The three Roscoea x beesiana I planted down in the ditch bed in the spring did not do at all well. I bought them as dried bulbs from small bulb specialists Broadleigh, potted them up individually and grew them on in the greenhouse before planting them out in the summer. The bulbs are strange, fleshy, multi-fanged things, more like an Erythronium than anything else I'v handled, and I was careful not to let them sit too wet after losing pots of actual Erythronium to rot through over zealous watering. They made slightly sad little tufts of leaves, and then I read that they should be planted four to six inches deep to protect the bulbs from frost, so I had to virtually bury the leaves when I planted them out. This may or may not have set them back.
I am partial to Roscoea. The plant centre used to sell a rather brash purple one, but R. x beesiana is subtler, pale yellow with purple streaks. The flowers are quite exotic, vaguely reminiscent of some sort of orchid with lower petals that hang down like the falls of an iris, and upper petals that stick up like perky rabbit ears. They are supposed to grow in partial to full shade, and flower later in the year than most woodland plants, and I thought they would bring a welcome touch of summer interest to the ditch bed.
Things didn't work out like that. Nothing ate them so far as I could see, but the leaves remained small and spindly, and the plants never rallied their energies enough to flower. Looking at the spot where I had them I had to admit that nowadays that end of the ditch bed really is dark in summer. In late winter and spring before the leaves on the trees are fully out it's fine for snowdrops and primroses, but by the middle of the year it has turned into a very gloomy tunnel as the trees have grown, with three river birches on one side and my seed raised Zelkova carpinifolia on the other. There's shade and then there's shade, and this seems to be too much shade. A willow leaved gentian I tried nearby after seeing one flowering one September at Wallington in Northumberland has done equally badly
So this afternoon, before the pathetic leaves could disappear entirely and I lost track of where the bulbs were, I very carefully dug them up again. The soil in the ditch bed was quite dry, which may not have been to the Roscoea's liking either. The bulbs weren't actually too bad, with modest signs of growth in the form of a few knobbly white protuberances. I potted them into modest nine centimetre pots for the while, mainly to keep them from drying out, reasoning that as Broadleigh sold them in their spring catalogue they presumably weren't doing much in the autumn, and put them in a propagating case out of reach of the mice with a note on the label to pot them deeper next spring once they were in active growth, and a mental note not to over water them in the meantime. Next year, if they survive the cold and damp and mice over the winter, I'll need to find them a new and lighter home.
Wednesday, 21 September 2016
Tuesday, 20 September 2016
tidying the herb bed
Today I tidied quite a lot of the herb bed, though not all of it so I couldn't cross it off the list of Things to Do. Once the postman had been I could have dragged the Henchman platform out from the middle of the turning circle and gone on with cutting the hedge, but I suppose I just fancied a change from great piles of eleagnus clippings. And although much of the herb bed tidying consisted of chopping down the old stalks of mint, lemon verbena and oregano, their stems are so soft they require no effort to cut, whereas the hedge is a bit harder on the hands.
Climbing rose 'Meg' is looking very sad. I gave her a dose of blood, fish and bone at the start of the season and another handful mid way through the summer and even watered her a couple of times, but it was evidently not enough, and by now most of the leaves have dropped off. She did not make any new shoots at all this year from low down, while some of the old branches died. This is clearly unsustainable. Roses need to keep renewing themselves, or there isn't a lot left, given a few years.
There is an ash seedling growing up through the roof of the chicken run. I have cut it down to roof level every couple of years but not grubbed it out entirely, because that seemed too much like hard work and because the chickens like a bit of shade and shelter anyway. After this year's rain in June the ash raced away, and I was thinking that it really was too much and I must make sure to cut it back in the winter, then a few weeks ago it suddenly began to look sparse and thin. I'm not sure if the problem was simply drought, and the sand is too mere for ash in very hot weather, or if it means the disease has arrived. Many of the leaves went brown, but did not display the brown staining down the central vein that I've seen in pictures, and the bark of the trunk has not cracked below the affected branches. But the disease is coming, make no mistake. We have seen dead young trees in Suffolk. It is rather gloomy, looking up at your trees every now and then and wondering when they will fall sick, knowing that most of them will.
The herb bed is infested with at least one species of creeping grass, and possibly two. It (or they) have crept through the roots of the mint and the lemon verbena and the oregano, so it is impossible ever to dig them out entirely. Experience teaches me that even when the grass has not gone through the roots of other things it is very difficult to dig it all out. The odd little bit always runs down really deep, ready to recolonise the area even after it's been dug over repeatedly. I managed to winkle out quite a lot of the roots, and the herbs coexist with the grass. Once they shoot up in the summer they hide the odd grass stem, and I yank off the tallest bits and try to make sure that at least it can't seed itself.
There is bindweed as well. I have never worked out how bindweed chooses where to live, and why it is a nuisance in some beds and absent from others. Is it particular about soil? Is it spread by birds who don't favour all parts of the garden equally? I just pull off the top growth and whatever root I can get out with a hand fork, resigned to the fact that I am never going to get all the roots.
The clematis on their tripods are looking OK so far. I watered them quite often when I had the hose out to do the greenhouse and the pots on the concrete. The very small bay tree bought as a truly tiny plant in a nine centimetre pot from a garden centre's herb range is finally growing, after a very slow start. When I first bought it I moved it to a bigger pot and grew it on for a while before planting it out, but once planted it did not like the winter cold or the summer droughts. Now it seems as though it might have got its roots down at last and be ready to do something. It would be nice if it was big enough for me to dare to remove the odd leaf for cooking. So far it hasn't looked as if it could spare any.
Climbing rose 'Meg' is looking very sad. I gave her a dose of blood, fish and bone at the start of the season and another handful mid way through the summer and even watered her a couple of times, but it was evidently not enough, and by now most of the leaves have dropped off. She did not make any new shoots at all this year from low down, while some of the old branches died. This is clearly unsustainable. Roses need to keep renewing themselves, or there isn't a lot left, given a few years.
There is an ash seedling growing up through the roof of the chicken run. I have cut it down to roof level every couple of years but not grubbed it out entirely, because that seemed too much like hard work and because the chickens like a bit of shade and shelter anyway. After this year's rain in June the ash raced away, and I was thinking that it really was too much and I must make sure to cut it back in the winter, then a few weeks ago it suddenly began to look sparse and thin. I'm not sure if the problem was simply drought, and the sand is too mere for ash in very hot weather, or if it means the disease has arrived. Many of the leaves went brown, but did not display the brown staining down the central vein that I've seen in pictures, and the bark of the trunk has not cracked below the affected branches. But the disease is coming, make no mistake. We have seen dead young trees in Suffolk. It is rather gloomy, looking up at your trees every now and then and wondering when they will fall sick, knowing that most of them will.
The herb bed is infested with at least one species of creeping grass, and possibly two. It (or they) have crept through the roots of the mint and the lemon verbena and the oregano, so it is impossible ever to dig them out entirely. Experience teaches me that even when the grass has not gone through the roots of other things it is very difficult to dig it all out. The odd little bit always runs down really deep, ready to recolonise the area even after it's been dug over repeatedly. I managed to winkle out quite a lot of the roots, and the herbs coexist with the grass. Once they shoot up in the summer they hide the odd grass stem, and I yank off the tallest bits and try to make sure that at least it can't seed itself.
There is bindweed as well. I have never worked out how bindweed chooses where to live, and why it is a nuisance in some beds and absent from others. Is it particular about soil? Is it spread by birds who don't favour all parts of the garden equally? I just pull off the top growth and whatever root I can get out with a hand fork, resigned to the fact that I am never going to get all the roots.
The clematis on their tripods are looking OK so far. I watered them quite often when I had the hose out to do the greenhouse and the pots on the concrete. The very small bay tree bought as a truly tiny plant in a nine centimetre pot from a garden centre's herb range is finally growing, after a very slow start. When I first bought it I moved it to a bigger pot and grew it on for a while before planting it out, but once planted it did not like the winter cold or the summer droughts. Now it seems as though it might have got its roots down at last and be ready to do something. It would be nice if it was big enough for me to dare to remove the odd leaf for cooking. So far it hasn't looked as if it could spare any.
Monday, 19 September 2016
getting back into the swing of gardening
I was surprised at how stiff I felt this morning after yesterday's efforts. I thought we had quite an active holiday walking around gardens and exploring ruins, but clearly time spent shuffling through stately homes doesn't provide an equivalent workout to hedge cutting, not to mention all the hours of sitting in the car. And my hands were tired enough last night for me to think that even though I've just had my secateurs sharpened and they are the best swivelling handle Felcos, still I had better pace myself with the pruning and alternate between that and other jobs not needing the secateurs so that I didn't wake up one day and find I'd knackered my grip and wouldn't be able to do anything for a month.
So I made tomato soup, since we have tomatoes. I told the housesitters they were welcome to eat any of the tomatoes as they ripened and asked that they pick the rest of the ripe ones and put them in the fridge, but they don't seem to have done either of these things, to judge from the quantity of ripe and in some cases overripe fruit on the plants and absence of picked ones. They probably didn't notice the instruction about the tomatoes in the welter of advice about the cats. My basic tomato soup method is to sweat onion and carrot in butter, then add the tomatoes and simmer until everything's soft, then liquidise, pips and all. It makes quite an acceptable soup even if you don't have any stock, with a sprinkle of Marigold powder and a herb of your choice. At the moment I'm using dried basil, which works fine. If you don't happen to have grown any basil, and I haven't, it negates the idea of a cheap basic soup if you have to go and buy a packet or pot of the fresh stuff. If I am feeling lavish I might add some tomato puree and a tiny bit of sugar for extra tomato taste, or some cream if I have any. I might progress to tomato and lentil soup now it's autumn, in which case I could switch ground cumin for the basil.
I tried to ring the plastic company about my acrylic sheet, but nothing happens when you ring their number and their website doesn't come up any more, so I think they have gone bust. I have lodged a claim with PayPal and am waiting to see what happens next. In all my years of internet shopping this is the first time I've had a supplier fail so the PayPal compensation scheme is a whole new uncharted territory. It is a nuisance. We'd used that plastic distributor twice before and they used to be very good. There again, plastics stockholding is not a high quality business. In my small company days I don't think I'd have expected it to be on a very high rating.
After lunch I went to the dump with another five bags of long grass from the lawns, and a box with the broken glass from the greenhouse roof. Ah, the glamour and excitement of gardening. I thought I would treat myself to a new large propagating case for this year's pots of dwarf bulbs, after having to seal up the old cases last year with gaffer tape where the corners had chipped and the roof vents had dropped out, and the two years before that where I didn't manage to shut the cases sufficiently and the mice destroyed almost every bulb. However, the Clacton garden centre had run out of lids, and I had to make do with a new pair of gardening socks.
Something has been burrowing in the largest pot in the conservatory, excavating quite a pile of compost and bits of chewed root from the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone'. I suspect mice, having not found any cat poo in the pile of dug-out compost. I was all set to lay an electric rat zapper but found that one of my traps, the one that got rained on when the pane fell out of the greenhouse roof and has been drying in the laundry ever since, did not show any signs of life even with four new batteries, while the batteries in the second had rotted and dissolved two of the terminals. The Systems Administrator kindly switched the intact battery holder from the defunct zapper to the trap that had not been watered, and it is duly charged with fresh batteries and baited with a peanut. I shall see what I catch, if anything. The SA thought one of the cats might have mistaken the giant pot for a conveniently situated litter tray, but I am sure it's mice. There is a hole.
So I made tomato soup, since we have tomatoes. I told the housesitters they were welcome to eat any of the tomatoes as they ripened and asked that they pick the rest of the ripe ones and put them in the fridge, but they don't seem to have done either of these things, to judge from the quantity of ripe and in some cases overripe fruit on the plants and absence of picked ones. They probably didn't notice the instruction about the tomatoes in the welter of advice about the cats. My basic tomato soup method is to sweat onion and carrot in butter, then add the tomatoes and simmer until everything's soft, then liquidise, pips and all. It makes quite an acceptable soup even if you don't have any stock, with a sprinkle of Marigold powder and a herb of your choice. At the moment I'm using dried basil, which works fine. If you don't happen to have grown any basil, and I haven't, it negates the idea of a cheap basic soup if you have to go and buy a packet or pot of the fresh stuff. If I am feeling lavish I might add some tomato puree and a tiny bit of sugar for extra tomato taste, or some cream if I have any. I might progress to tomato and lentil soup now it's autumn, in which case I could switch ground cumin for the basil.
I tried to ring the plastic company about my acrylic sheet, but nothing happens when you ring their number and their website doesn't come up any more, so I think they have gone bust. I have lodged a claim with PayPal and am waiting to see what happens next. In all my years of internet shopping this is the first time I've had a supplier fail so the PayPal compensation scheme is a whole new uncharted territory. It is a nuisance. We'd used that plastic distributor twice before and they used to be very good. There again, plastics stockholding is not a high quality business. In my small company days I don't think I'd have expected it to be on a very high rating.
After lunch I went to the dump with another five bags of long grass from the lawns, and a box with the broken glass from the greenhouse roof. Ah, the glamour and excitement of gardening. I thought I would treat myself to a new large propagating case for this year's pots of dwarf bulbs, after having to seal up the old cases last year with gaffer tape where the corners had chipped and the roof vents had dropped out, and the two years before that where I didn't manage to shut the cases sufficiently and the mice destroyed almost every bulb. However, the Clacton garden centre had run out of lids, and I had to make do with a new pair of gardening socks.
Something has been burrowing in the largest pot in the conservatory, excavating quite a pile of compost and bits of chewed root from the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone'. I suspect mice, having not found any cat poo in the pile of dug-out compost. I was all set to lay an electric rat zapper but found that one of my traps, the one that got rained on when the pane fell out of the greenhouse roof and has been drying in the laundry ever since, did not show any signs of life even with four new batteries, while the batteries in the second had rotted and dissolved two of the terminals. The Systems Administrator kindly switched the intact battery holder from the defunct zapper to the trap that had not been watered, and it is duly charged with fresh batteries and baited with a peanut. I shall see what I catch, if anything. The SA thought one of the cats might have mistaken the giant pot for a conveniently situated litter tray, but I am sure it's mice. There is a hole.
Sunday, 18 September 2016
hedge cutting
I spent today cutting the eleagnus hedge. What started as a welcome thickening after its severe reduction last autumn and the odd wispy shoot growing out into the drive was starting to get out of hand, to the point where visiting delivery van drivers were beginning to eye it up cautiously. And it was doing that infuriating thing that hedges made out of fairly lax plants do, and flopping out at the top. Cutting it has been on my list of things to do for some time, until post holiday and with the weather being cooler it bubbled up to the top.
The hedge is just coming into flower, and as it seems a shame to remove every bud and I don't want another winter staring at bare stems I am leaving it fairly shaggy rather than trying to clip it back to a billiard table finish. The theory is that it can have a second clip over in the spring, just as it's coming into growth. Even so I was worried before I started about how long it was going to take. Last year's big cut seemed to take up weeks of gardening time. I started before we went on holiday and as far as I can remember the job lasted the rest of September when we got back. Happily this time the job is going rather faster: I must have cut over half the side facing the drive, and shredded quite a lot of the prunings as I went along.
The point of shredding the debris is two-fold, so that I can add the trimmings to the compost heap, and so that they will not hang around the bonfire area for ages. Whole dried leaves of Eleagnus x ebbingei are astonishingly leathery, and seem to last for ever without rotting. Last year they all fell off the great pile of prunings before the Systems Administrator got around to burning them, and it was another job in itself gathering them up and disposing of them. Shredded and mixed in with other types of garden waste they disappear in a more reasonable timescale.
