a time of gifts

The cold turn the weather has taken is bad for trade.  In fact, it is a thorough all-round nuisance, since I have loads to do in the garden for the rest of the week, and need to check the bees for swarming, only it is not warm enough to open the hives.  Today in the plant centre I wore my fleece hat for the first part of the morning, and by mid afternoon was back in the NCP car park attendant's coat.  The wind blew incessantly, drying out the pots so that my co-workers will have a lot of watering to do tomorrow.  It is windy now, a bottom-end six in the gusts round the showers.

Somebody rang wanting to send a magnolia in lieu of funeral flowers.  Once I'd understood that she wanted a plant delivered locally, rather than sent by mail order, the conversation became much less incoherent, and I managed to find a specimen of the variety she'd chosen.  She wanted a card to go with the magnolia.  I suggested a photograph of a fritillary, whose nodding head and muted colours seemed suitably restrained but also beautiful.  She e-mailed us the message to go in the card, and I copied it out in my best handwriting, and explained to the gardener who will deliver it the importance of making sure it got there before Thursday.  As he is a quietly competent and kindly man, and lost his own father-in-law quite recently, I'm sure the delivery will be fine.

Another customer rang about a white Cercis siliquastrum the gardener delivered this morning, wanting to know who had sent it.  I had another incoherent conversation, before grasping that he hadn't bought it himself, and wanted to know who had given it to him.  I found the delivery book, but all it said was that it had been paid for by a third party.  I explained to him that unfortunately our records didn't say who had bought it, and that he must have a mystery benefactor.  He laughed, but went away puzzled.

A woman rang from Durham, who had fallen in love with Amelanchier, after seeing two growing on a slag heap.  She didn't know how they had got there.  I suggested that as the fruit were attractive to birds the seeds might have arrived that way.  She wanted to buy herself a small plant, and wavered over the different varieties described in the RHS magazine before settling on Amelanchier x grandiflora 'Ballerina'.  She told me that she had been given some money, and so didn't mind the delivery charge, but thought this was a wonderful way of spending an unexpected gift.  The whole transaction took rather a long time, and I suspected that she wanted somebody to talk to.  People who ring up the plant centre quite often do.

I have a slight cold.  I've had intimations that a cold was lurking around for days, so am glad it held off until after the funeral, supper, and the anniversary party.  The Systems Administrator had already got what sounds like the same cold, which is vaguely encouraging in that it remains slight, an ache and a snuffle.  We will just have to sniff our way through tomorrow evening's Ayckbourn at the Colchester Mercury Theatre.

old friends

We went today to a party to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of one of my school friends. She and I must have known each other for forty years, which is a solemn thought, and apart from her mother and brother I may have known her for longer than anybody else there today, though we don't see each other very often.  She lives in Bromley, which is not somewhere you can pop round for supper starting from north Essex, and manages to combine having three children with being a partner in a City law firm.  That doesn't leave a lot of spare capacity over for other things, especially given that her mother still lives in Devon.

We took the train.  My initial reaction, when the Systems Administrator said that we could go on the train, was one of complete surprise.  I am so used to there being engineering works at weekends on our line, and replacement buses for a stretch between Witham and Chelmsford or some such inconvenience, that the idea that trains worked at weekends and that you could use them to visit people did not occur to me.  The trains ran more or less to time going there and coming back, though as we de-trained at Liverpool Street I did hear an announcement that the next service to Stansted was cancelled, with apologies for the inconvenience caused.  No replacement buses for the Stansted bound passengers.  They'll just have to miss their flights.

I did wonder, as I groped in the back compartment of my handbag for my one day travelcard for the umpteenth time and then struggled to put it away again one handed, why it was that I had opted to take a white peony and a box of eggs as hostess presents, instead of buying a bottle of fizz or a decent burgundy and making life easy for myself.  Still, there were lots of bags containing bottles in their hall, while nobody else had brought plants and eggs that I could see.  A peony is a good present for people who are not mad keen gardeners, as long as they have a reasonable sized garden. Provided it is planted at the correct depth, which is the same depth it's already at in its pot, it needs nothing else doing to it, ever, except to cut off the dead leaves at some point in the winter, and it will live longer than the recipient.

The forecast rain held off, and it was sunny enough for us to stand out in the garden with our pre-lunch drinks and nibbles.  It was even sunny enough for me to need my sun hat, which I'd taken just in case, a retro style vaguely 1930s ruched number in white cotton, and warm enough for me not to be cold despite the fact that I'd forgotten my cardigan.  I had a raincoat, but standing around eating sausages on sticks wearing a coat rather spoils the atmosphere.

Big set piece parties are like weddings and funerals, bringing together people from different stages and aspects of their hosts' lives.  At work based events most people more or less know each other, and you can exchange politenesses with members of other departments before gravitating towards your particular mates.  At beekeepers gatherings there are easy, if formulaic, questions to get a conversation going.  Do you have  bees?  How many hives?  Where do you keep them?  Are you finding swarming really bad this year?  Following which you can gravitate towards your particular mates.  For weddings, and anniversary parties, I suppose the nearest equivalent is enquiring which of the couple other people know, and how, plus how far they've travelled, but you don't necessarily have any particular mates to gravitate towards, so you have to hope you'll strike lucky.

Fortunately we did, with a former housemate of my friend whom I recognised vaguely from our Oxford days, and her husband, who turned out to be kindred spirits.  Keen gardeners, large garden, cats, liked poetry, arty people with a practical streak.  It's a pity they live near Dorking.

So it was a very nice day, and we even managed to spend some time talking to our hosts, which doesn't always happen at parties, and I discovered how you combine being a partner specialising in intellectual property with having three children, which is that you have a formidably efficient nanny. The nanny was very nice, unmarried herself and with no children, and probably the nearest thing to Mary Poppins you will find in Bromley.  I tell myself encouragingly that as my school friend and I have managed to stay in touch for this long, if we can keep it up for another ten or fifteen years she will have retired, and we'll have time to have lunch and go to an art gallery.

last of the daffodils

It is just starting to spit with rain, so I have come inside for a cup of tea, while it decides whether it is going to rain properly or stop.  The Systems Administrator's view is that the cloud is so high and fast moving that we won't get much in the way of rain just yet.  In fact the ground could do with a proper soaking, since the top few centimetres of soil is starting to get quite dry, but I'd much rather (not that my preferences will have any bearing on what actually happens) that it did that at night.

I have been planting out more of the daffodils, carefully potted up last September.  It is late and slightly mad to be doing it, since they have almost finished flowering and I have missed getting the benefit of them in situ for this year.  However, I haven't had time to finish the job before now, and there are advantages to planting them as they start to fade.  I can see what else is flowering around them, and avoid colour clashes like the orange and yellow 'Jetfire' with the pink and purple Pulsatilla, and I can see how tall other foliage has grown by this stage, and how much leaf deciduous shrubs are carrying, to make sure I don't plant the daffodils in a spot where they are going to be concealed and invisible by the time they flower.

'Pipit' is lovely, with strongly scented pale yellow flowers, the trumpet almost white, held in clusters of two or three blooms on one stalk.  'Cheerfulness' is a white double with a muddled yellow centre, also scented, though I don't find the fragrance as free on the air as 'Pipit'.  I am dropping them into the island bed, between the clumps of asters.  I suppose there is a risk that the aster foliage will grow too tall and shading before the daffodils have finished dying down, and that the bulbs will not be able to store sufficient energy for next year, but the way to find out is to try.  You often see daffodils planted in borders among herbaceous plants and shrubs, and they seem to last from year to year.

I planted out the pale yellow tulips 'Concerto' from their terracotta pots as well, breaking them down into groups of three bulbs.  The bulbs look hugely fat and healthy, and I'm hopeful of flowers next year.

In the sloping bed the Exochorda x macrantha 'The Bride' is breaking into bloom.  It has white flowers (what other colour could they be?) and is well named, with a pendulous, mounding habit that means the ends of the branches seem to trail along the ground like a train.  By a lucky chance it is planted at the feet of a double gean, Prunus avium 'Plenum', which flowers at the same time, so that from a distance you see a cascade of white running from the top of the tree to the ground.  If you should plant Exochorda x macrantha then watch its neighbours carefully, and curb any that crowd in upon it, since if any of the Exochorda's branches are shaded out they will die.  Many roses behave in the same way.

There is lots of basal foliage on the tall growing, slightly tender Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue', and it is starting to run about with new isolated shoots some fifteen centimetres from the central mass of shoots where I planted the original potful.  I take this as a sign that it is happy.

Anyway, it seems not to be raining, so I shall go back to it, though the sky has gone very grey, and the wind is howling dismally in through the garage door, the gusts banging the cat flap open.  The forecast for the end of next week is starting to deteriorate, to the dismay of the Systems Administrator who has tickets for the second day of the test match.  Tomorrow we are going to a lunchtime party to celebrate an old school friend's silver wedding anniversary, and on Monday I have to go to work, so I'd better make the most of it while it's not raining, even if it is grey and blowing half a gale.

three cricket matches, a flower show and a funeral

The Systems Administrator was comparing notes with a friend, as they made arrangements to go to the cricket, and the contents of the SA's diary were three test matches, the Chelsea Flower Show, and a funeral.  Today is the funeral.  I don't suppose I'll feel like doing a write-up of what is anyway a private affair when I get back, so I will tell you about my father's cousin's late wife now, to help fill the odd couple of hours until it is time to go out.

