I finished digging out the rhododendron stumps on Tuesday, but I didn't mention it at the time. I didn't feel like writing another blog post about stumps and witch hazel. Today it was the turn of the climbers on the veranda to start facing the chop.
There are at least two basic approaches to growing climbers up the side of a building. There is the RHS or National Trust house approach, where each branch is neatly tied in and pruned to within an inch of its life (nobody says 'within a centimetre of its life'. Makes you think English is still not metric at heart, even if we dutifully use metres and centimetres). The resulting wall shrub sticks out 30cm max from the face of the wall. Very tidy. Then there is the romantic profusion approach, where plants are tied to the wall and scramble into and over each other. Spasmodic efforts are made to remove forward facing growth, and the resulting tangle protrudes 1-2m from the supporting structure. Meanwhile birds nest in there, and it is all very naturalistic and charming. There are no prizes for guessing which category our garden falls into.
The jungle along the veranda has got to be reduced, so that we can get the scaffold in there to paint the barge boards and fit new guttering. And since there is a fair amount of dead wood mixed up among the live, it will look better for a good clean out. It is a complicated tangle. There are the remains of a Solanum crispum that was there when we bought the house. Most of it has died through old age, or the cold winters, or a combination of both. There is a climbing rose, also there when we moved in, which according to the label we found on it is 'New Dawn'. It has grown larger than some books say that 'New Dawn' would, but otherwise looks right. It is not so vigorous as it was, and could probably do with an intensive feeding regime to give it a boost. Also, I don't think it likes being overrun by the Clematic montana, another legacy of the previous owners (they had a Russian Vine as well, but I resorted to strong poison to get rid of that). There is a Clematis of the texensis type, yet another legacy, whose label I think said 'Duchess of Albany' I've added Trachelospermum jasminoides and Berberidopsis corallina, both refugees from the conservatory. Neither have formed much of a tangle yet, but the Trachelospermum looks happier about life than it did under glass. There is an inherited honeysuckle, species unknown, and I tucked in a Jasminum beesianum, which has finally grasped the idea that it is supposed to climb and not run about over the ground.
I thought I'd better start on this job fairly soon, partly because February is the target month for the last of the exterior decorating, and partly because I don't want to leave it until spring and then find birds nesting in there. I began by burrowing inside the mess, to cut and pull out any dead rose branches, bits of decayed Solanum, and so on. There was a fair amount. Then I cut down a large elder sapling that had seeded itself a pace out from the line of the trellis. This was performing a quasi-useful function acting as a prop for the climbers, but couldn't stay there given the need to get the scaffold in. Removing it had the predictable effect of causing a mass of Clematis montana to collapse on my head. Having cleaned what dead stuff I could from the inside, which reduced the bulk, I'm now working along the outside, cutting growth back and tying it in.
The Clematis montana is reluctant to grow along the bottom of the veranda, and keeps flopping forward and trying to set off across the rose bed. Clematis climbs by winding its leaf stalks around anything it touches, mainly other Clematis stems, and separating the branches enough to haul them back up to the top of the trellis means cutting through dozens of dry and tightly twisted leaf stalks. This is slow and fiddly, and there would be a quicker and more brutal way, which would be to reduce everything, accepting that there won't be any flowers this year, and assuming that all will grow back. I don't want to do that, as I would rather have some flowers this year than not, and I'm not keen on the scorched earth look. Some might see it as a symbol of humanity successfully subjugating nature, but I prefer to hang on to a bit of unsubjugated nature, wherever possible.
Last night I started a similar job on my desk, and finally cleared the last data off my old laptop. I got my current laptop last spring, when my previous one (an ancient hand-me-down from the Systems Administrator, but it worked well for years) and my moderately aged desktop both showed signs of becoming alarmingly unstable. I transferred essential files at once, and started scrubbing things I didn't really need to keep, but never completed the task. Since April of last year I've had two geriatric computers sitting on my desk, taking up so much room that I had to retreat to the kitchen, when I wanted to type and refer to a reference book at the same time. Before I resumed the clearance, the Systems Administrator disabled the laptop's connection to the net, so that it couldn't try and start collecting nine months worth of downloads.
It is rather poignant clearing an old laptop. All those letters relating to woodland talks going back to 2006. I don't need them. The talks are done and dusted, the donations handed over to the charity. I don't need a record of how many people were in the audience and which group asked the question about UK versus European provenance for tree seeds, in the light of climate change. And yet it is a little archive of my life. I chucked it out. I won't throw the computer away, even now, just in case. It will go and gather dust in the spare room for another decade or two. The last stage of the project will be to fire up the desktop and do the same final clear-out from that. And then I shall have so much space on my desk, I won't know what to do with it.
Saturday, 21 January 2012
Friday, 20 January 2012
in the kitchen
It rained again this morning, bringing our total rainfall in the past thirty six hours to over 15mm, or more than half an inch in old money. That's useful, but still not nearly enough. When I dug out the non-doing Choisya from the long bed a couple of weeks ago, I was turning up lumps of bone dry earth, once I got more than 15-20 cm below the soil surface.
I amused myself by making a bird crumble, using up a packet of butter bought before Christmas and never eaten in the overwhelming tide of food, that was beyond its sell-by date and gone rather cheesey, and some wholemeal flour bought in one of my periodic delusions that I was going to start making my own bread. Left-over pastry is recommended for the bird table, so by extension birds ought to like a fat-rich mixture of butter and brown flour. I didn't bother cooking it, just rubbed flour into the butter until it went into crumbs. The bird table this afternoon has been visited by dunnocks, great tits, long tailed tits, chaffinches, robins, and a blackbird, and the bird crumble seems to be a success. That's just as well, as there's still a whole pudding basin of the stuff in the fridge.
The cats were all in favour of spending the morning in the kitchen with me. Wet day outside, warm Aga inside, human company and Schubert's Death and the Maiden on the radio, and the sneaky chance to try and lick out the mixing bowl. What could be nicer? I evicted them before starting on the human food. There is a music society concert this evening, and although nobody has specifically asked me to make anything, I presume that there'll be wine and nibbles afterwards, so I made some cheese stars. I only finally discovered how to do these last year, after getting embroiled in the music club. A friend gives us beautiful cheese straws when we visit her, and I'd asked a few times how they were done, and only ever been told that they were very easy. I thought this must be her way of preserving her culinary secret, until I had to make them myself, and discovered that they were pretty easy. I found recipes in various books, some of which seemed to include a quite ridiculous amount of cheese, to the point of being practically pure baked cheese, and settled on the Good Housekeeping version. It is simply shortcrust pastry, made in the ratio of two parts flour to one part of fat, with half of the butter replaced by grated cheddar, and enriched with egg yolk at the rate of one egg for every 100g of flour. I roll the pastry thin, and as it was raining and I had plenty of time I cut them out in stars with a pastry cutter instead of just slicing the pastry into oblongs. They puff up as they cook, though not as much as flaky pastry, and are done in no more than seven minutes in a fairly hot oven. If they were fatter they would presumably take longer.
It seemed a pity to throw the egg whites down the sink, so I made some meringues (it was still raining). Meringues are very, very easy, so long as you can get your oven cool enough and are not in a hurry. When I was a child, my mother would drop the temperature of our coal fired Aga below its normal range, I think by stuffing a sock in a vent (but maybe she left the door open to cool it, and the sock was for something else), and cook meringues in the lower oven, which was the cooler of the two. The baking tray was lined with rice paper, which stuck in places to the meringues, but was edible and didn't taste of anything. It fascinated me that you could get edible paper. I use baking parchment, not the fancy reusable silicon sort sold by the likes of Lakeland, but the stuff like non-stick greaseproof paper, available in supermarkets. Two egg whites need 100g of caster sugar, and make you about ten normal sized meringues. Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff but not gone into lumps, then add the sugar one dessert spoon at a time, leaving 30 seconds between spoonfuls. You end up with a shiny, frothy mixture like deluxe shaving foam. Spoon it out. Cook it slowly until they are as crunchy as you want. When dried through they sound hollow when tapped. Today's lot got two and a half hours because I went out while they were cooking. If I'd wanted them sticky in the middle I'd have given them less. Our simmer oven sits at just below boiling point, which seems ideal.
And that was the morning gone, apart from firming up the arrangements to meet some friends following a quick chat at last night's lecture on beekeeping research. Its amazing how long you can keep busy with a couple of packets of butter, the tail end of a lump of cheddar, some sugar, some flour, and a couple of eggs.
I amused myself by making a bird crumble, using up a packet of butter bought before Christmas and never eaten in the overwhelming tide of food, that was beyond its sell-by date and gone rather cheesey, and some wholemeal flour bought in one of my periodic delusions that I was going to start making my own bread. Left-over pastry is recommended for the bird table, so by extension birds ought to like a fat-rich mixture of butter and brown flour. I didn't bother cooking it, just rubbed flour into the butter until it went into crumbs. The bird table this afternoon has been visited by dunnocks, great tits, long tailed tits, chaffinches, robins, and a blackbird, and the bird crumble seems to be a success. That's just as well, as there's still a whole pudding basin of the stuff in the fridge.
The cats were all in favour of spending the morning in the kitchen with me. Wet day outside, warm Aga inside, human company and Schubert's Death and the Maiden on the radio, and the sneaky chance to try and lick out the mixing bowl. What could be nicer? I evicted them before starting on the human food. There is a music society concert this evening, and although nobody has specifically asked me to make anything, I presume that there'll be wine and nibbles afterwards, so I made some cheese stars. I only finally discovered how to do these last year, after getting embroiled in the music club. A friend gives us beautiful cheese straws when we visit her, and I'd asked a few times how they were done, and only ever been told that they were very easy. I thought this must be her way of preserving her culinary secret, until I had to make them myself, and discovered that they were pretty easy. I found recipes in various books, some of which seemed to include a quite ridiculous amount of cheese, to the point of being practically pure baked cheese, and settled on the Good Housekeeping version. It is simply shortcrust pastry, made in the ratio of two parts flour to one part of fat, with half of the butter replaced by grated cheddar, and enriched with egg yolk at the rate of one egg for every 100g of flour. I roll the pastry thin, and as it was raining and I had plenty of time I cut them out in stars with a pastry cutter instead of just slicing the pastry into oblongs. They puff up as they cook, though not as much as flaky pastry, and are done in no more than seven minutes in a fairly hot oven. If they were fatter they would presumably take longer.
It seemed a pity to throw the egg whites down the sink, so I made some meringues (it was still raining). Meringues are very, very easy, so long as you can get your oven cool enough and are not in a hurry. When I was a child, my mother would drop the temperature of our coal fired Aga below its normal range, I think by stuffing a sock in a vent (but maybe she left the door open to cool it, and the sock was for something else), and cook meringues in the lower oven, which was the cooler of the two. The baking tray was lined with rice paper, which stuck in places to the meringues, but was edible and didn't taste of anything. It fascinated me that you could get edible paper. I use baking parchment, not the fancy reusable silicon sort sold by the likes of Lakeland, but the stuff like non-stick greaseproof paper, available in supermarkets. Two egg whites need 100g of caster sugar, and make you about ten normal sized meringues. Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff but not gone into lumps, then add the sugar one dessert spoon at a time, leaving 30 seconds between spoonfuls. You end up with a shiny, frothy mixture like deluxe shaving foam. Spoon it out. Cook it slowly until they are as crunchy as you want. When dried through they sound hollow when tapped. Today's lot got two and a half hours because I went out while they were cooking. If I'd wanted them sticky in the middle I'd have given them less. Our simmer oven sits at just below boiling point, which seems ideal.
And that was the morning gone, apart from firming up the arrangements to meet some friends following a quick chat at last night's lecture on beekeeping research. Its amazing how long you can keep busy with a couple of packets of butter, the tail end of a lump of cheddar, some sugar, some flour, and a couple of eggs.
Thursday, 19 January 2012
admin and drill
It was raining today. We need the rain. The headline in last night's East Anglian Daily Times, being given out free again at Colchester station, was Region's dry spell prompts drought warning. Apparently the east of England is in the middle of the driest winter since 1921, and we needed 120% of the long-term average rainfall over the entire winter period to get water levels back to normal. I've grumbled in the past about how forecasts are barely accurate five days ahead, let alone medium term (remember the dire warnings last autumn that the coming 2011-12 winter would be another savagely cold one, anyone?) and so don't attach too much credence to forecasts for the month ahead. But according to Weatherquest they're for no more than average rainfall. There's less than two and a half months of winter left to go. It's not unknown in this part of the world for it not to rain in April. At all.
The prospect of drought is worrying. We won't necessarily get a hosepipe ban here. Tendring Hundred has the lowest leakage rate in the UK, the highest water charges (some connection there) and has never had a hosepipe ban, ever. We're on a water meter so I'm as frugal as possible with watering anyway, and plants in the garden are chosen to withstand dry conditions. However, even drought tolerant species need watering when first planted, until their roots are firmly established, and the worse the drought the greater the number of plants needing help. Trees can need irrigation for up to two years after planting, if it's really dry. Even without a hosepipe ban that can represent hours spent each week just watering to keep plants alive. With a hosepipe ban it would be one long round with cans, and normal gardening would cease.
Drought is bad for trade at the plant centre. Our customers (most of them) are not idiots, and if the soil is too dry they cut right back on planting, and stop buying. They might get pretties for pots, and a few things for pet schemes near the house or for a small garden, but the committed gardeners, the ones with big spaces to fill and a time horizon stretching beyond the end of June, will hold their fire, for a season if necessary.
So we need the rain. Also, I needed to do my tax return, which I have been saving for a rainy day, while aware that the end of January deadline for on-line submission was ticking closer, after which, as Classic FM never ceases to remind me, a fine of £100 will be due for late payment even if you owe nothing (how exactly does that fit in with David Cameron's new-found enthusiasm for consumer protection?). It seemed unwise to leave it to the last minute anyway, in case of computer glitches. I've filed on-line for several years now, but I had a hazy feeling that January 20th might be the last date for getting a new password, if I ran into difficulties.
I hate doing my tax return. I loathe it with an intensity out of all proportion to the work involved. I really, really, pathologically dislike it. There's always one missing certificate for some tiny bit of income from some account or other, requiring phone calls to find out the missing numbers. I'm forced to confront which of my pathetic savings accounts have been demoted to yielding diddly squit to a jam tart (again), meaning I am going to have to spend another soul-destroying day shopping around for better rates. Why doesn't somebody come up with a Loyalty Bank, in which long term customers are rewarded, instead of being penalised for not spending half their spare time moving their money around to chase the latest savings deal? We'd all bank there.
And then there's the HMRC website. I hate it. Pages on the HMRC website update at the pace of a snail that's not in a particular hurry. After I spent ages and ages customising my return (no, I'm not in receipt of a pension, I don't have money offshore, I wasn't party to any tax avoidance schemes, I'm not blind, I don't have any allowable expenses, nor life insurance gains, nor income from property. The list went on and on), each page took ages to load as I trudged through the mundane details of my modest earnings and lowly income from savings and investments. The rules for boxes where I had nothing to declare seemed entirely arbitrary. When I put 0 against the value of tips, a big red X came up and a message that the value of this entry must be greater than zero or else blank. Further on I left another box blank where I had nothing to declare, and was told that the box could not be left empty and I must put 0.The site was running so slowly that each error message took about two minutes to deliver. I crashed out of it about three times.When I printed my tax calculation to check it against the supporting spreadsheets the printed version ran to two pages. All that page 2 said was 'HMRC : View your calculation. View your full calculation. Page 2 of 2.' Excuse me, hasn't the government heard of not printing what you don't need? Why two bits of paper when all of the information was on page one?
I know I should have done the return last summer, and not left it until practically the end of the self-assessment period, when lots of other people would be trying to access the site. I just hate doing it so much, the temptation to put it off until the eleventh hour is practically irresistible. Still, I finally got there, and have got my 32 character submission receipt number to prove it (why 32 characters? That surely provides enough unique combinations for the entire population of the planet to submit a UK tax return several times over). As a build-up to sorting out the return I tidied my desk, and found all sorts of things, including a birthday card that I bought last autumn and absolutely could not find when the time came to send it. So that's two jobs ticked off the list. Onwards and upwards.
The prospect of drought is worrying. We won't necessarily get a hosepipe ban here. Tendring Hundred has the lowest leakage rate in the UK, the highest water charges (some connection there) and has never had a hosepipe ban, ever. We're on a water meter so I'm as frugal as possible with watering anyway, and plants in the garden are chosen to withstand dry conditions. However, even drought tolerant species need watering when first planted, until their roots are firmly established, and the worse the drought the greater the number of plants needing help. Trees can need irrigation for up to two years after planting, if it's really dry. Even without a hosepipe ban that can represent hours spent each week just watering to keep plants alive. With a hosepipe ban it would be one long round with cans, and normal gardening would cease.
