working among the roses

The volume of trade is starting to ease at the plant centre.  I expect the dry weather has something to do with it, and I think the first exultant rush of glee that winter has finally gone and spring is on its way has worn off.  I had time to make good progress putting the latest delivery of roses out for sale, trimming back any dieback and tidying the existing rows while I was about it.  The rose grower doesn't bother pruning each stem to just above a node, but chops the plants off at one height, so the stem ends die above the highest node.  I suppose this is quicker for the grower, and means that they can use unskilled staff.

There was some much-trumpeted research a few years back that demonstrated that roses pruned with a chainsaw were as floriferous as those conventionally hand pruned to a growth bud.  However, whether or not the roses need their dead snags removing, the manager likes it done to make them look tidy, and I agree.  In my own garden I am a stickler for pruning to a growth point, and not leaving useless ends of stems sticking out at random.  With roses this doesn't always protect against dieback.  Our cluster-flowered roses were carefully pruned to outward facing buds by me, using the trusty Felcos, but still have some dieback, where the plant has decided to dispense with that stem or bit of a stem and just make a new one.  I like listening to music while pruning.  Anything too up-tempo is distracting, but the piano music of Eric Satie is just about perfect.  It has a wistful quality that matches one's mood as one decides which bits to take out, and which to retain.

a nightingale sang (and everybody kept on talking)

I went last night to hear the nightingales sing at Fingringhoe.  This Essex Wildlife Trust reserve formed out of an old gravel quarry is a nightingale stronghold, of county-wide and national significance.  I had never knowingly heard one sing live, only on the radio, and I thought it would probably be very beautiful, and that if I heard their song knowing for sure it was nightingales, I would be more confident about identifying them if I ever heard them again.

The song was as beautiful as I'd expected it to be.  It is very loud, heard live and close up, deep and melodic, interspersed with strange, atmospheric chucks.  I recommend live nightingales as an experience.  The snag was that as the reserve shuts at 5.00pm, the only way to get in at dusk is to join a guided nightingale walk.  This is what we did, but what I had not expected was that our tour guide would talk.  Loudly.  Practically all the time.  He regaled us with interesting facts about nightingales (they migrate from Africa, they arrive in early April and leave around July or August, they return to the same territory, only the males sing, they nest quite close to the ground in thickets.  OK, they were interesting facts, but I'd much rather we'd been told them before the start of the tour and then gone and listened to the birds).  When he ran out of Interesting Facts about nightingales he filled in the silences with other facts about how big the quarry used to be, and what good wildlife habitats former quarries made, and how the reserve was managed.  Our fellow tourists joined in cheerfully, wanting to know if nightingales did sing in Berkeley Square, and informing us that in Keats' time they sang on Hampstead Heath, and vying with each other to demonstrate their superior knowledge of birds, and personal acquaintance with professionals high up in the world of nature conservation.  Why?  Why were they there if they didn't want to listen to the thing we'd supposedly come to hear?  So that they could tick off 'heard nightingale' in their twitchers' score books of bird encounters?  They all seemed to be enjoying themselves.

My companion and I hung back from the group as far as we could, and did more or less manage to hear the nightingales singing with only a distant racket of human voices.  Fingringhoe as night falls is a magical place, with the birds singing among the trees and scrub, and the lights flashing on the Colne buoys.  There was a crescent moon, and the tide was very low.  As well as the nightingales we heard an enthusiastic cuckoo.  So I'm glad I went, but I was reminded why I don't belong to any nature study groups, apart from the beekeepers, and generally avoid guided tours like the plague.

I bought a nightingale CD, produced by the British Trust for Ornithology, which starts with the famous recordings of Beatrice Harrison playing her cello with a nightingale, and the wartime sound of a vast bomber fleet gradually approaching as a nightingale sings, then goes on into field recordings of the birds' song.  I thought we could listen to it on the veranda on hot summer evenings, and pretend there were nightingales in the wood (the officer in charge of engineering projects looked mutinous at the idea of rigging speakers in the wood, and said it would be very difficult and that it would be wrong to fake nightingales).  By the time it gets hot enough to sit outside at dusk the nightingales would not be singing, since they would be well on their way back to Africa, but as my grasp of ornithology is distinctly shaky I shan't let that put me off.

referendum day

So, it's AV referendum day.  People who are enthusiastic about it, either for or against, have been grumbling that cover of the AV debate was hijacked by the royal wedding and the death of Osama Bin Laden, but I suspect that the media would have found something else to talk about instead of constitutional reform in any event.  I was quite keen on the sound of AV when I first heard about it on R4, some months ago.  Then I began to think I understood how it actually worked, and became less convinced.  I read my little leaflet carefully when it dropped through the letter box, which confirmed I'd grasped the mechanics correctly, as did Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis on The Now Show that Friday.

I haven't been at all impressed by the campaigns either for or against.  The Vote No lot's explanation as to why AV would not be a Good Thing has been limited to making spurious sporting comparisons, in which the horse or athlete or whatever that crossed the line first ends up coming third, which is Not Fair.  I am utterly indifferent to sport, and dislike being treated like an idiot.  The Vote Yes Campaign have mainly trotted out assorted actors and luvvies who have told me that AV forces politicians to 'reach out' to more voters, and that 'every vote will count', which is bilge every bit as bad as the No Campaign.  The other reason given for voting in favour of AV was that while AV was not very good, voting against it would be interepreted as voting against change and in favour of the status quo, whereas if we went for AV now it would signal that we wanted change, and we might be allowed to have another change later.  So, I don't want to go to Disneyland on holiday, but if I say so it will be taken as meaning I want to stay at home, whereas if I agree to go to Disneyland I might be allowed another holiday some other time? (sorry, the bad comparisons are catching).

Under AV, if no candidate gets an outright majority with half the vote or more, the candidate who scored the fewest votes is eliminated, and the second choice votes of their supporters allocated to the remaining candidates.  And so on, until a candidate has half the votes.  There, that isn't difficult to understand.  I'm a bit perturbed that The Now Show seems to have grasped it more clearly than The Today Programme.  In British politics there are some mainstream parties, and some smaller parties, which range from the comical to the downright sinister.  In my constituency of Harwich and Essex North, seven candidates stood at the last election, and the sitting MP, Tory Bernard Jenkin, came in first with 46.9% of the vote, leaving him 3.1% short of an outright majority.  Bottom came an independent candidate, with 0.3% of the total vote, then a Green, with 1.9%, then the BNP with 2.2%.  So under AV my MP would be chosen by the second preference votes of people who voted Independent, Green and for the BNP.  If that didn't clinch matters then UKIP votes at 5.2% of the total would come into play.  The second preference choices of the voters whose first choice was Liberal Democrat or Labour, 43.5% of the total, seem unlikely to be taken into account.

