gravel today

I spent today weeding the gravel in the front garden.  It's a gentle task that doesn't involve any very strenuous activity with the left hand (given I am right handed) or the risk of banging my knuckles into anything hard.  There is something satisfying about pulling out the roots of sheeps sorrel.  You curl your fingers under the tuft of leaves, trying to find the long running yellow root, then lift that, seeing how long a piece you can extract in one go, and trying to get it to break leaving a visible end protruding from the soil, so that you can have another bite at the same cherry.

This part of the garden is infested with a fine leaved, clump forming grass.  I don't know what species.  It isn't Poa annua, annual meadow grass, though it is an annual.  There are also patches of a perennial weed grass with a running root, but not couch grass.  The root curls more than couch grass roots.  That one dives deep as well as running near the surface, and buries itself in the bases of shrubs and hedges where it is impossible to dig all of it out, so I should be vigilant with the spot weedkiller in the spring.  I am not very good at the names of weeds, though I can recognise them.  There is another annual, a little yellow flowered member of the pea family, and an annual spurge.  Then various plants spill out of the border which suddenly count as weeds when they seed in the gravel, including Geranium sanguineum and Lychnis coronaria.  Actually, the Lychnis has proved such a smotherer that nowadays I don't want it in the border either.  This just goes to prove that a weed is indeed any plant in the wrong place.

The ivy hedge never recovered over the summer, so I've been pruning the dead branches out.  Bits are still alive, but there are many leafless branches which are now visibly dry and dead.  I was honestly expecting it to shoot again, given how indestructible ivy normally is, but there's been very little regrowth since winter.  I presume it was the winter that killed out patches of it, and that it hasn't had the strength to regrow because the soil is so poor and the rainfall overall has been low.  I'll sprinkle bone meal along the base of it for now, then give it a higher nitrogen boost next spring, and see if that kick-starts it into action.  If it fails to regenerate then maybe it is time to start taking box cuttings.  I liked that ivy hedge.  The variety has smallish, crinkly leaves in a pleasant shade of greyish green, and a graceful, branching growth habit.  I lost track of what cultivar I settled for, which is irritating, but it made a very neat hedge up until last year, and didn't run across the ground as manically as the other hedge in a different (unknown) cultivar does.  Which does suggest it is not an especially strong grower.

There is one seedling which is quite definitely Morina longifolia, so I carefully avoided weeding it out.  I was pleased when I found it, but now I've read John Hoyland's article for the Telegraph I feel a little miffed to have only got the one.  There again, conditions in north Essex are far from those he describes as ideal for Morina, and a pretty poor substitute for 9,800 feet in the Himalayas, so I should be grateful the plants consent to grow at all.

One of the surviving Gazania still has a flower and two buds on it, an incongruous sight on 22 November.  I shall definitely add some more next year, sowing seed if I get round to it, or splashing out on a garden centre pack of plugs if I don't, or if the seeds don't germinate, or damp off.

By ten past four it was too dark to see what I was doing weeding, and I had to come in.  I was listening to a Radio 4 programme about the brain, which said that the most rewarding activities, defining rewarding as producing the most dopamine, were those were the outcome was not assured and there was an element of uncertainty.  That makes gardening a very rewarding activity, I thought.  I dream and plan, plant and prune, and have an idea of what could happen.  Flowers.  A profusion of tulips.  The ivy hedge restored to health.  A glittering array of south African daisies in the gravel.  But nothing is guaranteed.  Voles.  A long cold winter.  That amount of uncertain reward should get the dopamine flowing all right.

another quiet day

The dog had an entertaining start to the day.  She was playing the rat game, rummaging around the office whimpering as if she had detected some rodent intruder, but each time the gardener lifted up the clutter at the place where she was looking nothing emerged, or scuttled away, and the dog went to whine somewhere else.  I thought she was spoofing the boss, and he agreed.

My start to the day was less entertaining.  I found some gentians that were going mouldy, which I deadheaded and cut back, as something useful to do while I was waiting for the manager to finish checking the emails and come and tell me what I should be doing.  He marched up after a while and asked who had put the shrubs into the tunnel where the magnolias used to be.  This was one of the things on his weekend list of things to do, and I had done it, so I said so.  He said that they were going the wrong way, as he had wanted the alphabet going downhill away from the central aisle and not uphill towards it, and would I like to switch them all round.  Thank you very much.  It didn't say that in his instructions, and there is no logical reason why the alphabet should go one way or the other, given that in different parts of the nursery it goes both ways.  I worked jolly hard over the weekend, labelling and moving a huge number of plants with a hand swollen to the size of a small potato that hurt every time I knocked the back of it on anything, and taking horsepill antibiotics that made me feel like crap.  I said so, emphatically.

Afterwards I felt vaguely remorseful, but only vaguely.  He is the manager.  He must be paid a lot more than I am, and gets better terms and conditions, and for that he is supposed to supervise and motivate me, not start my week by moaning that instructions that only existed in his head hadn't been followed.  Then I switched the pots around.

One of our regular customers came in, asking whether we could fit one of the trained espalier apple trees in her car.  I suggested taking the empirical approach, and measuring the tree and the car to find out if it were theoretically possible.  The tree turned out to be 48 inches wide and 67 inches tall including the pot (there's my cover blown.  I have dutifully blogged all year in metric, but I think in feet and inches.  Sorry.  I can cook in metric but under stress can imagine 8oz better than 250g).  The car turned out to be a Nissan Micra, and was 52 inches wide.  A distance of 67 inches from the inside of the tailgate would put the top of the tree somewhere above the handbrake.  I said that the tree would go in the car.  The only slight difficulty was that the door of the Micra was several inches narrower than the width inside the boot, but the tree just slid in on the diagonal, after I'd cut off a bit of one of the supporting canes.  It was protruding beyond the branch tied to it anyway, so she won't miss it.  Whether and how she will ever get the tree out again at the other end is another question.

Somebody rang up asking if we had any Parrotia persica.  After a little searching around I found some nice plants for a relatively modest price.  It turned out that he was a tree officer, organising a memorial tree that somebody wanted to donate to a local park, and between them they had decided on a Persian ironwood.  He was keen to have more exotic trees in the park, and pleased with the price because his donor was on a limited budget.  I thought how unlikely, and how delightful, that in these cash strapped times a council still had a tree officer who was willing to work with members of the public, and put the time and effort into sourcing unusual trees.  A colleague recently started a marketing initiative, sending out a list of rare woody plants we can currently supply to arboretums and large gardens, and I suggested the tree officer should add his name to it.  I guess that you become a tree officer because you like trees, but you probably spend a lot of your working life after that dealing with ones that are suspected of becoming unsafe, or undermining foundations.  Being allowed to plant new trees instead of delivering the fatal verdict on existing ones must make a nice change.

The electricians arrived to instal new lights in the central portion of the shop, which meant moving various tables of breakables so that they could get the scaffolding in.  New lights were sorely needed.  The old ones consisted of three gigantic bulbs in metal casings that always filled up with flies in summer, only intermittently all came on at the same time, and cast the same amount of depressing and insufficient light as energy saving lightbulbs do in the home.  Putting up the new lights caused us little inconvenience, apart from the scaffolding and the noise of cordless drills and screwdrivers (marvellous inventions), but unfortunately by the time they were ready to connect the new lights to the mains and disconnect the old ones, which entailed switching off the lighting circuit for obvious reasons, it was already mid afternoon.  The shop with no lights at all was extremely dark, and I think the electricians struggled to see what they were doing wiring up the new ones.  I couldn't really see the till either, but by then there were very few customers.  The shop illuminated by the new lights looked much more welcoming, and very, very bright.

The day's takings were pitifully small, though there will be some invoices to come for various deliveries.  Maybe it is the economic apocalypse.

fog and brass

Once I drove out into the lanes this morning it turned out to be foggier than I'd realised. thick patches that swelled off the fields.  It stayed that way until mid morning, and at one point I could see moisture droplets forming, not even drizzle falling out of the sky but water condensing out of the air in front of me.  Then suddenly the sun broke through.  I came out of a meeting about the website and a tree planting promotion to tie in with the Queen's Jubilee, and it was a beautiful day, with the sort of sky the word cerulean was invented for.

The owner had the very sensible idea of taking part in the national tree planting campaign for next year's royal Jubilee.  She knows a firm that makes plaques, and we have trees, ties and stakes, so we can offer our customers a package.  It turns out that patriotically celebrating your monarch's sixty years on the throne is a far from spontaneous, joyous action, and that there is a set of official rules and guidelines running to several sheets of A4, covering what commemorative objects are deemed suitable by the Palace, and giving suitable approved phrases to use.  However, it looked as though we could use an off-the-shelf set of words for the plaques (if you want to dedicate a building or suchlike it seems you need to apply for an official permit).

A very cute guide dog puppy in training came into the plant centre, and my colleague and I politely refrained from distracting it, because we both knew you are not supposed to distract working dogs.  It turned out that the puppy had developed a dislike of going out, and we were invited to make a fuss of her as part of the puppy walkers' project to convince her that life outside the reassurance of home was fun.  She was a five and a half month old golden retriever, and they have amazingly soft hair at that age.

I had arranged to leave work half an hour early, so that I could get to the concert in the church.  It seemed a shame to miss the first half when I have a season ticket, and given that I was set to spend the interval pouring out tea and washing cups.  It took ten minutes scrubbing away in the slightly basic facilities of our staffroom to get my hands to a state where anybody sensible would want them near a teacup.  I thought as I signed off my time sheet half an hour early that I hadn't planned this properly.  I should have offered to stay late at some point so that I could take the extra time in lieu this afternoon.  Oh well, I didn't.

