an ill wind

I came downstairs this morning to find the light on the answering machine flashing.  That is never a good sign.  Nobody ever rings us about anything nice before nine in the morning.  If it were good news it would have kept until later, or they'd have sent an e-mail, or a text.  Answer machine messages first thing mean trouble, sudden illness, cancelled arrangements, something bad.  This one turned out to be moderately bad, as it was the neighbours from the far end saying that our extremely large tree was down in their garden.  I went back upstairs to break the bad news to the Systems Administrator, who was still asleep after a work reunion in London the evening before.

The damage, at first sight, was not as bad as it might have been.  A poplar was lying wind-thrown along the line of their hedge, resting in places on the hedge, and unfortunately going through the middle of what had been a nice little rowan, until another tree ten times its size landed on it.  There were some branches hanging over their garden, but it hadn't reached their greenhouse, or touched any structure.  There were no smashed pots or ornaments.  And nobody was dead.

The tree looked perfectly healthy, with normal sized leaves right to the end of every twig.  The boss's mantra at work is that die-back that starts on the outside of a tree and at the top must be taken seriously, but it didn't look as though we'd been negligent owners overlooking obvious problems with this tree.  It was growing along the edge of the ditch, and it seemed as though a combination of saturated soil and a summer gale hitting it when it was in full leaf had been too much for it to cope with.  The root plate lay up-ended, at ninety degrees to the ground.  End of poplar.

The Systems Administrator sent me home to start ringing round for an arborist to get the main trunk out of the hedge and the rowan.  If it had been all on our property we'd have done it ourselves, slowly, in stages, but in somebody else's garden we were keen to minimise further collateral damage, in the interests of neighbourly relations, and because unlike a professional tree firm we don't have any insurance for cutting up large trees in other people's gardens.  I tried a local chap, that we've never used before but know of via a neighbour who has worked for him in the past, and to my astonishment he said he could look at the problem today, as he'd be passing.  The SA reappeared at home, having tried to placate the neighbour, and we set out with the truck (once I'd cleared the remaining bags of mushroom compost off the back), loppers, saw and chainsaw, to show willing by removing the light debris from the garden.

The neighbour seemed reassured that something was happening quickly, and even gave us cups of tea, and we made polite conversation for a few minutes without her complaining any more about the fallen tree, and me not remarking that it was funny how after she'd told me that they weren't using our spinney as a dump for prunings or mowings, sawn off branches from a Magnolia grandiflora had appeared in it at just the same time that one disappeared from her garden.  We chopped off and carried away the branches in her border, that weren't carrying any weight, which filled the back of the truck, and went home and emptied those on to the concrete and went back with a lawn rake and some large buckets and raked the small twigs off the lawn, and pulled little tufts of poplar out of her shrubs and off her borders.  The borders had been very nicely mulched with compost, which I remembered had been dumped in our spinney, but I regret to say that somebody had tied the leaves of the daffodils in knots.  You really aren't supposed to do that.

We removed a few broken twigs and stems from her plants while we were at it, on the grounds that they weren't very damaged, and she would notice it less if she couldn't see the broken bits.  Most of the plants were OK, even a little bed of African marigolds that appeared unscathed from under the chaos, but one small strawberry tree seemed to be completely obliterated.  I found bits of it while I was picking up twigs, and then the SA finished clearing that area, and afterwards there was no trace of the Arbutus at all.  By then our neighbour had gone out, so I rang as soon as we got home and left a message promising to get her a new one on Monday, on the grounds that it was only fair, and prompt offer of restitution might help fend off vengeful claims for more substantial compensation.  The SA did at my prompting take photographs of the tree before we started clearing up, and again afterwards, so that we could prove the extent of the damage, or lack of it, and the reasonableness of our belief that the tree was in good health right up to the point where it fell over.

I love trees, but sometimes I wish that they could love me back a bit, instead of falling on things inconveniently.  However, it could have been much worse, and we are not alone in our troubles.  I saw in the paper that the second day of The Suffolk Show had to be cancelled on safety grounds, after some of the tents blew down in the night, and given that the wind was forecast to increase through the day.  The plant centre had a stand in the floral area this year, and the boss is on the organising committee.  All that effort preparing for the show has been half wasted, so they will be spitting, not to mention all the would-be show visitors, caught in the resulting gigantic and confusing traffic jam and wondering if they're going to get refunds.

time to think about autumn bulbs

The rain arrived at half past one, just as I was going in to lunch, so I settled down for the afternoon with my bulb catalogues.  Or rather, at least in the first instance, the Peter Nyssen website.  I read about this bulb wholesaler years ago in Christopher Lloyd's books, and dismissed the idea that it also sold to the retail public as too difficult, at least if you had an ordinary private garden and modest means, rather than Great Dixter.  With the rise of internet shopping I had a look a couple of years ago, placed an order, was happy with the resulting crop of flowers, and have used it since.  This autumn as well as planting up the tulip and hyacinth pots to go in front of the house, I want more Fritillaria meleagris and Crocus tomassinianus to naturalise in the back garden.  The daffodils need topping up, and I'd like to extend the range of alliums.  I could do with more miniature tulips and other small bulbs to go in the gravel.  In fact, it is a bad bulbous case of eyes bigger than tummy, and a large part of working out the order is pruning the initial list of Nice To Have down to a more sensible number of bulbs that I can afford to buy and will have time to plant.

There was a sad article recently by Mary Keen in the Telegraph, imploring us to use specialist growers or lose them.  Her first example is Avon Bulbs, who find nobody places bulb orders at Chelsea any more, and just about cover their costs at the show by selling seeds.  She queries how long, in the days of online shopping, Avon will go on staging their beautiful displays.  I saw Avon's display, and it was indeed lovely, as it always is.  The trouble is, their bulbs are so much more expensive than if I buy them from Peter Nyssen.  25 bulbs of the elegant orange lily flowered tulip 'Ballerina' from Nyssen cost £3.75, versus £5.00 for 10 from Avon.  Do I really want a wonderful Chelsea stand that much, or would I rather be able to afford three times the display in my own garden?  This comparison is only fair if both firms are selling bulbs of the same size and quality, not if one is selling big fat healthy stock that's true to name, while the other sends you small and diseased bulbs, some of which turn out to be the wrong thing anyway when they flower, but so far with Peter Nyssen I've been pleased with what I've received.  There's been the odd undersized or mouldy bulb, but no more than with any other supplier.

Bulbs seem a natural for online shopping, as they package so easily for mail order, compared to shrubs and herbaceous plants, with their weighty rootballs, and the ever-present problem of how to package them so that the top growth doesn't get smashed, if somebody in the delivery chain decides that the words LIVE PLANTS THIS WAY UP are just too hard to read, or don't apply to them.  Against that, the advantage to purveyors of rare plants of selling mail order is that their potential market expands to the whole of the UK, or even Europe if they can cope with the transport issues.  That makes it much more likely they will sell their whole crop or stock of whatever it is before it begins to deteriorate.  Most plants don't really like being in pots for any length of time.  You can do your best to look after them, watering, feeding, pruning and tidying, but most of the time it's a holding operation at best (which cost you money).  When I've raised plants myself, from seeds or cuttings, and planted some out into the garden but not used all of them, I'm always struck by how quickly the ones out in the open ground generally look larger, lustier and more full of life than the ones still stuck in pots.  As to why this is, take your pick from the plant not liking a restricted root run, or not liking having hot roots during the day, or a big contrast between day and night root temperatures, or sitting too wet, or too dry, or not getting as much air to its roots as it would like.  I don't exactly know, but you can see that most things are mightily relieved to be planted out.  A business model that lets the grower meet up as quickly as possible with the seven people in the country who want a Thingummyjig whatyercallit, instead of only those potential customers who live within driving distance of their nursery, is a good business model.

Chill winds are certainly blowing around the plant retailing sector, and sometimes I feel moderately worried, though not so worried as I should be if I had a mortgage instead of some savings, and children instead of cats.  However, I don't think the rise of internet shopping is to blame.  In Mary Keen's article I was rather more struck by the comment from the owner of Marchants, that as well as the rain and the drought he saw a disinclination to garden that he couldn't quite pin down.  Now that is worrying.

in search of a dramatic arc

Reading up on white campion while drinking a mug of tea, I discovered that it is diecious, bearing male and female flowers on separate plants, so I may or may not get seed from my plant in the corner of the back garden.  I also learnt that it is moth pollinated.  Gardening for bees is all the rage nowadays, and people have planted buddleia for the butterflies for a long time, but you don't hear much support for moths.  I suppose they don't do themselves any favours by fluttering around lights at night, and most of them are dingy shades of brown, while clothes moths and wax moths get the moth tribe a bad name (though maybe not, given that our love affair with the butterfly survives the cabbage white).  When I was a child we had a French au pair at one stage, who was afraid of moths, so I became afraid of moths as well.  I have got over that now, but still don't like them as much as I like beetles, or spiders.