She was called Ann, and she was ninety, so had a good innings.  She went as I should like to go, fully active until hospitalised with a bout of pneumonia, and that was it.  Only twenty four hours in hospital.  Musician and individual.  Wife of Derek.

Ann studied at music college, where she was so poor she became malnourished, and contracted TB, which she survived.  As a young woman she made her way out to Africa.  She met my father's cousin, and they ended up running an outward bound school in (I think) Rhodesia.  Unusually for the time, it was fully mixed race.  We've seen photos, and it developed into quite a large operation, but in the early days it didn't run to a bathroom, so Ann took her baths in a pool under a waterfall, while the (almost entirely male) staff discreetly absented themselves.  One of the photos was of her sunbathing (decorously in a bikini) on a rock by the waterfall, and in her day she was a stunner.

Back in England she taught the piano, and when they moved to Aldeburgh she persuaded the authorities at Snape to let her play in their practice rooms sometimes.  That's pretty good going for an octogenarian, getting access to a concert grand in one of England's premier music venues. Kindly, sociable, a fount of stories about her own life, interested in other people's, deaf as a post, discreetly silent on whatever other ills of old age affected her.  The SA always said she was as mad as a box of frogs, which was intended as a compliment.

I remember two stories in particular.  As a young woman she went on holiday to Scandinavia with a group of friends.  I suppose this must have been soon after the war, and that exchange controls were still in place.  Standing on the deck of a ferry they debated whether to visit Denmark, but none of them had any Danish kroner.  A man overhearing their conversation told them that he worked for a bank, and that if they decided to come to Copenhagen if they should call at his bank and he could exchange some money for them.  He gave them a card, and as he seemed quite respectable and they were young and blithe and wanted to see Denmark, they went to Copenhagen and called at the address they'd been given.  The doorman seemed surprised to see them, but took the card and let them in.  It did not seem quite like a normal bank, but they were able to exchange sterling for kroner and were not pounced upon by white slave traders.  Afterwards they realised that they had just visited the Danish national bank, and that their acquaintance on the ferry was the Governor.

Later on, in Africa, Ann needed to take her driving test.  Tests were administered by the local police chief, so Ann set off to the testing site, a police station surrounded by bush, taking one of her music pupils with her as a chaperone.  In my day in England you had to reverse round the kerb on a corner.  Ann had to reverse round a rose bush, which she ran down.  In her defence she pointed out to the police chief that it was over anyway, to which he replied 'Madam, it is now'.  When the test was over Ann's chaperone began to complain that she was hungry.  The police chief sighed and said 'I suppose you had better stay to lunch'.

Today's funeral is intended by her husband to be a celebration of her life.  There was much to celebrate.

rose, thou art sick

The wind has been getting up through the day, and is now blowing close to a full gale, while out at sea the Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic is recording a force nine on the Beaufort scale.  That's a severe gale.  Once it gets up to force ten it is a storm, a storm being bigger than a gale in technical weather terms.  Not all advertising copywriters know that.

A gale is enough to make large branches in the ash trees in the wood wave about, while the alder seems to sway almost down to the coppice stools.  It's not weather for working underneath trees, unless you have to, and the Systems Administrator had to put plans to remove more of the fallen ash at the far end on hold.  I crawled around trimming the edges of the top lawn, where the largest thing that could fall on me was a rose bush.

There is a lot of sudden die-back in some of the roses.  They looked healthy when I pruned them back in the winter, and the leaf buds began breaking normally, but in recent days many of the leaves have shrivelled, and the ends of stems, and even some whole stems down to ground level have blackened.  I don't honestly know why.  Sudden death of the visible parts of a woody shrub is often down to root damage, so has last year's endless rain rotted their roots so that they can't support the bushes?  Or is there a soil-borne infection?  Or did a cold night coming at a critical time just as the sap was rising burst the cells and kill parts of the plants that way?  Is it old age?  They can't have been in for more than a dozen years, and roses ought to last longer than that.

I pruned poor Magnolia grandiflora 'Samuel Sommer' extremely hard.  It is a case of kill or cure, and I fear it will be the former, but it looked so terrible with its great bare defoliated branches that it was doing no good as it was.  Our neighbours' gardener, the one who is still using our spinney as an off-site compost heap since we still haven't got round to fencing it, cut down their M. grandiflora hard.  I know this, because I noticed it had disappeared at the same time as some evergreen magnolia branches appeared in the spinney.  The other day as I was going past I saw a fresh crop of magnolia leaves rising above their fence, so the stump is clearly shooting again.  I'm afraid that 'Samuel Sommer' has picked up a fungal infection following cold damage in the recent hard winters, and am not at all optimistic that it will respond in the same way as next door's plant.  I washed the pruning saw when I'd finished, and wiped it with Dettol.

The Arbutus x andranchnoides is looking terrible.  The last few hard frosts hit it hard, and most of the leaves have gone brown and crispy.  A few green ones are left at the very top, indicating that the wood is not entirely killed, but I expect there is a lot of dead wood in there.  I have a dark suspicion, based on how it behaved in the previous couple of winters, that if it manages to produce a new crop of leaves it will take most of the summer over it, and that I'll have to do a lot of fiddly pruning out of dead twigs.  It was doing beautifully, up to the winter of 2010-2011.

out and about

We had a good evening at the Italian restaurant.  With five of us it was better than meeting at somebody's house.  Nobody had to assume the role of hostess, which would have altered the dynamics of the group, and left the other four with a vague obligation to reciprocate, so that our get-together ballooned remorselessly to five suppers instead of one.  And going out avoided the dilemma of partners left creeping about trying to watch TV while remaining invisible and excluded, or being unceremoniously evicted for the evening.  One person did have to cook two lots of supper for her family before she could escape to meet us.

Pizza cooked in a proper pizza oven is difficult to reproduce at home, even if you make your own base.  I don't know how the professionals manage to stretch it so thin and then move it in and out of the oven without it disintegrating, and the Aga doesn't reach those temperatures anyway.  I went for one with anchovies and capers, as the Systems Administrator is not keen on either so I avoid cooking with them at home.  Those who had linguine said that was very good as well.  There was a narrow majority vote for pudding, and the two non-pudding eaters were persuaded to squeeze down some fruit salad.  I had a crushed raspberry semifredde, which I could probably have made myself, on the other hand I've had been eating it for a week, since you can't really prepare one helping of something like that.  The building is attractive, the staff are cheerful and efficient, parking is easy.  It's called Lucca Enoteca if you want to try it for yourself. It's in Manningtree High Street, and for those social occasions when a restaurant is called for I recommend it highly.

It was followed by lunch today to discuss the looming funding deficit of the music society. Somebody who used to sponsor us will not be doing so in future, while ticket sales are trending gently downwards, and the society's taste in musicians has crept upmarket in recent years.  We can address the latter by booking younger musicians at an earlier stage of their careers, which is very satisfying if you get it right.  Long before I was involved they had Alison Balsom, who was then newly out of music college, and is now a mandatory feature on Classic FM, where a week rarely goes by without her.

The issue of the falling audience numbers produced a rather more free-wheeling discussion, where ideas thrown into the pot included doing different kinds of concert, or concerts at a different time of the year, or a festival instead of a concert.  Eventually, after the treasurer had left, I managed to extract from the programme secretary the detail that to balance the books we need to sell around thirty more tickets per concert.  Thirty is not such a huge and terrifying number.  There must be more than thirty people around this part of the Essex-Suffolk border who like chamber music enough to go to a concert, if they knew it existed.  By the end of lunch we'd agreed to print more leaflets, make them more eye-catching, and distribute them more widely.  We'd also agreed to try and enlist the energies of existing supporters to attract new audience members, by dint of offering season ticket holders a free ticket so that they could bring a friend, and simply asking them if they could display posters or mention us online.

It was a very elegant lunch, in an extremely smart house with a fabulous view up the valley.  My trouble is that nowadays my stomach is really not geared up for lunch.  I can manage Christmas lunch, but salmon and potato and broccoli and salad and fruit is too much for me in the normal way of things at lunchtime, even though I had only one potato, and passed on the wine, the cheeseboard and the chocolate.  A new recruit to the committee suggested that if every committee member brought two or three people with them to the concerts, and had a rule that you could only come to Sunday lunch if you came to the concert afterwards, that would solve the numbers problem, but I thought she must have a wildly different life to mine.  I can't think when we last had anyone to Sunday lunch, or at least I can, and it was months ago, when the Systems Administrator's relations came over, and they certainly wouldn't have wanted to go to a concert afterwards, firstly because they all had long drives home, and secondly because I don't think any of them like chamber music.

good hair day

My hair appointment was for nine o'clock.  Good, in that it meant I'd be home earlier and it would take up less of the morning.  Bad, in that I had to time my arrival during the tail end of Colchester's rush hour, when the traffic would be heavier.  I made it with five minutes to spare.  At five past the hairdresser called in to say that she was ill and would not be coming to work.  My hair is not easy to cut.  It is thick, it curls naturally, and it grows in semi-random directions over my head.  An inept cut can leave it flopping outwards from the crown from a flat spot through which the scalp peeps.  My hairline at the back was once described by a hairdresser with ruthless honesty as 'dodgy'. I don't like it when I have to change hairdressers, and resigned myself to having my hair cut by a strange one because I needed a haircut urgently, and didn't have time to come back another day.

She made a very passable job of it, maybe not quite as short as I'd like, but she was presumably taking a cautious approach with an unfamiliar customer.  She was the only one at work, and had to stop snipping a couple of times to answer the phone, but she had my sympathy there.  I know from first-hand experience how that feels.

