if you can't stand the heat

Today was a reminder why so little gets done in the garden in August.  It's too hot.  I remember once, years ago when I still worked in London, I booked a week's holiday in August, not to go anywhere but because I had some holiday allowance to use up and felt like a break.  During that week I built the foundations, no more, of a very small set of steps, which then remained unfinished for another two years.  High temperatures and humidity are not conducive to getting work done outside.

After just a few days with the thermometer in the high twenties parts of the garden are starting to show the strain.  The leaves of the Pulmonaria in the ditch bed, that had been standing up quite handsomely and making good ground cover, unlike the ones in pots at work which looked dreadful and had to be cut back weeks ago, have started to flag, and the Kirengeshoma palmata is drooping.  I'm not so fussed about the lungworts, since they have basically done their stuff for the year, but Kirengeshoma is supposed to be at its peak now.  It is a Japanese woodlander, growing almost a metre tall and bearing pendulous yellow bell shaped flowers.  The RHS says it has a reputation for being fussy and difficult to grow, but I've always found it straightforward, even in the dry conditions of the Clacton coastal strip, though I have put it near the ditch.  Most plants for woodland conditions flower in the spring, and so anything that performs in August is useful.  Interestingly, given that hydrangeas are one of the shrubby mainstays of the late summer garden, it is a member of the same family.  It is an absolute shocker in a pot, the leaves browning and burning at the least opportunity, which makes it difficult to sell.

I pressed on weeding the entrance bed, with rather long breaks in the shade for glasses of water and cups of tea.  I've got the outermost corner clear, which is a morale booster, since it now gives me a basis from which to press my advance.  The ivy hedge has sent horizontal shoots out over the bed, many of which have started rooting where they touch, and I replanted some of those into buried 9cm plastic pots with a dose of mycorrhizal fungus, as the hedge has also gone bald in places, and I need new plants to thicken up the gaps.  The shoots running out into the border looked far happier than stretches of the hedge, and I suspect that the original plants are starved.  It is on very light soil, and I haven't been assiduous about feeding it.

The plan is to mulch the whole bed with chicken manure, then Strulch, then wait for fresh growth of grass and hit it with glyphosate.  Some of the weed grasses in there have running roots, and while I've removed what I could it is never possible to dig all of it out, especially when you are working around shrubs.  The shrubs look in need of renewal, poor things, and as well as cutting out some old wood I'll dose them liberally with 6X on top of the mushroom compost.  I'm still thinking in terms of Santolina, box mounds and dwarf pines to fill in the gaps.  There might be room for one or two flowering specimen shrubs, but it is such rooty, dry ground, I need tough, drought resistant doers.

The Systems Administrator moved the tractor and trailer for me to round up the piles of prunings that have accumulated in the back garden, and took away the woody debris that's built up so far in the entrance bed, though there'll be plenty more to come.  I'm cutting the Portuguese laurel back to size, since much as I like it I don't want it to reach the 8 metre spread and 12 metre height that it would be capable of if left unchecked. The boundary hedge has sent great long shoots out into the bed, and I'm taking them off, though I shall need the step ladder and long handled loppers to complete the job.  The SA was making noises about mowing the lawn, but took my advice to leave it until the weather cooled down.  Yesterday's final trip to the cricket as temperatures reached around 30 degrees in London was probably a trip too far, and we don't want the virus to flare up again in a relapse.  Apart from the SA's own health, comfort and well-being, it is only a month until we are supposed to be going on holiday.

there may be trouble ahead

The illuminated road signs in Colchester have stopped telling us to plan our journey during the Olympics, which is all that they've said since May, irrespective of whatever hold-ups and delays there were on the A12 or the A120, and are now warning us that there is heavy traffic at Chelmsford due to an event at Hylands.  This is the V festival.  The Systems Administrator's train out of London yesterday after the cricket was standing room only, because it was packed with young people carrying rucksacks.  They were discussing A level results and very Wow that's like totally amazing.  The SA thought it was odd to see them there, given that train didn't stop at Chelmsford, but most of them were too busy texting or talking to notice as they sailed through.  By Colchester some were looking confused, though the SA heard one girl confidently telling her friends that it was, like, OK, because Chelmsford was the next stop after Colchester.

I converted £25 of my Tesco clubcard points into double points, and spent them all on cat food.  I don't suppose that's what we're meant to do.  I expect the Tesco marketing department are hoping I'll convert them into vouchers for clothing, or electrical goods, and then buy something I wouldn't have bought otherwise, but we always need cat food.  You have to queue at the information desk to swap them for vouchers, which was staffed by a young girl with either a summer cold or bad hay fever, who said that I could convert that one, indicating the voucher for ten pounds.  I asked why I couldn't convert the other two vouchers, for £2.50 and £9.50, and she said, between sneezes, that the converted vouchers had to be for multiples of five pounds, but that she could give me another £20 worth of cat food tokens and put the other two pounds back on my account.  Which rather begs the question why Tesco sent me vouchers for £9.50 and £2.50 rather than £10 and £2.  Fifty pounds buys quite a lot of cat food, and should keep us going for a while.

