two Scottish musicians

We went last night to hear Mike and Ali Vass play at the Colchester Arts Centre.  They are twins, young folk musicians from Nairn in north east Scotland.  We heard them before in 2008, and liked them enough that as soon as I got the Arts Centre programme for this spring and saw they were coming round again I ringed the date on the calender.  Sadly not a great number of others did likewise, and it was a salutory reminder how sharply the audience for folk falls off below the top-level established acts, like Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman or Spiers and Boden, both recent sell-outs at Colchester.  It was a great waste, as the Vass twins are good and it would be nice if lots more people heard them.  Still, everyone has to start somewhere.  We once heard Kate Rusby playing in the upstairs room of the Red Lion in Manningtree, and I don't suppose she'd do that nowadays.  The Arts Centre manages to make the smaller audience look as though it is more or less filling the space by setting out tables and chairs, cafe style, and just having a couple of rows of seats at the back, which is where we were, having aimed to miss the support act.  My dad, who has sung at the Arts Centre on one of their occassional singers nights, said that due to the lights he couldn't see the audience from the stage anyway, so the arrangement of the furniture must be to reassure the listeners that they are not too few, rather than the performers.

Mike and Ali Vass are both excellent musicians.  Mike Vass plays the fiddle, very well, and the guitar, not at the level of Martin Simpson or Richard Thompson, but bread-and-butter guitar is fine when underpinned by enormous musicality and feel for the material, which he has in spades.  He writes his own tunes, as well as playing trad ones, and I liked them enough to buy his new CD, freshly released this month.  I don't often buy any CDs on the night, as my Amazon wishlist always stretches to at least ten pages, and I'd rather think about what I'm going to get and ponder track listings at leisure, but apart from the fact that I like the Vass twins I was pleased they'd come to Colchester and wanted to support them.

Ali Vass plays the piano with energy and verve.  You get a few piano players in folk, but it's not common nowadays, and carries slightly scary connotations to my generation of country dancing at school on days when it was too wet for sport.  In my dad's compendious vinyl collection there are recordings of first and second generation American Irish fiddlers in New York who are almost always accompanied by a piano, but the pianos of the 1950s and 60s went boom-chick boom-chick using about three chords all the way through.  That was swept away in the 70s as groups like Planxty showed what could be achieved with a bouzouki, and guitar accompanists like Paul Brady soared beyond boom-chick.  Ali Vass is following in their footsteps, but on a piano.  In fact, usually keyboards, which is what she used the first time we saw them, but last night there was an actual grand piano, large and rather battered.  I didn't know the Arts Centre possessed a grand piano.  Have they had it for years lurking behind the curtains, but last time she didn't ask to use it, or have they recently bought it or been given it?  Anyway, Ali Vass seemed thrilled with it.  I would love to know how she arrived at her style, whether she has done her grade 8 but went down the folk route, and what role jazz has played in her musical education.  In the Vass treatment the piano is not confined to accompaniment, but at times takes the tune from the fiddle, which with a fast reel is quite something.

They do some traditional Scottish songs as well.  I was pondering today what defines a folk song, and of course there is no definition, but traditional songs almost always tell a story.  Lovers depart and come back, their fortunes made or not, and are joyously reunited with their sweethearts or murdered by cruel parents.  There is a narrative in which things happen, generally reaching a conclusion.  The same song-writing model, in fact, that was used most of the time by The Jam, Elvis Costello and other favourite non-folk bands of my youth.  Ali Vass has a good voice for folk, deep, strong, melodic and truthful.  She was breaking up a bit on the high notes last night, and I said then that she was struggling.  Looking for their website just now I saw that their gig tomorrow at Loughborough has been cancelled, so we were very lucky to see them yesterday.  Lucky also in that she got married earlier this year, and will be making her home in the States, so touring the UK with her brother seems likely to be curtailed.

As a duo the nearest they seem to having a website is a page on their agent's website.  They are sharing an agent with some very famous and seriously good names in the world of Scottish and Irish music, which is encouraging.  Mike Vass has his own site, and works with other partners as well as his sister, and teaches tradditional fiddle.  If you get the chance to hear either or both I'd grab it.  Assuming you like traditional Scottish music, that is.

(I should like to make a small modification to Bill Gates' domestic arrangements.  When he is in the middle of cooking, or telling a really good story to friends, or shaving, or showering, I should like his cooker, or his dinner party, or his razor, or water supply, to arbitrarily shut down for ten minutes while it instals updates.  In that ten minutes he can watch his souffle collapse, his friends lose interest in the punchline, and feel his face congeal and his skin chill.  Then he will know how it feels to be a person of modest technical abilities trying to communicate using Windows 7.  I must speak to the Systems Administrator about this and see if the blasted thing can't be programmed to at least ask me first if this is a convenient moment.  But I would still like Bill Gates to suffer the unscheduled shutdowns, in defence of all those people who don't have a Systems Administrator).

My other gripe is still about the folk club's awful timing.  The Vass twins came on at 8.45pm, and there was a half hour interval, which the people sitting next to us grumbled was too long.  Even though I loved the music, by the last couple of sets I could feel my eyeballs prickling under my eyelids with tiredness.  We got home at 11.30pm, I'd done a ten hour working day before I went out for the evening, and it was only Monday.  That's not good.

bittercress and peacocks

The boss announced that we must tackle the hairy bittercress in the herbaceous tunnel, before it ripened and shed its seeds everywhere.  He added generously that the manager could use one of the plant centre staff up until 10.00am.  As we were both watering until gone twenty past nine this was a slightly symbolic gesture, but I managed to spend an hour and a quarter over there before it got too busy in the plant centre.  Hairy bittercress grown in a nice, warm, irrigated tunnel displays a vigour not possessed by the starvelings that try to colonise my gravel, and make huge, plump plants fully 20cm tall.  I think we may have missed the boat slightly with the seed shedding, though.

We had to hose dollops of peacock ordure off the ramp up to the back of the shop.  My colleague believes that at this time of the year they like to look at themselves reflected in the glass of the door.  At least they don't show any interest in the parked cars:  I have heard of peacocks attacking their reflections in the panels of a well-polished motor.  Mine will be quite safe anyway, as it hasn't been washed since winter, and not for quite a long time before that.  I keep thinking that I really must wash it, but it would be a great excuse to be able to say that you would have a clean car, except that then it might be attacked by peacocks.

One of the hens made repeated forays into the shop, presumably looking for cake crumbs after yesterday's Yellow Book festivities.  Another hen, or maybe the same one, managed to get locked into the staff room.  Chickens and carpets don't mix.  The carpet is an unfortunate shade of pink, donated by a former staff member who had a mate who was refurbishing a pub, and was already pretty grubby, but it is marginally worse now.

Most of the customers were delightful, though I did get one peeved and self-righteous one who was not very happy that we hadn't rung her to warn her that the cistus she had been told would be arriving in around three weeks when she ordered it about three weeks ago was still expected in three weeks as of today.  I apologised for that and explained that ordering in plants from small suppliers wasn't as straightforward as ordering baked beans, and that unfortunately as it was a very busy time of year and the list of people waiting for plants ran to 12 pages of A4, we didn't have the resources to call each of them to keep them updated on progress obtaining their plants.  Actually, I've never tried ordering baked beans, and for all I know it is fiendishly complicated.  How do you explain politely to querulous and possibly rather dim people that the level of personal service they are expecting for their nineteen quid is wildly unrealistic?

all's well in tulip time

The tulips are looking great.  If I were an oligarch I wouldn't bother buying a premier league football club, but I should like one of those gardens where every year 10,000 tulip bulbs were planted.  As it is I have a dozen pots of them.  I love tulips in all their manifestations, as bunches of flowers for the house, and Blom's magnificent display at Chelsea (the stress each year.  Will this be the first time in about 65 years that they don't get awarded a Gold Medal?), but tulips outdoors have an extra beauty because the sun can shine through their petals.  You can see where the petals overlap at the base of each flower by the arc of darker colour, sharply demarcated from the luminous area of single thickness of petal above.  Viewed close up the petals glisten and have a striated surface texture like polished steel.

I went for bright colours again this year.  The soft pinks and whites are pretty, but the hot reds and oranges are more exciting.  First to open was 'Red Impression', a classic goblet shaped tulip in bright red, with a black blotch at the base of each petal.  These are still looking good, but starting to lean and weave in different directions.  It is a Darwin hybrid.  I tried to pick varieties that would open over a period, to give me a longer season, and it should in theory have been behind the Triumph tulips, as the Triumphs are supposed to open mid to late April and the Darwins late April to mid May, but never mind.  Triumph tulips are also the traditional tulip shape, and I went for 'Orange Sun', 'Abu Hassan', 'Jan Reus' and 'Negrita'.  'Orange Sun' is very much at the red end of the orange spectrum, with a silvery reverse to the petals, and the effect is warm and soft and not at all glaring.  'Abu Hassan' is a deep brownish-purple, with yellow edges and bases to the petals.  'Jan Reus' is a lovely deep burgundy, and again the backs of the petals have a hint of silver.  'Negrita' is a rich mid-purple.

Last to open are the Lily Flowered tulips, with their elegant pointed petals.  The first flower has just opened in one pot of 'Ballerina', which is a warm apricot, lifted by the yellow stamens and basal blotch.  The other Lily Flowered variety is 'Red Shine', and that hasn't opened at all yet.

I got them all from Peter Nyssen, a whosesaler which has also sold to members of the public for many years.  Christopher Lloyd repeatedly recommended the firm in his books, which is where I picked up the name.  The minimum quantity you can buy of one tulip variety is 25 bulbs, which does two 33cm pots nicely.  The cheapest ones were £16 per hundred bulbs last season, which equates to £4 per 25 and £2 per pot.  Buying tulips in packets from garden centres, or from the wonderful Bloms, it is easy to pay 45-50p per bulb, which comes to over £5 per pot.  In the old City days it was a great game to go around the Bloms stand with an order form, ticking the boxes against the names of the ones I liked, and then forgetting about it until autumn when a large box of tulip bulbs arrived, together with the bill.  Nowadays I make sure I choose Peter Nyssen's cheapest varieties, many of which are very good, just not the newest and trendiest.  It's tough on Bloms, as I still look at their lovely Chelsea exhibit, and Peter Nyssen doesn't do one of those.