So it isn't true that 'every vote counts'.  The second choices of people whose first choice was a minority party will count, but not those of voters whose first choice was one of the main parties.  As for MPs being forced to 'reach out to voters across the spectrum', how exactly is Bernard Jenkin supposed to reach out to supporters of an Independent candidate plus the Greens and the BNP?  Apart from being a good constituency MP, and appearing a decent and reasonable human being, which a sensible MP would do anyway, to 'reach out' to people for their first choice votes.

One conceptual difficulty appears to me to be that having a proportional system, which could be considered Fair, is incompatible with retaining the constituency link.  The electorate get round this to an extent by choosing to live in areas with other similar people, so we end up with home counties Tory enclaves, Lib Dem tofu land in the South West, and so on.  The British appear attached to the idea of the constituency link.  I am myself, because it makes MPs clearly accountable to a defined group of people, which does seem to help keep them on the straight and narrow.  Plus as more decisions are taken by Government rather than Parliament, more and more of an MPs role is as a glorified social worker (that or trying to get into Government) so people need to know who 'their' MP is, and the MP needs to know his or her patch, which would be tricky if it were the size of East Anglia.  Another difficulty is that having a larger number of political parties does by definition fragment politics, as demonstrated in Iraq where following their elections they had about two hundred parties and no Government.  If a sizeable part of the British electorate is strongly opposed to one of the large parties, which under the present electoral system is likely to win, then they may need to make some realistic compromises, organise themselves and band together, rather than vote for a huge range of minority parties.  But I didn't hear those sorts of issues discussed in the media.  It was all rather a disappointment.

unexpected inhabitants in the Eryngium

I have been clearing away dead bits from the Eryngium pandanifolium.  This is (when it has not been blasted by snow) a statuesque and imposing evergreen.  I bought it as my 40th birthday present to me, when we visited Great Dixter for the first time on the actual day of the birthday.  I had read Christopher Lloyd's books, most of them many times, starting with his Foliage Plants, which was one of the first gardening books I ever bought in my early twenties.  I loved his style and philosophy, and his accounts of Great Dixter, and the garden in reality proved to be every bit as good as it sounded (things aren't always).  I liked the Eryngium as we walked around the garden, and bought one to take home with me, without having a clear plan where I was going to put it.

It is one of the rosette forming members of the species, with long, strap-shaped, spiny-edged  leaves, which throws up typical Eryngium flowers on long stems.  What I had not grasped, even having seen it growing at Dixter, was how large it was going to get.  I fitted mine into a gap among the roses, congratulating myself that it would introduce some useful architectural bones into a twiggy and formless area.  It did that, but it grew prodigously.  The tuft of leaves reached a good metre tall, and the flower stems twice that, and it divided and spread at the base to form multiple growing points until it was well over a metre wide.  On one side it began it grow into a low box hedge, which became thin and skinny where the Eryngium pressed into it, and frequently too tall because it was such a spiny business reaching through the Eryngium to trim the top.

The box hedge was the saving of it last winter.  Most of the leaves died, and most of the crown as well, but from the side closest to the hedge, where it got a modicum of protection from the cold and snow, new shoots have emerged.  I cleared away the dead leaves, and was starting to remove the dead bits from the crown, while keeping an eye out for signs of life, when I heard a strange fizzing noise.  I puzzled about this for a while, until bumble bees started to emerge from the crown, at which point I retreated hastily.  Bumbles are normally gentle creatures, and I have only been stung once, when I was cutting long grass with shears and cut right over the entrance to their nest in an old mouse burrow, without knowing it was there.  I can testify from personal experience that their stings are extremely painful.  Fortunately this lot showed no desire to chase me across the garden, and after a while I ventured to retrieve my tools and my radio.  I thought I'd better not push my luck any more for one day, and left mulching that bit of the border until another time, but I'll put some Strulch around them and over the remains of the crown at some point.

They will have finished nesting by the autumn, so I can then carry out my plan to lift what is left of the plant, and replace it in its original position further from the box.  I suppose one advantage of doing a lot of cultivation by hand rather than machinery is that you are more likely to get advance warning when you are heading into danger.  There are accounts of people being killed while strimming undergrowth, and hitting a wasps' nest.

an ancient weed

The horsetail leaves have started emerging in the back garden.  This is an ancient plant, and one of the most determined and ineradicable weeds found in the UK.  The spore bearing cones appeared several weeks ago, and are now withering, but the leaves will be with me until the autumn.  They are bright green, thin fronds carried on brittle central stalks.  Given moisture they reach 30-40cm in height, while in a dry year they are somewhat shorter.

Questions about horsetail, or Equisetum arvense, crop up regularly on Gardeners' Question Time, and are the cue for the panel to laugh and suggest moving house.  If Bob Flowerdew is on the programme that week he will say that horsetail can't stand mowing, and that the questioner can put their garden down to grass and grow standard trees.  This would be fine, assuming they wanted that sort of a garden.  The roots of horsetail are black, and brittle, and are said to go down so far underground that coal miners have found them growing in the mines.  They run, and horsetail will cover a large area, limited only by whether it finds conditions to its liking.  Black polythene is no cure.  The horsetail will sit underneath, biding its time until the ground is clear again, if necessary for years, and the fronds are capable of finding their way through woven landscape fabric.  It is a plant of poor drainage and compacted ground.  Here it runs around in the back garden, where the underlying clay comes close to the surface, and is absent from the front, where the sand goes on down seemingly for ever.  Just to be on the safe side we have a rule that no roots or waste containing soil from the back garden goes on the compost heaps at home.  Instead it all goes to the municipal dump, where it can be composted at higher temperatures than we can achieve.

Looking on the bright side, we don't have ground elder or Japanese knotweed, and horsetail, although visually intrusive, is not a very competitive plant.  When we first moved here I put a lot of effort into digging it up, or painting its shiny leaves with a mixture of glyphosate and wallpaper paste, before deciding that it was impossible to kill and instead I needed a strategy to live with it.  What I do now is pull up the leaves when they appear, as many as I can get to (which is dependent on weather and what else is going on at the time).  They will regrow but not as tall.  If I keep at them the regrowth ends up so short that it is hidden among the other plants.  This is one reason why I'm so keen on getting a continuous layer of low herbaceous planting between shrubs and the showier herbaceous feature plants.  The horsetail doesn't seem to affect the growth of the garden plants, and I avoid having to see too much of it.  At least, as it doesn't get going until late April and early May, the ground is left more or less clear for early displays of small bulbs and suchlike.  It withers in autumn, leaving remarkably fragile, insubstantial remains.

