Today ended up as a bonus full day in the garden. I'd made a slightly provisional arrangement to visit some elderly cousins up in Suffolk, and take them to a nearby garden that was open today under the Yellow Book scheme, but I hadn't had any reply to my gentle e-mail enquiry yesterday sounding them out about whether or not they would like to go, and when I rang this morning it was clear that my cousin had completely forgotten about it and was already very busy. So with mutual expressions of goodwill we didn't go, and suddenly I had the rest of the day to get on with weeding and planting things out of the greenhouse.
In theory I have allotted myself three days a week to work on the garden, since I average out at two days a week at the plant centre. That gives me two days off a week to do everything else, just like normal people with full time jobs. In practice it never works like that. There are so many things to fit into the two days that they invariably spill over into the gardening time. There are my friends and relations, for a start. Then there are the talks, for the woodland charity, and some on my own account about gardening and beekeeping. There are art galleries and museums to visit, and open gardens, and occasionally it's nice to go for a walk. There are the bees to be looked after, the chickens to be mucked out, and sometimes the cats need to go to the vet. There is the mundane business of housework, and haircuts, and trips to the dentist. There are the Pilates lessons and exercises, without which my back would seize up. And there are emergencies, like falling trees or the car breaking down.
I can't really grumble about it all, since to friends who still have to work full time, working part time seems an unimaginable luxury. I don't know how they fit all the non-work things into their two days, though of course part of the answer is that they don't do some of them. The talks, for a start. If I still had a proper job I wouldn't have time to do volunteer talks, which would be a shame, though of course I wouldn't be in a position where I needed to do them to keep my CV looking vaguely interesting and my presentation skills up to date. And people with proper jobs generally have a cleaner. We don't, partly because we couldn't afford one, but also because the whole idea of having to tidy up before the cleaner comes, and your things being moved anyway so that you can't find them afterwards, is abhorrent. Even when we both had real jobs we didn't have a cleaner, after one unsuccessful experiment in about 1988.
My determination to keep time free for the garden does mean that other activities get ruthlessly pared back. It's one reason why I buy most of my clothes by mail order, since a mooch round the shops isn't a pleasure, but a waste of good gardening time. I try to fit in a regular haircut before, as PG Woodhouse memorably put it, my head looks like a chrysanthemum, but that's it. Going defiantly and naturally grey is partly a feminist statement, but largely because there is no way I'm spending hours in the salon having my hair coloured. A pamper day sounds to me not like a treat, but a completely pointless use of hours that could have been put to much more interesting and productive ends. If I'm not in the garden I'd rather be in the National Portrait Gallery than Champneys. Friends and visitors know that our house totters along just on the untidy side of downright insanitary, and that's after we've made a special effort to clean it for them. I could dust the mantelpiece or I could plant out the horned poppies that are still sitting in the greenhouse. There's no contest, most of the time.
(It should be noted as a matter of record that the Systems Administrator today did the vacuuming and washed the kitchen floor, and that I am very, very grateful, since the amount of cat fluff was getting so bad that even I minded. When you sit down to lunch and realise that there is cat fur stuck to your hands, which you have washed, and the edge of your plate, and the butter knife, it is time to Do Something.)
Sometimes things have to go by the board that would have been nice. I ended up missing the RA exhibition of Zoffany portraits, which I'd have rather liked to see, and I'm about to miss a Garden Museum exhibition about the history of garden visiting that shuts tomorrow, because there just wasn't a spare day to get to London. That was worse when I worked full time, and I missed all sorts of things I wish I'd seen.
The garden could really do with three days a week. In fact, it could do with twice that, but three days would be good. Of course I could not have a garden, or at least not one so large and so complicated, but you see I really like the garden. It suffers, compared to a paid job, because employers take a dim view if you bunk off to do other things, but there is no external pressure to stop me taking time off from gardening, only my own force of will.
Saturday, 23 June 2012
Friday, 22 June 2012
dodging the showers
As the showers passed through today I felt like one of the little people in a weather house, coming out when the sun shone and scuttling back inside again when it rained (and for the greatest assemblage of kitsch I've seen for a long time have a look at the assembled images of weather houses on Google).
We went to collect another load of poplar logs, which had already lost moisture and were noticeably lighter than when the tree was first sectioned. So much for the theory that they have to be seasoned under cover. The last few wouldn't go on the truck, so it will take one more trip, but we've got most of it away. The remaining lumps in the spinney mainly consist of branch junctions, which are larger than the round sections of trunk, and heavy to lift, but won't split with the maul and hammer. They'll have to be lugged on to the truck, and cut up at the System Administrator's leisure with the chainsaw.
I pulled up weeds that had sprung up in the middle of the long bed in the front garden where I dug out a failing Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' (too dry) some months ago, and have not yet replanted the space, and stuck in some Cleome raised from seed. They've been sitting in their pots in the greenhouse for a long time, and lay down flat as soon as they were planted because it was so windy, so goodness knows if they'll come to anything. Unfortunately there was no net contribution to my aim of clearing out the greenhouse, as while I was there I potted up some tiny self-sown Alchemilla mollis seedlings, which I want to try as ground cover in the back garden where it is damper. The long bed is far too dry, but Alchemilla is a tough plant, which given less than ideal conditions of drought doesn't rapidly die out, but lives on in a shrivelled state of distress, looking miserable. I removed most of the old, woody clumps last winter, but would like the free new plants to try again elsewhere in the garden.
Then, between showers, I turned my attention to the gravel at the entrance, which is once again laced with tufts and intertwining roots of creeping sorrel. I have eight young Gazania plants to go in there, raised from seed and grown on in 9cm pots. Plants of that size retail at £3.50 or £3.75 at the plant centre, and having a tray of them ready to go out makes raising plants from seed feel like a worthwhile exercise (though not as much as the things that you can't easily buy. I get a real buzz from my seed raised Dicentra scandens, which I haven't seen offered as a growing plant, though I expect I could track it down by mail order if I didn't already have one). A couple of gazanias have survived the past three winters, so lived through months of almost constant freezing conditions and those two nights when the thermometer plummeted to minus 13 C, and are just coming into flower. It shows that they are almost hardy, given sharp drainage. If I kept growing new plants from seed, and hanging on to the ones that survive outside, and then started harvesting seed from those, I ought to be able to develop a winter hardy strain, if I felt like it (I don't).
The SA had a bonfire, hose laid out ready to hand as a precaution, and managed to get rid of quite a lot of the great pile of poplar brash and accumulated prunings. The wet weather has produced a prodigious volume of summer growth, some in places where it stops us moving around the garden or is threatening to overwhelm other plants. I had to cut quantities of hazel shoots back that were growing out into the crowns of my collection of potted witch hazel, since I don't know how much shading Hamamelis will take, and I didn't want to leave it and then discover that the back half of the witch hazels had died out. Some shrubs won't put up with other plants growing on top of them. Roses hate it, and branches engulfed by dense rival vegetation quickly die. I lost a large part of a 'Gruss an Aachen' which resented the evergreen embrace of an encroaching Cistus. Exochorda macrantha 'The Bride' behaves in the same way. The witch hazels were still leafy when I freed them, so that was fine.
We went to collect another load of poplar logs, which had already lost moisture and were noticeably lighter than when the tree was first sectioned. So much for the theory that they have to be seasoned under cover. The last few wouldn't go on the truck, so it will take one more trip, but we've got most of it away. The remaining lumps in the spinney mainly consist of branch junctions, which are larger than the round sections of trunk, and heavy to lift, but won't split with the maul and hammer. They'll have to be lugged on to the truck, and cut up at the System Administrator's leisure with the chainsaw.
I pulled up weeds that had sprung up in the middle of the long bed in the front garden where I dug out a failing Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' (too dry) some months ago, and have not yet replanted the space, and stuck in some Cleome raised from seed. They've been sitting in their pots in the greenhouse for a long time, and lay down flat as soon as they were planted because it was so windy, so goodness knows if they'll come to anything. Unfortunately there was no net contribution to my aim of clearing out the greenhouse, as while I was there I potted up some tiny self-sown Alchemilla mollis seedlings, which I want to try as ground cover in the back garden where it is damper. The long bed is far too dry, but Alchemilla is a tough plant, which given less than ideal conditions of drought doesn't rapidly die out, but lives on in a shrivelled state of distress, looking miserable. I removed most of the old, woody clumps last winter, but would like the free new plants to try again elsewhere in the garden.
Then, between showers, I turned my attention to the gravel at the entrance, which is once again laced with tufts and intertwining roots of creeping sorrel. I have eight young Gazania plants to go in there, raised from seed and grown on in 9cm pots. Plants of that size retail at £3.50 or £3.75 at the plant centre, and having a tray of them ready to go out makes raising plants from seed feel like a worthwhile exercise (though not as much as the things that you can't easily buy. I get a real buzz from my seed raised Dicentra scandens, which I haven't seen offered as a growing plant, though I expect I could track it down by mail order if I didn't already have one). A couple of gazanias have survived the past three winters, so lived through months of almost constant freezing conditions and those two nights when the thermometer plummeted to minus 13 C, and are just coming into flower. It shows that they are almost hardy, given sharp drainage. If I kept growing new plants from seed, and hanging on to the ones that survive outside, and then started harvesting seed from those, I ought to be able to develop a winter hardy strain, if I felt like it (I don't).
The SA had a bonfire, hose laid out ready to hand as a precaution, and managed to get rid of quite a lot of the great pile of poplar brash and accumulated prunings. The wet weather has produced a prodigious volume of summer growth, some in places where it stops us moving around the garden or is threatening to overwhelm other plants. I had to cut quantities of hazel shoots back that were growing out into the crowns of my collection of potted witch hazel, since I don't know how much shading Hamamelis will take, and I didn't want to leave it and then discover that the back half of the witch hazels had died out. Some shrubs won't put up with other plants growing on top of them. Roses hate it, and branches engulfed by dense rival vegetation quickly die. I lost a large part of a 'Gruss an Aachen' which resented the evergreen embrace of an encroaching Cistus. Exochorda macrantha 'The Bride' behaves in the same way. The witch hazels were still leafy when I freed them, so that was fine.
Thursday, 21 June 2012
between showers
When I woke up this morning I could hear the rain drumming on the roof. On the Today programme they were saying something about the summer solstice, which experts have decided was not so big a deal for our pagan forbears as the winter solstice. How they can tell after all this time I have no idea, but if the weather in those days was like it is now then I'm not surprised. Ah, an English summer.
The rain passed by mid-morning. Our rain gauge must have been under-reading, since the display said we'd had only 1.4mm and I could tell from the weight of some pots that were dry last night that we'd had more than that. The Systems Administrator went to investigate the problem, and said that a large plant was partially blocking the funnel. There is an apparently reliable station at Epping whose readings the SA follows, so I suppose we're now faced with the choice of keeping our records as they are, knowing that last night's rainfall measurement was wrong, and doctoring them using a best guess based on the Epping site (6mm, which sounds much more plausible).
I planted out the last tulips from pots into the dahlia bed, and started mulching it with Strulch and tying heavy twine between the coloured posts. The trouble is the chickens, which love scratching around in there, and have eaten some plants almost to stumps, while others are half a metre high and forming flower buds. It is irritating of them to fixate on the dahlia bed, when they have the whole of the front garden to play in, but they do. I suggested that if I got a water pistol the SA could stand guard over the dahlia bed during chicken exercise time, but the SA seems to think that this would not be so good as sitting in a deckchair listening to cricket on the radio, or podcasts of The Bugle or Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Friday afternoon film review. So I am trying string, again, although determined chickens can be very expert limbo dancers. I threatened to go and blast them with the hose if they went on eating the dahlias, and the SA said I was being cruel to them.
Then it began to rain again, and I potted things on in the greenhouse, though what I really need to do is plant things out, because the greenhouse is full to bursting, so that I have to be very careful walking from one end to the other, and there is nowhere to put anything down. At the moment it is difficult even to get in there, since the trellis that I built myself, very slowly and laboriously, to help screen the view of the end of the greenhouse from the rest of the front garden (I told you we had some fundamental design problems in the front), blew over in the gale a week ago. This is an inconvenient time of the year for it to do so, since the honeysuckle that by now more or less covers the trellis is in full bloom, and looking rather lovely, and the climbing rose 'Chevy Chase' is just making soft new growth as well as opening its little red flowers. I would rather the trellis had stayed where it was, just at the moment. The uprights, that I cadged off the boss a few years ago when we were demolishing a pergola in the plant centre, have rotted through at the base. The SA has bought a couple of Metposts, and mending the trellis has been added to the long list of things to do. In the meantime the honeysuckle dumps water over me each time I squeeze into the greenhouse, if it's been raining.
The big tabby appeared at lunchtime for his supplementary feeding, and would not eat his helping of ordinary cat food. I thought it was because he wanted an expensive pouch, but when the SA moved his dish from its usual place in the hall to its Special Lunch place next to the dustbin in the kitchen the cat ate the normal tinned food with relish. He is a quick learner, for an animal that generally gives the appearance of being rather absent minded and quite dim, and very set in his ways once he has learnt something. The SA says he has OCD.
The rain passed by mid-morning. Our rain gauge must have been under-reading, since the display said we'd had only 1.4mm and I could tell from the weight of some pots that were dry last night that we'd had more than that. The Systems Administrator went to investigate the problem, and said that a large plant was partially blocking the funnel. There is an apparently reliable station at Epping whose readings the SA follows, so I suppose we're now faced with the choice of keeping our records as they are, knowing that last night's rainfall measurement was wrong, and doctoring them using a best guess based on the Epping site (6mm, which sounds much more plausible).
I planted out the last tulips from pots into the dahlia bed, and started mulching it with Strulch and tying heavy twine between the coloured posts. The trouble is the chickens, which love scratching around in there, and have eaten some plants almost to stumps, while others are half a metre high and forming flower buds. It is irritating of them to fixate on the dahlia bed, when they have the whole of the front garden to play in, but they do. I suggested that if I got a water pistol the SA could stand guard over the dahlia bed during chicken exercise time, but the SA seems to think that this would not be so good as sitting in a deckchair listening to cricket on the radio, or podcasts of The Bugle or Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Friday afternoon film review. So I am trying string, again, although determined chickens can be very expert limbo dancers. I threatened to go and blast them with the hose if they went on eating the dahlias, and the SA said I was being cruel to them.
Then it began to rain again, and I potted things on in the greenhouse, though what I really need to do is plant things out, because the greenhouse is full to bursting, so that I have to be very careful walking from one end to the other, and there is nowhere to put anything down. At the moment it is difficult even to get in there, since the trellis that I built myself, very slowly and laboriously, to help screen the view of the end of the greenhouse from the rest of the front garden (I told you we had some fundamental design problems in the front), blew over in the gale a week ago. This is an inconvenient time of the year for it to do so, since the honeysuckle that by now more or less covers the trellis is in full bloom, and looking rather lovely, and the climbing rose 'Chevy Chase' is just making soft new growth as well as opening its little red flowers. I would rather the trellis had stayed where it was, just at the moment. The uprights, that I cadged off the boss a few years ago when we were demolishing a pergola in the plant centre, have rotted through at the base. The SA has bought a couple of Metposts, and mending the trellis has been added to the long list of things to do. In the meantime the honeysuckle dumps water over me each time I squeeze into the greenhouse, if it's been raining.
The big tabby appeared at lunchtime for his supplementary feeding, and would not eat his helping of ordinary cat food. I thought it was because he wanted an expensive pouch, but when the SA moved his dish from its usual place in the hall to its Special Lunch place next to the dustbin in the kitchen the cat ate the normal tinned food with relish. He is a quick learner, for an animal that generally gives the appearance of being rather absent minded and quite dim, and very set in his ways once he has learnt something. The SA says he has OCD.
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
talking tonight
This is a real flying post. I am going out in fourteen minutes to do a talk on gardening for bees to a garden club outside Sudbury. It was booked back in January, which is quite short notice by garden club standards, and they were originally trying to get me for a date later in the year which I couldn't do, then I ended up filling in for a cancellation. I was getting slightly concerned when by yesterday I hadn't heard from them to confirm that the talk was on. I had the e-mails, but a series of six month old e-mails isn't the same as an actual conversation near the time with a live person. I rang the bookings secretary and got her voicemail, so left a message.
I rang again this morning at ten past nine when I still hadn't heard anything, but got the answerphone once more. I tried looking the club up on the net to see if they had a website and published their programme, but they didn't seem to. In a fit of inspiration I rang a friend who I thought belonged to that society, to see if she had a list of events and if so was I on it, but she was out. I decided to assume that it was on and went to collect the plants, hoping I wasn't on a wild goose chase.
