saturday I had to practically dig the hole with a chisel.  There, having dealt with work very succinctly we can proceed to yesterday's visit to two gardens in Norwich.

In a moment.  The hot monotony of the plant centre was broken by a couple of incidents.  Firstly, repeated phone calls from a man who is coming to see the owner tomorrow to demonstrate (wait for it) an EPOS system.  Just think, we might be going to have barcode scanning, giving us stock control systems that were almost live, if we kept tabs on dead plants and returns in a timely fashion (which would be the point at which we discovered what the shrinkage is).  I can think of so many questions I should like to ask about any proposed system, I am quite sad I won't be there tomorrow.

The other thing which amused me was a visit by one of my fellow music society committee members, in search of the owner.  Since she volunteered to try and drum up sponsorship for the society from local businesses I deduced that she was there to try and tap the owner for money. From her blank gaze at me I gathered she hadn't clocked who I was, or that we had met a couple of times before.  I wasn't surprised, since I didn't get the feeling I'd made any great impression on her previously, and it takes a certain mental flexibility to connect the person wearing a cheap and compost-stained uniform shirt and picking the dead leaves off primroses on the wrong side of a shop counter, with someone you last met in their best Boden bib and tucker, in the dining room of the house with the best view in the village.

I rate her chances of getting sponsorship from the plant centre at approximately zero.  Or at least, I should say that the owner was about as likely to take up pole dancing and stage a demonstration in aid of the Countryside Alliance as she was to want to give money for a chamber music concert.  The owners have displayed no discernible interest in the arts in the decade I've known them.  She goes to the odd event at the Royal Geographical Society, and apart from that they like horses, hunting, shooting, fishing, plants, and Scottish country dancing.  Also they run a retail business with customers rather than clients, so have nobody to schmooze over a spot of music and some dinner. Local accountants or IFAs would seem more likely prospective sponsors.  And I have seen how carefully the owner controls every last day's worth of extra hours from the part-timers.  I really can't see her spending the equivalent of eight or ten days' wages in order to have the firm's name in a concert programme.  Everybody in the village knows we exist anyway.

Anyway, back to Norwich.  We caught the train, so our trip was nearly scuppered before it started, since a train ran into another train in Norwich station in the early hours of Sunday morning. Fortunately it was going very slowly, so there were no serious injuries, and trains were not cancelled for the rest of the day.  The train ran to time, the pub where we meant to have lunch was where the Systems Administrator said it would be, and the pub where we actually had lunch, having stumbled across it while checking out the location of the first garden as we waited for the original pub to open, was pleasant.  We went to the Adam and Eve, which claims to be the oldest pub in Norwich. It occupies a seriously quaint building, keeps its beer well, and does good chips.  OK, the food is traditional pub grub not gastropub, as some reviewers on Tripadvisor have commented, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else.  It is even next to a public car park which had spaces in it at Sunday lunchtime, should you desire to drive into Norwich instead of letting the train take the strain.

You have one more day in 2013 to visit the Bishop's House Gardens.  They open on Sundays for local charities, and the last opening for this year is next weekend.  The Diocese of Norwich website very charmingly doesn't seem to give an address for the gardens, and I had to go to the Visit Norwich site to discover it, but they are just round the corner from the Adam and Eve, in Bishopsgate.  You get a splendid view of the cathedral from the gardens, plus a fine ruined medieval gatehouse and seventeenth century chapel.  In the upper part of the garden, which is informal, there is a large Liriodendron and a good London plane, plus a large expanse of level lawn which I was itching to fill with shrubs, but of course they need it for diocesan entertaining.  In the lower part of the garden are shrub borders containing some rarities and a hebe grown from Queen Victoria's wedding bouquet, a pair of large herbaceous borders, a rather struggling rose garden, a wildflower meadow labyrinth that is really fun, a collection of bamboos, and an organic vegetable garden to supply the Bishop's table.  The herbaceous borders were in full clatter and very colourful, but if you don't catch them next Sunday you won't see them in their full glory for a couple of years, since they are going to be cleared in turn, fallowed for a year while the soil is cleaned of persistent weeds, and then replanted.

After the Bishop's garden we went to see Will Giles' Exotic Garden.  This was a repeat visit.  We first went two or three years ago, and I've got one of his books on exotic plants (for use in the British climate).  It is an extraordinary place and I recommend it highly.  It is not large, occupying the garden of a suburban house just up the hill from the railway station in a road now largely occupied by insurance offices and similar.  He has enterprisingly agreed with his insurer neighbours that his garden visitors can use their car park, since he only opens at weekends when they are closed.  We paid our money to a young man playing the bongos, and walked through a grove of bamboos and assorted shrubs, some more exotic than others, and odd bits of sculpture, until we arrived at the garden proper.

The core of the garden is brilliant and bonkers.  Gravel paths lead through a maze of small beds holding a mixture of things that can stay outside all year, some of which look exotic, such as Fatsia japonica, and tender things bedded out for the summer.  There are loads of pots, and lots of sculptures, ornaments and found objects.  The front of the house has almost disappeared under a two storey wooden veranda covered in a rampant vine, and he has somehow persuaded the city planners to let him build a large tree house, which you are free to climb into.  As you ascend the slope behind the house the ground has been formed into beds with retaining walls of flint, rubble and oddments, some of them quite substantial.  There is a waterfall running down the tallest.  You can sit in the pavilion at the top of the slope, by which point the planting has become xerophytic, and admire the view of industrial Norwich, and the ingenuity of Will Giles' design.

He does some very clever things.  We liked the two classical columns, made of telegraph poles topped with blocks of wood, the uppermost tier wrapped in lead, and with planted-up pots resting on them.  They were substantial poles, a good four or five metres high.  A narrow window in the pavilion at the top of the garden basically looks into a holly hedge, but the effect is to give a feeling of distance and seclusion even though you are at that point sitting immediately next to a dilapidated larchlap fence.  The vistas are by necessity short, because it isn't a big site, but every one ends in an object or focal point of some sort, a trick that Frederick Gibberd used at his garden. Small gravestones that you assume will be for pets turn out to be recycled human ones from Victorian times.  Holly bushes are clipped into vertical blocks and walls fully five or six metres high.

We peered into his polytunnel on the way out, which is screened from the rest of the garden by hedges.  It is lined with bubble wrap, and an electric fan was running to circulate the air.  Smallish cupboards like fume cabinets ran along one side, lined with another layer of bubble wrap, and with individual thermostatic controls.  His book talks about the minimum overwintering requirements of the plants he uses, and some of them need a higher temperature than we manage to keep our house at.  Tropical gardening, even on a sheltered south facing slope in a city, needs a fair amount of heat in the winter months.

Back to today.  When I got home from work, expecting to have to do the watering on what has been officially the hottest day for seven years, the Systems Administrator had already done it, and it had taken an hour and a half.  How nice is that?

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