The problem comes with the smallest and sappiest growth, which tends to wrap itself around the insides of the shredder instead of chopping into neat bits. The trick is to feed an older and woodier stem through the shredder every so often, which sweeps the sappy bits along with it in its progress through the machine. This time the balance of soft regrowth and older wood was not quite right for optimum shredding, and I was left with a pile of twigs that wouldn't feed through the shredder. I snipped some up with secateurs as a last job to do while the light failed, but some may end up on the bonfire. Home made compost is good stuff, but there's a limit to how much time you can invest in making it.
The hedge is just coming into flower, and as it seems a shame to remove every bud and I don't want another winter staring at bare stems I am leaving it fairly shaggy rather than trying to clip it back to a billiard table finish. The theory is that it can have a second clip over in the spring, just as it's coming into growth. Even so I was worried before I started about how long it was going to take. Last year's big cut seemed to take up weeks of gardening time. I started before we went on holiday and as far as I can remember the job lasted the rest of September when we got back. Happily this time the job is going rather faster: I must have cut over half the side facing the drive, and shredded quite a lot of the prunings as I went along.
The point of shredding the debris is two-fold, so that I can add the trimmings to the compost heap, and so that they will not hang around the bonfire area for ages. Whole dried leaves of Eleagnus x ebbingei are astonishingly leathery, and seem to last for ever without rotting. Last year they all fell off the great pile of prunings before the Systems Administrator got around to burning them, and it was another job in itself gathering them up and disposing of them. Shredded and mixed in with other types of garden waste they disappear in a more reasonable timescale.
The problem comes with the smallest and sappiest growth, which tends to wrap itself around the insides of the shredder instead of chopping into neat bits. The trick is to feed an older and woodier stem through the shredder every so often, which sweeps the sappy bits along with it in its progress through the machine. This time the balance of soft regrowth and older wood was not quite right for optimum shredding, and I was left with a pile of twigs that wouldn't feed through the shredder. I snipped some up with secateurs as a last job to do while the light failed, but some may end up on the bonfire. Home made compost is good stuff, but there's a limit to how much time you can invest in making it.
Saturday, 17 September 2016
two museums, one castle, a waterfall, an old railway station, and part of a garden
We spent Friday touristing closer to the cottage, to give the Systems Administrator a break from the A1 before the journey home, and because it was forecast to be the greyest and dampest day of the week and we wanted to visit The Bowes Museum. It is supposed to have one of the finest collections of decorative and fine art in the country, tucked away in the relative obscurity (from the point of view of London and the south east) of Barnard Castle. I'd long been aware of it, without knowing exactly where it was except that it was in the north, and as we firmed up on this year's holiday I realised we'd be staying ten miles down the road from it. It turned out to be a very, very good museum, and if we lived close by I'd go often, especially as I get in for free with my Art Pass. We looked at eighteenth and nineteenth century French furniture, and a splendid collection of porcelain, and a great many pictures and sculptures spanning the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, including an El Greco and a vast, extraordinary Italian alter piece. We looked at glassware and silverware and coins, until after two hours our brains were bursting and we could not absorb any more art. This was a slight shame, since the piece de resistance of The Bowes Museum is their mechanical silver swan, a twin to the one in The Hermitage Museum, and it operates once daily but not until two. Still, we have seen its trick of swivelling its neck and devouring a silver fish from the rippling crystal stream on television, and probably lots of people would have wanted to see it move and we would all have had to stand a distance from the cabinet, but we were able to have a good look at it when it was not moving and marvel at the delicacy of its construction. The museum was the creation and gift of a local landowner and his French wife, and occupies a handsome building styled along the lines of a French chateau designed and built for the purpose. Sadly, they both died before it was finished. Other donors have continued to swell the collection, and it is absolutely superb, and very uncrowded and quiet to visit compare to the latest London blockbuster. I really liked the Bowes.
Then by way of a change we drove up Teesdale to High Force. Local tourist marketing mythology has it down as the tallest waterfall in England, though according to its Wikipedia entry it isn't. It doesn't matter, tallest or second or third tallest it is spectacular. The whole of the Tees, not just one side tributary, has carved itself a gorge in the upper part of Teesdale, and at High Force it rushes over the Whin Sill, a great layer of hard igneous rock lying across the north east. It crops up again under some of the Northumbrian castles and parts of Hadrian's Wall. The path to High Force is rather sedate, being neatly graded and gravelled by the Raby Estate which owns the falls, but you can scramble out on to the rocky beach below the waterfall if you so choose and sit on a boulder while you contemplate The Sublime. It is very impressive and quite loud. The waters of the Tees are stained a rich brown by the peat. We noticed that further downstream, and it gives High Force a cappuccino tinge.
We wanted to see more of Richmond before the holiday ended, and took the scenic route over the moors via Brough. The north Pennines are magnificent and brooding, the striped poles two metres high that run along the verges giving you an idea of what it might be like in the winter when it snows. Compared to the Lake District the landscape is vast, the moors stretching wider and further than any fell, the valleys broader and more intensively farmed. It is a great part of the world if you like big, open landscapes and wandering about looking at stuff.
One of Richmond's medieval churches has served since the 1970s as home to The Green Howards Museum which tells the history of the local regiment. It has recently been refurbished, and seemed to me to be very well done. This was confirmed by the SA, who as a keen military historian has more of a framework on which to hang the sort of information in the museum, and is more likely to spot any errors. Then we went and looked at the inside of Richmond Castle, built as a royal castle not long after the Norman invasion but which never saw active service. It is quite large with a well preserved keep, and good views of the town from the top of the keep, including a glimpse down into the delightful garden of Millgate House. English Heritage a few years ago sponsored the creation of modern gardens at several of their castles, presumably wanting to increase their general level of visitor interest, but meaning they are now saddled with the maintenance expenses of features that are nothing whatsoever to do with the main historic element. At Richmond this takes the form of quite a lot of whiskery yew hedges and modernist blocky topiary, all on a sloping site making it impossible to stand a simple platform. I predict the management will regret this in years to come, now they are supposed to cover their own costs as visitor attractions. The man on the door tried very hard to sell us a guide book and then to persuade us to join English Heritage.
Finally we strolled down to the old railway station, since it is not in the SA's nature to visit a town and not inspect the station. The line ended on the opposite bank of the river to the main part of the town, and Richmond is the only town in England where the railway company paid for a bridge that had a road on it rather than the railway. The station is now used as an art cum bijou leisure centre, with a cinema and cafe plus various shops and galleries, and we ate a late tea while thinking that it would be nice to go to the cinema there, if you lived in Richmond.
And today we saw a little part of one garden as we broke the journey home at Anglesey Abbey, to give the SA a break from driving and so that we would not arrive home too early while the housesitters were still having their lunch and before they had loaded their car. The gardens include a great dahlia border, which ought to be at its peak in mid September, and was. It is colour graded, moving from pale yellow at one end via orange, red, purple and mauve, to pink and eventually white. They are all good gaudy doubles, cactus and pompom forms, none of your subdued good taste not-really-like-a-dahlia singles, and the effect is striking. We drove over specially to see it a few years back, and only discovered after someone in the visitor centre had sold us a guide to the individual varieties for fifty pence that access to the dahlia walk was closed at both ends to save the grass. After that and a similar experience when we drove over to see the snowdrops I rather went off Anglesey Abbey, but it might be time to forgive them. We did not have time to look at most of the rest of the garden or the watermill, but did discover a truly impressive display of Cyclamen hederifolium under the trees en route to the dahlias.
When we got home we still had four cats and six hens, which was a relief. I was worried about how the kittens would react being left with strange people for the first time, and whether the serious kitten would refuse to come in at night, and it turns out he did stay out at night a couple of times but survived the experience. Mr Fluffy and the ever energetic Mr Fidget both seemed to have grown in the week and looked much more like cats than when we went away. They all remembered who we were and were pleased to see us, which was nice.
Then by way of a change we drove up Teesdale to High Force. Local tourist marketing mythology has it down as the tallest waterfall in England, though according to its Wikipedia entry it isn't. It doesn't matter, tallest or second or third tallest it is spectacular. The whole of the Tees, not just one side tributary, has carved itself a gorge in the upper part of Teesdale, and at High Force it rushes over the Whin Sill, a great layer of hard igneous rock lying across the north east. It crops up again under some of the Northumbrian castles and parts of Hadrian's Wall. The path to High Force is rather sedate, being neatly graded and gravelled by the Raby Estate which owns the falls, but you can scramble out on to the rocky beach below the waterfall if you so choose and sit on a boulder while you contemplate The Sublime. It is very impressive and quite loud. The waters of the Tees are stained a rich brown by the peat. We noticed that further downstream, and it gives High Force a cappuccino tinge.
We wanted to see more of Richmond before the holiday ended, and took the scenic route over the moors via Brough. The north Pennines are magnificent and brooding, the striped poles two metres high that run along the verges giving you an idea of what it might be like in the winter when it snows. Compared to the Lake District the landscape is vast, the moors stretching wider and further than any fell, the valleys broader and more intensively farmed. It is a great part of the world if you like big, open landscapes and wandering about looking at stuff.
One of Richmond's medieval churches has served since the 1970s as home to The Green Howards Museum which tells the history of the local regiment. It has recently been refurbished, and seemed to me to be very well done. This was confirmed by the SA, who as a keen military historian has more of a framework on which to hang the sort of information in the museum, and is more likely to spot any errors. Then we went and looked at the inside of Richmond Castle, built as a royal castle not long after the Norman invasion but which never saw active service. It is quite large with a well preserved keep, and good views of the town from the top of the keep, including a glimpse down into the delightful garden of Millgate House. English Heritage a few years ago sponsored the creation of modern gardens at several of their castles, presumably wanting to increase their general level of visitor interest, but meaning they are now saddled with the maintenance expenses of features that are nothing whatsoever to do with the main historic element. At Richmond this takes the form of quite a lot of whiskery yew hedges and modernist blocky topiary, all on a sloping site making it impossible to stand a simple platform. I predict the management will regret this in years to come, now they are supposed to cover their own costs as visitor attractions. The man on the door tried very hard to sell us a guide book and then to persuade us to join English Heritage.
Finally we strolled down to the old railway station, since it is not in the SA's nature to visit a town and not inspect the station. The line ended on the opposite bank of the river to the main part of the town, and Richmond is the only town in England where the railway company paid for a bridge that had a road on it rather than the railway. The station is now used as an art cum bijou leisure centre, with a cinema and cafe plus various shops and galleries, and we ate a late tea while thinking that it would be nice to go to the cinema there, if you lived in Richmond.
And today we saw a little part of one garden as we broke the journey home at Anglesey Abbey, to give the SA a break from driving and so that we would not arrive home too early while the housesitters were still having their lunch and before they had loaded their car. The gardens include a great dahlia border, which ought to be at its peak in mid September, and was. It is colour graded, moving from pale yellow at one end via orange, red, purple and mauve, to pink and eventually white. They are all good gaudy doubles, cactus and pompom forms, none of your subdued good taste not-really-like-a-dahlia singles, and the effect is striking. We drove over specially to see it a few years back, and only discovered after someone in the visitor centre had sold us a guide to the individual varieties for fifty pence that access to the dahlia walk was closed at both ends to save the grass. After that and a similar experience when we drove over to see the snowdrops I rather went off Anglesey Abbey, but it might be time to forgive them. We did not have time to look at most of the rest of the garden or the watermill, but did discover a truly impressive display of Cyclamen hederifolium under the trees en route to the dahlias.
When we got home we still had four cats and six hens, which was a relief. I was worried about how the kittens would react being left with strange people for the first time, and whether the serious kitten would refuse to come in at night, and it turns out he did stay out at night a couple of times but survived the experience. Mr Fluffy and the ever energetic Mr Fidget both seemed to have grown in the week and looked much more like cats than when we went away. They all remembered who we were and were pleased to see us, which was nice.
Friday, 16 September 2016
two gardens, a viaduct and a museum
Wednesday was forecast to be brighter on the Cumbrian side of the Pennines than in the east. I was keen to make a return visit to Levens Hall, which we last visited in 1984, and the Systems Administrator wanted to see the Ribblehead viaduct from the ground having previously ridden over it in a train, so Wednesday seemed the obvious day to head west. Granted, it is a fair drive from Barnard Castle, but still a lot closer than starting from north Essex.
The gardens at Levens open at ten, but the house doesn't open until one. Four hours seemed more than enough time to spend looking at topiary, so we decided to start off with the gardens at Holker Hall near Grange-over-Sands. We stopped there once before, on our way to visit friends in the Lakes, and after an hour or so the Systems Administrator said we could not stay any longer or we would be so late it would be rude. I liked the gardens so much the first time round I bought the owner's book about them, and was eager to see them again. They are medium sized in grand garden terms at around twenty five acres, set in extremely beautiful countryside. Near the house are formal gardens with topiary, and bedded out blue salvias still putting on a bright show in mid September. As you go further from the house the garden gets wilder and more naturalistic, as you'd expect, until suddenly you come to another formal garden, sunken and paved with a little stone garden pavilion romantically overgrown with vines, pond and waterspout, and pergola, and at this time of the year quantities of small flowered, late clematis rambling over and through the other plants in the borders and the stone wall along the back. It is such a good trick to confound visitors' expectations by altering the usual running order of garden features, and I liked the sunken garden very much. There are all sorts of interesting trees in the grassy areas away from the house, including the Holker lime, a leviathan 7.9 metres in girth. New since our previous visit is a grassy bowl designed by Kim Wilkie, which has a strangely soothing quality as sun falls on its opposite sides at different angles so changing the apparent colour of the grass. We didn't bother with the hall, but the garden at Holker is a delight.
At Levens Hall we started with the house, to make a change after just viewing a garden, and because the house closes earlier and you never want to feel you are looking at things against the clock. The house as now seen was mostly constructed between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It still has its original Elizabethan oak panelling and plasterwork and some marvellous leather wallpapers, and is largely furnished in the dark and massive Jacobean style. I really like that sort of thing, while seeing why it was that by the Georgian era people were ready for a change. It seems a miracle that Levens survived so unaltered and unmodernised, but when we asked one of the guides why this was and whether it was because the money had run out she said no, the family had been wealthy enough, but Levens had ceased to be their main seat and had been occupied by a series of long-lived widows who liked it as it had always had been.
The famous topiary garden was laid out at the very end of the seventeenth century. What I had not reckoned with when I requested we add Levens Hall to our itinerary was that in September they would be cutting it. This meant that one corner was cordoned off, and there was some noise, on the other hand it was so interesting to see how they did it. A gardener was tackling the top of one of the large yews with a battery powered, long handled hedge trimmer, working from a cherry picker he could operate from the platform. Between cutting sessions he spent a long time flicking away the cut ends with a long bamboo cane. That must be tricky, since freshly cut yew on yew is quite difficult to see, but it dries to a deep brown that would show up badly, and by then the hydraulic platform would have gone back to the hire depot. The beds surrounding the clipped yews and box are always bedded out, this year in a bright combination of vivid yellow and purple, which was still looking extremely colourful despite the lateness of the season. Maybe it is easier to make things last in the west where they get more rain.