The leaves of horsetail naturally accumulate silicon, and in times gone by it was used for polishing pewter, according to Richard Mabey.  We do have a pair of pewter plates on the mantelpiece that are pretty black and in need of a good polish, so maybe I should try it sometime.  Unfortunately Mabey doesn't give any instructions about how to go about this domestic task, whether the horsetail should be wet or dry, and if I should use a bit of soap or anything with it.  Mabey also says that the leaves if boiled in water make an excellent fungicide against mildew.  My normal approach to mildew control is to try not to grow things that get mildew, but maybe I should try that too.  We'll see how it goes.

wretched wind

Another bank holiday Monday, another day at the plant centre.  I woke up this morning full of ideas of what I was going to do in the garden, then remembered I had to go to work.

The wind is a real nuisance in a plant retail operation.  Pots blow over, plants break their branches or crush their neighbours, and the compost dries out terribly quickly.  It's impossible to use the overhead irrigation systems, except for the trees where the nozzles are low down, as the water blows around everywhere instead of soaking into the pots, so everything except the trees has to be watered by hand.  Sometimes you stand a pot back upright and it has blown over again before you can water it.  We started watering at just after 8.00am, and I was still watering until 10.40am, then started again at 4.50pm and went on until 6.00pm.  My colleague was watering the behind-the-scenes area the other side of the car park, that customers don't go into, until noon.

There is a Paeonia rockii in one of the borders in the plant centre, in full flower.  A customer asked me what it was, and I had to tell her that we didn't have any, and might not be getting them for a long time.  Other customers wanted to know where they could get lunch: we don't have a cafe.  Given the tough time British pubs are facing, it seems very unenterprising of our local hostelries not to put leaflets about their food offering in our shop.  We don't do food, except for biscuits, apple juice and coffee out of a machine, and we're always being asked for recommendations by customers who are making a day out of it.

Somebody wanted an idea for a shrub to flower late on in the year, and seemed happy with my suggestion of  Heptacodium miconioides, the Seven son flower of Zhejiang.  It comes from China, but was only introduced to UK gardens relatively recently, and doesn't even have an entry in my copy of Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles.  It carries white, scented flowers at the ends of its branches in autumn, and after the petals drop the display is continued (in a good year) as the calyxes turn red, and (in a good year) it produces red berries.  It is one of those plants that I liked as soon as I saw it.  It is a rapid grower: the plants we have in the plant centre have made at least 20cm of extension growth already this season, while confined to their pots.  Another customer was greatly taken with the leaves and open habit of  Lomatia tinctoria.  It is a good-looking plant, and I was able to tell her that based on my own (statistically insignificant) experience of growing one plant, once, it seemed straightforward and easy in cultivation.  I do like it when customers are keen and willing to try unusual plants.

The William and Kate tea towels haven't sold.  I didn't think they would.  I suppose the owner can always use them in a post-modern ironic way to dry things with.

the brief flowering of a true aristocrat

The Paeonia rockii is flowering.  This is a beautiful and exotic tree peony that is one of the most fabulous things I have ever succeeded in growing.  The flowers, which only last for a few days, are huge, 15cm or more across, single, white, and have at the base of each petal a purple blotch.  They have a sweet scent if you stick your nose in, though they don't broadcast their fragrance around the garden.  The leaves are divided, a cool grey-green, and the whole plant exudes elegance and glamour.

It is not easy to find, and not cheap when you do find it, the reason being that it is difficult to propagate.  We have only ever had them in stock at work once in the eight years I've been there, which is when I bought mine.  That was in 2005, and we were charging £30 for them then.  It was only a single twig about 30cm high, which I planted next to a large stake, not so much to support it as to highlight its position and make sure I didn't tread on it.  The following spring it produced one flower, so out of proportion to the still diminutive shrub that I cut it off and put it in water, for fear that its weight would snap the top off the plant.  I was very pleased to see that the initial flower was a good one, as some strains in cultivation are better than others.  By now it is a well-branched shrub around 1.5m in all directions.

My plant grows in a west facing bed with shrub roses to the south of it, so it is sheltered from the worst of the wind, but definitely in less than full sun.  Tree peonies come into leaf remarkably early in the spring, and the books advise avoiding an east facing aspect lest the morning sun fall on the frozen leaves.  The spot where Paeonia rockii is has reasonable drainage, and although conditions are probably a bit drier than it would like in an ideal world, it has done better than the other varieties of tree peony I've tried, which have been in places where the clay rises to the surface.  They can make a lot of growth in a season, but can give a lot of it back the following winter through dieback.  I have never observed any pest or disease on them.  Talking to customers at work I get the impression that one of the main hazards to tree peonies is jobbing gardeners treating them in the same way as herbaceous peonies and cutting them to the ground.  You don't want to do that.  Just take any dead bits out once the plant has started into growth.  The stems are brittle and can be bowed right down by the weight of the flowers, seeming too frail to support them, so a bit of staking is sometimes called for.

some heroic survivors

Many of my accounts of the effects of last winter have been of losses, so I should like to pay tribute to a couple of unexpected survivors, which are still alive despite my best efforts at neglect, and which I would not have thought were that hardy.

The first is the white form of Vitex agnus-castus, the chaste tree.  I don't know when the white flowered form came on the scene, but the species is said to have been cultivated in the British Isles since 1570.  It originates from Mediterranean regions and across to central Asia, and is generally considered to require a sunny, sheltered position (nursery code for not fully hardy).  It carries buddleia-like sprays of scented flowers at the ends of its shoots in September and October.  I'm always on the lookout for plants that will continue the flowering season on into autumn, and was charmed by the chaste tree when I saw it.  There is a large and handsome specimen in the botanical gardens at Leiden (interesting and well worth a visit), and both the blue and white flowered forms grow in the walled garden at Marks Hall (a really good modern scheme within an old walled garden, and much easier to get to than Leiden).  Comparing the blue and the white I decided in favour of the latter.  I bought a likely-looking plant at work, and put it down outside the greenhouse.  As I brought pots in for the winter the greenhouse became full to bursting, and it was very difficult to see what everything was, and I lost track of what was in and what was out.  When the snow came down before Christmas the Vitex was still outside on the concrete, and there it stayed until the spring.  I found the pathetic bundle of twigs as I started moving things about in March, and cursed myself for losing a perfectly good plant through carelessness.  The ones at work come inside for the winter, into the tunnel with the heater in it.  Then I saw that the buds were swelling.  It is making generous new growth from low down, and will be planted tomorrow, or next week.