Following on from my grumbles about how road verges seem to get mown before the wild flowers can set seed, I got an e-mail update today from the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife, and saw that they are running a campaign to improve the management of road verges.  Apparently there are 238,000 hectares of road verge in Great Britain.  That seems quite a lot to me.  The Essex Wildlife Trust manages reserves totalling around 2,900 hectares, and it is one of the largest of the UK's 47 wildlife trusts (OK, the website doesn't say whether 'largest' is with reference to area under management, or membership).  Managing 238,000 hectares in ways that are helpful for wildlife ought to make a difference in the national scheme of things.

With great self discipline I stuck to my plan of weeding the island bed and mulching it with mushroom compost, as a prelude to planting up the gaps.  It was tempting first thing to wander around pulling out goose grass from the other borders, but I really should finish one project before moving on to the next, or the weeding I did yesterday will only need doing again in another few weeks.  The mushroom compost has got quite wet, sitting in  plastic sacks on the back of the truck through the past couple of months of rain, and smells about as you would expect.

The Rosa glauca that I planted last year has finally started throwing strong new shoots from the base, after sitting there doing nothing, not dying but not growing, ever since it went in.  It used to be known as Rosa rubrifolia, which is worth knowing in case you find it mentioned in an old gardening book, or are shopping for one at a nursery run by somebody resistant to new plant names.  It has greyish-purple leaves ('leaden foliage' is the usual description), small pink flowers and red hips in the autumn, and is a delightful thing, well grown.  It will not tolerate semi-shade and root competition from a large hedge, to judge by my previous failures at growing it.

Meanwhile, I gathered that The Archers is to have more dramatic and darker plot lines.  I am still not listening since the BBC threw Nigel Pargetter off the roof, and even the Systems Administrator, who was brought up on The Archers, has given up, saying that the whole thing has just got too silly and miserable.  Although I don't listen I have gathered the gist of what's going on, and I'd have thought that clocking up a fatal freak accident, an attack that left somebody in a coma, a (not fatal) heart attack, and an outbreak of farm-bourne food poisoning that left a child seriously ill in hospital was quite enough drama and darkness to be going on with in fifteen months.  Life doesn't go on at that pace in North Essex.  Apparently the characters need dramatic arcs, and to be in jeopardy so that we sympathise with them.  Perhaps that is what Cardunculus needs in order to go viral.  Instead of pootling on about wild flowers, and manure, and roses, and toads, and mouldy cheese, and cats, and the hard seats and eccentric sense of timing at the Colchester folk club, and chickens, and the pointlessness of Damien Hirst in the mind of anyone sentient, I need to end each post with a cliff-hanger.  The lawn tractor did refuse to start this afternoon, and the SA feared that there might be a problem with the electrics as well as the fuel system, and I thought that might do.  Will the SA be able to mend the electrics?  Or be electrocuted trying?  Will this downshifted nouveau pauvre couple be able to afford a new lawn tractor?  Dum de dum de dum de dum.  But then the SA said that the electrics were fine, it was just that the engine won't start unless the parking brake is on, and it wasn't.  Can the SA fix the obstruction in the fuel system?  Er, yes, probably.

a rush of growth

Plants have grown visibly in the few days I've been away, or out.  Some of the shrub roses have reached heights I've never seen before, and are rising far above their rusted metal supports and flopping out over the lawn.  Everything looks green and lush in a way that it doesn't always, in Essex, and much bigger than I am accustomed to thinking of it.  Unfortunately the weeds have grown as well.  The horsetail was an inevitability, since the roots are lurking through great stretches of the back garden, and nothing I can do will ever get rid of them.  I'd hoped to be without the several species of grass infesting some of the beds, but they are returning in the absence of a spring mulch, and the priority now is to get them out before they seed this year.

The weather has been good for flowers as well as weeds.  In the front garden, two patches of tall bearded iris that I replanted in enriched soil have thrown up a forest of flower stalks, one deep purple and the other a subtle thing in subdued shades of cream that might possibly be 'Lady Mohr', but I'm not at all sure about that.  The rhizomatous iris need regular division and replanting of the best bits in refreshed soil, otherwise they stop flowering, or at least they do on our miserable light sand.  In the course of replanting they tend to migrate around the borders, to accommodate the growth of shrubs and other inhabitants of the bed since the last time they were dug up.  All in all it makes it difficult to keep a label attached to each patch, and by now I don't know what many of ours are, though I know that most of the bearded iris came originally from Kelways.  I was pleased to see that I had managed not to muddle up the purple and cream varieties, since adjacent patches sometimes grow into each other, and out of flower it is not at all obvious which rhizomes belong to which group.

In the back garden a large, fat clump of foxgloves have opened white and not the common purple, which is lucky as white ones look better in that spot.  A self sown wild campion in the dark corner by the new deck has opened white too, so it is Silene latifolia and not the closely related Silene dioica.  Again, that is extremely good of it, since I wanted white campions in the garden, and if it sets seed I can save some and have a go at raising plants of local provenance.  There is lots of white campion in the verges of the lanes, but generally those seem to get mown before it's time to collect seed.  I noticed a Verbascum phoeniceum in a rather nice shade of pink instead of the usual dark purple, and thought it would be worth saving the seed from that as well, if I get round to it.  I need to scoot around with some raffia and mark the stems of the flowers I want to harvest seed from, otherwise I'll forget which they are before it's finished ripening.

The Robinia hispida is just opening.  This is a member of the pea family, with brown bristly stems (hispida means hairy or bristly, so crops up in several plant names, and that of a viper) and bright pink flowers.  It is fast growing, with brittle stems, and often grown as a wall shrub to give it some protection.  Mine is free standing, and makes a sprawling, open shrub.  Pieces regularly break off it, but then they do off the boss's wall-grown one at work.  At the moment a couple of stems are tied to wooden stakes to stop them falling out over the lawn, but that is not very elegant, and I must either find them some smart iron stakes or cut them off.

The roses are opening gradually.  A couple of the old and shrub roses have come out in the past few days, but the main display is still to come.  I think that is later than some years, since I remember we gave a party in mid June a few years ago, and the first flush was already past its best, but I'm not entirely sure, and it goes to show that I ought to keep better records.  I don't, though.  It isn't as if there is anything I can do about it.  'Paul's Himalayan Musk' will flower when it's good and ready, there'll be one intense burst of flowering only, and that will be that, no repeats.  Whether it starts by the first weekend of June, or not until the second one, is outwith my control.

Faced with the burgeoning growth of weeds on almost every side, I decided to start on the island bed in the back garden.  I have a couple of Cistus, a Phygelius (that's been sitting in the greenhouse since last year) and the third (and final.  If this one doesn't take I'm giving up) Romneya coulteri waiting to go into that bed, and now is a good time to buy more herbaceous fillers if I need them to cover the soil (I have my eye on a very nice pale yellow Hemerocallis called 'Whichford'), so I might as well get the bed planted up and mulched, after dosing it with hefty allocations of mushroom compost, given I have to start somewhere.

back to work

There wasn't much watering to do after all the rain, but I checked inside the tunnels and found a few dry things. Then it was on to tidying up the herbaceous section for the rest of the day.  At this time of year that means lining things back up in neat rows in alphabetical order, removing the odd weed, and some deadheading.  It is quite gratifying, producing organisation and neatness from a slightly fuzzy muddle of plants.

Some pots of bulbs labelled 'Alba' had all come up with one blue plant among the white, so they went on one side for the manager to have a look at.  Viola 'Irish Molly' had greenfly, so that was another note, and some of the hellebores had gone mouldy in the base.  This is a problem I've had occasionally at home, and it can kill the plant by degrees, as one leaf or stem and then another goes soft at the bottom, keels over and dies.  Helleborus x hybridus seems much more resistant than some of the others.  I had to take a couple of 'Ivory Prince' off sale, plus plants of H. x sternii, H. x ericsmithii and 'Silver Dollar'.  In the garden I have found H. x ericsmithii a superb and reliable grower, but it can get very sad in a pot.

I helped some customers find particular plants they were looking for, and they were all so happy and grateful, it was quite touching.  I know that it can be difficult to find help in shops nowadays, but it still isn't that rare.  The last time I was in Tesco, looking for amaretti biscuits, a member of staff looked them up on the computer for me and pointed out the shelf where they were, among the biscuits, where I had looked straight through them.  Mind you, that is partly Tesco's fault for moving things around, since they used to be on the top shelf, the last time I bought them, and had shifted down to knee height, one shelf from the bottom.

The only customer not to be happy and grateful was the one who came in holding two flowers for identification.  One was Gladiolus byzantinus, and she wasn't happy because we didn't have it, while the other was some kind of mauve flowered Centaurea (I told you they were the new thing at Chelsea), and instead of being at least mildly impressed that we could tell her instantly that it was a Centaurea, she was huffy because I couldn't guarantee exactly which variety it was.

The trouble with going away for the weekend and then in to work on Monday is that there is nothing to make into a packed lunch.  No bread or rolls, or fruit, or small tomatoes of the size that can be eaten in one mouthful.  I had to make do with a pack of oatcakes and a lump of cheddar, (which at least helps us avoid any more wasted cheese.  It was a pleasant, quite strong cheddar from the farm shop, which had started to go mouldy in the fridge along one face only, making me think it might have been cut with a knife that had previously been used for a blue cheese.  I discovered it in the cheese drawer when I was cleaning the fridge for our housesitter, and cut off the blue bits and put it in a fresh bag, which seems to have done the trick in halting the rot).