Then came our pilgrimage to the Ribblehead Viaduct. The Settle and Carlisle line was one of the last major trunk routes to be built, the viaduct being completed in 1875. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering when you consider where it is, hundreds of feet up in the middle of a moor. Coincidentally I had just finished reading a book about railway navvies picked up on our last holiday the very night before we went to see Ribblehead, and the final chapter was about the Settle and Carlisle, so I know that apart from dealing with ground so boggy that barrows had to use barrels for wheels or they sank into the ooze, the soil the navvies had to excavate was largely boulder clay. Dry, it was hard as cement and you could scarcely drive a pick axe into it, wet it turned to slurry so sticky it wouldn't tip out of the wagons used to shift it. The workmen spent a year building one embankment without advancing a yard, the loads of clay they tipped running everywhere across the slope except where they were wanted. More recently Ribblehead makes an appearance in Ben Wheatley's black comedy Sightseers about a couple on a caravan holiday that turns nasty.
Even further up the moors along really tiny roads is England's highest railway station. Dent Station is 1,150 feet above sea level, annual rainfall around ninety two inches. The old station is now a holiday let, and while trains still stop it looks as though you have to buy your ticket on the train with not even a ticket machine on the platform. The Systems Administrator, who is a mine of useful information about railways, told me firstly that the Settle and Carlisle had not overall been especially expensive to build, despite the incredible engineering works of the viaduct and the tunnels, because the land the route followed was so cheap to buy, and secondly that nowadays it is largely used for freight when it hasn't been partially blocked by landslips like it is at the moment, providing useful extra north-south capacity.
And that was Wednesday, and supper is not yet ready, so I shall press on, though the internet connection in the cottage is rather dodgy. On Thursday we went to Beamish, the great museum of life in the north east just north of Durham. Again, it was not the closest visitor attraction to where we are staying, but it is a fabulous museum and the cottage was picked to be strategically handy for the A66 and A1. We visited Beamish four years ago, and it was vast, with more to see and do than you could ever see or do in a day. They have moved endangered buildings from their original sites to create a pit village and pit head, town of the early 1900s, Georgian valley, and 1940s farm. Vintage trams and buses take you around the site if you don't feel like walking, and in almost every building there is something being made or working. The hundred and fifty year old engine at the colliery (which I now know was not a beam engine but a vertical piston A frame engine) was in steam so we could see its mighty flywheel turning and piston rising and falling. Cakes were being made and sold in the bakery, heavy horses stood outside the livery yard, and in the 1940s farm we found to my great joy a vast and patient pig. Since our previous visit they have finished the reconstructed 1820s restoration of a medieval church, with a nice set of Georgian box pews coming from a church in Somerset, and a photographer's shop complete with dressing up costumes and vintage dark room has appeared in the 1900s high street. We didn't have our photo taken, but we could have. From Thursday to Sunday they were holding their annual agricultural fair, and while we missed the brass bands going on a weekday, we did have a long and instructive conversation with a clog maker about the uses and qualities of different woods. We were into Beamish at half past ten, by the time we'd queued for our tickets, and didn't leave until nearly five, and still hadn't seen everything there was to see. The tickets are valid for a year, but sadly I don't think we're likely to be in county Durham again that soon.
And two days of touristing is quite enough for one evening. I forgot to say, Barnard Castle has a very good curry house, the Bengal Merchant. If for some reason fate or choice takes you to Barnard Castle then that's the place to go.
The gardens at Levens open at ten, but the house doesn't open until one. Four hours seemed more than enough time to spend looking at topiary, so we decided to start off with the gardens at Holker Hall near Grange-over-Sands. We stopped there once before, on our way to visit friends in the Lakes, and after an hour or so the Systems Administrator said we could not stay any longer or we would be so late it would be rude. I liked the gardens so much the first time round I bought the owner's book about them, and was eager to see them again. They are medium sized in grand garden terms at around twenty five acres, set in extremely beautiful countryside. Near the house are formal gardens with topiary, and bedded out blue salvias still putting on a bright show in mid September. As you go further from the house the garden gets wilder and more naturalistic, as you'd expect, until suddenly you come to another formal garden, sunken and paved with a little stone garden pavilion romantically overgrown with vines, pond and waterspout, and pergola, and at this time of the year quantities of small flowered, late clematis rambling over and through the other plants in the borders and the stone wall along the back. It is such a good trick to confound visitors' expectations by altering the usual running order of garden features, and I liked the sunken garden very much. There are all sorts of interesting trees in the grassy areas away from the house, including the Holker lime, a leviathan 7.9 metres in girth. New since our previous visit is a grassy bowl designed by Kim Wilkie, which has a strangely soothing quality as sun falls on its opposite sides at different angles so changing the apparent colour of the grass. We didn't bother with the hall, but the garden at Holker is a delight.
At Levens Hall we started with the house, to make a change after just viewing a garden, and because the house closes earlier and you never want to feel you are looking at things against the clock. The house as now seen was mostly constructed between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It still has its original Elizabethan oak panelling and plasterwork and some marvellous leather wallpapers, and is largely furnished in the dark and massive Jacobean style. I really like that sort of thing, while seeing why it was that by the Georgian era people were ready for a change. It seems a miracle that Levens survived so unaltered and unmodernised, but when we asked one of the guides why this was and whether it was because the money had run out she said no, the family had been wealthy enough, but Levens had ceased to be their main seat and had been occupied by a series of long-lived widows who liked it as it had always had been.
The famous topiary garden was laid out at the very end of the seventeenth century. What I had not reckoned with when I requested we add Levens Hall to our itinerary was that in September they would be cutting it. This meant that one corner was cordoned off, and there was some noise, on the other hand it was so interesting to see how they did it. A gardener was tackling the top of one of the large yews with a battery powered, long handled hedge trimmer, working from a cherry picker he could operate from the platform. Between cutting sessions he spent a long time flicking away the cut ends with a long bamboo cane. That must be tricky, since freshly cut yew on yew is quite difficult to see, but it dries to a deep brown that would show up badly, and by then the hydraulic platform would have gone back to the hire depot. The beds surrounding the clipped yews and box are always bedded out, this year in a bright combination of vivid yellow and purple, which was still looking extremely colourful despite the lateness of the season. Maybe it is easier to make things last in the west where they get more rain.
Then came our pilgrimage to the Ribblehead Viaduct. The Settle and Carlisle line was one of the last major trunk routes to be built, the viaduct being completed in 1875. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering when you consider where it is, hundreds of feet up in the middle of a moor. Coincidentally I had just finished reading a book about railway navvies picked up on our last holiday the very night before we went to see Ribblehead, and the final chapter was about the Settle and Carlisle, so I know that apart from dealing with ground so boggy that barrows had to use barrels for wheels or they sank into the ooze, the soil the navvies had to excavate was largely boulder clay. Dry, it was hard as cement and you could scarcely drive a pick axe into it, wet it turned to slurry so sticky it wouldn't tip out of the wagons used to shift it. The workmen spent a year building one embankment without advancing a yard, the loads of clay they tipped running everywhere across the slope except where they were wanted. More recently Ribblehead makes an appearance in Ben Wheatley's black comedy Sightseers about a couple on a caravan holiday that turns nasty.
Even further up the moors along really tiny roads is England's highest railway station. Dent Station is 1,150 feet above sea level, annual rainfall around ninety two inches. The old station is now a holiday let, and while trains still stop it looks as though you have to buy your ticket on the train with not even a ticket machine on the platform. The Systems Administrator, who is a mine of useful information about railways, told me firstly that the Settle and Carlisle had not overall been especially expensive to build, despite the incredible engineering works of the viaduct and the tunnels, because the land the route followed was so cheap to buy, and secondly that nowadays it is largely used for freight when it hasn't been partially blocked by landslips like it is at the moment, providing useful extra north-south capacity.
And that was Wednesday, and supper is not yet ready, so I shall press on, though the internet connection in the cottage is rather dodgy. On Thursday we went to Beamish, the great museum of life in the north east just north of Durham. Again, it was not the closest visitor attraction to where we are staying, but it is a fabulous museum and the cottage was picked to be strategically handy for the A66 and A1. We visited Beamish four years ago, and it was vast, with more to see and do than you could ever see or do in a day. They have moved endangered buildings from their original sites to create a pit village and pit head, town of the early 1900s, Georgian valley, and 1940s farm. Vintage trams and buses take you around the site if you don't feel like walking, and in almost every building there is something being made or working. The hundred and fifty year old engine at the colliery (which I now know was not a beam engine but a vertical piston A frame engine) was in steam so we could see its mighty flywheel turning and piston rising and falling. Cakes were being made and sold in the bakery, heavy horses stood outside the livery yard, and in the 1940s farm we found to my great joy a vast and patient pig. Since our previous visit they have finished the reconstructed 1820s restoration of a medieval church, with a nice set of Georgian box pews coming from a church in Somerset, and a photographer's shop complete with dressing up costumes and vintage dark room has appeared in the 1900s high street. We didn't have our photo taken, but we could have. From Thursday to Sunday they were holding their annual agricultural fair, and while we missed the brass bands going on a weekday, we did have a long and instructive conversation with a clog maker about the uses and qualities of different woods. We were into Beamish at half past ten, by the time we'd queued for our tickets, and didn't leave until nearly five, and still hadn't seen everything there was to see. The tickets are valid for a year, but sadly I don't think we're likely to be in county Durham again that soon.
And two days of touristing is quite enough for one evening. I forgot to say, Barnard Castle has a very good curry house, the Bengal Merchant. If for some reason fate or choice takes you to Barnard Castle then that's the place to go.
Thursday, 15 September 2016
more sightseeing
We have seen too many things since I last blogged to list them all in the title, for Tristam Shandy-like my life is unfolding faster than I can write about it. So I will see how far I get this evening, before I get fed up or it's supper time.
Monday's first wildlife sighting came before we had even left the cottage, as there was a wren flitting about on the shrubby honeysuckle outside the kitchen window. Our first stop was Thorp Perrow arboretum, which I have long wanted to see. It is supposed to be one of the best collections of trees in England, and covers eighty-five acres, including a pinetum planted in Victorian times when seed of many north American species was first introduced, and a collection started by the present owner's grandfather in the 1930s. Thorp Perrow turned out to be wonderful, with all sorts of nice and interesting trees and shrubs and a very tranquil atmosphere, and one of the best garden guide books I have ever bought. Rather than putting nice printed name labels on their trees, which tend to get stolen by visitors who would like a record of something's name and haven't remembered to bring pen or paper to write them down (one hopes the rise of the camera phone is gradually putting an end to this particularly annoying practice) the Thorp Perrow trees have numbers. The guide book lists all the numbers (or at least everything planted up to 2014) with name, family, planting date where known and region of origin listed against every number, then a list of species in the arboretum at the back of the guide grouped by genus. And it included data on soil types in different parts of the arboretum, plus annual rainfall and hours of sunshine. And it will serve as a reference guide to what has successfully grown for how long in the relatively testing conditions of north Yorkshire.
And the tea shop was nice. I liked Thorp Perrow very much, but eventually had reluctantly to admit that I was not going to be able to inspect every tree personally in the course of one visit. By way of seeing a completely different way of playing with trees in a designed landscape, we went on to Hackfall Wood, somewhere else I've been aware of and wanted to see for years. Hackfall Wood is interesting on two counts: it is an ancient woodland, and in the eighteenth century was used as the basis for creating a landscape garden of follies and eyecatchers. After a period of neglect and decline in the twentieth century it was rescued, the Woodland Trust acquiring the site and a garden trust being formed to take care of the buildings, which are now Grade I listed.
The wood sits in a steep valley with a stream romantically tinkling down it, occasionally helped to tinkle better by some artful stonework. Ferns thrive in the damp air and the trunks of fallen trees periodically span the little gorge, the older ones themselves fringed with more ferns. All is extremely picturesque, and having not looked properly at the Ordnance Survey map before our walk it came as a complete surprise to me when suddenly the view opened to reveal the valley dropping down below us to a substantial river, the Ure. It was all very, very pretty. The newish car park at the Masham end is not very big, and in high season must be rammed: a Monday afternoon in mid September is probably a better time to visit. The view from the car park is stunning, across the top end of Wensleydale and right over to the vale of York and north York moors.
From Hackfall we returned to Richmond and a third approach to the designed landscape in the form of a town garden belonging to Millgate House. I think I read about it on the Richmond town website, and saw that it had received glowing reviews from all sorts of people and clutches of awards. Ever curious about gardens, it seemed worth a visit when it was right on our doorstep and only two pounds fifty to get in. Reader, it was superb. If we'd driven quite a long way with the main purpose of seeing it I wouldn't have felt cheated. The houses in Millgate present a continuous facade, and you reach the garden by opening a door with a notice on it instructing you to open the door and go down the passageway, the first part of which leads through someone's house. Both sides of the passageway are planted with ferns and roses. There is an honesty box for your two pound fifties. You turn through an opening in the wall and suddenly you are in the garden.
And what a garden. It is not very big, and sits on quite a steep slope, parts of which are terraced. There are no lawns, just narrow paths and plants. The back of Millgate House extends further down the hill than its neighbours, so that from the garden you have no sense of being overlooked except by Millgate House itself, which is a grand Georgian building with yet more plants tumbling from the first floor balcony. There are roses, clematis, hydrangeas, ferns, hostas, cheerful self seeding wanderers like Welsh poppies, phlox and all sorts of flowers growing into and around and through each other. There are topiarised hollies and box, and at least two magnolias, and clipped yews, and I found a choice little daphne unexpectedly plopped down in one densely packed bed. There are cheerful frilly fuschias in pots and little pots of succulents. There is a trough with water trickling into it from a wall spout, and lots and lots of places to sit down. It is absolutely superb, deeply atmospheric, and horticulture of the highest order. You could not ask somebody who didn't know quite a lot about plants to do anything to help you in that garden. Taste and judgement ooze out of every cranny.
And then we walked around the outside of the castle, but did not have time to go in because although the castle was open until six, we had put ourselves in a short stay car park with a maximum of two hours and our ticket was due to expire well before then.
Tuesday was earmarked for the North York Moors Railway, since it was forecast to be hot and we thought we might as well be sitting down on a train looking at the scenery rather than walking miles in the boiling heat. We got on at the Grosmont end, and were initially intimidated by the number of people wanting to get on with us, and the number of people already on the train who had got on at Whitby. According to the Systems Administrator there was some concern within the railway when they began to extend to service to Whitby, since the track from Grosmont to Whitby is part of Network Rail, and they have to pay a hefty access fee and have network accredited drivers to cover that stretch. But the enthusiasts for going to Whitby believed that it would boost the railway linking it to a main tourist destination like Whitby, and they seem to be right. We did get seats, and after the first stop we managed to bag window seats when some people got off, but the NYMR seems to be doing very well. It is the most heavily used preserved steam railway in the country, with 350,000 visitors a year, and even on a weekday in mid September they had five different locomotives in steam. A few years ago you'd only have seen that at a gala weekend.
One of the locomotives was a rare freight engine, and another was an American design shipped over here in the last war by the US army, so the Systems Administrator was happy to have seen some unusual locomotives. I have said it before but when the SA and I look at a steam train we don't see the same thing. So on the steep hill leaving Grosmont as the engine struggled to keep moving the SA knew that it was not short of steam because a fine mist of rain had fallen past the windows, a sign that the boiler safety valve had opened to release excess pressure, ergo it had full pressure. I hadn't noticed. At Grosmont are the engineering sheds, where we saw one of the engines that had been working earlier standing over an inspection pit while a man hit part of it a lot of times with a hammer. Then the rare American engine arrived, and we thought first that it was going to take on coal and then that its insides were going to be raked over, but instead a man advanced on it with another hammer.