This afternoon's concert was by a brass quintet, whose playing was colourful and repertoire not entirely my sort of thing.  They chatted a fair amount between numbers, and the consensus from the other committee meetings was that less chat (there were some fairly weak jokes) would have been welcome.  The brass quintet do a fair bit of work in schools, and I wondered if they were slightly stuck in talking to schoolchildren mode.  The performance of the opening to Handel's Water Music on a collection of watering cans and kettles, while amusing, seemed aimed at the school market.  I did learn something, which is that the tubes in trumpets and trombones are the same diameter most of the way down (trombones logically must be, they slide), whereas in flugelhorns and French horns the tube is flared all the way down.  I never knew that.

The large thorn worked its way out of my knuckle last night, though a small one that I think had been there for ages without causing trouble is now on the move.  It's good that the potential source of infection is gone, though I suppose having started on the antibiotics I have to finish the course for the greater good.  The residual inflammation is spectacular and painful.  Tomorrow's Cardunculus may be a short one, depending on whether by then I am reduced to typing with one hand.

nice day, not many customers

It was a very beautiful morning, with a streaky pink sky behind the lime avenue on the lettuce farm, and layers of mist laying over the fields.  I was rather surprised, on getting into the car and flicking the wipers to clear the condensation from the windscreen, to discover that it was not moisture on the inside of the car but ice on the outside, and that the wipers would not flick because they were frozen down.

The farming programme on R4 was talking about the severity of the drought, from Shopshire across to East Anglia.  It's true.  Recent rain has moistened the top few centimetres of soil, but dig down and it's still dry.  If we don't get some proper rain at some point over the winter then next year is going to be very difficult, for farmers and gardeners.  By the time I reached the Stour valley the radio had moved on to the Today programme, and a politician was explaining how within the next two weeks the European economy could go over the cliff.  I suppose it could.  The idea seemed to exist in a different world to the one in which clear morning sunlight shone on a high tide in Constable country, and beyond the river reeds and pastures stretched away.

There had been a delivery of shrubs from France since the last time I was at work.  The boss has bought plants from this French supplier for all the time I've worked there, including lilacs, some varieties of Philadelphus, and hydrangeas.  We don't take many deliveries from them each year, and it did seem as though we had a year's supply of Philadephus 'Buckley's Quill' sitting on the grass at the back of the plant centre.  There were some fine chunky Magnolia 'Elizabeth', which is a good yellow flowered variety (though maybe not the best), but alas, the customers we had waiting for them had all either found plants elsewhere in the meantime, or weren't prepared to pay the price of such large specimens.  Over sixty pounds for a magnolia is painful.

The wood turner who lives in the village, and makes wooden pepper mills and fruit that we sell in the shop, using wood from the estate, called in to see what extra stock we needed.  As we chatted I discovered one of the drawbacks of living in a conservation area with no street lights (on account of the light pollution).  The pavement in his street was dug up for work on the gas main, and going out after dark he fell over the barriers around the hole, which were not lit.  The gas company say it is not their fault there were no lights, as the council wouldn't permit them.  The wood turner is taking Warfarin and so vulnerable to internal injuries such as you get from walking straight into a metal barrier, so he's not at all happy.  He was even less happy when his doctor told him that if he developed a headache he should call an ambulance immediately, in case it was an aneurysm.  I thought that if the council had really forbidden any lights, even small ones, for an a obstruction on the pavement, then that was a pretty stupid decision.  Though I suppose if you know you are at risk from knocks and bumps and you live in a village with no street lights, you might do well to invest in a decent torch.

The wood turner's misfortune reminded me again how quickly life can turn.  One minute things are fine, the next, not.  A case in point being my hand, still swollen to a shiny potato, though the tide of red seems to have peaked at the first joint of my middle finger and half way down the back of my hand, and is now receding.  There has to be something in there, and I keep hoping it will work its way out.  I have my eye on a pair of leather pruning gloves, with suede gauntlet cuffs to protect the wrists, which I'd better get and wear when working around roses and other plants with substantial thorns.  I was wearing gloves when the accident happened, and trying to be careful, but obviously the gloves were not up to the job and I was not careful enough.  I must remember to swap them for normal gloves for fingertip weeding, since expensive leather wears through at the fingertips every bit as quickly as normal rubberised fabric.

Trade seemed quiet, but I learned on getting home that the A14 was horribly blocked due to resurfacing work following an earlier accident, with enormously long tailbacks.  If you had been thinking of paying us a visit, and then heard that the A14 was one gigantic traffic jam, you would probably have altered your plans and decided to do something else this afternoon.  But who knows?  Maybe it is the drought, or the prospect of Europe's economy going off a cliff. 

he who cooks chooses the menu

I'm coming to the end of my week as duty cook.  Generally the Systems Administrator does the cooking.  This is partly an expression of a generous and nurturing character, and partly because whoever does the cooking gets to choose what we eat, and the SA likes to eat cooked meals involving meat, and does not trust me to provide them at regular intervals.  It is true that I do believe that toast (with honey) or cheese with olives and oatcakes constitute perfectly adequate meals, especially on nice days when it seems a pity to waste good gardening weather doing stuff in the house, like cooking, but I am happy to be fed and nurtured, so generally the system works pretty well.  However, last weekend the SA did ask if I felt like cooking at all, and on Sunday evening used the phrase 'just summon the energy to go and cook', so I said I'd cook this week.  That wasn't as noble as it sounds, given that the SA was out all day on Tuesday and out again for lunch on Thursday, but I felt quite inspired, once I'd looked through some books, and it's easier to shop for ingredients across a run of meals than a single one, as you can use things up across a couple of meals, instead of being left with bits of this and that.

Unfortunately even when I cook I don't get to choose everything I would like to eat.  Compromise of course runs both ways, and I daresay that some of the SA's curries would be hotter, and Pukka Pies might feature more often on the menu, if I weren't involved.  However, there are foods I'm partial to that the SA can't eat, or really doesn't like, including fish, spinach, game, offal and capers.  The first two produce bona fide allergic reactions, the others the SA simply finds too rich, or hates the taste.

I've read the newspaper articles saying that many people clinically tested for what they belive to be food allergies and intolerances turn out to have no such thing.  My guess is that some of these alleged allergy sufferers are attributing a general malaise to a cause such as wheat intolerance, because it is human nature to want an explanation plus something to blame, and a few who say they have food intolerances simply enjoy making a nuisance of themselves.  The SA is unambiguously allergic to shellfish.  Eat shellfish, feel very ill, throw up, get the trots.  It's pretty clear cut.  Freshwater fish and mackerel have a similar effect on a smaller scale, and white fish and salmon disagree about one time in four.  This is a pity, as the SA genuinely likes fish and chips and smoked salmon, but there's always the chance that indulgence will be followed by an evening in the bathroom.  As a result of never cooking fish at home, I don't know how to cook fish, so I don't miss that, but I would really like to not have to skip over all those recipes involving anchovies.  Spinach has the same effect as fish, which is a shame from my point of view, as I like spinach, and a surprising number of recipes include it.

My solution is to choose the forbidden foods when we eat out, and broach the occasional tin of anchovies when the SA is away.  If you are wise, you will accept that there are some foodstuffs that you yourself like, but that some other people really can't eat without unpleasant after-effects.  Unfortunately, attitudes to food allergies can be very odd, and there are a few unwise people who take a refusal to eat fish, or spinach, as a slur on their cooking, or their region's culinary traditions, or irrational prejudice to be combated and overcome, rather than entirely rational aversion based on painful past experience.  When I was thirteen I went on a school exchange visit to Brittany, which being coastal had plentiful seafood.  One of the French families took their English charge to a smart seafood restaurant as a treat.  She said that she could not eat prawns, because she was allergic to them.  They persuaded or bullied her into eating them anyway, presumably believing that she was just being silly, had never tried them, would love them once she did, etc etc.  She came out in enormous red spots.  Like she said, she was allergic to prawns.  I've found the SA's fish allergy queried often enough over the years.  What, not even a nice bit of salmon?  Not even sole?  Not even when I cook it really beautifully?  I haven't yet worked out how to tell people politely that their lovingly prepared fish and the SA have sometimes parted company the moment we got home.

When I cook I can still indulge myself among all the things that the SA does eat.  Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian comes out, as during the week the SA will be in for a bean stew or a vegetable bake.  I like vegetarian food.  I usually choose a vegetarian option in ethnic restaurants for ethical and gastronomic reasons, as I don't suppose the chicken in the chicken tikka massala was free range, and Asian cuisines tend to do vegetarian food well.  When I'm cooking there will be more root vegetables on the menu, and more of them will be mashed instead of roasted.  There might be squash or pumpkin, though there wasn't this week.  There will be a lot less red meat, but it is not all lentils and healthy eating, as there will be more full fat dairy products.