I returned home to a flashing light on the answering machine, which turned out to be a message from the bookings organiser of the garden club I'm talking to next Tuesday, saying that her Chairman had been asking her how I was going to achieve 'masses of colour' using plants rather than slides, and asking if I could ring to discuss it.  I thought it was a bit late for that now.  They knew when they booked me that I talk using live plants, not photographs.  Was she expecting me to offer to put together a slide display before Tuesday?  Or suggest a different topic that didn't require plants?  I could talk about beekeeping or the woodland charity if she prefers.  Or did she think that the plant centre would be full of masses of colour, but I might not think to bring it with me unless reminded?  Or that the quality of my presentation would be improved by letting me know in advance that she didn't have faith in me, and rather wished she hadn't booked me?

When she rang making the original enquiry and we got to the point in the conversation where I told her what my fee was, she told me that I charged the same as my manager, and suggested I might like to offer to do it for less.  I wasn't sure that my manager would be thrilled to know that his garden club ladies were disclosing his fee rate to his staff, but seeing that we were both doing talks freelance and not as representatives of the plant centre, I didn't see why I should be expected to undercut him, and politely declined.  Nine times out of ten, if you are going to get trouble, it will be from a posh lady with a purring voice.

watering, weeding, deadheading (and not forgetting the chickens)

Watering all the pots outside took a long time this morning, as I gave each one a dose of liquid feed (except those I'm afraid of poisoning, the camellias, the phoenix palm and a miserable Lapageria which is eaten by snails each time I take my eyes off it, but lives on in an almost leafless state).  I used B&Q's own brand of balanced plant food, mixed somewhat on the weak side, one capful (it is a very small cap) to a can of water.  Most of the ivy leaved geraniums are doing disgracefully badly, and at the current rate of progress are headed for the compost bin rather than the greenhouse at the end of the season.  Maybe I should have fed them more frequently, or maybe the cold wet summer after the long British winter was just too discouraging for them.  I'll start again next year with fresh, vigorous plants.

Some things have done unexpectedly well recently.  A Hoya, given to me by a friend who rooted it from her grandmother's plant, has suddenly made about a metre of extension growth.  Still no flowers, but at least it looks healthy.  For months after I was given it the thing refused to grow at all, and when I decided to try repotting it in fresh and different compost turned out to have a very shaky root system.  It has abandoned the green florist's cane I gave it, and is winding itself around the other plants on the stand in the middle of the conservatory, so I think it will soon be time to move it to a larger pot, and give it something more substantial to climb up.  However, the Tropaeolum tuberosum 'Ken Aslet' is doing what it did last year, and sending out shoots that go yellow and die again without having produced even one orange and yellow long spurred flower in early July.  I nust spend an hour or two researching the requirements of this plant (and the Lapageria), since whatever they are, I'm clearly not meeting them.

Then I returned to digging out the weeds from the entrance bed.  I'm starting to think foliage interest for the ground cover, large areas of rounded shapes of clipped box and Santolina.  Magazine photographs of hillside gardens in Provence may well have permeated my thinking, but I'm not too proud to borrow a good idea when I see one.  Totally new ideas in gardening are very rare.    Derek Jarman's garden was new, and expanded our ideas of what a garden could be.  I can't think of any other recent ones offhand.  The prairie planting movement that started in Germany and the Netherlands, and has been researched by academics at Sheffield university, is newish, but only really a development of natural planting ideas put forward by William Robinson, and Christopher Lloyd's championing of exotic planting spawned a legion of imitators, but was again a return to Victorian values.  By garden ideas I mean schemes that are actually built, and function in the real world over a period of several years, so I don't count some of the more garish schemes we've seen at Chelsea.

The Systems Administrator is off for another day's cricket, so at four I unleashed the chickens of mass destruction, and busied myself dead-heading the dahlias and lavender, and trimming the box domes by the front door, while they fossicked around in the Eleagnus hedge.  The rooster does not like going in the hedge, but patrols along the edge of it.  I do need them to go back into their run very soon, since the SA has just rung and need's collecting from Colchester station in just over half an hour.  I might have to resort to bribery in the form of sultanas.