Also left on the concrete by mistake were two 9cm pots containing young plants of Geranium 'Stephanie'.  Again, we take all hardy geraniums inside for the winter at work, and I assumed that I had lost them.  They must have been frozen solid for long periods.  However, both sprouted healthy sets of leaves, and are now planted out and flowering cheerfully.  I first planted 'Stephanie' a couple of years ago, and was pleased enough with it that the two maltreated plants were bought to bulk up an existing group.  I guess that it might be derived from Geranium renardii, as it has similar sage-green scalloped leaves, and is said to like the same conditions.  The flowers of 'Stephanie' are a rich violet-blue, with purple veins, very pretty, and my plants are doing well on some of the thinnest, hungriest sand in the garden.  I would advise all gardeners on light soil (who like hardy geraniums) to seek it out.

Addendum  The robin eggs have hatched so did not cook in the heatwave.  I have put the frame with netting on it left over from the strawberries across the door as planned, which should at least deter the cats from wandering in there casually for a lie-down.  It is a relief the hen isn't sitting any more, as she did keep flying off the nest when I went in to water anything, and I have been reduced to making quick raids to collect things that need potting on, and doing the potting outside, sitting on a low wall with a wheelbarrow of compost.

Also the decking is officially finished.  We moved the last of the Hamamelis pots back on to the further deck in the back garden yesterday, and today some of the offcuts were used to make a doorstep for the door we mainly use.  It is functionally the back door, but is at the front of the house, and as built had an ugly concrete doorstep with a manhole cover in front of it.  The wooden doorstep covers both of these, and with any luck some of the gravel will fall out of the treads of our shoes before we and it make it into the house.  The Companion Animals are rather suspicious of the new doorstep, but they'll get used to it.  The decking looks very good in a Chelsea flower show sort of way.  I realised during construction that freshly cut cedar was one of the smells I associate with Chelsea.  In the end we had two or three deliveries from the timber company, as we used them for the beams as well.  They are called Silva Timber Products, and we found them reliable and good value.  (The bad news is that the chopped-down Hebe in front of the near deck are going to have to go.  Only clipped box will do, but at the thought of grubbing out five Hebe stumps my heart sinks).

a dry season

I didn't watch the Royal Wedding.  It's not really my sort of thing, but I'm glad today turned out fine, given all the people who did want to line the route, or hold their own street parties.  The lack of rain is getting serious, though.  A while back the Systems Administrator, who likes technology, added to the data empire by investing in an electronic weather station.  This takes all sorts of weather related  measurements and transmits them by wireless back to a base station in the house, which displays and stores them.  They can be downloaded to the p.c. and in theory we could analyse them and produce graphs and tables galore.

The rain gauge requires at least 0.7mm precipitation in one go to read it.  In total since 1st March it has recorded 9mm, which is a seriously small amount of rain.  9mm is less than half an inch.  Even allowing for one or two showers of less than 0.7mm that's a pathetic amount of rain to fall  in nearly two months.  Coastal north Essex is one of the dryest places in the country, but we expect to get around 21 inches or 525mm per annum on average.  Since the start of March we're running at an annualised rainfall of around 50mm or 2 inches.

An increasing proportion of each gardening day is spent watering.  Watering recent plantings, watering the fruit (we had a dry April last year, I didn't water the sweet cherry enough, and after a good set it dropped its entire crop), watering trees planted within the past year, and things badly hit by last winter's cold but which I think might have the capacity to resprout if the drought doesn't finish them off, and the little patch of new turf where I cleared away the bags of left-over sand.  I felt a certain wry amusement  one of the last times I visited Hyde Hall, where after going past the much trumpeted Dry Garden (never irrigated after initial planting) I saw the sprayers going on the borders even though there wasn't then a drought.  Nothing here is routinely irrigated, apart from edible crops and recent plantings, and the plants in most of the garden, not just the gravel garden, are chosen for their modest moisture requirements.  No border phlox or delphiniums or monarda here, and few viburnums.  If this weather goes on much longer, however, then even established plants will start showing signs of acute stress, and will require a drenching with the hose.

If I were having a house built from scratch, I would instal a grey water capture system and a very large underground water storage tank during the initial construction.  It is so much easier to fit these things at the outset than to retrofit.  We are eyeing up the price of water tanks once again, as there would be room for quite an array of them under the veranda, but they are expensive.  The last time we did the maths we would have to fill them from captured water a lot of times for it to be cheaper than buying the water out of the tap.  We debate getting the well going again too, but again pumps are costly and tend to break down, and it's not clear we would manage to pump enough water to make the investment worthwhile.

making plans for the conservatory

In the conservatory the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone' is flowering.  This is an evergreen of uncertain parentage, which forms a shrub or small tree, and at this time of the year has strongly scented, pink flowers.  The new foliage that follows is an attractive shade of copper.  We started stocking them at work four or five years ago, and I was enchanted by them, and amazed that our customers didn't buy all that we had at once.  They were semi-large standards and quite expensive, which may have been one reason, and also dubiously hardy, which is a consideration when you are thinking of spending that much on a plant.  I asked for one as a birthday or Christmas present, and my records show that we got ours in April 2007, which is slightly confusing as that's not when my birthday is.  As we've had it for four years I can report that it makes a good long-term subject for a container.  It is now in a 50cm pot, and I have pruned it a few times to keep it within bounds.  It suffers a bit from caterpillars that roll up its leaves, but appears immune to red spider mite, and the mealy bugs that came in on another large specimen.  I can also vouch from personal experience that if you let it get dry and it wilts (a good gardener wouldn't, but these things happen) it will recover, unlike some evergreens like Callistemon which will simply die.

The conservatory needs a good sort out.  I had a moment of epiphany a day or two back when I realised that I should get rid of the Acacia longifolia.  This species has willow-like leaves, which are not so pretty as A. dealbata, the classic mimosa, and it has grown too tall for the available space and is trained across the ceiling, and half-blocking the doorway.  I have been tidying out the dead leaves and twigs for the past couple of seasons, but the plant, while nice in its youth, has become old and ugly.  This is sad, and a fate that awaits many of us, but good gardens and a ruthless attitude to individual plants often go hand in hand.  I am not so ruthless as I should be.