From Grosmont we went to Saltburn-by-the-Sea, which we'd been thinking of doing before thinking of going to Whitby, and then almost going to an ironstone mining museum, which would have been a case of Saltburn doing itself out of two tourists, since we read about the museum on Saltburn's website and it is not at all close to Saltburn. The last minute return to Plan A was prompted partly by the fear that Whitby would be absolutely jam packed with tourists, and indeed there weren't many spaces in the car park at Saltburn. Saltburn-by-the-Sea was built as a tourist resort by the railway company, so our visit followed on very nicely from Sunday's trip to the Darlington railway museum, but the biggest draw was the funicular cliff railway, as featured by Michael Portillo and John Sergeant (and apparently in an episode of Inspector George Gently, but we never watched beyond the pilot episode).
The cliff railway has two cars, one going up and one down, and uses water to adjust their relative weights. We were pleased and surprised to discover it running on a weekday, since the website had made it sound as though it might only be running at weekends, but it was not only running but extremely busy. The man in charge of letting us on at the bottom told us that this had been their best and busiest season ever. It would not in fact be very hard work to walk up from the beach to the town as long as you were in normal health, since it's only a hundred and twenty feet, but the cliff railway is very fine, with stained glass windows in the two cars and a splendid Victorian waiting room at its foot. The town centre is laid out on a grid, being planned, with fine tall Victorian houses and guest houses near the sea front, some with cast iron, glass topped canopies stretching out over the pavement in front of them like those at Llandudno. The former railway station, now redeveloped for bijou retail use, is in the Italianate style. There is an Italian garden towards the back of the old town, tucked down in a valley with a promenade walk leading back to the sea front. Finding the Italian garden was the only point where Saltburn's tourist infrastructure let us down, as the previously frequent town maps petered out in one done to a different scale that didn't show the garden, while the next information board we found after that had no maps, just photographs of three buildings none of which we could see from where we were standing.
Back at the seaside, Saltburn has a pier, the most northerly public pier in England. It is not very big, but once you've passed through an unobtrusive amusement arcade at the landward end the rest of the pier is wonderfully uncluttered, with nothing but happy people walking about or fishing. I discovered afterwards that we'd been lucky with our tides, because it was surrounded by water as we walked to the end, exclaiming at how clear the sea was compared with the gloop of the Thames estuary, but when I saw it on breakfast TV as a backdrop to the weather presenter it was standing surrounded by golden sand. Which is very nice, but a pier should let you out over the water. The beach at Saltburn is vast. It must stretch for miles up the coast, and as I discovered at low tide it goes out a long way as well. The promenade is refreshingly uncluttered by advertising signs, stalls with plastic merchandise or other tat, and the general effect is more Southwold than Clacton-on-Sea. The locals don't seem to mind not having the chance to buy a plastic windmill or ice cream every six yards: the beach was good and busy with folk of all ages. According to the waiter in the Indian restaurant we went to the following day, Saltburn-by-the-Sea has always been nice.
And that has caught me up one day so I'm only two days behind, and is more than enough for one evening.
Monday's first wildlife sighting came before we had even left the cottage, as there was a wren flitting about on the shrubby honeysuckle outside the kitchen window. Our first stop was Thorp Perrow arboretum, which I have long wanted to see. It is supposed to be one of the best collections of trees in England, and covers eighty-five acres, including a pinetum planted in Victorian times when seed of many north American species was first introduced, and a collection started by the present owner's grandfather in the 1930s. Thorp Perrow turned out to be wonderful, with all sorts of nice and interesting trees and shrubs and a very tranquil atmosphere, and one of the best garden guide books I have ever bought. Rather than putting nice printed name labels on their trees, which tend to get stolen by visitors who would like a record of something's name and haven't remembered to bring pen or paper to write them down (one hopes the rise of the camera phone is gradually putting an end to this particularly annoying practice) the Thorp Perrow trees have numbers. The guide book lists all the numbers (or at least everything planted up to 2014) with name, family, planting date where known and region of origin listed against every number, then a list of species in the arboretum at the back of the guide grouped by genus. And it included data on soil types in different parts of the arboretum, plus annual rainfall and hours of sunshine. And it will serve as a reference guide to what has successfully grown for how long in the relatively testing conditions of north Yorkshire.
And the tea shop was nice. I liked Thorp Perrow very much, but eventually had reluctantly to admit that I was not going to be able to inspect every tree personally in the course of one visit. By way of seeing a completely different way of playing with trees in a designed landscape, we went on to Hackfall Wood, somewhere else I've been aware of and wanted to see for years. Hackfall Wood is interesting on two counts: it is an ancient woodland, and in the eighteenth century was used as the basis for creating a landscape garden of follies and eyecatchers. After a period of neglect and decline in the twentieth century it was rescued, the Woodland Trust acquiring the site and a garden trust being formed to take care of the buildings, which are now Grade I listed.
The wood sits in a steep valley with a stream romantically tinkling down it, occasionally helped to tinkle better by some artful stonework. Ferns thrive in the damp air and the trunks of fallen trees periodically span the little gorge, the older ones themselves fringed with more ferns. All is extremely picturesque, and having not looked properly at the Ordnance Survey map before our walk it came as a complete surprise to me when suddenly the view opened to reveal the valley dropping down below us to a substantial river, the Ure. It was all very, very pretty. The newish car park at the Masham end is not very big, and in high season must be rammed: a Monday afternoon in mid September is probably a better time to visit. The view from the car park is stunning, across the top end of Wensleydale and right over to the vale of York and north York moors.
From Hackfall we returned to Richmond and a third approach to the designed landscape in the form of a town garden belonging to Millgate House. I think I read about it on the Richmond town website, and saw that it had received glowing reviews from all sorts of people and clutches of awards. Ever curious about gardens, it seemed worth a visit when it was right on our doorstep and only two pounds fifty to get in. Reader, it was superb. If we'd driven quite a long way with the main purpose of seeing it I wouldn't have felt cheated. The houses in Millgate present a continuous facade, and you reach the garden by opening a door with a notice on it instructing you to open the door and go down the passageway, the first part of which leads through someone's house. Both sides of the passageway are planted with ferns and roses. There is an honesty box for your two pound fifties. You turn through an opening in the wall and suddenly you are in the garden.
And what a garden. It is not very big, and sits on quite a steep slope, parts of which are terraced. There are no lawns, just narrow paths and plants. The back of Millgate House extends further down the hill than its neighbours, so that from the garden you have no sense of being overlooked except by Millgate House itself, which is a grand Georgian building with yet more plants tumbling from the first floor balcony. There are roses, clematis, hydrangeas, ferns, hostas, cheerful self seeding wanderers like Welsh poppies, phlox and all sorts of flowers growing into and around and through each other. There are topiarised hollies and box, and at least two magnolias, and clipped yews, and I found a choice little daphne unexpectedly plopped down in one densely packed bed. There are cheerful frilly fuschias in pots and little pots of succulents. There is a trough with water trickling into it from a wall spout, and lots and lots of places to sit down. It is absolutely superb, deeply atmospheric, and horticulture of the highest order. You could not ask somebody who didn't know quite a lot about plants to do anything to help you in that garden. Taste and judgement ooze out of every cranny.
And then we walked around the outside of the castle, but did not have time to go in because although the castle was open until six, we had put ourselves in a short stay car park with a maximum of two hours and our ticket was due to expire well before then.
Tuesday was earmarked for the North York Moors Railway, since it was forecast to be hot and we thought we might as well be sitting down on a train looking at the scenery rather than walking miles in the boiling heat. We got on at the Grosmont end, and were initially intimidated by the number of people wanting to get on with us, and the number of people already on the train who had got on at Whitby. According to the Systems Administrator there was some concern within the railway when they began to extend to service to Whitby, since the track from Grosmont to Whitby is part of Network Rail, and they have to pay a hefty access fee and have network accredited drivers to cover that stretch. But the enthusiasts for going to Whitby believed that it would boost the railway linking it to a main tourist destination like Whitby, and they seem to be right. We did get seats, and after the first stop we managed to bag window seats when some people got off, but the NYMR seems to be doing very well. It is the most heavily used preserved steam railway in the country, with 350,000 visitors a year, and even on a weekday in mid September they had five different locomotives in steam. A few years ago you'd only have seen that at a gala weekend.
One of the locomotives was a rare freight engine, and another was an American design shipped over here in the last war by the US army, so the Systems Administrator was happy to have seen some unusual locomotives. I have said it before but when the SA and I look at a steam train we don't see the same thing. So on the steep hill leaving Grosmont as the engine struggled to keep moving the SA knew that it was not short of steam because a fine mist of rain had fallen past the windows, a sign that the boiler safety valve had opened to release excess pressure, ergo it had full pressure. I hadn't noticed. At Grosmont are the engineering sheds, where we saw one of the engines that had been working earlier standing over an inspection pit while a man hit part of it a lot of times with a hammer. Then the rare American engine arrived, and we thought first that it was going to take on coal and then that its insides were going to be raked over, but instead a man advanced on it with another hammer.
From Grosmont we went to Saltburn-by-the-Sea, which we'd been thinking of doing before thinking of going to Whitby, and then almost going to an ironstone mining museum, which would have been a case of Saltburn doing itself out of two tourists, since we read about the museum on Saltburn's website and it is not at all close to Saltburn. The last minute return to Plan A was prompted partly by the fear that Whitby would be absolutely jam packed with tourists, and indeed there weren't many spaces in the car park at Saltburn. Saltburn-by-the-Sea was built as a tourist resort by the railway company, so our visit followed on very nicely from Sunday's trip to the Darlington railway museum, but the biggest draw was the funicular cliff railway, as featured by Michael Portillo and John Sergeant (and apparently in an episode of Inspector George Gently, but we never watched beyond the pilot episode).
The cliff railway has two cars, one going up and one down, and uses water to adjust their relative weights. We were pleased and surprised to discover it running on a weekday, since the website had made it sound as though it might only be running at weekends, but it was not only running but extremely busy. The man in charge of letting us on at the bottom told us that this had been their best and busiest season ever. It would not in fact be very hard work to walk up from the beach to the town as long as you were in normal health, since it's only a hundred and twenty feet, but the cliff railway is very fine, with stained glass windows in the two cars and a splendid Victorian waiting room at its foot. The town centre is laid out on a grid, being planned, with fine tall Victorian houses and guest houses near the sea front, some with cast iron, glass topped canopies stretching out over the pavement in front of them like those at Llandudno. The former railway station, now redeveloped for bijou retail use, is in the Italianate style. There is an Italian garden towards the back of the old town, tucked down in a valley with a promenade walk leading back to the sea front. Finding the Italian garden was the only point where Saltburn's tourist infrastructure let us down, as the previously frequent town maps petered out in one done to a different scale that didn't show the garden, while the next information board we found after that had no maps, just photographs of three buildings none of which we could see from where we were standing.
Back at the seaside, Saltburn has a pier, the most northerly public pier in England. It is not very big, but once you've passed through an unobtrusive amusement arcade at the landward end the rest of the pier is wonderfully uncluttered, with nothing but happy people walking about or fishing. I discovered afterwards that we'd been lucky with our tides, because it was surrounded by water as we walked to the end, exclaiming at how clear the sea was compared with the gloop of the Thames estuary, but when I saw it on breakfast TV as a backdrop to the weather presenter it was standing surrounded by golden sand. Which is very nice, but a pier should let you out over the water. The beach at Saltburn is vast. It must stretch for miles up the coast, and as I discovered at low tide it goes out a long way as well. The promenade is refreshingly uncluttered by advertising signs, stalls with plastic merchandise or other tat, and the general effect is more Southwold than Clacton-on-Sea. The locals don't seem to mind not having the chance to buy a plastic windmill or ice cream every six yards: the beach was good and busy with folk of all ages. According to the waiter in the Indian restaurant we went to the following day, Saltburn-by-the-Sea has always been nice.
And that has caught me up one day so I'm only two days behind, and is more than enough for one evening.
Tuesday, 13 September 2016
a railway museum and two castles
I'd assumed we'd be staying in north Yorkshire as we're near Richmond, but when we arrived we found the place was just over the county boundary, in County Durham. The distinction isn't entirely arbitrary. Richmond is on the river Swale which joins the river Ure and eventually ends up in the Ouse, flowing out into the North Sea at Hull. Barnard Castle, the nearest town to the north of us, is on the Tees which enters the sea at Teesside, between Hartlepool and Ravenscar.
We started our tourist efforts in Darlington at the Head of Steam museum. Darlington used to be a great railway town. I hadn't realised how big the railways were there: Swindon, yes, or Doncaster, but in my mind Darlington's association with railways stopped at the building of the Stockton and Darlington railway. Not so, it went on to become a major engineering centre, and suffered badly as the railways began to wind down in the second half of the twentieth century. The town centre was horribly hacked about by planners in the 1960s and 1970s, leaving odd examples of fine Victorian architecture marooned among dual carriage ways and brutalist concrete buildings, but the vibe we got on our visit was that it was doing OK now.
The Head of Steam museum has got one of Stephenson's original engines, the Locomotion. The Stephenson engine everybody seems to have heard of, myself included, is the Rocket, but Locomotion was built four years earlier, in 1825. I was quite touched to think of the great engineer George Stephenson perched on the little seat to the side of the engine, driving it on its maiden voyage, with two of his brothers acting as firemen. The museum is housed in Darlington railway station on the line of the original Stockton and Darlington railway, which represents one of the pivotal feats of the industrial revolution. Altogether we liked the Head of Steam museum. Note to councils everywhere: try to keep your museums open even in these difficult times, they encourage tourists who bring hard cash to your area.
In fact we did not have to part with any hard cash to get into the museum since we went on Heritage Open Weekend when it was free. It is not very expensive to visit anyway, but the main bonus of going during the Heritage Weekend turned out to be that visitors were invited into the shed, a former railway foundry, where the North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group have one of their two workshops. It was only under the Systems Administrator's guidance that I began to grasp that preserved steam railway operations and steam locomotive ownership are quite distinct. Preserved railways don't generally own their engines, they hire them from whoever does own them, be it a group of enthusiasts or a rich individual like Pete Waterman. NELPG has four locomotives, the volunteer who showed us around told us very proudly, the most of any group in the country.
The one in the shed at Darlington was in for what had turned into a major overhaul, since besides needing the usual ten yearly boiler certificate it had turned out to have a cracked cylinder case. A replacement had been cast: the pattern alone cost fifty thousand, for what will probably be one-off use since no other engines remain to that design, and the new cylinder case weighed nearly three tonnes. It was lucky it didn't weigh any more since the heaviest weight the foundry could handle was three tonnes. There aren't many foundries left able to do that sort of work. The wheels had been to Devon and Belfast for specialist repairs. I couldn't work out how a society with six hundred members could remotely begin to afford any of this, until the SA reminded me that they were getting the hire fees from the other three engines that weren't in for repair. This overhaul had taken five years so far, and the volunteer hoped they might finally finish next year, and make room in the shed for the next engine. Our glimpse into the locomotive workshop was jolly interesting, and I now know how I would diagnose hot running in an axle (put tallow on the end and see if it melts during running).