James Taylor is playing in this test match.  The SA was dismissive when I said that we'd seen him make a county century at Lord's, the time the SA took me there, then worked out that our trip was two years ago, and realised that I was probably right.  You see, even though I am not terribly interested in sport, I was paying attention.  I remembered James Taylor, because he is very little, and looked very young, and I think that may have been his first century in a county match.  The SA will be able to put me right.  One of the attractions of cricket to its aficionados is the statistics.

waiting for the parcel van

Convalescence is an expensive business.  The Systems Administrator, reduced to spending days sitting on the sofa, ordered an Android tablet.  I am not utterly convinced what gap in the SA's technical armoury this fills, given that the SA has a perfectly good laptop and almost never goes to places where the laptop wouldn't work perfectly well, if necessary with a dongle.  However, bored and idle fingers will roam across the Amazon website, and the tablet was ordered, also a case.  I don't quite see the attraction of a case, given that a tablet is supposed to be lightweight, and the case weighs 406 grammes, but that is speaking as somebody who puts their Kindle in a used envelope for safe keeping when taking it out and about.  Also, as I persist in carrying my stuff around in a satchel made out of saddle grade leather, guaranteed to last practically for ever, that weighs approximately three quarters of a tonne, I am in no position to criticize.

The case arrived yesterday, but the tablet didn't.  The SA had paid a premium for a guaranteed time slot delivery, and spent the morning hovering about listening for the van, so was rather irritable about this.  The parcel seems to have made it as far as about Elmstead Market, according to the parcel company's tracking service, and then gone back to our local depot.  Which is in Chelmsford.  Note to the management of all commercial parcel operations:  Chelmsford is a forty-five minute drive from our village to the east of Colchester, and that's on a good day when the A12 hasn't ground to a standstill because some clown turned their caravan over.  It cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as local.

Amazon refunded the premium delivery charge, but the SA couldn't wait around for the van today due to having a ticket for the Test at Lord's.  All that sofa rest has been building up to this moment, and the SA trundled off, ears ringing with instructions to wear a hat and drink lots of water, leaving me to sign for the parcel, which was due sometime mid-morning.  I thought I'd better work in the front garden, rather than continue in the back and risk not hearing the van, so made a start on weeding the bed by the entrance.  It's a task I'd been leaving until later, on the grounds that it wasn't as urgent as several other jobs, but if it's left too long it will get urgent.  I weeded the whole thing last year, but never planted up the gaps, so once again the soil is covered in a layer of assorted grasses, mostly clump formers that are easy to pull out, but some with running roots.

It's a problem area, which I'm not sure how to fill.  I've tried various things, some of which have thrived and many of which have not.  Some were rescued and moved, some died outright, others merely languish.  It is an awkward space, triangular in shape, on very light soil which by now is invaded by the roots of the boundary hedge and those shrubs that have taken, and blasted by wind.  It doesn't merit very intricate planting, because nobody is going to hang about there to look at it closely.  I need something that will cope with the drought, the wind and the rootiness, that will smother weeds, and grow fast to cover the ground, because I am running out of time, patience and energy to keep weeding it.  I want the bed to look after itself for great stretches of the year, with my input limited to some pruning, and pulling out the small number of weeds that have crept in.  I don't want to spend a fortune on plants, so herbaceous subjects that would need to go in at nine or ten plants to the square metre, and then take several years to join up, are definitely out.

At the moment I don't even have a feel for the look or mood to aim for.  The surviving plants are a rather ill-assorted lot, accumulated over nearly twenty years of fiddling about rather than according to any sort of design brief, but I don't want to remove anything large that's coping because I want the whole thing filled up sooner rather than later.  This leaves me with a magnificent pineapple broom, a couple of weigela and a philadelphus, two slightly unhappy crab apples, a shrubby honeysuckle that doesn't seem to mind the conditions, a scotch rose that is starting to run incontinently, some vast late flowering red hot pokers that are among the best plants for a dry and awful site that I've ever met, several hollies, a bird-sown Portuguese laurel, a Cotinus that's finally starting to get going though rather loomed over by the laurel, a mystery berberis that I think was originally the rootstock of something else, two large and well-established cottage garden peonies, a japanese quince that clashes disastrously with one of the crabs, a struggling Ribes speciosum, a yellow fruited shrubby ivy, a semi-prostrate cotoneaster that doesn't quite manage to suppress the weeds, a slightly tender thing from the pea family whose name I can't remember at this minute, and a few other odds and sods.  They don't exactly gel to a unified vision, do they?  Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

The van duly arrived.  The driver was very young, and it turned out that yesterday his Satnav had taken him to the edge of our spinney and then wanted him to drive through a field.  I suggested that he would get to know the route, and he said he had only been doing the job for a couple of weeks.  Then he asked if I could possibly delay signing for the parcel for five minutes, because he was slightly ahead of his time and all hell would break loose if his electronic signature machine showed that he'd been early.  I said that was fine, and hung around the kitchen for five minutes waiting until I could have the SA's parcel and the van would go away.  Compared to DPD the Royal Mail looked almost good in comparison.

a quiet day in the garden

What a summer.  After the gloom lifted briefly for the Olympics, which was good timing on nature's part, it is back to grey skies and rain showers.  I read in the Telegraph about the unhappy campers who have opted to holiday in this country, struggling in rain and wind in the West Country to put their tents up.  Here it was dull all day, which somehow managed to combine with it being windy and very humid at the same time.  At five it started to rain, and I was driven in from the garden.