The tulips were potted last November in ordinary multi-purpose compost, and stood outside all through the winter weather.  Unlike the potted hyacinths, they are absolutely fine.  That is more than can be said for the pots.  I used to use traditional clay pots, around the 33cm size, and got fed up with them blowing over, so a couple of years ago I bought some broader based, shorter ones from B&Q.  They are 33cm at the top, but only 25cm across the base and 25cm tall.  The proportions look very nice, in fact, and they give adequate rooting depth for tulips  Unfortunately they were not sufficiently weather proof.  None of them have cracked, but the rims are flaking off.  I think I need to plan ahead, and buy a set of plain pots for bulbs from Whichford Pottery, if they have a winter sale as usual, except that that will be after the point when I should have planted the bulbs.

In the gravel, dwarf tulips are bringing the miniature bulbs season to its conclusion.  These are reasonably persistent, at least in our free draining gravel.  They are all so pretty, I tend to choose them as well on the basis of going for the species and varieties where I can afford to get 25 rather than 3.

Addendum  I wrote that Geranium maculatum 'Chatto' had flowers in a dreamy shade of pale blue, which is how I remembered them.  Then I found the label on the kitchen table, and it said that the flowers were pink, so I went outside and had a look at them.  I'm not sure whether they should be called pink or blue.  They are a pale lavender with veining, which in some lights is definitely pink, but in others a soft blue in the way that blue clematis almost always have some pink in them.  It just goes to show that you should have the plant in front of you while writing about it.  I couldn't be bothered to set up an extension cable so that I could sit in front of the tulips to blog about them (laptop battery life nowadays approx 3 minutes) but I did go out (with a clipboard) and take notes before sitting down to write.

Two gardening programmes

We watched Gardeners' World last night, partly because it was on before Monty Don's Italian Gardens, which was the programme I really wanted to see.  The reformed, back-to-basics version is OK.  Quite nice, really.  If I were still commuting and wanting something very undemanding to collapse to on a Friday night in front of the box I can see it would be fine.  They've got rid of the awful embarassing matey backchat between the presenters, and returned to a series of more or less sensible features about gardening.

I would have liked to know more about Carol Klein's old daffodil varieties.  Why are they later blooming than the modern ones?  I can see the advantages of having developed daffodils that flower especially early, but why drop the late flowering strains from mainstream commerce?  And was it a coincidence that most of the varieties featured were white?  The last of my daffodils to flower, which are not old or rare varieties, are the white and pale coloured ones.  I should have liked to know the name of the one with the gappy, slightly twisted petals, but didn't write it down at the time, and have since had a rummage around the programme's website without finding it.  I could presumably watch the programme again on i-player until I got to the feature on daffodils, but I don't think I can be bothered.  I suppose the BBC won't name actual suppliers because they can't be seen to favour individual commercial firms (I'd love to know where Monty got those chunky artichoke plants from in their beautiful wrappings), but to be told that old daffodils are hard to find but if you search around you can track them down isn't very helpful.

I wasn't completely convinced by Rachel de Thame's feature on renovating a shrub bed.  We saw her take some of the top growth off the condemned Choisya, then a shot of her levering the roots up with a garden fork, then in the next shot it was already quite loose in the ground and she and the plant's owner were tugging at it, and out it came with a final heave.  I have never dug up a large Choisya, and it may be that they have sparse root systems, or that this one had been so damaged by the cold that half its roots were dead, but I wonder how long it really took to get out of the ground, and how they actually did it, and what tools they used.  The last time I tried to lever up quite a small hydrangea using a garden fork I broke the handle.  It is true I have a bee in my bonnet about pickaxes at the moment (the Pittosporum tobira went today.  I'm starting to have an azalea theory in its place) but digging out established shrubs is generally heavy physical work.  It can take the best part of half a day, if not an entire day, and it is immeasurably easier if you have the right tools (a pickaxe, and possibly a saw for the larger roots).  I'm not sure that leaving beginner gardeners with the impression that they can do the job in half an hour with a garden fork is doing them any favours.  There was no mention of the fact that before going on to plant your new herbaceous perennials you would need to remove the remaining Choisya roots, or that it would be a very good idea to refresh the soil with plenty of added organic material before replanting.

So Gardener's World probably gets 5 out of 10, or 6 if I'm feeling generous, which is a considerable improvement on its previous rating of about 1.  However, Monty Don's Italian Gardens were really good.  I thought they would be, having enjoyed his previous series on gardens around the world.  Last night he looked at gardens built by ambitious cardinals vying for the papacy.  We learnt about the social context of the gardens, why they were built and how they were used, and where they were (not too far from the Vatican).  He covered economic and practical aspects of getting that much water into a garden, and practical aspects of construction such as that the sculptures in one garden were carved in-situ from rock outcrops on the site.  He mentioned symbolic aspects of the gardens, and the original access routes and viewpoints from which they were approached and seen (not always the current ones).  He discussed which original features had been lost (mainly flowers and specimen plants) and the extent to which the gardens differed from their original design.  He covered present ownership (mostly state owned).  He questioned whether restoration was always wholly desirable, and the difficulty of deciding at what point in time you should restore to, if you were restoring.  There was really a lot of interesting stuff in there, and plenty of footage of the actual gardens, which were very handsome.  It's a four part series, and if you missed part one it's worth catching on the i-player and then watching the rest of it.  I expect to be glued to the TV between 9.00pm and 10.00pm for the next three Fridays.

more weeding, more flowers

I spent today in the back garden, weeding, before the ground gets too dry to stick a trowel in, and acutely aware of how far behind I am with normal maintenance after losing so many working days to the snow and the cold.  We went to get another 20 bags of mushroom compost earlier in the week, and I've already used 6 bags of it, teasing it carefully around the primulas then romping across the blank spaces between shrubs.  The Pittosporum tobira has definitely had it, stone dead after the cold weather, another set of roots to pickaxe out.  I should mention one impressive survivor, a narrow leafed form of common bay that I got from the Architectural Plants nursery.  Many of our customers at work have sad stories of bay cut to the ground, but this one is looking only slightly burnt in a few places.  It makes a tall, narrow shrub, and is a fine plant.  The Architectural Plants catalogue said it was hardier than the usual bay, and I once tried to interest the boss at work in stocking it, but he didn't sound impressed.  I try to clip mine to a neat cone, which would be easier if it weren't planted on a steepish slope surrounded by other shrubs.

There are plenty of flowers to look at while weeding, apart from the primulas.  Osmanthus delavayi is just opening.  This is a lovely, slow growing evergreen shrub, with small, matt, dark green leaves, and small scented white flowers.  Left unclipped it will form quite an open bush, and I've seen it in woodland gardens in light shade from the surrounding trees, but in full sun and clipped over after flowering it forms a dense bush.  I've got it at the corner of a bed, an idea I'm pretty sure I copied from one of Christopher Lloyd's books.  There is a hybrid with larger leaves which is more vigorous, Osmanthus x burkwoodii, but O. delavayi is more elegant.  Good things are worth waiting for.

Among the polyanthus, and in the same rich pink part of the colour spectrum, is the pink form of Japanese quince that used to be called 'Appleblossom' and is now properly 'Moerloosei'.  It flowers late, for a Chaenomeles.  My shrub suffers from something knawing its bark in the winter months, I suspect voles or other small rodents, but has survived.  It has lost some vigour in the past couple of years, and I feel it will appreciate some nice mushroom compost, topped off with a dusting of fish, blood and bone.

The double gean is opening, Prunus avium 'Plena'.  This is always some days behind the single form in flowering, and will eventually make a huge tree, though not in my time.  In front of it is Exochorda x macrantha 'The Bride', which is well named.  As you would expect it has white flowers, looking very fresh against mid green leaves, but in addition it has a train-like habit, as the branches sweep downwards and cascade out across the ground.  I have learnt from experience that it requires its own space.  If any other shrub is allowed to grow into it the Exochorda will respond by developing a dead, bald spot, which takes a while to grow out when the interloper is tidied back within bounds.  Slightly squeezed into a space at the back of the bed, Exochorda serratifolia is making surprisingly good growth, given it is supposed to require full sun, but is on the north side of a tall hedge with other shrubs around.  That also has white flowers, held in more vertical sprays than 'The Bride', which I bought because I liked it so much, without proper thought as to where I could put it (a bad habit I have partly learnt to curb).  It ended up in a sort of gap where I wanted to thicken up the planting between us and the neighbours.  This seems a cavalier use for a fine shrub, but it has fighting spirit and is coping so far.

unexpected lodgers in the greenhouse

Robins are nesting in my greenhouse.  I was watering one day, and stretched out my hand to remove a pile of leaves that seemed to have suddenly collected in a tray of bronze grasses, when I realised it was in fact a bird's nest.  There was no sign of any actual bird, and I assumed that the greenhouse had got too hot for them and that the nest was abandoned, as we'd had a couple of unusually warm and sunny days before I put this year's shading paint on.  I was beginning to think that if I removed it carefully and treated it for fleas my nieces and nephew might like it, when I saw one day that there was an egg in it.  Still no signs of birds, and I again thought it must be abandoned, but left it alone.  A day or two later I saw there was another egg, brownish pink.

My partner, who knows more about birds than I do, said that it was probably robins, as he'd seen them in that corner of the garden, and that they laid their clutch over several days but didn't start incubating them until they'd finished laying, so that all would hatch at the same time.  I had no idea that eggs were able to survive in limbo, at room temperature, until the parent bird was ready to sit, but I don't know much about the domestic habits of robins.