Addendum  The editors of The Journal of Animal Ethics have decreed that it is demeaning to animals to term them pets, and that we should call them Companion Animals and ourselves Human Carers.  Vets seem to use the term companion animal anyway, but I draw the line at becoming a Carer to the cats.  It sounds too unspeakably dreary.  A more appropriate word would be Servant.

three blue flowers

The Camassia leichtlinii have been doing their stuff.  They are hardy bulbs with spikes of violet-blue flowers around 2.5cm across, each with six slender petals, and wispy protruding stamens with tiny yellow anthers.  From a distance they form a good mass of colour, especially in evening light when, like many flowers with some purple in them, they seem to fluoresce.  Close up they are not quite so satisfactory, as the bottom flowers on the spike have withered before the top ones open.  Also, they were intended to contrast with the yellow roses in that bed, and they will be over before the roses start.  Still, they are pretty plants.  People who like the ambience of a garden without being total plant nuts ask what they are with genuine enthusiasm.  They are extremely good doers with me, growing on yellow clay that is sticky beyond belief in wet weather and is now set like concrete.  The Camassia leichtlinii don't merely grow, they bulk up into generous clumps and seed themselves around.  The dense bunches of strap-shaped leaves remain decent-looking for a long time, unlike some bulbs, like alliums whose leaves start to die back by the time the flowers come, and you have to work out how to hide them.  The white flowered form of C. leichtlinii flowers later than the blue, opening just as the blue is finishing, so by planting them both you can have an extended Camassia season.

Centaurea montana is also flowering, and this time I got the blue and yellow contrast spot on, because it opens at exactly the same time as the neighbouring yellow tree peony.  This plant grew in the garden of my childhood, and I wanted to grow it myself when I got my own garden, once I had worked out what it was.  In the mid 1980s it was so far out of fashion that I had difficulty tracking down plants, or even the seeds.  It seems more in favour nowadays, and a white flowered form and yellow leaved variety are also available.  I tried it initially in the top part of the garden, but it sulked and failed to thrive on the sand, and now lives happily in the yellow clay.  Centaurea montana has elegant thistle flowers, with a central boss of pink petals and black anthers, and surrounding rays of slim blue petals ending in a graceful fringe.  The blue again has a distinct hint of violet, and glows as sunset approaches.  The flowers are carried on long sprays that get tatty after flowering, but once those are cut down the grey basal leaves are respectable for the rest of the summer.  If you are not too enthusiastic about dead-heading it will seed itself usefully.

I'm not totally convinced by the merits of Ceanothus as a tribe.  I've tried using the low-growing, evergreen C. thyrsiflorus var. repens as groundcover on banks in two different gardens, and both times it grew rapidly to form a lovely dense mound, flowered ravishingly for a couple of years, and then died, leaving a great ground-uncovered hole in the planting scheme.  I've come across a couple of theories why Ceanothus are prone to do this.  One said that the roots are very susceptible to wind-rock, and the other said that being from California they can be killed by excess water during periods when they aren't actively growing.  Whatever the cause, they don't seem reliable, as a second prostrate variety I tried died as well.  However, 'Puget Blue' deserves an honourable mention.  It makes a stiff, medium sized shrub, with tiny wrinkled dark green leaves, and at this time of year is smothered in small, fairly dark blue flowers.  I have it in two places in the top part of the garden, on very light, free-draining soil, and it has withstood the cold of the past two winters, and numerous ferocious gales have rocked its roots, yet it is still alive.

revamping the gravel

I've been replanting the gravel in one half of what we call the Italian garden.  The term long pre-dates Monty's excellent TV series, and in truth the resemblence to anything Italian isn't very marked.  The Italian garden sits at one end of a largish turning circle, which was laid to grass when we moved in.  It was weedy and pathetic turf on the thin soil, and we never used it for ball games (don't play them), sunbathing (why would you choose to sunbathe in your front garden when you have a much more private back garden?) or anything else.  It required cutting and looked dull.  So we gave up with grass entirely in the front garden, and turned it over to gravel.  While we were at it we dug a square formal pond, and made a paved area by the pond, and a paved path across the turning circle.  The path is carefully aligned with the front door and is the same width as the porch, an attempt to relate the geometry of the garden to the geometry of the house lifted straight out of the pages of John Brookes.  It does work visually.  Visitors occassionally notice it, and point it out to us as though it were a marvellous accident we might not have noticed.

The paved area wasn't really used for anything for years.  I bought four cube shape lead planters, and a terracotta greyhound couchant from the Whichford pottery, which lounged alongside the pond, and that was about it.  We had a small fountain for a couple of years, until it broke down.  They always do.  The grounds of Writtle College were littered with defunct water features when I studied there.  At one point we divided the turning circle in two with a breakwater made out of reclaimed timber, and the other end began to develop a character as a seaside garden, but the end with the pond remained mainly an area that we walked through to get to cars parked on the other side of the drive.  It was planted with rosemary, lavender, and a curry plant that spread hugely, plus some self-seeding Euphorbia characias and agapanthus, but it wasn't very interesting.  Eventually I got round to buying a cafe table and a couple of chairs, and started putting out pots of geraniums and things for the summer and, based on the mediterranean planting and collection of hardware, it became the Italian garden, or when I'm feeling long-winded, 'the mad decayed Italian garden'.  The paving, which was only laid on sand and not hardcore, has become uneven over the years, and poppies and blue Nigella damascena seed freely into the cracks, as do weeds.

I had begun to resent the amount of space that the curry plant took up, and realised I didn't really like the smell, which made me worry that the chicken house needed cleaning out, so I was quite glad that last winter did for it.  Removing the remains of that, and the rosemary bushes, which were dying off in patches, has cleared a large space.  Some new rosemary and lavender plants went in today, and an Aloysia triphylla, the wonderful lemon scented verbena, which may or may not survive a winter outside.  I'd like to add an extra-blue, extra-tender teucrium, when they turn up at work, and some different euphorbias.   This scheme was cooked up months ago, when I was tidying the hot tunnel at work, but it's amazing that it is actually happening the same year I thought of it.  The winter killing so many of the incumbent shrubs forced my hand rather.

I'm waiting to see if the olive tree will sprout again, or if last winter really was a step too far for it.  It made it through the previous one, just, so I don't know whether, if it is dead, to risk another olive and hope we don't have another winter quite so severe for a good while, or whether to substitute with something like Eleagnus 'Quicksilver'.  Olives do have such a distinctive habit.  Van Gogh captured it exactly in one of the drawings shown in the Royal Academy's exhibition a while back (which was so good that I am prepared to forgive them Modern British Sculpture, as long as they don't do anything else like that for a long time).  The deciduous eleagnus are pretty and graceful and have silver leaves, but they don't honestly look a lot like olives.