Drought is bad for trade at the plant centre. Our customers (most of them) are not idiots, and if the soil is too dry they cut right back on planting, and stop buying. They might get pretties for pots, and a few things for pet schemes near the house or for a small garden, but the committed gardeners, the ones with big spaces to fill and a time horizon stretching beyond the end of June, will hold their fire, for a season if necessary.
So we need the rain. Also, I needed to do my tax return, which I have been saving for a rainy day, while aware that the end of January deadline for on-line submission was ticking closer, after which, as Classic FM never ceases to remind me, a fine of £100 will be due for late payment even if you owe nothing (how exactly does that fit in with David Cameron's new-found enthusiasm for consumer protection?). It seemed unwise to leave it to the last minute anyway, in case of computer glitches. I've filed on-line for several years now, but I had a hazy feeling that January 20th might be the last date for getting a new password, if I ran into difficulties.
I hate doing my tax return. I loathe it with an intensity out of all proportion to the work involved. I really, really, pathologically dislike it. There's always one missing certificate for some tiny bit of income from some account or other, requiring phone calls to find out the missing numbers. I'm forced to confront which of my pathetic savings accounts have been demoted to yielding diddly squit to a jam tart (again), meaning I am going to have to spend another soul-destroying day shopping around for better rates. Why doesn't somebody come up with a Loyalty Bank, in which long term customers are rewarded, instead of being penalised for not spending half their spare time moving their money around to chase the latest savings deal? We'd all bank there.
And then there's the HMRC website. I hate it. Pages on the HMRC website update at the pace of a snail that's not in a particular hurry. After I spent ages and ages customising my return (no, I'm not in receipt of a pension, I don't have money offshore, I wasn't party to any tax avoidance schemes, I'm not blind, I don't have any allowable expenses, nor life insurance gains, nor income from property. The list went on and on), each page took ages to load as I trudged through the mundane details of my modest earnings and lowly income from savings and investments. The rules for boxes where I had nothing to declare seemed entirely arbitrary. When I put 0 against the value of tips, a big red X came up and a message that the value of this entry must be greater than zero or else blank. Further on I left another box blank where I had nothing to declare, and was told that the box could not be left empty and I must put 0.The site was running so slowly that each error message took about two minutes to deliver. I crashed out of it about three times.When I printed my tax calculation to check it against the supporting spreadsheets the printed version ran to two pages. All that page 2 said was 'HMRC : View your calculation. View your full calculation. Page 2 of 2.' Excuse me, hasn't the government heard of not printing what you don't need? Why two bits of paper when all of the information was on page one?
I know I should have done the return last summer, and not left it until practically the end of the self-assessment period, when lots of other people would be trying to access the site. I just hate doing it so much, the temptation to put it off until the eleventh hour is practically irresistible. Still, I finally got there, and have got my 32 character submission receipt number to prove it (why 32 characters? That surely provides enough unique combinations for the entire population of the planet to submit a UK tax return several times over). As a build-up to sorting out the return I tidied my desk, and found all sorts of things, including a birthday card that I bought last autumn and absolutely could not find when the time came to send it. So that's two jobs ticked off the list. Onwards and upwards.
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
number 23 for the revolution
Since I've got the Royal Academy Friends card, the Systems Administrator and I went to the exhibition of Russian architecture, Building the Revolution. This closes shortly, so once again I'm dashing to see something at the last minute, and Cardunculus is not a helpful guide to planning your cultural day out. We'd been meaning to go since last November, when the SA's eyes fell upon the RA magazine article about it and lit up with genuine enthusiasm. But then we both had colds, one after another, and time ticked by, and we didn't go, until suddenly it was a case of this week or never.
We went to Piccadilly on the bus, which was a novelty for me. Indeed, I can't think when I last travelled on a London bus. I think it was in Oxford Street on one of the old Routemasters, probably over twenty years ago. My failure to use London buses doesn't reflect any snobbish disdain for them, merely the fact that I don't know where any of them go, and in the pre-Oyster days I was anxious that I'd get on the wrong bus, inadvertently stray outside whatever zone I'd paid to be in, and be hit with a penalty fare. Or else miss my stop, or get lost, or not be able to find the stop for the return bus going the other way. Tubes are easy. The action takes place in tunnels with diagrams showing exactly where the train is going. Bond Street will follow Oxford Street as night follows day. It couldn't possibly be anything else, while a bus could go anywhere. However, the SA cracked buses some time ago, and knows what number goes to Picadilly (23), and where it goes from, and that you only have to swipe your Oyster card getting on and not getting off the bus.
The view from the top deck of the number 23 was great, once we'd taken twenty minutes to get to get as far as Mansion House (I could have walked to St Pauls in only two minutes more than that). I notice all sorts of architectural details and bits of buildings that normally I'd have missed. Apart from being higher up and getting a different viewpoint, being on a bus frees up all the parts of one's mind which would otherwise be occupied with not walking into people, or crossing the road without being run over. We passed Charing Cross, and I realised that I couldn't remember which queen the monument was raised for, and that today was No Wikipedia day and I wouldn't be able to look it up easily when I got home.
The exhibition was interesting, although there's not much point in my saying that, as there's scarcely time for you to go, if you haven't been already. It featured pre-war buildings that reflected and symbolised the new Russian socialist society, with factories, communal living blocks, schools and infrastructure projects. There was a strong International Modernist aesthetic, the same movement that was at the same time influencing the British seaside in the form of the De Lar Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, and the Midland Hotel at Morecombe. Indeed, the former was designed by the same German-Russian partnership of Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff who were responsible for some of the buildings in the RA show.
It is not an original thought that seeing where a society puts its architectural efforts tells you a lot about that society. In Medieval times people built cathedrals, in Victorian times railway stations, and in modern times banking headquarters and shopping centres. The Russian revolutionaries took industry and communal living very seriously. The Victorians built some grand mills, and the 1930s saw the construction of the Art Deco Hoover Factory (and Fort Dunlop was built at some point but it's No Wikipedia day and the Fort Dunlop site tells me a lot about the redevelopment but not when it was built. Or at least not quickly). But I can't offhand think when I last read a review in the Guardian's architecture pages of an exciting new industrial building.
An extra twist of the exhibition is that there aren't very many extant photographs of most of these buildings when they were new, so modest drawings of the time were displayed next to large, recent colour photographs of the buildings. Some are still in use for their original purpose, especially the schools and some residential schemes, and a vast radio mast. Some have been converted into artistic spaces. Many of the factories are derelict, some in danger of collapse. This is rather poignant, because of their historical significance, and because many of them are beautiful. Well, beautiful if you like the International Modernist look, which on the whole I do. Those rounded walls and balconies and internal circulation by curving ramps and spiral staircases like big abstract white sculptures, they're good.
If you go into RA exhibitions on a Friend's card nobody seems to give you a gallery guide, so I can't remember where the Russian city is, that still has its white concrete water tower, now defunct as a water tower but still functioning as an eye-catcher at the end of a long boulevard. They could twin with Colchester, if twinning weren't going out of fashion. Two towns united in their devotion to their derelict, iconic water towers. I was too mean to buy the exhibition catalogue. I generally am. There seemed to be lots left, with four days left to go, so I wouldn't be surprised to get one cheap later.
Then we walked across Green Park and St James Park and got a number 11 back. I think I'm getting the hang of buses. Also embarking on a new stage of my cold. The SA's was a two-parter, so that's not unlikely.
We went to Piccadilly on the bus, which was a novelty for me. Indeed, I can't think when I last travelled on a London bus. I think it was in Oxford Street on one of the old Routemasters, probably over twenty years ago. My failure to use London buses doesn't reflect any snobbish disdain for them, merely the fact that I don't know where any of them go, and in the pre-Oyster days I was anxious that I'd get on the wrong bus, inadvertently stray outside whatever zone I'd paid to be in, and be hit with a penalty fare. Or else miss my stop, or get lost, or not be able to find the stop for the return bus going the other way. Tubes are easy. The action takes place in tunnels with diagrams showing exactly where the train is going. Bond Street will follow Oxford Street as night follows day. It couldn't possibly be anything else, while a bus could go anywhere. However, the SA cracked buses some time ago, and knows what number goes to Picadilly (23), and where it goes from, and that you only have to swipe your Oyster card getting on and not getting off the bus.
The view from the top deck of the number 23 was great, once we'd taken twenty minutes to get to get as far as Mansion House (I could have walked to St Pauls in only two minutes more than that). I notice all sorts of architectural details and bits of buildings that normally I'd have missed. Apart from being higher up and getting a different viewpoint, being on a bus frees up all the parts of one's mind which would otherwise be occupied with not walking into people, or crossing the road without being run over. We passed Charing Cross, and I realised that I couldn't remember which queen the monument was raised for, and that today was No Wikipedia day and I wouldn't be able to look it up easily when I got home.
The exhibition was interesting, although there's not much point in my saying that, as there's scarcely time for you to go, if you haven't been already. It featured pre-war buildings that reflected and symbolised the new Russian socialist society, with factories, communal living blocks, schools and infrastructure projects. There was a strong International Modernist aesthetic, the same movement that was at the same time influencing the British seaside in the form of the De Lar Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, and the Midland Hotel at Morecombe. Indeed, the former was designed by the same German-Russian partnership of Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff who were responsible for some of the buildings in the RA show.
It is not an original thought that seeing where a society puts its architectural efforts tells you a lot about that society. In Medieval times people built cathedrals, in Victorian times railway stations, and in modern times banking headquarters and shopping centres. The Russian revolutionaries took industry and communal living very seriously. The Victorians built some grand mills, and the 1930s saw the construction of the Art Deco Hoover Factory (and Fort Dunlop was built at some point but it's No Wikipedia day and the Fort Dunlop site tells me a lot about the redevelopment but not when it was built. Or at least not quickly). But I can't offhand think when I last read a review in the Guardian's architecture pages of an exciting new industrial building.
An extra twist of the exhibition is that there aren't very many extant photographs of most of these buildings when they were new, so modest drawings of the time were displayed next to large, recent colour photographs of the buildings. Some are still in use for their original purpose, especially the schools and some residential schemes, and a vast radio mast. Some have been converted into artistic spaces. Many of the factories are derelict, some in danger of collapse. This is rather poignant, because of their historical significance, and because many of them are beautiful. Well, beautiful if you like the International Modernist look, which on the whole I do. Those rounded walls and balconies and internal circulation by curving ramps and spiral staircases like big abstract white sculptures, they're good.
If you go into RA exhibitions on a Friend's card nobody seems to give you a gallery guide, so I can't remember where the Russian city is, that still has its white concrete water tower, now defunct as a water tower but still functioning as an eye-catcher at the end of a long boulevard. They could twin with Colchester, if twinning weren't going out of fashion. Two towns united in their devotion to their derelict, iconic water towers. I was too mean to buy the exhibition catalogue. I generally am. There seemed to be lots left, with four days left to go, so I wouldn't be surprised to get one cheap later.
Then we walked across Green Park and St James Park and got a number 11 back. I think I'm getting the hang of buses. Also embarking on a new stage of my cold. The SA's was a two-parter, so that's not unlikely.
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
the National Art Fund
I have started trying to arrange a trip with my mother to the Royal Academy's exhibition of large and recent landscapes by David Hockney. It has crystallised my feeling that it is not worthwhile her renewing my annual birthday present subscription, as once again advance booking is required, even for Friends. Since she gave me the sub three years ago the RA has unilaterally altered the terms and conditions, by limiting my guests to family members (undefined, unenforceable, unenforced) and jacking up the annual cost to a hundred quid (or £90 by direct debit). Their website nowadays says 'free entry to all RA exhibitions' which is true, in that Friends don't pay when they book tickets, but when you are travelling up from the country (40 minute rail delays this morning due to signalling problems at Ilford) a pre-booked entry time is a nuisance. It means we have to build slack into the timetable before our slot in case the trains are late, which will leave us wandering around the west end for an hour or so in February if they're not, or else forego lunch if there are delays. It used to be that you just waved your card and went in, even for popular exhibitions like Van Gogh.
My replacement is already lined up, as my National Art Pass has arrived. For fifty quid (reduced to £37.50 in the first year if you pay by direct debit) I have got a card giving me free entry into some museums and galleries I should like to visit, and half price admission to exhibitions at others. In London it gets me into the Courtauld, a gallery I adore and visit regularly, and the Garden Museum, which I'm partial to (provided they are covering design or history and not community vegetable growing). It will also get me free into several places I've thought about visiting and not got round to it, including The Handel House Museum, Leighton House and Eltham Palace. I get half price entry to exhibitions at The National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Imperial War Museum. These are all fine institutions I was planning on visiting this year (well, maybe not the Imperial War Museum. I haven't looked yet to see what they've got on). I checked on the Portrait Gallery website before buying the card, and the booking options for Lucien Freud did include buying a ticket with an Art Pass (as well as about seven other concessionary tickets) which allayed my concerns that the card might not work for exhibitions where I needed to book in advance.
There's an element of duplication with other memberships, as some National Trust properties are in the scheme, and I'm a member anyway. Have been since I was four, courtesy of my parents. So is the Tate, and I'm inclined to keep membership of that one going, as the members' room at Tate Modern is so nice, and being able to walk straight into the likes of the Rothko exhibition is worth a lot.
With the Art Pass came a book of participating venues through the UK. All have benefited from art purchases funded by the scheme. Some offer free access anyway, so holding an Art Pass doesn't confer any immediate benefit, but it looks a useful book. Unless I had picked up a brochure somewhere, I wouldn't have known about the Cromer Museum (with Victorian fisherman's cottage and history of Cromer's incarnation as a seaside resort) or the Time and Tide museum at Great Yarmouth (about herring fishing) but they sound interesting. It's the sort of booklet it will be worth taking along on holiday (not forgetting the tile gazetteer).
The proceeds raised by the Art Fund go to help museums and galleries pay for acquisitions. I like the idea of helping to do that. All in all it looks like a pound a week well spent, signing up for your National Art Pass.
My replacement is already lined up, as my National Art Pass has arrived. For fifty quid (reduced to £37.50 in the first year if you pay by direct debit) I have got a card giving me free entry into some museums and galleries I should like to visit, and half price admission to exhibitions at others. In London it gets me into the Courtauld, a gallery I adore and visit regularly, and the Garden Museum, which I'm partial to (provided they are covering design or history and not community vegetable growing). It will also get me free into several places I've thought about visiting and not got round to it, including The Handel House Museum, Leighton House and Eltham Palace. I get half price entry to exhibitions at The National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Imperial War Museum. These are all fine institutions I was planning on visiting this year (well, maybe not the Imperial War Museum. I haven't looked yet to see what they've got on). I checked on the Portrait Gallery website before buying the card, and the booking options for Lucien Freud did include buying a ticket with an Art Pass (as well as about seven other concessionary tickets) which allayed my concerns that the card might not work for exhibitions where I needed to book in advance.
There's an element of duplication with other memberships, as some National Trust properties are in the scheme, and I'm a member anyway. Have been since I was four, courtesy of my parents. So is the Tate, and I'm inclined to keep membership of that one going, as the members' room at Tate Modern is so nice, and being able to walk straight into the likes of the Rothko exhibition is worth a lot.
With the Art Pass came a book of participating venues through the UK. All have benefited from art purchases funded by the scheme. Some offer free access anyway, so holding an Art Pass doesn't confer any immediate benefit, but it looks a useful book. Unless I had picked up a brochure somewhere, I wouldn't have known about the Cromer Museum (with Victorian fisherman's cottage and history of Cromer's incarnation as a seaside resort) or the Time and Tide museum at Great Yarmouth (about herring fishing) but they sound interesting. It's the sort of booklet it will be worth taking along on holiday (not forgetting the tile gazetteer).
The proceeds raised by the Art Fund go to help museums and galleries pay for acquisitions. I like the idea of helping to do that. All in all it looks like a pound a week well spent, signing up for your National Art Pass.
Monday, 16 January 2012
the worst day
The alarm clock went off this morning. I lay in bed for a while, grumbling that I had to go and be fumigated with creosote, and that it was not fair, when I was a small fluffy person who ought to be fed ice cream with a spoon, but then I had to get up. According to the Daily Telegraph, the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year, as the joyous effects of the Christmas break have completely worn off and people contemplate their credit card bills, the yawning distance until their next holiday, the cold, the dark, and the failure of their New Year Resolutions. Being gassed with creosote didn't make it into the equation.
