talks and teeth

My fourth box from Mr Fothergill arrived, and the postman handed it over remarking cheerfully 'More plants!' so he has clearly got the idea.  When I opened it I discovered I had ordered frost resistant Delosperma, or ice plants, not Gazania, and they were already in 9cm pots that should see them through the winter, so beyond standing them on the greenhouse staging I didn't need to pot them or do anything.  Frost resistant or not, I think they might as well be planted out next March and not now.

I gave a woodland conservation talk to a gardening club last night.  They are a friendly group, with thriving membership numbers, and I already knew them from a previous talk about gardening and bees, so I was fairly confident that it would be OK.  I'm due to give another talk on Monday evening to a group in Billericay, so I'll have to take my equipment and trug of twigs with me to work, plus some clean clothes and a nailbrush, and go there straight from work, having tried to make myself look roughly presentable in the loo at the plant centre.  As I'm working over the weekend as well it's going to be a bit of a marathon three days.  Then at the end of next week I've agreed to go and talk to Braintree beekeepers about gardening and bees.  When I agree to do these things, which is generally ages in advance, I think it will all be fine, and then as the hectic period approaches I begin to feel rather gloomy about it, and wonder why I get myself into such situations.  And then it's fine.

I once saw a documentary in which people surfed up the Severn bore.  The better ones stayed on the wave for ages.  Getting into the mental and emotional state where you can stand up in front of a room full of people and entertain them, and then do it again after three days of solid physical work, and then for a third time in just over a week, is probably a bit like riding the bore.  It's good to sometimes make the effort, but you couldn't do it all the time.

Once I'd got back from the talk, and unwound, it was quite late by my standards, but I had to set the alarm as I needed a haircut and the only appointment I could get was at 9.00am.  Normally I wouldn't risk Colchester's traffic at that hour, but happily it was running freely.  Then I went to Tesco, where the money off toothpaste voucher they'd sent me wouldn't work at the till.  When I reclaimed my discount at the customer service desk I discovered that the entire mailing was faulty, and nobody's toothpaste voucher would scan.  Somebody in an IT department somewhere is going to have some explaining to do.  People who look askance at my downshifted status, compared to the intellectual stimulation of their own graduate level employment, forget how much of having a proper job consists of spending your days sorting out messes of unbelievable tediousness, like having sent entire batches of non-scanning money-off vouchers to customers.

Then, proving that I know how to have a good time, I went to the dentist.  I quite like the dentist, who is a reassuring Swede who doesn't give out the disapproving vibes of some dentists.  Also I don't generally need anything doing to my teeth.  I shouldn't be smug about that particular health outcome, as doubtless genetics and lifestyle will find something else to go wrong if not my teeth.  By the time I left the parental home and the ministrations of the Devon dentist I had four fillings, and I have never required another since.  Makes you wonder about the drill and fill method of paying dentists in the 1970s, doesn't it?

back in the back

I've moved my focus of operations to the back garden, and have finally started tackling the overgrown naturally damp bit.  It is called the gunnera bed, and used to contain a gunnera until that died a couple of years ago, from winter cold, winter damp, or being eaten from the inside by rodents, or maybe just old age or random failure to live.  The bed was enlarged to incorporate more of the lawn after we realised quite how wet it was one winter when the lawn tractor bogged down to the axles.

Naturally wet ground is a great asset, especially in a dry part of the country like this, allowing me to grow large leaved, lush looking plants needing reliable moisture, that I couldn't grow anywhere else.  It is not the easiest border to manage, however.  The weeds grow like stink, and so does a yellow stemmed bamboo that I introduced a few years ago not expecting it to be such a runner.  The water table fluctuates wildly, reflecting some mysterious underground flow and not just how much it has rained in the past couple of months, so areas that were previously dry occassionally turn to bog and drown things.  Weeding the bog bed in the garden at the place where I work turned out to be a never ending occupation for a colleague who used to work one day a week in the garden.  By the time she ever got to the bottom she needed to start again at the top.  My bog bed is much smaller than that, but I don't have anything like a day a week to devote to it, and it has turned into a knotted mess of grass, horsetail and Siberian purslane at the front, with nettles and thistles behind.  Meanwhile a yellow berried form of Viburnum opulus I bought to go in it ages ago is getting desperately potbound by the greenhouse.  I think that getting this sorted out is going to take some time.

I like to work on one part of the garden for a few days, and then switch to working somewhere else.  Spending several days in the front, I had plenty of time to look at what was in bloom, see what was doing well and what not so well, and make plans for things that might need to be changed or tackled at some point.  Now I'm doing the same in the back, and getting the benefit of the artworks we installed this spring.  Hydrangea aspera 'Mauvette' is looking great in the ditch bed, with big lacecap flowers consisting of pale pink sterile flowers surrounding the central plate of tiny fertile mauve (well, what colour did you think they'd be?) ones.  The leaves are large and hairy and the whole plant is very handsome, in a gaunt way.  I also noticed that a branch of the willow tree behind the ditch, already savagely pruned this spring, was hanging too low over the hydrangea and blocking too much light from it, so it needs another trim.

Addendum  I rang my hairdresser to book a haircut, having suddenly reached the P,G. Woodhouse stage ("For goodness sake why don't you get a haircut?  Your head looks like a chrysanthemum") and found to my consternation that the girl who has been cutting it for the last two or three years has left.  I try to avoid attachment when it comes to hairdressers, remembering that they always leave, things always change, and that to resist change is to be unhappy.  But it is nerve-wracking starting with a new one.  My hair is not easy to cut, being thick, curly and unruly, a legacy of the shtetl and the celtic fringes.  It has defeated some hairdressers utterly, while others have given me cuts that would have been very good, if only I had been prepared to spend half an hour blow drying it every morning and never gone out in the rain.  I tried my luck with the senior stylist the girl that answered the phone recommended, and fortunately the results are fine, so with any luck that is the hair question sorted for another two or three years.