On the way to the plant centre I stopped at a friend's house, to sort out some beekeeping business, and she told me a not entirely reassuring story about how a chap talking to her garden club about fuchsias had turned up at another club where he thought he was booked, only to find a second speaker already there and setting up. He claims to have sat at the back and enjoyed the talk, which if true was commendably stoic of him. By the time I'd got all the plants and bits and pieces stowed in the car I was going to be late for lunch, so I rang home to warn the Systems Administrator, who told me that my garden club lady had rung, having just got back from holiday, and the talk was on. Once I knew that I wasn't wasting my time en route to making myself look ridiculous I began to look forward to the talk.
My friend had e-mailed back to say that no, she wasn't a member of that society, and wishing me luck. I expect it will be fine, though actually gardening for bees is the most technically difficult talk I do, because of the stretches when I'm not talking about the plants in front of me, so have no props to remind me what I'm supposed to be talking about. And now I must go, hoping that there aren't any huge traffic jams on the Sudbury road, or gridlock around Colchester north railway station. I could update the post when I get back, telling you how it went, but I probably won't. I don't suppose the uncertainty is going to keep anyone up all night.
I rang again this morning at ten past nine when I still hadn't heard anything, but got the answerphone once more. I tried looking the club up on the net to see if they had a website and published their programme, but they didn't seem to. In a fit of inspiration I rang a friend who I thought belonged to that society, to see if she had a list of events and if so was I on it, but she was out. I decided to assume that it was on and went to collect the plants, hoping I wasn't on a wild goose chase.
On the way to the plant centre I stopped at a friend's house, to sort out some beekeeping business, and she told me a not entirely reassuring story about how a chap talking to her garden club about fuchsias had turned up at another club where he thought he was booked, only to find a second speaker already there and setting up. He claims to have sat at the back and enjoyed the talk, which if true was commendably stoic of him. By the time I'd got all the plants and bits and pieces stowed in the car I was going to be late for lunch, so I rang home to warn the Systems Administrator, who told me that my garden club lady had rung, having just got back from holiday, and the talk was on. Once I knew that I wasn't wasting my time en route to making myself look ridiculous I began to look forward to the talk.
My friend had e-mailed back to say that no, she wasn't a member of that society, and wishing me luck. I expect it will be fine, though actually gardening for bees is the most technically difficult talk I do, because of the stretches when I'm not talking about the plants in front of me, so have no props to remind me what I'm supposed to be talking about. And now I must go, hoping that there aren't any huge traffic jams on the Sudbury road, or gridlock around Colchester north railway station. I could update the post when I get back, telling you how it went, but I probably won't. I don't suppose the uncertainty is going to keep anyone up all night.
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
summer in the country
I am writing this sitting in a steamer chair on the veranda. It is a reflection of the summer we've had so far, that the fact that I am sitting outside in the garden shortly before seven in the evening is worthy of note. I am wearing linen trousers and a cotton t-shirt (OK, long sleeved. There's no need to get carried away) and no socks. And no thermals or fleece. Last week at work I was so cold that by elevenses I had to go into the loo and put on the thermal leggings I'd chucked in my bag at the last minute, just in case.
The birds are singing very loudly, but are partly drowned out by the pair of microlight aircraft that are pootling overhead, like noisy airborne lawnmowers. I am looking down into a white and pink and purple sea of old and shrub roses, with the occasional foxglove spire poking up among them. The evening air is humid, and the scent of the roses lies thick and sweet.
Our Ginger has given up trying to climb into my lap and sit on my keyboard, and has collapsed beside me, snoring gently. The big tabby is washing, and the cats have stopped fighting each other, after a spectacular stramash over the weekend that resulted in great tufts of fur being pulled out all over the sitting room. The big tabby was in a sulk yesterday, but by this morning he'd forgotten.
There is still heat in the sun, and the low angle of light catches the heads of the golden oat, Stipa gigantea, which are shimmering gently. Everything has grown wildly with the rain, the roses, which have never been so tall and are spilling out of their supports, the lumps of box included in the rose bed to give some evergreen bulk in the winter, and the little hedges of golden leaved shrubby honeysuckle, which have gone intensely whiskery despite having had a good haircut in the spring. The wind has some easterly in it, and the veranda is sheltered by the house. It is not a strong wind, but enough to turn the blades of the turbine on the farm behind the house.
Tomorrow I have to go and do a garden talk (or at least I think I do. The organiser hasn't contacted me or replied to my phone message yet) and on Thursday night I'm doing a beekeeping talk. By then it is forecast to be raining again. But tonight I can sit on the veranda. It is one of those evenings that reminds you why you bother to live in the country.
The birds are singing very loudly, but are partly drowned out by the pair of microlight aircraft that are pootling overhead, like noisy airborne lawnmowers. I am looking down into a white and pink and purple sea of old and shrub roses, with the occasional foxglove spire poking up among them. The evening air is humid, and the scent of the roses lies thick and sweet.
Our Ginger has given up trying to climb into my lap and sit on my keyboard, and has collapsed beside me, snoring gently. The big tabby is washing, and the cats have stopped fighting each other, after a spectacular stramash over the weekend that resulted in great tufts of fur being pulled out all over the sitting room. The big tabby was in a sulk yesterday, but by this morning he'd forgotten.
There is still heat in the sun, and the low angle of light catches the heads of the golden oat, Stipa gigantea, which are shimmering gently. Everything has grown wildly with the rain, the roses, which have never been so tall and are spilling out of their supports, the lumps of box included in the rose bed to give some evergreen bulk in the winter, and the little hedges of golden leaved shrubby honeysuckle, which have gone intensely whiskery despite having had a good haircut in the spring. The wind has some easterly in it, and the veranda is sheltered by the house. It is not a strong wind, but enough to turn the blades of the turbine on the farm behind the house.
Tomorrow I have to go and do a garden talk (or at least I think I do. The organiser hasn't contacted me or replied to my phone message yet) and on Thursday night I'm doing a beekeeping talk. By then it is forecast to be raining again. But tonight I can sit on the veranda. It is one of those evenings that reminds you why you bother to live in the country.
Monday, 18 June 2012
my turn to make the tea
Somebody rang in sick, so we were down to two staff in the plant centre, just the manager and me. That's not unworkable for a quiet Monday, though not ideal. It doesn't leave much scope to have a visible staff presence scooting around among the plants. A couple of customers who made it as far as the tills did say plaintively that there was nobody outside to help or answer questions, and one professional gardener shopping on behalf of the garden he manages said that some customers had even tried to ask him for help (though he may just have been winding the manager up).
Worse was that neither of us knows how to operate the tea room. Obviously, we know how to make a cup of tea, but not in which cupboards and drawers to look to find the tea pots, cups, milk jugs and cake tongs. Luckily my first customer for tea had been before, and was able to tell me the previous tea room operative had got a tea pot out of the cupboard by the dishwasher. Then she had to remind me that I'd forgotten to give her any milk, though she was very nice about it. (Sometimes in the plant centre we do raise the late and much lamented Linda Smith's concept of hand-knitted out of tofu to whole new levels). I had no idea which size milk jugs I was supposed to use for what numbers of people, or how much milk to put in them, so portion control went out of the window, and neither of us knew how the dishwasher worked either, though when the owner appeared late on in the afternoon it turned out that the reason why it wouldn't go is that it wasn't switched on. Apparently last week the hot water dispenser threw a wobbly half an hour before a coach load of 51 people was due to arrive, who had been promised tea and biscuits before their garden tour, but the new young member of the sales staff fixed that by dint of switching it off and switching it on again at the wall.
We are terribly short of plants for dry shade. The people who have dry shade and need to ask for advice on what to do with it do tend to have rather unrealistic expectations, wanting evergreens that will flower prolifically over a long season, while the more experienced gardeners have generally learnt to be grateful for anything that will grow. However, telling customers that Mahonia aquifolium should do it, that Ruscus aculeatus or butcher's broom certainly will, and that Sarcococca confusa is worth a try if it isn't too, too dry, while Euphorbia amygdaloides var. robbiae is practically indestructible, is not helpful when none of them are in stock.
Driving home I passed a white van parked near the far end of our road, and a man standing next to it playing the bagpipes. I presume he was practising. Bagpipes can't be an easy instrument to learn or practice, if you live anywhere with any near neighbours at all, so a country lane might be one of the only places you can find. I was once visiting a poultry feed supplier based in one of the Colchester trading estates, and was amused as I got out of the car to hear the sound of bagpipes, somebody presumably deciding that playing in an industrial unit sandwiched between the main railway line and the inner by-pass was better than enraging family and neighbours by practising at home.
Worse was that neither of us knows how to operate the tea room. Obviously, we know how to make a cup of tea, but not in which cupboards and drawers to look to find the tea pots, cups, milk jugs and cake tongs. Luckily my first customer for tea had been before, and was able to tell me the previous tea room operative had got a tea pot out of the cupboard by the dishwasher. Then she had to remind me that I'd forgotten to give her any milk, though she was very nice about it. (Sometimes in the plant centre we do raise the late and much lamented Linda Smith's concept of hand-knitted out of tofu to whole new levels). I had no idea which size milk jugs I was supposed to use for what numbers of people, or how much milk to put in them, so portion control went out of the window, and neither of us knew how the dishwasher worked either, though when the owner appeared late on in the afternoon it turned out that the reason why it wouldn't go is that it wasn't switched on. Apparently last week the hot water dispenser threw a wobbly half an hour before a coach load of 51 people was due to arrive, who had been promised tea and biscuits before their garden tour, but the new young member of the sales staff fixed that by dint of switching it off and switching it on again at the wall.
We are terribly short of plants for dry shade. The people who have dry shade and need to ask for advice on what to do with it do tend to have rather unrealistic expectations, wanting evergreens that will flower prolifically over a long season, while the more experienced gardeners have generally learnt to be grateful for anything that will grow. However, telling customers that Mahonia aquifolium should do it, that Ruscus aculeatus or butcher's broom certainly will, and that Sarcococca confusa is worth a try if it isn't too, too dry, while Euphorbia amygdaloides var. robbiae is practically indestructible, is not helpful when none of them are in stock.
Driving home I passed a white van parked near the far end of our road, and a man standing next to it playing the bagpipes. I presume he was practising. Bagpipes can't be an easy instrument to learn or practice, if you live anywhere with any near neighbours at all, so a country lane might be one of the only places you can find. I was once visiting a poultry feed supplier based in one of the Colchester trading estates, and was amused as I got out of the car to hear the sound of bagpipes, somebody presumably deciding that playing in an industrial unit sandwiched between the main railway line and the inner by-pass was better than enraging family and neighbours by practising at home.
Sunday, 17 June 2012
after the party
Today was Open Farm Sunday, and the lettuce farm was taking part, but I missed it because I had to go to work. That was a shame, as I'd have liked to see behind the scenes and learn more about what they do. Oh well, maybe next time. When I got to work there was nobody about, although the car of one of my colleagues was already parked in the car park, and the office door was locked. My other colleague arrived, who has a key, and just as we were about to let ourselves into the office the owner appeared in her dressing gown, waving frantically, and unlocked the door. It occurred to me that living over the shop must be a bit like having chickens. You can never have a lie-in, because at eight you have to let the staff in.
It turned out that my missing colleague, finding herself locked out, had started righting the pots that had blown over. It took a very, very long time to stand all the pots upright, after yesterday's wind, and an age to water them. In the afternoon a customer asked if she could have a discount on a Myrtus communis, saying it looked so sad, and adding it was very dry. We politely declined, on the grounds that it didn't look that bad at all. A word of advice from the other side of the counter: if you are going to ask somebody to do you a favour, don't in your next breath criticise their work. I explained that the previous day's conditions had been extremely drying to plants in pots, that we had been unable to use the overhead irrigation to good effect because it was still windy, and that we had spend half the morning watering pots by hand and would start doing more of the same at five as soon as the customers had gone. She bought the myrtle anyway.
The boss's mother took me to see the puppies, which are living in a basket in the kitchen. The dog seemed quite pleased to have visitors, and didn't mind the puppies being picked up, and I was given one to hold for a while. The dog is brown all over, but the puppies are the characteristic Jack Russell light and tan combination. They are desperately sweet, with funny little scrunched up faces and tiny ears. When not being picked up they lie in a heap, presumably for warmth, and twitch. I wondered whether they were dreaming, and if so what a week old puppy would dream about. I would greatly like to have a dog, but the cats would hate it and are too old to have such a thing inflicted on them, and I don't have time to look after a dog. What I would really like is for the Systems Administrator to have a dog, and then I could play with it sometimes, but the SA does not have time to look after a dog either, and pointed out that the dog couldn't go to Lords or Trent Bridge, or curry nights in London. The puppies were all spoken for anyway.
The owner came out into the plant centre late on, and it turned out that she and the boss hadn't got to bed until three, which trumps my effort, since I was tucked up by two. Four and a quarter hours sleep is not enough to prepare one for nine hours of picking up plant pots, dragging hoses about, being nice to people and operating an archaic manual till and credit card machine without causing accounting chaos. I warned the owner that if the tills were wildly out she'd better blame me.
It was a nice party, though. I really can't see why we stopped seeing those people, except that two hours drive away is a long way, and they were busy having children while we were busy sailing and gardening, and the thirties are an age when you tend to be rather fiercely focused on your career. Now we've caught up with each other again I expect we'll stay in touch.
It turned out that my missing colleague, finding herself locked out, had started righting the pots that had blown over. It took a very, very long time to stand all the pots upright, after yesterday's wind, and an age to water them. In the afternoon a customer asked if she could have a discount on a Myrtus communis, saying it looked so sad, and adding it was very dry. We politely declined, on the grounds that it didn't look that bad at all. A word of advice from the other side of the counter: if you are going to ask somebody to do you a favour, don't in your next breath criticise their work. I explained that the previous day's conditions had been extremely drying to plants in pots, that we had been unable to use the overhead irrigation to good effect because it was still windy, and that we had spend half the morning watering pots by hand and would start doing more of the same at five as soon as the customers had gone. She bought the myrtle anyway.
The boss's mother took me to see the puppies, which are living in a basket in the kitchen. The dog seemed quite pleased to have visitors, and didn't mind the puppies being picked up, and I was given one to hold for a while. The dog is brown all over, but the puppies are the characteristic Jack Russell light and tan combination. They are desperately sweet, with funny little scrunched up faces and tiny ears. When not being picked up they lie in a heap, presumably for warmth, and twitch. I wondered whether they were dreaming, and if so what a week old puppy would dream about. I would greatly like to have a dog, but the cats would hate it and are too old to have such a thing inflicted on them, and I don't have time to look after a dog. What I would really like is for the Systems Administrator to have a dog, and then I could play with it sometimes, but the SA does not have time to look after a dog either, and pointed out that the dog couldn't go to Lords or Trent Bridge, or curry nights in London. The puppies were all spoken for anyway.
The owner came out into the plant centre late on, and it turned out that she and the boss hadn't got to bed until three, which trumps my effort, since I was tucked up by two. Four and a quarter hours sleep is not enough to prepare one for nine hours of picking up plant pots, dragging hoses about, being nice to people and operating an archaic manual till and credit card machine without causing accounting chaos. I warned the owner that if the tills were wildly out she'd better blame me.
It was a nice party, though. I really can't see why we stopped seeing those people, except that two hours drive away is a long way, and they were busy having children while we were busy sailing and gardening, and the thirties are an age when you tend to be rather fiercely focused on your career. Now we've caught up with each other again I expect we'll stay in touch.
Saturday, 16 June 2012
out of touch
I'm writing this on Friday evening, because I know there won't be time to write anything much on Saturday. We are going to a party tonight (casting myself forward mentally to Saturday morning when, if I remember, I shall press Publish before going to work). The party is in Great Missenden, which for those of you not familiar with the geography of southern England is in Buckingshire. It is fairly close to where the Systems Administrator grew up, and quite a long drive from North Essex, and I'll have to leave work early for us to get there at a reasonable time, even though it is a grown up party that doesn't even start until eight. One of the Systems Administrator's old school friends has hit a milestone birthday, and we have been invited.
We haven't seen these old friends for a long time. The SA last saw them several years ago, when they had another party, which I missed because the grey tabby needed to go to the vet and had vanished and I stayed at home to round her up if she reappeared. That was the time she fell into a bucket that had been used for creosote, back in the days of real creosote, and had filled up with a mixture of rainwater and the last dregs of creosote, which after she fell in it we discovered was highly toxic to cats. If we'd know that we wouldn't have had creosote on the premises. You can't buy it now, or at least, not legally. The SA went and I remained at home and managed to catch the cat, and the SA had a nice time, but didn't stay in touch. On that basis I'm not quite sure why we're going this time.
It's a funny question, why we stay in touch with people, or drift out of touch. Geographical proximity helps cement friendships, despite e-mail and texts, not to mention Skype, meaning that in theory we can stay in touch with anybody anywhere. And we had telephones and the post before that. It isn't like it was for the families of emigrants to the New World, who could expect to hear nothing from their loved ones for months at a time. And one can go and stay with one's friends (so handy if they live in an attractive part of the world) and we do sometimes. But it isn't the same as having friends nearby, that you can invite regularly for supper, or meet for coffee, or go out together for the day. Or visit them when they're ill, or call on them to help when you've got your truck stuck in mud.