Actually, this week's menu all got out of synch.  I planned ahead, made a list and stuck to it, like you are supposed to.  Then on Wednesday we didn't fancy the left over bolognese sauce with jacket potatoes that by mutual consent had been scheduled for lunch, so they became supper.  This pushed Wednesday night's planned adjuki bean stew forward to Thursday, because by then I'd already bought the shitake mushrooms and soaked the beans.  On Thursday night the SA was still full of lunchtime curry and wasn't really in the mood for bean stew.  Thursday's planned tagliatelle has got bumped forward to tonight (already bought the fresh pasta and the cream), which leaves us long of a packet of ready made puff pastry as I hand the baton back to the SA.  Luckily that keeps until December 3rd, so it can get worked in at some stage.  I never believe the figures about the hundreds of pounds worth of food that the average family is said to throw away each year.  Ours is a fraction of that, though when I was sorting out the kitchen store cupboard the other day I did chuck out some partly used packets of dried beans dating back to 2007-9.  Once they get that old, they take forever to cook, if they ever do.  It is a sign I should cook a little oftener, to use them up in time.

planting tulips

Four large boxes arrived yesterday afternoon while I was out, which contained the pots from Whichford, so I spent a happy day unpacking them, and planting the tulip bulbs that have been sitting down in the garage for weeks.  I was relieved to see the pots arrive, given that I did want to get on with planting the tulips, and the pottery hadn't given me an ETA.  The Systems Administrator who was at home when they arrived said that they came by a commercial parcel company, not Whichford's own transport.

Terracotta flowerpots can't be the easiest things to send, though I assume the carrier they use knows not to drop the boxes if they want to keep the Whichford account.  The pots were stacked inside each other, padded with wood shavings, and bubble wrap secured snugly around the rims with parcel tape, tied into rigid bundles with plastic string, and surrounded by tightly packed straw.  None of them were broken.  In the spirit of reduce, recycle, reuse, the straw and wood shavings went into the chicken run as litter to soak up their droppings, and keep their feet dry if it ever rains.  The bubble wrap went in the plastics recycling bin and I'll take the boxes into work to use for our own mail order, so the only thing that went straight into the rubbish was the plastic string.  There was a tiny bit of newspaper involved too, which I'll use to line the vegetable peelings bin the next time I empty it, and I was amused to see that was from The Times.  I wouldn't expect the Daily Mirror, not from Whichford.  The boxes are currently dumped in the lower sitting room, where they are affording great amusement to the cats.  Let's hope none of our plant mail order customers have severe cat allergies.

I bought six pots decorated with basket weave for the tall tulips, which was fewer than I'll need but as many as I could afford at the time, and some shallow pans for the houseleeks that live on the low wall around the terrace (or patio.  Terrace sounds pretentious and patio sounds suburban so I'm not sure which it is).  Several of the current garden centre houseleek pots are disintegrating after last winter, and I would like to upgrade them all in time.  Some of last year's tulip pots haven't crumbled too badly yet, and will do for another year.  I got some reduced-to-clear peat free compost in B&Q, which I wouldn't risk for long term pot plantings of shrubs, but should do for bulbs that will be all finished come next May.  Or at least I hope it will.  The last bag I had wasn't bad, and the things I planted in it are alive and sprouting.

The peat issue is a tricky one.  While the Irish burn the stuff in power stations I feel that not using it in the garden must be a futile gesture, then I read about the beauties of peat bog vegetation, and the value of peat bogs in locking up carbon, and feel I shouldn't ethically use it, except maybe for seed compost where the volume really will be tiny, and the cost of failure (all those packets of seed and all that time spent sowing them) severe.  Just because other people do bad things isn't always an excuse to do them too.  If the tulips fail I will reconsider my high moral position.

I've gone for orange, red and purple again for the tulips, plus a few T. kaufmanniana that I've put in little clay pots for next spring, then will plant out into the border.  I considered going for soft pinks and creams as a change, but I like the strong colours. and they look well with the lime green flowers of Euphobia x characias which seeds itself around the Italian garden where the tulip pots stand.  T. kaufmanniana has cream coloured petals with a yellow base, and those bulbs will end up in the island bed in the back garden where I already have a couple of T. kaufmanniana varieties, I think 'Ancilla' which is pale lemon with a scarlet throat, and 'Heart's Delight' which is red and white.  Unlike the tall Darwin and Triumph hybrids, which mostly dwindle quickly in the ground, several of the small species tulips naturalise reasonably well, and I've had these two for years.

the thorn beneath

I shouldn't have gloated about how nice it was to have a whole day to get on with the garden.  Today I came back from my Pilates lesson via the Colchester Walk In Centre for minor ailments, and that was the afternoon gone.  I can't complain about the time spent going to Pilates, since I choose to do it.  I like the teacher, and the exercises seem to make the difference between being a chronic back pain sufferer and living a normal active life.  At school I was unutterably hopeless at gym lessons, and throughout adulthood I have avoided most forms of organised physical exercise, but Pilates isn't too bad.  At any rate, it is preferable to the alternative.

The trip to the Walk In Centre was because yesterday as I was weeding around a rose I felt something prick me through my gloves and stab me in the left knuckles.  I thought I could see a dark speck in the centre of the (tiny) wound, suggesting that a thorn had broken off in there, but couldn't get anything to pop out when squeezed.  It isn't very easy to squeeze your knuckles (try it), especially when watched by three chickens.  During the night my hand began to hurt, but I couldn't be bothered to get up and start fiddling with it in the small hours.  I inspected the tiny wound again after my shower this morning, and still couldn't find anything there, but my knuckles had reddened and started to swell.  By lunchtime it had got visibly worse, so I thought I might as well see a member of the medical profession and start on antibiotics today, as wait for two or three days and start then after the symptoms had got really bad.  Also, the Systems Administrator said I might as well go today because otherwise I would only spend the evening worrying about it.  That was probably right, as you do hear of the very occasional unfortunate gardener who ends up losing their hand or entire arm after a tiny scratch goes septic.

The GP surgery receptionist said they were fully booked unless I was an emergency.  I thought I wasn't an emergency, but that I would like to get medical attention before I became one, so I called at the Walk In Centre on the way back from my lesson.  The parking is confusing (it's free, but that's not immediately obvious), at the point when I arrived I was the only person sitting in the waiting area, the rolling screens said that the time to be seen was running at half an hour, and I reckon that's what it took, which was no worse than a visit to the GP, who often runs half an hour late.  The nurse was pleasant and professionally reassuring and agreed with my view (so clearly I thought she was a very sensible woman) that to have worsening symptoms the day after getting a scratch was not normal and suggested there was infection.   She gave me a prescription for a week's supply of Flucloxacillin, which she said was the best antibiotic for skin.  Given that the injury was caused by a plant she didn't want to dig around to see what, if anything, was left in there, as it will dissolve in situ or find its own way out.

Reading the leaflet for the Flucloxacillin (I'm nerdy that way) the list of things it treats, besides skin, is so long that at the end of a week I doubt I'll have a bacterium left in my body.  This is not necessarily a good thing, but the main thing is that I don't want my left hand to turn into an agonising mass of infected flesh that has to be amputated, followed by the rest of my arm two days later.  The nurse warned me that the hand might look worse before it looked better, but that the sign to watch out for was if I got a red streak up the length of my arm.  That'll be A&E time.

Although I rather wish I hadn't spent the best part of 45 minutes in part of Colchester Hospital and another 20 minutes in Asda waiting for their pharmacist to put a pot of Flucloxacillin in a paper bag, the episode in no way puts me off gardening.  The girl in the pharmacy said it was a very good reason not to garden, but it's just one of those things.  Like sprains if you do sport, or sore feet if you wear fashionable shoes.  Or, I suppose, a one in four chance of death if you climb K2.  All hobbies have their hazards, and their rewards.

a (whole) day in the garden

Today I had a whole uninterrupted day to spend gardening.  It wasn't a working day.  I didn't have to get ready for a talk, or give a talk.  No dentist's appointment, no optician, no Pilates lesson, no haircut.  No calling around for coffee, or lunch, or tea.  No art galleries or garden visits.  No trip into Colchester to pick something up, or put up posters.  I didn't even go out on garden related errands, like a trip to the dump or to collect more mushroom compost.  It stayed dry so I could stay outside until it got dark.  It was wonderful.  It's not that I want to spend seven days a week gardening, hermit-like, and never see anybody or do anything else.  I should get bored, depressed and knackered.  But once in a while it is extremely nice to be able to get stuck in and put in a full day's work on the garden, at the end of which I feel I have made some progress.

I finished planting the new box cushion by the deck outside the conservatory.  I started last week after picking up some nice little box plants at work, but hadn't done the QS beforehand, and didn't buy enough.  Obviously it isn't a cushion yet, but it will be.  I think in landscape speak it might be foundation planting, a depressing term that conjures up visions of beige coloured support hose.  I am hoping the box will look good, in a sort of modernist garden goes romantic way.  That was a job ticked off the list in good faith.  I couldn't see anything needing doing to complete the initial phase of that project.

I picked up lots of leaves for the leaf bin.  It seems almost like a waste of effort when there are plenty more left to fall, but they rake up and pick out of other plants much better when they are still crisp and solid than when they have gone soft and slimy.  The 'Taihaku' has almost finished dropping its leaves, whereas the wild gean hasn't gone any redder than the last time I mentioned it, which was days ago.  The hazels at the edge of the wood are starting to shed.  Each big bucket of leaves tipped on to the leaf pile gives me a good feeling.  With any luck the Systems Administrator will have another go with the leaf vac later in the week.  Apparently if the leaves are wet the machine sprays water over the operator's legs and is not so fun to use.  Given how heavy the dew is at this time of the year, not to mention the risk of showers, a leaf vac that only works comfortably on dry leaves seems to me to incorporate a fundamental design error.

I started cutting back the brambles at the end of the wood, which have grown up since we cut the Rhododendron ponticum down last winter, admitting light, which favours brambles.  This is preparatory to starting to pickaxe out the rhododendron roots.  Fired up by my success removing the hebes, I thought I could tackle them one at a time between other jobs, and so keep a balance between the big renovation projects that need doing, and the more genteel tidying up tasks.  One of the Writtle tutors said that garden restoration was a sign of failed maintenance in the past, which is true, but only up to a point.  Shrubs do succumb to old age or adverse weather conditions, and areas of planting that worked well for years cease to do so.  We never actually planted the rhododendrons.  We inherited some from the previous owners, and some of those must have reverted to the ponticum rootstock and then seeded themselves.  It is true that we should not have allowed them to do that, but we did have many other things to worry about as well at the time.  We will be left with one large one with deep red flowers, which I like very much, not sharing the current prejudice among chic designers against rhododendrons.  I wish I knew its name.