An article in the Independent is headlined Is this the end of costly dyes? Scientists working on cure for grey hair.  Apparently if I were to rub my scalp with a topical, UVB-activated compound called PC-KUS ( a modified pseudocatalase) this would reverse the accumulation of hydrogen peroxide in my hair follicles which is bleaching my hair from the inside out.  Blimey, I never knew that was why it was going grey.  I thought the follicles were just not producing pigment any more, or something. Since I don't mind having grey hair, and don't want to smear modified pseudocatalase on my head any more than I want to cover it with hair dye, I'll probably give that treatment a miss, if it ever makes it to the mainstream.

Then it was back to the garden, where another few square metres got fed and Strulched.  So much Strulch, so little time.  Spring has been concertinaed in on itself.  The daffodils were barely out when they were over, the flowers on the 'Tai Haku' had scarcely opened before the leaves opened as well.  That was a pity, since the cloud of blossom on the bare branches is one of the glories of the tree.  The young leaves are an attractive shade of bronze, but they end the impression of dazzling, overall whiteness.  The bright yellow flowers of the Kerria japonica (the single form, more elegant than the double) seemed to have only just opened when they began to fade.

The bright pink flowers of Lonicera tatarica are opening.  This is an upright growing, medium sized shrubby honeysuckle.  It is not a shrub that connoisseurs would rate at all highly, and would win me no prizes in the choice, rare shrubs stakes (score additional bonus points for species not commercially available in the UK, double them if you collected the seed in the wild yourself, or were given the plant personally by Roy Lancaster).  L. tatarica is commercially available, although you will not stumble over one in B&Q.  The pink flowers are cheerful, the slightly greyish foliage mildly agreeable, the vertical habit useful where space is limited or screening needed.  However, its great virtue is its extreme toughness and willingness to live and look quite happy about life on very meagre rations.  Mine is in the entrance bed, graveyard of many a planting scheme.  On thin sand, exposed to the wind from all directions, periodically invaded by low level weeds and rarely fed, it contrives to grow and flower.  A colleague with a dry garden has found it equally obliging.  Hers suffers the additional indignity of being hard pruned to keep it to a more modest size.

And that is enough flower stories for one evening.  You probably don't want any more, and I am going out to a ladies' supper in an Italian restaurant that boasts a genuine wood fired pizza oven. After all that weight lifting over the weekend I feel I've earned a pizza.

a working bank holiday

This could be a short blog post, as I am absolutely shattered.  The sun shone, the customers came in droves, and we were busy.  That's good, we need the sales after the dire winter and last year's incessant rain, but it is hard work when they all come at once.  And I finished emptying my two red trollies, so I have lifted several times my own body weight in compost.

In a spirit of enquiry I have just weighed a plant in a 2 litre pot of normally damp compost, neither bone dry nor sopping wet.  It comes in at 1.1 kilos.  A silver plant trolley holds eighteen 2 litre pots, total weight around twenty kilos.  To put a trolley load out for sale you lift every pot twice, once when you transfer it from the big red trolley to the silver trolley, and again when you line it out on the bench or bed for sale.  I lost count of how many trolley loads of plants I moved, and they weren't all 2 litre pots.  Some were shrubs in 3 or 5 litre pots, and some were little nine centimetre pots that hold less than a litre of compost.  But taking twenty kilos per trolley as a benchmark estimate, and assuming I moved a dozen trolleys of plants, that comes to 480 kilos lifted, or approaching nine times my own weight.  That's not counting the bag of compost I loaded into somebody's car for them, or the trees I put to one side, or the pots already out for sale that I moved up to make space for the extra stock, or the reserved plants I fetched from behind the scenes for customers who'd come to collect them.  It's quite possible that I've lifted twenty times my own weight in the past three days, and that's not counting the physical effort involved in dragging the hoses around during watering.

I don't have flabby arms.  Back ache, but not flabby arms.

The cafe once again absorbed most of my young colleague's energies, plus the owner's for a chunk of the day, and the owner is starting to sound more convinced about the need to get help, at least at weekends.  It's a funny thing, the cafe.  If it were mine I'd want more management information about it.  Today it seems to have taken up between thirty and forty per cent of the staff hours worked in the plant centre.  I'm not sure of the exact proportion, because I don't know how much of the day the owner worked when she wasn't in the cafe, and quite how much other stuff my young colleague managed to get done.  I do know it contributed around seven per cent of the takings.  It's hard to ratchet up the sales when you are serving tea and cake.  Supposing it takes five minutes to serve each couple, including preparing the drinks, dishing out the cake, rounding up the dirty crockery, wiping tables and washing up (the washing up appears non-stop) and supposing they spend eight pounds or ten pounds per couple, you don't get beyond a hundred and twenty pounds per hour per staff member.  You can put that value of shrubs or flower pots through the till in a couple of minutes.

I was pleased to see a customer I hadn't seen for so long I was beginning to think he must have moved away.  He is a journalist, and since he requested a free copy of a friend's book on tube maps and then didn't write a review, I am theoretically cross with him.  However, he is one of those engaging people who lift the energy level of the room when they come in, and he has a charming and pretty wife, an extremely cute daughter and two amiable dogs, so I was glad he hadn't vanished from the Suffolk scene.

And that's me done at the plant centre for another week.  And now I am going to go and change out of my grubby uniform and collapse on the sofa with a cold beer.  At least bank holidays pay double time.

still busy

The watering in the plant centre took until ten o'clock this morning.  In fact, we hadn't quite finished by the time the first customers arrived, and had to keep an eye on them to make sure that nobody tripped over the hose we had stretched across the exit from the shop, in order to water the plants on the reserve bed.  The last little section of watering seemed to take a very long time, like the arrow that slows as it approaches its target, because the phone kept ringing.

We could initially only find two telephones between the three of us.  The phone chargers that used to live on the floor of the office had disappeared, apparently because the boss got tired of tripping over them and moved them, but when I tracked them down to the table in the outer office where the walkie-talkies live, they were empty.  I found a third charger somewhere else, that did contain a phone, which turned out not to be working.  I wasted some time hunting around the office before giving up.  Later on one of my colleagues spotted a stray phone in the cafe, so one of yesterday's shift must have left it there instead of remembering to take it back up to the house.

The owners were not around all day.  They'd warned me yesterday that they'd be away.  A fifteen year old from the village had been hired to help with the tea room from noon until five, the owner airily assuring me that her mother sometimes helped in the house and the girl was of good working stock.  For a moment I thought I might have slipped into an episode of The Village.  Even with the services of the fifteen year old to wash up, collect trays and make pots of tea, the cafe seemed to absorb most of my young colleague's time, and my older colleague and I spent three solid hours operating the tills in the middle of the day while we were busiest, leaving no staff members outside in the plant centre to help customers at all.  Still, you can only do what you can do.

Some of the large magnolias are coming out in the wrong colours.  A man rang up from Bedford, who had bought a yellow flowered 'Elizabeth', only to find when the first bud coloured and the flower opened that it was pink.  My colleague inspected the remaining stock, and discovered another alleged 'Elizabeth' that was coming out purple, and a supposedly pure white variety that had pink flowers.  They were very pretty, with different colours on the two sides of the petals, but definitely not 'Manchu Fan'.  That is deeply embarrassing.  At least they have flowered wrong at a young age, so there is time to put things right for the customer. When we visited Caerhayes a few years ago we read in the guidebook how an earlier member of the Williams family bought some magnolias from the great house of Hillier, of the sort that don't flower until they are twenty years old or more.  When, eventually, one opened its first flower and it was not the expected variety, Hillier kindly refunded the original purchase price.

The woman who works in the office had volunteered to look after the dog for the day.  She came and collected it in the morning, took it for a nice walk around the garden, and then she and her husband spent the rest of the day admiring it, as far as I can gather.  She would have liked one of the litter, I think, but her husband was not convinced that the family needed or could cope with a dog, so maybe this is her campaign to convert him.  I only discovered recently that he has written a book, about a walk he made through Spain a few years ago, following the tracks of a famous Spanish poet, which was e-published after winning a travel writing competition.

When I got home I had to water all my own pots, which took me until half past seven, after starting in the plant centre at eight this morning.  If tonight's blog post lacks any verve and sparkle it is because I am absolutely knackered.

busy

It was another busy day at work, which is what we need.  I noticed a sign by the till advertising for part time assistance in the cafe, so the owner has changed her mind since last Monday, when she told us firmly that she could not afford to employ anybody else this year, while fixing me with a firm stare as if the boss might have been reading my blog request for a tea shop girl.  I also noticed, when I went over to check what watering needed doing on The Other Side, that the pink primula which the manager had been saving to split, and that the owner had told him to get out for sale while they were in bloom, were still blooming away unseen.  He wanted to split them because he couldn't get any more from any of our suppliers this year.  Maybe he just hasn't had time to get them out, or maybe the owner has relented on her sudden policy to maximise sales and no splitting.

The manager and his behind-the-scenes helpers had managed to load up two full red trolleys of plants for sale.  The list of jobs to do had my name chalked up against the red trolleys to unload them, plus so many other jobs, some unallocated, that we'd have barely had time to finish them even if we hadn't had any customers.  By the end of the day I'd cleared roughly three quarters of one trolley, and it was so windy today that there will be a lot of watering to do in the morning, so I'm unlikely to manage to move more tomorrow than I did today.