I pretty much gave up with resolutions a long time ago, though I have so far kept my one modest one for this year, which is only to eat cakes and biscuits made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour and other ingredients I would use if I were making a cake myself, and pass on those containing unidentified vegetable oils, palm oil, whey powder, stabilisers and so on. This policy should be gently slimming in the long run while not depriving me of anything genuinely delicious, though I think I will make an exception for the Tate's muffins on days out in London.
There was a mild air of panic and chaos when I arrived at work. The boss's horse is suffering from some horsey ailment, and is supposed to be resting in its stable. When the owner opened the stable first thing this morning to give it whatever it is that horses eat for breakfast, the horse bolted. And was very reluctant to be caught again and the owner had to summon the boss to help her chase it round the field. By the time they had got it safely locked up again nerves were a little jangled.
This didn't stop us having an impromptu meeting about the garden guide. I think we're working on the right lines now. I wrote the text as a tour around the garden, but the map had numbered areas. The numbered areas all have names, which I used as section headings (the names are descriptive, and most are quite charming, like Primrose Hill. The furthest part of the garden is known for historic reasons as Knicker Alley, and I did change that to The Lower Garden). The round tour of the garden goes through some areas twice, on the out and back legs, and the tour narrative sat awkwardly with the descriptions of the block areas. We've now agreed to drop the section headings (which will also save space in the printed version) and the block areas on the map, and just describe it as a tour, with the suggested route on the map. It is essentially like writing reports in the City, only more flowery. The difficulty is never really in finding the words, but in deciding what it is that you want to say. Once you've established that, the words come.
The poor gardener spent all day creosoting, apart from fetching in some logs first thing, so it probably was the worst day of his year. There were very few customers, so maybe they were having a bad day as well. I'd expected to be scribing for the manager while he started the stock take, but the boss hadn't produced any of the paperwork, so we couldn't do that, and I spent the day cleaning up iris and messing around with fruit netting and bamboo canes in the relative warmth of the shop, instead of sitting in a plastic chair in a polytunnel with an ambient temperature of 5 degrees C. So I didn't do badly at all, for the worst day of the year.
Addendum Happy Birthday Liz xxx
I pretty much gave up with resolutions a long time ago, though I have so far kept my one modest one for this year, which is only to eat cakes and biscuits made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour and other ingredients I would use if I were making a cake myself, and pass on those containing unidentified vegetable oils, palm oil, whey powder, stabilisers and so on. This policy should be gently slimming in the long run while not depriving me of anything genuinely delicious, though I think I will make an exception for the Tate's muffins on days out in London.
There was a mild air of panic and chaos when I arrived at work. The boss's horse is suffering from some horsey ailment, and is supposed to be resting in its stable. When the owner opened the stable first thing this morning to give it whatever it is that horses eat for breakfast, the horse bolted. And was very reluctant to be caught again and the owner had to summon the boss to help her chase it round the field. By the time they had got it safely locked up again nerves were a little jangled.
This didn't stop us having an impromptu meeting about the garden guide. I think we're working on the right lines now. I wrote the text as a tour around the garden, but the map had numbered areas. The numbered areas all have names, which I used as section headings (the names are descriptive, and most are quite charming, like Primrose Hill. The furthest part of the garden is known for historic reasons as Knicker Alley, and I did change that to The Lower Garden). The round tour of the garden goes through some areas twice, on the out and back legs, and the tour narrative sat awkwardly with the descriptions of the block areas. We've now agreed to drop the section headings (which will also save space in the printed version) and the block areas on the map, and just describe it as a tour, with the suggested route on the map. It is essentially like writing reports in the City, only more flowery. The difficulty is never really in finding the words, but in deciding what it is that you want to say. Once you've established that, the words come.
The poor gardener spent all day creosoting, apart from fetching in some logs first thing, so it probably was the worst day of his year. There were very few customers, so maybe they were having a bad day as well. I'd expected to be scribing for the manager while he started the stock take, but the boss hadn't produced any of the paperwork, so we couldn't do that, and I spent the day cleaning up iris and messing around with fruit netting and bamboo canes in the relative warmth of the shop, instead of sitting in a plastic chair in a polytunnel with an ambient temperature of 5 degrees C. So I didn't do badly at all, for the worst day of the year.
Addendum Happy Birthday Liz xxx
Sunday, 15 January 2012
creosote (substitute)
There was no frost last night. I feel like a general fighting the last war, to have put the heaters on because there was a frost the previous night. At least I remembered to switch them off this morning before leaving for work.
The smell of creosote substitute hung over the plant centre and permeated everything. Occasionally I thought I detected a faint whiff of Sarcococca, but it was mostly creosote. The herbaceous tables were dry enough for me to start replacing the pots that had been cleared off them so that they could be painted, so I cleaned up and moved Hemerocallis and iris, breathing the chemical stink as I did so. I presume that creosote substitute is not so noxious as the real thing, which was pretty potent, and incidentally very toxic to cats.
The fuel for the tunnel heater is stored in an old container labelled - what else - 'creosote', which caused my colleagues a certain amount of head scratching as they set out to refill the heater. They did put the right stuff in the tank. There were three people working on painting the tables on Friday, and there are still five big containers of creosote substitute left in the pot shed. When they're finished I guess that will be it for this year.
One of our customers today turned out to be a true, dedicated (not to say fanatical) gardener. She bought a trolley full of shrubs and trees, which she seemed very pleased with, and it turned out that today was a red-letter day for her, and she was going out afterwards for a special lunch to celebrate. She moved down here from Edinburgh, where she had a walled garden with perfect soil, and had spend four years struggling with her new garden, where nothing would grow. She ended up removing vast quantities of builders' rubble and barrowing in twenty tonnes of topsoil. Finally, she was ready to start planting. Today's purchases were the first of the structural elements (although I did notice one hellebore had sneaked into her trolley) and as she departed, beaming, she promised that she Would Be Back. It sounded like a long haul, and I gather there were some difficulties regarding access, and the neighbours.
The Systems Administrator suggested yesterday evening that maybe customers in January tended to be nice because the only people who come in at this time of year are the keen and knowledgeable ones. Not so today. (It is a good rule of thumb that when you greet anybody with a cheerful 'good morning' in the hour between noon and one o'clock, which still feels like morning if you have not yet had lunch, and they reply 'or afternoon', the conversation is unlikely to go well after that, because you are dealing with a picky so-and-so). Today's pernickety old lady, pleasantries brushed aside, advanced on the till with a plastic bag containing a shrub, and announced that she had bought it a year ago and wasn't happy with it. The shrub was a Spiraea, still with our label on it. I asked what was wrong with it, and she said that it had never done anything. I asked if the leaves had emerged normally, and she said that it had leaves and flowers on when she bought it. She rummaged around in her purse for her receipt, and was surprised to find that she had bought it in July, and not a year ago. You wouldn't expect to buy a Spiraea in full bloom in January. I inspected the roots in the plastic bag, which looked absolutely fine. Quite good, actually, as they had started to move beyond the confines of the original pot. I scraped at a stem with my fingernail and, as I expected, there was green underneath. I suggested as gently as I could that it was alive, and was in fact perfectly healthy, but she reiterated that she didn't like the look of it, and that her family hadn't liked it either. I explained that as Spiraea were deciduous that was what they looked like in January, then played the 'weekend staff aren't allowed to give refunds' card, and we agreed that she would leave the plant with me so that the manager could look at it in the morning.
The owners' son rang up from his boarding school grumbling that he was bored. I tried to be sympathetic, but really he ought to have been grateful that nobody was making him go for a cross-country run, or any of the hearty stuff they do at boarding schools. After all, he could have been breathing creosote fumes and talking nicely to idiots.
The smell of creosote substitute hung over the plant centre and permeated everything. Occasionally I thought I detected a faint whiff of Sarcococca, but it was mostly creosote. The herbaceous tables were dry enough for me to start replacing the pots that had been cleared off them so that they could be painted, so I cleaned up and moved Hemerocallis and iris, breathing the chemical stink as I did so. I presume that creosote substitute is not so noxious as the real thing, which was pretty potent, and incidentally very toxic to cats.
The fuel for the tunnel heater is stored in an old container labelled - what else - 'creosote', which caused my colleagues a certain amount of head scratching as they set out to refill the heater. They did put the right stuff in the tank. There were three people working on painting the tables on Friday, and there are still five big containers of creosote substitute left in the pot shed. When they're finished I guess that will be it for this year.
One of our customers today turned out to be a true, dedicated (not to say fanatical) gardener. She bought a trolley full of shrubs and trees, which she seemed very pleased with, and it turned out that today was a red-letter day for her, and she was going out afterwards for a special lunch to celebrate. She moved down here from Edinburgh, where she had a walled garden with perfect soil, and had spend four years struggling with her new garden, where nothing would grow. She ended up removing vast quantities of builders' rubble and barrowing in twenty tonnes of topsoil. Finally, she was ready to start planting. Today's purchases were the first of the structural elements (although I did notice one hellebore had sneaked into her trolley) and as she departed, beaming, she promised that she Would Be Back. It sounded like a long haul, and I gather there were some difficulties regarding access, and the neighbours.
The Systems Administrator suggested yesterday evening that maybe customers in January tended to be nice because the only people who come in at this time of year are the keen and knowledgeable ones. Not so today. (It is a good rule of thumb that when you greet anybody with a cheerful 'good morning' in the hour between noon and one o'clock, which still feels like morning if you have not yet had lunch, and they reply 'or afternoon', the conversation is unlikely to go well after that, because you are dealing with a picky so-and-so). Today's pernickety old lady, pleasantries brushed aside, advanced on the till with a plastic bag containing a shrub, and announced that she had bought it a year ago and wasn't happy with it. The shrub was a Spiraea, still with our label on it. I asked what was wrong with it, and she said that it had never done anything. I asked if the leaves had emerged normally, and she said that it had leaves and flowers on when she bought it. She rummaged around in her purse for her receipt, and was surprised to find that she had bought it in July, and not a year ago. You wouldn't expect to buy a Spiraea in full bloom in January. I inspected the roots in the plastic bag, which looked absolutely fine. Quite good, actually, as they had started to move beyond the confines of the original pot. I scraped at a stem with my fingernail and, as I expected, there was green underneath. I suggested as gently as I could that it was alive, and was in fact perfectly healthy, but she reiterated that she didn't like the look of it, and that her family hadn't liked it either. I explained that as Spiraea were deciduous that was what they looked like in January, then played the 'weekend staff aren't allowed to give refunds' card, and we agreed that she would leave the plant with me so that the manager could look at it in the morning.
The owners' son rang up from his boarding school grumbling that he was bored. I tried to be sympathetic, but really he ought to have been grateful that nobody was making him go for a cross-country run, or any of the hearty stuff they do at boarding schools. After all, he could have been breathing creosote fumes and talking nicely to idiots.
Saturday, 14 January 2012
respectable finish from a slow start
The frost on the car this morning came as a bit of a shock, after the run of mild weather. The car thermometer said that it was minus 2.5C, and I fretted slightly that I hadn't set the heaters to run in the greenhouse and conservatory. I consoled myself with the thought that they should have some reserves of heat to see them through one chilly night, after those sunny days, and anyway, it was too late to do anything about it.
The manager's list of instructions for the weekend asked me to 'do what I could' with the ornamental end-table displays. Given how little plant material we had in stock that was allowed to be outside rather than safely tucked away in a tunnel, but was not a leafless deciduous pot of brown sticks with no display value whatsoever, doing what I could didn't amount to doing very much. I started rationalising the tables, so that each one used a limited range of plants and appeared to have some sort of theme, instead of being an indiscriminate jumble of whatever was not under cover.
Coloured stems featured heavily, and I found some willows with nice furry buds, to develop the stem theme further. Skimmia are allowed to stay out, as are Sarcococca. I have no idea why these two evergreen species are deemed safe to keep outside over winter, when most evergreens are taken in. We offer quite a few varieties of both, and the display tables look better when you stick to one or two different sorts per table, rather than a licorice allsorts jumble. Evergreen Euonymus stay out, and it's worth saving the yellow variegated ones for a yellow themed table, rather than dotting them around through every single display. The Hamamelis were looking good, and there were some Chaenomeles in flower. There is a lot of brown in Hamamelis flowers, and I tried to pick that up in the other plants I used with them, and found some Viburnum tinus that had an apple-blossom tinge in its pink flowers to go with the clear pink of the Chaenomeles.
We had the usual quota of regular customers, fortunately only nice ones, and not any of the ones whose appearance in the plant centre makes your heart sink into your wellingtons. The pleasant couple from Dedham bought a shrub and a couple of bergenias. A charming petite blonde came in, whose mother-in-law also shops with us, so we have to be careful when ordering plants to make it clear which Mrs C. they're for. I could even remember without looking at the list which hellebore she is waiting for, but they haven't arrived yet. There were only two of us on duty, and we only had one till going, which was ample for most of the day, then sudennly in the final hour it got busy with some big trollies going through, and we had a queue, but reached a respectable total for the day's takings in the end.
Back home I put the heaters on. I've scarcely run them this winter, so I shall indulge myself. The pots of Geranium maderense in the greenhouse and Streptocarpus in the conservatory looked fine, so no harm was done last night. The Norfolk Island Pine had blown over. I forgot to right it this morning, but as it still looks green and alive I left it resting in the embrace of the honeysuckle along the veranda, in the hope it might get some shelter. It might make it through the next 6-8 weeks alive, and so on to spring, but it might not. Better not to be optimistic.
The manager's list of instructions for the weekend asked me to 'do what I could' with the ornamental end-table displays. Given how little plant material we had in stock that was allowed to be outside rather than safely tucked away in a tunnel, but was not a leafless deciduous pot of brown sticks with no display value whatsoever, doing what I could didn't amount to doing very much. I started rationalising the tables, so that each one used a limited range of plants and appeared to have some sort of theme, instead of being an indiscriminate jumble of whatever was not under cover.
Coloured stems featured heavily, and I found some willows with nice furry buds, to develop the stem theme further. Skimmia are allowed to stay out, as are Sarcococca. I have no idea why these two evergreen species are deemed safe to keep outside over winter, when most evergreens are taken in. We offer quite a few varieties of both, and the display tables look better when you stick to one or two different sorts per table, rather than a licorice allsorts jumble. Evergreen Euonymus stay out, and it's worth saving the yellow variegated ones for a yellow themed table, rather than dotting them around through every single display. The Hamamelis were looking good, and there were some Chaenomeles in flower. There is a lot of brown in Hamamelis flowers, and I tried to pick that up in the other plants I used with them, and found some Viburnum tinus that had an apple-blossom tinge in its pink flowers to go with the clear pink of the Chaenomeles.
We had the usual quota of regular customers, fortunately only nice ones, and not any of the ones whose appearance in the plant centre makes your heart sink into your wellingtons. The pleasant couple from Dedham bought a shrub and a couple of bergenias. A charming petite blonde came in, whose mother-in-law also shops with us, so we have to be careful when ordering plants to make it clear which Mrs C. they're for. I could even remember without looking at the list which hellebore she is waiting for, but they haven't arrived yet. There were only two of us on duty, and we only had one till going, which was ample for most of the day, then sudennly in the final hour it got busy with some big trollies going through, and we had a queue, but reached a respectable total for the day's takings in the end.
Back home I put the heaters on. I've scarcely run them this winter, so I shall indulge myself. The pots of Geranium maderense in the greenhouse and Streptocarpus in the conservatory looked fine, so no harm was done last night. The Norfolk Island Pine had blown over. I forgot to right it this morning, but as it still looks green and alive I left it resting in the embrace of the honeysuckle along the veranda, in the hope it might get some shelter. It might make it through the next 6-8 weeks alive, and so on to spring, but it might not. Better not to be optimistic.
Friday, 13 January 2012
eggs
This morning I found another sign of the approach of spring. Opening the chicken house to top up their food, I discovered two eggs in the nesting box. Nice fat dark brown ones, slightly speckled. The chickens have looked distinctly bouncier in recent days, more active and alert, and have started taking an interest again in the world outside their run. In the shortest, darkest days they just stood hunched in the corner, looking as if they were waiting for winter to be over. It'll be time to start letting them out for an afternoon constitutional soon.
I got another three rhododendron stumps out of the wood. That was cheating slightly, as I picked on the ones that looked least likely to offer resistance (two were completely dead). The three left to go still have some leaves, and may have more of a root system to contend with. Still, I feel I'm approaching the home straight in the end of the wood. I filled up the trailer with another load of brambles and ivy, and managed not to poke myself in the eye on the brambles during the course of the day. The Systems Administrator obligingly got out the electric chainsaw, and removed a branch of a coppiced hazel that was growing into the airspace of Magnolia campbellii 'Charles Raffill'. It's all beginning to come together. I should be safe buying a Eucryphia x nymansay, when I see a good one at work, as I now have the space cleared to put it. (Finally. I identified the spot where I wanted to put it back in 2009, which shows the speed at which things sometimes progress in this garden).