I looked into the greenhouse this morning and a pair of anxious eyes looked back at me over the top of the nest, so they have started sitting.  I'll try not to disturb them, but I'm not prepared to vacate the greenhouse entirely and not water any of the plants until the robins have finished nesting.  I think the best thing to do will be to not ever look at them directly, and pretend I haven't noticed them.  They can't be afraid of me per se, because they follow me around the garden when I'm weeding.

Searching around the internet I gather that the female incubates the eggs, but that both parents help feed the young.  They can have 2-3 clutches in a season, and it sounds as though they build a fresh nest each time, which I suppose is more hygienic but extra work for them.  It will be interesting to see how they get on, and how we rub along together.  I've got a wooden frame with netting over it, previously used for keeping the birds off some strawberries.  Incubation apparently lasts 12-15 days, and once the eggs get close to hatching I'd better see about leaving the frame wedged across the greenhouse door, to deter the cats from going in if they hear the babies squeaking for food.  It's not as tall as the door, so there'd be a gap at the top for the adults to fly through, plus I'm sure they're bright enough to discover the roof vents.

pondlife, and coastal climbers revisited

Looking into the formal pond in front of the house, I've seen newts.  The pond is slightly failing in its role as an ornamental feature, as a carex that formed part of the original planting has seeded into all the other containers and largely overwhelmed the rest of the marginal plants, while the water surface is a mess of duckweed, and the body of the pond choked by the submerged oxygenators that have multiplied wildly.  As a wildlife feature it's doing a great job.  The actual water is limpid, crystal clear, and full of life.  The newts have grown crests for the breeding season, but since they are very small, and when I see them the rest of the time they are crestless and the usual common newt brown and orange, I'm sure they are common ones and not great crested (if I thought there was any danger we had great crested newts in the front garden I would keep very quiet about it).  The newts swim about the edges of the pond, tiny toes outstretched.  When I disturb them around the garden while weeding at other times of the year they sham dead, to deter me from eating them.  The first time one did this I thought I must have somehow killed it, but have since discovered that this is normal newt behaviour.  As well as the newts I saw a couple of what looked like small flint cylinders, with tufts of weed growing on them, bumbling about, and I presume these were the larvae of some insect.  I need to clear the pond out at some point, but this is definitely not the right time.

I found a toad as well yesterday, while I was weeding in the back garden.  I picked it up carefully and put it in the middle of a Podocarpus where it wouldn't get disturbed again.  Toads have a very poor sense of self-preservation.  If uncovered by somebody weeding then instead of shuffling off as fast as they can crawl to put distance between themselves and the potential danger, they move about a trowel's length and stop as soon as they are hidden from view, so in a few minutes they get dug up again.

I find the presence of amphibians reassuring, apart from the fact that I like toads, as it makes me feel that the garden must be reasonably healthy and unpolluted.  We very rarely get frogs, but I have been told that they tend not to co-exist with toads.  I don't know why not.

Fired up by the question about climbing plants for a windy garden right by the sea, I re-read one of my few books about coastal gardening, Gardening at the Shore by Frances Tennenbaum, published by Timber Press.  They are north American publishers, and she is an American author whose examples are all drawn from north America, so it requires a little intelligent thought to extrapolate her views to gardening in Felixstowe, but many of the points she makes are just as applicable this side of the Atlantic.  Neither the text nor illustrations make much mention of climbing plants.  As is often the way with this sort of book, there is a final section on suitable plants for the matter in hand, and the section on Vines only names two.  One is Carolina jasmine or Gelsemium sempervirens, which sounds very useful, apart from the fact that I can't recall ever seeing for sale here.  The other is Parthenocissus quinquefolia, Virginia creeper.  I'd never thought of that as specifically good for coastal conditions, but she says it will grow on dry dunes and even the ocean shore.  In the body of the text in the earlier chapters she suggests that it is worth experimenting with roses, if they are given a modicum of shelter.

I checked the list of shrubs and climbers for specific purposes in the back of Graham Stuart Thomas's excellent Ornamental shrubs, climbers and bamboos, but the only climber included among shrubs for exposed gardens at the seaside was Muehlenbeckia complexa.  Then I tried the RHS on-line plant selector, going for climbers for a coastal position, and leaving all other conditions such as soil type and flower colour entirely open.  This came up with a list of 24 names, including quite a lot of different honeysuckles, common jasmine, wisteria, a few rose varieties, plus, rather bizarrely, one Raymond Evison clematis, the variety 'Rosemoor'.  I can't believe that 'Rosemoor' is so uniquely gifted among all other clematis varieties as to wind and salt tolerance, but there it is.  The RHS doesn't mention muehlenbeckia.  Maybe they don't count it as a climber.

After my quest for knowledge I felt that on the whole gardening experts didn't associate climbing plants with coastal gardening any more than I did.  I don't think this is just down to habit, prejudice or fashion.  Leaving aside other parts of the world with very humid climates where forests grow close to the sea, coastal vegetation around the UK and northern Europe tends to be low-growing, due to the blasting effect of salt laden winds.  The reason why plants evolve a climbing habit is to hoist themselves up to the light, whether by mountaineering up other, taller plants, or by scrambling up rock faces.  If you come from coastal conditions where there aren't other tall plants to block the light, and the general name of the game is to hunker down low out of the worst of the salt wind, you don't need to climb.  That's not to say that some climbers from inland areas won't turn out to be salt-tolerant, but there's no reason to expect that many will be.  UK gardens close to the sea that do manage to grow tall plants inevitably make use of extensive shelter-belt plantings, to cut down the effect of wind and salt within the garden, and in the case of the great Cornish gardens are often tucked into valleys that give additional protection.  The wonderful garden made by Derek Jarman at Dungeness, which was an immediate response to the shingle and the sea, with no shelter belt, did not use climbing plants.

So I'm afraid the pleasant couple from Felixstowe, with their series of big arches that they want to cover with flowering climbers, have set themselves a difficult challenge.  If they had been designing the garden with respect to its surroundings and the wider landscape maybe they shouldn't have had big arches.  Or if they want pergolas covered in flowering climbers maybe they shouldn't have chosen to live right by the sea.  But I will try to get down to the sea-front gardens at Clacton at some point this summer, and see what's growing on the pergola there, and how it's doing.

underplanting for shrub roses

Barring unforseen events and emergencies I have a whole week to spend in the garden.  Between now and Sunday lunchtime I'm not committed to going anywhere or doing anything (apart from making a pudding for the lunch).  I was looking forward to it all over the weekend, and scanning the weather forecast, torn between the need for rain and my acute desire that it should not rain during the daytime (which is ridiculous, since it will rain when it rains, irrespective of whether or when I would like it to).

I worked in the back garden today, so admired the 'Taihaku' at intervals.  There are some buds still to open, but already petals are falling on the lawn.  I was weeding around the shrub roses, a fiddly task since by now I have to manouvre around tufts of hyacinth and colchicum foliage, plus self-sown seedlings of Orlaya grandiflora.  This is a delightful umbellifer, with white flowers like lacecap hydrangeas, a flat central cluster of tiny flowers surrounded by larger petals around the outside of the cluster.  I first saw it on a Chelsea show garden designed by Tom Stuart-Smith a few years ago, and was enchanted, so asked one of the girls on the stand what it was called.  She replied that it was a wild flower and Tom said it didn't really have a name.  I said that even weeds had names, and managed to discover what it was.  Since then it has become rather trendy, and one of the glossy magazines gave away packets of seed.  Received wisdom is that it transplants badly and is best sown in-situ from fresh seed, and certainly I haven't found packeted seed gave me many plants.  My self-seeding colony hangs on at one end of the rose bed, but sadly the Orlaya isn't as generous with its progeny as the wild umbellifers that try to move into the garden.  I think cow parsley is a beautiful plant, but it has territorial ambitions all over my cyclamen.  There is also some sort of hogweed, with ribbed stems and more solid flowers than cow parsley,whose name I haven't yet discovered yet.  It is handsome, but too inclined to spread itself about, so I'm now rooting seedlings out when I find them.  I do have a plan to establish self-seeding parsnips in this bed, because their yellow flowers would look so good with the purple roses, and it would be a horticultural joke to see how many people recognised them out of context for a vegetable gone to seed, but I haven't got round to that yet.  There is some angelica which shows signs of setting up a colony in front of 'William Lobb'.

There are also quite a few seedlings of a dark leaved form of Geranium maculatum.  Due to poor record keeping (no excuse for that) I'm not sure whether the original parent plants are the form 'Elizabeth Ann' or 'Espresso'.  There are so many named forms of geranium, and some of them look so similar my mind begins to glaze over.  G. maculatum is one of the  geranium species that will bear a bit of shade, hence I'm experimenting with it as ground cover around shrubs.  The initial results, including the controlled amount of self-seeding, are encouraging, so today I added three plants of G. maculatum 'Chatto'.  This is already in bloom, one of the earliest flowering geraniums, and has mid-green leaves and flowers in a dreamy shade of pale blue.

Three white flowered plants of Vinca minor that I planted last autumn are spreading, and showing signs of starting to do their intended task, which is to stabilise the soil at the end of the bed where it slopes down quite steeply towards the deck.  Buoyed by that preliminary success I'm planting a blue form as well, 'La Grave', which used to be called 'Bowles Variety'.  I don't know why poor old E A Bowles has lost his periwinkle.

tidying the clematis and climbers for a seaside garden

Today being a weekday, it wasn't as busy at the plant centre as it was over the weekend.  I spent some time untangling the clematis in the climber tunnel.  They have suddenly leapt into growth, and are sending out tender young shoots in all directions, which will cling to the bamboo cane in the next pot as happily as their own.  I like clematis.  The way they climb is fascinating, winding their leaf stalks around whatever support they can find.  There is something very soothing and meditative about uncurling the little stalks, and tracing each stem back to its own pot.  I fastened the loose stems to their canes using a tie gun, a useful though cranky device that lets you wrap green plastic tape around whatever you are tying up, then staples the two ends of the tape together while cutting it off from the reel of tape in the gun.  When it works.  Many of the clematis have already over-reached the tops of their supports, and unless they were carrying well-developed flower buds that it would be too much of a waste to cut off, I cut them back to a pair of leaves at the top of the cane.  Those that were only just above the end of the cane had their tips nipped out, to encourage them to bush out.  It is sad cutting out all that healthy growth, but if allowed to grow above their support they eventually flop over and break, and once they grow into each other the more timid customers won't buy them, while the more ruthless can cause serious damage trying to extract the plant they want.