A man rang up saying that he had box blight in his Buxus suffruticosa, but not his B. sempervirens, if this was possible, and that he was going to bring us a piece of infected box to look at.  I said that if he really thought he had box blight then we would very much prefer it if he did not bring infected samples on to the premises, and if he wanted help confirming the diagnosis he could e-mail us some good quality photographs.  I explained that as the dwarf box, Buxus suffruticosa, has a more dense and congested habit than common box, it was more prone to fungal infections which thrive in damp, close conditions, and so it was entirely possible that he had blight in one but not the other.  Unfortunately there was no chemical treatment available, or at least not one that either he or I could buy.

He wanted to replace the dwarf box with ordinary.  Personally, once I had box blight in my garden I'd be thinking about replacing with something other than box, like Teucrium chamaedrys, but he didn't ask my opinion about that.  Instead he asked whether we had any common box available, and requested me to reserve our entire stock of five and a half trays, each tray holding twenty plants, and he would be in later in the day.  He did not come in.  He may yet show up tomorrow, but otherwise is the leading contender for Most Inconsiderate Customer of the Weekend.

A smiling woman came to the till who obviously knew me, and I was racking my brains trying to work out who on earth she was, when she put me out of my misery and asked me how my bees were.  At that it fell into place and I could even remember her name, but I fear she saw my confusion and was tactfully helping me out.  I have a very transparent face.  It's tricky, when you've worked for a long time in a shop, trying to recall why it is that you recognise people.  They could be regular customers, or I might have met them at the music society, or they could work somewhere where I'm a customer, like the vets, or be connected by any number of routes.  In the past decade I've bumped into my physiotherapist, my former GP, the local Woodland Trust officer, two former colleagues (one of whom didn't recognise me so I kept jolly quiet, the other of whom I was delighted to see), a couple of stockbroking contacts, the editor of a gardening magazine whom I failed to persuade she wanted a regular beekeeping column, though we remain on friendly terms, and assorted staff members from Writtle.  I was once at the tip, and recognised one of my fellow recyclers as the man who rounds up trolleys in the Tesco car park.

We made the budget last month, so the owner bought a box of cakes for the staffroom.  It's such a long time since that happened that I'd practically forgotten about the tradition.  However, by today all that remained was the box, my co-workers having eaten the cake.

odd jobs

Today should have been a full day in the garden, but little bits of other things got in the way.  It is a friend's birthday next week, so I needed to post her card and present.  I got her a book.  I am not sure she reads books nowadays, but I couldn't think what else to get her, since she is one of those people who is very keen on her career to the point of having no discernible outside interests.  My finances and the nature of our relationship don't run to jewellery, trophy handbags or an i-anything, so a book it was.  I wrote her a short letter to go with the card and the book, and schlepped off the post office.  When you live in the country it is a five mile round trip to the post office.

The birthday is not until next Wednesday.  I asked the man in the post office whether second class post would get there in time, but he replied that nothing was guaranteed except guaranteed overnight delivery.  I said that I didn't expect a guarantee, just an indication of whether, given normal service, it was reasonable to expect that a parcel posted second class to London this morning would arrive by next Wednesday, and whether I was right in thinking that if there was a monumental screw-up and not normal service then the package was equally likely to be delayed whether it went first or second class, but he replied again that nothing was guaranteed except overnight delivery.  With a helpful attitude like that to customer service it is no wonder that the Royal Mail is the fast-growing, profitable success story that it is.

Then I had a look at the bees, as it was finally warm enough and not windy.  The books say not to open bee hives unless the outside temperature is sixteen degrees C, to avoid chilling the brood, and although it was sunny earlier in the week and last week it never got within three or four degrees of that.  I've gone well over the ten day limit between inspections since I last opened them, and was getting worried that they might have started thinking about swarming.  None had, though as I feared one hive was queenless.  I gave them a frame containing eggs from another colony, which theoretically gives them the opportunity to make a new queen and sort themselves out, but I'm not optimistic that they'll do anything with it by now.  Still, to have kept three colonies out of the four through the long winter wasn't too bad, and they all looked healthy.

Then later on I wasted a quarter of an hour on the phone trying to get through to the British Museum to change some tickets I can't now use, and spent another quarter of an hour writing 100 words of gardening tips for June for work.  A regional glossy that the owner advertises with manages to largely save itself the expense of paying a garden journalist when it wants some gardening blurb, by dint of asking its advertisers to contribute copy.  The owner is more of a finance woman than a writer, so subcontracts blurb writing to me.  I was supposed to run off the one hundred words this morning, and clean forgot about them, until the owner sent me a plaintive e-mail at around five this afternoon.

I spent the rest of the time weeding the herb bed, which shouldn't have been that big a job, since it is not that large a bed, and I had a go at it back in the winter, but I didn't finish it.  It is annoyingly infested with a coarse but clump forming weed grass, which if I can prevent it from seeding should be possible to clear out given a year or two.  A paving slab and cobble path runs diagonally across the bed, and the cobbles had got clogged with moss and weed grass.  The path is edged with chives, and four iron tripods planted with Clematis alpina, one of which is flowering beautifully while another is completely dead.  I'd like to get the area tidy before everything has finished flowering, and while there is still time to buy new herb plants at work.

The coming weekend is a working one, and then on Tuesday morning I have to go and get my hair cut, and won't have another potential full day of gardening until Thursday.  No wonder it is so wild and weedy.

a trip to the capital

Today I made a cultural foray to the capital.  I had tickets with a friend for an LSO St Lukes lunchtime concert, and had arranged to meet her at quarter past twelve at Liverpool Street, which meant that if I got organised I could go to the Whitechapel Gallery first.  It is only a ten minute walk from Liverpool Street, once you've found the way, and doesn't open until eleven.

I arrived at five to, and spent the time enjoying the sunshine and admiring the new Rachel Whiteread artwork on the front of the building.  She has designed a frieze of bronze leaves which now adorn what was a blank space at the top of the facade, originally intended for a mosaic that proved too expensive to install.  They are covered in gold leaf, and glittered splendidly in the sun.  I thought they were very pretty and elegant, while musing on why it is that they are classed as an artwork rather than decoration.  Presumably because they are by a famous artist.  They were paid for by the Art Fund, and voted the most popular acquisition of 2012 by its members.  Indeed, I voted for them myself, but mainly because I hadn't heard of most of the other candidates.

The Whitechapel Gallery is showing mixed media works by two Romanian artists, and some botanical photographs from the 1920s.  I'd never heard of the Romanian pair, Gert and Uwe Tobias, but liked the look of their brightly coloured, mixed-media pictures I'd seen in the adverts for the show.  I liked them in reality as well, and by a strange coincidence had been reading about life in Romania in the 1970s on the train travelling up to London.  Burying the Typewriter by Carmen Bugan.  The daughter of a dissident, life as a small child was idyllic, going for long stays with her beloved grandparents on their farm.  Aged around ten she increasingly began to perceive the disconnect between what the state media said about life in Romania and the West, and the realities of life as lived in Romania, and the West as portrayed on Western radio.  You were not supposed to listen to Western radio, or to have a typewriter that you used to produce literature protesting against the regime, hence the typewriter was buried when not in use.  That was synchronicity, and provided a good starting point for looking at the Tobias brothers' strange, folk art inspired, surreal and sinister pictures.

The plant photographs were by Karl Blossfeldt, and I'd never heard of him either.  Silver nitrate prints of close up shots of unfolding leaves, buds, tendrils, stems and flowers.  He said that anyone could photograph plants, the key was in the looking.  They were faintly disconcerting in their immense but soft detail, and I bought a postcard of pumpkin tendrils that if I am ever feeling rich I might ask the local blacksmith to turn into a piece of metalwork for the garden.

The concert was great, Joanna MacGregor playing Bach and Shostakovich preludes and fugues, pieces by each alternating in one continuous programme which we were forbidden to applaud until the end.  My companion said at the end that she had enjoyed it, but that it was music for the head rather than the heart.  I'm still grappling with Shostakovich, beyond the jazz suites, but JS Bach can come and play to my head any day of the week.  Despite the grandeur of Bach, I couldn't help wondering how she could play the piano wearing such spindly heels.  The Tim Minchin barefoot approach looks much more comfortable.

We had lunch in the cafe attached to the London Review of Books bookshop, just round the corner from the British Museum.  On the way there we bumped into two friends of my friend from Northumberland, who had just been to the museum and were rushing back to Euston.  That is quite an unlikely coincidence, even more so when I learned after they'd hurried off to get their train that the Alistair of Alistair and Rosie (or was it Liz?) was Alistair Anderson, the great Northumbrian concertina player. I've been a fan for around thirty years and have got several of his albums, and now I've met him, and didn't know it.  The cafe is really rather nice, good food, a very exotic list of teas (I stuck to assam, but my friend had an enormously elaborate concoction involving flower buds and three different containers), and a pleasantly bookish atmosphere.

We were going to the museum to see Ice Age Art, which does what it says on the tin.  It is a collection of ice age carvings on bone, stone and tusk, with a few pieces of twentieth century art interposed to show how modern the ice agers were, or alternatively how primitive art influenced artists of the last century.  It is not a big show, but I rather liked it.  Some of the objects were beautiful, and many were very intricately made, and  the whole idea that 20,000 to 30,000 years ago people were bothering to do that sort of thing, using stone tools, was incredible.  Each piece embodied dozens or hundreds of hours work, which meant that the society had to support the artists, who would have had to work during daylight hours instead of hunting or foraging.  It must have been important to them.  The difficulty from the curator's point of view is that we honestly don't have a clue why they did it, or what the objects meant to them.  This irritated my friend more than me.  I have always had a slack-jawed ability to marvel at things without worrying unduly if I don't at that moment see where they fit in to a broader narrative.