There was one solitary snowdrop in bloom. There are the first leaves of a few bluebells showing, but in general the bulbs in the wood haven't yet started coming through. I remember panicking about this in past years, thinking that by mid January there ought to be more growth visible, and that something must have happened to them (I don't know what. The biggest vole invasion in the history of gardening). They have always turned up in the end, so I expect they will this year. It's a mystery why this one lone snowdrop is so early.
I finally ticked the Italian garden off my list of things to do. That has shrunk since I set it up, but is still far too long to finish by the end of February (or probably before the end of 2012). There are some jobs on it that I haven't touched at all. Mind you, there are some that are to all intents and purposes finished that I haven't crossed off. It seems I have a neurotic reluctance to declare any gardening task actually finished.
The black cat was in the wars again, this time with a septic eyelid, but his shot of antibiotics last Monday seems to have been sufficient to nip trouble in the bud, as it looks better than it did. He is now famous at the vets, following his cruciate ligament operation. Although they have not explicitly said so, we are more and more certain that he was the first ever cat (as distinct from dog) they'd tried the operation on. Well done that cat, for being a medical pathfinder.
I got another three rhododendron stumps out of the wood. That was cheating slightly, as I picked on the ones that looked least likely to offer resistance (two were completely dead). The three left to go still have some leaves, and may have more of a root system to contend with. Still, I feel I'm approaching the home straight in the end of the wood. I filled up the trailer with another load of brambles and ivy, and managed not to poke myself in the eye on the brambles during the course of the day. The Systems Administrator obligingly got out the electric chainsaw, and removed a branch of a coppiced hazel that was growing into the airspace of Magnolia campbellii 'Charles Raffill'. It's all beginning to come together. I should be safe buying a Eucryphia x nymansay, when I see a good one at work, as I now have the space cleared to put it. (Finally. I identified the spot where I wanted to put it back in 2009, which shows the speed at which things sometimes progress in this garden).
There was one solitary snowdrop in bloom. There are the first leaves of a few bluebells showing, but in general the bulbs in the wood haven't yet started coming through. I remember panicking about this in past years, thinking that by mid January there ought to be more growth visible, and that something must have happened to them (I don't know what. The biggest vole invasion in the history of gardening). They have always turned up in the end, so I expect they will this year. It's a mystery why this one lone snowdrop is so early.
I finally ticked the Italian garden off my list of things to do. That has shrunk since I set it up, but is still far too long to finish by the end of February (or probably before the end of 2012). There are some jobs on it that I haven't touched at all. Mind you, there are some that are to all intents and purposes finished that I haven't crossed off. It seems I have a neurotic reluctance to declare any gardening task actually finished.
The black cat was in the wars again, this time with a septic eyelid, but his shot of antibiotics last Monday seems to have been sufficient to nip trouble in the bud, as it looks better than it did. He is now famous at the vets, following his cruciate ligament operation. Although they have not explicitly said so, we are more and more certain that he was the first ever cat (as distinct from dog) they'd tried the operation on. Well done that cat, for being a medical pathfinder.
Thursday, 12 January 2012
dreams of tender beauties
It might have been a tad ambitious, doing all that raking yesterday. It felt OK at the time, which goes to show how much you can do when you care about the outcome. I slept late this morning, and woke still feeling exhausted. Sleeping in is no fun when you have animals, because you realise as soon as you come to that they should have been fed an hour ago, and that the chickens are still locked in a box. When I did biology at school I was once marked down in an exam answer about how the lung is adapted to its function, because I had not explicitly said that it was hollow. I'd mentioned the alveoli, and how they increase the surface area of the lung to facilitate oxygen exchange with the blood, but I hadn't actually said 'the lung is hollow'. I suppose that I assumed that as a given, otherwise where would I start? The lung is alive. The lung is compatible with the immune system of the rest of the organism. Or maybe I took the lung's hollowness as being implied by the rest of my answer. Anyway, I dropped a point or two. Today felt as though my lungs were not as hollow as they should have been, and it was tiring.
I weeded the gravel, as being a gentle task, not involving great physical effort, and worth doing before the bulbs come through any more than they have. The shrubs in the Italian garden are still looking good. It's the twelfth of January today, nearly half way through the month, and no really cold snap is forecast at the moment. Anything could still happen between now and March, but it seems possible that we might get through to spring without a hard freezing spell to wreck them. That would be a great boon.
I've got a replacement Teucrium fruticans 'Azureum' sitting in its pot in the greenhouse, waiting until March to plant it out, just in case. I'd like a small leaved myrtle in the Italian garden, and I might risk an Acca sellowiana. This is what used to be known as Feijoa,and its common name is pineapple guava. It has grey leaves, and red bottle-brush flowers. It is reckoned to be hardy outdoors only in the milder regions, so I tried one tucked in between other shrubs in the long bed, and it amazed me by surviving the past two winters, which certainly weren't mild. However, it is so hemmed in by its sheltering neighbours I'm not sure it will come to much, so I thought about risking one in the Italian garden, and giving it a bit more elbow room.
I'd like an Erythrina crista-galli as well. This is a magnificent shrub, and really is tender. The only good one I've seen was tucked into the corner of two walls at (I think) Wakehurst Place, with a heat-reflecting stone terrace in front of it. It has grey leaves,ferocious spines, and huge red claw shaped flowers in late summer or autumn. Its common name is the coral tree or cock's comb. Probably our front garden is not warm enough. But the drainage is superb, and Wakehurst Place must get quite parky in the winter, and Erythrina is deciduous, with the ability to behave herbaceously and throw new shoots from ground level, so it might not mind the cutting winter winds too much. Chiltern Seeds are offering seed again this year. I grew some once before, but attempted to keep the plants in pots, and found them difficult. We've lost stock over the winter at work before now, and when I went to an RHS study day some years ago on the subject of growing Mediterranean climate plants in the UK, I took the chance of asking Wolfgang Bopp how I should look after it (he was curator of the Welsh Botanic Gardens, then head-hunted by the Harold Hillier Gardens, where as far I can tell he still is, and is as big a cheese as you will find to ask about the cultivation of Erythrina crista-galli). He said it was difficult in a pot. It needed to be dry in winter but wet and well-fed in summer with a generous root run, so ideally not in a pot. It's tempting to try again. I have nothing to lose except the cost of a packet of seed, and a little time. I could buy one, if we get them again at work, but I'd sooner start from scratch.
And that was it. You will notice that most of today's gardening took place in my head, but that's the way with gardening. The R3 composer of the week was Couperin, which was nice.
I weeded the gravel, as being a gentle task, not involving great physical effort, and worth doing before the bulbs come through any more than they have. The shrubs in the Italian garden are still looking good. It's the twelfth of January today, nearly half way through the month, and no really cold snap is forecast at the moment. Anything could still happen between now and March, but it seems possible that we might get through to spring without a hard freezing spell to wreck them. That would be a great boon.
I've got a replacement Teucrium fruticans 'Azureum' sitting in its pot in the greenhouse, waiting until March to plant it out, just in case. I'd like a small leaved myrtle in the Italian garden, and I might risk an Acca sellowiana. This is what used to be known as Feijoa,and its common name is pineapple guava. It has grey leaves, and red bottle-brush flowers. It is reckoned to be hardy outdoors only in the milder regions, so I tried one tucked in between other shrubs in the long bed, and it amazed me by surviving the past two winters, which certainly weren't mild. However, it is so hemmed in by its sheltering neighbours I'm not sure it will come to much, so I thought about risking one in the Italian garden, and giving it a bit more elbow room.
I'd like an Erythrina crista-galli as well. This is a magnificent shrub, and really is tender. The only good one I've seen was tucked into the corner of two walls at (I think) Wakehurst Place, with a heat-reflecting stone terrace in front of it. It has grey leaves,ferocious spines, and huge red claw shaped flowers in late summer or autumn. Its common name is the coral tree or cock's comb. Probably our front garden is not warm enough. But the drainage is superb, and Wakehurst Place must get quite parky in the winter, and Erythrina is deciduous, with the ability to behave herbaceously and throw new shoots from ground level, so it might not mind the cutting winter winds too much. Chiltern Seeds are offering seed again this year. I grew some once before, but attempted to keep the plants in pots, and found them difficult. We've lost stock over the winter at work before now, and when I went to an RHS study day some years ago on the subject of growing Mediterranean climate plants in the UK, I took the chance of asking Wolfgang Bopp how I should look after it (he was curator of the Welsh Botanic Gardens, then head-hunted by the Harold Hillier Gardens, where as far I can tell he still is, and is as big a cheese as you will find to ask about the cultivation of Erythrina crista-galli). He said it was difficult in a pot. It needed to be dry in winter but wet and well-fed in summer with a generous root run, so ideally not in a pot. It's tempting to try again. I have nothing to lose except the cost of a packet of seed, and a little time. I could buy one, if we get them again at work, but I'd sooner start from scratch.
And that was it. You will notice that most of today's gardening took place in my head, but that's the way with gardening. The R3 composer of the week was Couperin, which was nice.
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
out of season
It was a beautiful warm, still, sunny day. I keep finding more signs that spring is approaching. In the so-called Italian garden in the turning circle, a group of purple dwarf iris have suddenly burst into bloom. The last time I looked there were just the snouts of new buds emerging through the gravel. Now there's an entire bunch of flowers, and another clump nearby not far behind. In the back garden one witch hazel is fully out. It is the mid-orange flowered variety Hamamelis x intermedia 'Orange Peel', and I sniffed the spicy fragrance on the air before I saw it. The scent of witch hazel is a curious thing. I seem to notice it more in wafts in passing than when I stick my nose right up against the flowers.
I hurried along and pruned the vines around the veg patch. This is a task I meant to do before Christmas, or at least between Christmas and the New Year, as vines bleed badly once the sap is rising, and you are advised to finish pruning early. I don't know why I didn't do it then, except that I was engrossed in other things and maybe the vine is not top of my list of concerns. Due to errors and omissions in my record keeping process, I don't know what variety it is. The grapes are white, and I'm sure I meant to choose one that was capable of setting edible fruit out of doors, since I never had any ambitions to make my own wine. A couple of years ago I tried hard to do things by the book, and pruned it at the correct times, and thinned the bunches of grapes ruthlessly, and the fruits were still small and extremely pippy, though the chickens liked them. The main job of the vine is really to clothe the wire rabbit fence that runs round the veg patch, and provide the odd leaf for cooking. I quite like stuffed vine leaves, and it gives a smug feeling to be able to use home grown fresh leaves, instead of tinned.
I cut a couple of branches experimentally, and sap didn't gush forth, so I got on with it, since it was one of those jobs where the situation was only going to get worse the longer I left it. It still didn't seem to be bleeding by the time I'd more or less finished, so with luck the sap is not rising that much yet, and it won't. Maybe it will start later. I'm not an expert on the cultivation of vines. It makes a vast amount of growth each year, throwing out new shoots that are 3-4m long and longer. Normally I keep trimming these through the summer to try and keep the whole thing in check, but the veg patch was mostly fallow last season, as I tried to catch up with everything else.
Another job that should have been done last autumn, ideally in September, was to scrantle* the meadow. We did the back garden in the middle of that month, but never got on to the meadow. I'm not sure why. I think the Systems Administrator, who basically dislikes trudging up and down for hours pushing a power scythe and then having to collect large amounts of grass, hoped that it could get by without a cut every year. I'm not crazy on the task either, and dislike repeatedly asking anyone to do anything, in case it could be construed as nagging, so we ended up with a communications failure, and it didn't get done. We ended up scrantling the meadow this afternoon, as it has daffodils planted in it and I was beginning to worry that if we didn't do it soon their leaves would be through. My part of the job is to rake the fallen grass aside, to clear the way for the next passage of the scythe. I didn't check the exact time we started, but it must have taken us about an hour and a half, during which I raked continuously. That should have burned off a couple of mince pies. We'll leave it for a day or two in the hopes that it might dry out in the wind, and the SA will put the lawn tractor over it, and I'll have to rake it again. We now have two trailer loads of weedy and rank grass to dispose of. I'm hoping that they'll burn, chucked on a lively bonfire a forkful at a time.
*We borrowed this useful agricultural term from Stella Gibbons to describe the act of cutting long grass with a power scythe, since there isn't a verb specifically for that. The exact nature of the original operation remains a mystery.
Addendum I have done my bit to sabotage an on-line poll in the Guardian, while telling the exact truth. It goes to show how misleading statistics can be. The question was, will you be spending less in the sales this January than last, to which my response was No. However, that doesn't have any positive implications for my confidence or spending power this year. It's simply that since I spent nothing in the sales in 2011, I certainly wasn't going to spend less in 2012. When I took part, with an hour to go until the poll closed, 80% of respondents had answered Yes. I'm sure you shouldn't tell people how other people have voted on the same question if you want an accurate result, in case it influences what at least some of them say.
I hurried along and pruned the vines around the veg patch. This is a task I meant to do before Christmas, or at least between Christmas and the New Year, as vines bleed badly once the sap is rising, and you are advised to finish pruning early. I don't know why I didn't do it then, except that I was engrossed in other things and maybe the vine is not top of my list of concerns. Due to errors and omissions in my record keeping process, I don't know what variety it is. The grapes are white, and I'm sure I meant to choose one that was capable of setting edible fruit out of doors, since I never had any ambitions to make my own wine. A couple of years ago I tried hard to do things by the book, and pruned it at the correct times, and thinned the bunches of grapes ruthlessly, and the fruits were still small and extremely pippy, though the chickens liked them. The main job of the vine is really to clothe the wire rabbit fence that runs round the veg patch, and provide the odd leaf for cooking. I quite like stuffed vine leaves, and it gives a smug feeling to be able to use home grown fresh leaves, instead of tinned.
I cut a couple of branches experimentally, and sap didn't gush forth, so I got on with it, since it was one of those jobs where the situation was only going to get worse the longer I left it. It still didn't seem to be bleeding by the time I'd more or less finished, so with luck the sap is not rising that much yet, and it won't. Maybe it will start later. I'm not an expert on the cultivation of vines. It makes a vast amount of growth each year, throwing out new shoots that are 3-4m long and longer. Normally I keep trimming these through the summer to try and keep the whole thing in check, but the veg patch was mostly fallow last season, as I tried to catch up with everything else.
Another job that should have been done last autumn, ideally in September, was to scrantle* the meadow. We did the back garden in the middle of that month, but never got on to the meadow. I'm not sure why. I think the Systems Administrator, who basically dislikes trudging up and down for hours pushing a power scythe and then having to collect large amounts of grass, hoped that it could get by without a cut every year. I'm not crazy on the task either, and dislike repeatedly asking anyone to do anything, in case it could be construed as nagging, so we ended up with a communications failure, and it didn't get done. We ended up scrantling the meadow this afternoon, as it has daffodils planted in it and I was beginning to worry that if we didn't do it soon their leaves would be through. My part of the job is to rake the fallen grass aside, to clear the way for the next passage of the scythe. I didn't check the exact time we started, but it must have taken us about an hour and a half, during which I raked continuously. That should have burned off a couple of mince pies. We'll leave it for a day or two in the hopes that it might dry out in the wind, and the SA will put the lawn tractor over it, and I'll have to rake it again. We now have two trailer loads of weedy and rank grass to dispose of. I'm hoping that they'll burn, chucked on a lively bonfire a forkful at a time.
*We borrowed this useful agricultural term from Stella Gibbons to describe the act of cutting long grass with a power scythe, since there isn't a verb specifically for that. The exact nature of the original operation remains a mystery.
Addendum I have done my bit to sabotage an on-line poll in the Guardian, while telling the exact truth. It goes to show how misleading statistics can be. The question was, will you be spending less in the sales this January than last, to which my response was No. However, that doesn't have any positive implications for my confidence or spending power this year. It's simply that since I spent nothing in the sales in 2011, I certainly wasn't going to spend less in 2012. When I took part, with an hour to go until the poll closed, 80% of respondents had answered Yes. I'm sure you shouldn't tell people how other people have voted on the same question if you want an accurate result, in case it influences what at least some of them say.
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
painter of moonlight
I went up to London today. I was still feeling sufficiently coldy that if I hadn't already arranged to meet some former colleagues for lunch I probably wouldn't have chosen to go today, but I wanted to see them, and it's mean to people who have gone to the trouble of organising something like that to blow them out at the last minute unless you have a very good excuse. Week two of a cold doesn't really count.