The housesitter says it was fun, and as well as watering the pots gave the Systems Administrator's MGB a wash, because it made him sad to see it dirty, and has now offered to help with a spring service, if required.  As it needs to get through its MOT and he has just started work at a classic car specialist garage that is an extremely kind offer that could be very useful.  I think of him, and the young lad that had the gumption to take the initiative over the misplaced wedding suits, and conclude that the middle aged shouldn't get too sniffy about the youth of today.  Many of them are every bit as nice and as sensible and responsible as we believe that we all were, when we were young.

two gardens and a wedding

The traffic on Friday was about as bad as we feared it would be, and reminded us why normally we aim not to go anywhere on a Bank Holiday.  The R2 traffic report warned of a snarl-up on the M25 around the Waltham Abbey area, so we took the A414 across through to Hatfield, which cost us time, and then there was a slight delay caused by a small shunt near Reading, and a serious delay caused by a really nasty accident a little further on, where somebody had smeared their car over the central reservation, and were being cut free by the fire brigade.  That lost us another three quarters of an hour, then there were roadworks on the M4 near Bristol.  Fortunately the Systems Administrator knows the local roads around there, having stayed many times with race-going friends who used to live there, so was able to by-pass the roadworks by the counter-intuitive expedient of cutting north of the motorway despite the fact that we were heading south, and rejoining the M5 just the other side of the works.  Still, having left home at half past nine, we rolled through the gates of Knightshayes Court outside Tiverton at five to four.

Knightshayes is a National Trust property.  The house, a Victorian gothic extravaganza, is closed on Fridays.  The house and garden both shut at five, so it didn't matter that the house wasn't open, as we wouldn't have had time to look at it anyway.  We had a rather quick scramble around the garden, and saw the terraces near the house, which have some very nice dry garden planting, and the large lily pond surrounded by yew hedges and adjacent yew hedge with a topiary fox hunt along the top, which is the iconic image of Knightshayes used in  most books that mention it.  There are extensive woodland walks underplanted with azaleas, Cornus, and the usual suspects that you find that kind of garden, and a large parkland with interesting trees, but we scarcely had time to look at those.  The walled kitchen garden is now back in production, growing vegetables for the cafe and flowers for the house, and last entry to that was at 4.30pm whereas we got to that part at twenty to five.  The SA was turning obediently away from the gate as bidden, when I asked the youthful guardian of the garden with my best appealing expression and largest brown eyes if we couldn't have a very quick look, since we had driven all the way from Essex and the traffic had been dreadful, if we faithfully promised to be out by five.  He sighed and let us in.  Looking at anything against the clock is never the best way to enjoy it, and we only really got a taster of Knightshayes.  It would be worth revisiting, though I can't think when we'll be travelling that way again, and it's a pity we were so late getting there, since this is a good time of year to see it, with the azaleas in bloom and the shrub roses just coming out.

The wedding was very nice.  It was good to see the relations, and the venue was relaxed and stylish, the flowers simple and extremely well done, the food and drink good and plentiful, the bride's dress lovely, the page boys and bridesmaids cute, and all the things you'd hope for from a wedding.  There's no point in reviewing it in detail, since it isn't as if it's going on a national tour and you could buy tickets if you liked the sound of it.  We learnt that the run up had about as many panics as you'd expect, including the bride changing her mind about the dress, and Parcelforce last week delivering all the morning suits to a sixteen year old boy in Oakham, while the t-shirt he'd ordered was sent to the groom's brother.  The sixteen year old showed commendable initiative and responsibility in that having opened the parcel (you'd have thought he'd be suspicious that it was a bit large for one t-shirt) and discovered it contained several morning suits for a wedding the coming weekend, he tracked down our nephew's phone number and rang up to explain he had the suits and thought they might be wanted urgently.

On the way back we made a small detour to Malmesbury to visit Abbey House Gardens.  These have been created since the mid 1990s by a delightfully eccentric pair of (occasionally nudist) hippies.  I first saw them on Gardeners World about ten years ago, when he, decorously clad in a loincloth, was driving a digger around the garden of the fabulous house he'd bought next to the ruins of Malmesbury Abbey, and it's featured in the garden magazines since.  It is a wonderfully exuberant garden and I recommend it highly, if you are ever travelling in the direction of Bristol.  The upper part of the garden, next to the house and within the shadow of the abbey, has a formal layout with yew hedges and (small) vistas that end in focal points like vistas should, but the planting within the hedges is joyfully chaotic and colourful, and there are jokes, like the big yew ball clipped into a giant face.  There is a laburnum tunnel, not so large as the one at Bodnant but looking very good at the moment as the laburnum is out, and lots of pergolas and arches dripping with wisteria and roses, and wooden edged raised beds that invoke the spirit of the medieval herb garden.  Then you enter an entirely different world, as the garden sits on the edge of a steep hillside running down to the river and some monastic fish ponds.  That is planted up with trees and and an understorey of shrubs and herbaceous plants, including some superb Japanese maples and quite rare woodlanders, and you can descend via zig-zag paths to the river.  The rain, which had temporarily cleared as we arrived at the garden, started again as we explored the lower part, and we sheltered underneath a Japanese style gateway (remarkably rainproof) watching the raindrops bounce off the fishpond and the river, while steam rose from the vegetation on the opposite bank.  It was very atmospheric and charming, and we had the lower garden entirely to ourselves.  It was a wonderful garden, and quite made up for the disappointment of the rushed visit to Knightshayes.  We'd like to go back, though not on one of the nudist days.

When we got home the cats seemed entirely unruffled by our absence.  They ate their tea, and curled up beside us in the sitting room and went to sleep, which is always a good sign.

Cardunculus is on holiday

We're off to the West Country.  Knightshayes, wedding, Sunday morning coffee with the rellies, Abbey House garden in Malmesbury on the way back, that's the plan.  In the meantime the menagerie is being looked after by the extremely nice, sensible and conscientious son of a friend.  He is nineteen years old and over six feet tall, so any would-be burglars that have tracked down the location of our house from references to the lettuce farm can forget it (another reason not to advertise your life on Facebook).

a visit to Henry Moore

I went today to The Henry Moore Foundation, a trip originally scheduled for April for my father's birthday, that got postponed due to inclement weather.  It got back into the diary for today because my parents have a very old friend staying with them, and my mother was starting to panic about how to amuse him for an entire week, and thought that he might like the Henry Moore Foundation.

It is a charitable foundation based around Moore's own house, studios and land and it is very interesting.  You can tour the house, in small guided groups, advance booking necessary, and are allowed to wander at will around the rest of the site.  The house is a marvellous 1950s time capsule, since while the Moores lived there until their deaths in the 1980s they much preferred art collecting to interior decorating.  Almost every surface is stuffed with works by other artists (many famous), stones, bones, shells, and ethnic carvings.  A succession of local women were hired to dust and cook, the Moores not being domestically inclined.

The grounds are large, and contain a lot of Henry Moore sculptures, which show off to good advantage with plenty of space around them in the open air, instead of being stuffed cheek by jowl together in an art gallery.  There are some quite nice trees and herbaceous borders as well.

Some of the outbuildings are as used by Henry Moore for his work, and you can see his tools, and sculptures in various stages of completion.  Others are now used as exhibition spaces.  There are some wonderful textiles woven at West Dean College, based on his drawings, in a magnificent timber framed barn that he bought and had reassembled on site.

The staff are mostly friendly.  The pub, now owned by the foundation, is so-so.  If I were you I'd take a picnic, if it's nice weather.

I'm not sure it was my parents' friend's cup of tea, since he kept asking as walked around why the heads of the sculptures were so small, and didn't come over as a Henry Moore fan.  He is visiting from Australia, and I'd have thought a nice trip to see Flatford Mill might have pressed more buttons in terms of revisiting Old England one last time.  My dad doesn't have as much stamina as he used to, and ran out of steam half way round the studios, and I was knackered after an over-committed May.  I'd like to go back sometime, though.

Tomorrow we are going to Devon for our nephew's wedding, and I am not taking the laptop, since while the Systems Administrator is normally very patient about sitting quietly while I type, I don't think that's appropriate on a family weekend, and there won't really be time.  So you will have to hear the edited highlights when we get back, and until then Cardunculus will be on holiday.

waste not, want not

We are on the fourth week of the new recycling regime.  It has been interesting to see how much does go into the council's food recycling bin, and the answer so far has been reasonably low.  According to the Love Food Hate Waste campaign brought to us by WRAP (a not for profit organisation) the average family wastes £480 of food per annum.  Their website doesn't say what constitutes an average family, but families with children waste more, £680 worth.  The photo on Love Food Hate Waste's homepage did cause me a scintilla of annoyance by including two banana skins in the pile of wasted food, since not even the most fanatical anti-waste campaigner is suggesting we eat those.  It looks as though the average household size in the UK is around 2.4, and on a falling trend, but I'd like to know more about this average family.