The other reason for wanting to clear out at least some of the rhododendron stumps is to make space to plant my Michelia doltsopa 'Silver Cloud' into the ground.  It is still in its pot, and has been much happier since being moved out of the conservatory, but I don't want it in a pot outdoors over the winter.  It may not prove winter hardy, which will be a shame, but it could be fine.  The boss says they are hardier than people give them credit.  It was going to die of red spider mite under glass, so it and  I have nothing to lose by trying.  If I manage to clear out several stumps I would have room for one of the lovely Oemleria cerasiformis we have at work at the moment.

I finished trimming the lawn around the slabs set in the grass.  That was a relatively lightweight tidying up job, but makes things look much sharper.  While I was at it I had another go at 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', which was once again trying to grow out across the steps to the lower garden, and trimmed some low branches from the birches and zelkova in the lower part of the garden, so that tall people can walk around it without ducking.  I'm short myself, so they didn't bother me, but I thought it would be nice for the SA, and any full size visitors, and actually having your entire garden designed for the convenience of people who are only 1.6m tall does give it a slightly hobbit-like air.

moving a million pots

Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and bonfires.  The gardener at work had a bonfire, that put smudges of ash over my car.  He said it put them on his car as well, and I dare say they'll wash off when it rains.

I moved a lot of pots today.  Really a lot of pots.  I haven't even begun to work out how much they must have weighed in aggregate, but many times my own body weight in compost.  First of all I transferred the magnolias from the edge of the tunnel, where they are next to the polythene and could get too cold in a harsh winter, to the aisle down the middle of the tunnel.  That was OK.  I read some of the labels as I went along, to try and learn something, and left gaps in what I hoped were sensible places for new stock arriving over the winter.  I like the sound of 'Piroutette', which only grows to 3m and has large white flowers, according to the boss's description.

Then I moved the bamboos in from outside.  They stayed out last winter, and suffered badly, so this year they're coming in.  To save space in the tunnel in the plant centre, only three specimens maximum of each variety went in there, and any surplus was wheeled over to the Other Side.  I brushed the dead leaves off each pot, and as I stood with 10L pots of giant grasses balanced against my stomach with one hand, while dusting down the surface of the compost with the other, I began to think I should have been on that manual lifting course.  I'm not good at bamboo nomenclature, not helped by the fact that it has kept changing throughout my gardening life, and getting the bamboos in strict alphabetical order took serious concentration.  Overflow plants that wouldn't fit inside the shade structure with the rest of the bamboos during the summer had been put down around the outside of the shade tunnel in no particular order, making the exercise into a strange bamboo mail-merge.

I gather the lifting course consisted of being told to think before lifting anything heavy or awkward in case there was a better way of managing it, avoid twisting, ask for help if needed, keep your back straight etc, but not much actual supervised practice lifting, so maybe I didn't miss much.  I know the theory already.  The trick is to realise when you are twisting, using your back more than you should, and so on.  In my Pilates lessons I am forever being told I have made some movement or adopted a posture I wasn't aware of, and that's before I've got several kilos of bamboo rootball balanced on my stomach while the topgrowth tries to poke me in the eye.

Two gardeners from one of the UK's grandest stately homes (well, Chatsworth, actually) came to collect some shrubs they'd reserved, and choose some other things while they were at it.  They asked advice on the hardiness of Olearia, and mentioned a glasshouse, so I asked hopefully if they might like a 4m tall Norfolk Island Pine, but they said they had one already, that someone had given them and that had outgrown its space, and they couldn't work out what to do with their's either, as it was now too large.  The (I presume) head gardener had overwintered Norfolk Island Pine outside in Cornwall, where it had survived, while not being very happy, but he didn't hold out any hope for Derbyshire, or Essex.

The manager was disconcerted recently to be asked by a customer why we had so little stock, and whether we were closing down, so I was tasked with composing a notice explaining that a lot of shrubs had been moved into the tunnels for the winter, and why.  I came up with something suitable, which the woman who works in the office typed and laminated, and the gardener managed to find the notice boards on stakes we use for open days, and put the notices by the entrance to the plant centre.  It is because roots in a pot are more likely to freeze than if they are in the ground, which disagrees with some plants, especially evergreens that go on losing water through their leaves regardless.  Also because compost in pots can get sopping wet, causing the roots of some species to rot.  I added words of reassurance about how most of the plants would be fine outdoors in winter once they were planted in the ground, not a pot, and how customers in doubt about the hardiness of any plant could ask a member of staff.  The real mystery, which I would love to know the answer to, is why we leave Sarcocca and Skimmia outside, and they are mostly OK, when we bring in Ilex aquifolium and Viburnum tinus.

the new tip

The protests against the closure of the local dump were to no avail.  I got a letter from the council a couple of weeks ago saying that they had noted the objections, reviewed the future of the dump, and were going to close it anyhow.  I really don't know whether consultation exercises do any good, or whether the original proposal generally goes ahead regardless.  The last place I worked in the City was shut down, because the bank that owned it had acquired another investment management business and was integrating them under the banner of the new acquisition, in Edinburgh.  There was a staff consultation exercise, as there had to be by law, but since the integration and closure of the London office were going ahead regardless, and management made it clear that redundancy terms were not on the table for discussion, I couldn't see what they were consulting about, and refused to have anything to do with it.

Anyway, the dump is going.  This morning I couldn't lay my hand on the letter that said exactly when it would shut.  The Essex council website still listed its opening hours as normal, with no mention of the planned closure, but I suspected that might just be because nobody had remembered to update the website.  I thought I might as well go and investigate the next nearest dump, since I'd be using it soon enough.

The Rush Lane dump is larger than the one that's closing, with a one way system, and parking that is more organised, once you work out what the rule is.  Cars park nose to tail in about three parallel rows, with clear lanes between them, so that when you've finished dumping your waste you pull out and drive off.  That probably produces fewer collisions than the random reversing and turning round one gets at the other dump, though I had better avoid going at busy periods, since with my complete inability to parallel park I wouldn't be able to get into a space, if it were very full.  Instead of climbing up steps and dropping your green waste into a gigantic skip, you feed it into a hopper from which it is pushed by a gigantic ram.  Having an engine running constantly seems to me less green than simply making a big pile of stuff and then compacting it occasionally, but I am not an expert on waste disposal.

The drive is 7 to 8 minutes longer than the trip to the other dump.  If I go to the dump on average once a fortnight, which is plausible averaging it out across the year, an extra quarter of an hour drive each time adds up to six and a half hours a year extra time just driving between my house and the tip.  That's a depressing thought.  I could improve matters if I managed to compost more at home, and needed to take less to the dump, which would work if the garden were less weedy.  Recycling weeds back on to the borders via the compost heap is a thankless task.  A friend who began to put her hairy bittercress and other nasties in her green waste bin instead of her own compost heap was struck by the improvement it made to the garden beds after quite a short while.  We don't get green waste collection here, so it's a choice between home compost, burning, or the council tip.

I started pulling up the nettles and brambles that have established themselves along the edge of the wood, on the way to the compost heap.  I put the stems and roots where the bonfire goes, hoping that the Systems Administrator might be able to burn them, otherwise that'll be another 35 minute round trip to the dump, if not two.  And I don't fancy trying to stuff the nettles into bags.  I got stung just pulling them up.

the value of Friendship

Yesterday I went with my mother to see the Degas exhibition at The Royal Academy.  She likes Degas, and bought me my subscription for my birthday.  We should have been a month ago, on 11 October, but they sent tickets for the wrong day.  The exhibition was very good, and I'm still irritated with the RA.

They call having an annual season ticket being a Friend of the RA, since the term member is already reserved for the academicians.  This makes it difficult to know what to call my mother's present, since calling it a Friendship sounds ridiculous.  She first bought me an annual sub three years ago, at my suggestion when she asked what I'd like, and since then the cost has rocketed from around the sixty pound mark to ninety pounds if you pay by direct debit, and a round hundred if you pay on a one-off basis.  The ticket entitles you to take a guest in (though the UK tax system has introduced a glitch there), and with tickets to Degas costing £14, or £13 concessions, and the other show currently on costing £9 or £7, a ticket holder has to notch up around eight entries in the course of a year to recoup the cost of the season ticket, compared with buying tickets on a pay as you go basis.  The RA doesn't put on as many as eight exhibitions each year, so you have to go to each one more than once, or take a guest pretty much every time, to make it pay.

You could say that getting your exact money's worth isn't the point, and that it's good to support arts organisations.  That's true, and indeed the Systems Administrator and I have supported the RSPB for years without ever visiting one of their reserves.  We're happy to help conserve birds, but don't want to spend our spare time sitting in a bird hide.  We don't get full value out of the National Trust on an aggregate cost of entry basis either, because they don't have many properties in the Eastern region.  However, while I'm happy to pay £14 to go into an art exhibition, if it's a good one, I'm not sure I want to support the RA so much that I want my aged mother to pay £90 on my behalf for around £60 worth of entries.  And I reckon around £60 worth of entries is around what I get.  I don't live in London, so I can't pop into the RA, it's a full day's excursion.  And I do take guests, but not every time I go.  I don't know that many people who want to come with me, my principal art loving friend is also a Friend, and sometimes I prefer to go round galleries by myself.