After lunch the manager enquired if I was getting too hot in the tunnel, and would prefer to switch to potting left-over bare-root fruit, but I was quite happy where I was.  People go on holiday to get a climate like that.

Working out in the plant centre rather than inside operating the till I'm in the front line for fielding customer queries.  A couple from Felixstowe wanted to know what climbers I could recommend to grow very close to the sea.  This isn't something I've ever given much thought to, and thinking about it today I realised I didn't particularly associate climbing plants with the idea of a seaside garden.  They told me that wisteria did well in their garden, so I learnt something from them.  I wondered if it would be worth trying Campsis, in that while the boss says on the label that it requires sunny sheltered conditions, I have seen healthy looking ones flowering freely along the tops of garden fences in Burnham-on-Crouch, and that must get quite strong and salty winds sweeping up the estuary.  The manager thought that kiwi fruit and grapevines might be worth a go, as both would tolerate arid conditions.  Hillier's dictionary only came up with Russian vine, which I couldn't recommend to anybody (unless maybe they wanted to conceal an aircraft hanger) and Muehlenbeckia, but that has funny little leaves and nothing much in the way of flowers and the customers already had it and didn't fancy another.  There is a pergola in the seafront gardens at Clacton (which were restored around the turn of the millennium and are rather nice, as municipal gardens go) and I wished I'd paid more attention to what was growing on it (though I may have written it down in my garden visiting notebook, but I didn't have that with me).  It is a good question, climbing plants for the seaside, and has given me something to think about.

garden unseen (by me)

The garden at work appeared on Gardeners' World a couple of weeks ago.  Unfortunately I didn't know it was on, and missed it.  Maybe I should give GW another go, now that Monty's back.  I gather that last week they covered the Gibbert Garden at Harlow, so they must have been on a little eastern counties tour.  I don't know if it was the direct effect of the TV feature, but visitor numbers have risen markedly since.

I don't often go around it myself.  Customers find this bizarre.  When asking for the name of something they've seen in the garden they try to describe it, and I have to admit I haven't seen it.  The trouble is, there isn't really time.  By lunchtime I've generally been on my feet for the best part of five hours.  I'm hungry, and I want a cup of tea, and to sit down on a chair, with a table to put my tea on.  If I wander down the garden the tea is cold by the time I sit down, and I'll probably have to sit on the ground.  Even though the surroundings are beautiful it's too uncomfortable.  I find it takes twenty minutes to eat lunch and drink the tea, which leaves ten minutes out of my half hour lunch break.  Five minutes there and five minutes back isn't going to get me very far into the garden.  Also, I want to get away from the customers for half an hour.  I'm generally quite happy with my role as Staff, but not while I'm eating my lunch.

In general I don't think looking at things against the clock works, whether it is trying to see the garden in the last few minutes of my break, or rushing around an art gallery in the half hour before it closes, or before the moment where I have to get back to Liverpool Street if I'm to beat the commuter period when cheap day returns are invalid.  To appreciate something properly is to immerse yourself in it, which means losing your sense of time.  It's no good if you have an eye on your watch.

The boss has said in the past that we're welcome to go around the garden after work, which is kindly meant, but by six I'm ready to go home.  I'm tired, and I've got my own watering to do when I get back.  And I want to see what's going on in my garden, and check my e-mails.  I could go over there on a day when I'm not working, but there are so many other things to do, I never seem to make the time.  They say the shoemaker's children are the worst shod.

At least when I get home I don't have to do the cooking.  Many households operate on the basis that things get done by the person who cares most about the outcome.  My partner does not share my cheerful conviction that tea, toast, cheese and fruit constitute a nourishing diet, and that meat more than once or twice a week is an optional extra, so I get home to a proper cooked meal.  With meat.  During Cheltenham week the nearest I got to animal protein was an anchovy.

The bits of the garden I can see over the plant centre wall do look very nice.

a fairly busy day at the plant centre

It was another busy day at work, though maybe not so frantically busy as it has been.  I managed to spend a good part of the day putting plants out for sale and helping customers outside in the plant centre, rather than stuck on the till.  The manager had left a note to say I should move some shrubby honeysuckles, Lonicera rupicola var. syringantha, from the shrub beds where they were flowering largely ignored, to the display tables by the entrance.  I moved a couple, and by mid-afternoon both had sold, though so had one left in their original position with the shrubs.  This has soft pink flowers and blueish-green foliage, and is a pretty thing.  I was quite tempted to buy one myself, but desisted.  I wonder if it is drought tolerant.  Lonicera tatarica is a marvellously tough plant, thriving with me and in a colleague's equally dry garden, but I don't know if L. rupicola is equally amenable.  It is supposed to be marvellously scented, according to my researches just now on the internet.  I must admit I didn't smell it, but I have a slight cold and can't smell much at all at the moment.  I've a feeling I could easily talk myself into getting one, as long as it could cope with the sandy soil in the top part of the garden.

On the tills we kept running out of change.  I wish the banks would get on and dispense five pound notes through cashpoint machines, as they have said they are going to do.  Customers tender £20 notes, which you can't blame them for, and we soon run out of fivers and have to use pound coins in their change, so we run out of those too.  Today we even managed to run out of 1p bits at one point.  A woman whose partner had given me twelve pounds for an eleven pound something transaction demanded a five pound note in addition to her thirty-something pence change.  When I said that the plants were over eleven pounds and they'd given me twelve pounds she began to query the price of the plants.  Fortunately she had her itemised (three items) till receipt in her hand.  Her partner shushed her and hurried her away.  I think he was rather embarassed.

Looking on the bright side, I remembered a belt for my trousers, and managed not to water my feet, having changed to plimsolls now that the weather's warming up.  I hate spending all day in damp shoes.

the fleeting joy of cherries, and the beekeeping season gets underway

The wild gean is out in all its glory.  The leaves are just starting to open, which gives the tree a slight tinge of bronze-pink, though the individual flowers are certainly white.  It is very lovely.

At the opposite end of the top lawn the Japanese cherry 'Taihaku' has just opened.  I have been looking at it periodically all through the day, knowing that its season is short, and that I'll be at work for the next three days.  The flowers are white, single, and large, and carried so generously that the tree appears a mass of white, again tinged pink by the newly emerging leaves.  The branches spread widely, and I hope that eventually it will reach right across the lawn.  After I planted it I put a bench by it, so that we could sit under it and look up at the blossom.  For the first couple of years the bench was bigger than the crown of the tree, but nowadays you can indeed sit under the canopy of flowers.  The story goes that 'Taihaku' was believed lost to cultivation in Japan, when in 1926 the great gardener Collingwood Ingram, an expert on cherries, nicknamed Cherry Ingram by his friends, recognised a rather tatty plant in a Sussex garden as the lost Great White Cherry, propagated it, and saved it for the world. Our plant is a descendent of that Sussex tree.  My late father-in-law planted a 'Taihaku' in the 1960s, when it was not so easily come by as it is now, so my partner has a sentimental attachment to our tree.

On a different subject entirely, I inspected the bees today.  I knew that all three colonies were alive because I'd had the roofs off, though not lifted the crown boards before today, to feed them when winter seemed to be dragging on for so long and I was worried they might starve.  March is an easy time to lose bees through starvation.  They were overwintered on mesh floors (for the benefit of non-beekeepers, the floor as you would expect is the bottom of the beehive, and was traditionally solid, made of wood.  In recent years beekeepers have been experimenting with floors made out of fine wire mesh, the idea being that any of the dreaded varroa mites that fall off the bees drop right through the bottom of the beehive before they can climb back on another bee).  I'd asked around other beekeepers about the merits of keeping the mesh right through the winter, and opinion seemed divided whether it would be too cold for them versus a solid floor that kept the icy winds out, or whether the additional ventilation would be a help to them by preventing condensation and damp conditions in the hive.  Apart from the period when I was using a vapour based varroa treatment I've had them on mesh, and they all survived the experience despite it being a very long, cold winter.

One of the colonies was a swarm that we didn't get until last July, and it was nip and tuck whether it was big enough to be worth over-wintering or whether to combine it with the colony I split from the big colony last spring.  I decided to chance it, partly because I was feeling lucky, partly because I had the spare hive and the swarm and the experiment didn't really cost anything, and partly because I liked the look of my existing stock and didn't want to mess them around.  So it was a bit of a result that the swarm made it through to this April.

My two original colonies were looking fine.  The big colony was beginning to fill the brood box and I gave them a super, given it is now good weather, there's  a nectar flow on from the garden flowers, and it's forecast to be fine for the next several days.  The colony I made from them were looking good too, though smaller.  Again for the benefit of non-beekeepers, what I wanted to know, apart from whether they had enough to eat, was whether the queen was laying eggs and the workers were busy making new bees, as they should be at this time of the year, and whether they'd started thinking about swarming yet, given it's now the second week of April.  In the back of my mind was the possibility of bee disease, but that wasn't the main aim of today's inspection.  Looking after bees is like looking after cats, in that you don't deliberately check your cat for illness and injury each time you stroke it, but part of your mind is registering whether its coat looks right and whether it has any tender spots that might indicate a new septic bite developing.