Then we met a friend of hers who is a successful producer of TV commercials, so that the friend could hand over my friend's camera, which she had accidentally left behind at a previous gathering, and we sat outside in a little square drinking a glass of chilled white wine, and I felt terribly sophisticated.  And then the trains ran to time on the way home, and I remembered to go and vote, and buy some cat food because we'd run out.

Addendum  Or do trains to Northumberland go from Kings Cross?

another day in the garden

I am beginning to think I have broken the back of the work in the island bed, and might get it finished given another couple of sessions.  This is just as well, since I need to carry out skirmishes, if not open new fronts, in the conservatory, the herb bed, the shrubs around the top lawn, and the gravel garden outside the Systems Administrator's blue summerhouse.

In the course of weeding I made a gratifying discovery, three strong new shoots at the base of the single stem the Romneya coulteri carried last year, which by now is resolutely dead.  Romneya coulteri is the Californian tree poppy.  There is a fine one in the gravel at Beth Chatto's gardens, between the lavatory block and the entrance to the plant sales area.  When happy it is a wonderful shrub, with grey leaves and papery white flowers like a poppy, and suckers and runs about vigorously.  Note the qualifying phrase.  It is notoriously difficult to establish in the ground, whether from a pot grown plant or a root you have begged from a friend who already has one in their garden, and this is my third attempt at getting it to take.  I had told myself, firmly, that if it didn't succeed this time then that was it, since my normal limit is that if something has failed to establish twice running it obviously doesn't like my conditions, and I should grow something else that does.  I bent the rules for the Romneya, given that they are known to be so tricky, and are so beautiful once they get away, and if it would just take it should like the free drainage and sun in our garden.  We are only a mile as the crow flies from the Chatto gardens.

The shoots are not even two centimetres high yet, and things could still go wrong.  They could be frosted, or something could eat them, or the Romneya could change its mind about the whole thing.  However, three chunky shoots at ground level the year after planting is better than I have ever achieved before, and I'm quite bullish.  I found some small but solid looking shoots as well which must belong to a couple of seed raised Amsonia I planted out last year.  I was beginning to wonder where those had got to, and if I'd see them again, or if the long winter had done for them.  The rich blue flowered and slightly tender Salvia guaranitica has new growth at the base, buds still held tight to the ground, but there are no signs of life yet from its pink flowered neighbour.  I don't understand why there is so much earth mounded over its base, and hope that doesn't mean there is an ant nest directly underneath.

Amelanchier x grandiflora 'Ballerina' has opened.  It has white flowers held in short erect racemes, if you are a botanist, and looks as though a cloud of white butterflies had descended on it, if you are a romantic.  The flowers are larger than those of some of the wild species Amelanchier, and although I love 'Ballerina', I sometimes have twinges of doubt when I look at the flowers of A. canadensis as to whether I chose the right one.  Amelanchier canadensis has a charming wild naturalness to it which I covet.

The season is marching on.  I had to clear away the pots of hyacinths, which were well and truly over, and found that two or three pots of tulips were ready to be swapped over with them for display in the Italian garden.  The olive tree has made it through the winter, and I'm beginning to dare think it might have escaped being cut back, though there's always next winter.  There are no signs of green on the Aloysia triphylla at all. This is an ungainly shrub with slightly negligible mauve flowers, and leaves that smell deliciously of lemon.  It is always late into growth, and this is a late year, but even so, I am not entirely confident it is alive.  We'll see.

limited resources spread rather thin

Today I started weeding and mulching the island bed in the back garden, feeling like a general trying to fight on too many fronts simultaneously.  The term island bed seems to have fallen out of popular use in garden literature.  It was coined by Alan Bloom back in the 1960s and 70s, to denote a freestanding bed surrounded by grass, as opposed to a border backed by a fence or hedge.  His Wikipedia entry says he invented them, though I suspect that overstates the case.  I can't believe that nobody ever thought of growing plants in an area not bounded by a wall or other vertical divider until Alan Bloom came along.  Kidney shaped beds had their day, and Beth Chatto laid out her vast amoebic shaped ones, and then the concept slipped out of fashion, along with the term.  A Tom Stuart Smith designed garden has areas of freestanding planting, generally of rectilinear design, and I imagine he and his clients would be quite startled if you maintained that their gardens contained island beds.

Ours is roughly triangular, not kidney shaped, and its shape reflects the origins of the site, in that it sits along the edge of what was the garden when we bought the house, while the area that is now garden beyond it was originally part of the orchard.  The grass on the far side of the bed, looking at it from the house, was laid by me on what used to be a farm track running down the side of the orchard, using thick slabs of turf cut from the original lawn to make two large borders.  I barrowed in extra topsoil as well*, to improve the track as far as I could, but drew the line at attempting to dig the track over.  It is a marvel the grass path has done as well as it has.

The island bed formed a very pleasant, self-renewing community for years, with Cistus, Stipa gigantea, Verbena bonariensis, tree lupins and asters.  About three years ago the Cistus started to succumb to old age, and the bed has since gone through three programmes of renewal, each one in turn being hit by the cold and wet winters, so that the planting is still nowhere near as dense as it should be.  When the garden plants are crammed in good and thick you don't see that the self-renewing community also includes generous measures of creeping sorrel and horsetail.  Now the race is on to pull up the speedwell and cow mumble and get the bed fed with mushroom compost plus fish, blood and bone, and Strulched, before the plants grow up too much more.  Already the foliage of the self-sown alliums is waving around in wispy, hard-to-weed-among fronds.

A pot of Coronilla varia that I planted in one of the renewals is running about prodigously, so much so that I am starting to wonder if I have unleashed a terrifying weed upon the garden.  But its little pink pea flowers are pretty, and go on for a long time, and in a garden of this size with no paid gardener or eager horticultural students or volunteers, I need ground covering plants.  The Cistus and tree lupins can rise above the Coronilla, and it can fill in the gaps.

Crocosmia 'Lucifer' is spreading splendidly.  Some Crocosmia are of doubtful hardiness, while others fall into the terrifying weed category, especially in mild gardens in the south west.  'Lucifer' hits the happy median, reliably surviving the cold and wet, seeding itself to make useful increase, but not so much it threatens to take over.  The sword-shaped leaves are taller than may of its relatives, mid green and attractively ribbed.  The spikes of flowers are a rich, fine red with a hint of orange, while the strings of bobbly seedheads last until autumn, and are a good architectural feature.  It was bred, fittingly, by Alan Bloom.

Meanwhile, the bed by the entrance also wants weeding and mulching before the Euphorbia cyparissus grows any more (another terrifying but pretty spreader).  So do hunks of the long bed, and some remaining patches of the sloping bed, and the top half of the near rose bed.  Definitely action on too many fronts.  Growing any vegetables this year now seems a very distant prospect.

I am mystified by the scattering on the grass below 'Tai Haku' of what look like leaf buds.  I don't remember it ever doing that before.  I opened one up, to see if it was simply a cast-off bud coating, but it seemed to be an entire bud containing small leaves.  Have they been randomly pulled off by some mischievous bird or squirrel?  I haven't seen any creature messing around with the tree.  Did one of the recent cold nights check and damage some buds that were at a critical stage of opening?

As I was not being followed by any cats at the time, I went and had a quick look at the blackbird nest.  The bird was still sitting, and looked back at me.  It was difficult to say if she was afraid, since she didn't move or make any sound.  I left her to it.

*Harvested from a very unfortunate incident involving an unsupervised builder and a digger.  I have learned a few things in my years, and one of them is never to leave a builder alone on your property with an excavator.

a full day ahead

This is probably all the blog there is going to be today, since tonight I am taking my dad to hear Martin Simpson at the Colchester Arts Centre.  Martin Simpson is a singer and guitarist of supreme talent, and so far as I know the gig is not sold out.

As it is only twenty to seven there isn't much to say about the day, but that's fine as there is no time to say it in.  I am boiling eggs for my packed lunch [gets up to take egg saucepan off the stove].  Indeed, writing that reminded me that the eggs had probably boiled long enough.  I still feel vaguely bloated from eating far too much lunch yesterday, though an hour or two dragging hoses around will sort that out.

The Systems Administrator was taken with the pub at Margaretting Tye, saying that the food was really very good, apart from the portions being at least thirty per cent larger than they needed to be, and that the time to go would be mid-week, when it wasn't absolutely jam packed, and that in fairness to the staff most of them might have just been taken on for the season so they hadn't yet had time to gel and work as a team.  Margaretting Tye is just outside Stock, north of Billericay and south of the A12, and very close to an ancient wood, Swan Wood, now in the care of the Woodland Trust, and its recently planted extension, cutely named Cygnet Wood.  There is a fine ancient wood outside Billericay as well, called Noursey Wood, which is owned by the council and so well loved locally, it has its own Society.  So once the bluebells are out we could go down to mid Essex and walk around some ancient woodland, before having a pub lunch.  Maybe ordering from the bar menu and not the full works.