From Darlington we went to Raby Castle, which didn't open until later in the morning. Part of the art of touristing is planning your running order for things that open late, shut early, or don't open on Mondays or Fridays and Saturdays or whenever it might be. Raby Castle is close to Barnard Castle, and the great merit of visiting on a Sunday was that we would be allowed to go round the castle at our own pace and not be limited to a guided tour. It is a splendid castle, steadily modified from being a defensive fortification to being an extremely grand house with a medieval vibe. The castle was originally in the possession of the Nevill family, was confiscated by the crown after they unwisely took part in an uprising in the sixteenth century, and was bought along with Barnard castle (the actual castle, not the whole town) by Lord Barnard in the seventeenth century.
Wikipedia's entry on Raby Castle is rather sniffy about the extent to which the Barnard family altered the medieval fabric, on the other hand three centuries on, Raby still has a roof on it and is a functioning family home, whereas Barnard castle is a ruin. Raby in its present form is great fun, highlights including the Victorian octagon drawing room done out like a Paris salon of the middle of the century, which is quite fabulously ornate. We were interested to note that the replacement silk wall hangings fitted as part of the restoration a few years ago were woven in Sudbury. There is a decent art collection as well, a great hall complete with carriage entrance and carriage as the nobility could be driven right into the building and not get wet getting out of the carriage, and a very large library complete with a young pianist playing a Steinway grand. And there were helpful room guides and quite a lot of fresh flowers. And some odd touches like a rug made out of a skinned spaniel, head still attached, and a stuffed fox.
Raby has a deer park, with deer and long horn cattle and an extraordinary number of geese, and an eighteenth century walled garden cunningly positioned on a south facing slope a little way from the castle and sheltered from the worst of the wind by the ridge the castle stands on. I'd have liked to learn more about the original purpose of the garden, and whether it had originally been entirely for produce or included a pleasure garden. Nowadays there are some good bulgy yew hedges said to be over two hundred years old, trimmed in such angular planes they made me think of a brutalist concrete sculpture of the 1960s reenacted in yew. The most remarkable feature was a White Ischia fig, said to have been planted in 1786, which took up the whole of its own purpose built heated glass house. I paced out the house and it was fully twenty-one of my strides long, and the fig was attempting triffid-like to burst out of it, leaves pressed up against the glass and slithering out where the windows were cracked open for ventilation.
After Raby we went to look at the castle in Barnard Castle, now in the care of English Heritage. It had a brief period of glory when it held off the great uprising for five days of siege in the sixteenth century before surrendering, but by then it was already becoming obsolete. It sits dramatically over the river Tees, but is hemmed in by the town, and Lord Barnard preferred to make a home out of Raby and used the town castle as a source of stone for his building works. It is pleasant enough to walk around now on a fine day, and looks just like a ruined castle ought to do, complete with round tower, but there isn't all that much of it any more.
And after all that and our drive up from Essex the previous day we were tired and went back to our holiday let, which is some sort of converted agricultural building rather than a quaint cottage but perfectly pleasant, being clean, quiet, warm enough, and with a straightforward cooker that stays on when you turn it on. And that was day one of our touristing so I am now two days behind and the holiday is unfolding faster than I am writing about it.
We started our tourist efforts in Darlington at the Head of Steam museum. Darlington used to be a great railway town. I hadn't realised how big the railways were there: Swindon, yes, or Doncaster, but in my mind Darlington's association with railways stopped at the building of the Stockton and Darlington railway. Not so, it went on to become a major engineering centre, and suffered badly as the railways began to wind down in the second half of the twentieth century. The town centre was horribly hacked about by planners in the 1960s and 1970s, leaving odd examples of fine Victorian architecture marooned among dual carriage ways and brutalist concrete buildings, but the vibe we got on our visit was that it was doing OK now.
The Head of Steam museum has got one of Stephenson's original engines, the Locomotion. The Stephenson engine everybody seems to have heard of, myself included, is the Rocket, but Locomotion was built four years earlier, in 1825. I was quite touched to think of the great engineer George Stephenson perched on the little seat to the side of the engine, driving it on its maiden voyage, with two of his brothers acting as firemen. The museum is housed in Darlington railway station on the line of the original Stockton and Darlington railway, which represents one of the pivotal feats of the industrial revolution. Altogether we liked the Head of Steam museum. Note to councils everywhere: try to keep your museums open even in these difficult times, they encourage tourists who bring hard cash to your area.
In fact we did not have to part with any hard cash to get into the museum since we went on Heritage Open Weekend when it was free. It is not very expensive to visit anyway, but the main bonus of going during the Heritage Weekend turned out to be that visitors were invited into the shed, a former railway foundry, where the North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group have one of their two workshops. It was only under the Systems Administrator's guidance that I began to grasp that preserved steam railway operations and steam locomotive ownership are quite distinct. Preserved railways don't generally own their engines, they hire them from whoever does own them, be it a group of enthusiasts or a rich individual like Pete Waterman. NELPG has four locomotives, the volunteer who showed us around told us very proudly, the most of any group in the country.
The one in the shed at Darlington was in for what had turned into a major overhaul, since besides needing the usual ten yearly boiler certificate it had turned out to have a cracked cylinder case. A replacement had been cast: the pattern alone cost fifty thousand, for what will probably be one-off use since no other engines remain to that design, and the new cylinder case weighed nearly three tonnes. It was lucky it didn't weigh any more since the heaviest weight the foundry could handle was three tonnes. There aren't many foundries left able to do that sort of work. The wheels had been to Devon and Belfast for specialist repairs. I couldn't work out how a society with six hundred members could remotely begin to afford any of this, until the SA reminded me that they were getting the hire fees from the other three engines that weren't in for repair. This overhaul had taken five years so far, and the volunteer hoped they might finally finish next year, and make room in the shed for the next engine. Our glimpse into the locomotive workshop was jolly interesting, and I now know how I would diagnose hot running in an axle (put tallow on the end and see if it melts during running).
From Darlington we went to Raby Castle, which didn't open until later in the morning. Part of the art of touristing is planning your running order for things that open late, shut early, or don't open on Mondays or Fridays and Saturdays or whenever it might be. Raby Castle is close to Barnard Castle, and the great merit of visiting on a Sunday was that we would be allowed to go round the castle at our own pace and not be limited to a guided tour. It is a splendid castle, steadily modified from being a defensive fortification to being an extremely grand house with a medieval vibe. The castle was originally in the possession of the Nevill family, was confiscated by the crown after they unwisely took part in an uprising in the sixteenth century, and was bought along with Barnard castle (the actual castle, not the whole town) by Lord Barnard in the seventeenth century.
Wikipedia's entry on Raby Castle is rather sniffy about the extent to which the Barnard family altered the medieval fabric, on the other hand three centuries on, Raby still has a roof on it and is a functioning family home, whereas Barnard castle is a ruin. Raby in its present form is great fun, highlights including the Victorian octagon drawing room done out like a Paris salon of the middle of the century, which is quite fabulously ornate. We were interested to note that the replacement silk wall hangings fitted as part of the restoration a few years ago were woven in Sudbury. There is a decent art collection as well, a great hall complete with carriage entrance and carriage as the nobility could be driven right into the building and not get wet getting out of the carriage, and a very large library complete with a young pianist playing a Steinway grand. And there were helpful room guides and quite a lot of fresh flowers. And some odd touches like a rug made out of a skinned spaniel, head still attached, and a stuffed fox.
Raby has a deer park, with deer and long horn cattle and an extraordinary number of geese, and an eighteenth century walled garden cunningly positioned on a south facing slope a little way from the castle and sheltered from the worst of the wind by the ridge the castle stands on. I'd have liked to learn more about the original purpose of the garden, and whether it had originally been entirely for produce or included a pleasure garden. Nowadays there are some good bulgy yew hedges said to be over two hundred years old, trimmed in such angular planes they made me think of a brutalist concrete sculpture of the 1960s reenacted in yew. The most remarkable feature was a White Ischia fig, said to have been planted in 1786, which took up the whole of its own purpose built heated glass house. I paced out the house and it was fully twenty-one of my strides long, and the fig was attempting triffid-like to burst out of it, leaves pressed up against the glass and slithering out where the windows were cracked open for ventilation.
After Raby we went to look at the castle in Barnard Castle, now in the care of English Heritage. It had a brief period of glory when it held off the great uprising for five days of siege in the sixteenth century before surrendering, but by then it was already becoming obsolete. It sits dramatically over the river Tees, but is hemmed in by the town, and Lord Barnard preferred to make a home out of Raby and used the town castle as a source of stone for his building works. It is pleasant enough to walk around now on a fine day, and looks just like a ruined castle ought to do, complete with round tower, but there isn't all that much of it any more.
And after all that and our drive up from Essex the previous day we were tired and went back to our holiday let, which is some sort of converted agricultural building rather than a quaint cottage but perfectly pleasant, being clean, quiet, warm enough, and with a straightforward cooker that stays on when you turn it on. And that was day one of our touristing so I am now two days behind and the holiday is unfolding faster than I am writing about it.
Friday, 9 September 2016
ready to roll
Cleaning is one of those projects that sucks you in. I was so impressed by yesterday's newly clean and tidy cupboard that today I tackled the accumulation of tiny bits of fluff in the ends of the divided cutlery drawers. They had been gently annoying me for months, just not enough for me to take all the cutlery out of the holders, and take the holders out of the drawers, and wash them. But other people's bits of fluff are like their elderly wooden spoons or spatulas with a dent branded in them where they got rested on the edge of a too-hot pan. You may not mind your own gnarly spatula or fluff, but you don't want anything to do with anybody else's. It did not objectively speaking take very long to remove the cutlery or wash the drawers, and I was left with the faint feeling that I should have done this ages ago.
The Systems Administrator, not to be outdone, fell upon the sinks with Viakal and removed vast deposits of whatever strange mineral residue it is that our water leaves on any surface it touches even briefly. I don't understand our water. This is not a chalky area, and we don't have classically hard water, but something in it solidifies into ferocious white and green mounds around the bases of taps and round all plugholes. The kettle doesn't just have scale inside it, it has dribbles of scale down the outside as well. I wipe and scrub fairly ineffectually, and make periodic efforts with the limescale remover, but I didn't have time to do more than clean the kitchen sinks before the last lot of visitors, and was tempted to do the same again today. Thanks to the SA's good offices suddenly they're back to bare metal.
I did however clean the glass divide between the inner and outer halls with glass polish. I have read that you can achieve a perfectly good finish with newspaper and vinegar. I have also read that your entire house will then smell of vinegar. And I crawled around the wooden floors wiping off the odd rings where one of us slopped a drink, and various stains left by the cats into whose nature it was better not to enquire too closely.
You could consider it rather pitiful that we end up spending forty-eight hours cleaning the house before we can go on holiday. But cleaning has to be done sometime, and we'll get most of the benefit when we get back since the house sitters will clear up after themselves. The trouble is that if house cleaning is not very far up your list of things to do, the main thing that concentrates the mind is the prospect of visitors, and people who are going to live in the house for a week are going to see a lot more of it than guests who are only round for the evening. As you usher them briskly through the hall they might not notice the alluvial deposit on the telephone table. By broad daylight and given a week to consider the matter they probably will, and they will need to look in your cutlery drawers.
Now the place is fit to leave our thoughts can turn delightfully to the pleasures in prospect in north Yorkshire. Ruins, lots of ruins. And stately homes. And steam trains. And the Dales scenery. I will blog about the best bits in due course, but not necessarily every day, since part of the point of being on holiday is that you don't have to do anything.
Thursday, 8 September 2016
before the holiday
I sometimes wonder whether the people who design domestic white and brown goods ever consider how they are supposed to be cleaned. I know that at least in theory they are tested, because back in my small company investment fund management days I went on a company visit to Kenwood, and we were taken to the product development department. But does testing extend to using the product over a sustained period and then trying to wipe it clean? Or just making sure that it doesn't blow up when switched on, and asking which design of handle a focus group prefers?
I thought this again as I tried to clean the filter of the dishwasher. It's been leaving little brown specks on the plates recently, even though I topped up the rinse aid, and the general idea of a dishwasher is not that you have to wash everything again as you unload it. The filter was completely revolting, and actually rather put me off the idea of having a dishwasher at all. Do I want water that has been in contact with this filter sprayed over utensils I'm going to eat with? Even once I'd disassembled it to the smallest parts it would break down to without actually breaking, I was left with inaccessible interstices with brown goo stuck in them. What was I supposed to use to clean it with? A small bottle brush like the ones you get with some upmarket bird feeders? A pipe cleaner? In the end I managed with my finger, a nail brush, and the skewer I keep by the sink for poking earth out of the holes in stones, plus a great deal of washing up liquid. The Systems Administrator was entirely unsympathetic about the state of the filter, saying that I did not have to clear the drains.
Cleaning the cupboard with the glasses and the overflow fridge in it was more rewarding, as I discovered a whole box of tealights I'd forgotten we'd got, and enough Price's white wax candles to last this Christmas and probably the next. The bottle of cream soda I'd been thinking we really ought to use sometime, except that I was afraid it might be too old, turned out to have been best before March 2015. In theory running a second fridge is a wicked waste of electricity, except that it is so useful for chilling drinks and holding overflow food when entertaining. I sometimes wonder if we should manage without it, but so far have resisted being that hair shirt about it. We'll need to make room in the kitchen fridge for the house sitters to store food, since they can't live here for the week without one, so our supplies of butter, cheese, and all those jams and pickles that ought to be OK at room temperature since jamming and pickling were supposed to be ways of preserving food, except that the modern versions do seem to go mouldy unless refrigerated, will have to shift into the other fridge.
I have started a list of things we need to pack, to remind us to take them and then to act as a checklist when we are packing to come home again. A decade ago I left a bath robe hung on the back of a holiday cottage bedroom door, but I've got more systematic since then. Reading lights. Some holiday lets are well equipped but some aren't. An extension cable in case we need it to plug the reading lights in. Basic spices so that we don't end up buying yet more mixed herbs and chilli powder when we've already got multiple pots of both. A sharp knife. One decent saucepan, and a flat edged wooden spoon in case the spatulas in the cottage are as revolting as our dishwasher filter was. Your own old wooden spoons are one thing, but other people's are quite another. An astonishingly large array of electronic equipment, laptops, tablets, phones, and chargers for all of them. The National Trust guide, which also has our car park sticker in it, plus the church guide, the tile guide, and several garden guides. My garden visiting notebook.
The owners of this year's cottage, or rather converted outbuilding, live on site. That could be very handy in case of difficulties, like the flat two years ago where we couldn't get the cooker to work. It was a ridiculously sophisticated cooker with an elaborate timer and an instruction book an inch thick. We both pored over the book, and neither of us could persuade the cooker not to randomly turn itself off in the middle of cooking. We ended up microwaving everything when we were not eating out, and by the end of the week neither of us wanted to see another pasta bake ready meal again for the foreseeable future. This time round we can just go and bang on the owners' door. Help, how does the cooker work?
I thought this again as I tried to clean the filter of the dishwasher. It's been leaving little brown specks on the plates recently, even though I topped up the rinse aid, and the general idea of a dishwasher is not that you have to wash everything again as you unload it. The filter was completely revolting, and actually rather put me off the idea of having a dishwasher at all. Do I want water that has been in contact with this filter sprayed over utensils I'm going to eat with? Even once I'd disassembled it to the smallest parts it would break down to without actually breaking, I was left with inaccessible interstices with brown goo stuck in them. What was I supposed to use to clean it with? A small bottle brush like the ones you get with some upmarket bird feeders? A pipe cleaner? In the end I managed with my finger, a nail brush, and the skewer I keep by the sink for poking earth out of the holes in stones, plus a great deal of washing up liquid. The Systems Administrator was entirely unsympathetic about the state of the filter, saying that I did not have to clear the drains.