I feel a bit hypocritical buying the gravel.  It came from a local builders' merchants who did a leaflet campaign, and I saw I could buy it by the bulk bag, delivery charge included in the price of the bag.  Of course delivery is not actually free, as the gravel costs more, but it does mean I can buy a single bag and not feel I ought to get more to make the delivery cost more economic.  After today's efforts I'm about two-thirds through the bag, and wondering if I should have got two bags, except that after the experience with the left-over sand I was trying not to repeat that error.  Getting the delivery lorry up the drive was slightly traumatic and I'd rather not order a second bag for a bit, until we've trimmed the hedge along the drive.  The new gravel is a perfect match for the existing stuff, which came from the Birch quarry, and I suspect that it came from the same place.

The reason why I feel hypocritical is that there is a planning application in the offing for a large gravel quarry in our parish.  I don't honestly want a gravel quarry up the road, and my partner lodged an objection against it on behalf of our household.  If the quarry happens it will probably not be a disaster for us.  I expect there will be a bit of extra background noise and dust on top of what we get anyway, from the roads and planes and lettuce farm, but when we go for walks past the other quarries in the area they aren't that awful.  Until the application is settled one way or the other we would probably find it difficult to sell our house, but fortunately we weren't planning to move at the moment.  If the application goes through the house will probably be worth a bit less than it would be otherwise, though if we can stick it out for twenty years or so we have been promised a nature reserve at the end of it, which would be nice.  I expect we'll survive the quarry if it happens.  But on the whole I would rather it didn't, so I feel mean buying bags of gravel from Birch, where the locals don't want a quarry either.  But not so mean I won't buy the gravel.

working on Easter Monday

I was a bit surprised as the boss and my colleagues compared notes on their respective Easter Sunday lunches, which all seem to have involved special culinary efforts with roast meats, and relatives returning from afar to share in the repast.  Easter Sunday had rather passed us by.  We worked hard in the garden, and then ate penne with a vaguely Italian sauce while watching Oil City Confidential.  Still, each to their own.

I don't mind working on Easter Monday.  We generally avoid going anywhere on bank holidays, as the traffic will be worse than it is the rest of the time, and wherever we are visiting more crowded.  My normal work day is a Monday, so quite a few bank holidays fall on my watch.  It used to annoy me considerably that the full time staff who were required to work on bank holidays were given a day off in lieu, while the part-timers were just expected to turn up as normal.  Fortunately our legislators shared my view that this was unfair, and a couple of years ago employment law was changed so that part-time staff had to be treated the same as full-timers, so now bank holiday working for part-timers is on double rates.  In general I'm sympathetic to the view that small businesses need less rather than more red tape and regulation, but I was very pleased that the law ironed out that particular injustice.

The manager doesn't work on bank holidays as a rule.  There is a weekly van service from Norfolk, that calls on Mondays bringing assorted plants in flower, plus herbs and other impulse-buy oddments.  My colleague wondered if there was anything we needed, but my view was that without the manager it was better to give the van purchases a miss this week.  We could look at what is low on stock, but we wouldn't know if the manager had already arranged to get it from somewhere else, plus we would have to work out our selling prices based on the cost to us and our normal retail mark-up, and decide whether our customers would be prepared to pay them.  In my previous incarnation I coped with some large financial transactions, including once putting my signature to the order to sell around £250 million assorted mid-cap and small-cap equities in a programme trade, and another time buying about the same amount of B.P., so I could probably rise to the challenge of buying a couple of hundred quid's worth of bedding plants and herbs.  But there are basically two models for managing staff.  You can give them the power to make decisions, then back their decisions up, even if you have to explain why next time you would prefer them to do it differently.  Or you can not give them the power to take decisions, in which case you don't expect them to decide things while you're not there.  On the whole the place I work operates on the latter system.

The pea cock is still displaying his tail.  It is a pity that a couple of the long feathers are broken, but I don't suppose he'd appreciate it if we tried to pull them out to tidy him up.  The young pea cock is also raising his little tail, which doesn't have the coloured streamers yet.  He does this while following his mother around the plant centre, so the effect is positively Oedipal.  But he is no more confused than his father, who keeps displaying to the guinea fowl.

I was chatting to a very pleasant customer who turned out to be the head gardener at one of the Cambridge Colleges.  He was at the Chatto Gardens recently, and they said they were so busy, they were having to pull staff off garden work to help keep up with the volume of mail order.  It's reassuring that the industry sounds generally buoyant.  Certainly we're still very busy, despite the lack of rain.

bluebells

The bluebells in the wood have opened.  It seems to me that they are early this year.  I'm sure that bluebell open days around here are normally held in early May.  A few years ago we went on holiday to Cornwall at almost exactly this time, from around 18th to 25th April, and on the last day we went to Enys, a very old, beautiful and decayed garden with a benign microclimate, famous for its bluebells, and were too early for the main display, instead just getting a tantalising hint of what it would be like in a few days, when we were back in Essex.

Anyway, the bluebells are lovely and I'm pleased to see them, early or late.  They are the native English bluebells, with flowers down one side of the nodding spikes.  The intensity of blue of a large bluebell wood is like nothing else.  Ours is not that large, and the bluebells are very particular about where they will and won't grow, so patches of blue erupt here and there where the ground conditions are precisely to their liking.

The bulbs go very deep, and are difficult to lift.  It is illegal to take bluebells from the wild anyway, but as the landowner I was trying to remove them from the line of the path and reuse them in the meadow.  They were having none of it.  The leaves will not stand trampling, so you need a path through your bluebell wood to go and look at them without treading on them.

Bluebells in Essex are strongly associated with ancient woodland (technically, woodland that has been there continuously since 1600 at the latest, though the wood may be much older than that), but in some parts of the UK bluebells aren't markers of ancient woodland.  Our little wood divides into two sections, the alder carr which I've tracked on maps back to the 1730s and is presumed ancient, and the northern section which reverted from farmland in the last century.  The bluebells stop short at the edge of the old part, and show no inclination to travel further.  I have read how this is because they lack a good seed dispersal mechanism, and find it difficult to spread.