Shared interests and values definitely help keep friendships going. Even if you've known somebody for thirty years, if you get to the point where, when you see them, you seem to have nothing in common to talk about, there isn't much incentive to go on making the effort to go on seeing them. Habit and sentiment can only keep you going for so long.
That's assuming you ever reached the point of a genuine person to person friendship in the first place. Joint membership of a group that's created by virtue of an organisation, such as an employer, or school, or university course, can feel like a friendship, while you're carried along by the shared experiences that membership of the group confers. Take away the group, lose your job, leave school, graduate, and the shared bond may disappear with a speed that surprises you.
Mark Vernon has written an extremely good book on the subject, though Montaigne was there first. I don't know why the SA drifted apart from this group of people. I quite liked them, much of the time, though not the time that the birthday boy's brother left a broken down white van in our garden while we were away on holiday, that stayed there for rather a long time after we got back. He had bought it at the nearby car auction and it began to play up shortly afterwards, so he told the people looking after the house that we wouldn't mind his leaving it there. We did, actually. Maybe tomorrow we'll all discover we like the new middle aged people into which our former thirty-something selves have morphed, and the old friendships will be rekindled. Maybe we'll find there was a reason why we drifted out of touch, apart from a one-way flow in Christmas cards (they send us one). I'm agnostic on the subject, and quite happy to see how it goes. I suspect it will be rather a dreadful moment when the alarm goes off at 6.15 on Sunday morning, though, and I have to get up and go to work. It is a long drive from Great Missenden to North Essex.
We haven't seen these old friends for a long time. The SA last saw them several years ago, when they had another party, which I missed because the grey tabby needed to go to the vet and had vanished and I stayed at home to round her up if she reappeared. That was the time she fell into a bucket that had been used for creosote, back in the days of real creosote, and had filled up with a mixture of rainwater and the last dregs of creosote, which after she fell in it we discovered was highly toxic to cats. If we'd know that we wouldn't have had creosote on the premises. You can't buy it now, or at least, not legally. The SA went and I remained at home and managed to catch the cat, and the SA had a nice time, but didn't stay in touch. On that basis I'm not quite sure why we're going this time.
It's a funny question, why we stay in touch with people, or drift out of touch. Geographical proximity helps cement friendships, despite e-mail and texts, not to mention Skype, meaning that in theory we can stay in touch with anybody anywhere. And we had telephones and the post before that. It isn't like it was for the families of emigrants to the New World, who could expect to hear nothing from their loved ones for months at a time. And one can go and stay with one's friends (so handy if they live in an attractive part of the world) and we do sometimes. But it isn't the same as having friends nearby, that you can invite regularly for supper, or meet for coffee, or go out together for the day. Or visit them when they're ill, or call on them to help when you've got your truck stuck in mud.
Shared interests and values definitely help keep friendships going. Even if you've known somebody for thirty years, if you get to the point where, when you see them, you seem to have nothing in common to talk about, there isn't much incentive to go on making the effort to go on seeing them. Habit and sentiment can only keep you going for so long.
That's assuming you ever reached the point of a genuine person to person friendship in the first place. Joint membership of a group that's created by virtue of an organisation, such as an employer, or school, or university course, can feel like a friendship, while you're carried along by the shared experiences that membership of the group confers. Take away the group, lose your job, leave school, graduate, and the shared bond may disappear with a speed that surprises you.
Mark Vernon has written an extremely good book on the subject, though Montaigne was there first. I don't know why the SA drifted apart from this group of people. I quite liked them, much of the time, though not the time that the birthday boy's brother left a broken down white van in our garden while we were away on holiday, that stayed there for rather a long time after we got back. He had bought it at the nearby car auction and it began to play up shortly afterwards, so he told the people looking after the house that we wouldn't mind his leaving it there. We did, actually. Maybe tomorrow we'll all discover we like the new middle aged people into which our former thirty-something selves have morphed, and the old friendships will be rekindled. Maybe we'll find there was a reason why we drifted out of touch, apart from a one-way flow in Christmas cards (they send us one). I'm agnostic on the subject, and quite happy to see how it goes. I suspect it will be rather a dreadful moment when the alarm goes off at 6.15 on Sunday morning, though, and I have to get up and go to work. It is a long drive from Great Missenden to North Essex.
Friday, 15 June 2012
bureaucracy gone mad
I read something today on the East Anglian Daily Times website which made me mad. Really hopping mad. Assuming it is true, that is, and allowing for the tendency of news organisations to get things wrong, but the EADT is generally a pretty staid and worthy sort of a paper, not part of the sensationalist gutter press.
In Mistley on the Essex bank of the river Stour, close to the curious twin towers that are all that remain of a Georgian church designed by Robert Adam, is an animal sanctuary. I'm not a regular visitor myself, finding it quite worrying enough that our chickens can't be fully free range due to fox problems, without going to see other animals in enclosures. However, it has been there for 23 years, and I've never noticed any reports of complaints from the neighbours, or allegations that the animals are not well treated. The sanctuary is inspected annually by Defra and Environmental Health. It is open to the public, and I believe it is very popular with visitors who like that sort of thing. The RSPCA and the council both give it stray and unwanted animals that would otherwise lack a home, and it looks after around two thousand birds and mammals. It is run by a husband and wife team called Mike and Maureen Taylor who must dedicate their entire lives to their charges.
You would think that everybody would be happy. Mr and Mrs Taylor and their visitors love the animals. The animals have somewhere to live where they are properly looked after, which if they could be consulted on the matter they would probably prefer to a one-way trip to the vet. The RSPCA and council have somewhere to offload their waifs and strays. The neighbours aren't grumbling. But no, somebody has referred the animal sanctuary to Tendring District Council, asking them to investigate whether it requires a zoo licence. TDC has felt obliged to follow up on this enquiry and referred it the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency, part of Defra. They have asked for a list of all the animals, and pronounced that the sanctuary is not merely a sanctuary, it is a zoo. And if it is a zoo it needs a zoo licence.
Although the EADT feature is illustrated with a picture of a rhino, it doesn't sound as though the Mistley animal sanctuary has anything so exciting as that. The article talks about hawks, owls, a rhea and a skunk, which I gather make a difference to the sanctuary's status because they are not native to the UK. I don't know exactly what having a zoo licence entails, but it seems that it would add substantially to the animal sanctuary's costs, in terms of extra enclosures and so on, and presumably a licence fee. Fortunately for the Taylors, there is a way round this. They can keep their exotic non-natives and not be counted as a zoo, so long as they don't display them to the public for more than seven days a year.
What? You cannot be serious. You really cannot be serious. Nobody is saying that the animals present a danger to the public and can't safely be kept on the site. They can stay where they are and not count as a zoo, just so long as people don't look at them for more than a week each year? That is insane. That is utterly and completely mad and bonkers, and you and I and everybody else who works or ever saved and has a scintilla of income is paying taxes on that income so that government departments can employ people to request lists of animals from an animal sanctuary which has run without causing anybody any bother for 23 years, which has passed its annual inspections, which the local council itself uses as a repository for unwanted animals, and pronounce that they can keep all their animals so long as they don't let people see some of them much, otherwise they must incur extra costs running the sanctuary differently because it is a zoo.
It gets worse. The sanctuary was referred to Tendring District Council by a Police Wildlife Crime Officer. In these days of straightened public finance it is an achievement that Essex police still have one of those. You would think he or she might be doing something beneficial to society, like preventing the theft of rare birds' eggs, or the illegal destruction of protected species of raptors, or investigating attacks on wild animals, or stopping badger baiting, but no, the Police Wildlife Crime Officer has chosen to pick on the animal sanctuary. He or she isn't even reported as being concerned that they might have birds on display illegally taken from the wild or something else that would count as a crime, merely that they might technically be a zoo. It's only the other day I was reading dire warnings from a Chief Constable (admittedly not Essex's) that with falling police numbers due to government cutbacks, crime must inevitably rise, and what do we see here? The police prioritising the persecution of an animal sanctuary which has not been causing any trouble to anybody.
It makes me spit. It makes me think I shall write to my MP about it, as being a prime example of a case where we need less government red tape, and for our public servants to exercise more intelligence and discretion. (The only thing that deters me is that I have previously written to him about domestic chickens in the context of bird flu panics, and he might think I am some sort of animal nut, but I have also written to him about libel reform, and you can't get more serious and high minded than that). Here's a link to the original story. If you think it's as bonkers as I do why not write to your MP as well?
In Mistley on the Essex bank of the river Stour, close to the curious twin towers that are all that remain of a Georgian church designed by Robert Adam, is an animal sanctuary. I'm not a regular visitor myself, finding it quite worrying enough that our chickens can't be fully free range due to fox problems, without going to see other animals in enclosures. However, it has been there for 23 years, and I've never noticed any reports of complaints from the neighbours, or allegations that the animals are not well treated. The sanctuary is inspected annually by Defra and Environmental Health. It is open to the public, and I believe it is very popular with visitors who like that sort of thing. The RSPCA and the council both give it stray and unwanted animals that would otherwise lack a home, and it looks after around two thousand birds and mammals. It is run by a husband and wife team called Mike and Maureen Taylor who must dedicate their entire lives to their charges.
You would think that everybody would be happy. Mr and Mrs Taylor and their visitors love the animals. The animals have somewhere to live where they are properly looked after, which if they could be consulted on the matter they would probably prefer to a one-way trip to the vet. The RSPCA and council have somewhere to offload their waifs and strays. The neighbours aren't grumbling. But no, somebody has referred the animal sanctuary to Tendring District Council, asking them to investigate whether it requires a zoo licence. TDC has felt obliged to follow up on this enquiry and referred it the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency, part of Defra. They have asked for a list of all the animals, and pronounced that the sanctuary is not merely a sanctuary, it is a zoo. And if it is a zoo it needs a zoo licence.
Although the EADT feature is illustrated with a picture of a rhino, it doesn't sound as though the Mistley animal sanctuary has anything so exciting as that. The article talks about hawks, owls, a rhea and a skunk, which I gather make a difference to the sanctuary's status because they are not native to the UK. I don't know exactly what having a zoo licence entails, but it seems that it would add substantially to the animal sanctuary's costs, in terms of extra enclosures and so on, and presumably a licence fee. Fortunately for the Taylors, there is a way round this. They can keep their exotic non-natives and not be counted as a zoo, so long as they don't display them to the public for more than seven days a year.
What? You cannot be serious. You really cannot be serious. Nobody is saying that the animals present a danger to the public and can't safely be kept on the site. They can stay where they are and not count as a zoo, just so long as people don't look at them for more than a week each year? That is insane. That is utterly and completely mad and bonkers, and you and I and everybody else who works or ever saved and has a scintilla of income is paying taxes on that income so that government departments can employ people to request lists of animals from an animal sanctuary which has run without causing anybody any bother for 23 years, which has passed its annual inspections, which the local council itself uses as a repository for unwanted animals, and pronounce that they can keep all their animals so long as they don't let people see some of them much, otherwise they must incur extra costs running the sanctuary differently because it is a zoo.
It gets worse. The sanctuary was referred to Tendring District Council by a Police Wildlife Crime Officer. In these days of straightened public finance it is an achievement that Essex police still have one of those. You would think he or she might be doing something beneficial to society, like preventing the theft of rare birds' eggs, or the illegal destruction of protected species of raptors, or investigating attacks on wild animals, or stopping badger baiting, but no, the Police Wildlife Crime Officer has chosen to pick on the animal sanctuary. He or she isn't even reported as being concerned that they might have birds on display illegally taken from the wild or something else that would count as a crime, merely that they might technically be a zoo. It's only the other day I was reading dire warnings from a Chief Constable (admittedly not Essex's) that with falling police numbers due to government cutbacks, crime must inevitably rise, and what do we see here? The police prioritising the persecution of an animal sanctuary which has not been causing any trouble to anybody.
It makes me spit. It makes me think I shall write to my MP about it, as being a prime example of a case where we need less government red tape, and for our public servants to exercise more intelligence and discretion. (The only thing that deters me is that I have previously written to him about domestic chickens in the context of bird flu panics, and he might think I am some sort of animal nut, but I have also written to him about libel reform, and you can't get more serious and high minded than that). Here's a link to the original story. If you think it's as bonkers as I do why not write to your MP as well?
Thursday, 14 June 2012
talking for my lunch
I had a lunchtime booking for a talk today, to a ladies' lunch club that meets bi-monthly. They wanted an introduction to beekeeping, and the bookings secretary who rang last week to check that I was coming was very keen that I should bring honey for sale. I don't have much honey left, none of it bottled, and so the Aga has had two tubs of last year's crop gently liquifying on it for the past couple of days, one of dark honey and one of light.
Honey is best stored in bulk, in an airtight container. You don't want to expose it to air, because being a very strong sugar solution it will tend to absorb moisture from the atmosphere (deliquescent is the term, if you want to be technical about it), and you don't want it to do that, because if it becomes too dilute it may ferment (or at least the top layer), in which case the flavour is spoilt and it is no good for anything. A big snap top plastic bucket of honey has a lower surface to volume ratio than a little jar, and a better seal than a screw top lid. However, if the honey has solidified in the bucket you have to reliquify it to get it into jars, or at least soften it, being very careful not to overheat it as that spoils it as well. Standing the plastic buckets on the Aga warming plate balanced on Aga saucepan lids (which are made with flat tops for stacking so do very well as trivets) gives a suitably gentle heat source. The honey takes ages to melt completely by this method, and when I went to jar it up last night I found that it was still granular, so the buckets had to stay in situ overnight, and I filled the jars this morning. The remaining bit of the pale honey that I collected last May was still not entirely clear, which was a pity, since it was a beautiful pale straw colour when fresh.
Lunch clubs are funny gigs. You get lunch, which is nice, but means they take up quite a large portion of the day, by the time you've done your talk after the meal. I agreed to do this one ages ago, and as the date drew nearer and today turned out to be a dry one I could usefully have spent in the garden, I slightly wished I hadn't. Still, too late to complain now. If it had been bucketing down I'd have felt very smug that I had a productive alternative lined up for the day. They were a pleasant group of ladies, who seemed to enjoy the talk for the most part, with only one or two showing signs of taking a post-lunch snooze. They asked a lot of questions, which is a sign of audience engagement, though several did go on quizzing me in detail about Manuka honey even after I'd explained that most UK beekeepers, including me, didn't produce it and I didn't honestly know a great deal about it.
They only bought four or five jars of honey, which was a pity after my efforts bottling the stuff, but didn't come as a great surprise. Still, I did need to jar up some more, as it always comes in useful for presents when visiting people, and I have another talk next week where I might sell another four or five jars. Plus I kept two jars back for home consumption. One of the committee members at the beekeepers' meeting on Monday, who helps field questions from the general public, told us how she'd had to be diplomatic replying to somebody asking how many beehives he would need to make a living from beekeeping as a commercial business, starting from scratch with no experience of keeping bees. I don't bother keeping records of my income and expenditure as a beekeeper (though I do record the lot numbers of honey sold as required by law) but I know that I don't make any sort of profit. The cost of frames and foundation for the bees to build their comb on, sugar to feed them in the autumn and fondant in the late winter, treatments for the varroa mite, my Beekeepers Association subscription and the ticket for the annual conference, when I go, cost far more than I ever get from selling a bit of honey and doing a couple of talks. With the weather this year, one of the two commercial beekeepers I know has been looking pretty grim faced, the last couple of times I've seen him, and the Systems Administrator told me that even The World at One ran a story today about colony losses this spring.
Addendum Today was dustbin day, and we have hit a new low for food thrown away which could have been eaten, the council food recycling bin containing nothing at all except the rind off a piece of cheddar, and the fat from two slices of cooked ham. Just as long as the council appreciate that it isn't that we've mistakenly put the cooked food waste in the main bin, but rather have managed not to have any.
Honey is best stored in bulk, in an airtight container. You don't want to expose it to air, because being a very strong sugar solution it will tend to absorb moisture from the atmosphere (deliquescent is the term, if you want to be technical about it), and you don't want it to do that, because if it becomes too dilute it may ferment (or at least the top layer), in which case the flavour is spoilt and it is no good for anything. A big snap top plastic bucket of honey has a lower surface to volume ratio than a little jar, and a better seal than a screw top lid. However, if the honey has solidified in the bucket you have to reliquify it to get it into jars, or at least soften it, being very careful not to overheat it as that spoils it as well. Standing the plastic buckets on the Aga warming plate balanced on Aga saucepan lids (which are made with flat tops for stacking so do very well as trivets) gives a suitably gentle heat source. The honey takes ages to melt completely by this method, and when I went to jar it up last night I found that it was still granular, so the buckets had to stay in situ overnight, and I filled the jars this morning. The remaining bit of the pale honey that I collected last May was still not entirely clear, which was a pity, since it was a beautiful pale straw colour when fresh.