One of the advantages of being a Friend is that you don't have to queue, or book.  Instead you can drop in whenever you want to, if you are passing, for as short a time as you want.  That's a big advantage.  Except that it doesn't apply for Degas.  For the Degas exhibition, in order to control overcrowding, you have to apply in advance, for a timed entry slot, and there is no readmission.  So I booked in advance, and they sent tickets for the wrong month.  Fortunately I noticed as I was putting them in my purse so that I wouldn't forget them, a couple of days before we were due to go, and my mother was very nice about it, but it was a nuisance.  And I don't like having to book tickets in advance anyway.  Especially when I'm going to London by myself, I'd prefer to decide at the last minute when to go, the weather playing a big part in that decision.  I'd rather not have to spend the one fine dry day in the week in London when I could use it in the garden, and be free to go to town the next day instead when it drizzles.  And with timed slots, you have to aim to arrive early in case the trains are all screwed up, and then if they do run to time you can't just go in when you reach the RA and get on with your day.

The other glitch is more theoretical than actual, but is a deeply depressing indictment of the state of our public administration.  A year or so ago the rules on Gift Aid were altered, so that if a charity claimed Gift Aid on subscriptions, benefits provided by the charity were limited to the person paying the subscription, and members of their family.  The RA responded by changing their subscription rules so that  in theory I can only take family members in as my guest.  That's what it says on their website.  My mother is clearly a member of my family, as presumably is my brother (not that he'd want to come), and I assume that children, spouses and civil partners also count, but it is not at all clear where family stops.  Cohabitees not married or in civil partnership?  Fiancees?  Anybody you've been sleeping with for at least a year and you spend most of your time round at their's even though you don't technically live together?  Grandparents?  Cousins?  Second cousins?  Step-siblings?  Of course it is an entirely academic question because the staff on the door don't ask.  As I walked up the stairs of the RA with a former colleague to see the Hungarian photographs I wondered idly what relationship we should claim, but our acting skills were not put to the test.  It is ludicrous, unenforceable and unenforced, and it exasperates me that we have politicians and civil servants wasting public money thinking up and then drafting such idiotic legislation.

I can see that it was necessary to control crowding in the Degas exhibition, given that it was expected to be very popular, but if the RA is going to withdraw most of the advantages of being a Friend for the popular exhibitions, I might as well not bother to be a Friend.  The British Museum and the Coutauld both charge a lot less to be a supporter, both are admirable institutions, and I have never been to a duff special exhibition at either.

The Degas, when you get there, is very good.  The pictures are beautiful to look at, and it is well and intelligently curated, linking Degas' interest in portraying movement with contemporary developments in photography.  We both enjoyed it very much, and then we went and looked at The National Portrait Gallery, since the earliest train we could get home was the 18.48 out of Liverpool Street, and enjoyed that as well.  The trains ran to time, service was good on all tube lines, we had a nice lunch and a nice tea and it was a successful day out.  But I'm irritated with the RA.

Addendum  My mother told me a piece of family history I never heard before.  It is quite bizarre.  In 1936 or 1937 my paternal grandfather decided that he was tired of capitalism, and would like to go and live in Russia.  He got as far as having an interview with the Russian ambassador in London, who listened to his story and explained that Russia already had enough Jewish intellectuals, and that my grandfather would be well advised to remain in England.  The mind boggles.

you wait for ages and then

I should have been on a manual handling course at work yesterday morning, but I had something else on.  The course was arranged to teach us how to load large pots and bags of compost and so on into customer's cars without injuring ourselves.  Or at least I hope it did.  The neat pictures you see in training diagrams always show people lifting regular shaped parcels vertically up from the ground (keep your back straight and lift with your knees) but most things you need to lift in real life are irregular shapes, and often with protruding lumps, or slippery.  I should have liked to go on the course, but it would have turned the day into a mad rush, and I didn't want that.  The boss has promised to tell those of us who weren't there what was said, though I don't know how much benefit you get receiving these things second hand.  I'll have to hope that the Pilates has taught me sufficient awareness of how I'm using my body to prevent me injure myself lifting.  That and my cheerful willingness to refuse to lift anything I think I can't manage.

I would have liked to go to a study day that the Suffolk Agricultural Association was running yesterday on historic gardens, but I had something else on.  There was a pile of leaflets at work, and I'd got as far as bringing one home and getting quite excited about it, before realising that I couldn't go.  One of the speakers was Kim Wilkie, a landscape designer who recently did a splendid black reflective pool for the gardens at Boughton House, which I hope to visit one of these years.  I think they had the historian Caroline Homes as well, and it promised to be a good day.  One of my colleagues was going.

However, I was already committed, to do a talk on trees in Billericay starting at 2.30pm.  That's the second talk I've done in Billericay this autumn.  They must like trees down there.  I'd been through the town as well when I went to the beekeeping conference last month, so could visualise the point where according to my instructions I had to fork left, and made it to the church hall car park without getting lost.  They were a nice group of people, and seemed to enjoy the talk, and made a generous donation to the charity, though I realised when I got home that the cheque only had one signature on it.  Either they have lax financial controls, or the bank is going to refuse the cheque, but I'll post it off to the charity and let them deal with that one.

It's a pity the way that nothing happens for days, and then three events come along at once, but there you go.  Today I'm going to the Royal Academy, which should have happened a month ago, but that's another story.

bad shepherds

We went to hear Adrian Edmondson and The Bad Shepherds at The Colchester Arts Centre last night.  They are a folk-punk band, playing classic punk and new wave songs of the 1970s and early 1980s on folk instruments, intercut with traditional reels.  This ticks three of my boxes at once, and sounds like pretty much a dream project.  The Jam, The Stranglers, Ian Drury and the Blockheads, The Talking Heads and The Clash provided the soundtrack to my teens and university years.  My father got into folk music in the post war revival, and stayed there, so I grew up with traditional Irish music on vinyl (sadly no live gigs to speak of, in 1970s East Devon).  And I have had a soft spot for Ade Edmondson since The Young Ones.

It might have proved an odd and unsuccessful mixture.  After all, I like olives, fruitcake and baked beans, but that doesn't mean I want them together.  The Bad Shepherds, however, have made a triumph out of oddity, and last night's performance was a sell-out, an honour shared with only three other shows between now and Christmas.  Their music works because they are good musicians, and because it is actually a good idea.  There are three of them in the band, between them covering fiddle, mandolin, vocals, bouzouki, whistles and Uilleann pipes.

The fiddle player won the All-Ireland Fiddle Championship, twice, and has worked with some of the best folk musicians in the business, including American Irish fiddler Martin Hayes. ( Hayes is Irish, lives in the States, and is quite simply a genius.  Any other fiddler who dares perform with him is either very good themselves, or so terribly bad they don't realise how bad they are, otherwise they would die of shame.)  Adrian Edmondson plays what he calls thrash mandolin, which means strummed rather than fancy tunes picked out with a plectrum, in other words the rhythmn section.  He has got a good sense of rhythmn and has discovered where enough chords are, and while no Richard Thompson has learnt to play the mandolin pretty well, given that he bought his first one in a junk shop when he was drunk.  He sings lead vocals, and you can hear the words quite a lot of the time, and he is a first-class showman.  The third member of the band plays everything else, and sings.  His credits on their website include working with Lesley Garrett, Midge Ure, and Status Quo, as well as Maddy Prior and Barbara Dickson, but he plays the Uilleann pipes like a true traditional Irish (which he is) musician.  So the three of them are no novelty act, but two highly skilled musicians from the Irish tradition, plus a competent and charismatic front-man.

The fusion of punk and new wave songs with traditional tunes works because they are so similar, under the surface.  You could say that punk was a protest movement, folk tunes are the music of the common masses, ergo they go together, but the similarity runs deeper than that.  A reel consists of four lines, each with four bars, each with four beats in it, taken fairly fast.  Turns out, a lot of new wave songs have the same structure.  You can carry on from the song straight into an instrumental break without shifting tempo.  New wave and punk didn't have much of a back beat, compared to classic rock, and reels don't have a back beat either, so the rhythmns match up nicely.  (I think myself it is a better natural fit than folk-rock, when English dance tunes are put on top of a rock drummer.)  Irish reels do have a complicated and beautiful pattern of beats, which I hope one day a friendly musicologist will explain to me.  A good piper puts them in using the drone, or a fiddler with the occasional double note, but they sound like low pitched morse code, a complex underpinning.  (That is why people who try to clap along to Irish music are a menace.)

If the song and the instrumental don't go at the same speed, you can bridge the gap between them using a drone on pipes or fiddle, to give a break point where noise is still going on (so the audience knows you haven't finished this one yet) but the first tune has stopped.  The Bad Shepherds use this, as did Planxty, and everyone from time to time, but a clean shift from one to the other is more exciting.  The Uilleann pipes are always exciting anyway, but especially so when they are pumped through a very large speaker.

We even met a couple of friends in the crowd, people I know via beekeeping.  They are connected to the world of international music, in that they are the parents of Belle and Sebastian's keyboard player.  That's the nearest I get to knowing anybody in rock.  Most of the audience were nice and well behaved, and the Arts Centre couldn't have been anticipating trouble in that while pints of beer were served in plastic glasses, they were also selling bottled.  My only gripe, and it is a really major gripe, was with the quartet stood near us who talked.  Not just the odd comment, but a full running conversation.  I thought at first that the band would drown them out, but they responded by talking louder.  After the first three and a half songs I worked out that if I stayed where I was I was going to spend the evening thinking about nothing except how annoying they were and how much I hated them, so I went and found myself a corner near the front, where people were taking the music seriously.  Why do people do that?  I mean, why?  Apart from the fact that they have no manners, why shell out seventy quid on tickets if all you are going to do is talk during the act.  You might as well just go to the f**cking pub.  I managed not to say that to them, but I thought I'd better move before I did.