Happily the trains were running smoothly, so I didn't end up spending half an hour standing around Colchester station, and I had time to call in at the Guildhall Art Gallery. This has been running an exhibition since last September of works by a Victorian painter, Atkinson Grimshaw, which I'd been vaguely meaning to see and not got round to it. Since it finishes in five day's time, if I didn't go today I wasn't going to, and an exhibition in Gresham Street fitted in nicely with lunch in Clerkenwell. Atkinson Grimshaw was very popular in his day, and so went the way of Victorian painters in much of the twentieth century, becoming wildly unfashionable to the point of derision. Then he began to come back into favour, and the last time Christies sold one it went for £169,250. I don't know much about Victorian painters, but liked the sound him when I read a review in one of the papers. Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight.
He was a self-taught artist, born in Leeds, and Leeds City Art Gallery still has one of the largest public collections of his works. He painted northern scenes, of streets and harbours and landscapes, and big houses half hidden by leafless trees. It always seemed to be November in the north. In his forties, by then a commercially successful painter, he moved to London and painted more streets, and views of the Thames. By then it always seemed to be night, around the time of the full moon. His paintings are smooth and glossy, every leaf in place, no trace of brushwork. His palette contains umpteen shades of greenish blue and pale gold. And I really liked them. I didn't feel I was gazing into the soul of humanity, or that a great spiritual truth was being revealed to me. Atkinson Grimshaw was no Rembrandt.
It's just that I like Prussian blue harbours and moonlit water. I like winter. I like melancholy views of big Victorian houses lurking behind leafless trees, and dishevelled gardens strewn with dead leaves. I've been to Whitby and Scarborough, and can imagine the horror of standing at the mouth of Whitby harbour at night watching as a ship founders (there was a strong onshore wind blowing when we were there and the entrance to the harbour looked beyond terrifying, even in daylight). I can empathise with the vicarious thrill of watching the Scarborough spa burn down. I've always had a weakness for rain on cobblestones, and I like bridges and riverbanks. I suggested to a friend last autumn, when we were looking for an art exhibition to visit, that looking at Atkinson Grimshaw might be a sort of guilty pleasure, like eating a big box of chocolates while reading something by Philippa Gregory and knowing that it was not Middlemarch. The suggestion was rejected and we went somewhere else instead. But that is exactly what looking at Atkinson Grimshaw is like. I'm glad I didn't miss it.
The Guildhall Art Gallery has a permanent collection of (I think mostly Victorian) art as well, and in the basement are the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, which you can go down and walk around. I didn't due to lack of time, and had to content myself with peering at it through a viewing slit next to the cloakroom. However, entry to the permanent collection and amphitheatre is free, and so are the special exhibitions, if you have got a national art pass. I've just sent off for one (not in time for Atkinson Grimshaw) so more of that anon.
Monday, 9 January 2012
onwards and upwards
The holidays were finally over today, and it was back to work, where things are gently apace. The person who was offered the plant centre job turns out to have accepted it. In fact, he accepted it promptly upon being offered it, but his acceptance letter got caught up in the Christmas post and didn't reach us until December 28th. I never actually saw or spoke to my employers when I worked on New Year's Eve, so didn't know what was going on. I'm glad he's taken the job. When I met him (briefly) I thought he seemed nice and genuinely keen, and I'd hate to think that my judgement had deteriorated that badly. Besides, we need somebody, so it would be a waste to be back to square one.
They have installed a wireless link for a computer in the shop. There's no actual computer as yet, but getting the connection for it is a start. It will be very useful to be able to check and send e-mails without somebody having to leave the plant centre and schlep up to the office, and the manager will be able to use if for plant orders while remaining front of house. It could be a useful sales tool, for example, when customers ask questions like 'can you show me a picture of the flower?' but I foresee that we will have to be disciplined about not spending ages googling details of plants for them. I sometimes look up unfamiliar names for more info when browsing through seed lists, and it is possible to take an extremely long time trying to get the low down on one plant. Plus, some sites are of dubious accuracy, and quite a few that come up are American and don't relate in a straightforward way to how that plant might perform in south east England.
The new plant list, that has been stalled for nearly two years, has been resurrected as a live project. We don't run to a catalogue with photographs and descriptions (yet). I'm not sure we ever will, as it would be the size of a hefty garden dictionary, given the range of plants we carry. In early 2010 the boss sent me spreadsheets of the plants he buys in, and I spent a fair time deleting duplicate entries for plants bought from more than one supplier, or in more than one size, and pulled the whole thing together into a Word document, for the boss to check through and delete anything he thought we weren't going to sell in future for whatever reason. Principle reasons being that we can't get it any more, or it sold very badly, or it kept dying before we could sell it. The Word document was over 160 pages long, and the boss always seemed to have something else more urgent to do than look at it. Probably the thought of looking at it made him feel the need to lie down in a dark room. In the meantime, we went on using the 2006-7 list. About a year ago we ran out of copies to give to customers (it is on the website, but not all of our customers like using computers). It was embarrassing, although I'm not sure which was more embarrassing, giving people a list that was five years out of date, or not having a list at all. Last autumn the manager announced that he was now authorised to update the plant list, following which nothing happened. However, the Word document has finally made it off the office computer and into the light of day, and the manager has started crossing entries off in pencil. Of course by now there will be other plants to add, as the list has grown since early 2010. Still, it's progress.
The owner suddenly announced that we really were going to get on with the garden guide ready for the coming season. The gardener drew a rather good map of the garden about two years ago, and last spring I produced some text, and the whole project quietly went into hibernation, but now we are on to a revised map to allow for changes that have been made to the garden since the original one was drawn, and revised text (including where I had put some trees in the wrong place, but I did write it at home without the benefit of a planting plan or the ability to nip outside and check). The idea is to have a fairly plain guide in year one, that's not too expensive to produce, and go on to something glossier when we've tested it on the public, and had the chance to iron out any glitches.
A customer rang up wanting to reserve some plants, who turned out to be called Pennyfeather, which she carefully spelt for me saying it was ususual, and it turned out that she was not aware of the Eveleyn Waugh character Paul Pennyfeather. How can you reach adulthood with the name Pennyfeather and not have come across your namesake in Decline and Fall? She seemed pleased to hear that a Pennyfeather had been immortalised in literature, but maybe she was being polite and was privately bewildered. Another customer rang wanting to pay for a plant that had been the subject of a protracted exchange of e-mails with one of my colleagues. No plant had actually been reserved, but fortunately we still had some. The e-mails appeared to have been deleted. The manager asked me why my colleague should have done that, and I explained that if I were a cynical person I would say it was to ensure that things worked smoothly when they were there, and not so much when they weren't, thereby reinforcing their image of being indispensable. However, as I am not a cynical person of course I did not think any such thing.
It's good to be back.
They have installed a wireless link for a computer in the shop. There's no actual computer as yet, but getting the connection for it is a start. It will be very useful to be able to check and send e-mails without somebody having to leave the plant centre and schlep up to the office, and the manager will be able to use if for plant orders while remaining front of house. It could be a useful sales tool, for example, when customers ask questions like 'can you show me a picture of the flower?' but I foresee that we will have to be disciplined about not spending ages googling details of plants for them. I sometimes look up unfamiliar names for more info when browsing through seed lists, and it is possible to take an extremely long time trying to get the low down on one plant. Plus, some sites are of dubious accuracy, and quite a few that come up are American and don't relate in a straightforward way to how that plant might perform in south east England.
The new plant list, that has been stalled for nearly two years, has been resurrected as a live project. We don't run to a catalogue with photographs and descriptions (yet). I'm not sure we ever will, as it would be the size of a hefty garden dictionary, given the range of plants we carry. In early 2010 the boss sent me spreadsheets of the plants he buys in, and I spent a fair time deleting duplicate entries for plants bought from more than one supplier, or in more than one size, and pulled the whole thing together into a Word document, for the boss to check through and delete anything he thought we weren't going to sell in future for whatever reason. Principle reasons being that we can't get it any more, or it sold very badly, or it kept dying before we could sell it. The Word document was over 160 pages long, and the boss always seemed to have something else more urgent to do than look at it. Probably the thought of looking at it made him feel the need to lie down in a dark room. In the meantime, we went on using the 2006-7 list. About a year ago we ran out of copies to give to customers (it is on the website, but not all of our customers like using computers). It was embarrassing, although I'm not sure which was more embarrassing, giving people a list that was five years out of date, or not having a list at all. Last autumn the manager announced that he was now authorised to update the plant list, following which nothing happened. However, the Word document has finally made it off the office computer and into the light of day, and the manager has started crossing entries off in pencil. Of course by now there will be other plants to add, as the list has grown since early 2010. Still, it's progress.
The owner suddenly announced that we really were going to get on with the garden guide ready for the coming season. The gardener drew a rather good map of the garden about two years ago, and last spring I produced some text, and the whole project quietly went into hibernation, but now we are on to a revised map to allow for changes that have been made to the garden since the original one was drawn, and revised text (including where I had put some trees in the wrong place, but I did write it at home without the benefit of a planting plan or the ability to nip outside and check). The idea is to have a fairly plain guide in year one, that's not too expensive to produce, and go on to something glossier when we've tested it on the public, and had the chance to iron out any glitches.
A customer rang up wanting to reserve some plants, who turned out to be called Pennyfeather, which she carefully spelt for me saying it was ususual, and it turned out that she was not aware of the Eveleyn Waugh character Paul Pennyfeather. How can you reach adulthood with the name Pennyfeather and not have come across your namesake in Decline and Fall? She seemed pleased to hear that a Pennyfeather had been immortalised in literature, but maybe she was being polite and was privately bewildered. Another customer rang wanting to pay for a plant that had been the subject of a protracted exchange of e-mails with one of my colleagues. No plant had actually been reserved, but fortunately we still had some. The e-mails appeared to have been deleted. The manager asked me why my colleague should have done that, and I explained that if I were a cynical person I would say it was to ensure that things worked smoothly when they were there, and not so much when they weren't, thereby reinforcing their image of being indispensable. However, as I am not a cynical person of course I did not think any such thing.
It's good to be back.
Sunday, 8 January 2012
visit from the sparrowhawk
Looking out of the sitting room window this morning, I saw a pile of grey pigeon feathers by the little oak tree. We must have had a visit from a sparrowhawk, for I can't think what else would stop to pluck its prey that close to the house. A fox, if it managed to get a pigeon, would surely take it away into the woods, and as I know from those odd times when the cats have caught pigeons (I'm sure they were very old and ill pigeons) cats don't bother to pluck them. I noticed yesterday afternoon that there were periods when the bird table was suddenly completely deserted, and wondered then if there were some predator about, though it could just have been one of the cats. Some people who feed the birds get very upset when sparrowhawks take any of 'their' birds, but while I'd rather sparrowhawks ate pigeons than blue tits or robins (there are too many pigeons around here. They cause damage to crops and gardens, and although it is a strictly subjective judgement, I find the noise they make quite annoying), I think to have raptors in your garden is thrilling. The owls were calling vigorously last night, and I like them too. They eat voles, which are the enemies of gardeners as they eat crocus bulbs and chew through bark and kill branches, if not whole young trees, so the vole's enemy is my friend, but I like owls anyway.
The wind had dropped and the air outside suddenly felt pleasant to breathe again. Shoots of the dwarf iris are visible through the gravel, and the buds on the two shrubs I bought eight days ago, that have been sitting in the front garden waiting to be planted, have swelled visibly since I brought them home. The world is stirring. I would not call it spring, exactly, not on 8 January, and there could be cold weather to come (I do hope not. It could cause a lot of damage, the way plants are coming out of dormancy), but things are on the move. I never know how to respond to non-gardeners who blithely assume that of course in January I won't be doing anything outside. Weather permitting, it is always a busy time of year, and the earth feels anything but dead.
As I was feeling stronger and the weather was kinder I did a run to the dump at Clacton. It is just off Jaywick Lane, not the most salubrious spot. There was an armed robbery at a farm shop in Jaywick Lane five days ago, and Jaywick itself was the most deprived place in England in 2010 according to the Multiple Index of Deprivation released last March. That places it bottom among 32,482 neighbourhoods, based on statistics for income, employment, health, disability, crime, and living standards. As the leader of Tendring District Council said, that's quite an embarrassment for somewhere only sixty miles from London. Jaywick has a beautiful beach, and if history had worked out differently it could be a thriving retirement or commuter town. Unfortunately, it has a legacy of very grotty (though historically interesting) housing left over from the interwar Plotlands movement, which by now are homes to some very troubled people. Still, everybody at the dump was carefully putting their carloads of stuff into the right containers like exemplary citizens. I did a woodland talk at Jaywick, a few years ago, and the audience were perfectly nice. In fact, they gave me a donation for the charity above the going rate, which was generous but unnecessary, and I did notice on the letter they'd sent me confirming the booking that they received funding from Essex Council. Groups which have to raise every last penny themselves from membership dues and fund raising events tend to be more frugal about how they spend it.
Then, as the trip to the dump hadn't prostrated me, I move more iris, and some asters. I am absolutely sure that now is not the right time to be disturbing asters, but I had a clump that turned out to be shorter than I was expecting. Either I hadn't read the label properly, or the description at the nursery where I bought them was wrong, so they'd ended up too far back in a bed for their diminutive height, and I wanted to move them to the front of that bed, and replace them with another taller aster that I'd optimistically tucked in by a rose bush in the front garden and which turned out to barely see the light of day, poor thing. I really don't want to save all this rejigging until March or April, when the soil would be warming up, the asters starting into active growth, and it would be officially the right time to do the job. I want to get those two beds weeded, replanted, mulched and sorted, ideally by the end of February. I'll let you know if the asters survive the experience.
The wind had dropped and the air outside suddenly felt pleasant to breathe again. Shoots of the dwarf iris are visible through the gravel, and the buds on the two shrubs I bought eight days ago, that have been sitting in the front garden waiting to be planted, have swelled visibly since I brought them home. The world is stirring. I would not call it spring, exactly, not on 8 January, and there could be cold weather to come (I do hope not. It could cause a lot of damage, the way plants are coming out of dormancy), but things are on the move. I never know how to respond to non-gardeners who blithely assume that of course in January I won't be doing anything outside. Weather permitting, it is always a busy time of year, and the earth feels anything but dead.
As I was feeling stronger and the weather was kinder I did a run to the dump at Clacton. It is just off Jaywick Lane, not the most salubrious spot. There was an armed robbery at a farm shop in Jaywick Lane five days ago, and Jaywick itself was the most deprived place in England in 2010 according to the Multiple Index of Deprivation released last March. That places it bottom among 32,482 neighbourhoods, based on statistics for income, employment, health, disability, crime, and living standards. As the leader of Tendring District Council said, that's quite an embarrassment for somewhere only sixty miles from London. Jaywick has a beautiful beach, and if history had worked out differently it could be a thriving retirement or commuter town. Unfortunately, it has a legacy of very grotty (though historically interesting) housing left over from the interwar Plotlands movement, which by now are homes to some very troubled people. Still, everybody at the dump was carefully putting their carloads of stuff into the right containers like exemplary citizens. I did a woodland talk at Jaywick, a few years ago, and the audience were perfectly nice. In fact, they gave me a donation for the charity above the going rate, which was generous but unnecessary, and I did notice on the letter they'd sent me confirming the booking that they received funding from Essex Council. Groups which have to raise every last penny themselves from membership dues and fund raising events tend to be more frugal about how they spend it.
Then, as the trip to the dump hadn't prostrated me, I move more iris, and some asters. I am absolutely sure that now is not the right time to be disturbing asters, but I had a clump that turned out to be shorter than I was expecting. Either I hadn't read the label properly, or the description at the nursery where I bought them was wrong, so they'd ended up too far back in a bed for their diminutive height, and I wanted to move them to the front of that bed, and replace them with another taller aster that I'd optimistically tucked in by a rose bush in the front garden and which turned out to barely see the light of day, poor thing. I really don't want to save all this rejigging until March or April, when the soil would be warming up, the asters starting into active growth, and it would be officially the right time to do the job. I want to get those two beds weeded, replanted, mulched and sorted, ideally by the end of February. I'll let you know if the asters survive the experience.
Saturday, 7 January 2012
learning from experience
The birds have not eaten all of the seed bought from the farm shop. It turns out to contain what looks like wheat, and some large round seeds I can't identify but which don't seem palatable to song birds, or even starlings. I have encountered the same problem with what looked like a giant bargain bag of wild bird food I got in the feed store when I was buying layers' pellets for the chickens. The Systems Administrator bought the current lot, believing that a bag of bird food for a pound was worth trying, despite my muttered warnings about the last batch of cheap seed. Fortunately the farm shop bag is quite small, and a pound is not a costly experiment. As we agreed, you only find out by trying.