In week one our family of two threw away the bone from a joint of lamb.  That doesn't really count as waste any more than banana skins (not that we have had any bananas in the past month).  There were the scrapings from a stew, and a couple of burnt pizza crusts.  It is probably better for the Systems Administrator not to eat those anyway.  Week two saw a bona fide wasted piece of Cheshire cheese that I discovered green and evil in a bag in the fridge, net weight around 50 grammes (I didn't weigh it).  In week three we threw away another piece of cheese, this time a small goat's milk round bought for the cheeseboard when we had friends to supper, that wasn't eaten on the day and then slipped under the radar.  Clearly we must be more careful with our cheese management.  Chelsea week saw the demise of a packet of six mini scotch eggs, that we didn't have room for after the pork pies and didn't fancy after they'd spent the day touring the flower show.  That was a shame, but the scotch eggs were on special offer, and taking our own picnic was a lot cheaper than buying food at Chelsea Flower Show prices, even if some did get thrown away.

This week the bin contains some skin and bones from a chicken stew and the shells from four hard boiled eggs, again not waste in the sense of food that we could have eaten but didn't, plus half a jar of pesto, that is waste.  I don't know how that ended up in the fridge, except that we must have had pasta when it was the sort of weather when you feel like having pasta with pesto, and then it wasn't again for six weeks.  Plus, we have discovered that the farm shop sells pots of pesto that are infinitely nicer than the Tesco's jars.  I'm not sure how to count the three pots of dripping carefully saved from previous joints and not used for cooking.  They were potentially edible (before the meat juice under the dripping went green with age.  The dripping itself looked fine), but by-products of roasting beef rather than something we'd paid for directly.  Given the attitude of modern medicine to cooking with beef dripping instead of olive or sunflower oil we probably weren't supposed to eat it anyway.  There were three shrivelled spring onions this week, but they went in the bin for our compost heap, not the council one, and there was nothing to be done about the spoonful of cooked courgette, since courgettes only come as whole vegetables, and if two were too much for two people, one wouldn't have been enough.

The chickens help us out by eating any surplus boiled potatoes or rice, and stale bread.  As a mechanism for converting waste carbohydrate into nutritious high quality protein a chicken is hard to beat (OK, they mostly live on bought grain and layers pellets, but stale brown bread is never thrown away).  People without the option of shovelling the unnecessary extra couple of spuds they erroneously peeled and cooked into a chicken run are going to have a heavier waste food bin than ours.

I reckon that food thrown away that could have been eaten if we'd been more organised has come in at about a pound a week in the first month of the new recycling regime.  We are quite assiduous at making the most of food.  Today's lunch started off two meals ago as a tomato and onion spicy side dish to go with curry.  It was reborn as tomato and mixed bean stew to go with barbecued burgers, by adding a tin of mixed beans in tomato sauce.  I bulked up the remains of that with a red pepper and four rather tasteless large tomatoes that were sitting in the fridge, and once it was nicely melded scooped depressions in it and cooked four eggs (from the chickens) in the sauce.  (This was loosely based on Middle Eastern methods that I'd read about in Claudia Roden, and seen in passing in No One Knows about Persian Cats).  I suppose the risk with all this reheating is that we'll give ourselves food poisoning, but we haven't yet.  Get leftovers you plan to keep into the fridge pronto after the meal, even if they're still a bit warm, and bring to a proper simmering boil each time.

It's around a five mile round trip from home to any shop at all, so the cost of petrol to nip out to buy a pint of milk is about the same as the milk.  When you live in the country you need to keep a certain amount of perishable food in stock, like cheese, bread, and milk.  Actually, if you live in the average suburb it's probably a couple of miles to the shops.  The time wasted, and aggravation, of discovering as you are about to cook that you don't have some basic vital ingredient like an onion make it sensible and rational to keep a supply in the kitchen cupboard.  If occasionally you misjudge and one or two go soft before you can use them, that's an acceptable trade-off for most people.

The non-food part of the recycling is still worrying me.  The council's waste contractors will not accept a large range of plastics that are described on them as Widely recyclable, and since the new regime came in the volume of our black bins has probably doubled.  The rationale for this is that plastic wrappers and trays aren't worth much, so it's not worthwhile to collect them.  Should the market value of a given material at a particular time be the determining factor in whether it is recycled, or is the reason for recycling plastics to reduce the volume going into landfill?  In the latter case shouldn't we recycle them anyway, rather than cherry picking our bins to donate the profitable bits to industry?  And where do my black bins go?  The council leaflet just said they would by now be tiny (they're not, they're bigger).  Somebody I met who lived in Switzerland for 15 years said that the efficient way to do recycling was in bulk, of clean uncontaminated material in factories during manufacturing, and that the Swiss don't fiddle about but send all of their consumer waste to incinerators with proper filters to avoid air pollution, and simply harvest the energy.  In the UK people tend not to like the sound of incinerators, so that would be a hard sell here.  But I do find the idea of those black bags mostly full of recyclable material going to landfill rather depressing.

renovation deferred

We conceded defeat today, and took the scaffolding down and stowed it away at the end of the house.  The Systems Administrator had been going to renew the gutter along the back roof, and paint the barge board while the old guttering was removed, but the weeks of rain put paid to that plan, and now the border behind the house is a jungle of new growth.  The SA prodded the woodwork in several places and pronounced that there were no signs of rot, and the job would keep until next spring.  Indeed, I suppose it could be done in the autumn, if we get an Indian summer and I'm brisk about cutting down the herbaceous plants, but the thought of trying to manoeuvre the tower in now among the hardy geraniums, and campanulas, and Lamium orvala, and the new leaves of Tetrapanax papyrifera 'Rex', and rapidly emerging shoots on the buddleias, was just too much.  I think the SA had visions of Rachel repeatedly weeping for her children, because they were not, each time another plant got smashed, and decided against it.  The problem isn't just the feet and outriggers of the scaffolding squashing the odd plant once it's up, but finding somewhere to stand all the component parts each time it has to be dismantled to move it along to the next section of barge board.  On dead flat, solid ground I suppose you could roll the whole tower intact, but not on a slope and on earth.

We need a settled spell of several dry days to tackle the gutter, since once the old one is off there is really no choice but to press on until the job is finished.  The weather now feels anything but, with the Met Office issuing warnings of severe rain.  It poured yesterday in Braintree and Chelmsford, big fat solid lumps of rain that the SA could see on the rain radar, but it all petered out before reaching us here, and we didn't get a drop.  It feels humid, though.  The SA wilts in damp heat, and the bees were a trifle tetchy when I went to see them.  It wasn't ideal beehive-opening weather, but tomorrow is forecast to be worse.

Some of the shrub roses are opening.  The white single 'Nevada' is full out.  I fell for that variety many years ago, after seeing one in a border in the formal part of the gardens at Killerton.  It is not much in fashion nowadays, though the RHS lists 19 suppliers, so it is not endangered.  The brilliant magenta single 'Anne of Geierstein' is also blooming.  She is well past her centenary, bred in 1894, and I am confused as to how rare she now is, since the RHS Plantfinder says that she was last listed in 2009, but the Peter Beales website offers to sell me one for £12.45.  Some mistake surely.  'Anne of Geierstein' is classified as a sweet briar, but I have never noticed any smell from her foliage.  My plant grows on its own roots, the original specimen having sickened and died after layering itself a metre away from where it was planted.

Less welcome is the epic growth of goosegrass, and I need to spend a day going around pulling it out.  The seeds are not yet ripe and ready, and I must get rid of it before they are, besides which, it would make the borders look much tidier.  That and finishing doing the edges.  Unfortunately tomorrow's gardening jobs will be geared towards making the watering intelligible to the (non-gardening) friend who is kindly looking after the pots as well as the cats and chickens while we're off at the wedding.  Collections of pots awaiting planting out have proliferated, and need to be gathered into one place clearly designated Water Those, while  the pots of dead things outside the greenhouse will only cause confusion, and since they need to be dealt with it might as well be tomorrow.

Our neighbour the retired farmer, who sold what was his farm to the lettuce farmer, came round to deliver the parish magazine.  I think he would like us to object to the planned polytunnels, but didn't want to seem to be steering us.  I sympathise with the owners of the house more directly affected by it than we are, who are related to him, but he isn't in a very good position to grumble in that he sold the land.  If he wanted to be secure from future agricultural developments he shouldn't have done that.

free advice

It was baking in the plant centre.  Fortunately, and surprisingly, trade was brisk, and I was kept busy on the till and out of the sun for much of the hottest part of the day without the manager having to manufacture excuses for me to stay indoors.  The owner had a stand at a plant fair yesterday, and almost developed sunstroke after spending the day out in the open, even wearing a hat, so her instructions to us first thing this morning were to be very careful.

Just as I'd finished watering the owner flagged me down to help a customer who needed some advice.  She was carrying a sketch pad under her arm, which turned out to contain the outline of a garden with plant names pencilled in round the edges, supplemented by photographs.  She had just moved to a house whose garden was a blank, and wanted advice on what to plant.  A friend of a friend who dabbled in garden design had drawn her a plan, and she had some existing plants (propagated or lifted from her old garden.  I never quite gathered) which she intended to use, supplemented by a list of new plants that she wanted.