Lunch clubs are funny gigs. You get lunch, which is nice, but means they take up quite a large portion of the day, by the time you've done your talk after the meal. I agreed to do this one ages ago, and as the date drew nearer and today turned out to be a dry one I could usefully have spent in the garden, I slightly wished I hadn't. Still, too late to complain now. If it had been bucketing down I'd have felt very smug that I had a productive alternative lined up for the day. They were a pleasant group of ladies, who seemed to enjoy the talk for the most part, with only one or two showing signs of taking a post-lunch snooze. They asked a lot of questions, which is a sign of audience engagement, though several did go on quizzing me in detail about Manuka honey even after I'd explained that most UK beekeepers, including me, didn't produce it and I didn't honestly know a great deal about it.
They only bought four or five jars of honey, which was a pity after my efforts bottling the stuff, but didn't come as a great surprise. Still, I did need to jar up some more, as it always comes in useful for presents when visiting people, and I have another talk next week where I might sell another four or five jars. Plus I kept two jars back for home consumption. One of the committee members at the beekeepers' meeting on Monday, who helps field questions from the general public, told us how she'd had to be diplomatic replying to somebody asking how many beehives he would need to make a living from beekeeping as a commercial business, starting from scratch with no experience of keeping bees. I don't bother keeping records of my income and expenditure as a beekeeper (though I do record the lot numbers of honey sold as required by law) but I know that I don't make any sort of profit. The cost of frames and foundation for the bees to build their comb on, sugar to feed them in the autumn and fondant in the late winter, treatments for the varroa mite, my Beekeepers Association subscription and the ticket for the annual conference, when I go, cost far more than I ever get from selling a bit of honey and doing a couple of talks. With the weather this year, one of the two commercial beekeepers I know has been looking pretty grim faced, the last couple of times I've seen him, and the Systems Administrator told me that even The World at One ran a story today about colony losses this spring.
Addendum Today was dustbin day, and we have hit a new low for food thrown away which could have been eaten, the council food recycling bin containing nothing at all except the rind off a piece of cheddar, and the fat from two slices of cooked ham. Just as long as the council appreciate that it isn't that we've mistakenly put the cooked food waste in the main bin, but rather have managed not to have any.
Wednesday, 13 June 2012
manual labour and high culture
The Systems Administrator has got a summer cold. This left me in charge of catering, and while I scored a hit with last night's supper (soft white finger rolls with slices of corned beef, because it hurt the SA's throat to swallow anything hot) I forgot to buy cat food. For their breakfast this morning they had two of the ultra expensive pouches split between the four of them, and as many biscuits as they could eat to fill up on. The black cat and his sister, the fat indignant tabby, don't like biscuits, and the fat tabby is intensely suspicious of any change to her normal routine, so the feline atmosphere was frosty.
Our friend Roger met us at the spinney, and in about quarter of an hour had the truck pulled back on to level and solid ground. He was very cheerful about the whole thing, and regaled us with stories of hauling out other vehicles that had been bogged down to their axles. I suppose that if you enjoy testing the full capabilities of your Landrover, rather than having a four wheel drive as a status symbol while not using it for anything more difficult than ascending the heights of Muswell Hill or Southwold High Street, you do need a willing partner in order to use the winch in earnest. Plus part of innate good manners is knowing how to make people you've helped feel that they've practically done you a favour.
We brought back two truck loads of wood, then the SA's back began to give warning signs that we'd done enough for one day. My Pilates teacher would have a fit to see me hauling a couple of tonnes of wood on to the back of a Transit, but what's the point of building up your strength if you aren't going to use it for anything productive? Days of lifting many, many of pots of compost have given me strong arms and shoulders, for a small middle aged lady, and I rather enjoy carrying wood, up to a point. After two truck loads we had probably reached that point.
It grieved me to leave the rest of the wood unattended in full sight of the public lane, but the SA has promised to go back for another load tomorrow. We took the smaller pieces away first, that would be the easiest to lift, both literally and metaphorically, and most of what's left is too big to carry until it's been split. Sawn rounds of poplar turn out to split reasonably easily. The SA hits them along the line of the radius with a wood splitting maul, which is a not especially sharp axe whose head has a wide, blunt back, then once the maul lodges in the log, if it doesn't split it clean through, hits the back of the maul with a sledge hammer.
The SA looked up poplar wood on the internet, as one does, and discovered that its only commercial use is for making matches, on which basis we could have a match factory. It has a high water content when fresh, but once seasoned burns well, fairly quickly and with a nice flame. It is relatively cheap to buy, and easy to split, and one forum contributor said that it was the best wood for pubs with open fires, better than oak whose logs last for ages, since customers enjoyed being able to put extra logs on the fire from time to time. It has to be seasoned and stored under cover, otherwise it absorbs rain water. I can't work out at all how many truck loads of bought wood our haul of poplar will come to, but if we get all of it back safely we'll probably recoup the full amount of the arborist's bill.
By way of complete contrast we went last night to see Dancing at Lughnasa at Colchester's Mercury Theatre. It's the last in the current season of productions by their own company, and I was keen to see it on the basis that I knew it was terribly famous and that Brian Friel is a highly regarded playwright. Plus, I like to support the theatre and didn't much like the sound of the alternatives. A literary play about the lives of women in rural Donegal in the 1930s would not be the SA's first choice, and nor would spending the evening in a theatre while suffering from a cold, but my offers to find out the Mercury's returns policy, which I vaguely thought was generous, were brushed aside, and we went.
I was a little taken aback at first to discover that last night was a captioned performance for the hard of hearing, and that the illuminated matrix display in front of one side of the stage was in our line of vision, and my heart sank when it described the music being played in the auditorium before the performance started as a lively jig, when it was a hornpipe. The human eye and brain are very good at detecting faint signals in the visual periphery, so much so that if you are looking for a lit navigation mark at night, one of the best ways of finding it is to let your gaze drift gently over the whole area where you expect to find it, rather than staring for it fixedly, and you'll often catch it out of the corner of your eye, and I was afraid that the wretched thing was going to be distracting. On the other hand, having taken part in a demonstration of one very famous psychological experiment that shows how people can fail to see something in front of their eyes if they are concentrating on something else, I would never underestimate the ability of the human brain to screen visual stuff out, and so it proved with the deaf interpretation board. After the first few lines of dialogue I didn't see it any more.
Dancing at Lughnasa is a good play, and it was well done at the Mercury. Tackles big issues with a light touch, well acted, good set. It's on for a couple more days, and is not a sell out, which is a shame. There is one moment near the end, when something is brought on to the stage, which I won't identify to avoid giving a plot spoiler, which I would have made more realistic and shocking if I'd been producing it, since I think that moment is meant to give the audience a jolt, but that's a minor caveat. When we got home the SA was quite enthusiastic about it, and admitted to having enjoyed it having expected not to. A play that can grip somebody who isn't naturally inclined to like that sort of thing and has sat in a theatre for two and a half hours suffering from a sore throat bad enough that they've given up on hot food, must be pretty good.
Our friend Roger met us at the spinney, and in about quarter of an hour had the truck pulled back on to level and solid ground. He was very cheerful about the whole thing, and regaled us with stories of hauling out other vehicles that had been bogged down to their axles. I suppose that if you enjoy testing the full capabilities of your Landrover, rather than having a four wheel drive as a status symbol while not using it for anything more difficult than ascending the heights of Muswell Hill or Southwold High Street, you do need a willing partner in order to use the winch in earnest. Plus part of innate good manners is knowing how to make people you've helped feel that they've practically done you a favour.
We brought back two truck loads of wood, then the SA's back began to give warning signs that we'd done enough for one day. My Pilates teacher would have a fit to see me hauling a couple of tonnes of wood on to the back of a Transit, but what's the point of building up your strength if you aren't going to use it for anything productive? Days of lifting many, many of pots of compost have given me strong arms and shoulders, for a small middle aged lady, and I rather enjoy carrying wood, up to a point. After two truck loads we had probably reached that point.
It grieved me to leave the rest of the wood unattended in full sight of the public lane, but the SA has promised to go back for another load tomorrow. We took the smaller pieces away first, that would be the easiest to lift, both literally and metaphorically, and most of what's left is too big to carry until it's been split. Sawn rounds of poplar turn out to split reasonably easily. The SA hits them along the line of the radius with a wood splitting maul, which is a not especially sharp axe whose head has a wide, blunt back, then once the maul lodges in the log, if it doesn't split it clean through, hits the back of the maul with a sledge hammer.
The SA looked up poplar wood on the internet, as one does, and discovered that its only commercial use is for making matches, on which basis we could have a match factory. It has a high water content when fresh, but once seasoned burns well, fairly quickly and with a nice flame. It is relatively cheap to buy, and easy to split, and one forum contributor said that it was the best wood for pubs with open fires, better than oak whose logs last for ages, since customers enjoyed being able to put extra logs on the fire from time to time. It has to be seasoned and stored under cover, otherwise it absorbs rain water. I can't work out at all how many truck loads of bought wood our haul of poplar will come to, but if we get all of it back safely we'll probably recoup the full amount of the arborist's bill.
By way of complete contrast we went last night to see Dancing at Lughnasa at Colchester's Mercury Theatre. It's the last in the current season of productions by their own company, and I was keen to see it on the basis that I knew it was terribly famous and that Brian Friel is a highly regarded playwright. Plus, I like to support the theatre and didn't much like the sound of the alternatives. A literary play about the lives of women in rural Donegal in the 1930s would not be the SA's first choice, and nor would spending the evening in a theatre while suffering from a cold, but my offers to find out the Mercury's returns policy, which I vaguely thought was generous, were brushed aside, and we went.
I was a little taken aback at first to discover that last night was a captioned performance for the hard of hearing, and that the illuminated matrix display in front of one side of the stage was in our line of vision, and my heart sank when it described the music being played in the auditorium before the performance started as a lively jig, when it was a hornpipe. The human eye and brain are very good at detecting faint signals in the visual periphery, so much so that if you are looking for a lit navigation mark at night, one of the best ways of finding it is to let your gaze drift gently over the whole area where you expect to find it, rather than staring for it fixedly, and you'll often catch it out of the corner of your eye, and I was afraid that the wretched thing was going to be distracting. On the other hand, having taken part in a demonstration of one very famous psychological experiment that shows how people can fail to see something in front of their eyes if they are concentrating on something else, I would never underestimate the ability of the human brain to screen visual stuff out, and so it proved with the deaf interpretation board. After the first few lines of dialogue I didn't see it any more.
Dancing at Lughnasa is a good play, and it was well done at the Mercury. Tackles big issues with a light touch, well acted, good set. It's on for a couple more days, and is not a sell out, which is a shame. There is one moment near the end, when something is brought on to the stage, which I won't identify to avoid giving a plot spoiler, which I would have made more realistic and shocking if I'd been producing it, since I think that moment is meant to give the audience a jolt, but that's a minor caveat. When we got home the SA was quite enthusiastic about it, and admitted to having enjoyed it having expected not to. A play that can grip somebody who isn't naturally inclined to like that sort of thing and has sat in a theatre for two and a half hours suffering from a sore throat bad enough that they've given up on hot food, must be pretty good.
Tuesday, 12 June 2012
bogged down
We set off after lunch to start retrieving the logs from the fallen poplar, which the tree surgeons removed from the neighbour's hedge and logged yesterday morning (when they must have been very early, since they rang me to ask if it was OK to do it that morning at quarter past seven, and by the time the Systems Administrator wandered up there at half past ten they'd finished and gone). With the rise in heating oil and electricity costs, the popularity of log burning stoves has soared, and the price of logs has rocketed. I was concerned that if we didn't retrieve it fairly quickly we'd find that someone else had got there first.
The piles of logs looked very big seen close up, much bigger than they'd seemed from my car as I drove home last night after the beekeepers' committee meeting. The land in the spinney drops gently away from the public road. The Systems Administrator reversed the truck on to the level patch of grass at the top of the slope, looked at how far we were going to have to carry the logs, and said we could get the truck closer than that.
You can guess what happened next. It got stuck. Flatbed Ford Transit on earth track after the amount of rain we've had. We tried putting small branches under the wheels, but the truck declined to even start climbing on to them, and just dug its back wheels in a little deeper. We walked home, collected some boards, drove back to the spinney with them, and tried to put them under the wheels, but the truck did not want to drive on to the boards any more than it had wanted to drive over the branches. The Systems Administrator hit the boards repeatedly with lengths of poplar branch to try and jamb them under the leading edges of the tyres, but the truck spat them out each time.
I said that our friend Roger had a winch on his Landrover, and why didn't we ask him for help. The SA would much rather have solved the problem unaided than bother anybody else, but I couldn't see how we were going to get the truck out without outside assistance. The SA suggested we could buy a winch. I said that there was nothing to attach the winch to, and the SA gestured at the electricity pole. It was a very large pole, but I said that I did not think you were supposed to use electricity poles as attachment points to winch trucks out of the mud. The SA said that if the truck were jacked up so that boards could be slid properly under the wheels it would get going. I said that I was mechanically useless and knew nothing of such things, but that I was sure Roger wouldn't mind helping out.
I asked Roger, grovelling terribly. He said that of course he would help, asked what sort of truck it was, and said he knew why it had got stuck. Actually, the SA had some theory about differentials but I personally blamed the mud, the slope, and the sliminess of a thick layer of poplar leaves. Roger is a good hearted man with a natural engineering bent, who really likes Landrovers, and seemed entirely happy to do a good deed helping out the escaped townies who had got themselves into such a fix, and he agreed to come in the morning and rescue us, for which I offered some wood, a bottle of wine and my eternal thanks.
After I had arranged for us to be towed out the SA went back with the jack and some more boards, to try the plan of getting the truck properly on them, while I reverted to gardening, planting the tulips from their pots into the dahlia bed. After a while the SA returned saying that the truck was now on the boards but needed some gravel for added traction, and disappeared again with a bucket of grit. I continued to pull parsley out of the dahlia bed until the SA came back for the second time, saying that the truck had just spat the boards straight out behind it.
It is just as well that I know somebody who has a Landrover with a winch on it. Roger says the Landrover would be able to do the job without the SA even releasing the truck's handbrake. I think the moral of the story is, if you have an elderly flatbed Ford Transit, don't take it off road, even a little bit.
The piles of logs looked very big seen close up, much bigger than they'd seemed from my car as I drove home last night after the beekeepers' committee meeting. The land in the spinney drops gently away from the public road. The Systems Administrator reversed the truck on to the level patch of grass at the top of the slope, looked at how far we were going to have to carry the logs, and said we could get the truck closer than that.
You can guess what happened next. It got stuck. Flatbed Ford Transit on earth track after the amount of rain we've had. We tried putting small branches under the wheels, but the truck declined to even start climbing on to them, and just dug its back wheels in a little deeper. We walked home, collected some boards, drove back to the spinney with them, and tried to put them under the wheels, but the truck did not want to drive on to the boards any more than it had wanted to drive over the branches. The Systems Administrator hit the boards repeatedly with lengths of poplar branch to try and jamb them under the leading edges of the tyres, but the truck spat them out each time.
I said that our friend Roger had a winch on his Landrover, and why didn't we ask him for help. The SA would much rather have solved the problem unaided than bother anybody else, but I couldn't see how we were going to get the truck out without outside assistance. The SA suggested we could buy a winch. I said that there was nothing to attach the winch to, and the SA gestured at the electricity pole. It was a very large pole, but I said that I did not think you were supposed to use electricity poles as attachment points to winch trucks out of the mud. The SA said that if the truck were jacked up so that boards could be slid properly under the wheels it would get going. I said that I was mechanically useless and knew nothing of such things, but that I was sure Roger wouldn't mind helping out.
I asked Roger, grovelling terribly. He said that of course he would help, asked what sort of truck it was, and said he knew why it had got stuck. Actually, the SA had some theory about differentials but I personally blamed the mud, the slope, and the sliminess of a thick layer of poplar leaves. Roger is a good hearted man with a natural engineering bent, who really likes Landrovers, and seemed entirely happy to do a good deed helping out the escaped townies who had got themselves into such a fix, and he agreed to come in the morning and rescue us, for which I offered some wood, a bottle of wine and my eternal thanks.
After I had arranged for us to be towed out the SA went back with the jack and some more boards, to try the plan of getting the truck properly on them, while I reverted to gardening, planting the tulips from their pots into the dahlia bed. After a while the SA returned saying that the truck was now on the boards but needed some gravel for added traction, and disappeared again with a bucket of grit. I continued to pull parsley out of the dahlia bed until the SA came back for the second time, saying that the truck had just spat the boards straight out behind it.