So that was an evening spent in tribute to the music of my youth.  Middle age comes to us all.  Adrian Edmondson had to perform most of the gig sitting down, wearing a pair of slippers.  He said he had first sprained his ankle, and then broken his toe, and then succumbed to that rock and roll disease, gout.  They did all look as though they were enjoying themselves, and I hope they were, as they've got another twelve gigs to get through between tonight and 26th November (Union Chapel, Islington).

tuesday night was film night

When I switched on my computer this morning I found a dubious e-mail in my inbox.  The headline said that it concerned the non-delivery of my parcel, which I could collect from my nearest USPS depot, and there was a word document for me to print my delivery label.  I didn't open the document.  Despite the fact that it had made it into my in-box, and not even my spam box, the e-mail didn't look quite right.  For starters, I am not expecting a parcel at the moment.  I often am, as I do much of my shopping over the net, but the only things I'm currently expecting are some Whichford flowerpots, which will probably come in Whichford's own van, and certainly won't be left in a depot somewhere.  And the wording was not quite right.  It said that my parcel had been at the post office since 3 November, and that I could collect if from the USPS office.  Post offices and delivery company offices are quite different things.  And it didn't apologise for their failure to deliver, which a genuine service company would almost certainly do. And generally such communications include all the information you need in the body of the e-mail, including the identity of the sender and a tracking number, and don't require you to open an attachment.  And they had sent the e-mail twice, which made me look at it twice.  And like I said, I'm not expecting a parcel.  But if I had been, I might have clicked without thinking, first thing in the morning, if I was pushed for time and about to rush out.

We watched Get Carter last night.  It was released in 1971, so 2011 is its 40th anniversary.  I saw it once before, a long time ago, and knew that it featured the brutalist car park, because there was a lot of furore recently about that being demolished, plus I remembered a beach, and that was about it.  Watching it again I realised what a superlatively good film it is.  The structure would be daring and unusual now.  It is a film with no scene setting or explanations at all, beyond the sequence ahead of the credits where Michael Caine's character says that he is going north to find out why somebody died.  We don't find out who is dead, or how, or what they have to do with Michael Caine.  Then there is a long sequence of Michael Caine sitting on an intercity train, reading a book (The Long Goodbye), looking at his fellow passengers, and eating a meal in the restaurant, until he gets to Newcastle.  Nothing happens on the train.  I'm not sure you could get away with such a long non-action sequence at the beginning of an action movie nowadays.

Once in Newcastle events unfold (don't worry, no plot spoilers to follow).  Somebody called Margaret hasn't met him in a pub, and he is annoyed.  Who is Margaret?  Why hasn't she come?  He goes to a shabby house.  Whose house is it?  He views a body, presumably that of the person whose death has brought him north, but we don't find out who they are, yet.  And so on through the entire film.  As the audience we gradually piece together who the characters are, how they are connected, and what is going on, and the tension builds.  When I started watching The Sopranos (which I love) it took the whole of a feature length first episode just to introduce the characters.  Get Carter throws the characters at your head and leaves you to sort it out.

Wikipedia and the IMDb site are great inventions.  After watching the film, having not looked it up before to avoid finding out what happened, we were able to see what else the actors had been in, and how the film reviewed at the time.  The answer is, very badly.  Most critics disliked the violence, the sex, and the atmosphere of ruthless cruelty.  Soulless and nastily erotic...virtuoso viciousness, one would rather wash one's mouth out with soap than recommend it, according to Wikipedia.  By 2004 Total Film magazine acclaimed it as the greatest UK film in any genre.  It is a nasty film.  Quite a few people get killed, and none of the sex takes place within the context of a loving, committed relationship.  Gangsterism is a nasty business.  Which makes Get Carter a more moral film than the cuddly, semi-comic gangsters of the Guy Ritchie genre.  Though there are some moments of farcical comedy in Get Carter.

Besides Michael Caine, who made some very good films at that stage of his career (Alfie, The Italian Job), the other star of Get Carter is the scenery.  Filmed on location in Newcastle and Gateshead, it is set largely among scenes of urban decay, slum housing, bridges, the docks, and of course the famous car park, and the coal stained, ravaged beach.  I can't think of many other films that convey such a strong sense of place, and where the place seems so irrevocably linked with the action.  In 2000 the Americans remade it, starring Sylvester Stallone. Goodness knows why.  It bombed.  I regret to report that Michael Caine took a part in the remake.  Though as he himself admits in interviews, he is a working actor and if he isn't doing anything else at the time he'll accept all sorts of scripts, meaning that as well as being in some of our best films he has been in some real turkeys.

out with the hebe, in with the box

I'd been thinking that I'd better take a break from wafting around picking up leaves with my fingertips and cutting down herbaceous stems, and tackle one of the more strenuous jobs removing the remains of deceased (or mostly deceased) shrubs, so today I dug out the hebes from by the deck in front of the conservatory.  There were five of them, and they came out not exactly easily but with less difficulty than I was expecting, revealing the fact that they didn't have very good root systems.  There is a band of vile, heavy clay across the middle part of the back garden, partly because the clay does rise near to the surface in places here, but exacerbated by the landscaping done by the previous owners.  The chap who built the house was a farmer, so he must have heard of topsoil, but he and his wife don't seem to have been keen gardeners, and didn't consider that it mattered in a domestic setting.  The garden below the house was sliced off to form a level terrace, and laid entirely to grass.  When I began to lift the turf to make beds, I discovered that it sat directly on yellow clay.

The hebes had put up quite a good fight, all things considered.  They like decent drainage, but if you are going to plant them directly into clay subsoil leavened with some organic material, you are most likely to get away with it in a garden in the lowest rainfall area of the UK.  I wouldn't try it in Wales, or Cumbria.  These hebes remained fully clothed with leaves, and made tight, attractive mounds for several years, but began to fall apart, as hebes do, which was made worse by the snow.  I cut them down hard when the Systems Administrator rebuilt the deck, to get them out of the way, and they responded with some regrowth, but not enough to have any chance of looking even halfway decent again.

Work got off to a slow start because I couldn't find the pickaxe.  I looked in the pot shed where I keep the gardening tools not in current use, and couldn't see it where I thought it ought to be, so I looked in the long flowerbed, which was where I last remembered using it.  Then I looked by the bog bed, though I was fairly sure I'd had it since then.  Then I looked in the garage in case I'd tidied it away in there.  Then I looked again in the pot shed and found it where it ought to be, nestled down among the spare spades and forks, hidden behind a large flowerpot.

When I originally planted the hebes I'd put landscape fabric around them, to try and suppress the horsetail.  This was only partially successful, and the hebes had sent roots out over the top of the fabric, presumably using the debris of their own fallen leaves as soil, and telling me what they thought about clay subsoil.  The landscape fabric was by no means pickaxe resistant, but did get in the way, and I had to cut bits out with scissors as I went,  To extract the rootballs I swung the broad end of the pickaxe down towards the edge of the base of each plant, leant on it to lever the roots up as much as I could, and repeated, working my way round the rootball several times, until it broke free of the ground,  I had to be careful not to hit the deck, which took a long time to build and is an object of some pride on the S.A.'s part.

As I said, the root plates levered up, not easily, but more easily than a healthy hebe should.  By the time it got too dark to see what I was doing (at ten past four, for Pete's sake) I'd dug over the bed once, removing roots (to go to the dump), stones (to add to the path by the dustbins) and assorted bricks and bits of glass and rubble.  The hebes had been mulched with a decorative layer of gravel on top of the landscape fabric, so that got dug in, and the next job will be to dig the bed over again, incorporating mushroom compost.  Then I will plant some nice young box plants that I picked up at work yesterday, which will in due course be pruned in some artistic way I have not yet decided.  Probably informal undulations, since I'm not very good at sharp geometry.  Then that will be good for the rest of my gardening career, unless it gets box blight.

It was an incredibly grey day, and mostly alternated between very fine drizzle and something you might have just dignified with the title of rain.  Not enough to do the ground (still dry when you go down more than a few centimetres) any good at all, but enough to turn the soil surface to a slick, that stuck to my tools, gloves and clothes.  In the field the poor Lithuanians were harvesting lettuces.

staff wanted

Replies are coming in to the adverts for a plant centre assistant.  People have been ringing up about it, and dropping CVs off.  As I grappled with the question of whether there was an application form (almost certainly not.  That would have required one of us to invent a form.) I did begin to think that it might have been helpful to give the existing staff, who have to answer the telephone, a copy of the advert that would-be plant centre assistants were ringing up about.  The boss said that he'd had one application for a pant centre assistant, and an enquiry about the vacant plant centre assistant.  Oh dear.

Basic literacy shouldn't be a graduate level skill.  Apart from bona fide dyslexia sufferers, people ought to be able to spell.  Maybe not antidisestablishmentarianism, and they are allowed to look in the dictionary to check how many times c and n occur in occasionally, but they ought to be able to spell plant.  Particularly when they want to work in a plant centre.  Assuming it was a slip-up, and they know really, would you believe that anybody who couldn't be bothered to check their CV for basic spelling mistakes would ever bother to do the watering properly?