And with that consoling thought it is now 07.46 and time to put the eggs in cold water to cool them down, then peel them.  I have no sympathy with journalists who simper in their columns that they couldn't have a packed lunch because they'd have eaten all of it by eleven o'clock, like when they were twelve and on school trips.  Come out of your newspaper office and work somewhere that is more than ten miles from a Pret, a Starbucks or a Caffe Nero.  You might eat all of your lunch by mid-morning on the first day, but you won't still be doing it by the end of the week.

a pub lunch

Today we went out to lunch.  Third time lucky.  We were going to meet friends who live in north London mid-way between us and them for lunch in a country pub early in the year, and it snowed.  I cancelled the pub, and we rescheduled for March.  They all had flu.  I cancelled the pub again, and we rescheduled for today.  Having seen the lane leading to the pub I am now sure we would not have got there in the snow, even assuming that either party could have made it up the A12.  It was good to see them, and if we'd had to cancel for a third time then I'd have had to think of a different pub, since I couldn't have faced making a fourth booking.

The trouble with going out to lunch is that it does chop into the day.  It didn't seem worth putting on my gardening clothes for half a morning's work, and then having to change out of them and spend a quarter of an hour scrubbing my hands to try and get them to a state where they'd look respectable eating lunch in a fairly smart pub with three committed urbanites.  Instead I caught up with some admin, and went for a walk around the garden.  Garden owners tend not to stroll in a leisurely fashion around their own gardens.  Monty Don writes that he does, every day when he is at home, but most of us charge out there intent on making progress with whatever we're working on currently.

The primroses have made enormous cushions.  Something about the growing conditions in the past year has really suited primroses.  It isn't just the ones here: the primroses at work are looking equally huge and luxuriant.  I have been trying to establish primroses in the bank below the daffodil lawn, but the ones at the bottom of the garden are doing much better.  Even the plants growing in the bed around the trio of Betula nigra, where the soil gets pretty dry, are doing spectacularly well. They have started seeding themselves into the shady end of the lawn, where the grass is thin, along with violets, so that without doing anything myself to achieve the effect I have a small flowery mead.  Gardening is much easier if you work with the natural inclinations of plants, so I had better accept that the primrose bank was not such a good idea, and that I have a very nice primrose lawn, only not where I intended it to be.  Maybe the bank is too dry.  Or too sunny.  Or too riddled with voles.

Traffic on the A12 was running freely, something you can never count on, and the pub was where the Satnav said it would be.  The decor was subtly more posh Essex and less the stripped down Aldeburgh look than it appeared in the photos on the website, and I'd have preferred it without the (admittedly not too loud) background music, but it looked promising, wide range of cask ales on offer, reasonable menu at sensible prices, friendly staff.  I'd left it a day or two late to make my final booking, and they only just squeezed in our table of five when I rang, but made an effort to fit us in when I demurred at a two o'clock start for lunch.

I'm really not sure how I'd rate the lunch experience.  On the plus side, the food was pretty good, and they were accommodating about switching mashed potato for the roast specified on the menu. On the minus side, they brought two hot main courses some time before the others, so that our friends ended up starting to eat while their daughter and the Systems Administrator and I remained foodless.  That's bad.  When you go out to eat with other people you would like to all eat at the same time.  OK, maybe not in a party of a dozen, unless you are at a swish restaurant rather than a gastropub, but with five people you expect to see five main courses pretty much simultaneously. Further on the minus side they forgot one main course entirely, so the SA and I sat staring at our plates of untouched food (mostly salad, luckily) to show solidarity with the daughter while her parents ploughed on through their roast meat and potatoes.  On the plus side, the waitress was apologetic and offered the daughter a free drink on the house.  She's clearly under-age, so that was not going to be a very costly gesture, but it was gracious.  However, the waitress then forgot to bring the drink until reminded.  Service was slow, and with a table booked for one we were still waiting for puddings (for those having them) and coffee at gone half past two.  On the plus side, they voluntarily deleted the late main course from the bill.  Would I go there again?  Probably, if I wanted to meet somebody in that part of Essex, but the SA and I wouldn't drive down there ourselves just for lunch.  The pub was The White Hart in Margaretting Tye, if you want to try it for yourself.

The SA and I very rarely do go out to lunch, except when on holiday.  It's partly down to finances. When you decide to downshift, you forego regular eating out.  But it's also because we don't generally want to.  We can both cook, and both like cooking.  I have very rarely eaten a meal out and thought that at the pure food level I had consumed something delicious and fantastic that we couldn't have done ourselves at home.  Deep fried dishes are one exception, hence my devotion to fish and chips and tempura batter when eating out.  Also savoury tartlets involving flaky pastry, since I only do shortcrust.  But bye and large, leaving aside the presentation, I haven't often put something in a restaurant in my mouth, been blown away by the taste and texture, and known that we could never, ever make something like that ourselves.  And it would still go against the grain to pay £9.95 a head for glorified bangers and mash when we could buy sausages every bit as good in the farm shop and have it at home for under a fiver for two all-in, provided we could be bothered to peel our own potatoes, even if I were as rich as Warren Buffett.

But mainly, lunch out does eat into the day.  It's fine when you're meeting friends, especially those that live at a distance, but not for the two of us.  By the time I've changed, and cleaned myself up, and we've driven somewhere, and waited for the food to arrive, and the bill to arrive, and driven back, that's two or three hours gone out of the middle of the day that I could have spent in the garden. And then I've probably eaten more than I normally would at lunchtime, and will never get back into the swing of things because I'm too busy digesting.  The SA and I have all evening to stare at each other over plates of food and exchange whatever news and views we have.  And there is no risk that somebody will want to explain today's specials, or clear our plates, or ask whether everything is all right, just as one of us is getting to the punchline of a story.

Admit it.  Eating out is supposed to be a treat, but how often have you been out for a meal with a group of people when nobody has been unhappy about something?  The soup was lukewarm, or the main course was over-salted to the point of inedibility, or the puddings took ages to arrive, or the coffee arrived ten minutes before them, or the tea consisted of a pot of water, no longer boiling, and a teabag.  I am aghast each time I read a restaurant review in one of the papers where half the dishes were judged not very nice, the service was sloppy, the bill came to sixty quid a head, and yet the reviewer gave it seven out of ten.

clean and tidy

The forecast this morning was for a dry start to the day, but rain later.  When you are a keen and very behind-hand gardener, your days revolve around the weather prospects, so my day started outside, trimming the last of the honeysuckle under the veranda, and trying to tie in the rose 'Climbing Etoile d'Hollande', which after a shaky start has grown to gargantuan proportions, and was lying prostrate flopped out over the bed.  I began tidying and cutting back the climbers under the veranda last autumn, to provide access for scaffolding so that the Systems Administrator could renew the guttering and paint the barge board along the back of the house.  The climbing rose, which had been wedged in among the honeysuckle, was dislodged in this process, which is why it spent the winter lying down, but now it really is time to pull it up again.

It rained so constantly last year that we agreed to leave the rest of the exterior decorating until the spring, and then in March it was never warm enough for the paint to have gone off if the SA had applied it.  It needs a minimum temperature of around 8 degrees C to dry, and we almost never reached that.  It is spoiled if there is any dampness in the air as well, and really it is a mystery to me how exterior decorators ever manage to work at all in the British climate, given that there are about three weeks a year when conditions seem to be suitable for decorating.  Painting the barge boards needs to progress quickly once started so that the guttering can be replaced, since it won't be very convenient living without it.  I know that people in thatched cottages manage, but that's their choice, and they have all that Olde Worlde charm to console them.  We have a 1960s shoebox.

As I was trimming off surplus bits of honeysuckle, trying to start from the ends of shoots and work in, rather than cutting through a stem and finding I'd killed a quarter of the plant without meaning to, I spotted an old bird nest low down, tucked in against the trellis.  I delved deeper into the honeysuckle, to extract the dead material from inside to reduce its overall bulk while retaining the living, flowering wood, and suddenly saw there were two speckled deep turquoise eggs in the nest. Oh, right, not an old bird nest, then.  I retreated to a tactful distance and pretended not to be interested in the nest.  Later on there was a female blackbird sitting in it.  I may have removed too much of her cover before spotting her, and she may decide that the nest is now too exposed to magpies and abandon it.  If she doesn't then I suppose that pushes the date to start decorating back by at least a month, since we can't ram a leg of the scaffolding platform right in beside her.

At twenty to one it started to rain, not drizzle, but the first few big, heavy drops that tell you that a serious shower is in the offing.  That was my cue to pack my tools away, given the forecast.  The Systems Administrator was surprised to see my in from the garden so early, and surprised that it was raining, and surprisingly gung ho about the prospect of taking the truck after lunch to collect mushroom compost, an expedition that has been planned and postponed a couple of times due to weather conditions.  If the SA was prepared to drive the truck and lift the bags on to the back then I wasn't going to cavil at a bit of rain, and so we went after lunch and bagged up 23 buckets of compost.  It would have been 24, which is a nice round number and exactly three times what I can fit in the boot of the Skoda, but I ripped one of the bags trying to fit it around the bottomless bucket that is the garden centre's measure for charging customers.  Twenty three bags will last me for a good while, given where I've got to with the weeding.

Then it was time for the cleaning.  That's the trouble with cleaning.  You can postpone it by dint of finding other, more urgent and nobler tasks like cataloguing the beekeepers' library, but it catches up with you in the end.  I wiped kitchen cupboards, and sprayed limescale remover on the sinks, and put stray boxes of screws back in the workshop, and removed a dead vole and some nameless lumps of something nasty from under the table in front of the TV.  The Systems Administrator came and volunteered to finish the vacuuming, after watching the last major race of the jump season, which was apparently won by a horse that we saw two years ago at Fakenham, since when it has Come On. The SA has missed one corner of the hearthrug, but it is still a lot cleaner than it was.  I scoured the Aga with special Aga scouring cream, and wiped off the cat hairs that seem electrically attracted to it, and wiped the crumbs off the toaster, and wiped up the extra crumbs that emerge all over the work top each time you move a toaster, several times since there kept being more crumbs.  I scrubbed the downstairs loo and the downstairs wash basin, and cleaned embarrassing quantities of cat fur off the skirting board in the loo.  I lasted until half past six, by which point the house still wasn't clean, but I'd had enough of cleaning for one day.