I left the swarm until last, because they'd been a bit lively when I was feeding them, and if they were going to get buzzy I didn't want them fussing round me while I looked at the other two hives.  They appeared to have gone queenless, as there were no eggs or brood.  That would explain the recent slight stroppiness.  I wondered whether to give them a week to see if they sorted themselves out, but decided to do what the books would advise, and gave them a frame with fresh eggs and brood on it out of the large colony.  I was very careful about shaking the bees off the frame before transferring it, as I would hate to transfer the queen by mistake and knacker the good colony in my efforts to remedy the bad.  In theory they should be able to make themselves a queen using one of the fresh eggs.  If they don't then they can have a queen cell (developing queen) once the big colony starts trying to swarm, as I expect it will.  I hear about non-swarmy strains of bees, but so far none have come my way.

dressed to impress (not)

I went in to work today.  I don't normally, on Thursdays, but trade is so busy that we're doing extra shifts to try and keep up.  After the dreadfully quiet winter we need to make the most of it while customers want to buy plants.  It will start tailing off soon, though, if we don't get some rain.  The Met Office have been saying it was the dryest March for 40 years, and now it is unseasonally hot.  One of our customers, who has a large garden and opens under the Yellow Book scheme, was saying that it was much too dry to plant, and that was ten days ago.  I was watering at home last night for over two hours, not just newly planted areas but established plants like the pulmonarias, which had begun to flag badly.  I try not to water unless essential, given our water is the most expensive in all England and we're on a meter, so when I'm reduced to watering the borders in the first week of April that shows it really is dry.

I have changed into my summer work clothes, as it's so hot.  This has thrown up a couple of problems, now that I'm not wearing my coat and uniform fleece.  I shoved my phone and radio into the pockets of the hideous water-repellent trousers instead, and discovered that under their weight the trousers had a marked tendency to fall down.  I don't think the pants showing above the trousers look is a good one in any circumstances, but especially not for middle aged people working in upmarket horticultural retailing.  I daresay I have a suitable belt somewhere.

The other problem is the uniform shirt.  We used not to have a uniform for years, which suited me fine.  I wore my old office shirts to work, since I wasn't going to wear them anywhere else, and they had long sleeves and collars to prevent sunburn, and were made of good quality cotton.  Clothes are an expression of personality, and I like expressing my personality, and wearing shirts that actually fit.  The uniform shirts and fleeces were introduced so that customers could identify members of staff from fellow customers, which makes perfect sense, though the kit we carry does give them a clue.  Most people don't go shopping carrying a telephone handset, radio and secateurs.  The uniform didn't extend to waterproof coats, so customers couldn't see it anyway if it was cold, or raining.  The problem with the uniform shirts, apart from the fact that they are shapeless and made out of polycotton, is that I only have two of them.  Two is not enough if you are working three days on the trot in warm weather, so I end up wearing my old office shirts anyway.  There is an additional problem with one of the shirts, in that a while back I wore it while cutting down irises for the winter.  Something in the iris sap reacted with the polycotton in the wash, and the shirt came out of the washing machine with brown spatters up the front and sleeves.  They have faded with time, but still look as though I had worn it to commit an axe murder.  In the winter it is hidden under other layers of clothing and doesn't really show, but it is now on full display.

My colleagues are about as disorganised with their uniforms as I am, so overall it is a half-hearted effort.

Addendum  I had to write this on my other computer, because my laptop refused to let me sign in to Blogspot on the grounds of inability to receive cookies.  It was fine up to yesterday.  The Systems Administrator has gone to London to catch up with old colleagues and eat curry, so I can't ask why the laptop's stance on cookies has suddenly changed.  I haven't missed a day posting yet, but if I do it will probably be down to technical failure, and any of my friends and relations reading Cardunculus on a real-time basis should not worry unduly (unlikely they are or would anyway).

cat on a two storey roof

When I started this blog it was my intention to write about my life and times in horticulture, with an occassional foray into art and travel (partly to cover the days when I hadn't done any horticulture).  But yesterday I saw a story in the East Anglian Daily Times so awful, funny and mind-bogglingly silly that I feel I must share it with you.  It was so ridiculous that I checked the date carefully, several times, to make sure it did say April 5th and not April 1st.  I think it must have been a genuine story, because the senior officials in the organisation concerned have apologised to the public in today's EADT.

A cat was seen on the roof of a two storey house, in Leiston.  Somebody called Suffolk fire brigade, and the fire brigade sent a turntable ladder from Bury St Edmunds, which is 60 miles from Leiston.  They also sent firefighter crews with specialist training in working at height from Felixstowe, 30 miles away, and Bungay, 20 miles away.  This was to comply with national 'working at height' regulations.  Then an on-call retained firefighter from the local crew at Leiston climbed a ladder and rescued the cat, as regulations permit firefighters to work temporarily from the top of a ladder.

In total more than 20 firefighters were dispatched, but that's not the best bit.  The part that made me undecided whether to laugh, lie on the floor crying hysterically, or just hit myself over the head with a shovel, was the justification offered by the chairman of the Suffolk branch of the Fire Brigades' Union.  This is what he said, according to the EADT.

Health and safety says that if we go up on to a roof, it brings into play our working at height procedures and safety system.
If a cat is stuck on a roof, there is a chance the owner could get distressed and try to rescue it themselves and we would end up having to rescue them as well.
It is crazy and it’s overkill and if we are having to send five teams to an incident like that, what happens if there is a serious incident elsewhere?
It strengthens our case that we need more people to make sure we have enough cover to cope with the demands of the service.

NO.  No, no, and thrice no.  No.  This incident does not mean that we 'need more people to make sure we have enough cover to cope with the demands of the service'.  It means that we need to interpret health and safety regulations in a sensible fashion.  It does not require three specialist crews to rescue a cat safely from the roof of a two storey house.  It requires a ladder and two sensible people, one to climb the ladder and one to hold on to the bottom of the ladder.  And maybe a bag to put the cat in.  If I were doing the risk assessment I'd say that the person who climbed the ladder shouldn't be afraid of cats.  And that's it.  No need to extrapolate from the actual position, that there is a cat, possibly stuck, on a roof, to the entirely hypothetical position that there is a distressed owner on the roof as well.  We cannot afford this sort of idiocy.

You can read the original story here and the management's subsequent red-faced apology here.  You will be glad to know that fire chiefs say that lessons have been learnt.  The cat was fine, by the way.  It ran off.

top class folk

We went last night to hear Spiers and Boden at the Colchester folk club, which meets in the Colchester Arts Centre.  I couldn't define a folk club, but using the elephant test that I know one when I see it, I don't think Colchester's is really a folk club, but a series of folk concerts put on between September and May with a couple of singers' nights thrown in.  As a club it has some serious deficiencies, but they get some very good guests.

Spiers and Boden are excellent.  They are an English folk duo, and they are on their tenth anniversary tour, so they must have started young as they don't look that old yet.  Jon Boden plays the fiddle and the guitar, and sings.  As an instrumentalist he doesn't have the showy, melliflous intricacy of a Martin Hayes (fiddle) or Martin Simpson (guitar) but he understands the rythmns of English folk and plays it with great energy and precision.  His voice is warm and fairly deep and without the nasal, sheeplike quality of some folk singers, and his diction is fantastic.  You can hear the words of songs you don't already know, a rare thing among folk singers, and difficult to achieve in the acoustics of the Colchester Arts Centre, which are rather muddy.  Also he is tall with large eyes and a neat brown beard and an engaging grin, which all help, if you are going to be a folk superstar.  John Spiers is shorter and rounder but with an equally radiant smile, and plays various squeeze boxes and sings backing vocals.  His harmonies on the melodeon and concertina are complicated and unusual enough to be interesting, without leaving me with the distressing feeling that I must have strayed into a jazz club.  As a duo they are great.  On stage they have an easy line in chat, and come across as being two thoroughly nice blokes, but in the music it is the contained energy and controlled timing that does it for me.  Folk music should be full of energy, which is not at all the same thing as playing it too loud and too fast.

I wish the folk club had the same perfect timing.  Seats are not bookable, and the doors open at 7.45pm, but then nothing else happens for half an hour, so having arrived in time to bag a good seat you are left to make desultory conversation to your companion, or sit alone if you don't have one.  The seats are stackable chairs, and while padded they are not that comfortable.  I'm guessing that sitting on a plastic seat drinking beer out of a plastic cup in a converted Victorian church wouldn't be top of most people's lists of really fun things to do on a Monday night.  At about 8.15pm there is sometimes a support act.  Unfortunately the local folk scene isn't especially good, and I have only rarely heard a support act at the Colchester folk club that was any good either.  Some of them are to be avoided at all costs.  Sometimes there isn't a support act at all, and you spend the first hour listening to recordings of upcoming acts.  At around 8.45pm the act you have come to hear is put on.  They do a first set, then there is an interval to buy more beer and CDs and go to the loo, then a second half.  It doesn't end much before 11.00pm, which is later than some people might choose for a Monday, with the rest of the working week ahead of them.  I was absolutely knackered by the time I got home, given I'd got up at 6.00am and already done a ten hour day at the plant centre, and I would much rather the musicians I had paid to see simply started at 8.00pm, and then with a decent interval we could still all be away by 10.00pm.  That would probably suit the performers better too, given that they are on gruelling tour schedules.  Enough folk musicians have died or been badly injured over the years in late night car accidents after gigs, when they were driving dog tired and trying to get home, or on to the next gig.

To reduce the amount of tedious hanging about we didn't arrive until 8.15pm.  There was a notice on the door saying that it was Sold Out, so it's just as well that after the Cara Dillon non-experience I had bought tickets.  The only seats left were right at the outside of the south nave, which left me with a sinking feeling that I was going to spend the evening looking at a pillar, but once seated I found the pillar was safely to my left and I could in fact see perfectly.

