still coldy

I still have the cold, runnier but feeling less deathly than yesterday.  I even summoned the energy to have a shower, which was probably a relief to the Systems Administrator, whereas yesterday morning I felt utter aversion at the idea of exposing my head and body to water.

It's just as well I didn't make any New Year, New Me resolutions for 2015 since by now they would all have been broken.  Weight loss, exercise regimes, gardening projects, old friends rediscovered, intellectual ideas pursued with tenacity and panache, perhaps for money, forget it all until later. All I have done today is read about cake, eat cake, plod through a couple of online Sudokus at a speed that put me in the bottom three per cent of people playing them, flick through the Tate magazine while thinking how art is generally so much better than discussions about art, flick through the Times which we wouldn't buy if it didn't come courtesy of Waitrose, and look at the pictures in a big book about new English gardens.

New English gardens, incidentally, exist very much on a continuum with older English gardens, despite author Tim Richardson's ardent wish to discover something new about them.  Geometric layouts are in, as are New Perennial plantings (Persicaria, swathes of ornamental grasses and a generous sweep of tall daisies), hedges either pleached, square profiled or wavy topped, clipped domes of box or hornbeam, large plain paving slabs in pale stone, and earth mounds covered in short cut grass.  In other words, the mainstays of the big gardens at Chelsea over the past fifteen years.

Out are ponds, conservatories, alpines, any kind of small plant, bedding (even Cosmos and tobacco flowers), planted pots, conifers (other than yew), roses, climbers, most summer flowering shrubs, peonies, scented plants, gravel, fruit and vegetables.  New English gardens are photographed almost exclusively between the months of April and October.  It helps to have an expensive and photogenic house at the heart of your garden, an equally photogenic view beyond, and a budget running comfortably into six figures.