I've said before that it is a small world.  The SA was listening yesterday evening to Radio 2, and heard a request from a family whose car was all packed and ready to go, driving up to Northumberland with their border terrier Perkins.  When we stayed in Alnwick we met a border terrier called Perkins in one of Alnwick's nicer pubs (good beer, good decor, good juke box, quite clean, spoiled only by the baffling habit of the locals and bar staff of leaving the door on to the street open.  Northern people seem impervious to cold, and to consider it quite normal to sit all evening in the pub still wearing your anorak).  We gathered that the family with Perkins were regular visitors rather than permanent local residents.  It had to be the same border terrier.  Small world.

delving into the library

It was raining this morning, so I thought I'd better go through the books in the beekeepers' library. I could have done the vacuuming and cleaned the kitchen, which badly need doing, but since I am a very dedicated committee member I thought the library should take precedence.  The fact that I don't like housework very much may also have had something to do with it, but on the plus side for the library I had a member asking whether we had a book about wax, and the prospect of the County library being dispersed among the divisions because it is being evicted from Writtle College library.  I'm not surprised by that, since they were already short of space and having to weed their horticultural books when I was there thirteen years ago.  If our division was about to be offered the chance to bag some books from the County then we needed to know what we already had.

The previous librarian sent me a spreadsheet of the library contents, but since I wouldn't have known the names or titles, apart from a handful, looking at what we had and seeing its age and condition seemed a good idea.  The contents of the boxes proved fascinating, as an historical document as much as an aid to keeping bees now.  Given the new bee diseases that have arrived in recent decades, the changes in land management and available forage, and new regulations on honey labelling and marketing, books dating from the early part of the last century are going to be of limited use in a practical sense, though bee behaviour won't have changed that much in a hundred years when they have been around for millennia.  One of my fellow beekeepers, I can't remember who, queried at the AGM whether we needed a library, now that so much information was available on the internet.  But it is interesting to see how things used to be done, and I trust a respected classic author on subjects like bees in archaeology and mythology more than I do a website of unknown provenance found by Google search.

My standard textbook on general beekeeping was and is by Ted Hooper, and the library has two copies of his useful book, but I noticed that we had two and three copies of general guides by other, earlier authors.  Before Hooper there was Herrod-Hempsall, and before him Edwards.  Several of the books were North American, so not directly applicable to North Essex, but would be an interesting read if one had the time.  I can't see many of our members wanting to borrow an HMSO 1912 Instruction in bee keeping for the use of Irish bee keepers, but you never know.  A 1925 first edition of Anatomy and Physiology of the Honeybee by Snodgrass is a classic, and will be worth money.

Some of the books came from Thurrock division, which years back seceded from Essex Beekeepers and set up on its own account.  There must be something in the water at Thurrock, given that they have a unitary authority as well, instead of being part of Essex County Council.  Others were gifted to the association by past members.  I remember one of the donors, a kindly man, greatly interested in pollen identification, who sadly developed Altzheimer's.  I had doubts about the historical interest of a few disintegrating post-war paperbacks, and some were downright insanitary, but most of the books were worthy of finding sanctuary in somebody's spare room for a while longer.  I aim to read some of them myself.

Sitting in several other boxes are magazines and pamphlets going back to the 1970s, the collection I picked up from the previous librarian having already grown by two boxes donated by a member who no longer wanted to give them house-room, but didn't like to put them in the paper recycling bin at the local tip.  Sorting and cataloguing those will have to wait for another wet day, in fact, probably another wet year as bad as 2012.  My dedication to the library only goes so far.

the joys of spring

It was another beautiful day.  I've seen the forecast on the TV and the Met Office website, and know that a front is advancing from the north and that the warm weather won't last, but I'm enjoying it while it does.  At the start of the week, or rather on Tuesday morning, I could scarcely believe that I had the rest of the week to get on with things at home.  Surely something would happen.  A cat would appear with an injury requiring a trip to the vet, or I would poke myself in the eye and spend the rest of the day at the walk-in centre, or my car would develop some bizarre fault requiring it to be taken to the garage and collected again.  But all was well.  It is early Thursday evening and so far nothing has gone wrong at all.

My left knee did take exception to crawling around on a mixture of earth, mushroom compost, fish blood and bone, Strulch, and Euphorbia cyparissus while wearing jeans with a hole in, and turned an ominous shade of dark pink.  I considered a diagnosis of cellulitis or housemaid's knee, but instead opted for scrubbing it with a face flannel and seeing if it calmed down again.  I have ordered a pair of cheap jeans from Tesco, and will see how long they last.  It may be that I have to look on gardening trousers as disposable items, akin to gardening gloves.  They have not yet arrived at my chosen click-and-collect store, so in deference to my knee I sacrificed a pair of early 90s vintage chinos, which only ever buttoned up when I was at my thinnest.  That doesn't happen so often nowadays, and with the button left undone and a belt they will do for gardening.

In the back garden the buds of the 'Tai Haku' are starting to open.  Yesterday morning they were still shut.  By yesterday afternoon the tree was showing white, and this afternoon whiter still, but still not fully out.  This is the great white cherry, thought lost to cultivation in its native Japan, and saved by the discovery of one poorly-looking tree in an English garden by the early twentieth century cherry enthusiast Collingwood 'Cherry' Ingram.  It holds its branches out almost horizontally, in classic Japanese cherry pose.  The flowers only last a matter of days, but they are glorious.  The young leaves are a pleasant shade of bronze, and the autumn colour is good.  It will get large with time, which is fine by us.  It sits on one corner of the top lawn, forming a fulcrum around which other parts of the garden swirl.  Japanese cherries are still vaguely out of fashion, but I like 'Tai Haku'.  I am not interested in being fashionable, and a good habit, decent leaves and spectacular display of blossom, plus a romantic history, are enough for me.  The Systems Administrator is fond of 'Tai Haku' partly because the SA's late father grew it in their first garden in Berkhamsted, when the SA was very small.

The egg situation is unclear.  Yesterday the SA heard hammering from the chicken house, but by the time the SA investigated the hens had broken an egg on the floor of the main house, and were eating it.  But today we collected five eggs.

In the gravel garden my two plants of Zauschneria have both made it through the long, cold winter, and last year's endless rain, and are suckering nicely.  I think this is testament to the extremely sharp drainage in the front garden.  It comes originally from the dry slopes and chaparral of North America, and carries red flowers at the orange end of the spectrum, in late summer.  It does very badly in pots, and tends to look pretty rough, which is probably one reason why you don't see if for sale very often.  I got one of my plants at work, and the other at the Chatto gardens.  The top growth is killed by the winter, at least in north Essex, but the plant shoots again from below ground level, so you simply cut the dead twigs off in the spring, and presently get a whole new set of grey-leaved twigs to admire.

Berkheya purpurea from South Africa has a similar trick.  Every bit of the plant above ground level is stone-dead and dessicated by the end of winter, but about now new felted grey leaves start appearing from below ground.  I missed a trick when I failed to provide more shelter from cold winds in the top part of the garden, otherwise with drainage like this we ought to be able to grow all sorts of things.

feed and mulch

A boot load of spent mushroom compost doesn't last long.  I bought another eight bags this morning, and by the evening had only got three left.  The race is well and truly on to get as many beds mulched as possible, before the emerging foliage is so advanced that I can't get at the ground, and cause damage trying.  The Strulch, which has been stacked up outside since I don't have anywhere under cover to store it, has gone rather blue and mouldy in its bags, but I expect that will wear off once it is in the sunlight and the fresh air.  Just so long as it doesn't give me farmer's lung, I'm happy.

The entrance bed has got a large and spreading patch of Euphorbia cyparissus.  I am in two minds about this plant, which is in many ways a terrifying weed.  But as the Missouri Botanical Garden website states, it tolerates dry soil, shallow rocky soil and drought.  In the entrance bed it shrugs off the effects of the meagre sand and root competition from surrounding shrubs to make ground cover that is really quite pretty in season.  Forget the botanic garden's suggested planting density of eight to ten plants to the square yard.  I didn't buy more than three pots to get my enormous patch.  It runs ferociously at the root, but I haven't found seedlings elsewhere in the garden.  It is surrounded on one side by tarmac, on the second side by the hedge between us and the lettuce field, and on the third side by gravel.  If it ever runs through the ivy hedge and tries to set off across the gravel I shall have to resort to strong poison, but in the meantime I am on balance grateful for the ground cover it provides.

I cut away its dead stems earlier in the spring, and gave the area a preliminary weed, so now need to get it fed and Strulched before the Euphorbia shoots grow too much.  I worried briefly that I would injure them sprinkling mushroom compost around them and covering them with mineralised straw, while trampling on them.  Then I thought that if I had wanted to get rid of the Euphorbia I would not expect manure plus straw mulch to be any use at all.  There are some roots of a creeping grass among the Euphorbia, and while I pulled up what I could, I shall need to return on calm, dry days with the glyphosate.

