a timely chop

Today I did a useful and timely job that I don't always manage, and remembered to cut down the Geranium phaeum and most of the sweet rocket, Hesperis matronalis, before they could ripen seed. Or at least, I hope there was no ripe seed lurking in there, since I put the stems on the compost heap, and don't want every bed where I use the compost from that batch coming up geraniums.  G. phaeum is a useful plant, tolerant of dry shade, and bearing upright stems of small purple flowers that are attractive to bees and other pollinators.  My plants are a strain with attractive dark blotches on their leaves, which makes them more interesting than the little purple flowers would be by themselves.  The parent plant was the variety 'Samobar', but its many progeny do not strictly deserve the name, though they look very similar (and who is to say that in these hard times the commercial nurseries don't raise them from seed anyway, and simply chuck out any that aren't blotched enough?).

Note the use of the qualifier 'many'.  Geranium phaeum is generous with its babies.  Extremely generous.  It has formed a sweep down a section of the long bed larger than I would ever have planted myself.  I leave it there, because it does such a good job of covering a stretch of dark, dry, root ridden and frankly unappealing soil around shrubs.  It is a miserable spot, and I am grateful to anything as attractive as the geranium that will volunteer to live there as happily as it seems to do. Grateful, but not so grateful that I want it to repeat the trick all around the garden.  One stray plant has set up an outpost at the bottom of the hill in the shade of the Zelkova, and while I left it there, because it seemed too harsh to pluck it out when it was about to flower and its young, blotched leaves were so pretty, I made sure I cut the flowering stems down before it could start colonising the entire bed.

Hardy geraniums fall broadly into two camps.  There are those that send up branched, flowering stalks from ground level.  Many of them bloom once, and once only, but if you cut out the old flowering stems when they have finished, the plant will often send up a clump of fresh foliage from ground level and look quite presentable for the rest of the season, besides functioning as ground cover.  If you are in a hurry and have a lot of plants to tidy up, you need not even be too careful about cutting out only the flowering stems, and leaving the new emerging leaves.  Just grab the whole lot, cut, and chuck on the compost heap, and if you have chopped off a few new leaves in the process, the plant will soon make more, though it will look startlingly bald for a few days.  G. phaeum falls into this group.

Then there are the real minglers and sprawlers, that send out rambling flowering stems that continue to elongate and flower for weeks and months.  The yellow leaved, magenta flowered 'Ann Folkard' is one such.  By autumn, when I come to clear the border, the stems can be a yard long. There is no need to cut this type back mid season, as they will continue flowering anyway. Geranium sanguineum behaves in similar fashion, and with attractive red autumnal leaf tints as a bonus, but the majority of varieties fall into the first category.  You can work out which type an unfamiliar hardy geranium in your garden is, if you simply take some time to look at it and see how it grows and flowers, before reaching for the secateurs in hopes of improving it.

Sweet rocket is another useful plant, that will tolerate dry conditions according to one of my former colleagues who grew it at home, though most of ours is in relatively damp spots.  It is happy in light shade, and unhappy in a small pot on a garden centre bench.  To look at the sad little specimens struggling to flower at a foot tall, you would have no idea of their potential in a border.  A member of the cabbage family, they produce typical cruciform flowers in white or purple, which are attractive to insects.  Like Geranium phaeum, Hesperis matronalis seeds ferociously.  This is not such a problem as it is with some plants, because the seedlings are relatively easy to pull up, and I sometimes leave misplaced plants to finish flowering in their first season before rooting them out, but it is one of those things you need to keep an eye on, lest you end up with far too much of it.  I read in an article about Tom Stuart-Smith that he loves sweet rocket, and grows it in his own garden, without using it in client gardens because of its seeding properties.

The old flower spikes tend to flop over, which is another reason to tidy them away mid season.  As I did so this afternoon I discovered Hesperis has another trick up its sleeve.  As well as seeding, the old flower stems will root themselves where they touch, expanding the clump.  It is said not to be the longest lived plant, sometimes functioning as a biennial, but is fairly perennial in our garden. Anyway, given the rate of volunteer replacements it shouldn't be a great problem if the parent plant doesn't last for too many seasons.

Addendum  The florentines turned out to be very nice, but I'm not at all sure they were what Gretel Beer had in mind.  Facsimile reproduction 1950s Faber cookery books do not come with any illustrations, and it is thirty years since I was in Vienna.  In consequence I set out to make the florentines with no clear idea at all of what I was aiming at, beyond a desire to use up some egg whites and a belief that any biscuit made out of nuts and chocolate could not be bad.  I suspect I subverted the author's intention when I substituted flaked almonds for blanched, because the prospect of chopping up five ounces of blanched almonds sounded like hard work.  At any rate, the florentines did not come out with the sort of dense texture I associate with commercial ones, nor did they spread out as I was expecting. Instead they remained as spiky peaks on the baking sheet, and were very light, with a tendency to shatter dramatically when bitten into, like a lux, grown up version of those chocolate rice crispy biscuits I remember from children's parties in the late 1960s.

I don't know if the Sicilian biscuits bore any resemblance to the originals either, since they were from another book without pictures, or at least not of the food.  Bitter almonds: Recollections and recipes from a Sicilian girlhood, is an account of the life story of a woman who rose above her poverty stricken origins and upbringing in a fairly grim orphanage run by nuns, to become the owner of a successful pastry shop.  Her establishment is popular with tourists, but I haven't been to Sicily. I made up one of her basic almond biscuit recipes, and shaped it according to the easiest method I could find.  The resulting biscuits looked rather like Pizza Express dough balls, only sparkling faintly with sugar, and tasted of cooked marzipan flavoured with lemon, which is what they basically were. I loved them, and could imagine the almond paste working as a flan pastry, pressed thinly over a tin and with something else cooked on top.  However, whether the chic tourist bakeries of Sicily actually sell anything that remotely resembles my lemon and almond, crumbly, shiny, doughball looky-likeys I have no idea.