High level plant retailing actually requires good written language skills.  This is unfortunate for people who love plants and the outdoors, but can't read very well, but they should probably be looking at other branches of horticulture.  Word blindness is a real handicap in my trade.  If you can't see the difference between Echinacea 'Sunrise' and Echinacea 'Sunset', or can't grasp that 'Pink Bedder' comes before 'Purple Bedder' in the alphabet, you are going to have a problem.  And after customers have driven long distances to collect plants that turn out to be the wrong thing, or the manager orders a load of plants and then discovers we had lots already, but they were in the wrong place, the business will have a problem as well.  It's tough, but that's how it is.  We aren't talking the ability to write expressive English, or discuss the unreliable narrator in literature.  We're talking plain, boring, bread and butter ability to recognise words.

After typing the above three paragraphs I was so concerned about my own spelling that I managed to find and use the spell-checker on Blogspot, for the first time ever.  It threw up two typos, and doesn't like bona fide, antidisestablishmentarianism, unreliable or Echinacea.  Botanical Latin is always a problem using a spell-checker, but I have been teaching Word on my laptop vocabulary, so it is better than it was.  One of my favourites, many years ago when I was writing a reference for a former assistant in the City, was Microsoft's rejection of the name Cazenove, and the suggested substitution, try Casanova.

winter preparations

I went on stacking the heated tunnel today.  In went Olearia, Osmanthus, and Oxydendron.  Selected Prunus and Salix, Sorbaria and Tamarix, Pachysandra and Liriope followed.

The Olearia are daisy bushes, shrubby members of the vast family of Compositeae.  They are jolly plants, tolerant of sea winds, though some are only so-so hardy.  Olearia nummulifolia is one of the hardier, slow growing, with tiny fleshy round green leaves, almost like a succulent.  The name means 'leaves like coins'.  Folia is clearly something to do with leaves (foliage) and nummarius is the Latin for coin, hence numismatics, the study or collection of currency.  There, you could have worked that out.  Olearia x haastii is another reasonably hardy one, making a medium sized shrub with small oval leaves in a fetching shade of greenish grey.  It is not such a slow grower as the first, but responds well to hard renewal pruning if it is exceeding its allotted space, or getting straggly.  Olearia macrodonta has large, toothed leaves reminiscent of a grey holly, but less shiny.  It is definitely less hardy than the first two, and last winter mine was cut almost to the ground.  They are happy on light soil in full sun.

The Osmanthus section started with O. x burkwoodii, which has moderately small, dark green leaves and sweetly scented white flowers in late spring, and progressed to one of its parents, O. delavayi, which has smaller leaves and is a rather desperately slow grower in its early years, but makes a more elegant plant.  Later came several forms of O. heterophyllus.  These have prickly leaves that could be superficially mistaken for holly, and there are several variegated forms, quite showy if you like that sort of thing.  Look carefully at an Osmanthus and you will see that the leaves are held in opposite pairs, unlike holly whose leaves alternate up the stem.  Osmanthus heterophyllus does not develop such good architecture as a mature holly, and I would stick with the latter.

The only willow that gets the protection of the heated tunnel is Salix fargesii.  This has stout mahogony twigs with, at this time of the year, large leaf buds in a beautiful shade of lipstick red.  It makes a largish shrub, and I have never found the space for it, but I should love to grow it.

During one of my stints on the till I discovered a bird food catalogue.  The covering letter to one of the co-owners addressed her as 'Birdcare Buyer'.  I suppose that she is the Birdcare Buyer, in much the same way as she is Chief Financial Officer, Head of Human Resources, Chief Media Buyer, Catering Manager, and the Fire Officer.  She really is the Fire Officer.  The certificate is hanging up in the office.  The catalogue cover said that it was for 'Birdcare Power Brands', and the covering letter was so OTT that I copied it out specially for use in the blog.  It read as follows:

At long last...it's finally getting colder!  Now's the perfect time to tempt your customers with some exciting ideas from the world's finest birdcare collection.

Available now, [product name] is one of this year's most eagerly awaited product innovations.  Reflecting the new trend in premium feeding, it's a brilliant new twist on this popular product category and a guaranteed attention-grabber in store.

One of this year's most eagerly awaited product innovations?  Really?  Forget the new i-phone, the latest Wii, the promising new cancer drug and the solution to the Eurozone crisis.  What people have been waiting for is a new moist, high calorie bird food for robins.  What I want to know is, do the people that write this stuff actually believe their own hyperbole, in which case they need help, or are their tongues firmly in their cheeks?  If the latter, do they believe that their customers (my employer) are idiots?  There are times when I am so, so glad I don't work in marketing.

it rained on my job

Now that it's November, the working day at the plant centre runs from 8.15am until 4.00pm.  In theory it ought to be easier to get to work by quarter past eight than eight on the dot, but in practice any change in starting time throws me out in the morning until I get used to it.  Advancing by fifteen minutes the point by which I should have cleaned my teeth, put my shoes on, put my uniform shirt on over my T shirt, and so on, for each stage in the process of getting myself fed, equipped with lunch, with clean teeth, fully dressed and heading out of the door, is confusing.  I am prone at the best of times to regard leaving the house as a frictionless and instanteous act, forgetting that collecting everything I need, locking the front door and climbing into the car does actually take a couple of minutes.  I think that taking a strict view of timekeeping I was probably late, but as the owners weren't around a strict view was not taken.

It was raining lightly but persistently, which gave me a chance to try out the car park attendant coat for real.  It isn't bad, still rather stiff, and my hands need to learn the routes to the pockets, but it is waterproof and wasn't either too baggy or too constricting.  The cuffs can be shut down with velcro tabs in wet or cold weather, and were pleasingly willing to stay shut, rather than popping the velcro apart and opening out at intervals.  The coats have the company logo on the back, mercifully fairly small, and a grey oval at the nape of the neck, on which one of my colleagues had written his name in black marker pen.  I flatly refuse to walk around in a coat that has my first name written on the back of my neck.  By the end of the day my coat had the beginnings of the usual patch of compost on the stomach, from cleaning pots, and I expect I'll soon learn to recognise it.

We are still packing plants away in the polytunnels for the winter.  I don't think anybody else has got any further with the heated tunnel since I was working in there on Monday.  I made reasonably progress today, though I got stuck minding the shop for chunks of the afternoon.  It worries some customers to see plants that they thought of as hardy being put under cover in November, and I have to explain the differences between a plant having its roots in the ground, and having them frozen solid in a black plastic pot.  Today I finished cleaning up the Genista, and brought in Ligustrum (except varieties of L. ovalifolium), one particularly precious shrubby honeysuckle, the hardy hibiscus, the curry plants, hebes, and Oemleria cerasiformis.  This last one is a beauty, a large, suckering, deciduous shrub that produces very sweetly scented white flowers in about February.  It likes humus rich soil and will tolerate semi-shade, so we're talking woodland edge conditions, and I want to plant one in the very end of our wood.  Just as soon as I have pickaxed out the roots of the Rhododentron ponticum.  I resisted the urge to buy an Oemleria before I had prepared the site, to avoid placing a hex on the digging out project.  In general it is better not to buy plants before the site for them is anywhere near reading for planting, as site clearance has a way of taking longer than you ever expect.  Sometimes a year or two longer.

There was a piercingly sweet and clean scent in the tunnel, which I tracked down to the Mahonia.  Mahonia flowers are good value in an enclosed space.  I never notice my M. japonica in the open garden as much as I do when they are in a tunnel, or the car.

The owners were shooting, or at least the shoot was in use.  I knew this because most of the radios were missing, and through the day there were periodic bursts of gunfire from beyond the garden walls.  I heard the crunch of tractor tyres at lunchtime, presumably as the guns came back for their lunch.  They are ferried about the estate in the back of a horsebox, seated on straw bales, with a little metal gate to stop them falling out of the back.  As I was leaving the landrover pulled into the car park, pulling a horsebox containing a horse, and one of the owners got out, dressed in black jacket, riding hat and immaculate white jodphurs, so she must have been doing some horsey thing and not shooting.

Because it doesn't get dark until half past four and the owners don't want to pass by the opportunity for a few late sales, they ask for a volunteer to stay after 4.00pm.  The deal is that whoever stays can come in late another time.  I didn't volunteer.  I'd already arranged to call on a friend after work for a cup of tea, and as a point of principle if I'm going to work late I'd like to be paid for it.  I don't regard half an hour at the end of the working day, when you are tired, dirty, possibly cold and hungry, and have other things to do, as being equivalent to half an hour before the working day.  What am I supposed to do with an odd half hour in the morning?  It isn't long enough to settle to anything, and would just be wasted in faffing about.  And like I said, I find changing start times confusing.  I am not a total jobsworth.  I will stop on my way home to shut the car park gate or bring in the sign, as we all do, in our own time and after we have completed our time sheets.  But I believe in drawing the line.

the autumn tidy up continues

I gave up waiting for frost to blacken the leaves of the dahlias, and started cutting them down.  After last night's rain, the ones in pots are as wet as they need to be before going into winter storage under the greenhouse staging, and it feels like time to put them away for this year.  Cutting the string off the supporting stakes, chopping down the dahlia stems and weeding the tops of the pots and the dahlia bed by the greenhouse, is another step towards winter.  Though it still doesn't feel like winter.  I'm trotting around the house with my bare feet shoved into a pair of clogs, and wandering outside to put the recycling out in a T shirt.

The Iris unguicularis are starting to put on a good show, not just the odd bloom but approaching a full display, so they are working by the calendar and not the thermometer.  Down by the septic tank, the ivy shaped leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium have expanded to almost cover the ground, another winter plant on the move.  The flowers have been and gone by now, but the leaves are a good feature in their own right.  I've bought a few more plants each year for over a decade to build up my stocks, always choosing ones with good leaf markings as well as selecting for flower colour, and they are starting to seed themselves around, so that while not there yet I'm getting closer to the sheet of cyclamen effect I've admired in various gardens open to the public.