My mind initially boggled.  Our garden was never designed on paper, and I don't consider myself a designer.  I got very high marks in the only design exam I ever sat, a Year Two module at Writtle, and rather low marks in the design assignment, which suggests I am better at talking about design than doing it (though the low marks in the assignment were partly because the tutor didn't like my handwriting on the plans).  I designed my brother's small garden, at his request, and it took getting on for half a week, though I did do him a colour plan (complete with dodgy handwriting) and written briefing.  The amount of design input I could provide in a quick chat in the back of the shop seemed limited.

Once we got started it wasn't as difficult as I'd feared.  Her list of plants was sensible for the site and she had realistic ideas about maintenance and what she wanted from the garden, so I started in one corner and worked my way round her draft plan, checking whether each plant would be happy with the conditions in that part of the garden and how it would look with its neighbours.  By the end of it we had a yellow themed area, and a purple and silver patch, and she seemed to like my suggestion that bringing the planting out from the fence at one point would make it more interesting than sticking to a peripheral border all the way round, and that the children (they must have been grandchildren) would probably like it if their play area were somewhat enclosed and more private.  It was a slight shock when, having sorted out that side of the house, she turned the page of the sketch pad and there was another map of the other half of the garden, but by then I was on a roll, and she mainly wanted advice on gravel gardening, which is one of my specialist subjects.  So she was very happy and grateful for my help, and it's just as well that most customers don't require that degree of hand-holding, as we couldn't do it, without increasing staffing levels about fifty-fold.

Somebody who'd been to Chelsea wanted to know if we sold Orlaya grandiflora, but once I'd explained that she would need to grow it from seed, preferably fresh seed sown in situ, and that it would die after flowering but seed itself about, and that the seedlings were quite easy to recognise, and in short, no, we didn't stock it, she went off the idea.

The unhappiest creature on the premises was probably the dog.  Far from blooming during pregnancy, she looked hot, heavy and distinctly apprehensive.

Addendum  On checking my e-mails when I got home I found that I was not the only person to have decided not to go to the beekeepers' meeting on Saturday.  Numbers were low, and the Committee is going to have to try and work out why that is.  It is very disappointing for the hosts when not many people show, and makes them less likely to be willing to do it again, so I now feel bad that I should have gone.  The trouble is, I know why I didn't go, which is that I'd been running around like a loony all month, and needed a weekend off.  Sometimes you just can't do everything.

back in the bog bed

I was shocked on writing up my gardening diary to realise that I hadn't done any gardening for the entire week before this weekend.  I even checked my pocket diary, in case I'd forgotten to write up the gardening one, but no, three days at work, Chelsea and another trip to London, catching up with admin and drill and housework, and the bees and a Pilates lesson, and that was the week gone, with no gardening except for watering.  No wonder I'm not on top of the horsetail.

The things planted in the bog over a week ago are looking very happy, so clearly they will live in waterlogged soil.  If they couldn't take constant saturation they would have let me know by now.  Indeed, one last Primula bulleyana and the final Filipendula rubra, that I didn't have time to plant last time round and have been sitting outside the front door since, don't look as good as the ones in the bog, which have grown since planting and are a better shade of green.  I got the leftovers into the ground, plus some white flowered ragged robin (all over Chelsea this year, but I bought mine before then), some pale yellow Trollius, a yellow Iris ensata in the boggy bit, and yet another kind of saxifrage next to the walkway.  I tucked a Gunnera tinctoria in behind the yellow bamboo, planted on a built up mound of compost, since while it needs it damp it won't like having its crown sitting in water.  There is scarcely room for it, since the bed isn't that large, but I do want a gunnera.  The huge leaves are fabulously prehistoric.  The idea is that the new deck, and attendant pretties like the primula and globe flowers, should be screened by tall, lush vegetation in the summer, so that you walk down the garden and come upon the deck as a surprise.  Well, obviously it won't be a surprise to us, because we know it's there, but it will feel secluded and secret.

The Systems Administrator returned from Nottingham, having taken the scenic rail route via Ely to avoid the replacement bus service, and wasn't able to use the new deck having chosen to let the chickens out for a yomp in the front garden.  They were very happy to come out, as I didn't manage to make the time to supervise chicken exercise while the SA was away.  I was originally planning to go to a beekeepers' garden meeting near Bures yesterday, and visit an open garden in Tendring today, before working out that there simply wasn't time to do everything.

In our garden, the Paeonia rockii has put on a splendid display of its huge and exotic white and purple flowers, while Aquilegia are popping up everywhere.  All the columbines are originally from seed, some that I grew and some that have seeded themselves.  There are some quite refined varieties, including one that looks like 'Ruby Port' though it may not be, and pale pink ones that could be 'Clematiflora', but others are the vigorous plain dark purple sort.  I like the latter, but ought to try and remember to cut them down before they seed, to keep the balance tipped towards the more unusual forms.

And that is it.  I am going to go and sit on the veranda before it gets too cool, and talk nicely to my other half.  It is a very beautiful evening.

setting out the pots

I spent a happy day moving the pots of geraniums from their winter quarters in the greenhouse to the Italian garden in front of the house.  These are geraniums in the pelargonium sense of the word, but not even the boss insists on calling them pelargoniums.  Their ancestors came from South Africa, and by March they were looking unutterably miserable after an Essex winter in a frost-free (but no more) greenhouse.  The recent hot weather has made them believe they are in heaven, and they are leafing up and sending out new shoots with the air of plants whose time has finally come.  I like keeping them from year to year, even though it is nip and tuck in the winter, because it saves the time and expense of buying fresh plants and compost each spring, and the labour of planting them up, and because it gives a pleasant sense of stewardship and continuity.

Some were bought at plant stalls, or received as presents from friends and relations and never came with names, while I've kept others going by taking cuttings and have managed to lose their labels, so I don't know what half of them are.  The scented leaf varieties seem to cope quite well with the low winter temperatures, while some other sorts bought for their relatively glamorous flowers from a specialist geranium grower did not make it through the two long, cold winters.  Some ivy leaf specimens bought at work look particularly stressed and dreadful in the winter, but leaf up vigorously in the spring.  If they can't cope with the conditions they go on the compost heap, and by a process of natural selection I'm ending up with a selection of those that can survive the winter damp and chill.

Some of the Geranium maderense grown from seed filched from plants by the V&A courtyard cafe are flowering this year.  This species normally dies after flowering, and flowers when it has built up the strength and inclination to do so.  I gave one of my young plants to a friend, and it flowered for her in the first year, so this spring I've been dosing mine occasionally with liquid tomato feed, which is what the specialist geranium nursery recommended in their growing instructions.  This species is not the easiest to keep going through the winter, being picky about the watering regime.  They seems to want to be dry (as do all geraniums in a UK winter) but die if allowed to get too dry, quite suddenly.  Cold nights distress them, sending the leaves wizened and bronzed, and they are more susceptible to aphid attack than the usual sorts of geranium.

I also have a few dwarf pomegranates, grown from seed, which have recently leafed up nicely, having spent the winter as pots of worrying little dried twigs.  They flowered last year, but not lavishly, and I have been including them in the tomato food regime.  Pots of the almost hardy, silver leafed Senecio, grown on from a tray of young plants bought at a garden gate, have mostly survived the winter, and are bushing out.  A couple shrivelled and died when we had a cold spell, but I couldn't work out whether that was the drop in temperature, or if I'd been too stingy with the watering in my attempts to avoid rot.

There are several pots of Agapanthus, the number tending to grow over time as I buy odd extra plants I like the look of.  My target this year is 'Queen Mum', which has large flowers of violet shading to white.  I admired them last year at work, but we only had a few huge plants at over thirty quid a pop, while this year we have more plants at a more sensible size and price.  Some of the older specimens could do with repotting, and I have made a basic error and planted them in pots that are narrower at the top than further down, with attractive pie crust edges and rope tops.  This is a shame, because the only way I'm going to get the plants out for repotting is to smash the pots.

There's a mauve flowered, striped leaf form of Tuhlbaghia, an allium relative whose affinity is betrayed by the onion smell of its leaves.  It flowers for a very long time once it starts, and is a better value plant than the green leafed and white flowered sort, which doesn't seem to bloom as prolifically, or for as long.  There's a pink flowered Crinum, which flowered a couple of times last year, and another Crinum that is supposed to be white, but I haven't been able to verify that because it has never flowered with me.  It is a weaker grower than the other, so maybe it is the white form, as white flowered variants are sometimes less vigorous than their stronger coloured companions.

There is a red and a white Clianthus, or lobster plant, both raised from seed and flowering a little but slightly beset by snails and the cold nights dragging on so late, and an Albizia, also raised from seed, which isn't growing as vigorously as I feel it ought to be, having seen the ones at work.  There's a marguerite with single pale yellow flowers, and I've bought a double pale yellow to expand the range.  The Argyranthemum, and a B&Q box of blue nemesias I've just got to go in the ancestral Heals pot, are the only bedding plants I've bought this year, everything else being a tender perennial or shrub that scraped through winter in the greenhouse.  B&Q are doing a BOGOF on plants this weekend, so I got a box of red and green flowered mimulus for free when I bought the nemesias.  I'm not exactly sure where I'll use them, but it seemed a shame to pass up free plants.

et in Arcadia ego

Finally, the housework caught up with me.  One might have expected that on a day that was warm and sunny, albeit blowing half a gale, I'd have been pulling up horsetail, or finishing planting up the bog, or moving the pots of geraniums out of the greenhouse.  I didn't like to risk moving them outside until last week, in case of one final overnight frost.  However, I wasn't doing any of these things, but spending a nice day cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming cat fur off the sitting room, and going to Tesco to buy courgettes and creme fraiche.