Cleaning the cupboard with the glasses and the overflow fridge in it was more rewarding, as I discovered a whole box of tealights I'd forgotten we'd got, and enough Price's white wax candles to last this Christmas and probably the next. The bottle of cream soda I'd been thinking we really ought to use sometime, except that I was afraid it might be too old, turned out to have been best before March 2015. In theory running a second fridge is a wicked waste of electricity, except that it is so useful for chilling drinks and holding overflow food when entertaining. I sometimes wonder if we should manage without it, but so far have resisted being that hair shirt about it. We'll need to make room in the kitchen fridge for the house sitters to store food, since they can't live here for the week without one, so our supplies of butter, cheese, and all those jams and pickles that ought to be OK at room temperature since jamming and pickling were supposed to be ways of preserving food, except that the modern versions do seem to go mouldy unless refrigerated, will have to shift into the other fridge.
I have started a list of things we need to pack, to remind us to take them and then to act as a checklist when we are packing to come home again. A decade ago I left a bath robe hung on the back of a holiday cottage bedroom door, but I've got more systematic since then. Reading lights. Some holiday lets are well equipped but some aren't. An extension cable in case we need it to plug the reading lights in. Basic spices so that we don't end up buying yet more mixed herbs and chilli powder when we've already got multiple pots of both. A sharp knife. One decent saucepan, and a flat edged wooden spoon in case the spatulas in the cottage are as revolting as our dishwasher filter was. Your own old wooden spoons are one thing, but other people's are quite another. An astonishingly large array of electronic equipment, laptops, tablets, phones, and chargers for all of them. The National Trust guide, which also has our car park sticker in it, plus the church guide, the tile guide, and several garden guides. My garden visiting notebook.
The owners of this year's cottage, or rather converted outbuilding, live on site. That could be very handy in case of difficulties, like the flat two years ago where we couldn't get the cooker to work. It was a ridiculously sophisticated cooker with an elaborate timer and an instruction book an inch thick. We both pored over the book, and neither of us could persuade the cooker not to randomly turn itself off in the middle of cooking. We ended up microwaving everything when we were not eating out, and by the end of the week neither of us wanted to see another pasta bake ready meal again for the foreseeable future. This time round we can just go and bang on the owners' door. Help, how does the cooker work?
Wednesday, 7 September 2016
almost away
I potted the daffodil bulbs this morning. I was rather relieved that I had enough compost left after potting on the seven and nine centimetre pots. Daffodils start making roots early in the autumn, as you will know if you have ever dug one up by mistake in late summer, and the first week of September is none too soon to be planting them. And now they can get on with starting to grow while we're away, probably a fortnight before I'd have got round to planting them otherwise. One of my favourite pieces of gardening advice is from Sir Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian: Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping.
And that was my last bit of gardening until after we return from holiday. I will refill the brown bin once it's been emptied on Friday, so that the next load has plenty of time to settle and I fit as much in as possible, and I must make sure I move my last bags of long grass cuttings from the lawn so that they don't sit there for the whole week marking the grass, but there won't be time for anything much else before we go, and once we get back we'll already be into the second half of September. Really there is no good time for gardeners to go away.
I hope it rains while we're off. Here, that is, not in North Yorkshire. The box of bulbs also contained a bag of a hundred Crocus tommasinianus for the bottom lawn, and I don't fancy dibbling a hundred holes until the ground is softer, while the stash on the concrete includes dozens of seed raised mallows and knapweeds for the daffodil lawn, and I'm certainly not planting them until I can dig comfortably. The human wrist is a engineering marvel, but if there's one sure way to knacker it for a month it's persistently trying to push a trowel into hard ground.
And that was my last bit of gardening until after we return from holiday. I will refill the brown bin once it's been emptied on Friday, so that the next load has plenty of time to settle and I fit as much in as possible, and I must make sure I move my last bags of long grass cuttings from the lawn so that they don't sit there for the whole week marking the grass, but there won't be time for anything much else before we go, and once we get back we'll already be into the second half of September. Really there is no good time for gardeners to go away.
I hope it rains while we're off. Here, that is, not in North Yorkshire. The box of bulbs also contained a bag of a hundred Crocus tommasinianus for the bottom lawn, and I don't fancy dibbling a hundred holes until the ground is softer, while the stash on the concrete includes dozens of seed raised mallows and knapweeds for the daffodil lawn, and I'm certainly not planting them until I can dig comfortably. The human wrist is a engineering marvel, but if there's one sure way to knacker it for a month it's persistently trying to push a trowel into hard ground.
Tuesday, 6 September 2016
air soup
We are back in air soup territory. The humidity when I got up was ninety-nine per cent, and I could feel my skull teetering on the edge of a headache. At one point I'd vaguely hoped to get myself to the Dulwich Picture Gallery today to catch the Winifred Knights exhibition before it closes next weekend, but by last night I'd decided that probably wasn't going to happen, and this morning there was no way I was going to go to Dulwich and back. The exhibition has reviewed very well, but when I reread the reviews it seemed there were only actually five of her paintings in it, with the rest being preparatory sketches. I'd have liked to see them and add a little known and neglected early twentieth century British artist to my tally, but not at virtually an hour's travelling time per painting in this weather. You can't do everything.
I did finish potting on the seven and nine centimetre pots on the concrete, and cleared away various weed infested dead plants that had never made it out into the garden in time, poor things. That's the trouble with propagating your own material. You start off with good intentions and high hopes, months before, and by the time they are ready to go out you hope the planting site will be ready. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Drought, brambles, rabbit incursions, colds, backache, incurable optimism. It's difficult to set a strict timetable in advance.
Some of the pots had recycled themselves into other things that could be useful. A crop of seedling artichoke plants died in their pots, because with the best will in the world I never managed to clear a bed for them in what is supposed to be the vegetable garden. Some pink Linaria 'Canon Went' raised for cutting likewise remained stuck in its pots because I didn't manage to get what was supposed to be the cutting bed under control either. I think those Linaria I didn't manage to redeploy in the back garden may have died in their pots after flowering but they have left me with a crop of seedlings in the defunct artichoke pots, so I can try again next year.
I had a brief moment of excitement yesterday when an email arrived informing me that my DPD parcel would arrive today, and another email this morning narrowed the time slot down to between 16.19 and 17.19. I am expecting some much delayed acrylic sheet to mend the greenhouse roof, and it would be nice to get that sorted out before going away. At 16.23 the DPD van drew up, only it did not have my plastic sheets but a large box which the driver assured me was heavy before putting it down solicitously in the hall for me. It was my bulbs from Peter Nyssen. Now it is good to get those before the holiday, so that I can open the box to let them breathe and check them off. Who knows, I might even pot up the daffodils tomorrow morning. However, the plastic company had promised me my acrylic would be arriving on Tuesday, the last time that I rang. I am beginning to get deeply annoyed with them, and can feel a one star review looming.
I did finish potting on the seven and nine centimetre pots on the concrete, and cleared away various weed infested dead plants that had never made it out into the garden in time, poor things. That's the trouble with propagating your own material. You start off with good intentions and high hopes, months before, and by the time they are ready to go out you hope the planting site will be ready. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Drought, brambles, rabbit incursions, colds, backache, incurable optimism. It's difficult to set a strict timetable in advance.
Some of the pots had recycled themselves into other things that could be useful. A crop of seedling artichoke plants died in their pots, because with the best will in the world I never managed to clear a bed for them in what is supposed to be the vegetable garden. Some pink Linaria 'Canon Went' raised for cutting likewise remained stuck in its pots because I didn't manage to get what was supposed to be the cutting bed under control either. I think those Linaria I didn't manage to redeploy in the back garden may have died in their pots after flowering but they have left me with a crop of seedlings in the defunct artichoke pots, so I can try again next year.
I had a brief moment of excitement yesterday when an email arrived informing me that my DPD parcel would arrive today, and another email this morning narrowed the time slot down to between 16.19 and 17.19. I am expecting some much delayed acrylic sheet to mend the greenhouse roof, and it would be nice to get that sorted out before going away. At 16.23 the DPD van drew up, only it did not have my plastic sheets but a large box which the driver assured me was heavy before putting it down solicitously in the hall for me. It was my bulbs from Peter Nyssen. Now it is good to get those before the holiday, so that I can open the box to let them breathe and check them off. Who knows, I might even pot up the daffodils tomorrow morning. However, the plastic company had promised me my acrylic would be arriving on Tuesday, the last time that I rang. I am beginning to get deeply annoyed with them, and can feel a one star review looming.
Monday, 5 September 2016
not wanted on voyage
I had an unexpected free morning today, as I was blown out on a woodland charity talk. I realised last Friday that nobody from the club I was meant to be talking to had contacted me to confirm that I was still on. That's not unheard of, as booking secretaries and Chairmen go on holiday or get ill or are struck by some kind of domestic crisis. Normally if I ring or email them before they contact me they are apologetic that they didn't get hold of me first. If it's a fairly last minute arrangement and we've spoken within the last few weeks I don't even mind if they don't call me again, especially if it's a local venue. This morning's talk was due to be very local, on the other hand it had been arranged in early April.
All I'd written in my diary was the name of the person who'd arranged the talk, and the fact that it was arranged by email. That told me where to look for further details, which is where things began to unravel. The person who'd made the actual booking had said in her email that she would pass my details to 'the lady who ran the group' who would be in touch with me, and I couldn't find any record of any contact from the group leader. Admittedly since I didn't know her name or the name of her organisation, searching my old emails was not very easy, but thinking about it I didn't remember hearing from her. I emailed the original contact, and heard nothing back.
And that was that, really. I didn't even know the time of the meeting beyond the fact that it was in the morning. I could have put all my kit in the car and gone to the community centre and looked for a group of pensioners who were game for a fifteen minute presentation about a woodland charity, but I didn't. I thought I'd done all I could attempting to contact the only name I had in good time. I sent an email to the woodland charity volunteer manager explaining the situation and filled my car with bags of long grass and went to the dump instead.
I shouldn't really be surprised. In a world where people don't bother to show up to medical appointments, even though unless they are blind, deaf and profoundly stupid they must be aware of the pressures the NHS is under, why should I assume nobody would be cavalier with the time and efforts of a charity volunteer who costs them and the taxpayer precisely nothing? It's remarkable really how often bookings do work out. Proper membership clubs with a committee and a booking secretary are nearly always reliable. They have a job to do, their fellow club members are expecting a full length talk, and they get on and organise it. They are nearly always very appreciative as well. The worst ones seem to be the little befriending charities, where somebody in the centre thinks the members would like it if someone popped in for a chat, and person running the group on the ground hasn't been involved in the decision and doesn't give two hoots about it.
After going to the dump I spent the rest of my bonus morning and the afternoon tidying up my little pots around the greenhouse ready for the house sitters. It's not that I'm worried about what they think of my pots. I am the customer, and my garden can be as messy as I like, but I thought they would find watering easier and might do it better if it was obvious what needed to be cared for. So dead things have been going on the compost heap or in the brown bin, depending on whether or not the compost is infested with that infuriating bronze leaved oxalis, pots that do have lily bulbs under the surface (I hope) have been cleared of bittercress so that they look loved and wanted, and so on. While I was at it I potted on some things that had been struggling along in seven or nine centimetre pots into one litre, in the hopes that they would use the warm weather over the next four to six weeks to make more roots.
All I'd written in my diary was the name of the person who'd arranged the talk, and the fact that it was arranged by email. That told me where to look for further details, which is where things began to unravel. The person who'd made the actual booking had said in her email that she would pass my details to 'the lady who ran the group' who would be in touch with me, and I couldn't find any record of any contact from the group leader. Admittedly since I didn't know her name or the name of her organisation, searching my old emails was not very easy, but thinking about it I didn't remember hearing from her. I emailed the original contact, and heard nothing back.
And that was that, really. I didn't even know the time of the meeting beyond the fact that it was in the morning. I could have put all my kit in the car and gone to the community centre and looked for a group of pensioners who were game for a fifteen minute presentation about a woodland charity, but I didn't. I thought I'd done all I could attempting to contact the only name I had in good time. I sent an email to the woodland charity volunteer manager explaining the situation and filled my car with bags of long grass and went to the dump instead.
I shouldn't really be surprised. In a world where people don't bother to show up to medical appointments, even though unless they are blind, deaf and profoundly stupid they must be aware of the pressures the NHS is under, why should I assume nobody would be cavalier with the time and efforts of a charity volunteer who costs them and the taxpayer precisely nothing? It's remarkable really how often bookings do work out. Proper membership clubs with a committee and a booking secretary are nearly always reliable. They have a job to do, their fellow club members are expecting a full length talk, and they get on and organise it. They are nearly always very appreciative as well. The worst ones seem to be the little befriending charities, where somebody in the centre thinks the members would like it if someone popped in for a chat, and person running the group on the ground hasn't been involved in the decision and doesn't give two hoots about it.
After going to the dump I spent the rest of my bonus morning and the afternoon tidying up my little pots around the greenhouse ready for the house sitters. It's not that I'm worried about what they think of my pots. I am the customer, and my garden can be as messy as I like, but I thought they would find watering easier and might do it better if it was obvious what needed to be cared for. So dead things have been going on the compost heap or in the brown bin, depending on whether or not the compost is infested with that infuriating bronze leaved oxalis, pots that do have lily bulbs under the surface (I hope) have been cleared of bittercress so that they look loved and wanted, and so on. While I was at it I potted on some things that had been struggling along in seven or nine centimetre pots into one litre, in the hopes that they would use the warm weather over the next four to six weeks to make more roots.
Sunday, 4 September 2016
in the ditch bed
It rained yesterday night, starting late in the afternoon when it rained on the kittens, who were vocal in their indignation. They haven't quite got to grips with the concept of rain yet, which shows how little there's been since we started letting them out. Last night's efforts sounded quite dramatic in the heavier downpours, but the rain gauge this morning showed there'd only actually been five millimetres, and prodding at the surface of the flower beds I could see it hadn't made much of a difference.
I felt vindicated in my decision to keep watering the ditch bed yesterday despite the forecast. The ditch bed is looking enormously better for a decent soaking and a quick weed and tidy. If only I had had time to do it before the visitors came. The hydrangeas have perked up, having been on the point of collapse, with only a few shrivelled leaves to show for their experience, and the flowers make satisfying domes of colour seen from across the lawn. They are almost the only things that are flowering, but the overall balance of light and shade is about right, and the various sculptures provide focal points in the absence of many flowers.
I've been pruning some low hanging, small branches from some of the trees, where they obscure the view, or shade other plants too much, or poke the Systems Administrator in the face when the SA is mowing the lawn. It can be difficult in winter when the trees are bare to visualise how its all going to look in late summer, when they are in full leaf, the weight of the foliage making the branches hang lower than you imagine they're going to. It's a pleasantly absorbing task, requiring enough concentration that I can't cope with any background music or speech radio while I'm doing it. How much to remove, to open out the view while leaving the tree you're pruning a nice shape?
I am nervous about cutting the lawn edges or anything else with shears while the kittens are charging about the garden. They have the knack of appearing from nowhere, and they move so fast, rushing and pouncing. I managed to trim odd bits of edge when I was quite sure none of them were nearby, but I can see myself having to lock them in for the odd hour when I'm ready to get really stuck into the edges. The daffodil lawn needs tidying up as well. The thought of one jumping on the moving blades and getting his feet caught in the cutting action is too awful.
