roots and music

A couple of us finished the last of the herbaceous potting that arrived last Thursday.  The hardy geraniums and Thalictrum are prototypical plants, with a neat solid central crown and a tuft of roots beneath.  You know where you are with them.  Aconitum carmichaelii 'Arendsii' has great chunky roots like giant molars.  The new leaves are already emerging and it's clear which way up they should go.  (I like these autumn flowering monkshoods.  They bring an attractive shot of blue to the border usefully late in the season.  All parts of the plant are poisonous, but I'm not going to eat them so that's fine).  Veronica consists of a tangled mass of wiry roots and things that might be thicker roots or stems, and it is frankly a puzzle with some of them which way up to put them or how deep they should go.  Lily of the valley has long brittle-looking white roots, with nodes from which emerge quantities of frizzled white side roots.  There are shoots at one end of the long white root, which I kept at the surface.  The roots look fragile and as if they could rot at the slightest provocation, and I'm not surprised that the plant has a reputation for being tricky to establish in the garden, or that once it is happy it can run like hell.  Hemerocallis roots are neat and chunky like pencils.  Hosta roots are funky, brilliant white and crinkly.  They make me think vaguely of some deep fried Far Eastern delicacy.  The roots of Mertensia, the Virginia cowslip, look like petrified dog turds.

Listening to the car radio on the way home I got exasperated with Eddie Mair and flicked over to Radio 3, where I found the most unearthly, etherial singing which turned out to be Trio Mediaeval, a Scandinavian three voice female polyphonic outfit who do mediaeval music plus Scandinavian folk and recently written material in the same vein.  I never heard of them, although having looked them up they have been around for years, tour extensively and have a fair-sized discography.  They are singing tonight at the Wigmore Hall and then not again in the UK for the foreseeable future.  I rarely manage to get to concerts in London anyway, but I shall certainly add one or two of the discs to my (admittedly over-optimistically long) Amazon wish list.