The immediate trigger for such a perverse outbreak of domesticity was that I'd invited a friend to supper, while the Systems Administrator is off with a friend at Trent Bridge.  I try to be careful not to mention to guests that I've spent the day of their visit cleaning, or that I don't like cleaning very much, since this would sound ungracious, and the cleaning isn't their fault.  The house needs to be cleaned periodically, so an impending visit doesn't create the necessity for housework, merely determines the timing of it.  In fact, given that I don't like cleaning, it's just as well that we do occasionally invite people round and are nudged into doing something about the state of the kitchen floor and the clouds of cat fur before they become a health hazard.

I like having a clean house, or at least a cleaner house.  Shiny cupboard fronts, crumb-free worktops, rugs that don't have an additional layer of fur overlaying the ethnic weave beneath, walls that aren't fretted with odd strands of cat hair, non-sticky place mats, clean hand towels, the loo smelling vaguely and reassuringly of Toilet Duck, side tables that aren't lightly spotted with red wine, light shades that don't suddenly and embarrassingly reveal themselves to contain a layer of detritus consisting of small dead flies, dust and more cat fur.  When I have accomplished these things I feel cleaner and shinier myself, reassured that chaos has been thrust back along with the vague possibility of infection.  It feels virtuous and comforting and nice.  I just don't like cleaning

Maybe I would like it more if I were better at it, or did it oftener and more conscientiously so that the end results were more impressive.  After an hour of scrubbing at the grease spots on the Aga, using two different sorts of proprietary cleaning product, one for chrome and steel and the other for enamel, and chasing dust and cat fur round it, I have to admit to myself that it is still not like the ones in the showroom, or in other people's houses who don't have four cats, and employ a competent cleaner, or wipe their Aga with proper Aga cleaning pastes oftener than once every three weeks.  Maybe because it is an electric one it seems to carry a static charge that attracts dust, and cat fur, and after an hour of wiping I can still see odd strands, and tide marks where the last swipe of the cloth got to, while there are still deposits around the hinges of the top plates which it would take me the rest of the day to remove, and I don't have the rest of the day.  It isn't really a clean Aga at all, just a lot shinier than it was, and it will have to do, just as the draining board and the sink will have to do, because to get them back to a showroom state of shininess would require the application of at least an entire bottle of limescale remover.  I don't really want that much industrial chemical running down into the septic tank, and I don't have the rest of the afternoon to spend scouring.

It's the same with the vacuuming.  I go diligently round and round the room, trying and failing to avoid getting the flex wound round the furniture and my legs.  A great deal of fluff came off the carpets and the pouffes today, even though the Systems Administrator gave it all a vacuum only a week ago.  After I have put the vacuum cleaner away I see bits that I missed, like the ethnic rug on the table in the downstairs sitting room which I completely overlooked, while new random bits of fur and dirt have appeared and settled in the time it took me to walk upstairs, open the spare room door, and put the vacuum cleaner away.  If we were to vacuum the house oftener maybe there wouldn't be such a reservoir of fluff lurking.  Maybe I would have a better routine and not forget the downstairs table.  Maybe the vacuumed house would look really, sparklingly clean, instead of merely appearing less obviously grubby.

In Poussin's pastoral paintings, shepherds gather around a tomb on which is inscribed Virgil's warning, et in Arcadia ego.  So it is here with housework.  Even in the middle of the rustic idyll, housework lurks.  I will never do enough of it, and it will never go away.  Tomorrow I am not going to clean the dust off the cases of the CDs racked under the stairs, even though they are very dusty.  Instead, I am going to move the geraniums out of the greenhouse.

bona fide celestial music

I made a return visit today to LSO St Luke's for another of their lunchtime solo Bach series.  In a way it would be nice for us country day trippers if concerts on a theme that we like could be spaced out through the year, instead of there being four in as many weeks.  My companion and I couldn't decide which we preferred out of the cello and the harpsichord, and solved the question by going to both, but I'd have been quite happy if today's event had been in two or three weeks, instead of in Chelsea week.  But it wasn't.

My faltering musical brain fails to grasp most of what is going on in the music of JS Bach, but in the end I find it the most perfect music there is, just as TS Eliot is in the end my desert island poet.  I listen to Radio 3 programmes that explain what a fugue is, or how the theme in the second part is the first theme played upside down, and I try hard but I can't hear it.  But today's three preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier felt as large and mysterious as the universe, planets and stars rolling on through vast unimaginable space, while the closing Partita was as lively and complex as the whole life of a human being.  If there were a god and it spoke, it would sound like the music of Bach.

Today's harpsichord recital was by an astonishingly talented and astonishingly young Iranian born musician named Mahan Esfahani.  I hadn't heard of him until this series came up, which says more about me than about him, but I'm sure I'll be hearing more of him and from him in the next few decades.  You can hear him sooner than that, since today's performance will be the Radio 3 lunchtime concert on Thursday 18 October at 1.00pm.  The concert was respectably attended, but by no means a sell-out.  Quite a few of the audience were there by themselves, mostly dressed in casual shirts or T shirts, and significantly more than half of them were men.  I wondered whether some were from the high tech firms that now cluster around Old Street (according to the Telegraph), taking in some abstract musical high culture in their lunch hours.  Pairs of ladies up from the provinces for the day were definitely in the minority.  Maybe Bach's abstract complexities appeal to the male brain, or maybe the fringes of Hoxton are still a bit threatening to some visitors, but it was a very different demographic to the RA Friends' room.

It seemed a terrible waste that music of such high quality was going on with plenty of empty seats in the house, but was an odd echo of Monday night's concert in Colchester with Brendan Power and Tim Edey.  The previous week when it was Spiers and Boden the Systems Administrator and I had to arrive ridiculously long before the main act to get seats, and were beset with silly women who professed not to understand why everybody was sitting down instead of dancing, having talked and giggled their way through half the numbers instead of listening to them.  The gig was a sell out.  For Power and Edey the room was set up with chairs around cafe tables near the stage, and rows of chairs behind with a generous central aisle, a signal that the Arts Centre knew it was nowhere near sold out and wanted to make the room look full.  Brendan Power is a harmonica player of world class, with a polished stage presence and a decent voice, while Tim Edey plays the guitar and the melodeon to a very high standard (though obviously not at the same time) and faster than you would have believed possible.  I'm rather with my dad when he said he did not altogether approve of people playing tunes faster than they were meant to go, just to show off that they could, but it was a jolly good and entertaining gig by two superb musicians at the top of their game, who won a major folk award (Radio 2 Best Duo) only three months ago.  The audience did not talk, or giggle, or try to clap along, but sat listening with the same level of attention that Mahan Esfahani got for JS Bach.  In terms of musicality and technical proficiency you could not squeeze a hair between them and Spiers and Boden, but in marketing terms, the latter have got caught up in the broader media enthusiasm for New Folk and Bellowhead, while Power and Edey are still mostly only known to harmonica enthusiasts (and there aren't very many of those) and hard core folkies who follow Mike Harding on Radio 2.

We wandered up after the concert to the Geffrye Museum, since it was a long time since I'd been there and my friend had never been there at all.  It is a lovely museum, opened in some former almshouses early in the last century partly with the aim of providing instruction and inspiration for the furniture industry that still occupied Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, and it contains room sets with furniture for English homes from Stuart times to the late twentieth century.  It has a charming garden behind, a large and restful expanse of grass and plane trees in front, and a cafe, that served a really good bagel on my last visit and this time round produced a passable scone.  Entry is free.

Then we were able to go home when we wanted to, on a train leaving Liverpool Street at twenty to six, instead of having to wait around for an hour, because the new franchise holder on the Colchester line has scrapped the restriction on the time of homeward travel using a cheap day return.  The quid pro quo is that the fare has risen by over three pounds, on the other hand we spent close to that last time on refreshments to tide us over and buy us a place to sit down while we waited for a train.  Day trippers were not consulted about whether we wanted to make this trade off, but I'd say it was a fair exchange.  It's a pity that after all that the train going home ran late.  I shall look up the timetable presently, and check that it was more than half an hour late, in which case I can put in a claim for 25 per cent of the cost of the ticket.  Oh, and this morning the Circle line was suspended entirely when I got to Liverpool Street, so thank goodness it didn't do that on Tuesday morning when the SA and I were going to Chelsea.

catching up with myself

 One of the neighbours called round on Monday, when I was at work, and spoke to the Systems Administrator to ask if we'd heard about the lettuce farm's planning application.  The copy of the letter she gave us was rather unnerving, since the application is for permission to erect polytunnels 6.4m high and up to 360m long, covering five fields, and construct two agricultural reservoirs, and the letter talked about how the development would 'dramatically change the present countryside landscape and impact on the local wildlife, volume of highway traffic as well as devaluing local properties'.  I was out on Monday evening, and the SA didn't look up details of the application in my absence.  I told myself that the farmer had been pretty sensible about community relations so far, and with the whole farm to choose from probably wouldn't try and stick the tunnels immediately next to houses, but it niggled at me at odd moments yesterday as a vague, overhanging threat.  This morning the SA looked up the full details on the web, and the proposed site of the tunnels is on the far side of the farm, well away from houses, while the planned reservoirs are due to be on the site of previous worked-out gravel extractions.