The need to find out by trying seems deeply ingrained into human nature. Tove Jansson, best known to many English readers for her Moomin stories (I still have my copies safely tucked away in the small spare bedroom) wrote for grown-ups as well, and one of her novels, The Summer Book, was serialised on R4 a while back. I liked it so much I immediately bought a copy, and the unabridged original turned out to be even better than the radio version (not always the case, as with the memoirs of Robert Graves' son, which on the radio was an entertaining account of artistic expatriate life in the Med, and in full turned out to include the entire line-up of every jazz band he ever played in). The Summer Book has also entranced everybody I've ever given a copy to, which hasn't always been the case with books I've liked and decided to share. Not much happens, mind you. A little girl and her father and grandmother spend the summer on the family holiday house on a small island. That's about it. One of the episodes which has always stuck in my mind as a universal truth is when the grandmother and little girl row over to a nearby island to introduce themselves to the new family there. The recent arrivals announce their intention of building a landing stage, and the grandmother warns them not to do so, as the winter ice will saw through the legs and destroy it. Rowing back to her own island she tells the child that they will build one, of course, because people always do.
I put out the last of the lard porridge, and put more lard in the Aga to melt to make some more. Fortunately, given I forgot to mention it, this time the SA remembered to look in the simmer oven before putting the lunch in to heat up. Look before you leap, in this house. So never throw logs into a log basket before checking there isn't a cat curled up in it, and never sit on a chair in the dark. The black cat has a tactful habit of purring if you come near him in the bottom of a basket or on a chair (black cat on black leather not the most obvious contrast), or squeaking politely if he thinks maybe you really are going to sit down. His sister, the fat tabby, likes to lie in the middle of the steps between the upper and lower sitting rooms, which can be a trap to the unwary.
Today, for the second day running, I have taken the responsible course and stayed indoors. This feels like (and is) a terrible waste of good gardening weather, but my cold has lodged firmly on my chest. I would like it to clear up as soon as possible, and have to admit that staggering around the garden in a cold wind is unlikely to help. The acid test is that I don't honestly feel up to it. I picked up the camellia pots when I topped up the bird table, and watered them, and those few minutes outside were enough to convince me that this was not the right place to be. I'd be happier if it were raining, because then I wouldn't feel I was missing out. The cold can't be too bad, then. The SA claims to only start seriously worrying about my illnesses at the point when I stop grumbling about them. I try not to take the cold personally, and remember the words of Don Marquis (an early twentieth century American poet, unaccountably overlooked nowadays) 'Men curse germs, but a germ thinks of a man only as a swamp in which he has to live'.
Addendum We watched Winter's Bone last night, one of last year's crop of films, about a seventeen year old girl from a desperately poor part of rural Missouri, searching for her father, who has skipped a court appearance for drugs offences after putting up the family house as bail. It reviewed brilliantly at the time, and Dr Kermode regarded it as his third favourite for the Oscars. It is a very, very good film at several levels, and I recommend it highly. Admittedly, it is not very cheerful (the SA said it made Fish Tank look like Bambi, but I don't think it was that much more depressing), but it was that or an indie film about an Iranian rock band.
The need to find out by trying seems deeply ingrained into human nature. Tove Jansson, best known to many English readers for her Moomin stories (I still have my copies safely tucked away in the small spare bedroom) wrote for grown-ups as well, and one of her novels, The Summer Book, was serialised on R4 a while back. I liked it so much I immediately bought a copy, and the unabridged original turned out to be even better than the radio version (not always the case, as with the memoirs of Robert Graves' son, which on the radio was an entertaining account of artistic expatriate life in the Med, and in full turned out to include the entire line-up of every jazz band he ever played in). The Summer Book has also entranced everybody I've ever given a copy to, which hasn't always been the case with books I've liked and decided to share. Not much happens, mind you. A little girl and her father and grandmother spend the summer on the family holiday house on a small island. That's about it. One of the episodes which has always stuck in my mind as a universal truth is when the grandmother and little girl row over to a nearby island to introduce themselves to the new family there. The recent arrivals announce their intention of building a landing stage, and the grandmother warns them not to do so, as the winter ice will saw through the legs and destroy it. Rowing back to her own island she tells the child that they will build one, of course, because people always do.
I put out the last of the lard porridge, and put more lard in the Aga to melt to make some more. Fortunately, given I forgot to mention it, this time the SA remembered to look in the simmer oven before putting the lunch in to heat up. Look before you leap, in this house. So never throw logs into a log basket before checking there isn't a cat curled up in it, and never sit on a chair in the dark. The black cat has a tactful habit of purring if you come near him in the bottom of a basket or on a chair (black cat on black leather not the most obvious contrast), or squeaking politely if he thinks maybe you really are going to sit down. His sister, the fat tabby, likes to lie in the middle of the steps between the upper and lower sitting rooms, which can be a trap to the unwary.
Today, for the second day running, I have taken the responsible course and stayed indoors. This feels like (and is) a terrible waste of good gardening weather, but my cold has lodged firmly on my chest. I would like it to clear up as soon as possible, and have to admit that staggering around the garden in a cold wind is unlikely to help. The acid test is that I don't honestly feel up to it. I picked up the camellia pots when I topped up the bird table, and watered them, and those few minutes outside were enough to convince me that this was not the right place to be. I'd be happier if it were raining, because then I wouldn't feel I was missing out. The cold can't be too bad, then. The SA claims to only start seriously worrying about my illnesses at the point when I stop grumbling about them. I try not to take the cold personally, and remember the words of Don Marquis (an early twentieth century American poet, unaccountably overlooked nowadays) 'Men curse germs, but a germ thinks of a man only as a swamp in which he has to live'.
Addendum We watched Winter's Bone last night, one of last year's crop of films, about a seventeen year old girl from a desperately poor part of rural Missouri, searching for her father, who has skipped a court appearance for drugs offences after putting up the family house as bail. It reviewed brilliantly at the time, and Dr Kermode regarded it as his third favourite for the Oscars. It is a very, very good film at several levels, and I recommend it highly. Admittedly, it is not very cheerful (the SA said it made Fish Tank look like Bambi, but I don't think it was that much more depressing), but it was that or an indie film about an Iranian rock band.
Friday, 6 January 2012
tempted by catalogues
The new year brings spring catalogues from Broadleigh Gardens and Avon Bulbs. I see that this year will be the last that Broadleigh exhibit at Chelsea, as owner Lady Skelmersdale has decided that 40 Chelsea exhibits will be enough. I have been to every Chelsea since the mid 1980s. If I were to go down to the garage and check my boxes of old RHS magazines I suppose I could work out the exact year I started, but I think I narrowly pip the Systems Administrator's record of continuous attendance at every Cheltenham race meeting since 1987. That means I've seen over 25 of Broadleigh's stands. They have always been wonderful, and I shall miss them. I can still remember Beth Chatto's exhibits, skilful displays of naturalistic planting, and she packed in Chelsea a good few years ago. Still, I suppose somebody has to retire to make room for new blood.
The agapanthus are tempting. Katherine Swift in The Morville Year has a clever trick for managing them in pots, which I pass on for those of you who aren't going to read the book, but might wish to grow potted agapanthus. She says that once potbound they are practically impossible to extract, so she grows them in plastic pots already slit down both sides, placed inside a second plastic pot of the same size. When she does need to get them out of their pot it just peels away. It is such a reasonable sounding idea, I would adopt it myself, if it weren't that I grow everything for long term display in terracotta, which I like aesthetically and believe it helps keep the roots cool.
The Allium tuberosum, or Chinese chives, sound nice as well. This is a late flowering, white form, excellent for wildlife, which I admired at the wildlife day at Beth Chatto last summer, as did a friend who liked it so much she bought a potful, and has kindly given me an envelope of seeds. If they germinate as readily as ordinary chives I should soon have lots. No need to buy Allium tuberosum, then.
Maybe I should have some more white Dodecatheon, commonly known as 'shooting stars' (although not at the plant centre where it is known as Dodecatheon.) It is a woodlander with flowers like drooping cyclamen. I have one, originally bought to go in the porch in spring close to eye level, so that I could admire it at close quarters, but it began to languish in its pot and was planted out by the ditch at the bottom of the garden, where it seems happier. One looks a bit lonely. Stingy, even. Maybe I should have several. The temptation always with catalogues is to want to try as many different and exciting plants as possible, when for maximum garden impact it might be better just to choose one plant, and blow the entire budget on buying lots of them (or at least several. Buying lots tends to require a bigger budget than mine).
I'm fairly sure I'll pass on the named varieties of snowdrops. They are interesting, and beautiful, and I'm happy to look at other people's, and might even try and get organised to go this year to the RHS London show in mid February, where there are always excellent displays of rare and choice snowdrops and cyclamen. But however delightful 'Ophelia', 'Straffan' and 'Green Brush' are (£7, £6 and £15 each respectively) I couldn't buy enough to make any difference at all to the garden. And they'd probably get dug up by voles when I wasn't looking, or the birds would scratch out the label and I'd lose them. Unless you have a collector's mind, and I haven't, despite loving many plants and being curious about them, a great big box of common Galanthus nivalis is a much better investment in a large, wild and woolly garden like ours. I skipped a year of planting snowdrops last year, as there were so many other jobs to do clearing up after the damage caused by two bad winters on the trot, but this year I might get some.
Avon Bulbs catalogue opens with their named snowdrops, which look equally lovely and, from my perspective, pointless. £25 each for 'Fuzz' and 'Galadriel', £20 for 'Welshway' or 'Wasp'. I think not. They have a wide selection of Eucomis, or pineapple flowers, so called because of the tuft of green leaves on top of each flower. That presupposes that they do flower, and mine didn't, last summer. I think I need to feed them, and maybe repot them into fresh compost each spring. The bulbs are slightly tender, and need to be kept dry in winter, so mine are tucked away under the greenhouse staging. I have to admit that there isn't a great deal of room under the staging, what with the over-wintering pots of dahlias, and lilies, and Eucomis, and the hyacinths that I'm keeping under cover this winter after their basal plates rotted outside last year. Better not go mad buying Eucomis, then. The alternative would be to get a second greenhouse, except that I don't have time to look after any more pots than will cram into the existing one, and I don't want to have to heat a second. At least I have a greenhouse. Katherine Swift hasn't, which means that in winter she shares her beautiful house with umpteen pots of orange trees and potted myrtles.
The agapanthus are tempting. Katherine Swift in The Morville Year has a clever trick for managing them in pots, which I pass on for those of you who aren't going to read the book, but might wish to grow potted agapanthus. She says that once potbound they are practically impossible to extract, so she grows them in plastic pots already slit down both sides, placed inside a second plastic pot of the same size. When she does need to get them out of their pot it just peels away. It is such a reasonable sounding idea, I would adopt it myself, if it weren't that I grow everything for long term display in terracotta, which I like aesthetically and believe it helps keep the roots cool.
The Allium tuberosum, or Chinese chives, sound nice as well. This is a late flowering, white form, excellent for wildlife, which I admired at the wildlife day at Beth Chatto last summer, as did a friend who liked it so much she bought a potful, and has kindly given me an envelope of seeds. If they germinate as readily as ordinary chives I should soon have lots. No need to buy Allium tuberosum, then.
Maybe I should have some more white Dodecatheon, commonly known as 'shooting stars' (although not at the plant centre where it is known as Dodecatheon.) It is a woodlander with flowers like drooping cyclamen. I have one, originally bought to go in the porch in spring close to eye level, so that I could admire it at close quarters, but it began to languish in its pot and was planted out by the ditch at the bottom of the garden, where it seems happier. One looks a bit lonely. Stingy, even. Maybe I should have several. The temptation always with catalogues is to want to try as many different and exciting plants as possible, when for maximum garden impact it might be better just to choose one plant, and blow the entire budget on buying lots of them (or at least several. Buying lots tends to require a bigger budget than mine).
I'm fairly sure I'll pass on the named varieties of snowdrops. They are interesting, and beautiful, and I'm happy to look at other people's, and might even try and get organised to go this year to the RHS London show in mid February, where there are always excellent displays of rare and choice snowdrops and cyclamen. But however delightful 'Ophelia', 'Straffan' and 'Green Brush' are (£7, £6 and £15 each respectively) I couldn't buy enough to make any difference at all to the garden. And they'd probably get dug up by voles when I wasn't looking, or the birds would scratch out the label and I'd lose them. Unless you have a collector's mind, and I haven't, despite loving many plants and being curious about them, a great big box of common Galanthus nivalis is a much better investment in a large, wild and woolly garden like ours. I skipped a year of planting snowdrops last year, as there were so many other jobs to do clearing up after the damage caused by two bad winters on the trot, but this year I might get some.
Avon Bulbs catalogue opens with their named snowdrops, which look equally lovely and, from my perspective, pointless. £25 each for 'Fuzz' and 'Galadriel', £20 for 'Welshway' or 'Wasp'. I think not. They have a wide selection of Eucomis, or pineapple flowers, so called because of the tuft of green leaves on top of each flower. That presupposes that they do flower, and mine didn't, last summer. I think I need to feed them, and maybe repot them into fresh compost each spring. The bulbs are slightly tender, and need to be kept dry in winter, so mine are tucked away under the greenhouse staging. I have to admit that there isn't a great deal of room under the staging, what with the over-wintering pots of dahlias, and lilies, and Eucomis, and the hyacinths that I'm keeping under cover this winter after their basal plates rotted outside last year. Better not go mad buying Eucomis, then. The alternative would be to get a second greenhouse, except that I don't have time to look after any more pots than will cram into the existing one, and I don't want to have to heat a second. At least I have a greenhouse. Katherine Swift hasn't, which means that in winter she shares her beautiful house with umpteen pots of orange trees and potted myrtles.
Thursday, 5 January 2012
gales stopped play
Another lump of wind is blowing through, and the QEII bridge at Dartford is shut again. Lucky we didn't want to go anywhere. The gale was forecast, and I hadn't picked up the camellia pots since the previous one, on the basis that they'd be better off lying down. My chest is worse too. It's a nice question whether that is my own fault, for going out yesterday, or if it would have got worse anyway. I suppose to find out you'd need to get a large number of volunteers to keep a diary each time they caught a cold, recording the duration and severity of each symptom (tight chest, sore throat, streaming nose, sinus pain, swollen glands, lethargy, enhanced stupidity) and what they did during that period (level of physical exertion, time spent outside, ambient temperature, exposure to air conditioning, stress level, diet) and see if you can find any statistically significant connections. In the meantime everyone will go on believing what they want to believe, so I believe that activity is fine as long as you feel like it (because inactivity is dull), and somebody I used to work with always claimed to know who had given her the cold (which given that she travelled by public transport twice a day was quite a feat).
At least I have the Christmas books. I've finished Katherine Swift's The Morville Year, a series of short essays about her garden based on her Times column. The garden, which she created around an old and distinguished house leased from the National Trust, is beautiful and elaborate, with clipped evergreens, old roses, trained fruit, areas of long grass, bees in old fashioned WBC hives, formal pools and a turf maze. Her prose is beautiful and elaborate as well, something to be taken a few bites at a time, like a box of very rich and expensive chocolates, rather than gobbled down in one sitting (like maltesers). It was written to be read in small weekly doses, so that's fair enough, and it's much posher than anything I could do myself, as is the garden. A nice book. A paperback edition will be coming out in March.
Now I've turned my attention to Designing the Seaside by Fred Gray. I'm not sure how I became aware of this one. It's been out since 2006, and still has no reviews on Amazon. I think it probably came up on a 'people who bought X also bought Y' Amazon initiated search, and I thought the subject sounded interesting. I like the seaside. Childhood outings were to Exmouth or Sidmouth more frequently than to the more iconic Dartmoor, and looking through the index of Designing the Seaside, the Systems Administrator and I have visited the following seaside resorts (that is 'visited' in the sense of having spent some time looking at them, rather than having driven through them on the way to somewhere else (Great Yarmouth) or used the marina overnight and pushed off first thing in the morning (Poole)): Blankenberghe, Bournemouth, Brighton, Brixham, Clacton-on-Sea, Cromer, Eastbourne, Llandudno, Ostend, Paignton, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Ramsgate, Scarborough, Southwold, St Ives, Wells-next-the-Sea and Weymouth. He doesn't mention Aldeburgh, Bridlington or Whitstable, but I think they count as Seaside (Designed) as well. I'm not sure about Whitby, or if it is more of a Port.
Designing the Seaside starts off with the development of Brighton as a resort and takes it from there, looking at seaside architecture, who went to the seaside, what they did, how it was marketed, and why it declined in the UK. The book contains some interesting stuff, both facts and ideas, and is generously illustrated with really good pictures, of old photographs, contemporary drawings, postcards, promotional posters and leaflets. It reads slightly stiffly, not with the easy narrative trot of a popular historian like Peter Hennessey or David Kynaston, and I began to wonder who Fred Gray was, and if he might possibly be a sociologist. I tracked him down easily enough at the University of Sussex, where he is Emeritus Professor of Continuing Education. That didn't really tell me a lot. Prior to that he was The Academic Director of Local and Regional Relationships, and before that the Dean of the Sussex Institute, which included the Centre for Continuing Education and the Departments of Education, Law and Social Work. Finally I discovered that by training he is a geographer. He must be astute in the dark arts of university politics, because despite being Emeritus he still has an office in university premises (Centre for Community Engagement).