Now this is very puzzling, because they do pop up in the garden, in the most unexpected places.  There are several thriving clumps in the gravel, under the boughs of a crab apple, and some in the borders.  Richard Mabey suggests in Flora Britannica that patches of bluebells in the countryside can show where a wood once stood, but the garden has been farmland since at least the 1730s, and is definitely not the remains of ancient woodland.  Some of the places they have chosen to live are very dry and arid and not at all similar to woodland soil.  They seem to like the company of a shrub.  Or else their seed dispersal mechanism is that some bird eats the seeds then craps while perching.  They look a bit random and unthemed growing wherever they choose of their own sweet will, but I don't mind them.  I've heard other things about bluebells.  They need shade.  They don't need shade, but hate grass, so thrive in light shade which suppresses the grass.  But I've seen them growing in grass too.  Heavy shade reduces flowering, and they persist in a leafy state multiplying by division only, which is why coppicing woodland is good for improving the bluebell display, by letting the light in.

a warm day at the plant centre

It's still busy at the plant centre.  Surprisingly so, given how dry the ground is getting.  It isn't really good planting weather.  Which said, I'm still buying plants myself.

A lot of customers don't seem to have grasped that we won't be opening tomorrow, on Easter Sunday.  People who rang to check whether we had things, or that I called to let them know that plants they wanted had arrived, kept saying that they'd come tomorrow, or that they wouldn't be able to come tomorrow, suggesting they thought we would be open, if they had been able to come.  The owners have put the Easter opening hours on the website and the answering machine message, but I've a feeling there are going to be some disappointed punters turning around in the drive tomorrow.

We have become agents for Haddonstone.  When I arrived at work last Monday a collection of composite stone urns and plinths and a couple of bird baths had appeared in front of the climber tunnel.  I moved one of the bird baths then, because it was placed exactly where it was likely get knocked over dragging the hose out to use, and today I moved the other for the same reason.  The top and the bottom are in two separate parts, and if I were to instal one at home I'm sure the top would fall off the first time a cat jumped on it (I'd give it one day maximum).  Even the small items are jolly heavy, and I'm waiting hopefully for some staff training about things like delivery charges, given that we can't send one driver out by themselves and expect them to unload fake stone plinths weighing 65kg single handed.  Also whether you are supposed to cement the top and bottom half of the bird bath together so that your cat or child can't knock the dish off the pedestal.  We have a glossy brochure of their entire product range on a lectern for customers to read, which implies we are willing to order items specially for people, in which case it would be useful to know how long that process takes.  For the time being if anybody asks about delivery, or ordering non-stock items, or how to stop the top falling off the bird bath, I shall have to admit that we've only just started stocking Haddonstone and refer them upwards to the manager, or take their details and get back to them later.  I don't think we've sold any yet.

It was so hot in the tunnels by lunchtime that I rang home and suggested putting a can of water on the greenhouse floor, to try and cool it down for the robin.  I know I ought to feel very privileged that this little wild creature has chosen to make her home with me, but actually she is a damn nuisance.  Each time she flies off the nest while I'm watering the plants I feel guilty.  She is getting braver at staying put, and I hope she doesn't abandon her eggs, but I'm not prepared to abandon a greenhouse full of plants.

the cost of free plants

I've been taking the pots of agapanthus, geraniums and other tender things out of the greenhouse and setting them up on the paving by the formal pond.  They're crammed in too closely to see what I'm doing with the watering in this heat, and I need to space the pots out properly.  It is theoretically still rather early to do this, but given the weather forecast for the next five days is for the unseasonal heatwave to continue, and then it will be practically May, frost seems unlikely now.  If the outlook changes there'll be a lot of panic fleecing one evening.

I have quite a collection of Geranium maderense.  This is a frost-tender plant from Madeira, which has the interesting habit that as its old leaves die their stout stalks point downwards, and help support the stem.  The large, palmate leaves are mid-green and shiny and quite exciting.  The geraniums honestly take up rather a lot of room in the greenhouse during the winter, but I don't have the heart to throw any of them away.  What happened was that I went to the V&A, and sitting in the courtyard cafe drinking coffee my eye fell upon the pots of gone-over something or others that lined the walls.  I realised they were Geranium maderense, so I went over to see if they had set any seed, and they had set vast quantities which I didn't belive anybody would be saving for anything, so I took some and wrapped it in a piece of paper for safe-keeping.  The next spring I sowed all of it, and soon afterwards some nice fat seedlings emerged and grew rapidly.  I didn't have the heart to throw any of them away, and pricked them out into individual pots.  By the time we got to winter they were already in 5L pots, as I'd read somewhere that the plant demanded a generous root run.  They took up almost the entire greenhouse bench and were rather in the way.

Overwintering G. maderense turns out to be moderately susceptible to overwatering, and aphid attack, and I lost a couple, but most made it through to spring.  I gave plants to one or two friends who are into exotic gardening, and used up my entire supply of spare 33cm terracotta pots on the others, thinking that as they'd die after flowering it would only be a temporary state of affairs.  The flowers when they come are supposed to be magenta, and quite exciting.  The geraniums made large handsome mounds of leaves by the front door and next to the pond, but showed no signs of flowering.  It got to autumn and time to pack the greenhouse for the winter.  The Geranium maderense took up half the space on the greenhouse floor, so were rather in the way, but I didn't have the heart to consign any of them to the compost bin.  I grumbled about this state of affairs to the manager at work, and tried to palm one off on him, but he said he alread had one, which had gone for years without flowering.

This suggests I might have the collection for several years to come, unless it decides to flower, or succumbs to some disease, or the muntjacs break in and eat it, or I accidentally-on-purpose fail to water it.  I'm going to have to get some more 33cm pots.  Expensive things sometimes, free plants.

After I'd sown the seed I read that it remians viable for up to 5 years, so I needn't have sown all of it at once.

a day at the museum

I took a day off from the gardening, and went with a friend to see the Afghanistan exhibition at The British Museum.  It is really good, and for once I wasn't rushing to catch something in its final week.  This one runs until 3 July, so there's still plenty of time to go and see it.  I find it a fascinating part of the world anyway, from the pages of Eric Newby, Colin Thubron, Peter Hopkirk and Frances Wood, and the plant collectors who worked in that region, so I was keen to go.The exhibition isn't large, but thoughtfully put together with some beautiful and fascinating objects.  One aim is to get visitors to think about Afghanistan as a place of history and culture, and not just the site of an endless series of wars, and it certainly does that. 