It is just as well that I know somebody who has a Landrover with a winch on it. Roger says the Landrover would be able to do the job without the SA even releasing the truck's handbrake. I think the moral of the story is, if you have an elderly flatbed Ford Transit, don't take it off road, even a little bit.
Monday, 11 June 2012
more rain and a rare bird
It's been a long day, which means it's going to be a short post.
It rained nearly all day and trade was very quiet. You can't blame people. A few of those who came in said that shopping for plants was the only gardening job they could get on with, given that they couldn't work in their gardens, but on the whole when you can scarcely get anything done outside you don't get to the point where you need to buy many plants. I tidied up the herbaceous section while it was only drizzling, and then had to take refuge in one of the tunnels and spruce up the bedding. I actually rather enjoy pulling yellow leaves and spent flower heads off pelargoniums, because I like them as plants, and their old flowers and dead leaves part company from the stem with a satisfying snap, but the petunias and impatiens were not so nice. The petunias had developed fuzzy mould at the bottom from the endless damp and cold weather, while the dead petals of bizzy lizzies stick to the leaves, and it is a sign of a desperately quiet day when you spend half an hour grooming them off with your fingertips.
The dog had four puppies, though I haven't seen them yet, and the peahen hatched one chick. I haven't seen that either, since I think the boss has put her and the chick in a coop to protect them from foxes. She sat on the second egg for another three days after the first one hatched, then lost interest in it. The gardener had his fifth grandchild, so it was a busy week on the procreational front.
The day's treat came when the local RSPB officer rang the boss to say that there was a bittern down on the marshes. The boss and the owner and the boss's father, who happened to have just called round, and the two members of the plant centre staff who had never seen a bittern before (the manager has, at Minsmere) all piled into the landrover and the boss drove us down to the marsh, and there was the bittern standing in the edge of a reedbed, being admired by two RSPB staff and the leader of the local scout group, who had a telescope. The bittern was visible with the naked eye, but we were all lent binoculars and allowed goes through the telescope so that we could have a better look. I can't generally see anything through binoculars, but managed to focus on the bittern using just my dominant eye, and then had a turn through the telescope. He or she was busy preening itself, rummaging around the undersides of its wings, which are striped, except when a heron flew overhead, and it flung its head back and stood in typical bittern camouflaged pose. That was really quite exciting, and marks my induction as a twitcher, since I have never before in my life jumped into a vehicle and rushed off to see a bird.
I went straight from work to the beekeepers' committee meeting, since if I'd gone home first I'd only have had to go straight out again. The Chairman was strict about stopping us talking at once, which was good, but driving home afterwards I did feel as though I'd just been to a masterclass in kicking the ball into the long grass, as we didn't seem to have decided much about anything. There again, we don't decide much about anything at the music society committee meetings, as the Chair and Bookings Secretary have it all under firm control. Maybe that's just what committee meetings are like.
It rained nearly all day and trade was very quiet. You can't blame people. A few of those who came in said that shopping for plants was the only gardening job they could get on with, given that they couldn't work in their gardens, but on the whole when you can scarcely get anything done outside you don't get to the point where you need to buy many plants. I tidied up the herbaceous section while it was only drizzling, and then had to take refuge in one of the tunnels and spruce up the bedding. I actually rather enjoy pulling yellow leaves and spent flower heads off pelargoniums, because I like them as plants, and their old flowers and dead leaves part company from the stem with a satisfying snap, but the petunias and impatiens were not so nice. The petunias had developed fuzzy mould at the bottom from the endless damp and cold weather, while the dead petals of bizzy lizzies stick to the leaves, and it is a sign of a desperately quiet day when you spend half an hour grooming them off with your fingertips.
The dog had four puppies, though I haven't seen them yet, and the peahen hatched one chick. I haven't seen that either, since I think the boss has put her and the chick in a coop to protect them from foxes. She sat on the second egg for another three days after the first one hatched, then lost interest in it. The gardener had his fifth grandchild, so it was a busy week on the procreational front.
The day's treat came when the local RSPB officer rang the boss to say that there was a bittern down on the marshes. The boss and the owner and the boss's father, who happened to have just called round, and the two members of the plant centre staff who had never seen a bittern before (the manager has, at Minsmere) all piled into the landrover and the boss drove us down to the marsh, and there was the bittern standing in the edge of a reedbed, being admired by two RSPB staff and the leader of the local scout group, who had a telescope. The bittern was visible with the naked eye, but we were all lent binoculars and allowed goes through the telescope so that we could have a better look. I can't generally see anything through binoculars, but managed to focus on the bittern using just my dominant eye, and then had a turn through the telescope. He or she was busy preening itself, rummaging around the undersides of its wings, which are striped, except when a heron flew overhead, and it flung its head back and stood in typical bittern camouflaged pose. That was really quite exciting, and marks my induction as a twitcher, since I have never before in my life jumped into a vehicle and rushed off to see a bird.
I went straight from work to the beekeepers' committee meeting, since if I'd gone home first I'd only have had to go straight out again. The Chairman was strict about stopping us talking at once, which was good, but driving home afterwards I did feel as though I'd just been to a masterclass in kicking the ball into the long grass, as we didn't seem to have decided much about anything. There again, we don't decide much about anything at the music society committee meetings, as the Chair and Bookings Secretary have it all under firm control. Maybe that's just what committee meetings are like.
Sunday, 10 June 2012
open gardens
It was the Open Gardens in the village where I work, and for once it was held on a weekend when I wasn't working. I'd been saying that I was going to go to the Open Gardens, ever since I discovered that I could go, to see what the people I sell plants to do with them when they get home. When it came to it, this morning it was so beautiful and peaceful in our own garden, and I had so much to do, that if it had been any other village and not the place where I worked, I probably wouldn't have bothered. But having announced I was going, I thought I'd feel rather silly tomorrow going into work and having to confess that in the end I hadn't bothered with it, and then later I'd probably wish that I had gone.
Not having a ticket, a programme or a map, I started with the garden of somebody I know, and knew was opening. She is a professional plantswoman, and her garden, which I have seen before at Easter time, was looking wonderful. I congratulated her on this, and she said that I should have seen it yesterday, after Friday's wind, and that they had half killed themselves getting it ready. It really didn't look like a garden that had been recently flattened, though when you observed very closely you could see how the stems of the Crambe were tied around with loops of fine black string. Apparently they were laid flat by the wind. She has a great many nice and interesting plants, and I liked her use of the yellow leaved Philadelphus coronarius 'Aureus' as a clipped dome. I admired that on my previous visit, and saw this time that despite the clipping it does manage to flower.
Then I called at the garden of a former colleague, who maintains a phenomenal quantity of trimmed box single handed. Long runs of box hedging can be made more entertaining if the top isn't kept the same height. Pyramid shaped sections rising up at intervals, preferably in places that relate to other features of the garden design, give the whole thing more pizazz, a trick used here, and at The Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury. My old colleague is another able and inquisitive plantswoman, and her borders are packed full with an interesting mixture of plants. I bought a little Polemonium with yellow and brown flowers from her plant stall, which I never saw before in my life. She promised me it would self seed, and I thought it would look charming wandering around our semi shaded bed along the ditch.
One of the music society committee members had opened her garden, which I'd never been into, though I presume that one of these years it will be her turn to host the annual committee supper (I don't know if we'll ever have to do that, or if our house will be deemed too far away, or not large enough). That turned out to be very pleasant and rather grand, with spectacular views out across the Stour vale to Dedham church, and a huge and magnificent tree on the very large lawn which was either a sycamore or a plane, but I never went right up to it to work out which. There was a Greek temple, and a thatched rustic summerhouse, and an avenue of pleached limes underplanted with two long rows of Alchemilla mollis, which was one of the simplest and most stylish bits of underplanting I've seen. A small boy asked his mother who cut the grass, a very good question, and I thought that it must take a long time. It was a lovely setting, but the garden didn't speak of owners with a passion for plants.
None of the other gardens were as large. There was a professional garden designer's garden, very Chelsea, with brick and knapped flint paths, a folly, a bridge over a pond, and lots of little ornaments and details, which hovered between charming and kitsch. Overall I rather liked it, but on my way out I overheard another visitor telling her companion that it had been a bit much for her taste. The garden owner was taken by my Polemonium, and showed me where she had one that had self seeded into the end of a raised bed tucked away in a corner, and I asked her the name of a geranium with veined flowers I liked, and discovered that it was G. versicolor, and that I could buy one for a pound. She gave me a plastic bag for the plants, which was handy.
Part of the amusement in looking at a selection of private and amateur gardens is in seeing how other people choose to do things. You get the straight paths brigade, with axes (as in plural of axis, not axe), cross-axes and focal points. In some gardens the borders have straight edges, or long sweeping curves, while in others they meander in and out in what is presumably intended to be studied informality but can come across as annoying little wiggles. You get the multiple island bed approach, and the method of dotting of individual shrubs around in cut grass, which I find exhausting, just thinking about the convoluted mowing pattern you would be forced to adopt, and how long it would take to cut all the edges. Some gardens are divided into separate sections using trellis, others more subtly divided with a nod to distinct areas, using tall plants and climbers on supports. Some gardens open out to your gaze in a single panorama.
Later on I bought an ice cream, and an Iris 'Holden Clough'. I had one of those before, and am not sure if that's what the half drowned iris is or not that I rescued from the swamp behind the bamboo, so I thought I'd get one as an insurance policy when I saw it, as they are not very easy to find. It is a cross between the bog loving Iris pseudacorus and something else, and likes a heavy, rich soil that is reliably damp but not permanently waterlogged, though it tolerates occasional flooding. I'm hoping I can find a suitable not too wet, not too dry spot for it somewhere at the bottom of the garden. It has strange, sinister, not very large flowers of brown and purple, and leaves that always seem to look a bit streaky. I used to suspect the stock we had at work of being virus infected, but when I asked the woman selling it if the leaves were always slightly striped she became quite animated, and told me how she had been discussing just that very thing with the owner of one of the big Norfolk wholesale nurseries the other day, and they had decided that it was not virus infection but simply how the plant was, since they were always like that.
I didn't form any very dramatic conclusions, but I wasn't expecting to. I decided that if you are going to divide a garden into different sections with trellis you should then go for a change of planting palette or mood in the different areas. If the sections look and feel the same as each other then there's not much point in having the dividers. Owners of large gardens with a lot of grass, that they need to keep open as grass, maybe to preserve a view, can generally usefully turn some of it over to wildflower meadow in the summer. It cuts down on the mowing, brings in the insects and is more interesting to look at than too much mown turf. Bare earth in June is wrong, unless in a vegetable patch or bed holding summer bedding that hasn't had time to fill out yet.
My tour round the village did make me realise how good our garden would be, if I were on top of the weeds. In terms of layout we're up there, apart from the one glaring error in the front over the location of the sheds and greenhouse in full view, and failure to provide anywhere where bulk loads can be dumped. There's no way round that, without demolishing almost everything in the front garden and starting again, so we'll just have to live with it. If we could get the concrete outside the sheds tidy that would help. We would beat most of the gardens I saw today for plant interest, some of them by a considerable margin. I simply need to conquer the weeds, which means adding to the planting matrix and investing in mulch until there is no bare earth and much less naked gravel showing anywhere by the end of May, and then getting into a routine where all digging out of dead stumps, planting and rejigging, goes on between September and March, so that in the summer I can spend my time edging, dead heading, and pulling out horsetail to keep the place looking tidy. Not too tidy, because that's not atmospheric, but not festooned in goosegrass and thick with horsetail. Unfortunately I have to go to work tomorrow, but action can resume on Tuesday.
Not having a ticket, a programme or a map, I started with the garden of somebody I know, and knew was opening. She is a professional plantswoman, and her garden, which I have seen before at Easter time, was looking wonderful. I congratulated her on this, and she said that I should have seen it yesterday, after Friday's wind, and that they had half killed themselves getting it ready. It really didn't look like a garden that had been recently flattened, though when you observed very closely you could see how the stems of the Crambe were tied around with loops of fine black string. Apparently they were laid flat by the wind. She has a great many nice and interesting plants, and I liked her use of the yellow leaved Philadelphus coronarius 'Aureus' as a clipped dome. I admired that on my previous visit, and saw this time that despite the clipping it does manage to flower.
Then I called at the garden of a former colleague, who maintains a phenomenal quantity of trimmed box single handed. Long runs of box hedging can be made more entertaining if the top isn't kept the same height. Pyramid shaped sections rising up at intervals, preferably in places that relate to other features of the garden design, give the whole thing more pizazz, a trick used here, and at The Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury. My old colleague is another able and inquisitive plantswoman, and her borders are packed full with an interesting mixture of plants. I bought a little Polemonium with yellow and brown flowers from her plant stall, which I never saw before in my life. She promised me it would self seed, and I thought it would look charming wandering around our semi shaded bed along the ditch.
One of the music society committee members had opened her garden, which I'd never been into, though I presume that one of these years it will be her turn to host the annual committee supper (I don't know if we'll ever have to do that, or if our house will be deemed too far away, or not large enough). That turned out to be very pleasant and rather grand, with spectacular views out across the Stour vale to Dedham church, and a huge and magnificent tree on the very large lawn which was either a sycamore or a plane, but I never went right up to it to work out which. There was a Greek temple, and a thatched rustic summerhouse, and an avenue of pleached limes underplanted with two long rows of Alchemilla mollis, which was one of the simplest and most stylish bits of underplanting I've seen. A small boy asked his mother who cut the grass, a very good question, and I thought that it must take a long time. It was a lovely setting, but the garden didn't speak of owners with a passion for plants.
None of the other gardens were as large. There was a professional garden designer's garden, very Chelsea, with brick and knapped flint paths, a folly, a bridge over a pond, and lots of little ornaments and details, which hovered between charming and kitsch. Overall I rather liked it, but on my way out I overheard another visitor telling her companion that it had been a bit much for her taste. The garden owner was taken by my Polemonium, and showed me where she had one that had self seeded into the end of a raised bed tucked away in a corner, and I asked her the name of a geranium with veined flowers I liked, and discovered that it was G. versicolor, and that I could buy one for a pound. She gave me a plastic bag for the plants, which was handy.
Part of the amusement in looking at a selection of private and amateur gardens is in seeing how other people choose to do things. You get the straight paths brigade, with axes (as in plural of axis, not axe), cross-axes and focal points. In some gardens the borders have straight edges, or long sweeping curves, while in others they meander in and out in what is presumably intended to be studied informality but can come across as annoying little wiggles. You get the multiple island bed approach, and the method of dotting of individual shrubs around in cut grass, which I find exhausting, just thinking about the convoluted mowing pattern you would be forced to adopt, and how long it would take to cut all the edges. Some gardens are divided into separate sections using trellis, others more subtly divided with a nod to distinct areas, using tall plants and climbers on supports. Some gardens open out to your gaze in a single panorama.
Later on I bought an ice cream, and an Iris 'Holden Clough'. I had one of those before, and am not sure if that's what the half drowned iris is or not that I rescued from the swamp behind the bamboo, so I thought I'd get one as an insurance policy when I saw it, as they are not very easy to find. It is a cross between the bog loving Iris pseudacorus and something else, and likes a heavy, rich soil that is reliably damp but not permanently waterlogged, though it tolerates occasional flooding. I'm hoping I can find a suitable not too wet, not too dry spot for it somewhere at the bottom of the garden. It has strange, sinister, not very large flowers of brown and purple, and leaves that always seem to look a bit streaky. I used to suspect the stock we had at work of being virus infected, but when I asked the woman selling it if the leaves were always slightly striped she became quite animated, and told me how she had been discussing just that very thing with the owner of one of the big Norfolk wholesale nurseries the other day, and they had decided that it was not virus infection but simply how the plant was, since they were always like that.
I didn't form any very dramatic conclusions, but I wasn't expecting to. I decided that if you are going to divide a garden into different sections with trellis you should then go for a change of planting palette or mood in the different areas. If the sections look and feel the same as each other then there's not much point in having the dividers. Owners of large gardens with a lot of grass, that they need to keep open as grass, maybe to preserve a view, can generally usefully turn some of it over to wildflower meadow in the summer. It cuts down on the mowing, brings in the insects and is more interesting to look at than too much mown turf. Bare earth in June is wrong, unless in a vegetable patch or bed holding summer bedding that hasn't had time to fill out yet.
My tour round the village did make me realise how good our garden would be, if I were on top of the weeds. In terms of layout we're up there, apart from the one glaring error in the front over the location of the sheds and greenhouse in full view, and failure to provide anywhere where bulk loads can be dumped. There's no way round that, without demolishing almost everything in the front garden and starting again, so we'll just have to live with it. If we could get the concrete outside the sheds tidy that would help. We would beat most of the gardens I saw today for plant interest, some of them by a considerable margin. I simply need to conquer the weeds, which means adding to the planting matrix and investing in mulch until there is no bare earth and much less naked gravel showing anywhere by the end of May, and then getting into a routine where all digging out of dead stumps, planting and rejigging, goes on between September and March, so that in the summer I can spend my time edging, dead heading, and pulling out horsetail to keep the place looking tidy. Not too tidy, because that's not atmospheric, but not festooned in goosegrass and thick with horsetail. Unfortunately I have to go to work tomorrow, but action can resume on Tuesday.