The news came as a relief.  Even though my rational mind thought that the developments were unlikely to take in the next door field, anxiety still lurked.  It's tricky living in the countryside.  You know that you don't own the view, and that fields are a working environment in which farmers have to make a living, but you still don't want rows of plastic tunnels over six metres high just over the hedge from your garden, just as you understand that farmers in the eastern counties need to store more winter rain for summer use, but don't want to listen to the noise of diggers and especially those wretched reversing bleepers for the year it takes them to excavate the reservoir.  The planning application has to make the commercial case for the development, and so we discovered that the farm plans to invest £9 million, and that the development will create six full time jobs.  That's £1.5 million capital spend per job created, so I think we can conclude that horticultural food production is not going to lead the UK out of its present unemployment problems.  The tunnels are intended to grow some kind of salad leaf used in supermarket bags of mixed leaves, which is currently imported to the UK, so the project will help the balance of trade, if it goes ahead.  Remember, the next time you buy a bag of mixed leaves or a supermarket lettuce, that the fields of north Essex are disappearing under fleece and polythene tunnels so that you can get one of your five a day.

Meanwhile I made some progress with my (rather long) list of things to do.  A fellow beekeeper is producing a leaflet for our stand at the Tendring Show (it is a lovely show.  Do come) and had circulated draft versions for constructive comment.  I fired off my first set of comments ages ago, and was disconcerted on getting back from work on Sunday to find myself being chased for comments on the next version when I'd only been sitting on it for a week, given the show isn't until the middle of July.  What with work, and Monday night's concert, and the Chelsea Flower Show, I had to confess that there was no way I was going to even look at it until today.  I sat down after breakfast to go through it, and was greatly relieved to send off my latest list of constructive comments and be able to tick Beekeeper's leaflet off my list of things to do.

Then I was able to have a look at the bees, since it has finally warmed up.  They like the warm weather, and all four colonies were in a benign and docile mood, while a problem a couple have been having with a fungal infection of their larvae, called chalk brood, was much reduced.  I was hoping that warmer and drier weather would do the trick, once the bees could fly freely instead of being stuck on top of each other in the hives.  One colony that was so slow to get going earlier in the year that I initially thought they must have gone queenless has increased greatly since the last inspection, and was starting to show signs of swarming.  I added a super (extra box) to give them more space, removed the incipient new queens, and crossed my fingers.  The tiny swarm I collected last year that made it through the winter, in defiance of what the text books say about the minimum colony size for successful overwintering, is building up as well.  I'm not sure what the other two colonies are doing, after my unsuccessful attempts at swarm control, but the bees seemed contented and purposeful, so I shall leave them to get on with it.  They have millions of years of evolution behind them in how to be a bee, whereas I have 13 year's experience in how to manage a bee, so when in doubt I take the view that they know better than I do.

Then I made it through my monthly Pilates lesson without disgracing myself.  By next month things should be less frantic, and we might progress to some new exercises and challenges, which would make it more interesting for both of us.  My life recently has felt like the proverbial paddling swan, legs going frantically even if the surface seems serene, though in truth it is probably more like a small dog doing the doggy paddle, little legs churning while the whole dog looks pretty worried.

Addendum  The Telegraph reports that the Shard doesn't make it into the world's top ten tall buildings, even at full height.  It would need to be another 460 feet tall.  Oh well.

the greatest flower show on earth

We spent today at the Chelsea Flower Show.  The RHS bills it as the greatest flower show on earth, and it is a good one.  The trains going into London ran to time today (bless them) and we were rather lucky to get a Circle Line train almost immediately, since there were severe Circle Line delays this morning, so we were at the Royal Hospital not quite as the doors opened, but by twenty to nine.

We started off by looking at the small show gardens in the Ranelagh Gardens area of the show ground, since experience teaches that they are quiet early on, and packed later.  Then we looked at some of the large show gardens, then the great marquee.  After a break for Pimms and our packed lunches we divided forces for a while, as we do every year, so that I can inspect the stands in the marquee in minute detail, while the Systems Administrator strides around looking at things more impressionistically at a pace less crippling to the back.  We met again at the war memorial, which is always our default meeting position since it is not going to have moved, and showed each other things the other had missed, and I caught up on some stands in the grand marquee I'd not had time to look at.  We had a final look at the show gardens, and I bought four more glass leaves to hang in our front garden.  Then we set off home, just ahead of the rush hour, and I couldn't believe I'd been at the show for seven hours, which proves I was enjoying myself.

We had a lovely day.  Chelsea is always done magnificently, so there is lots to see.  Good weather helps, as it is nicer looking at show gardens in warm sunshine than drizzle, and you can eat your picnic in the Ranelagh gardens, and the marquee doesn't get so horribly crowded as when everybody is inside at once sheltering from the elements.  Public transport working properly helps too, as it takes the edge off the day to arrive later than you'd planned, when the crowds have built up, because you were stuck somewhere, or take ages to get home. So it was a very successful outing, and all being well we'll be going again next year.

In terms of show gardens it was not a vintage Chelsea.  We both felt that, while beautifully executed, they were conservative in terms of design.  Grid based layouts with slab internal walls, straight line paths, big boulders, rills, yup, seen all those before.  Purple, orange and lime green colour schemes.  Yes, I definitely saw plenty of those last year.  Lots of Gold medals were awarded, and the winning show gardens were lovely, but on safe and familiar territory.  There was very little that we thought was surprising or felt like the start of an influential new trend.  Cleve West's large garden that won best in show was about the most conservative of them all.  Actually, we were pleased that won, because the sponsor's Chairman is a friend from our City days.  His wife was on the stand when we were there, playing the part of the Chairman's wife to perfection, but she didn't see us in the crowd.

Matrix planting is in.  Forget groups of three, or five, or drifts.  The same plant repeated randomly through the whole expanse of planting is the trendy Chelsea way to do it.  That will be a legacy of the New Perennials movement.  Wild flowers are in, and good insect plants.  Orange geums are popular for the second year running, whereas the dark red Cirsium rivulare 'Atropurpureum' is on the wane, having been all over Chelsea like a rash a few years back.  Orlaya grandiflora, used by Tom Stuart Smith a couple of years ago when nobody knew what it was, including one of the girls handing out blurb on his garden, is now everywhere.  The most surprising new fave plants, to me, were the variants on Centaurea montana.  The common or garden blue version of this good natured ornamental knapweed was popular in the years after the last war.  Margery Fish writes of it, and it grew in the garden my parents bought when I was a child, which had been planted up by a very keen cottage gardener.  When I first wanted to acquire it, about twenty five years ago, I had great difficulty tracking down plants or even seed, it was so out of fashion.  At this year's Chelsea it is everywhere, in shades of pink, mauve, and deep purple, but not blue.  The blue is still the nicest, I think.

The Diarmuid Gavin tower was just silly, but by now I don't mind that, regarding him being silly as part of the Chelsea tradition.  Andy Sturgeon's design for M&G bothered me, in that it featured internal stone walls peppered with expensive laser cut circular holes.  I think these were meant to echo the metal sculpture made out of copper rings (that weaves through the garden and enlivens it without challenging its formality, according to the programme), but I couldn't help thinking they symbolised the holes the current economic difficulties had shot in my portfolio, and the Systems Administrator said they reminded him of bullet holes, and he felt that Kate Adie ought to be there, in a flak jacket.  On the other hand, the garden by a Korean designer based on the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, which featured the rusting detritus of war and scorched tree trunks amidst a tangle of Korean plants, was completely wonderful.  Even among the crowds and bustle and BBC cameras and ice-creams and Pimms, it held a haunting air of loss and separation and history.

The grand marquee was beautiful, and I saw some new and fascinating plants, as well as old favourites like the auriculas (them reckless plants, as Mrs Fish's gardener used to call them) and Bloms tulips (another Gold medal.  Phew).  And I saw Roy Lancaster, who is one of my heroes, and got advice from the proprietor of Broadleigh Bulbs about my non-flowering Iris unguicularis.  The marquee is always wonderful, and probably my favourite bit.

And now we are going to watch it all again on the television.

work and play

Another Monday, another folk club night.  I'm taking my dad to hear Brendan Powers and Tim Edey.  They won a prize in this year's R2 Folk Awards, though that won't have swayed my dad, who doesn't listen to the radio, but he likes them anyway.  There'll be enough time after getting back from work to scrape the compost from under my fingernails and grab something to eat, but not much more than that, before it's time to go out again.  We are going to take the risk of not arriving at the Arts Centre until about quarter past eight, so we'll have less time to endure sitting on the hard chairs listening to whatever dodgy local support act the organisers have found for us.