Spiers and Boden have won all sorts of folk awards, which are richly deserved.  They form two elevenths or thereabouts of folk supergroup Bellowhead, which I have not seen but aim to do so, if only once for the experience and because they are said to be so entertaining live.  Bellowhead on the radio and TV go a bit too far down the folk-jazz-klezmer-Latin American fusion path for my comfort.  Spiers and Boden play around with those influences in a subtle way, but no so much that they stray from the point.  They opened their second set with their version of 'Rolling down to Old Maui', which is one of the best arrangements of a traditional song I have ever heard.  They have slighly flattened out the tune into an odd minor key (if I knew any music theory it would help me understand what I'm listening to) and put a catch in the rhythmn.  I've spent many hours in small yachts, rolling up and down and across the Thames estuary and southern North Sea, with a light breeze but a big swell, and Spiers and Boden have captured that slow swoop and catch and creak perfectly.  I'm not surprised to read that Jon Boden studied compositon for theatre at The London College of Music.  (He also has a degree in Medieval Studies from Durham, and John Spiers read genetics at King's College, Cambridge, at least according to Wikipedia.  I always suspected that good musicians tended to be extremely bright).

You can find their website here.

the days are lengthening

Now that it's April, we finish work at 6.00pm, and will for the next three months.  That's a long working day.  The amount of hand watering is increasing, too.  Our main display beds for trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants have overhead irrigation systems, but there are many odd corners that have to be done by hand, including the display tables, the large specimen shrubs that won't fit on the shrub beds, the areas where we keep plants that have been reserved for people, and the deciduous Euonymous, which for some reason are martyrs to fungal diseases if they sit on mypex fabric and get even a tiny bit too wet.  The hoses are one inch diameter (I think.  Don't think they've gone metric yet), which is a smaller bore than the hoses we used to have when I first started there, but they are around 50m long, and heavy to pull around the plant centre when full of water.  We can't even lift them, but drag them section by section so that we aren't attempting to move the entire hose at once.  Our hand watering routine is not yet as slick as it will be in a few weeks' time, as it is easy over the winter to forget the best routes around the plant centre and the optimal order to do things in, and odd plants have been put down on corners where they turn out to get in the way, when you are trying to drag a large hose about.  All of this will be refined and improved with practice.  By the height of summer, in really hot spells, we can be hand watering from 8am until 10.0am or 10.30am, and then start again by 4.30pm and go on until 6.00pm.

We get a few customers who have worked out that although we don't open until 10.00am, the staff are there from 8.00am onwards.  They try to come early so that they can catch us 'when we are less busy'.  What they refuse to see is that we are busy, with the watering, and that we don't want them falling over the hoses while we do it.  The prospect of being caught by the automatic irrigation system puts some off, otherwise we have to be firm with them.

A couple of customers appeared in the plant centre at one minute to six.  I suppose that serves us right for not shutting the gate from the car park at 5.00pm when we closed.  They knew that we had closed an hour previously, but smiled at us with goofy nervous smiles and a hopeful air that as we were still there we might serve them.  I rather wish people wouldn't do that.  Although the plant centre staff are absolutely not on commission, we are commercial enough that we would rather have a sale than not.  Plus we are all moderately kind and polite people.  But it is a long day, and even shop staff have other stuff to do when they get home.  I explained (moderately politely) that we did shut at five and that I was going to cease being paid in one minute's time, and I would help them if they knew what they wanted.  It turned out they wanted a rose, which was fairly quick, but then they wanted a camellia as well.  The manager offered to stay to sort them out, which was noble of him.  Reader, if you insist on going into a small business an hour after they shut, remember that the staff may have already been there for ten hours and may be tired.  And if it is a hot day they may have another hour's watering to do in their own garden when they got home, or, as in my case this evening, be planning to go out.

other people's conversations

Walking back to my car after an afternoon concert in a local church, I passed a couple admiring some flowers in one of the front gardens, and asking each other what they were called.  Since neither seemed to know, I paused briefly and told them they were leucojums.  Then I worried that I shouldn't have butted in and apologised that I couldn't help overhearing, but they thanked me and seemed genuinely pleased to know.

It reminded me of a time a while back when I was shopping in the branch of Tesco in Colchester nearest to the university.  A couple of young men of east Asian appearance were debating something, and just as I walked behind them one demanded of the other 'who wrote The Art of War'?  Into the silence that followed I murmered 'Sun Tzu'.  Without turning, the speaker answered his own question 'Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War', and the debate continued.  I wandered on by.  I still don't know if he even registered that a passing stranger had spoken to tell him the anwer, or if he thought it had popped up out of his own memory.

I should be careful.  One of these days I will get told off for interfering.

more April flowers

The buds on the wild gean are just opening.  This is a big, multi-stem tree that sits at the point where the garden meets the wood.  It was here when we moved in, and I'm pretty sure it was put there by the birds and not our predecessors, who were not keen gardeners.  Prunus avium can be a weed tree in woodland gardens, and I recall being shown around such a one in Suffolk by an owner who regarded wild cherries with the lack of enthusiasm generally reserved for sycamore seedlings.  But it is a fine thing in the right place.  When in full bloom its beauty will indeed "shine out like a beacon of snow" for a few days.  The pigeons have a go at the flowers but it is too large to be unduly troubled by them.  Lucky we don't have bullfinches.

Little bulbs are still putting on a fine display.  In the gravel, following on from the dwarf iris, there are brilliant blue Scilla siberica, and softer blue Chionodoxa and Puschkinia.  Two-tone Muscari latifolium grows there, its flowers brighter blue at the top of the stem and dark blue on the lower half.  The white flowered Muscari botryoides album also does well and spreads obligingly.  I have a few plants of Anemone pavonina, bought at the Chatto gardens after admiring them in the gravel garden.  These come in rich but soft shades of pink and cream, with flowers of a similar size to A. coronaria.  They seem reasonably perennial, but my attempt to increase my stock by saving and sowing seed failed, as the seed went mouldy.  Maybe they will do the job for me in situ.

In the long bed along the edge of the drive I have a lot of hyacinths.  I have never bought a hyacinth on purpose to plant in the garden, but after using them in pots, even indoors, I always plant them out.  They last for years.  This is not unusual: Christopher Lloyd wrote of one clump in his garden that he knew was decades old, because the plants had originally been given to his brother when he had appendicitis.  I like to ring the changes in pots from one year to the next, so we have dark and pale blue, yellow, white, and an exciting shade of purple from the variety 'Woodstock'.  This looks especially good in the late afternoon, with low sun and the light quality that comes with the threat of heavy rain somewhere, when the purple almost appears to fluoresce (Verbena bonariensis will do the same thing in that kind of light).  One of my tasks for this afternoon will be to replant a potful of Centaurea, originally planted last autumn, which I noticed had been pushed half out of the ground by a determined emerging hyacinth snout.  Despite their exotic appearance, hyacinths are attractive to foraging bees.  My hyacinth pots this year have almost failed though, for the first time in 25 years.  They were stood outside, due to lack of space in the greenhouse, and only about three bulbs out of 20 have come through.  The bulbs looked fine and healthy when planted, so I presume it was too cold for them.

In the back garden I have some of the dwarf tulips, I think 'Ancilla' and 'Heart's Delight'.  They are cheerful little plants that persist well in the border, though sadly mine are blooming through a ground cover layer of sheeps' sorrel, as I haven't managed to get to that bed yet, as I work my way round the ravages of winter.

The only trouble with dwarf bulbs and an enthusiasm for self seeding is that hand weeding rather than hoeing is generally required.  I like spending time with the plants, and am resigned to the fact that the garden tends to be rather weedy.  Since I have no plans to open to the public I needn't worry unduly about other people's notions of how a garden should look.  But if you like things to be tidy then extensive bulb plantings anywhere other than in pots or naturalised in long grass probably aren't for you.

Addendum  The irrigation is running in the lettuce field, sending up sprays of water between the rows like a finer version of the fountain in the courtyard at Somerset House, and the fleece is shining in the sun as brightly as the sea.  If I were a keen (or even competent) photographer I ought to keep a photo diary of the lettuce farm throughout the year.  It could easily fill up a room or two at Tate Modern.  Unfortunately I am not a good photographer, finding that walking around trying to capture things in a camera prevents me from looking at them.  But somebody should do it.

some April flowers

It being the first of the month, I took a turn around the garden to see what was flowering.  By now there are too many to talk about them all in one blog post without it ending up a mere list of names.  In the back garden (an entirely arbitrary choice, it could just as easily been the front) there are quite a few shrubs out, and bulbs and herbaceous woodlanders.  Plants originating from the floors of deciduous woodland tend to flower early in the year, then go dormant in the summer as the leaf canopy closes over them.

Down at ground level there are various primulas and assorted violets.  I was pleased to see a double primrose in a pleasant faded shade of pink still with me.  I think it is 'Dawn Ansell' but it might be an un-named hybrid bought because I liked the colour.  Double primroses tend not to be long lived, and the books talk about dividing and replanting, but I seldom seem to organise myself to find the time.  Three plants of P. vulgaris subsp. sibthorpii, a pink form originating from the Balkans and South East Asia are also looking well.  There are some cowslips blooming in the lawn, mostly raised from seed, though not a great display.  Maybe this is yet to come in a few days, or maybe the past month has been too dry for their liking.  A hybrid cowslip with red centres to its petals, growing in one of the borders, has made an enormous clump.  I don't know if that is the effect of hybrid vigour or of not having to compete with the grass.  The Primula denticulata in the same border look sadly puny, and I'm sure it has been too dry for them, though I wonder if the white one has seeded itself.  These were evicted from a pot where they weren't happy, and I can't remember how many I planted.

The violets are a real hotch-potch.  I have planted a lot of Viola odorata over the years, some of which were named forms, and they have since seeded themselves, so I don't know what most of them are, but they are very pretty.  The little purple leaved V. labradorica purpurea is seeding madly as well, but I don't mind that.  In a large country garden it is useful ground cover.  The violets and primroses are self-sowing into a mossy corner of the lawn shaded by birch trees, which I like in a Primavera, Allegory of Spring way.  I am not a lawn enthusiast.