Saturday, 9 June 2012
weeds and compost
The wind dropped overnight, and I ventured back into the garden. I managed to stick to my self-imposed plan for most of the day, to finish one bed before starting on the next, and spread the contents of several bags of mushroom compost around the areas I'd weeded. The final stage of weeding takes some time, fishing among the stems of the asters to pull out the last grass seedlings, which are tiny now and if overlooked will develop into monstrous clumps. I crumbled and splodged lumps of compost around the aster stalks as well. I hope they appreciate that, as I think they don't appreciate having their dormant buds covered over in winter, but the lumps will have largely broken down before then, and the soil is so mere, I feel they could do with the nutrition.
I reduced a large patch of Phlomis russeliana while I was at it, partly because it had got too big for the bed, out of scale with its surroundings, and I didn't want to look at that much of it, and partly because it was infested with wild yarrow, and I wanted to dig the worst bits of that out. It is an obliging, drought tolerant, evergreen herbaceous plant, very useful in dry gardens, with tall flower stems carrying a series of yellow bobbles, which I like myself, but know that some garden writers dismiss as muddy in colour. The bobbles dry to architectural seed heads, which I tend to leave through the winter, the downside being that the seeds spread like the very devil, germinating freely in the rest of the bed, and the lawn. I feel a sort of grim amusement that at work we sell plants for £3.75 a pop, when in my garden it is to all intents and purposes a weed.
Late in the afternoon I got bored of picking tiny weeds out of the asters, and fed up with mushroom compost, and decided to ignore my own work plan and start weeding the sloping bed opposite the island bed. There was some justification for this, in that it too contains clumps of weed grasses, which have set seed but not yet ripened it, and they need to come out urgently before they can scatter the beginnings of next year's crop of weeds. Also I want to plant the B&Q pink and yellow polyanthus in that bed, that are still in the ancestral pot by the front door, which I need to replant with the B&Q blue nemesias that are still in their multipack in the greenhouse.
The primrose and polyanthus display in the front of that bed is honestly rather a jumble. Some I bought, some I raised from seed and they came out much larger and pinker than I was expecting from the catalogue, and some have self sown. There is no colour theme, just a cheerful muddle of pinks, yellows, purples, deep magentas, burnt oranges and most of the other colours that hybrid primroses come in. I like it, because it reminds me of the flowers of my childhood, when I played for hours with plastic horses in the narrow borders of the front garden, before graduating to gardening. And I like a splash of bright colour in the spring. Most of the garden is in impeccable, albeit exuberant, high taste, but you don't want to overdo that, and the Systems Administrator likes colour. In my Peter Nyssen bulb order I included several different varieties of miniature daffodil, which I'll pot up in groups of three or five, and plant in among the primroses next spring, when I can see what other bulbs are coming up.
It's a nuisance that a willowherb with a running root has taken up residence in that bed. It has found a stronghold around the base of an extremely prickly Chaenomeles, where it is difficult to get in to weed thoroughly without being poked in the eye, and in any case the roots of the weed are entwined with those of the shrub. I hit its new growth with glyphosate back in the spring, but it survived that, as it always does, and is now growing away merrily. I am pulling out as many pieces of root as I can find and get at, while trying very hard not to scratch my eyes on the shrub, and will treat the regrowth with yet another dose of glyphosate, but I have no expectation that that will be the end of it.
The surface of this bed is darkened from the last application of mushroom compost, but already moss is growing on it in places, and some of the plants look hungry. It is terrifying how quickly light soil absorbs and loses whatever nutrients you give it, and like Oliver Twist is telling you that it wants some more. Still, to my great relief and joy the SA yesterday volunteered to go and get some more mushroom compost sometime soon. I know the poor SA loathes the task, but the compost is so useful, and so cheap compared to buying smart bagged stuff in a garden centre.
I reduced a large patch of Phlomis russeliana while I was at it, partly because it had got too big for the bed, out of scale with its surroundings, and I didn't want to look at that much of it, and partly because it was infested with wild yarrow, and I wanted to dig the worst bits of that out. It is an obliging, drought tolerant, evergreen herbaceous plant, very useful in dry gardens, with tall flower stems carrying a series of yellow bobbles, which I like myself, but know that some garden writers dismiss as muddy in colour. The bobbles dry to architectural seed heads, which I tend to leave through the winter, the downside being that the seeds spread like the very devil, germinating freely in the rest of the bed, and the lawn. I feel a sort of grim amusement that at work we sell plants for £3.75 a pop, when in my garden it is to all intents and purposes a weed.
Late in the afternoon I got bored of picking tiny weeds out of the asters, and fed up with mushroom compost, and decided to ignore my own work plan and start weeding the sloping bed opposite the island bed. There was some justification for this, in that it too contains clumps of weed grasses, which have set seed but not yet ripened it, and they need to come out urgently before they can scatter the beginnings of next year's crop of weeds. Also I want to plant the B&Q pink and yellow polyanthus in that bed, that are still in the ancestral pot by the front door, which I need to replant with the B&Q blue nemesias that are still in their multipack in the greenhouse.
The primrose and polyanthus display in the front of that bed is honestly rather a jumble. Some I bought, some I raised from seed and they came out much larger and pinker than I was expecting from the catalogue, and some have self sown. There is no colour theme, just a cheerful muddle of pinks, yellows, purples, deep magentas, burnt oranges and most of the other colours that hybrid primroses come in. I like it, because it reminds me of the flowers of my childhood, when I played for hours with plastic horses in the narrow borders of the front garden, before graduating to gardening. And I like a splash of bright colour in the spring. Most of the garden is in impeccable, albeit exuberant, high taste, but you don't want to overdo that, and the Systems Administrator likes colour. In my Peter Nyssen bulb order I included several different varieties of miniature daffodil, which I'll pot up in groups of three or five, and plant in among the primroses next spring, when I can see what other bulbs are coming up.
It's a nuisance that a willowherb with a running root has taken up residence in that bed. It has found a stronghold around the base of an extremely prickly Chaenomeles, where it is difficult to get in to weed thoroughly without being poked in the eye, and in any case the roots of the weed are entwined with those of the shrub. I hit its new growth with glyphosate back in the spring, but it survived that, as it always does, and is now growing away merrily. I am pulling out as many pieces of root as I can find and get at, while trying very hard not to scratch my eyes on the shrub, and will treat the regrowth with yet another dose of glyphosate, but I have no expectation that that will be the end of it.
The surface of this bed is darkened from the last application of mushroom compost, but already moss is growing on it in places, and some of the plants look hungry. It is terrifying how quickly light soil absorbs and loses whatever nutrients you give it, and like Oliver Twist is telling you that it wants some more. Still, to my great relief and joy the SA yesterday volunteered to go and get some more mushroom compost sometime soon. I know the poor SA loathes the task, but the compost is so useful, and so cheap compared to buying smart bagged stuff in a garden centre.
Friday, 8 June 2012
an ill wind
I came downstairs this morning to find the light on the answering machine flashing. That is never a good sign. Nobody ever rings us about anything nice before nine in the morning. If it were good news it would have kept until later, or they'd have sent an e-mail, or a text. Answer machine messages first thing mean trouble, sudden illness, cancelled arrangements, something bad. This one turned out to be moderately bad, as it was the neighbours from the far end saying that our extremely large tree was down in their garden. I went back upstairs to break the bad news to the Systems Administrator, who was still asleep after a work reunion in London the evening before.
The damage, at first sight, was not as bad as it might have been. A poplar was lying wind-thrown along the line of their hedge, resting in places on the hedge, and unfortunately going through the middle of what had been a nice little rowan, until another tree ten times its size landed on it. There were some branches hanging over their garden, but it hadn't reached their greenhouse, or touched any structure. There were no smashed pots or ornaments. And nobody was dead.
The tree looked perfectly healthy, with normal sized leaves right to the end of every twig. The boss's mantra at work is that die-back that starts on the outside of a tree and at the top must be taken seriously, but it didn't look as though we'd been negligent owners overlooking obvious problems with this tree. It was growing along the edge of the ditch, and it seemed as though a combination of saturated soil and a summer gale hitting it when it was in full leaf had been too much for it to cope with. The root plate lay up-ended, at ninety degrees to the ground. End of poplar.
The Systems Administrator sent me home to start ringing round for an arborist to get the main trunk out of the hedge and the rowan. If it had been all on our property we'd have done it ourselves, slowly, in stages, but in somebody else's garden we were keen to minimise further collateral damage, in the interests of neighbourly relations, and because unlike a professional tree firm we don't have any insurance for cutting up large trees in other people's gardens. I tried a local chap, that we've never used before but know of via a neighbour who has worked for him in the past, and to my astonishment he said he could look at the problem today, as he'd be passing. The SA reappeared at home, having tried to placate the neighbour, and we set out with the truck (once I'd cleared the remaining bags of mushroom compost off the back), loppers, saw and chainsaw, to show willing by removing the light debris from the garden.
The neighbour seemed reassured that something was happening quickly, and even gave us cups of tea, and we made polite conversation for a few minutes without her complaining any more about the fallen tree, and me not remarking that it was funny how after she'd told me that they weren't using our spinney as a dump for prunings or mowings, sawn off branches from a Magnolia grandiflora had appeared in it at just the same time that one disappeared from her garden. We chopped off and carried away the branches in her border, that weren't carrying any weight, which filled the back of the truck, and went home and emptied those on to the concrete and went back with a lawn rake and some large buckets and raked the small twigs off the lawn, and pulled little tufts of poplar out of her shrubs and off her borders. The borders had been very nicely mulched with compost, which I remembered had been dumped in our spinney, but I regret to say that somebody had tied the leaves of the daffodils in knots. You really aren't supposed to do that.
We removed a few broken twigs and stems from her plants while we were at it, on the grounds that they weren't very damaged, and she would notice it less if she couldn't see the broken bits. Most of the plants were OK, even a little bed of African marigolds that appeared unscathed from under the chaos, but one small strawberry tree seemed to be completely obliterated. I found bits of it while I was picking up twigs, and then the SA finished clearing that area, and afterwards there was no trace of the Arbutus at all. By then our neighbour had gone out, so I rang as soon as we got home and left a message promising to get her a new one on Monday, on the grounds that it was only fair, and prompt offer of restitution might help fend off vengeful claims for more substantial compensation. The SA did at my prompting take photographs of the tree before we started clearing up, and again afterwards, so that we could prove the extent of the damage, or lack of it, and the reasonableness of our belief that the tree was in good health right up to the point where it fell over.
I love trees, but sometimes I wish that they could love me back a bit, instead of falling on things inconveniently. However, it could have been much worse, and we are not alone in our troubles. I saw in the paper that the second day of The Suffolk Show had to be cancelled on safety grounds, after some of the tents blew down in the night, and given that the wind was forecast to increase through the day. The plant centre had a stand in the floral area this year, and the boss is on the organising committee. All that effort preparing for the show has been half wasted, so they will be spitting, not to mention all the would-be show visitors, caught in the resulting gigantic and confusing traffic jam and wondering if they're going to get refunds.
The damage, at first sight, was not as bad as it might have been. A poplar was lying wind-thrown along the line of their hedge, resting in places on the hedge, and unfortunately going through the middle of what had been a nice little rowan, until another tree ten times its size landed on it. There were some branches hanging over their garden, but it hadn't reached their greenhouse, or touched any structure. There were no smashed pots or ornaments. And nobody was dead.
The tree looked perfectly healthy, with normal sized leaves right to the end of every twig. The boss's mantra at work is that die-back that starts on the outside of a tree and at the top must be taken seriously, but it didn't look as though we'd been negligent owners overlooking obvious problems with this tree. It was growing along the edge of the ditch, and it seemed as though a combination of saturated soil and a summer gale hitting it when it was in full leaf had been too much for it to cope with. The root plate lay up-ended, at ninety degrees to the ground. End of poplar.
The Systems Administrator sent me home to start ringing round for an arborist to get the main trunk out of the hedge and the rowan. If it had been all on our property we'd have done it ourselves, slowly, in stages, but in somebody else's garden we were keen to minimise further collateral damage, in the interests of neighbourly relations, and because unlike a professional tree firm we don't have any insurance for cutting up large trees in other people's gardens. I tried a local chap, that we've never used before but know of via a neighbour who has worked for him in the past, and to my astonishment he said he could look at the problem today, as he'd be passing. The SA reappeared at home, having tried to placate the neighbour, and we set out with the truck (once I'd cleared the remaining bags of mushroom compost off the back), loppers, saw and chainsaw, to show willing by removing the light debris from the garden.
The neighbour seemed reassured that something was happening quickly, and even gave us cups of tea, and we made polite conversation for a few minutes without her complaining any more about the fallen tree, and me not remarking that it was funny how after she'd told me that they weren't using our spinney as a dump for prunings or mowings, sawn off branches from a Magnolia grandiflora had appeared in it at just the same time that one disappeared from her garden. We chopped off and carried away the branches in her border, that weren't carrying any weight, which filled the back of the truck, and went home and emptied those on to the concrete and went back with a lawn rake and some large buckets and raked the small twigs off the lawn, and pulled little tufts of poplar out of her shrubs and off her borders. The borders had been very nicely mulched with compost, which I remembered had been dumped in our spinney, but I regret to say that somebody had tied the leaves of the daffodils in knots. You really aren't supposed to do that.
We removed a few broken twigs and stems from her plants while we were at it, on the grounds that they weren't very damaged, and she would notice it less if she couldn't see the broken bits. Most of the plants were OK, even a little bed of African marigolds that appeared unscathed from under the chaos, but one small strawberry tree seemed to be completely obliterated. I found bits of it while I was picking up twigs, and then the SA finished clearing that area, and afterwards there was no trace of the Arbutus at all. By then our neighbour had gone out, so I rang as soon as we got home and left a message promising to get her a new one on Monday, on the grounds that it was only fair, and prompt offer of restitution might help fend off vengeful claims for more substantial compensation. The SA did at my prompting take photographs of the tree before we started clearing up, and again afterwards, so that we could prove the extent of the damage, or lack of it, and the reasonableness of our belief that the tree was in good health right up to the point where it fell over.
I love trees, but sometimes I wish that they could love me back a bit, instead of falling on things inconveniently. However, it could have been much worse, and we are not alone in our troubles. I saw in the paper that the second day of The Suffolk Show had to be cancelled on safety grounds, after some of the tents blew down in the night, and given that the wind was forecast to increase through the day. The plant centre had a stand in the floral area this year, and the boss is on the organising committee. All that effort preparing for the show has been half wasted, so they will be spitting, not to mention all the would-be show visitors, caught in the resulting gigantic and confusing traffic jam and wondering if they're going to get refunds.
Thursday, 7 June 2012
time to think about autumn bulbs
The rain arrived at half past one, just as I was going in to lunch, so I settled down for the afternoon with my bulb catalogues. Or rather, at least in the first instance, the Peter Nyssen website. I read about this bulb wholesaler years ago in Christopher Lloyd's books, and dismissed the idea that it also sold to the retail public as too difficult, at least if you had an ordinary private garden and modest means, rather than Great Dixter. With the rise of internet shopping I had a look a couple of years ago, placed an order, was happy with the resulting crop of flowers, and have used it since. This autumn as well as planting up the tulip and hyacinth pots to go in front of the house, I want more Fritillaria meleagris and Crocus tomassinianus to naturalise in the back garden. The daffodils need topping up, and I'd like to extend the range of alliums. I could do with more miniature tulips and other small bulbs to go in the gravel. In fact, it is a bad bulbous case of eyes bigger than tummy, and a large part of working out the order is pruning the initial list of Nice To Have down to a more sensible number of bulbs that I can afford to buy and will have time to plant.
There was a sad article recently by Mary Keen in the Telegraph, imploring us to use specialist growers or lose them. Her first example is Avon Bulbs, who find nobody places bulb orders at Chelsea any more, and just about cover their costs at the show by selling seeds. She queries how long, in the days of online shopping, Avon will go on staging their beautiful displays. I saw Avon's display, and it was indeed lovely, as it always is. The trouble is, their bulbs are so much more expensive than if I buy them from Peter Nyssen. 25 bulbs of the elegant orange lily flowered tulip 'Ballerina' from Nyssen cost £3.75, versus £5.00 for 10 from Avon. Do I really want a wonderful Chelsea stand that much, or would I rather be able to afford three times the display in my own garden? This comparison is only fair if both firms are selling bulbs of the same size and quality, not if one is selling big fat healthy stock that's true to name, while the other sends you small and diseased bulbs, some of which turn out to be the wrong thing anyway when they flower, but so far with Peter Nyssen I've been pleased with what I've received. There's been the odd undersized or mouldy bulb, but no more than with any other supplier.