By the end of the afternoon I'd nearly finished watering the ditch bed, but by then I'd discovered quite how dry the bog bed had become. Some of the ferns had gone completely brown, while the leaves of the poor old Gunnera were lying flat on the ground. I hope the ferns have merely packed up early for this year and will be back up next spring, but it's rather difficult to tell. I poked around their bases, and couldn't find any green, on the other hand they felt fat and firm. The self sown pussy willow that is supposed to be making a delightful pollard has got much too big. I need to work out when in the year I am supposed to cut it back, in order to get the catkins but then limit the size of the crown, if indeed that can be done. In the meantime I'm taking it back to the bare knuckle anyway. I suspect it is not the right time and I'm kissing goodbye to any pussies next spring, but it was casting much too much shade as it was.
Saturday, 3 September 2016
what's in a name?
Just as I was digesting my lunch and thinking about going back into the garden, the Systems Administrator asked me whether I'd left any tools out, because it was due to rain within the next five minutes. As I trundled down to the bottom of the slope to collect them, it was already spitting with fine drops. That bubbled up out of nowhere, unforecast. It's not due to rain until this evening, when we should get a real soaking, thank goodness. I ran the hose on the beds at the bottom anyway, since they are so dry it's going to take more than one night's rain to put things right.
As I digested I was scrolling through the complete list of 2015 girls' names published in today's Guardian. I wish they'd provide a little more statistical analysis, though I suppose if I were slightly more enterprising I could download my own copy from the ONS to a spreadsheet and work it out for myself. The ONS only includes names that were given to at least three babies, and there is an enormously long tail of names only appearing fewer than half a dozen times. It would be interesting to know what proportion were covered by the top ten, twenty or thirty names, and how many shared their name with only two or three other girls born that year.
Some of the choices that sound obscure to me are presumably perfectly normal and mainstream names in a language other than English, or the comparatively familiar northern European tongues. Some look dangerously as though the baby's parents just weren't very good at spelling. A few are baffling because they are so firmly boy's names. I'm not in favour of gender stereotyping, but Noah or Toby? I know that Noah is rising sharply in the popularity stakes, and Toby Jones is a wonderful actor, but even so. And it was definitely Uncle Vanya, not Aunt. I don't understand why anybody would call their baby after a brand of suet, or something that sounds like a kind of processed cheese. Some names unfortunately are going to be worse barriers to obtaining a job as an investment banker even than wearing brown shoes or an inappropriate tie.
But increasingly as the years go by the list makes me feel very ancient. My own name, or rather the nickname I've been called by throughout my life, doesn't make it into the top thousand, though at my school there was another girl with the same name in my year of sixty. My baptismal name squeezes inside the top hundred by a whisker. And it's the same for the names of most of my classmates. You couldn't move for Susans when I was at school, not to mention the Susans in Swallows and Amazons and the Narnia stories, and where are they now? Number 1601 on the list, that's where. There were only three baby girls registered as Lesley in the whole of the country in 2015. There were two in my class in the 1970s. Ann and Anne, Judith and Judy, Helen, Barbara, Fiona, all going the same way. Shortened versions of names complicate things a little. Many of the Kates I knew were probably christened Katherine, but that isn't doing much better (263 versus 393).
There's no denying it, names date us. Some last better than others: Olivia seems to have been having a good run ever since Olivia Newton John was in the charts. Will Isla last as well? I mean, where did that come from? When I was growing up the only Isla anybody had heard of was Isla St Clair and now it's number 4 in the list. By the time I really am ancient I expect the wheel will have turned again, and the list will be full of little Agathas and Gwens, Dorothys and Irises, Sybils and Doreens, Janets and Joans, while the massed ranks of Lilys and Scarletts will be feeling their age.
As I digested I was scrolling through the complete list of 2015 girls' names published in today's Guardian. I wish they'd provide a little more statistical analysis, though I suppose if I were slightly more enterprising I could download my own copy from the ONS to a spreadsheet and work it out for myself. The ONS only includes names that were given to at least three babies, and there is an enormously long tail of names only appearing fewer than half a dozen times. It would be interesting to know what proportion were covered by the top ten, twenty or thirty names, and how many shared their name with only two or three other girls born that year.
Some of the choices that sound obscure to me are presumably perfectly normal and mainstream names in a language other than English, or the comparatively familiar northern European tongues. Some look dangerously as though the baby's parents just weren't very good at spelling. A few are baffling because they are so firmly boy's names. I'm not in favour of gender stereotyping, but Noah or Toby? I know that Noah is rising sharply in the popularity stakes, and Toby Jones is a wonderful actor, but even so. And it was definitely Uncle Vanya, not Aunt. I don't understand why anybody would call their baby after a brand of suet, or something that sounds like a kind of processed cheese. Some names unfortunately are going to be worse barriers to obtaining a job as an investment banker even than wearing brown shoes or an inappropriate tie.
But increasingly as the years go by the list makes me feel very ancient. My own name, or rather the nickname I've been called by throughout my life, doesn't make it into the top thousand, though at my school there was another girl with the same name in my year of sixty. My baptismal name squeezes inside the top hundred by a whisker. And it's the same for the names of most of my classmates. You couldn't move for Susans when I was at school, not to mention the Susans in Swallows and Amazons and the Narnia stories, and where are they now? Number 1601 on the list, that's where. There were only three baby girls registered as Lesley in the whole of the country in 2015. There were two in my class in the 1970s. Ann and Anne, Judith and Judy, Helen, Barbara, Fiona, all going the same way. Shortened versions of names complicate things a little. Many of the Kates I knew were probably christened Katherine, but that isn't doing much better (263 versus 393).
There's no denying it, names date us. Some last better than others: Olivia seems to have been having a good run ever since Olivia Newton John was in the charts. Will Isla last as well? I mean, where did that come from? When I was growing up the only Isla anybody had heard of was Isla St Clair and now it's number 4 in the list. By the time I really am ancient I expect the wheel will have turned again, and the list will be full of little Agathas and Gwens, Dorothys and Irises, Sybils and Doreens, Janets and Joans, while the massed ranks of Lilys and Scarletts will be feeling their age.
Friday, 2 September 2016
drought strikes the ditch bed
It is desperately dry. At least the days aren't so hot now, and it must rain sometime, but the garden is parched. As we took our recent visitors on a brief tour after lunch I knew that there wouldn't be lots to show them. The end of August is always a tough time, let alone when the weeks of high summer have been hot and dry as they were this year. They admired the pink flowers of Clematis 'Alionushka', which is still putting on a valiant display on its new obelisk, and agreed that the conservatory was looking more floral than in previous years, and I explained my ambition to cut swathes into the rose beds.
I was not expecting that when we got to the lower lawn the lacecap hydrangeas would have collapsed. Leaves hanging dull and wrinkled, flowers drooping forlornly. I exclaimed that I must water them the following day, and tried to distract the visitors with the sight of the little hanging yellow pendants of Dicentra scandens, and the promise that there really was an entire Magnolia stellata under that cascade of foliage.
Yesterday I got the hose down to the bottom of the garden, no mean feat since the wooden steps that provide the most direct route from the tap have been three quarters overgrown by 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' and are half rotten. The Systems Administrator has agreed to my pleas to replace the broken steps once I've pruned the rose, which I will do this autumn. It seemed a pity to risk being left with stems of broken and dead rose stuck in the tree over the summer, and there's always the possibility of nesting birds, but they must have finished by now. Unfortunately by late yesterday afternoon there were too many pots needing watering for me to do them by hand, and the hose had to go back through the rose and up the steps, which was a quantum more difficult than getting it down had been.
This morning I dragged the hose out to the back once again and resumed watering where I left off. The hydrangeas were very glad of a drink, and so were the collapsing hellebores. The first Cyclamen coum have just started to flower in rather a cowed way, and might be livened up by a good soaking. The one surviving Leucothe under the river birches has got an awful lot of brown leaves and doesn't look more than half alive. The Fothergilla is dead. It hadn't been looking well all year. Life under the birches was definitely too dry for it. Thus the garden simplifies itself. Even a Berberis thunbergii f. atropurpurea 'Golden Ring' was looking badly stressed with brown and crisped leaves, and berberis are pretty tough, car park plants par excellence. It's a shame the leaves have spoiled now, given that good autumn colour is theoretically one of the attractions of deciduous berberis.
I tidied away the shrivelled remnants of primrose leaves, odd weeds and grass from the beds, while moving the spray head of the hose every few minutes. So many things need watering. The Gillenia trifoliata looks parched, the azaleas pathetic, some of the evergreen ferns have gone prematurely brown. Kirengeshoma palmata is threatening to give up before it starts. I have given up on the idea of trying to cut the worst sticking out branches of the eleagnus hedge before we go away. Watering and weeding is the order of the day now, until it rains properly.
I was not expecting that when we got to the lower lawn the lacecap hydrangeas would have collapsed. Leaves hanging dull and wrinkled, flowers drooping forlornly. I exclaimed that I must water them the following day, and tried to distract the visitors with the sight of the little hanging yellow pendants of Dicentra scandens, and the promise that there really was an entire Magnolia stellata under that cascade of foliage.
Yesterday I got the hose down to the bottom of the garden, no mean feat since the wooden steps that provide the most direct route from the tap have been three quarters overgrown by 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' and are half rotten. The Systems Administrator has agreed to my pleas to replace the broken steps once I've pruned the rose, which I will do this autumn. It seemed a pity to risk being left with stems of broken and dead rose stuck in the tree over the summer, and there's always the possibility of nesting birds, but they must have finished by now. Unfortunately by late yesterday afternoon there were too many pots needing watering for me to do them by hand, and the hose had to go back through the rose and up the steps, which was a quantum more difficult than getting it down had been.
This morning I dragged the hose out to the back once again and resumed watering where I left off. The hydrangeas were very glad of a drink, and so were the collapsing hellebores. The first Cyclamen coum have just started to flower in rather a cowed way, and might be livened up by a good soaking. The one surviving Leucothe under the river birches has got an awful lot of brown leaves and doesn't look more than half alive. The Fothergilla is dead. It hadn't been looking well all year. Life under the birches was definitely too dry for it. Thus the garden simplifies itself. Even a Berberis thunbergii f. atropurpurea 'Golden Ring' was looking badly stressed with brown and crisped leaves, and berberis are pretty tough, car park plants par excellence. It's a shame the leaves have spoiled now, given that good autumn colour is theoretically one of the attractions of deciduous berberis.
I tidied away the shrivelled remnants of primrose leaves, odd weeds and grass from the beds, while moving the spray head of the hose every few minutes. So many things need watering. The Gillenia trifoliata looks parched, the azaleas pathetic, some of the evergreen ferns have gone prematurely brown. Kirengeshoma palmata is threatening to give up before it starts. I have given up on the idea of trying to cut the worst sticking out branches of the eleagnus hedge before we go away. Watering and weeding is the order of the day now, until it rains properly.
Thursday, 1 September 2016
scrantling
Today we scrantled the long grass on the daffodil and fritillary lawns. When I say we, I mean it was the Systems Administrator who drove the power scythe. I raked the cut grass. I haven't nearly finished clearing away the debris yet but the key stage has been accomplished: the long grass has been cut down (except for one bank which I always have to do with shears). The first day of September is the earliest I think we've ever done it, but that's purely down to lack of organisation in previous years since today was none too soon. The long grass had ceased to be a thing of ornament or beauty, so it might as well go while it's dry and before it has entirely fallen over.
The SA does not enjoy operating the scythe. It is in fact the SA's least favourite gardening task, because it is so hard on the arms, especially as the scythe doesn't come out of gear very easily so going round corners takes a lot of physical effort. I expect I could steer the machine, but I know I could never start it because I have never been able to get anything to go with a starting cord, beginning with outboard engines thirty years ago. Maybe I am too short, but probably it is lack of technique. Raking is pretty hard work though, and I spared a thought for those intellectually lazy and now mercifully vanishing journos who kept popping up on the radio around the Olympics boring on about participation levels in sport, their assumption being that anybody who was not signed up to sport was sitting on their sofa. Come and spend a couple of hours raking cut grass, guys. You will not be in the running for a medal, I'm afraid, but your muscles will get a good stretch, I promise you.
This year we are going to try something different with the cut grass, which is to bag it up in old Strulch bags and take it to the dump. I don't want to put it on the compost heap because it is full of weed seeds. In past years we've carted it up to the utility area with the intention of putting it on the bonfire, except that a bonfire has to be good and hot before it will burn cut grass, by which point you can scarcely get close enough to it to throw the grass on, and one way and another the piles of cut grass have taken ages to get burnt, and hung around by the bonfire until almost the time of next year's cut, getting danker and less combustible with every passing month.
Before starting to put this plan into action I did wonder whether it was realistic, or whether the amount of long grass generated by the two lawns would be enough to fill a hundred bags and take a couple of dozen trips to the dump. We seemed to fill the trailer so many times when we were trying to burn the debris at home. But of course piling the grass stems into the trailer we could not squash them down, whereas I was really packing them into the bags. I must have filled ten or twelve bags by now, but I reckon I'm three quarters of the way round the fritillary lawn, which is by far the bigger of the two. I'm going to need several car trips to the dump, but not dozens. It will be doable, and then the cut long grass will be gone, which will be much better than having it festering by the bonfire heap for months.
This is the beauty of September, it is not so insanely hot and sticky. Suddenly things are getting done.
The SA does not enjoy operating the scythe. It is in fact the SA's least favourite gardening task, because it is so hard on the arms, especially as the scythe doesn't come out of gear very easily so going round corners takes a lot of physical effort. I expect I could steer the machine, but I know I could never start it because I have never been able to get anything to go with a starting cord, beginning with outboard engines thirty years ago. Maybe I am too short, but probably it is lack of technique. Raking is pretty hard work though, and I spared a thought for those intellectually lazy and now mercifully vanishing journos who kept popping up on the radio around the Olympics boring on about participation levels in sport, their assumption being that anybody who was not signed up to sport was sitting on their sofa. Come and spend a couple of hours raking cut grass, guys. You will not be in the running for a medal, I'm afraid, but your muscles will get a good stretch, I promise you.
This year we are going to try something different with the cut grass, which is to bag it up in old Strulch bags and take it to the dump. I don't want to put it on the compost heap because it is full of weed seeds. In past years we've carted it up to the utility area with the intention of putting it on the bonfire, except that a bonfire has to be good and hot before it will burn cut grass, by which point you can scarcely get close enough to it to throw the grass on, and one way and another the piles of cut grass have taken ages to get burnt, and hung around by the bonfire until almost the time of next year's cut, getting danker and less combustible with every passing month.
Before starting to put this plan into action I did wonder whether it was realistic, or whether the amount of long grass generated by the two lawns would be enough to fill a hundred bags and take a couple of dozen trips to the dump. We seemed to fill the trailer so many times when we were trying to burn the debris at home. But of course piling the grass stems into the trailer we could not squash them down, whereas I was really packing them into the bags. I must have filled ten or twelve bags by now, but I reckon I'm three quarters of the way round the fritillary lawn, which is by far the bigger of the two. I'm going to need several car trips to the dump, but not dozens. It will be doable, and then the cut long grass will be gone, which will be much better than having it festering by the bonfire heap for months.
This is the beauty of September, it is not so insanely hot and sticky. Suddenly things are getting done.