I shouldn't be horrid about support acts.  After all, everybody has to start off somewhere.  I just wish they could get together and found a new singers club, where they could practice on each other, instead of tagging themselves on to the coat tails of what are (in folk terms) international superstars.  Otherwise it's too much like having got a ticket to hear Mitsuko Uchida live, and finding that as the warm-up you have to listen to this really keen girl from the local sixth form college, whose just passed grade six piano.

If I am feeling keen, and awake, maybe I will tell you more about the harmonica and squeeze box duo when I get back.  If not then that's it, folks.  That's the trouble with a live blog.  I couldn't even have written today's entry last night, because I was busy writing yesterday's, while the poor Systems Administrator sat patiently, occasionally asking plaintively if it was time to go and start cooking the supper yet.  Have a good week.

more watering

The trouble with the weather being warmer and drier than of recent weeks is that we have to do more watering at work.  It took us a good couple of hours this morning.  The fact that the pipes of the automatic irrigation system are broken on a couple of the shrub beds didn't help, but in main it was because we were fiddling around, trying to water the individual pots that were dry, and not those that were already wet enough, if not too wet.  I volunteered to go and water the tunnel and outdoor standing areas on the other side of the car park, where we grow on plants for sale later, as well as storing the extras from large deliveries when there isn't room for them all in the plant centre.  The manager's note of jobs for the weekend said that we could use the overhead irrigation outside if needs be, but NOT inside the tunnel.

I don't like watering over The Other Side.  None of us do, apart from the manager's trusted helper.  It is true that newly potted little roots, which have not yet grown anywhere near big enough to fill their new 2 litre flower pots, are dangerously easy to overwater, and if allowed to sit too wet for any length of time they will rot, so only people who know what they're doing should be allowed near them.  However, other things can go wrong with the growth of potted-up roots besides overwatering.  In sunny weather it can get uncomfortably warm for plants in a large polytunnel, even with the doors open and the plastic sides rolled up to allow air in through the underlying shade netting.  Compost formulations seem to keep changing, presumably partly as manufacturers try to adjust their recipes to use less peat, and some compost I've encountered over recent years seems inimical to plant life.  However, if any plant fails to thrive over The Other Side the manager's instant response is always to blame the staff for getting the watering wrong.  I prefer not to be involved, when I can avoid it, but as today was forecast to be quite warm, and yesterday was warmish, anything that was already dry really was going to need watering.  It took a long time, as I lifted a lot of pots to check the weight, rather than rely on looking at the state of the top layer of compost, and I did the bare minimum, leaving anything I thought would last until tomorrow.  The manager can water it himself, then he will be happy it has been done properly.

In the course of my watering I spotted a couple of varieties that customers have asked me for in recent weeks, but which weren't out for sale in the plant centre.  The general rule of thumb is that anything over The Other Side with a price label on it is ready for sale, so if I'd known we had the plants hidden away behind the scenes then I could have scooted over and fetched them for people.  If the sales force don't know the full range of what's available, they can miss out on sales.  The danger of having us going and finding plants for people from there is that we don't know which things aren't out for sale because nobody has had time to put them out, and which things are actually reserved for some designer or large customer and are never destined to make it to general release in the plant centre.  At the moment there are various caches of plants roped off with stern notices on them saying Suffolk Show Do Not Touch.

A couple of customers commented on the fact that we were still allowed to use hoses, when they weren't, and I explained that we had a borehole and were mostly not using mains water, and that we were a business, and if not allowed to water our stock would be bankrupt inside a fortnight.  I don't know exactly what the exemptions are for horticultural businesses, but I presume there are some.  Anyway, we do have a borehole.

In the afternoon we hosted a meeting of classic cars in the car park, so eight or ten Daimlers and Austin Healeys came and lined up on the grass in front of The Other Side that we use for overflow car parking, where they looked very nice.  The girl who runs the tea room was rather excited at the prospect of a gathering of classic sports car owners, whom she hoped would be rich and glamorous, and I had to break it to her that most of them would be middle aged, if not older.  I was right.  If any of the classic car contingent were still looking forward to their fiftieth birthdays I'd have been quite surprised.

The peahen has made her nest in a raised bed just outside the office.  At first I thought this was an odd place to choose, being very public, but I suppose she knows all of us, and a nest right by the house is probably safer from the fox than one somewhere more secluded.  In the middle of the afternoon she rises off her nest and comes to stretch her legs in the plant centre, where she behaves very oddly, shaking her head and uttering loud hoots and screeches.  At one point she stood on the ridge of the house roof, hooting, and I took the opportunity to look in the nest and see how many eggs.  So far she has two.  They are very large, and a pale mottled brown.  She flew off the house roof, landing rather heavily in the gravel, and I wondered for a moment if she had taken umbrage at my looking at her eggs, and if so what it would be like to be attacked by a peahen, but she contented herself with looking at me and marching about purposefully.  One of my colleagues said she had been rushing at customers, but they must not have looked firm enough.  If you find yourself being approached by a large and possibly insane peafowl then just stand your ground, that's my advice.

Facebook passed me by

I had just started my day's allotted task of tidying up the herbaceous section, having equipped myself with a pink bucket and the only pair of work secateurs available for staff use, and was staring at Acanthus mollis, the first plant in the herbaceous alphabet, when the boss hailed me through the gate into the garden.  He told me the latest on the bees his friendly local bee farmer keeps on the estate, and suggested we go and have a look at the bait hives the bee farmer had put in the garden, to see if any bees had moved in yet.  They were only installed yesterday, and one had so much activity round the door we thought a swarm must already have taken up residence.  Bees in lesser numbers were crawling around the entrance of the second empty hive, which we thought were probably scouts at this stage, sent out by a swarm to find it a good permanent home.  Then we went to admire a rather ordinary and badly leaning conifer which has been transformed into a frothy tower of beauty at this time of the year by growing a white flowered wisteria up it.  This was Wisteria venusta, which has comparatively short racemes of individually quite large flowers, and the boss was very proud of the effect, and the way that the wisteria had turned a dull tree into something special.  The flowers had a pleasant scent, not as potent as W. sinensis, but sweet, and with a hint of the bean field about it, and the whole plant was humming with foraging bees.  I quoted W B Yeats to the boss, about the bee loud glade, and returned to Acanthus.

It was a pleasant day, warmer than days of late, which put all the customers in a good mood, and there were some familiar faces among the throng, including the couple around my age who once popped up at a lecture about local architect Raymond Erith, on which basis I feel they must be civilised people to know, besides which, they have kind faces.  I was rather taken aback in the afternoon by a man who appeared to have a dead squirrel hanging from his chin, but on closer view it was a straggly goatee beard, tied tightly just below his jaw with a rubber band.  I cannot think of any circumstances in which that would not be a seriously bad look.

While tidying the herbaceous section, in between stints on the till, I mused about the Facebook flotation.  I am not and have never been on Facebook.  When it first appeared it was for young people, and then London based journalists began to write about it, and I thought it was for metropolitan media types who were trying to be trendy, but still irrelevant to me, and then I began to not like the sound of it anyway.  Everything I heard about the opacity of the privacy settings put me off, knowing that I would never get those right.  Besides which, I couldn't think of anything much I needed to communicate via Facebook, and I couldn't think of many people I'd communicate it with.

I don't need to post status updates.  I have been married to the same person for 27 years, living at the same address for 18 and doing the same job for 8.  If any of those facets of my status suddenly change it will be a sufficiently momentous fact that I'd rather tell my friends and relations about it personally.  Facebook is supposed to be good for sharing photos, but I don't want to share photos.  I don't even have any photos to share, finding that the act of walking around photographing life is detrimental to the act of actually living it.  If I had any photos I can't see why people I know would want to look at them.  Pre-internet, making other people look at your holiday snaps was considered pretty naff, and I don't see that it would get less self-indulgent just because it happened on an on-line forum.  Much as I love the company of my friends, I don't feel any great need to look regularly at their photos either.

Anyway, I don't think most of my friends are on Facebook.  Some who have children may be on it in a low key way to stay in touch with their kids, but they have never suggested to me that I might like to join them there.  A good half of my friends don't even like computers very much.  I mean, they're not phobic.  They'll use Google when they have to, to check out museums and galleries and gardens and things, but they don't spend their spare time surfing the net as a leisure pursuit.  And I can't see the attraction of amassing great long lists of Facebook 'friends'.  And I find the whole idea of formalising social relationships in that way deeply bizarre.  Asking somebody to be my 'friend'?  'Unfriending' them if we've had a falling out or things have gone a bit cool?  It sounds like the language of the playground, not the nuanced relationships of adult human beings.

Apart from that, I don't really know what happens on Facebook, because I have never been there.  The only reason I can think of why I would join would be if it becomes ubiquitous among the sort of middle-aged people I hang out with for organising events.  If the Colchester beekeepers switched from using e-mail to using Facebook to announce details of club meetings, for example, then it would be unreasonable of me to refuse to use Facebook, and insist that I had to be different, and get my own special e-mail, or phone call, or letter, or message carried by runner in a cleft stick.  Until that day I'll steer clear of it.  I'm pretty sure that the flotation is insanely overpriced, though.