Bulbs seem a natural for online shopping, as they package so easily for mail order, compared to shrubs and herbaceous plants, with their weighty rootballs, and the ever-present problem of how to package them so that the top growth doesn't get smashed, if somebody in the delivery chain decides that the words LIVE PLANTS THIS WAY UP are just too hard to read, or don't apply to them. Against that, the advantage to purveyors of rare plants of selling mail order is that their potential market expands to the whole of the UK, or even Europe if they can cope with the transport issues. That makes it much more likely they will sell their whole crop or stock of whatever it is before it begins to deteriorate. Most plants don't really like being in pots for any length of time. You can do your best to look after them, watering, feeding, pruning and tidying, but most of the time it's a holding operation at best (which cost you money). When I've raised plants myself, from seeds or cuttings, and planted some out into the garden but not used all of them, I'm always struck by how quickly the ones out in the open ground generally look larger, lustier and more full of life than the ones still stuck in pots. As to why this is, take your pick from the plant not liking a restricted root run, or not liking having hot roots during the day, or a big contrast between day and night root temperatures, or sitting too wet, or too dry, or not getting as much air to its roots as it would like. I don't exactly know, but you can see that most things are mightily relieved to be planted out. A business model that lets the grower meet up as quickly as possible with the seven people in the country who want a Thingummyjig whatyercallit, instead of only those potential customers who live within driving distance of their nursery, is a good business model.
Chill winds are certainly blowing around the plant retailing sector, and sometimes I feel moderately worried, though not so worried as I should be if I had a mortgage instead of some savings, and children instead of cats. However, I don't think the rise of internet shopping is to blame. In Mary Keen's article I was rather more struck by the comment from the owner of Marchants, that as well as the rain and the drought he saw a disinclination to garden that he couldn't quite pin down. Now that is worrying.
There was a sad article recently by Mary Keen in the Telegraph, imploring us to use specialist growers or lose them. Her first example is Avon Bulbs, who find nobody places bulb orders at Chelsea any more, and just about cover their costs at the show by selling seeds. She queries how long, in the days of online shopping, Avon will go on staging their beautiful displays. I saw Avon's display, and it was indeed lovely, as it always is. The trouble is, their bulbs are so much more expensive than if I buy them from Peter Nyssen. 25 bulbs of the elegant orange lily flowered tulip 'Ballerina' from Nyssen cost £3.75, versus £5.00 for 10 from Avon. Do I really want a wonderful Chelsea stand that much, or would I rather be able to afford three times the display in my own garden? This comparison is only fair if both firms are selling bulbs of the same size and quality, not if one is selling big fat healthy stock that's true to name, while the other sends you small and diseased bulbs, some of which turn out to be the wrong thing anyway when they flower, but so far with Peter Nyssen I've been pleased with what I've received. There's been the odd undersized or mouldy bulb, but no more than with any other supplier.
Bulbs seem a natural for online shopping, as they package so easily for mail order, compared to shrubs and herbaceous plants, with their weighty rootballs, and the ever-present problem of how to package them so that the top growth doesn't get smashed, if somebody in the delivery chain decides that the words LIVE PLANTS THIS WAY UP are just too hard to read, or don't apply to them. Against that, the advantage to purveyors of rare plants of selling mail order is that their potential market expands to the whole of the UK, or even Europe if they can cope with the transport issues. That makes it much more likely they will sell their whole crop or stock of whatever it is before it begins to deteriorate. Most plants don't really like being in pots for any length of time. You can do your best to look after them, watering, feeding, pruning and tidying, but most of the time it's a holding operation at best (which cost you money). When I've raised plants myself, from seeds or cuttings, and planted some out into the garden but not used all of them, I'm always struck by how quickly the ones out in the open ground generally look larger, lustier and more full of life than the ones still stuck in pots. As to why this is, take your pick from the plant not liking a restricted root run, or not liking having hot roots during the day, or a big contrast between day and night root temperatures, or sitting too wet, or too dry, or not getting as much air to its roots as it would like. I don't exactly know, but you can see that most things are mightily relieved to be planted out. A business model that lets the grower meet up as quickly as possible with the seven people in the country who want a Thingummyjig whatyercallit, instead of only those potential customers who live within driving distance of their nursery, is a good business model.
Chill winds are certainly blowing around the plant retailing sector, and sometimes I feel moderately worried, though not so worried as I should be if I had a mortgage instead of some savings, and children instead of cats. However, I don't think the rise of internet shopping is to blame. In Mary Keen's article I was rather more struck by the comment from the owner of Marchants, that as well as the rain and the drought he saw a disinclination to garden that he couldn't quite pin down. Now that is worrying.
Wednesday, 6 June 2012
in search of a dramatic arc
Reading up on white campion while drinking a mug of tea, I discovered that it is diecious, bearing male and female flowers on separate plants, so I may or may not get seed from my plant in the corner of the back garden. I also learnt that it is moth pollinated. Gardening for bees is all the rage nowadays, and people have planted buddleia for the butterflies for a long time, but you don't hear much support for moths. I suppose they don't do themselves any favours by fluttering around lights at night, and most of them are dingy shades of brown, while clothes moths and wax moths get the moth tribe a bad name (though maybe not, given that our love affair with the butterfly survives the cabbage white). When I was a child we had a French au pair at one stage, who was afraid of moths, so I became afraid of moths as well. I have got over that now, but still don't like them as much as I like beetles, or spiders.
Following on from my grumbles about how road verges seem to get mown before the wild flowers can set seed, I got an e-mail update today from the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife, and saw that they are running a campaign to improve the management of road verges. Apparently there are 238,000 hectares of road verge in Great Britain. That seems quite a lot to me. The Essex Wildlife Trust manages reserves totalling around 2,900 hectares, and it is one of the largest of the UK's 47 wildlife trusts (OK, the website doesn't say whether 'largest' is with reference to area under management, or membership). Managing 238,000 hectares in ways that are helpful for wildlife ought to make a difference in the national scheme of things.
With great self discipline I stuck to my plan of weeding the island bed and mulching it with mushroom compost, as a prelude to planting up the gaps. It was tempting first thing to wander around pulling out goose grass from the other borders, but I really should finish one project before moving on to the next, or the weeding I did yesterday will only need doing again in another few weeks. The mushroom compost has got quite wet, sitting in plastic sacks on the back of the truck through the past couple of months of rain, and smells about as you would expect.
The Rosa glauca that I planted last year has finally started throwing strong new shoots from the base, after sitting there doing nothing, not dying but not growing, ever since it went in. It used to be known as Rosa rubrifolia, which is worth knowing in case you find it mentioned in an old gardening book, or are shopping for one at a nursery run by somebody resistant to new plant names. It has greyish-purple leaves ('leaden foliage' is the usual description), small pink flowers and red hips in the autumn, and is a delightful thing, well grown. It will not tolerate semi-shade and root competition from a large hedge, to judge by my previous failures at growing it.
Meanwhile, I gathered that The Archers is to have more dramatic and darker plot lines. I am still not listening since the BBC threw Nigel Pargetter off the roof, and even the Systems Administrator, who was brought up on The Archers, has given up, saying that the whole thing has just got too silly and miserable. Although I don't listen I have gathered the gist of what's going on, and I'd have thought that clocking up a fatal freak accident, an attack that left somebody in a coma, a (not fatal) heart attack, and an outbreak of farm-bourne food poisoning that left a child seriously ill in hospital was quite enough drama and darkness to be going on with in fifteen months. Life doesn't go on at that pace in North Essex. Apparently the characters need dramatic arcs, and to be in jeopardy so that we sympathise with them. Perhaps that is what Cardunculus needs in order to go viral. Instead of pootling on about wild flowers, and manure, and roses, and toads, and mouldy cheese, and cats, and the hard seats and eccentric sense of timing at the Colchester folk club, and chickens, and the pointlessness of Damien Hirst in the mind of anyone sentient, I need to end each post with a cliff-hanger. The lawn tractor did refuse to start this afternoon, and the SA feared that there might be a problem with the electrics as well as the fuel system, and I thought that might do. Will the SA be able to mend the electrics? Or be electrocuted trying? Will this downshifted nouveau pauvre couple be able to afford a new lawn tractor? Dum de dum de dum de dum. But then the SA said that the electrics were fine, it was just that the engine won't start unless the parking brake is on, and it wasn't. Can the SA fix the obstruction in the fuel system? Er, yes, probably.
Following on from my grumbles about how road verges seem to get mown before the wild flowers can set seed, I got an e-mail update today from the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife, and saw that they are running a campaign to improve the management of road verges. Apparently there are 238,000 hectares of road verge in Great Britain. That seems quite a lot to me. The Essex Wildlife Trust manages reserves totalling around 2,900 hectares, and it is one of the largest of the UK's 47 wildlife trusts (OK, the website doesn't say whether 'largest' is with reference to area under management, or membership). Managing 238,000 hectares in ways that are helpful for wildlife ought to make a difference in the national scheme of things.
With great self discipline I stuck to my plan of weeding the island bed and mulching it with mushroom compost, as a prelude to planting up the gaps. It was tempting first thing to wander around pulling out goose grass from the other borders, but I really should finish one project before moving on to the next, or the weeding I did yesterday will only need doing again in another few weeks. The mushroom compost has got quite wet, sitting in plastic sacks on the back of the truck through the past couple of months of rain, and smells about as you would expect.
The Rosa glauca that I planted last year has finally started throwing strong new shoots from the base, after sitting there doing nothing, not dying but not growing, ever since it went in. It used to be known as Rosa rubrifolia, which is worth knowing in case you find it mentioned in an old gardening book, or are shopping for one at a nursery run by somebody resistant to new plant names. It has greyish-purple leaves ('leaden foliage' is the usual description), small pink flowers and red hips in the autumn, and is a delightful thing, well grown. It will not tolerate semi-shade and root competition from a large hedge, to judge by my previous failures at growing it.
Meanwhile, I gathered that The Archers is to have more dramatic and darker plot lines. I am still not listening since the BBC threw Nigel Pargetter off the roof, and even the Systems Administrator, who was brought up on The Archers, has given up, saying that the whole thing has just got too silly and miserable. Although I don't listen I have gathered the gist of what's going on, and I'd have thought that clocking up a fatal freak accident, an attack that left somebody in a coma, a (not fatal) heart attack, and an outbreak of farm-bourne food poisoning that left a child seriously ill in hospital was quite enough drama and darkness to be going on with in fifteen months. Life doesn't go on at that pace in North Essex. Apparently the characters need dramatic arcs, and to be in jeopardy so that we sympathise with them. Perhaps that is what Cardunculus needs in order to go viral. Instead of pootling on about wild flowers, and manure, and roses, and toads, and mouldy cheese, and cats, and the hard seats and eccentric sense of timing at the Colchester folk club, and chickens, and the pointlessness of Damien Hirst in the mind of anyone sentient, I need to end each post with a cliff-hanger. The lawn tractor did refuse to start this afternoon, and the SA feared that there might be a problem with the electrics as well as the fuel system, and I thought that might do. Will the SA be able to mend the electrics? Or be electrocuted trying? Will this downshifted nouveau pauvre couple be able to afford a new lawn tractor? Dum de dum de dum de dum. But then the SA said that the electrics were fine, it was just that the engine won't start unless the parking brake is on, and it wasn't. Can the SA fix the obstruction in the fuel system? Er, yes, probably.
Tuesday, 5 June 2012
a rush of growth
Plants have grown visibly in the few days I've been away, or out. Some of the shrub roses have reached heights I've never seen before, and are rising far above their rusted metal supports and flopping out over the lawn. Everything looks green and lush in a way that it doesn't always, in Essex, and much bigger than I am accustomed to thinking of it. Unfortunately the weeds have grown as well. The horsetail was an inevitability, since the roots are lurking through great stretches of the back garden, and nothing I can do will ever get rid of them. I'd hoped to be without the several species of grass infesting some of the beds, but they are returning in the absence of a spring mulch, and the priority now is to get them out before they seed this year.
The weather has been good for flowers as well as weeds. In the front garden, two patches of tall bearded iris that I replanted in enriched soil have thrown up a forest of flower stalks, one deep purple and the other a subtle thing in subdued shades of cream that might possibly be 'Lady Mohr', but I'm not at all sure about that. The rhizomatous iris need regular division and replanting of the best bits in refreshed soil, otherwise they stop flowering, or at least they do on our miserable light sand. In the course of replanting they tend to migrate around the borders, to accommodate the growth of shrubs and other inhabitants of the bed since the last time they were dug up. All in all it makes it difficult to keep a label attached to each patch, and by now I don't know what many of ours are, though I know that most of the bearded iris came originally from Kelways. I was pleased to see that I had managed not to muddle up the purple and cream varieties, since adjacent patches sometimes grow into each other, and out of flower it is not at all obvious which rhizomes belong to which group.
In the back garden a large, fat clump of foxgloves have opened white and not the common purple, which is lucky as white ones look better in that spot. A self sown wild campion in the dark corner by the new deck has opened white too, so it is Silene latifolia and not the closely related Silene dioica. Again, that is extremely good of it, since I wanted white campions in the garden, and if it sets seed I can save some and have a go at raising plants of local provenance. There is lots of white campion in the verges of the lanes, but generally those seem to get mown before it's time to collect seed. I noticed a Verbascum phoeniceum in a rather nice shade of pink instead of the usual dark purple, and thought it would be worth saving the seed from that as well, if I get round to it. I need to scoot around with some raffia and mark the stems of the flowers I want to harvest seed from, otherwise I'll forget which they are before it's finished ripening.
The Robinia hispida is just opening. This is a member of the pea family, with brown bristly stems (hispida means hairy or bristly, so crops up in several plant names, and that of a viper) and bright pink flowers. It is fast growing, with brittle stems, and often grown as a wall shrub to give it some protection. Mine is free standing, and makes a sprawling, open shrub. Pieces regularly break off it, but then they do off the boss's wall-grown one at work. At the moment a couple of stems are tied to wooden stakes to stop them falling out over the lawn, but that is not very elegant, and I must either find them some smart iron stakes or cut them off.
The roses are opening gradually. A couple of the old and shrub roses have come out in the past few days, but the main display is still to come. I think that is later than some years, since I remember we gave a party in mid June a few years ago, and the first flush was already past its best, but I'm not entirely sure, and it goes to show that I ought to keep better records. I don't, though. It isn't as if there is anything I can do about it. 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' will flower when it's good and ready, there'll be one intense burst of flowering only, and that will be that, no repeats. Whether it starts by the first weekend of June, or not until the second one, is outwith my control.
Faced with the burgeoning growth of weeds on almost every side, I decided to start on the island bed in the back garden. I have a couple of Cistus, a Phygelius (that's been sitting in the greenhouse since last year) and the third (and final. If this one doesn't take I'm giving up) Romneya coulteri waiting to go into that bed, and now is a good time to buy more herbaceous fillers if I need them to cover the soil (I have my eye on a very nice pale yellow Hemerocallis called 'Whichford'), so I might as well get the bed planted up and mulched, after dosing it with hefty allocations of mushroom compost, given I have to start somewhere.
The weather has been good for flowers as well as weeds. In the front garden, two patches of tall bearded iris that I replanted in enriched soil have thrown up a forest of flower stalks, one deep purple and the other a subtle thing in subdued shades of cream that might possibly be 'Lady Mohr', but I'm not at all sure about that. The rhizomatous iris need regular division and replanting of the best bits in refreshed soil, otherwise they stop flowering, or at least they do on our miserable light sand. In the course of replanting they tend to migrate around the borders, to accommodate the growth of shrubs and other inhabitants of the bed since the last time they were dug up. All in all it makes it difficult to keep a label attached to each patch, and by now I don't know what many of ours are, though I know that most of the bearded iris came originally from Kelways. I was pleased to see that I had managed not to muddle up the purple and cream varieties, since adjacent patches sometimes grow into each other, and out of flower it is not at all obvious which rhizomes belong to which group.
In the back garden a large, fat clump of foxgloves have opened white and not the common purple, which is lucky as white ones look better in that spot. A self sown wild campion in the dark corner by the new deck has opened white too, so it is Silene latifolia and not the closely related Silene dioica. Again, that is extremely good of it, since I wanted white campions in the garden, and if it sets seed I can save some and have a go at raising plants of local provenance. There is lots of white campion in the verges of the lanes, but generally those seem to get mown before it's time to collect seed. I noticed a Verbascum phoeniceum in a rather nice shade of pink instead of the usual dark purple, and thought it would be worth saving the seed from that as well, if I get round to it. I need to scoot around with some raffia and mark the stems of the flowers I want to harvest seed from, otherwise I'll forget which they are before it's finished ripening.