I actually loved Geography at school. I know it is not considered a real subject by rigorous academics, because it is all little bits borrowed from other disciplines, like geology, soil science, economics, history, archaeology, climate study, architecture and sociology (though if you take that attitude to geography you probably don't count sociology a real subject either). I don't mind that at all. The fashion for at least the past half century has been for experts to know more and more about increasingly narrow specialisms. We need some people who will hazard a view about how the specialisms fit together. And I would recommend Designing the Seaside, if you are interested in that sort of thing, though the pictures are better than the prose.
At least I have the Christmas books. I've finished Katherine Swift's The Morville Year, a series of short essays about her garden based on her Times column. The garden, which she created around an old and distinguished house leased from the National Trust, is beautiful and elaborate, with clipped evergreens, old roses, trained fruit, areas of long grass, bees in old fashioned WBC hives, formal pools and a turf maze. Her prose is beautiful and elaborate as well, something to be taken a few bites at a time, like a box of very rich and expensive chocolates, rather than gobbled down in one sitting (like maltesers). It was written to be read in small weekly doses, so that's fair enough, and it's much posher than anything I could do myself, as is the garden. A nice book. A paperback edition will be coming out in March.
Now I've turned my attention to Designing the Seaside by Fred Gray. I'm not sure how I became aware of this one. It's been out since 2006, and still has no reviews on Amazon. I think it probably came up on a 'people who bought X also bought Y' Amazon initiated search, and I thought the subject sounded interesting. I like the seaside. Childhood outings were to Exmouth or Sidmouth more frequently than to the more iconic Dartmoor, and looking through the index of Designing the Seaside, the Systems Administrator and I have visited the following seaside resorts (that is 'visited' in the sense of having spent some time looking at them, rather than having driven through them on the way to somewhere else (Great Yarmouth) or used the marina overnight and pushed off first thing in the morning (Poole)): Blankenberghe, Bournemouth, Brighton, Brixham, Clacton-on-Sea, Cromer, Eastbourne, Llandudno, Ostend, Paignton, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Ramsgate, Scarborough, Southwold, St Ives, Wells-next-the-Sea and Weymouth. He doesn't mention Aldeburgh, Bridlington or Whitstable, but I think they count as Seaside (Designed) as well. I'm not sure about Whitby, or if it is more of a Port.
Designing the Seaside starts off with the development of Brighton as a resort and takes it from there, looking at seaside architecture, who went to the seaside, what they did, how it was marketed, and why it declined in the UK. The book contains some interesting stuff, both facts and ideas, and is generously illustrated with really good pictures, of old photographs, contemporary drawings, postcards, promotional posters and leaflets. It reads slightly stiffly, not with the easy narrative trot of a popular historian like Peter Hennessey or David Kynaston, and I began to wonder who Fred Gray was, and if he might possibly be a sociologist. I tracked him down easily enough at the University of Sussex, where he is Emeritus Professor of Continuing Education. That didn't really tell me a lot. Prior to that he was The Academic Director of Local and Regional Relationships, and before that the Dean of the Sussex Institute, which included the Centre for Continuing Education and the Departments of Education, Law and Social Work. Finally I discovered that by training he is a geographer. He must be astute in the dark arts of university politics, because despite being Emeritus he still has an office in university premises (Centre for Community Engagement).
I actually loved Geography at school. I know it is not considered a real subject by rigorous academics, because it is all little bits borrowed from other disciplines, like geology, soil science, economics, history, archaeology, climate study, architecture and sociology (though if you take that attitude to geography you probably don't count sociology a real subject either). I don't mind that at all. The fashion for at least the past half century has been for experts to know more and more about increasingly narrow specialisms. We need some people who will hazard a view about how the specialisms fit together. And I would recommend Designing the Seaside, if you are interested in that sort of thing, though the pictures are better than the prose.
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
the wrong time to move iris
Yesterday's wind blew the camellia pots over, and ripped the staples holding the feet of the Zimbabwean recycled metal secretary bird clean out of the deck. By this morning it had dropped, and I decided my cold didn't feel too bad, and I might as well get on in the garden. This may have been a very silly decision, given that the temperature was below 8 degrees C at lunchtime, and there was still a brisk breeze. If by tomorrow I am a lot worse I will have to blame myself for not taking more care, but I was very well wrapped up. I generally take the view that if I feel like gardening, I'm OK to garden, and if I don't feel up to it, I'll stay inside by the stove and not force myself. That is the luxury of doing gardening as a hobby rather than a job, and solely for your own private pleasure. I don't have a Yellow Book opening date to meet, or an Open Gardens Weekend in six months' time to worry about, and I'm not trying to impress the neighbours. In fact, I am reconciled to the fact that the garden will always be wild and weedy. I have about three days a week maximum to devote to it, given everything else. The Systems Administrator mows the lawns and weighs in with heavy pruning and construction projects, and bonfires, but doesn't get involved with the plants. In all it gets four person days a week, tops, and it could easily do with double that, given its size and complexity.
I am still working my way down the long bed in the front garden. The leaves of some of the grape hyacinths are showing in great tufts, and I tucked mushroom compost carefully around them. I started replanting the bearded iris. Early January is quite the wrong time to do this. The books say July is the optimum time, after flowering, or that it may be done in March but will affect that year's flowering, but I decided to dig them up anyway. In the first place, they were mixed up with the roots of that wretched running grass, and the only way to get the bed clean was to lift them, and I didn't want to leave odd weedy patches until July, or even March. Secondly , I think beared iris are pretty tough. Whenever I've divided them there have always been bits left over, and the scrappy rhizomes thrown on the compost heap, not even planted, cling to life for an extremely long time. Also, the soil can't be that cold. It has been a very mild winter, and we've scarcely had any penetrating frosts. Finally, the drainage in that bed is so sharp I reckon I can get away with a lot when it comes to rhizomes. If they all die, I'll have learnt something, and so will you, if I confess to it on the blog. I'll have to get some more, or else decide that two to three weeks of sublime flowers and nothing else for the rest of the year is not a good use of the space, and plant something else.
As I weeded I collected the stones I forked up. Irregular ones go on the path by the dustbins, which is making steady progress, and it no longer seems a ludicrous idea that I might collect enough stones to cover it completely. Round pebbles go in the middle of the turning circle, at the end loosely themed as beach. Flints go in the dry garden by the entrance, which I have decided needs to be much flintier. I know I have a cache of flints nestling under a hedge, where I put them after digging them up in the course of laying some paving, so I must go and retrieve some more of them. I found a beautiful very large one in the root plate of a tree that fell years ago in the wood, though sadly it has some chips. My cousin who is a retired geologist has a fine one, and so had a farmer I knew, which I think he found ploughing, so it seems to be a widespread interest. Henry Moore collected them.
I had a very nice day. I don't know how to explain that to anyone who is not themselves a keen gardener, since objectively speaking it ought to be miserable, forking roots out of wretched poor soil and spreading handfuls of wet and smelly straw and manure over it, on a cold windy day, stopping sometimes to stoop and pick up stones, with a chest cold. If it weren't my own garden and I'd been doing it as a job I'd have been counting the hours until it was time to pack up. And yet it is largely the process that I enjoy, since the product will never be perfect, or finished. It is a project. An idea. A dream. It is how I play.
I am still working my way down the long bed in the front garden. The leaves of some of the grape hyacinths are showing in great tufts, and I tucked mushroom compost carefully around them. I started replanting the bearded iris. Early January is quite the wrong time to do this. The books say July is the optimum time, after flowering, or that it may be done in March but will affect that year's flowering, but I decided to dig them up anyway. In the first place, they were mixed up with the roots of that wretched running grass, and the only way to get the bed clean was to lift them, and I didn't want to leave odd weedy patches until July, or even March. Secondly , I think beared iris are pretty tough. Whenever I've divided them there have always been bits left over, and the scrappy rhizomes thrown on the compost heap, not even planted, cling to life for an extremely long time. Also, the soil can't be that cold. It has been a very mild winter, and we've scarcely had any penetrating frosts. Finally, the drainage in that bed is so sharp I reckon I can get away with a lot when it comes to rhizomes. If they all die, I'll have learnt something, and so will you, if I confess to it on the blog. I'll have to get some more, or else decide that two to three weeks of sublime flowers and nothing else for the rest of the year is not a good use of the space, and plant something else.
As I weeded I collected the stones I forked up. Irregular ones go on the path by the dustbins, which is making steady progress, and it no longer seems a ludicrous idea that I might collect enough stones to cover it completely. Round pebbles go in the middle of the turning circle, at the end loosely themed as beach. Flints go in the dry garden by the entrance, which I have decided needs to be much flintier. I know I have a cache of flints nestling under a hedge, where I put them after digging them up in the course of laying some paving, so I must go and retrieve some more of them. I found a beautiful very large one in the root plate of a tree that fell years ago in the wood, though sadly it has some chips. My cousin who is a retired geologist has a fine one, and so had a farmer I knew, which I think he found ploughing, so it seems to be a widespread interest. Henry Moore collected them.
I had a very nice day. I don't know how to explain that to anyone who is not themselves a keen gardener, since objectively speaking it ought to be miserable, forking roots out of wretched poor soil and spreading handfuls of wet and smelly straw and manure over it, on a cold windy day, stopping sometimes to stoop and pick up stones, with a chest cold. If it weren't my own garden and I'd been doing it as a job I'd have been counting the hours until it was time to pack up. And yet it is largely the process that I enjoy, since the product will never be perfect, or finished. It is a project. An idea. A dream. It is how I play.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
after the party
The remnants of Christmas have been cleared away. The last four cheese stars went on the bird table. The cards have been taken down, the greenery put on the bonfire, the festive tablecloths put in the wash, the tree dismantled, and the radiator in the sitting room turned off as we retreat to the study. Does anybody wait until Twelth Night nowadays? The Christmas season seems to begin so long before Christmas these days that by the end of the New Year Bank holiday it ought to be over. The shops have probably got their Easter stuff in by now. Tradition is all very well, but the decorations would have overstayed their welcome by Friday.
Even so, it's sad taking them down. I checked one last time through the cards, putting aside those that have useful bits of information in them, like new addresses, telephone numbers, and reminders of what stage of schooling and university people's children have got to (or indeed their names). It's particularly sad taking down the tree, though it shouldn't be. Apart from the fact that the needles would have started to fall off pretty soon (they hung on well. Fresh tree, cold house), it was already starting to shower the room with small winged seeds as the cones opened. And I'd get bored with it, if it were there all the time. So the special glass baubles all went back into their dedicated boxes, the red and clear drops from Heals into long thin trays with internal card dividers and a concertina of tissue paper, the big Polish balls into a square box like a cake carton. The heavier and scratchier decorations go in the bottom of another box, the bread and butter baubles on top of those, and the most delicate of the rest form the top layer, along with a red Ikea cookie cutter that we found as we were taking the tree outside. We always find one after taking the tree out, sometimes not spotting it for days.
I saved the cones in case they came in useful. I'm not exactly sure what they will be useful for, and in the meantime they will emit a steady stream of seeds, but it seemed a dreadful waste to burn them. If we were suddenly to build a rustic folly anywhere in the garden we would definitely need fir cones. All the best rustic summerhouses are decorated with them. The branches will be shredded, and used as mulch for the blueberry bushes, since conifer litter is acid and blueberries like acid conditions and dislike manure. The trunk will be sawn up and burnt in the stove, unless we have something that needs propping up, in which case it could have a second career as a pole. A couple of branches of the wild gean, that were sagging badly under the weight of the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', are supported with old rhododendron branches, to stop them from collapsing over the Mahonia japonica that was supposed to be growing in the shade of the gean (the Mahonia itself is collapsing over the clipped box that was supposed to be surrounding it as ground cover).
There is a last bit of Christmas food to eat up, as I made the chicken carcass into stock. That is one reason for buying free range birds, the fact that they have good strong bones and make proper stock that sets to a jelly when cold, quite apart from the welfare argument. I used half the stock just now for leek and potato soup, with an experimental squeeze of lemon juice, and the Systems Administrator was muttering about using the other half in a Thai soup or stew. It is blowing a hooley, and raining extremely hard from time to time, mixed with hail. I've never seen the surface of the pond whipped to a chop like that before. The cold I felt I might be fighting off through most of December began to develop on New Year's Eve and has got to a Dame Celia Molestrangler level of huskiness, so it could be an afternoon for the Christmas books. I am befuddled by not working yesterday and the day before, plus the cold, and keep feeling as though it should later in the week than Tuesday.
Even so, it's sad taking them down. I checked one last time through the cards, putting aside those that have useful bits of information in them, like new addresses, telephone numbers, and reminders of what stage of schooling and university people's children have got to (or indeed their names). It's particularly sad taking down the tree, though it shouldn't be. Apart from the fact that the needles would have started to fall off pretty soon (they hung on well. Fresh tree, cold house), it was already starting to shower the room with small winged seeds as the cones opened. And I'd get bored with it, if it were there all the time. So the special glass baubles all went back into their dedicated boxes, the red and clear drops from Heals into long thin trays with internal card dividers and a concertina of tissue paper, the big Polish balls into a square box like a cake carton. The heavier and scratchier decorations go in the bottom of another box, the bread and butter baubles on top of those, and the most delicate of the rest form the top layer, along with a red Ikea cookie cutter that we found as we were taking the tree outside. We always find one after taking the tree out, sometimes not spotting it for days.
I saved the cones in case they came in useful. I'm not exactly sure what they will be useful for, and in the meantime they will emit a steady stream of seeds, but it seemed a dreadful waste to burn them. If we were suddenly to build a rustic folly anywhere in the garden we would definitely need fir cones. All the best rustic summerhouses are decorated with them. The branches will be shredded, and used as mulch for the blueberry bushes, since conifer litter is acid and blueberries like acid conditions and dislike manure. The trunk will be sawn up and burnt in the stove, unless we have something that needs propping up, in which case it could have a second career as a pole. A couple of branches of the wild gean, that were sagging badly under the weight of the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', are supported with old rhododendron branches, to stop them from collapsing over the Mahonia japonica that was supposed to be growing in the shade of the gean (the Mahonia itself is collapsing over the clipped box that was supposed to be surrounding it as ground cover).
There is a last bit of Christmas food to eat up, as I made the chicken carcass into stock. That is one reason for buying free range birds, the fact that they have good strong bones and make proper stock that sets to a jelly when cold, quite apart from the welfare argument. I used half the stock just now for leek and potato soup, with an experimental squeeze of lemon juice, and the Systems Administrator was muttering about using the other half in a Thai soup or stew. It is blowing a hooley, and raining extremely hard from time to time, mixed with hail. I've never seen the surface of the pond whipped to a chop like that before. The cold I felt I might be fighting off through most of December began to develop on New Year's Eve and has got to a Dame Celia Molestrangler level of huskiness, so it could be an afternoon for the Christmas books. I am befuddled by not working yesterday and the day before, plus the cold, and keep feeling as though it should later in the week than Tuesday.
Monday, 2 January 2012
unfortunate failure of a Mexican orange blossom
The plant centre was closed again today, too. Pity, as Bank Holidays count for double pay. Still, I don't suppose we'd have got much trade, and I can't blame the owners for trimming wage costs where they can, in these hard times. I used the time in the garden instead. Radio weather forecasters kept saying that today was much colder than yesterday, with a chill wind, and it was.
I'm still working my way down the long bed in the front garden, and am getting into my stride. This is on extremely light soil in full sun, and some of my original plantings failed to thrive, while others that were good for a time got old and hideous, and so it's been a renovation project in places over the past year. A Choisya x dewitteana 'Aztec Pearl' came out more easily than I feared it might. It was a pick axe job, but an easy one. The poor thing never prospered from the outset, despite being periodically dosed with 6X, pelleted chicken manure and other stimulants. (Plants that have never done well tend not to have very good root systems, so it was not a total surprise that it didn't take all afternoon to dig out, but you never know. The worst shrubs to remove are generally things that have got huge, and are not yet dead). 'Aztec Pearl', well grown, is a vigorous shrub with dark green leaves. The firm who built my parents' house planted a couple in the front garden, and they have grown prodigously, and would entirely block the window of the downstairs loo without regular pruning. 'Aztec Pearl' has narrow leaves, and masses of scented white flowers, and when I planted it I liked the idea of it very much. However, for all that the RHS says that it's suitable for well drained soil and full sun, and drought tolerant, mine was an abject failure, stunted with yellowing leaves despite my encouragements. I think our front garden does take 'well drained' and 'drought' to new levels of meaning sometimes.