Also down at ground level, Omphalodes verna is running about happily, forming a dense mat of foliage at this time of year with little blue flowers above it.  The blue form is much more vigorous with me than the white. O. cappadocica 'Starry Eyes' has two-tone flowers that are attractive, but doesn't cover the ground so enthusiastically as O. verna.  Some little treasures have reappeared, such as my Anemonella thalictoides, bought from Beth Chatto, which has anemone-like pink flowers and foliage resembling a very low growing Thalictrum, but it has to be admitted that the best overall garden effect comes from the plants which have spread so that there are lots, or else I could afford to plant lots in the first place.  I think there is more Corydalis solida around now than I remember originally planting, and its soft pink flowers and divided grey leaves look very nice creeping up through other things.

There are not so many Anemone blanda as there were.  Maybe they are not long lived, or the site is not quite to their liking, or maybe they were eaten by whatever ate most of the crocus corms out of the border.  I stick to blue, when I have any, which I prefer to the pink.  However, A. sylvestris are starting to run around to form a goodly patch.  Their flowers are a pure and brilliant shade of white.  A. blanda grow from little nobbly black corms, which one is advised to soak before planting, while A. sylvestris grows from black bootlace-like roots, which run when happy.  Some Erythronium dens-canis are flowering, pink above mottled leaves, and the more vigorous yellow flowered E. 'Pagoda' are getting to the end of their season.  'Pagoda' splits well, once it has made a large clump.  I discovered this when I accidentally dug up a dormant lump of it.  There are some Fritillaria meleagris blooming in the middle of the lower lawn, along with the cowslips, but not many.  Again, it is early for them, but it may have been too dry.

Wandering up the hill, the two flowering currants, one red and one white, are looking good.  I don't know the name of the red one, which was a present.  The white one is 'White Icicle' and has not made as large a plant so far, but has not been in the ground for as long.  They tolerate a fair amount of shade from the hedge behind them once it comes fully into leaf a little later in the season, plus root competition, and the flowers provide good forage for the bees early in the season.  And I think they are pretty, quite apart from the fact that they are long-suffering and useful.

Anyway, that's enough flowers for one evening.

three exhibitions

I have visited three exhibitions today, and my brain is rather full.  That's the trouble with occassional cultural trips to London: I feel the need to cram in as much culture as possible, what with the cost of train tickets, and finding the time to take a day off from everything else to go to London at all.

First of all I saw Jan Gossaert's Renaissance at the National Gallery.  It is very good, and it is on until 30th May, so plenty of time left for others to go and see it.  There are a fair few religious works, as you would expect of a Flemish artist working in the first part of the sixteenth century, an entire room full of portraits, and some frankly sexy ('erotic' is the word favoured by curators) versions of Adam and Eve and Mary Magdalen.  As well as paintings and drawings by Gossaert, there are works by some of his contemporaries, including a couple of lovely Durer woodcuts.  I went to this one with a friend, who bought the tickets, so I was relieved that they seemed to broadly enjoy it too, once we got past the initial rash of Virgin and Childs.  It is a heavy responsibility inciting other people into art galleries.  As a 21st century person of No Religion I tried to imagine what you would feel looking at a portrait of the Virgin and Child, if you were a devout Catholic in the sixteenth century, but failed.

In the afternoon I went to the National Portrait Gallery and looked at a couple of photographic exhibitions.  There is a risk doing this of ending up completely confused about who took which pictures, but in this case they are not that similar.  The big show (timed entry tickets, eleven quid) is of Hoppe portraits.  I'd never heard of Hoppe (sorry, there should be an accent over that final e but I can't work out how to insert it), not being all that well up on the history of photography, but it reviewed well in the papers.  It's great.  Again on until 30 May.  These pictures were mostly taken in the 1920s and 30s.  Some of the subjects I know of and admire, including poet Edward Thomas (looking tense), John Masefield (The Midnight Folk, The Box of Delights and The Bird of Dawning still count among my favourites) looking unexpectedly young and romantic, and Vita Sackville-West (in literary rather than gardening mode).  There is a marvellous picture of Thomas Hardy as quite an old man.  He was notoriously camera shy and Hoppe had almost despaired of getting the shot when Hardy suddenly settled.  He looks composed but wistful, and I was reminded of his rueful poetry about his first wife (marriage not a success.  I rate Hardy as a poet hugely more than as a novelist).  Some of the portraits are of people I hadn't heard of, so while I imagined them and their lives I may have been wildly off the mark.  Then there are some quirky scenes from life: a cupboard of skeletons at a shop that used to sell them to artists and medical students (female skeletons were rarer and cost more), an elaborately quoiffed and made-up woman working making wax heads for Madame Tussauds, three bell-ringers (one gloriously podgy) captured in mid-ring at St Olaves in Hart St. before the war.  It is really, really good.  Some of the pictures are original silver and whatsit prints, and are soft and wonderful as objects in themselves.

Then I whizzed around Ida Kar, an Armenian photographic artist who moved to Britain after WWII.  This exhibition is mostly of works from the 1950s and 1960s, so later than Hoppe, though I think they both include shots of Jacob Epstein.  Ida Kar must be less prestigous than Hoppe in that tickets are untimed and only three quid, though she did have a blockbusting exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery back in 1960.  You can get a combined ticket, as I did, in which case you don't have to go to Kar on the same day if you've run out of time or energy.  Kar's portraits mostly show their subject in their own home, or studio, or at least staged with a pile of props related to their career, whereas Hoppe mostly eschewed props, apart from the odd costume.  It is good show, and bigger than I had expected, and I'm slightly regretful that I ended up looking at it against the clock (last cheap day return home from Liverpool Street before the commuter period is at 4.15pm.  Miss that and you're left hanging around London until quarter to seven), and with a brain already stuffed with images.  It's on until June 19th, and if I do have a spare afternoon in town I'd like to go again.

beware the bouncing bunnies

The trail camera has provided some reassurance that my efforts repairing the wire around the back garden have reduced the inflow of plant-eating wildlife.  Over the six nights to yesterday evening it recorded cats and assorted birds, but no rabbits or muntjac.  We'll keep monitoring the nocturnal visitors periodically, but in the meantime I might risk planting out the pots of small bulbs that are supposed to be going out there.

It obviously pays to have patience and leave the camera in the same place for several nights, to build up a picture of what exactly is going on.  We had it trained up the side of the wood, where I knew rabbits were coming in to the meadow from their droppings.  Having repaired all the holes in the fence I could see this was a bit of a puzzle.  For several nights all we got was random photos of rabbits hopping about, but finally we got action footage of one getting in. You can see how it did it here.

Reader, it jumped.  I have measured that fence, and it is fully 60cm high.  I am working my way round the boundary adding a second strand of wire between the tops of the fence posts, and filling in with coarse gauge galvanised netting.  Anyone with a country garden, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

about the comments

The Systems Administrator has been pressed into service to help test the comments funtion, so I now know it does work using Firefox, and from somebody else's computer as well as mine.  If you click on comments a box comes up in which to post the comment.  You need to choose an option for the identity under which you are going to comment.  I have no idea what LiveJournal, WordPress or TypePad are, or how to make them go away, but if you go for name/URL you can put any name you like in the name box, and your comment will come up under that name.  A URL is a web address, which you'll only have if you've got a website or blog, but you can leave it out.  I don't get to see your e-mail address, though I do get an e-mail from Blogspot alerting me to the fact that a comment's been posted.  If I don't like it I can delete it!

Comments only work for posts made since I changed the comments settings.  Sorry about that.

a tale of two vegetables

I spent the morning planting asparagus crowns.  After making some price comparisons a while back I ordered these from Mr Fothergill, and was expecting them to be despatched in April, so was taken aback when they arrived last Friday, just before my long weekend working at the plant centre.  The instructions said that if you couldn't plant them immediately they should be removed from their packaging (a plastic bag.  They would get rather sweaty) but not allowed to dry out.  I wrapped them in damp newpaper and put them in a bucket in the study, as we're not lighting a fire in there at the moment and it's cool.  I tipped some extra water into the roll of newspaper over the weekend, and they looked fine this morning.  I think asparagus roots are quite tenacious of life, based on the fact that our existing plants are doing well now, despite having been accidentally dug up in their youth.

The current asparagus bed is my second attempt at growing it.  The first time was not a success.  The books said that asparagus required good drainage and normal soil, so I added a bit of fertiliser to the bed and planted a pack of crowns.  This was a long time ago, and I'd not yet grasped quite how far short of 'normal' the soil in the top part of the garden is.  The asparagus made straw-thin spears and struggled miserably.  I decided to bite the bullet and start again, in a different bed, with masses of added home-made compost.  I bought some pot grown plants from work, thinking I'd gain a bit of time that way, plus they were going cheap.  A while later my other half, on giving up full-time commuting, proclaimed a desire to grow vegatables.  I thought this was a splendid idea, since I like eating vegetables and much prefer growing ornamentals.  One day I wandered out to the veg patch, and the asparagus seemed to have disappeared.  I enquired what had happened to it. 'Oh, was that asparagus?  I thought it was the roots of beans or something and dug it up'.  I retrieved the (slightly dessicated) rootballs from the compost heap and found a couple that had rolled under a hedge, and replanted them.  Three years on the emerging spears equal the thickness of at least the second-best grade of locally grown asparagus at the farm shop, and I think we might cut some this season.  At last.  I'm only buying more plants to fill up that bed, instead of using part of it for something else, so that we can have more asparagus.  A surfeit, after years of famine.