I had to move some of the daffodils I planted in the long bed, not the pale coloured ones I planted in a dither while it was blowing a gale, but the cheerful two-tone orange and yellow 'Jetfire' that went in several weeks ago.  When they were the only things flowering in that part of the bed they looked very cheerful and I was pleased to see them there, but when the existing inhabitants came into flower before 'Jetfire' had finished I realised that orange and yellow Narcissus do not go with pink cherry blossom, or red Pulsatilla, and don't do a lot for a collection of hyacinths in harmonising shades of blue and purple.  The pale yellow daffodils are fine, but the strong yellow and orange quarrels with everything else in the bed.  I couldn't think what to do with the 'Jetfire', or the other pots of yellow daffodils waiting to be planted, then realised I could use them along the front edge of the entrance bed.  A splash of yellow as you arrive would be very cheery, and as the front of the bed is largely clear at the moment they would be easy to plant.  I peered suspiciously at the existing planting, trying to work out if there was anything likely to overlap with the daffodils and clash with them in a normal season, but none of the shrubs looked at all close to flowering.  Strong yellow and Malus floribunda are a pretty vile combination.  I know that since absent mindedly planting some yellow Crown Imperial fritillaries underneath my tree.

The Systems Administrator is letting the hens out for an evening run, now that the weather's warmer, though they won't be coming out tomorrow because we're going out, and then it's due to turn colder again, so today may be their last taste of freedom for a few days.  Looking at the mess they have made scratching around by the bog garden I am slightly relieved about that, much as they enjoy free-ranging.  They have heapeded the Strulch into great piles and kicked some on to the lawn, while a poor little decapitated flower of Fritillaria meleagris lay folorn on the ground.

so many weeds, so little time

I awoke to the beautiful prospect of a whole week of gardening.  Well, five days, since we are supposed to be meeting friends for lunch on Sunday.  The forecast is decent, though it might get a little showery by Friday, and my diary is otherwise empty, apart from a concert in the evening on Thursday.  The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and it felt like spring.  I had half a pallet of Strulch, and a boot load of mushroom compost.  Delight.

There is so much to do, it is difficult to know where to start.  I decided to begin by finishing weeding the top of the long bed, so that I could replace the pebble mulch currently sitting on an empty Strulch bag on the lawn before the grass under the bag went too yellow.  And we look straight out of the sitting room window at that part of that bed, so it might as well be tidy and free of extraneous bags instead of a long-term work-in-progress.  I thought optimistically that I would be finished by lunchtime, but the remaining pebble mulch had embedded itself in the soil and it took some time to excavate the stones, pick dead leaves and weeds out of the bed, smooth off the surface and replace the pebbles.

Cold weather has cut back the Bupleurum fruticosum, leaving only a couple of branches alive.  Or at least, I was pretty sure that the rest of the plant was not going to break leaf.  There were new shoots visible at ground level, and I thought the answer was to prune out the dead wood, mulch the plant and wait for regrowth.  While I was at it I trimmed back a very enthusiastic flowering currant that had spread sideways to several times its own height, and was threatening to engulf the Bupleurum.  The latter is a shrubby member of the carrot family, and you don't find many of those. It has elegant sea-green leaves and bright green flowers, held in the clusters of individually tiny flowers typical of the umbellifers.  That is when it is alive.  Mine was mostly leafless brown twigs.

The Systems Administrator mowed the back lawns, for the first time this year.  That has to be a record for us, to be giving the lawn its initial cut on St George's Day.  It could have done with cutting a week back, and the SA was all set to do it, but found the lawnmower battery had flattened down completely after a winter of disuse.  You can't use the portable jump starter on the lawn tractor, since for health and safety reasons it will only work when you are sitting on the seat, and the battery connections are (you guessed it) under the seat.  Today the SA used the push mower, having remembered to charge that up in advance.  It started, but was behaving as if the filters might be blocked.

All this crawling around weeding has worn through the left knee of another pair of gardening trousers, a rather hideous pair of jeans that I bought in a Lands End sale years ago.  I spent a long time searching on-line, and nobody seems to sell proper rugged gardening trousers, made out of really heavy cotton.  This is not just an issue for women (though gardening clothes aimed at women whose chief design feature is that they have pink floral motifs make me want to spit).  Customer comments on the Amazon clothing site were pretty scathing about the fabric (lightweight), fastenings (broke) and construction (shoddy) of most the outdoor trousers for men too.

This isn't a new problem, and my search for good gardening trousers is a perpetual quest.  Before the current jeans, I wore a pair of moleskin trousers from Toast that had become too shabby to wear anywhere else, but finally the waist fastening distorted to the point where they would not stay up, and the seams had started to come un-stitched, which was embarrassing when facing the postman or delivery drivers.  I've experimented with overalls from the farm supply shop, but they go at the knees, and tend to come to bits around the armholes as well.  A pair of cotton combat trousers from Millets wore through in no time at all.  I still wear their sister pair to work, but only when it is cold enough to wear thermals underneath, since one leg has a long rip from a close encounter with a rose bush.  The Systems Administrator suggested army combat trousers, and I'd happily try them if I could track down a pair in my size, but they don't seem too thick on the ground.

Finally on Amazon I settled on a pair of what were described as Work Wear Trousers VINTAGE RETRO Swedish Army Prison Issue 1950s.  They had received one ecstatic five star review, from somebody who did not actually want them to work in, but was delighted that they made him look like a Hoxton art student.  I was more taken by the claim that they were made out of heavy grade cotton, and thought they might not be as flimsy as the Millets ones, though the button fly would be a nuisance.  They arrived this morning, and they are absolutely beautiful, in an extraordinary, heavy, green and brown shot cotton fabric, very high waisted, with a little adjustable belt across the back as well as belt loops.  They are a couple of centimetres too long, but otherwise a perfect fit, and I realised that they were far too good to be immediately relegated to gardening trousers.  I could never bear to kneel on the earth in that shot cotton.  They need pressing, and turning up, and then they will be something that the Toast catalogue would want to charge me a hundred and fifteen quid for.  This fine example of the Annie Hall look set me back £9.99 plus postage, which seems a bargain.  But does not solve the problem of finding some new gardening trousers.

day three in the plant centre

I have just finished a thirty hour working week in three days, and I am tired.  Today, just as it got to five o'clock and we were down to one customer, and I was beginning to think that I could spend the last hour peacefully putting pots back in order and watering a few climbers I'd noticed were dry, the delivery of Italian plants that the manager was hoping wouldn't come until tomorrow arrived.

The Italian plants always come in an articulated lorry.  The drive at the plant centre is too small to take artics, and the owners always specify that our suppliers mustn't use them, but that doesn't do any good when the plants are coming all the way from Tuscany.  One driver did once ignore the No Artics sign and make his way up to the house, and it took a very long time to get him out again. None of us at the plant centre speak Polish, but my colleagues got the gist of what he was saying, and it was not at all polite.  Today's driver parked out on the road, meaning that passing traffic had to overtake him slightly too close to a nasty blind corner, and we needed to get the plants offloaded as quickly as possible.  The gardener was summoned from the far end of the garden to tow trailer loads of plants up the drive behind the tractor, and the rest of us toiled too and fro pushing the silver trolleys that the customers use.

The young gardener had got a lucky break, since he had the day off to make up for doing car park duty yesterday, and the boss managed to be out, but the owner came and lifted and hauled with the rest of us.  We tried to put like with like in neat rows, but most of the magnolias didn't seem to have labels, and I reckon it is going to take the manager most of tomorrow morning and drive him half mad in the process, trying to work out what they all are.  By the time we'd finished we had straggling lines of slightly squashed plants flopping over most of the lawn outside the loos.  They will look much better once they have been watered and released from the plastic nets they are wrapped in for travel.

I had a close encounter with another delivery in the morning, as a small lorry arrived with some fake lead pots, just as I was loading trays of ferns from the day's very first delivery into a trolley.  I summoned the manager over the radio, and the lorry driver, seeing me with the ferns, said cheerfully that I might be able to help him, and began to pick my brains about an Escallonia that he had bought at a car boot sale.  I'm always happy to talk plants, and admired his enterprise.

We were busy again.  My young colleague was back at work and able to operate the tea room, but the manager and I were left with it while she went for her lunch, which meant that the manager had to do it, since my hands looked as though I'd spent the morning moving trays of ferns around.  The manager was already incredibly busy trying to do manager things, and does not know how to work the hot milk machine (neither do I).  He tried to fetch my young colleague back from her lunch break, but she had got wise to this ploy, and disappeared to eat her lunch somewhere other than the staff room.  We badly need somebody to operate the tea room (Boss, if you are reading this, we need someone to do the tea room.  Please.).  The manager began to look distinctly frayed at the edges.  Even when my young colleague is doing the teas, it takes a great deal of her time, which leaves us with only two people to do everything else.  The tills, the telephones, the finding plants for people, the e-mails and the manager things, like ordering the next lorry loads of fake lead pots and Italian plants.  Two people can only do so much, though the customers who had to queue to pay while I finished the phone calls I was on when they arrived at the till were very nice about it.

When I got home, my Chelsea Flower Show tickets had arrived, which was a great relief, given our local postal service's record of randomly delivering other people's mail to our house, while things we were expecting fail to arrive at all.  I have been gently fretting about the tickets since the start of the month, and was very happy to see them.  The Systems Administrator reported that the chickens had laid three eggs, all in the nesting box, on their new regime of more layers' pellets and less grain, so things are looking up on the poultry front as well.