The Robinia hispida is just opening. This is a member of the pea family, with brown bristly stems (hispida means hairy or bristly, so crops up in several plant names, and that of a viper) and bright pink flowers. It is fast growing, with brittle stems, and often grown as a wall shrub to give it some protection. Mine is free standing, and makes a sprawling, open shrub. Pieces regularly break off it, but then they do off the boss's wall-grown one at work. At the moment a couple of stems are tied to wooden stakes to stop them falling out over the lawn, but that is not very elegant, and I must either find them some smart iron stakes or cut them off.
The roses are opening gradually. A couple of the old and shrub roses have come out in the past few days, but the main display is still to come. I think that is later than some years, since I remember we gave a party in mid June a few years ago, and the first flush was already past its best, but I'm not entirely sure, and it goes to show that I ought to keep better records. I don't, though. It isn't as if there is anything I can do about it. 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' will flower when it's good and ready, there'll be one intense burst of flowering only, and that will be that, no repeats. Whether it starts by the first weekend of June, or not until the second one, is outwith my control.
Faced with the burgeoning growth of weeds on almost every side, I decided to start on the island bed in the back garden. I have a couple of Cistus, a Phygelius (that's been sitting in the greenhouse since last year) and the third (and final. If this one doesn't take I'm giving up) Romneya coulteri waiting to go into that bed, and now is a good time to buy more herbaceous fillers if I need them to cover the soil (I have my eye on a very nice pale yellow Hemerocallis called 'Whichford'), so I might as well get the bed planted up and mulched, after dosing it with hefty allocations of mushroom compost, given I have to start somewhere.
Monday, 4 June 2012
back to work
There wasn't much watering to do after all the rain, but I checked inside the tunnels and found a few dry things. Then it was on to tidying up the herbaceous section for the rest of the day. At this time of year that means lining things back up in neat rows in alphabetical order, removing the odd weed, and some deadheading. It is quite gratifying, producing organisation and neatness from a slightly fuzzy muddle of plants.
Some pots of bulbs labelled 'Alba' had all come up with one blue plant among the white, so they went on one side for the manager to have a look at. Viola 'Irish Molly' had greenfly, so that was another note, and some of the hellebores had gone mouldy in the base. This is a problem I've had occasionally at home, and it can kill the plant by degrees, as one leaf or stem and then another goes soft at the bottom, keels over and dies. Helleborus x hybridus seems much more resistant than some of the others. I had to take a couple of 'Ivory Prince' off sale, plus plants of H. x sternii, H. x ericsmithii and 'Silver Dollar'. In the garden I have found H. x ericsmithii a superb and reliable grower, but it can get very sad in a pot.
I helped some customers find particular plants they were looking for, and they were all so happy and grateful, it was quite touching. I know that it can be difficult to find help in shops nowadays, but it still isn't that rare. The last time I was in Tesco, looking for amaretti biscuits, a member of staff looked them up on the computer for me and pointed out the shelf where they were, among the biscuits, where I had looked straight through them. Mind you, that is partly Tesco's fault for moving things around, since they used to be on the top shelf, the last time I bought them, and had shifted down to knee height, one shelf from the bottom.
The only customer not to be happy and grateful was the one who came in holding two flowers for identification. One was Gladiolus byzantinus, and she wasn't happy because we didn't have it, while the other was some kind of mauve flowered Centaurea (I told you they were the new thing at Chelsea), and instead of being at least mildly impressed that we could tell her instantly that it was a Centaurea, she was huffy because I couldn't guarantee exactly which variety it was.
The trouble with going away for the weekend and then in to work on Monday is that there is nothing to make into a packed lunch. No bread or rolls, or fruit, or small tomatoes of the size that can be eaten in one mouthful. I had to make do with a pack of oatcakes and a lump of cheddar, (which at least helps us avoid any more wasted cheese. It was a pleasant, quite strong cheddar from the farm shop, which had started to go mouldy in the fridge along one face only, making me think it might have been cut with a knife that had previously been used for a blue cheese. I discovered it in the cheese drawer when I was cleaning the fridge for our housesitter, and cut off the blue bits and put it in a fresh bag, which seems to have done the trick in halting the rot).
The housesitter says it was fun, and as well as watering the pots gave the Systems Administrator's MGB a wash, because it made him sad to see it dirty, and has now offered to help with a spring service, if required. As it needs to get through its MOT and he has just started work at a classic car specialist garage that is an extremely kind offer that could be very useful. I think of him, and the young lad that had the gumption to take the initiative over the misplaced wedding suits, and conclude that the middle aged shouldn't get too sniffy about the youth of today. Many of them are every bit as nice and as sensible and responsible as we believe that we all were, when we were young.
Some pots of bulbs labelled 'Alba' had all come up with one blue plant among the white, so they went on one side for the manager to have a look at. Viola 'Irish Molly' had greenfly, so that was another note, and some of the hellebores had gone mouldy in the base. This is a problem I've had occasionally at home, and it can kill the plant by degrees, as one leaf or stem and then another goes soft at the bottom, keels over and dies. Helleborus x hybridus seems much more resistant than some of the others. I had to take a couple of 'Ivory Prince' off sale, plus plants of H. x sternii, H. x ericsmithii and 'Silver Dollar'. In the garden I have found H. x ericsmithii a superb and reliable grower, but it can get very sad in a pot.
I helped some customers find particular plants they were looking for, and they were all so happy and grateful, it was quite touching. I know that it can be difficult to find help in shops nowadays, but it still isn't that rare. The last time I was in Tesco, looking for amaretti biscuits, a member of staff looked them up on the computer for me and pointed out the shelf where they were, among the biscuits, where I had looked straight through them. Mind you, that is partly Tesco's fault for moving things around, since they used to be on the top shelf, the last time I bought them, and had shifted down to knee height, one shelf from the bottom.
The only customer not to be happy and grateful was the one who came in holding two flowers for identification. One was Gladiolus byzantinus, and she wasn't happy because we didn't have it, while the other was some kind of mauve flowered Centaurea (I told you they were the new thing at Chelsea), and instead of being at least mildly impressed that we could tell her instantly that it was a Centaurea, she was huffy because I couldn't guarantee exactly which variety it was.
The trouble with going away for the weekend and then in to work on Monday is that there is nothing to make into a packed lunch. No bread or rolls, or fruit, or small tomatoes of the size that can be eaten in one mouthful. I had to make do with a pack of oatcakes and a lump of cheddar, (which at least helps us avoid any more wasted cheese. It was a pleasant, quite strong cheddar from the farm shop, which had started to go mouldy in the fridge along one face only, making me think it might have been cut with a knife that had previously been used for a blue cheese. I discovered it in the cheese drawer when I was cleaning the fridge for our housesitter, and cut off the blue bits and put it in a fresh bag, which seems to have done the trick in halting the rot).
The housesitter says it was fun, and as well as watering the pots gave the Systems Administrator's MGB a wash, because it made him sad to see it dirty, and has now offered to help with a spring service, if required. As it needs to get through its MOT and he has just started work at a classic car specialist garage that is an extremely kind offer that could be very useful. I think of him, and the young lad that had the gumption to take the initiative over the misplaced wedding suits, and conclude that the middle aged shouldn't get too sniffy about the youth of today. Many of them are every bit as nice and as sensible and responsible as we believe that we all were, when we were young.
Sunday, 3 June 2012
two gardens and a wedding
The traffic on Friday was about as bad as we feared it would be, and reminded us why normally we aim not to go anywhere on a Bank Holiday. The R2 traffic report warned of a snarl-up on the M25 around the Waltham Abbey area, so we took the A414 across through to Hatfield, which cost us time, and then there was a slight delay caused by a small shunt near Reading, and a serious delay caused by a really nasty accident a little further on, where somebody had smeared their car over the central reservation, and were being cut free by the fire brigade. That lost us another three quarters of an hour, then there were roadworks on the M4 near Bristol. Fortunately the Systems Administrator knows the local roads around there, having stayed many times with race-going friends who used to live there, so was able to by-pass the roadworks by the counter-intuitive expedient of cutting north of the motorway despite the fact that we were heading south, and rejoining the M5 just the other side of the works. Still, having left home at half past nine, we rolled through the gates of Knightshayes Court outside Tiverton at five to four.
Knightshayes is a National Trust property. The house, a Victorian gothic extravaganza, is closed on Fridays. The house and garden both shut at five, so it didn't matter that the house wasn't open, as we wouldn't have had time to look at it anyway. We had a rather quick scramble around the garden, and saw the terraces near the house, which have some very nice dry garden planting, and the large lily pond surrounded by yew hedges and adjacent yew hedge with a topiary fox hunt along the top, which is the iconic image of Knightshayes used in most books that mention it. There are extensive woodland walks underplanted with azaleas, Cornus, and the usual suspects that you find that kind of garden, and a large parkland with interesting trees, but we scarcely had time to look at those. The walled kitchen garden is now back in production, growing vegetables for the cafe and flowers for the house, and last entry to that was at 4.30pm whereas we got to that part at twenty to five. The SA was turning obediently away from the gate as bidden, when I asked the youthful guardian of the garden with my best appealing expression and largest brown eyes if we couldn't have a very quick look, since we had driven all the way from Essex and the traffic had been dreadful, if we faithfully promised to be out by five. He sighed and let us in. Looking at anything against the clock is never the best way to enjoy it, and we only really got a taster of Knightshayes. It would be worth revisiting, though I can't think when we'll be travelling that way again, and it's a pity we were so late getting there, since this is a good time of year to see it, with the azaleas in bloom and the shrub roses just coming out.
The wedding was very nice. It was good to see the relations, and the venue was relaxed and stylish, the flowers simple and extremely well done, the food and drink good and plentiful, the bride's dress lovely, the page boys and bridesmaids cute, and all the things you'd hope for from a wedding. There's no point in reviewing it in detail, since it isn't as if it's going on a national tour and you could buy tickets if you liked the sound of it. We learnt that the run up had about as many panics as you'd expect, including the bride changing her mind about the dress, and Parcelforce last week delivering all the morning suits to a sixteen year old boy in Oakham, while the t-shirt he'd ordered was sent to the groom's brother. The sixteen year old showed commendable initiative and responsibility in that having opened the parcel (you'd have thought he'd be suspicious that it was a bit large for one t-shirt) and discovered it contained several morning suits for a wedding the coming weekend, he tracked down our nephew's phone number and rang up to explain he had the suits and thought they might be wanted urgently.
On the way back we made a small detour to Malmesbury to visit Abbey House Gardens. These have been created since the mid 1990s by a delightfully eccentric pair of (occasionally nudist) hippies. I first saw them on Gardeners World about ten years ago, when he, decorously clad in a loincloth, was driving a digger around the garden of the fabulous house he'd bought next to the ruins of Malmesbury Abbey, and it's featured in the garden magazines since. It is a wonderfully exuberant garden and I recommend it highly, if you are ever travelling in the direction of Bristol. The upper part of the garden, next to the house and within the shadow of the abbey, has a formal layout with yew hedges and (small) vistas that end in focal points like vistas should, but the planting within the hedges is joyfully chaotic and colourful, and there are jokes, like the big yew ball clipped into a giant face. There is a laburnum tunnel, not so large as the one at Bodnant but looking very good at the moment as the laburnum is out, and lots of pergolas and arches dripping with wisteria and roses, and wooden edged raised beds that invoke the spirit of the medieval herb garden. Then you enter an entirely different world, as the garden sits on the edge of a steep hillside running down to the river and some monastic fish ponds. That is planted up with trees and and an understorey of shrubs and herbaceous plants, including some superb Japanese maples and quite rare woodlanders, and you can descend via zig-zag paths to the river. The rain, which had temporarily cleared as we arrived at the garden, started again as we explored the lower part, and we sheltered underneath a Japanese style gateway (remarkably rainproof) watching the raindrops bounce off the fishpond and the river, while steam rose from the vegetation on the opposite bank. It was very atmospheric and charming, and we had the lower garden entirely to ourselves. It was a wonderful garden, and quite made up for the disappointment of the rushed visit to Knightshayes. We'd like to go back, though not on one of the nudist days.
When we got home the cats seemed entirely unruffled by our absence. They ate their tea, and curled up beside us in the sitting room and went to sleep, which is always a good sign.
Knightshayes is a National Trust property. The house, a Victorian gothic extravaganza, is closed on Fridays. The house and garden both shut at five, so it didn't matter that the house wasn't open, as we wouldn't have had time to look at it anyway. We had a rather quick scramble around the garden, and saw the terraces near the house, which have some very nice dry garden planting, and the large lily pond surrounded by yew hedges and adjacent yew hedge with a topiary fox hunt along the top, which is the iconic image of Knightshayes used in most books that mention it. There are extensive woodland walks underplanted with azaleas, Cornus, and the usual suspects that you find that kind of garden, and a large parkland with interesting trees, but we scarcely had time to look at those. The walled kitchen garden is now back in production, growing vegetables for the cafe and flowers for the house, and last entry to that was at 4.30pm whereas we got to that part at twenty to five. The SA was turning obediently away from the gate as bidden, when I asked the youthful guardian of the garden with my best appealing expression and largest brown eyes if we couldn't have a very quick look, since we had driven all the way from Essex and the traffic had been dreadful, if we faithfully promised to be out by five. He sighed and let us in. Looking at anything against the clock is never the best way to enjoy it, and we only really got a taster of Knightshayes. It would be worth revisiting, though I can't think when we'll be travelling that way again, and it's a pity we were so late getting there, since this is a good time of year to see it, with the azaleas in bloom and the shrub roses just coming out.
The wedding was very nice. It was good to see the relations, and the venue was relaxed and stylish, the flowers simple and extremely well done, the food and drink good and plentiful, the bride's dress lovely, the page boys and bridesmaids cute, and all the things you'd hope for from a wedding. There's no point in reviewing it in detail, since it isn't as if it's going on a national tour and you could buy tickets if you liked the sound of it. We learnt that the run up had about as many panics as you'd expect, including the bride changing her mind about the dress, and Parcelforce last week delivering all the morning suits to a sixteen year old boy in Oakham, while the t-shirt he'd ordered was sent to the groom's brother. The sixteen year old showed commendable initiative and responsibility in that having opened the parcel (you'd have thought he'd be suspicious that it was a bit large for one t-shirt) and discovered it contained several morning suits for a wedding the coming weekend, he tracked down our nephew's phone number and rang up to explain he had the suits and thought they might be wanted urgently.
On the way back we made a small detour to Malmesbury to visit Abbey House Gardens. These have been created since the mid 1990s by a delightfully eccentric pair of (occasionally nudist) hippies. I first saw them on Gardeners World about ten years ago, when he, decorously clad in a loincloth, was driving a digger around the garden of the fabulous house he'd bought next to the ruins of Malmesbury Abbey, and it's featured in the garden magazines since. It is a wonderfully exuberant garden and I recommend it highly, if you are ever travelling in the direction of Bristol. The upper part of the garden, next to the house and within the shadow of the abbey, has a formal layout with yew hedges and (small) vistas that end in focal points like vistas should, but the planting within the hedges is joyfully chaotic and colourful, and there are jokes, like the big yew ball clipped into a giant face. There is a laburnum tunnel, not so large as the one at Bodnant but looking very good at the moment as the laburnum is out, and lots of pergolas and arches dripping with wisteria and roses, and wooden edged raised beds that invoke the spirit of the medieval herb garden. Then you enter an entirely different world, as the garden sits on the edge of a steep hillside running down to the river and some monastic fish ponds. That is planted up with trees and and an understorey of shrubs and herbaceous plants, including some superb Japanese maples and quite rare woodlanders, and you can descend via zig-zag paths to the river. The rain, which had temporarily cleared as we arrived at the garden, started again as we explored the lower part, and we sheltered underneath a Japanese style gateway (remarkably rainproof) watching the raindrops bounce off the fishpond and the river, while steam rose from the vegetation on the opposite bank. It was very atmospheric and charming, and we had the lower garden entirely to ourselves. It was a wonderful garden, and quite made up for the disappointment of the rushed visit to Knightshayes. We'd like to go back, though not on one of the nudist days.
When we got home the cats seemed entirely unruffled by our absence. They ate their tea, and curled up beside us in the sitting room and went to sleep, which is always a good sign.
Friday, 1 June 2012
Cardunculus is on holiday
We're off to the West Country. Knightshayes, wedding, Sunday morning coffee with the rellies, Abbey House garden in Malmesbury on the way back, that's the plan. In the meantime the menagerie is being looked after by the extremely nice, sensible and conscientious son of a friend. He is nineteen years old and over six feet tall, so any would-be burglars that have tracked down the location of our house from references to the lettuce farm can forget it (another reason not to advertise your life on Facebook).
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