'Aztec Pearl' is one of those plants which the gardening establishment has mysteriously not taken to its bosom. I think that must be due to the enthusiasm with which mass housebuilders and supermarket car park designers have used it. OK, it doesn't have astonishing grace and poise, but a fast growing (in the right conditions) evergreen shrub with slender, divided, glossy dark leaves and scented flowers in spring that are attractive to insects is a reasonably pleasant prospect. However, Graham Stuart Thomas, having praised Choisya ternata, says sniffily 'As to the new hybrid 'Aztec Pearl', I can see little to recommend it'.
Most of the bearded iris seem to need dividing again. I feel that iris ought to be happy in the front garden, but mine seem to go straight from freshly replanted rhizomes to congested mats with stunted leaves, without bothering much about flowering in between. Whatever it is that they really, really want, I don't seem to be providing it, and I don't know quite what it is. Feeding? The soil is free draining, but also exceptionally infertile. It has done for Ballota before now, that are supposed to be such good dry garden plants.
There is a creeping weed grass here and there. I forked out what I could, but it has taken refuge over the years in the ivy hedge and under the yews, whose roots are so dense I could never extract all of the grass. I hit it with glyphosate, when I can avoid spraying the legitimate inhabitants of the bed, and keep it in check, but I never manage to eradicate it. I am almost an organic gardener (organic purists would reject that claim as meaningless, since to deviate even slightly from the righteous path is to fail entirely. Sometimes they chuck in the adage about how 'you can't be a little bit pregnant' for good measure). Anyway, I very rarely use chemicals in the garden, but spot treating creeping and difficult to get at weeds with glyphosate is one instance where I do find them helpful.
The sun shone beautifully, and the wind was frankly cold, and as I worked I mused on what to put in the gaps, without coming to any firm conclusions. I might try a shrubby, twisty branched Japanese cherry next to the golden pine. Another Japanese cherry, one with double flowers that I bought as a tiny rooted shrub from a now sadly defunt firm up in Norfolk, is doing quite well elsewhere in the bed, despite the sandy soil, and I think the twisty cherry and the pine would complement each other. I might leave some room for annuals. I don't normally do annuals, except for self seeding ones, mainly in the gravel, but I have a yen for some Cosmos, and they do very well in nearby gardens. In the winter I could have wallflowers. I adore wallflowers, which are one of the fondly remembered plants of my childhood. I'll see how much room is left by the time I've finished shuffling the iris about.
I'm still working my way down the long bed in the front garden, and am getting into my stride. This is on extremely light soil in full sun, and some of my original plantings failed to thrive, while others that were good for a time got old and hideous, and so it's been a renovation project in places over the past year. A Choisya x dewitteana 'Aztec Pearl' came out more easily than I feared it might. It was a pick axe job, but an easy one. The poor thing never prospered from the outset, despite being periodically dosed with 6X, pelleted chicken manure and other stimulants. (Plants that have never done well tend not to have very good root systems, so it was not a total surprise that it didn't take all afternoon to dig out, but you never know. The worst shrubs to remove are generally things that have got huge, and are not yet dead). 'Aztec Pearl', well grown, is a vigorous shrub with dark green leaves. The firm who built my parents' house planted a couple in the front garden, and they have grown prodigously, and would entirely block the window of the downstairs loo without regular pruning. 'Aztec Pearl' has narrow leaves, and masses of scented white flowers, and when I planted it I liked the idea of it very much. However, for all that the RHS says that it's suitable for well drained soil and full sun, and drought tolerant, mine was an abject failure, stunted with yellowing leaves despite my encouragements. I think our front garden does take 'well drained' and 'drought' to new levels of meaning sometimes.
'Aztec Pearl' is one of those plants which the gardening establishment has mysteriously not taken to its bosom. I think that must be due to the enthusiasm with which mass housebuilders and supermarket car park designers have used it. OK, it doesn't have astonishing grace and poise, but a fast growing (in the right conditions) evergreen shrub with slender, divided, glossy dark leaves and scented flowers in spring that are attractive to insects is a reasonably pleasant prospect. However, Graham Stuart Thomas, having praised Choisya ternata, says sniffily 'As to the new hybrid 'Aztec Pearl', I can see little to recommend it'.
Most of the bearded iris seem to need dividing again. I feel that iris ought to be happy in the front garden, but mine seem to go straight from freshly replanted rhizomes to congested mats with stunted leaves, without bothering much about flowering in between. Whatever it is that they really, really want, I don't seem to be providing it, and I don't know quite what it is. Feeding? The soil is free draining, but also exceptionally infertile. It has done for Ballota before now, that are supposed to be such good dry garden plants.
There is a creeping weed grass here and there. I forked out what I could, but it has taken refuge over the years in the ivy hedge and under the yews, whose roots are so dense I could never extract all of the grass. I hit it with glyphosate, when I can avoid spraying the legitimate inhabitants of the bed, and keep it in check, but I never manage to eradicate it. I am almost an organic gardener (organic purists would reject that claim as meaningless, since to deviate even slightly from the righteous path is to fail entirely. Sometimes they chuck in the adage about how 'you can't be a little bit pregnant' for good measure). Anyway, I very rarely use chemicals in the garden, but spot treating creeping and difficult to get at weeds with glyphosate is one instance where I do find them helpful.
The sun shone beautifully, and the wind was frankly cold, and as I worked I mused on what to put in the gaps, without coming to any firm conclusions. I might try a shrubby, twisty branched Japanese cherry next to the golden pine. Another Japanese cherry, one with double flowers that I bought as a tiny rooted shrub from a now sadly defunt firm up in Norfolk, is doing quite well elsewhere in the bed, despite the sandy soil, and I think the twisty cherry and the pine would complement each other. I might leave some room for annuals. I don't normally do annuals, except for self seeding ones, mainly in the gravel, but I have a yen for some Cosmos, and they do very well in nearby gardens. In the winter I could have wallflowers. I adore wallflowers, which are one of the fondly remembered plants of my childhood. I'll see how much room is left by the time I've finished shuffling the iris about.
Sunday, 1 January 2012
a new year's day garland
The plant centre is closed today and tomorrow, so this morning I got my wish and was out in the garden. I'd be there now, except that it has just started to rain, moderately hard. A colleague said yesterday that on Christmas day he'd counted twenty different flowers out in his garden. I don't go in for counts per se. They raise the question of how open a flower has to be to count as 'out', and how far over it can go and still be included in the tally, and the odd battered rose doesn't contribute anything to the garden scene, even if it is technically 'out'. However, before settling down to the fingertip weeding and mushroom compost spreading, I did wander around the garden looking at what was making a good display at the moment.
One of the main things I noticed on getting up when I opened the bathroom blind, and again as I walked around, was not the plants but the birds. Tits and blackbirds flew in all directions, with an air of urgency as if they had business to attend to, and there was quite a respectable chorus just after dawn. Once I started weeding the robins appeared. Music and movement. Birds add greatly to the garden scene, as well as being useful natural aphid controllers. We are lucky here, to be next to woodland and in old landscape with numerous hedges and among farms that leave generous headlands and wildlife strips (all paid for by stewardship schemes, no doubt). Customers at work who ask about insects on their roses are sometimes surprised when I ask about the bird life in their garden, and steer them to the bird food as much as the insecticides. Some may suspect I am some sort of eco crank, or maybe even taking the piss, but they don't really need chemical spray, they need blue tits.
It has been a wonderful winter for berries (it was a bumper year for acorns, too, but the sweet chestnut harvest was pitiful). Plenty of hips, berries and crab apples set, and the birds have been slow to strip the bushes. I presume that is down to the mild winter. In the front garden, Malus 'Red Sentinel' is still laden with little bright red apples, the crop so heavy that the branches are weeping under the weight. 'Comtessa de Paris' has a nice display of little yellow apples as well, though I see that a few are doing that irritiating thing of remaining on the branches after turning brown, instead of dropping. The ever-popular 'Hornet' that grew at Writtle was a horror for doing that, and I made a mental note not to grow it.
Ilex aquifolium 'Golden Milkboy' has got one of its best displays of berries ever. This is an intensely prickly variegated form splashed with yellow in the centre of each leaf. It is quite prone to reversion, and painfully slow growing, admittedly on starved sand in the front garden. I keep it clipped to try and make a nice, dense dome like those in the photos of the late Rosemary Verey's garden, but I think it needs feeding up. The yellow berried shrubby ivy has a reasonable show, and in the back garden Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus' is still a smother of yellow fruit. A crop like that has never lasted into the new year before (I hope that doesn't mean it's on its last legs and is trying to set seed before pegging it). There's a nice crop of red berries on a slender leafed Aucuba too. That may have appreciated my removing great chunks of a vigorous shrubby honeysuckle that had engulfed it. The sea buckthorn still has plenty of orange-yellow berries. They are never the birds' first choice.
Prunus subhirtella 'Autumnalis' is flowering, both the new one in the front garden, and the old one in the back scheduled for removal because it sits too wet and branches keep dying. I feel as though the condemned tree is trying to reproach me, or spoof me into giving it a stay of execution, but when the leaves open I'm sure there'll still be too many dead twigs in there. The Daphne bholua are almost out, the first few flowers on 'Jacqueline Postill' yielding their spicy scent. Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' is studded with pale pink flowers, and has been for a while. The winter iris are beginning to get into their stride.
More surprising, and showing the effect of the mild weather, a plain green leafed, pink and mauve flowered Pulmonaria is well out. There are a few scattered primroses, and some cyclamen, though not sheets of them. One oriental hellebore has started blooming, a pale greenish yellow form with plum spots on the petals, and a couple of stinking hellebore, Helleborus foetidus, are well under way producing their little yellowish flowers. I collected these as self sown seedlings from the bottom part of the garden and tucked them in among the shrub roses, where they seem happy in the dark rootiness, and I hope that they will spread.
Mahonia japonica is opening but not in full flood yet in the back garden, and in the front M. x media 'Winter Sun' is still flowering, and has been for an incredibly long time. Sarcocca confusa is well out, though the scent wasn't carrying as well as it did yesterday at work (or maybe I couldn't smell it because I am going down with a cold). I noticed in passing that the leaves looked a bit pale and yellow. I will give it a dose of Maxicrop with seaweed, which is a great tonic for most things. The Hamamelis are not quite there. Two flowers were just about 'out', if I'd been trying to boost my total, but the real garden display hasn't started yet. Camellia japonica 'Alba Simplex' is still producing its incredibly elegant white flowers, a few at a time, and C. japonica 'Flame' is starting to join in.
The perennial wallflower 'Bowles Mauve' still had some flowers on it, but they were doing nothing for the garden, and the time really had come to tidy the plant, so I cut them off. They just looked left over and tatty. A self sown Euphorbia characias in the gravel is ahead of itself, its small lime green flowers just opening. They were badly scorched by the last two winters, and are enjoying the mild one. The leaves on the new basal shoots of my Euphorbia x pasteurii 'John Phillips' have visibly expanded in recent weeks, and the whole plant has developed a lush, confident air. It will get a nasty shock, if things turn cold this month or next. Leaves are an under-rated part of the winter garden. Our various pines in the front garden are looking very handsome, Pinus sylvestris 'Aurea' turning a nice shade of dark yellow that is not at all sickly or ill-looking, and the leaves of the Cistus look very neat and trim. They are good winter plants, when it doesn't kill them.
The first snowdrop leaves are through, and you can sense plants stirring and the garden getting ready to burst into life. This is simultaneously heartening, and alarming, because there not now many weeks left in which to weed, mulch and get the ground tidy before everything's on the move.
One of the main things I noticed on getting up when I opened the bathroom blind, and again as I walked around, was not the plants but the birds. Tits and blackbirds flew in all directions, with an air of urgency as if they had business to attend to, and there was quite a respectable chorus just after dawn. Once I started weeding the robins appeared. Music and movement. Birds add greatly to the garden scene, as well as being useful natural aphid controllers. We are lucky here, to be next to woodland and in old landscape with numerous hedges and among farms that leave generous headlands and wildlife strips (all paid for by stewardship schemes, no doubt). Customers at work who ask about insects on their roses are sometimes surprised when I ask about the bird life in their garden, and steer them to the bird food as much as the insecticides. Some may suspect I am some sort of eco crank, or maybe even taking the piss, but they don't really need chemical spray, they need blue tits.
It has been a wonderful winter for berries (it was a bumper year for acorns, too, but the sweet chestnut harvest was pitiful). Plenty of hips, berries and crab apples set, and the birds have been slow to strip the bushes. I presume that is down to the mild winter. In the front garden, Malus 'Red Sentinel' is still laden with little bright red apples, the crop so heavy that the branches are weeping under the weight. 'Comtessa de Paris' has a nice display of little yellow apples as well, though I see that a few are doing that irritiating thing of remaining on the branches after turning brown, instead of dropping. The ever-popular 'Hornet' that grew at Writtle was a horror for doing that, and I made a mental note not to grow it.
Ilex aquifolium 'Golden Milkboy' has got one of its best displays of berries ever. This is an intensely prickly variegated form splashed with yellow in the centre of each leaf. It is quite prone to reversion, and painfully slow growing, admittedly on starved sand in the front garden. I keep it clipped to try and make a nice, dense dome like those in the photos of the late Rosemary Verey's garden, but I think it needs feeding up. The yellow berried shrubby ivy has a reasonable show, and in the back garden Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus' is still a smother of yellow fruit. A crop like that has never lasted into the new year before (I hope that doesn't mean it's on its last legs and is trying to set seed before pegging it). There's a nice crop of red berries on a slender leafed Aucuba too. That may have appreciated my removing great chunks of a vigorous shrubby honeysuckle that had engulfed it. The sea buckthorn still has plenty of orange-yellow berries. They are never the birds' first choice.
Prunus subhirtella 'Autumnalis' is flowering, both the new one in the front garden, and the old one in the back scheduled for removal because it sits too wet and branches keep dying. I feel as though the condemned tree is trying to reproach me, or spoof me into giving it a stay of execution, but when the leaves open I'm sure there'll still be too many dead twigs in there. The Daphne bholua are almost out, the first few flowers on 'Jacqueline Postill' yielding their spicy scent. Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' is studded with pale pink flowers, and has been for a while. The winter iris are beginning to get into their stride.
More surprising, and showing the effect of the mild weather, a plain green leafed, pink and mauve flowered Pulmonaria is well out. There are a few scattered primroses, and some cyclamen, though not sheets of them. One oriental hellebore has started blooming, a pale greenish yellow form with plum spots on the petals, and a couple of stinking hellebore, Helleborus foetidus, are well under way producing their little yellowish flowers. I collected these as self sown seedlings from the bottom part of the garden and tucked them in among the shrub roses, where they seem happy in the dark rootiness, and I hope that they will spread.
Mahonia japonica is opening but not in full flood yet in the back garden, and in the front M. x media 'Winter Sun' is still flowering, and has been for an incredibly long time. Sarcocca confusa is well out, though the scent wasn't carrying as well as it did yesterday at work (or maybe I couldn't smell it because I am going down with a cold). I noticed in passing that the leaves looked a bit pale and yellow. I will give it a dose of Maxicrop with seaweed, which is a great tonic for most things. The Hamamelis are not quite there. Two flowers were just about 'out', if I'd been trying to boost my total, but the real garden display hasn't started yet. Camellia japonica 'Alba Simplex' is still producing its incredibly elegant white flowers, a few at a time, and C. japonica 'Flame' is starting to join in.
The perennial wallflower 'Bowles Mauve' still had some flowers on it, but they were doing nothing for the garden, and the time really had come to tidy the plant, so I cut them off. They just looked left over and tatty. A self sown Euphorbia characias in the gravel is ahead of itself, its small lime green flowers just opening. They were badly scorched by the last two winters, and are enjoying the mild one. The leaves on the new basal shoots of my Euphorbia x pasteurii 'John Phillips' have visibly expanded in recent weeks, and the whole plant has developed a lush, confident air. It will get a nasty shock, if things turn cold this month or next. Leaves are an under-rated part of the winter garden. Our various pines in the front garden are looking very handsome, Pinus sylvestris 'Aurea' turning a nice shade of dark yellow that is not at all sickly or ill-looking, and the leaves of the Cistus look very neat and trim. They are good winter plants, when it doesn't kill them.
The first snowdrop leaves are through, and you can sense plants stirring and the garden getting ready to burst into life. This is simultaneously heartening, and alarming, because there not now many weeks left in which to weed, mulch and get the ground tidy before everything's on the move.
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