We had 12mm rain last night, enough to soften the ground surface, though it has not penetrated very deep.  I've begun cutting the lawn edges around the paving slab path that leads across the back garden.  Over the course of the summer the grass has crept across the surface of the slabs, so that by now some of them are barely visible, just smudges of Marshalls Heritage in line across the turf.  Paving slabs dropped into lawns are somewhat retro, but a very practical way of getting hard access to the bottom of the back garden.  On frosty mornings I want to be able to go out there and look at the winter flowers without leaving footprints across the grass, to reproach me for my carelessness for weeks afterwards by going brown where my weight has damaged the frozen grass blades.  It's impossible to see where the edge of each slab is, so I make a rough guess, probing with the lawn edger, and shifting a centimetre further out if I touch concrete until the point where the blade slides down into the earth.  It looks smarter at the time not to cut too far away from the slab, though the lawn advances back quickly enough.

I've been coaxing fallen leaves off the gravel too, a fingertip job to avoid picking up stones as well as leaves.  I've collected red leaves from the Japanese maples, yellow leaves from the field maples and hazels, and big brown leaves from the Malus tschonoskii.  This is a useful tree, with a vase shaped habit and an ability to tolerate vile soils and transplanting at a large size that make it ideal for public landscape schemes.  I bought it for its excellent autumn colour and because I needed a relatively narrow tree in that spot.  I've never met any gardener or tree enthusiast who raved about Malus tschoniskii.  It does a job, but doesn't seem to inspire love.  Poor tree.

The Systems Adminsistrator collected chestnut leaves using the leaf vac, and has promised to go after the leaves from the 'Tai Haku' over the weekend, when more have fallen off.  It's tricky knowing when to start with leaf collection.  Too early and you end up raking over every bit several times, but too late and they have blown away into inaccessible places.  If you just wanted them off the lawn that might be fine, but I want the leaf mould.

This will be a working weekend for me, so no more gardening until Tuesday.  We need more rain, but please let it rain in the night.  I lost half this morning to some heavy showers.  Tidying dahlias and leaves is all very well, but I need to get out the heavy equipment, and make a start on the hebes that need to come out, to be replaced by box, and the big bed along the boundary.

another fantasy art work

Apologies, last night's posting was put up without having time to proof-read it, as I heard the crunch of car wheels in the drive while I was still typing.  Reading it just now I spotted two 'maybe' in the same paragraph, so I should have taken one of them out.  The process whereby once you've used a word once you are more likely to use it again used to be called Lexical Facilitation when I was at university, though it may be called something else now, or have been disproved as a phenomenon.  Proper journalists check their copy, pull out the Thesaurus and think of synonyms, hence the invention of the Popular Orange Vegetable, aka carrot.

It is difficult to make Birds custard while someone watches you.  The thin yellow liquid seems to take forever to thicken, and there is a terrible temptation to add more custard powder, despite having measured the correct amount in the first place using a proper measuring spoon.  If you succumb then by the time you get to the pudding course the custard has set to a thick gloop.  Last night I resisted the urge to try and speed the process up, unlike the previous time that my parents arrived while I was still making custard.  It turns out that my mother doesn't like custard anyway.

We had an idea for another fantasy art work, this time for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.  A while back I bought a couple of pouffes in a sale, nice squidgy round ones covered with knobbly fabric in a geometric tribal design, that is intended to look like recycled kilim rugs, but was probably made in a factory somewhere for the upholstery trade.  I got them for overflow seating, for when we have more than a couple of people round, and the rest of the time they are tucked out of the way in the downstairs part of the sitting room.  On Saturday we had friends to supper, so one pouffe was brought upstairs.  After the guests had gone the cats reappeared, and one promptly claimed the top of the pouffe as his own and curled up there.  They went on using it until we cleared it away before my parents could fall over it, and this morning the Systems Administrator put it back for them.  I sometimes think our cats might be hopelessly over-indulged.

Anyway, we decided that the fourth plinth should have a gigantic cat curled up on it.  The S.A. favoured ultra-realistic carving in white marble, but I thought that had already been done with Alison Lapper, pregnant.  I want a kitsch cat made out of fake fur, like one of those imitation cats they sell in Nauticalia that are slightly too small, but this cat should be much, much too big.  Really worryingly large.  And I think it should purr at random intervals to disconcert passers by.  The S.A. thinks that finding weather proof fake fur could be a problem, but I'm sure it could be done.  We are the conceptual artists, we don't have to make the blessed thing ourselves.  Like I said, Damian Hirst doesn't paint all his own dots.

final thoughts on leaf mould

Despite the warmth, I spotted another sign that the garden is sliding into winter, with the first flowers on the Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont'.  I must find out who he was sometime.  His flowers are said by Hilliers to be a clearer shade of pink than 'Dawn'.

In Tesco I was dismayed to discover that it is now the Christmas season.  For goodness sake, we haven't had bonfire night yet.  Though it seems to me that bonfire night is not what it was, and is being overtaken by Halloween.  Maybe the retailers see more opportunities in the latter.  Apart from maybe waving around a battery powered sparkler substitute and having glowing antennae on your head, there isn't a tradition of dressing up for bonfire night like they are succeeding in developing for Halloween.  I have done no Christmas preparations at all, apart from ordering one present for one person which I tagged on to an order I was placing anyway with the company concerned.  Since the person occassionally reads Cardunculus that is enough on that subject.

The pile of last year's dead leaves turned out to be much better decomposed and useful under the top crusty layer than I was expecting, and I was able to take three barrow loads to spread on the borders.  It is amazing how a pile of leaves a good metre high has shrunk a year later to no more than 10cm to 15cm of leaf mould.  The leaf bin has now been declared ready to receive this year's leaves, and I am trying to persuade the Systems Administrator that offerings of leaves will be gratefully received and make me very happy.  We do have a leaf blower and vacuum machine somewhere, which chops as it sucks.  In general I'm in favour of keeping the use of powered machinery to a minimum, but collecting leaves might entertain the S.A. more if it involves the use of equipment other than a rake.  I have been looking covetously at the leaves under the avenue of limes on the way on to the farm, that belong to the lettuce farmer, and wondering whether if I see him I should ask if I could have them, but the S.A. said that would be silly when I had lots of leaves of my own.  But you need lots of leaves.  Look at the way that last year's reduced to practically nothing.

And that's all there is, due to lack of forward planning.  My parents are arriving for supper in twenty minutes and I have suddenly remembered that I have to make the custard.  Custard is not very glamorous, but my dad likes it, and as he is supposed to be on a low fat diet it's better than cream with pudding.  Pudding is apple crumble with home grown apples.  I pre-cooked them before adding the topping, to avoid that thing where the crumble is going brown and the fruit within is still crunchy.  Just as well I did, they took ages.  I think the stew has curdled.  Should have taken up the S.A.'s kind offer to do a roast.

very short, the afternoons

The change in the clocks is biting.  I woke up this morning at six by the alarm clock, which was still seven by the body clock, but how long will that last?  By three this afternoon the chickens were looking as though they expected to be let out, which curtailed operations in the back garden, and by twenty to five it was too dark to see what I was doing as I weeded, and I had to come in.  It is still seven weeks to the shortest day, meaning fourteen weeks until the light is going to be any more useful than it is now (roughly speaking.  I know that the shift in sunset is assymetric around the solstice).

I'd be greatly in favour of the clocks shifting to get more light to the end of the day.  It doesn't make so much difference to me now, as I have the option to get up at six and get out into the garden by half past seven if I want to, but I remember the days when I worked in an office.  Coming home on the train in spring and autumn, it was possible to believe as far as Chelmsford that there might still be some light to get something done outside, only to have to face up to the truth by the time I got home that it was basically dark.  People who would have liked a game of tennis, or to go for a run or take their dog for a walk not in the dark, presumably felt as frustrated as I did.  I don't see why we have to go with what the Scots want.  If they can devolve their education and health systems they can devolve what time it is.  Russia copes with eleven time zones, so I'm sure the UK could manage with two.

The BBC, meanwhile, believes that nobody is interested in gardening in November, and has finished its season of Gardeners' World, replacing it with Mastermind.  I can't work out from the programme's website when it will be back.  Lucky we still have all those episodes of The Sopranos to get through.  My leaf mould, even after two years, doesn't look as crumbly and nice as Monty's.  Maybe I should water the heap sometimes.  It rains more in Herefordshire than coastal Essex, and I think Monty did mention keeping it damp even in the relative dankness of the Welsh borders.

I was going to do a systematic survey of what is still flowering, but didn't get round to it before it was time to release the chickens, and now it's dark.  The Gaura lindheimeri are still blooming madly, as are the ones in the border at work, demonstrating what good value, hard working plants they are.  There are some red and pink flowered ones in a bed on the verge that I pass on the way to the dump, which are doing equally well.  I have read that they are not reliably perennial, but the pink ones are so pretty I think I might give them a try next year.  The somewhat tender sub-shrubby Salvia are still flowering, though not making such big plants as they should, and they obviously need masses more feeding and mulching next year to persuade them to give of their best.  The quilled yellow petals of Rudbeckia subtomentosa 'Henry Eilers' remain pristine, and the Japanese anemones are still more or less blooming.  This last is a nuisance, in that I want to plant some allium bulbs among them, and if they would have the decency to go over then I wouldn't feel bad about cutting them down.