Wednesday, 31 August 2016
we want to see your kittens
We had guests to lunch. By this morning the house was fairly clean and tidy. I'd already wiped the kitchen units, sides as well as the worktops, and cleaned the Aga and washed the floor, and the Systems Administrator had vacuumed everywhere else, and I'd washed the hall floor and cleaned the downstairs cloakroom. I'd put out fresh hand towels and checked the visible supplies of soap and loo roll were not about to run out. The SA had put fresh newspaper under the kittens' food plates and their litter tray. Altogether things were looking quite presentable by our standards. This morning I added a few finishing touches like wiping the mantelpiece, something that doesn't normally bother me personally since I am too short to see it unless I stand on tiptoe.
By mid morning the kittens had had their breakfast, been out, come in again, and two were sitting quietly under one of the chairs in front of the television. Suspiciously quietly as it turned out, because a few minutes later we discovered they had a mouse. The SA got rid of the mouse. I got on with making Jane Grigson's leek and mushroom tart, with only a brief moment of panic when I emerged briefly from the kitchen and found the energetic kitten in the hall with a dead bird. The SA put the energetic kitten out, together with his bird, and vacuumed up the feathers. By half past eleven we were all sitting down quietly, even the energetic kitten, waiting for our visitors, until the serious kitten started wrestling with Mr Fluffy on the sofa.
As soon as the guests arrived the serious kitten disappeared. He hates and distrusts visitors. The other two stared at the strange people from a safe distance, before the energetic kitten decided that they were not dangerous and consented to sit looking kittenish on the pouffe and occasionally chase his tail in an entertaining way. This is the trouble with people declaring they want to see our kittens, apart from the fact that the kittens are virtually six months old and well on the way to being small cats. There's no guaranteeing whether they will want to be seen. Our Ginger obliged, and sat with us all before lunch then toured the garden with us afterwards, but we were a trifle light in the delightful balls of fluff stakes. Though on the plus side we did not have any more birds or mice. I still remember the time a couple staying with us in our previous house opened their bedroom door in the morning to find a dead rat laid out in the lobby.
Mr Fluffy did not want to consort with the visitors up close and personal, but consented to come in. The serious kitten would not come into the house at all, even when the SA waved a plate of food at him. The combination of heat, tail chasing and general excitement seemed to have blunted the energetic kitten's appetite, so Mr Fluffy was able to eat most of his brothers' lunch as well as his own, and retreated to the garden to spend the rest of the afternoon sleeping it off.
The troops regrouped once the scary visitors had gone away, and all three followed me over to the greenhouse to do the watering, then Mr Fluffy thought that dragging the hose round the garden was such a good game that he stayed with me while I watered the rest of the pots in the front garden. I am mildly regretful that they can't be depended on to entertain visitors, but that's cats for you. They like who they like. Our Ginger likes everybody and the short indignant tabby detested everyone except us. The Maine Coons were pretty sociable, the black cat gave strangers a wide berth. The new generation of cats will suit themselves according to their individual personalities. Mr Fluffy will probably learn to oblige once he gets used to the idea, but I don't hold out much hope of the serious kitten. A pity as he is growing into an elegant cat, and he is extremely affectionate to us, when he's in the mood to be fussed.
By mid morning the kittens had had their breakfast, been out, come in again, and two were sitting quietly under one of the chairs in front of the television. Suspiciously quietly as it turned out, because a few minutes later we discovered they had a mouse. The SA got rid of the mouse. I got on with making Jane Grigson's leek and mushroom tart, with only a brief moment of panic when I emerged briefly from the kitchen and found the energetic kitten in the hall with a dead bird. The SA put the energetic kitten out, together with his bird, and vacuumed up the feathers. By half past eleven we were all sitting down quietly, even the energetic kitten, waiting for our visitors, until the serious kitten started wrestling with Mr Fluffy on the sofa.
As soon as the guests arrived the serious kitten disappeared. He hates and distrusts visitors. The other two stared at the strange people from a safe distance, before the energetic kitten decided that they were not dangerous and consented to sit looking kittenish on the pouffe and occasionally chase his tail in an entertaining way. This is the trouble with people declaring they want to see our kittens, apart from the fact that the kittens are virtually six months old and well on the way to being small cats. There's no guaranteeing whether they will want to be seen. Our Ginger obliged, and sat with us all before lunch then toured the garden with us afterwards, but we were a trifle light in the delightful balls of fluff stakes. Though on the plus side we did not have any more birds or mice. I still remember the time a couple staying with us in our previous house opened their bedroom door in the morning to find a dead rat laid out in the lobby.
Mr Fluffy did not want to consort with the visitors up close and personal, but consented to come in. The serious kitten would not come into the house at all, even when the SA waved a plate of food at him. The combination of heat, tail chasing and general excitement seemed to have blunted the energetic kitten's appetite, so Mr Fluffy was able to eat most of his brothers' lunch as well as his own, and retreated to the garden to spend the rest of the afternoon sleeping it off.
The troops regrouped once the scary visitors had gone away, and all three followed me over to the greenhouse to do the watering, then Mr Fluffy thought that dragging the hose round the garden was such a good game that he stayed with me while I watered the rest of the pots in the front garden. I am mildly regretful that they can't be depended on to entertain visitors, but that's cats for you. They like who they like. Our Ginger likes everybody and the short indignant tabby detested everyone except us. The Maine Coons were pretty sociable, the black cat gave strangers a wide berth. The new generation of cats will suit themselves according to their individual personalities. Mr Fluffy will probably learn to oblige once he gets used to the idea, but I don't hold out much hope of the serious kitten. A pity as he is growing into an elegant cat, and he is extremely affectionate to us, when he's in the mood to be fussed.
Tuesday, 30 August 2016
grow your own tomatoes
As the end of summer approaches I have been considering the success or otherwise of the tomato plants. I don't really understand tomatoes. All those rules about determinate and indeterminate and bush forms, and stopping, and de-leafing, never seem to make much sense confronted with the enthusiastic mass of growth that my tomato plants make in the greenhouse. I even bought a book about tomato growing from Amazon, which left me more confused than before as the author talked about optimum temperature and humidity levels and the chemistry of tomato fertilisers. The temperature and humidity in my rather rickety greenhouse will be whatever they are, depending on the weather, and as for the chemistry of fertilisers, I don't mind applying some Tomorite from time to time but that's about it. Looking at Amazon now I see that my book doesn't even appear on the first two search pages, but a new crop of tomato growing books has taken its place. Maybe I should get a second opinion from a different tomato guru.
The tomatoes are growing in branded tomato grow bags from The Range, not the cheapest grow bags on offer but I suspect that with grow bags you get what you pay for, and if I was going to go to the trouble of trying to grow tomatoes I didn't want to stuff them into completely rubbish compost. I made a reasonably competent job of tying them to a framework of bamboo canes this year, after last year when I let them flop over the floor rather as the summer wore on without producing much of a crop and I became discouraged. Then at the eleventh hour they ripened quite a lot of fruit and I didn't really fancy eating the ones growing at ankle level that had been splashed by dirt off the greenhouse floor.
The first bag has got 'Sungold' in it. I bought a packet of seeds after hearing the man from Thompson and Morgan single out 'Sungold' for its high sugar content in the talk he gave to Suffolk Plant Heritage. It is an F1 hybrid and the seeds are correspondingly expensive, and as tomato plants normally germinate readily I only sowed four out of my packet, wanting three plants, and saved the rest for next year. I am pleased with 'Sungold'. It is a cherry tomato, individual fruits varying in size from a small marble to a good sized cherry, and they are very sweet but with a good, tangy, strong tomato taste. The skins are noticeably chewy in the mouth, but I don't know if that is typical of 'Sungold' or due to my less than perfect tomato cultivation skills. They caught me out when they first started to ripen because I had not realised that even when fully ripe they remained a pallid shade of orange. I was still waiting for them to go darker than that when they began to go squishy and split on the vine. They are quite prone to split during picking, and again I don't know if that's down to them or something I did. The tomatoes on each individual truss don't all ripen at the same time, so they would be useless as premium vine ripened tomatoes.
The second bag is of 'Cherry Belle', another F1 hybrid, which came free with a magazine. A red cherry tomato sounded a useful thing to have, but the fruit are actually larger than cherry tomatoes generally are, or indeed cherries. They have made the smallest plants of the five varieties but are the most difficult to water, and I wonder if I failed to bash their grow bag around hard enough to break up the compost before cutting my three crosses in the top and planting my tomatoes. After them comes what is supposed to 'Gardener's Delight'. Either my plants are all infected with virus, or there was a mix-up at the seed merchant and a striped variety like 'Tigeralla' got mistakenly packaged up as 'Gardener's Delight', because every one of them produces striped fruit, two-tone green ripening to red and orange. The next bag is of 'Nimbus F1', another magazine freebie that is cropping prolifically with round, red, medium sized tomatoes. Unfortunately none of the three are great as salad tomatoes, tasting better when liberally laced with Branston pickle than they do neat. I don't know if that is down to the varieties or my lack of skill with tomatoes. A mixture of whatever happens to be ripe at the time cooks to a quite decent tomato soup, mixed with carrot and onion well sweated in butter and a sprinkling of dried basil.
The fifth and final bag is planted with a giant variety called 'Black Russian'. The few tomatoes I got last year were well flavoured and made rather exotic salad, but as yet I have not had a single fruit ripen this year, and with only a day to go to September I don't feel 'Black Russian' is earning its keep. They are at the less sunny end of the greenhouse so maybe they have not been given a fair chance. I will read up on tomatoes over the winter, and decide whether to give 'Black Russian' a final go in a better position. I need to take the top off the hedge as well to stop it shading the greenhouse so badly. I fancy a classic plum tomato for cooking, and a proper red cherry tomato for salads. And I ought to buy my grow bags earlier in the season before The Range practically runs out. I am still not completely convinced by home grown tomatoes. In theory eating something absolutely fresh that you know hasn't been sprayed with anything ought to be wonderful, and it seems a waste not to use the greenhouse space over the summer. In practice it seems quite a lot of work and a moderate amount of expense for a mixed bag of tomatoes, three quarters of which aren't actually as nice as the ones we buy in Waitrose.
Monday, 29 August 2016
clean and tidy
I have spent most of the Bank Holiday Monday carrying bits of muddle from one room to another and cleaning the kitchen. It needed doing, certainly before we go on holiday, and with no convenient wet day forecast I thought I'd better get on and start doing it. The most startling result of the tidying up phase was the discovery of a bird nest in the garage. Feeling inside a largish white ceramic cache pot that once held a pot plant to see if it had another smaller pot stuffed inside or if I could use it to store various spare hose fittings, my fingers recoiled at the touch of something rough and organic. Pulling the pot down from the shelf and peering in I was amazed to discover the base of it filled with moss and fine twigs, with a very neat circular depression in the centre barely two inches across. The pot was a good six or seven inches wide at the base, so whatever had made the nest had moved a phenomenal amount of material. There were no eggs or fragments of eggs, no feathers, no droppings and no indication that the nest had been used.
What made it? A wren? And if so how did it (or they) get in? There were days earlier in the summer when the door was open during the daytime, but I always shut it at night and didn't open up before nine or so in the morning. Wouldn't whatever bird was eyeing up that pot as a potential nesting site have worked out that it kept being blocked off before the nest was half finished? Or was there a tiny, bird sized gap somewhere we hadn't noticed? I peered at the sides of the up-and-over door, and couldn't see one.
Cleaning the kitchen isn't so bad in that I can listen to the iPod on speakers, so it's my chance to catch up with music the Systems Administrator is not keen on. Today it was Gibbons, Haydn's Nelson Mass, Tinariwen's Radio Tisdas Sessions, the Brandenburg concertos, Talking Heads' Fear of Music, Elvis Costello and Lloyd Cole. I started with the more ethereal and classical, and got louder and poppier as I began to flag. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, a very good motto to clean your kitchen to.
I have got a new pot of Aga cleaner. Exasperated by all branded Aga abrasives now being sold in tiny tubes which would never seal up properly after the first couple of times I used them, due to the nozzle blocking up, whereupon the rest of the contents of the tube dried up and became impossible to squeeze out, I grumbled to the SA who succeeded in finding an online vintage and homeware supplier who would sell me an enormous pot of goo suitable for cleaning the Aga for less than the price of the tiny tube, with the promise that if it began to dry out I could simply add water.
Problems with cleaning your Aga are about as first world as they come, but the trouble with an Aga is that it is hot all the time, and cooking splashes bake on ferociously hard. You need an abrasive paste, and a plastic scouring pad to apply it. I know, I've tried wiping the Aga with normal kitchen cleaner and a dishcloth, and felt like Lady Macbeth washing her hands. It was hopeless. But the abrasive paste must not be too harsh, or you'll scratch the lovely enamel. Hurrah for Betty Twyford's Aga Enamel Cleaning Paste.
The Systems Administrator, not to be outdone, spent part of the morning rodding some friends' drains. The SA has got a good, practical, engineering bent and understands drains. The engineering bent might be needed in the morning, as the serious kitten, who is normally so sensible, forgot himself after supper and bit right through the lead to a pair of quite good headphones belonging to the SA. The SA thought they could be microsoldered back together, but that probably depends on quite how many bits they are in.
What made it? A wren? And if so how did it (or they) get in? There were days earlier in the summer when the door was open during the daytime, but I always shut it at night and didn't open up before nine or so in the morning. Wouldn't whatever bird was eyeing up that pot as a potential nesting site have worked out that it kept being blocked off before the nest was half finished? Or was there a tiny, bird sized gap somewhere we hadn't noticed? I peered at the sides of the up-and-over door, and couldn't see one.
Cleaning the kitchen isn't so bad in that I can listen to the iPod on speakers, so it's my chance to catch up with music the Systems Administrator is not keen on. Today it was Gibbons, Haydn's Nelson Mass, Tinariwen's Radio Tisdas Sessions, the Brandenburg concertos, Talking Heads' Fear of Music, Elvis Costello and Lloyd Cole. I started with the more ethereal and classical, and got louder and poppier as I began to flag. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, a very good motto to clean your kitchen to.
I have got a new pot of Aga cleaner. Exasperated by all branded Aga abrasives now being sold in tiny tubes which would never seal up properly after the first couple of times I used them, due to the nozzle blocking up, whereupon the rest of the contents of the tube dried up and became impossible to squeeze out, I grumbled to the SA who succeeded in finding an online vintage and homeware supplier who would sell me an enormous pot of goo suitable for cleaning the Aga for less than the price of the tiny tube, with the promise that if it began to dry out I could simply add water.
Problems with cleaning your Aga are about as first world as they come, but the trouble with an Aga is that it is hot all the time, and cooking splashes bake on ferociously hard. You need an abrasive paste, and a plastic scouring pad to apply it. I know, I've tried wiping the Aga with normal kitchen cleaner and a dishcloth, and felt like Lady Macbeth washing her hands. It was hopeless. But the abrasive paste must not be too harsh, or you'll scratch the lovely enamel. Hurrah for Betty Twyford's Aga Enamel Cleaning Paste.
The Systems Administrator, not to be outdone, spent part of the morning rodding some friends' drains. The SA has got a good, practical, engineering bent and understands drains. The engineering bent might be needed in the morning, as the serious kitten, who is normally so sensible, forgot himself after supper and bit right through the lead to a pair of quite good headphones belonging to the SA. The SA thought they could be microsoldered back together, but that probably depends on quite how many bits they are in.
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