Lettuce production in the next-door field is going at full clatter.  They planted up most of it last week, and the last bit today.  The young lettuce plants come in trays.  From the one commercial horticulture module I did at Writtle I'm sure that these are bought in from a specialist grower, and that our friendly neighbouring lettuce farmer doesn't sow them himself.  The trays are stacked on the back of a trailer towed behind a tractor, and two girls slide the lettuces onto a chute, and a mechanism at the bottom somehow plants each one the right way up and firms it in.  I'd really like to see that close up as I can't imagine how it works.  The lettuce farm did hold an open day a few years ago, but we were on holiday at the time.  Two young men walk behind the trailer and sort out any lettuces that the machine has not planted properly.  The crop at this time of the year is immediately covered in fleece, which comes folded, on a large roll about 1.5m wide, that two people can carry between them.  Once unrolled it is unfolded, and is about 10m wide.  The farm workers get the edges straight and hold the fleece down with spadefuls of earth at intervals, then a small tractor with a plough blade drives round the edge of the fleece, turning soil onto it to secure it.  It must be tricky getting the fleece spread out on windy days.

about the comments

I think I have finally worked out how to enable comments.  Sorry it took 90 days to get there, and thanks to both the people whom I know have tried to leave comments.  They will know that I am better with plants and animals than technology.  Anyway, I ticked one box instead of another deep in the bowels of my Blogspot control settings, and it seems to work now.  You can put any name you like in the name box, or go with anonymous.  If you want a URL you will have to set up a blog of your own!

peacocks and flowers

The peacock at work has been displaying his tail.  It is extraordinarily exotic.  Behind the big ornamental Arts Nouveau style feathers he has a shorter fan of stiff feathers, which he rattles.  The hen appears totally unmoved, and goes on eating grass, and I am reminded of the Punch cartoon of a small peahen standing in front of a male with an absolutely huge fan tail, and the caption 'What do you mean, no?'.  The young peacock that hatched last year has been raising his little tail as well, though he doesn't have anything like the full array yet.

The fancy chicken with the ultra large comb, that flops over one eye (I should have thought it would drive her mad) keeps coming into the back of the shop, now that it's getting warmer and we leave the doors open.  Fortunately most of the customers seem to think that this is quaint and charming.  The doors are automatic, but the sensor inside the shop is getting a bit weak, and sometimes it doesn't detect that you are approaching and you have to do a few steps like a square dance to trigger the doors, so leaving them open is easier in some ways.  The sensor outside the shop broke ages ago, and it was quite handy being able to stop customers from wandering in by the back door.  Those in the know are aware that to get in you have to turn a key in the door frame.

We do our own version of the peacock's tail, with arrangements of those plants that are looking especially floriferous or desirable on tables around the plant centre.  They help make the place look nice, and they are shamelessly intended to induce people to spend money on impulse purchases.  Sorry, that's what shops do.  I got to re-do some of the display tables today, which I always enjoy as it gives me a chance to play with all the prettiest plants, and makes a change from picking dead leaves off the Leycesteria.  I try to use things that could be grown together in the garden, partly to give customers some genuinely helpful ideas, and partly because I find the alternative looks so jarringly odd.  The design principles of unity and repetition help, so not too many different varieties on one table, and I aim to find things that look well together in terms of habit, and leaf size and texture, as well as colour.  Today I paired up a variegated Photinia with peachy brown and red young leaves with a Heuchera in just the same shade of russet.  I didn't actually like either plant particularly, but it was a good colour match.  Somebody will buy them.

I got home to find the chickens ranging freely.  Their chaperone, swaddled in layers of fleece and a hat, announced that they were starting to flock together much better.  Then the rooster fell in the pond.  In fairness to him, maybe he didn't know he couldn't walk on the duckweed, but he does now.  He breast-stroked across the width of the pond, shrieking horribly, and I plucked him out, but I think he is traumatised.

it's census day

So whose brilliant idea was it to hold the census on the day after the clocks change?  I got up at five in the morning, body clock time, to go to work, and now I am supposed to fill in this vast form.  Or rather, the householder is supposed to do so.  I'm not sure which of us that is.  It seems a rather archaic concept.  We own the property jointly, and most of our bills are paid by direct debit.  Maybe it should be the one who contributes more in cash terms towards paying household bills and expenses?  Or maybe the one who contributes more to domestic organisation?  The honours there seem evenly split.  I am responsible for arranging the cats' medical appointments, finding someone to look after the menagerie when we go away, booking builders and decorators, and the Christmas card list.  Problems with telecoms, and anything to do with the central heating, fuel oil, the TV and Sky box, or drains are strictly not my department.  We have another five weeks to argue about it before the enforcers come knocking at the door.

It's going to be difficult matching the details of our house to the options given in the questions about accommodation.  The living area is split level and open plan, so I'm not sure if the downstairs bit counts as part of the same room, a different room, or part of the hall (in which case it doesn't count).  If we were trying to sell the house the estate agent would call it two rooms, so we'd better go with that.  The number of rooms built or converted for use as bedrooms is baffling.  How do you know that a room was built as a bedroom?  My mother's house has a ground-floor room that was allegedly built as a dining room, but since it won't hold a table, six chairs and six people it gets used as a study.  Is somebody who needs a home office and buys a property with sufficient rooms to accommodate one supposed to impute intentions to the original builder?  My partner says bedrooms are upstairs, but what about bungalows and flats?  Our previous house was also split level, and two of the bedrooms there were downstairs.  I don't understand why they want to know the number of bedrooms anyway, unless somebody is contemplating a George Monbiot billeting system (Our records show that you have bedrooms surplus to your household's requirements.  Here is your new lodger).  Asking about the floor area would make much more sense, except that we don't use that in the UK, unlike the Continent, and most people wouldn't know how to work it out.  The local authority already knows roughly how big the properties in the district are, because they have been banded for council tax.

I'm not sure what to put for the central heating.  We have a two log burning stoves and an open fireplace, so wood is a significant part of our heating mix.  But apart from the warm air that rises by convection from the sitting room to the upstairs corridor, none of them heat multiple rooms, so according to the form they don't count as central heating.  But if we had a stove with doors on both sides, mounted in a chimney between two rooms, like my brother-in-law has, then I suppose that would count as central heating.  Or if we had a wood-chip boiler.  But in the country many more people rely largely on stoves and fireplaces than have wood-chip boilers.

The DVLA already knows the number of cars or vans registered at this address.  I suppose the number of vehicles not owned by us but available for our use might be of some use, but I'm not sure exactly what.  Some people can't drive, choose not to drive, or live in the centre of a city with good public transport and dire parking.  Living round here if you don't have a vehicle you would be struggling badly.  Counting vehicles without knowing the context doesn't seem to get you very far.

Individual question 2 seems likely to upset some people, as it asks What is your sex [tick box] male [tick box] female.  I wonder if the Office for National Statistics ran that one past the gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual community?

I don't see why my religion is any business of the State, though question 20 is voluntary.  The options don't seem very nuanced.  I am the child of a lapsed Anglican and a devout atheist, was baptised but not confirmed, attended a convent school at one time, am not a practicing member of any religion but do think about it.  My religion should probably be described as Protestant agnostic.  If I tick No religion I might be lumped in with the aggressive shouty atheists like Richard Dawkins, or the droning Humanists that go on about the iniquity of Thought for the Day, and I wouldn't like that.  I could put Jedi, but I think that joke might be so ten years ago, and I'm not a great Star Wars fan.  If it's worrying being aggregated with other forms of non-believer then goodness knows how different forms of believer feel about it (Catholic or Protestant?  Sunni or Shia?  Hey, whose counting?).

I suppose my job title is Plant Centre Assistant, though we don't go in for job titles much.  As to briefly describing what I do, Sell plants should cover it.  I don't see why the census needs to know the name and address of my employer, though.  The tax man already does.  I thought the census was supposed to be used at an aggregate level for planning services and infrastructure.  Asking how far from my home my work is might be quite useful, but they don't ask that.

I hope it's the last one.

Addendum  The householder turns out to be the person who volunteered to fill out the form on-line, partly to see if it worked (not me).  I have decided my National identity is English, because of the Midlothian question.  The householder forgot to include their A levels, so how they got into university is a mystery.

what a difference a day makes

All day the customers and my co-workers alike muttered to each other, as we passed in the aisles or met at the till, how cold it was, and how unlike yesterday.  I realised that my decision to swop my hideous fleece winter trousers for my equally unprepossessing  water repellent cotton summer trousers had been premature.

The boss announced that we were not going to replace any more plants that had clearly been killed by the cold weather.  I said that we ought to get on and modify our labels to say which plants were not reliably winter hardy, but he has obstinately taken against this idea, and says that there is no room on the labels for any more information, and that we ought to be giving out that sort of advice at the till.  This is not going to work, because when there is a queue of people with full trollies waiting to pay we can't start discussing the cultural needs of each plant.  There wouldn't be time.  Getting the right amount of money through the right till category is as far as it goes.  In my experience, trying to chat to customers about their plants while operating the till is a recipe for till errors.

It's a nice question, though.  If a customer buys a plant without prior knowledge of what it needs and in what circumstances it might succeed or fail, is it their duty to find out, or our duty to check whether they know and if not tell them?  Obviously if people ask for advice we do our best to help, but many don't ask.  The business model relies on a lot of customers not asking, otherwise prices would have to be significantly higher to pay for the extra staff.  The labels give a fair amount of information, but it has to admitted sometimes in terms that mean more to the experienced gardener than the novice.  The former can decode 'requires a sunny, sheltered position' as 'not all that hardy, could die in a cold winter' but the latter doesn't necessarily.  I had somebody return a couple of variegated Ugni molinae 'Flambeau' a while back, that had not even been planted in the ground but left in their 2 litre pots balanced on top of a pair of ornamental chimney pots.  The customer protested that her garden was sheltered.  However sheltered the site, Ugni are not hardy down to -12C or lower.  If you have never heard of an Ugni, maybe you should ask somebody about it or look it up before buying a couple because they look so pretty.  It's a tricky one.