We watched the short introductory film, which sets the scene in terms of where the objects came from and when they were found, and the mixture of influences that worked on the region, crossed by trade routes and bordered by the Persian empire on one side, the Indian subcontinent the other, and the Steppes, and invaded at one time by Alexander the Great.  Tribute is paid to the bravery and foresight of Afghan museum staff who hid and so preserved their collections as the Taliban approached.  Then there are four rooms, each covering a different archeological site, with some useful explanatory maps and text plus the objects themselves.  These are made of gold, stone, glass, ivory, plaster and ceramic, and include drinking vessels, bits of masonry and furniture, statues and jewellery.  The gold crown that features on the front of the exhibition literature was recovered from a nomad grave, and can be disassembled into sections for ease of transport.  It is decorated with many dangling discs of gold, and although protected inside a glass case is mounted in such a way that it vibrates in response to the visitors' footfall, so you see the little discs dance as they might have when it was worn, which is a very nice touch.

Although I never saw a flat-pack crown before, I'm afraid there is little new under the sun.  The skull of the nomad princess in whose tomb the crown was found was slightly deformed, said to be the result of tight binding of the skull, common among high-ranking people at that time.  Wouldn't she have had a constant headache?  The ability of people throughout the ages to make themselves deliberately uncomfortable is quite depressing.  There was also a pair of gold shoe soles, the leather shoes to which they were stitched having long since rotted away.  Rubbish for walking but good for display sitting down.  Shoe designer Christian Louboutin, who is currently sueing Yves Saint Laurent over breach of copyright for his trademark red soles, says that no-one before him has ever used a coloured sole to define a brand's identity.  The first century AD Afghan nomads may not have called it a brand, but they knew the impact of a brightly coloured sole.

My friend introduced me to not one but two new (to me) eateries.  We had coffee in the mezzanine layer of the cafe which has mysteriously appeared inside the Royal Exchange building in the eleven years since the City ceased to be my normal stamping ground.  The architecture is grand, and the coffee and bun were very nice too.  I think we might have been the only people there not talking shop.  Almost everyone else had a laptop and folders, and I'm sure there were quite a few soundings-out about jobs going on.  After looking at the Afghans, which gave us time to work off the buns, we had a curry at masala zone in Covent Garden, which is one of a small London chain.  I had a vegetarian thali, and liked the indian puppets that hang all over the ceiling.  I don't know if all their restaurants have puppets, but the food is jolly good, the atmosphere cheerful, and the late lunch crowd seemed to merge seamlessly with the pre-theatre crowd so we didn't feel silly ordering lunch at 3pm and sitting there chatting until after five.  My friend, who has been there several times, says the food is always good, and it is very reasonable value for central London, so I'd recommend it highly.  If you like curry.  And do try the masala chai.  It's delicious.  The restrictions on cheap tickets on homewards trains were lifted for the school holidays, so we had the luxury of not having to plan the afternoon against the clock.

After that things took a turn for the worse, as the train back to Colchester was an hour late getting in (actually, I hope it was a full hour and not only 58 minutes, then I can put in a delay repay claim for half of my ticket price instead of only a quarter).  As I sat down at the kitchen table to compose my considered thoughts on my grand day out, I heard creaking noises from the upstairs floorboards.  As the Systems Administrator is out with former colleagues eating steak, this meant either burglars or a cat locked in the bedroom.  I counted the cats and was sans Our Ginger, so ventured upstairs without taking the poker.  He has eaten some more of the bedroom carpet just inside the door, and done something horrible in the middle of the duvet.  Hey ho.  If my syntax is more mangled and my spelling more erratic than usual, it's been a long day, and I still have to sort out the bedclothes.

hitting the roof

I had to evict the Norfolk Island Pine from the conservatory.  The top was bending over where it touched the roof, again.  I've been pushing the pot towards the back where the headroom is greatest, but with only another few centimetres to go it was time to bite the bullet.  I'm very fond of this plant.  We've had it since it was about 30cm tall, and it was originally bought to go on the telephone table.  A recent newspaper report said that fewer and fewer people use or even have a landline (I think these are the young people who, as Jeremy Hardy puts it, use the interweb) and that mobiles are increasingly the norm.  We do still have a landline, and the telephone table, though nowadays it houses the base station for the roaming phone handsets and you don't have to conduct your conversation in the hall unless you want to.  However, the pine ceased to fit in there a long time ago.

Norfolk Island Pine is Araucaria heterophylla.  It looks as though it were related to the Monkey Puzzle, Araucaria araucana, as indeed it is, with tiered branches, but it has needles of a bright mid-green that are much smaller than those of the Monkey Puzzle, and soft to the touch.  It has made an excellent container specimen over many years, remaining fully clothed down to the ground, with no dieback, and apparently immune to all conservatory insect pests.  Unfortunately it will become huge in time.  One grows in a glass house at Kew, and it has had its top lopped off to accommodate it.  And there's the rub.  It is too tender to survive outside through a UK winter, but I don't want to have to cut its top off.  It is a lovely shape as it is, and I should feel like a butcher pruning it.  It looks very fine standing just outside the conservatory, beneath the veranda, and my mind has begun to run on wild schemes to wrap soil warming cable around the pot in winter, and make it a fleece tent to live in.  An alternative plan is to try and find someone who has a taller conservatory than me and would be able to give it a loving home.  I've got the summer to think about it.  It would fit in the sitting room, if we moved the dining table right over and skirted around the pine to get to the bottom of the stairs, but while this is allowed for the Christmas tree I think my partner would draw the line at making it a permanent arrangement from September to April.

I had to evict my Echium pininiana from the greenhouse for exactly the same reason.  This was raised from seed sown, acording to the label, on 19th February 2009.  I got a poor germination rate, in that only two seedlings emerged, and by the time I'd concluded that that was my lot I didn't want to risk destroying the only two I had trying to separate them, so it has grown as a two-branched multistem.  Accounts I've read about growing Echiums in containers have never been very encouraging, but this one is in a pot around the 35cm mark and has done respectably.  At any rate, it is taller than the greenhouse and has got flower buds on its stems, though it isn't as lush as ones I've seen growing in the ground in places with gentler climates than north east Essex.  The flowers, assuming things go according to plan and winter doesn't suddenly reappear with a final late frost (which could still happen) should be blue, and I think attractive to bees, and I ought to get self-sown seedlings, which will probably not survive the two winters outside they would need to do to flower.  I could save seed, or salvage seedlings if they appear, and raise another one under glass.

If I were an oligarch I wouldn't bother with buying The Evening Standard, but I would like to have a house that was wrapped around three sides of a two or three storey atrium, so that I could grow these things in comfort.

two Scottish musicians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bittercress and peacocks

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

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

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

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