I'm still working my way up the sloping bed.  Some of the tufts of grass I'm pulling out are attached to running roots, so I'll need follow up with spot treatments of glyphosate, which is easier said than done, when there always seems to be an amount of wind that makes me glad that at least I'm not at sea.  I have been throwing away handfuls of Libertia grandiflora seedlings, which seems wasteful, but I don't want to use it in any of the other beds, so if I potted them up I wouldn't have anything to do with them, and would be reduced to pressing them on (possibly reluctant) friends.  This Libertia makes a big fan of pointed leaves, which do at least stay looking decent to their tips, unlike bearded iris, but dead leaves accumulate round the edge of the fan and within the clump, and gradually the plant starts looking tatty.  The dead leaves pull out pretty easily, but it is a fiddle, and one more thing to find the time to do, and I don't always.  Overall I was probably more keen on it a decade ago than I am nowadays, but I'm keeping some plants, while digging out a couple of the largest and messiest clumps, as well as the misplaced seedlings.  It copes pretty well around shrubs, where it is shady, dry and rooty, so it seems gratuitous to reject it entirely.  Its white flowers are pleasant, but not something you'd make a big effort to see.

The mushroom compost, spread out over the area I've weeded so far, looks very neat, dark and even.  I enjoy applying it.  The rich, crumbly brown top dressing makes a statement that this bit of the bed is Done.  The sensation of done-ness is a delusion, since weeds will start growing there quickly enough, and the horsetail will sprout up again.  I need to follow the compost with a layer of Strulch, which does a fairly good job of stopping annual weeds from germinating. but to do that I have to order another pallet of mulch, since I'm down to the last three bags, which means I then have to commit to being at home when it is delivered, so I'm deferring the order until after my talk and the Chatto wildlife fair next week.

The young oak tree is sending up Lammas growth.  In a second flush of activity for the year it is producing new shoots, as yet unbranched and leafless and by now a good 30cm long, as it does in late summer, except in very dry seasons.  The canopy has darkened to a dull green.  The leaves of many of the roses are shocking, those that haven't fallen off, disfigured by blackspot.  Seasons like this test my no-spray philosophy to its limit.  I still don't spray for blackspot.  Roses that can't hack it will get evicted to make space for something else that can.  I've got my eye on some red floribundas that have never done much good, where the space could be more gainfully occupied by a nice Buddleia crispa, which would like the light soil much more than the roses ever did.

the war of the wasps

Today I put up the wasp traps, one on top of each beehive and one by the door to the veranda.  I was reminded of the need to do this last night, when the Systems Administrator commented that the wasps were starting to be a nuisance, and on Sunday, talking to a customer at work who bought a wasp trap.  From something he said to his companions I gathered that he kept bees, so I asked him if he did, and we all had quite a long and cheerful conversation about beekeeping.  He is mentored by somebody I know in one of the neighbouring villages, and is in turn helping a novice friend, who last year lost all his honey and almost lost his bees to wasp attack.

Wasps don't bother bees in the early part of the year, but later on, at the same time as they become interested in sweet things and start ruining your plums (when you have any), they will go into hives to rob the honey.  The entrance to a beehive is cut into a wooden block that runs the full width of the hive, and traditionally beekeepers removed the whole block in early summer, to give the bees more ventilation, but August is the time to replace it, to give the bees a small door that can be defended by just a few guard bees, like Horatio at the bridge.  I leave the block in place all year, since my bees are on perforated mesh floors so I reckon they can get enough air through that.  Until recently mesh floors were used in conjunction with a solid floor underneath, as part of a monitoring system to test the effectiveness of treatments against varroa, but in the last few years beekeepers have been using them as the only floor, the idea being that any mites that lose their grip and fall off the bee they are feeding on will fall through the floor and right out of the hive.  It is still early days with open floors, and there isn't yet a consensus about the best way to use them at all points of the year, so I don't know if leaving a narrow entrance at all times would be frowned on by the experts, but my bees seem happy with it.

The customer at work bought a very handsome purpose made, coloured glass wasp catcher that cost £7.99.  Mine were rather less grand, made out of plastic milk bottles with tinfoil over the neck, secured with a rubber band, and a hole a bit less than a centimetre square poked in the foil.  I baited them with some 2010 strawberry jam that has started to crystallise and half filled them with water.  The wasps crawl through the hole attracted by the sweet and fermenting smell, and generally don't find their way out again before they drown.  Bees are not greatly into strawberry jam, so the theory is that they don't bother going in there.  It worked last year, though I think I used an odd end of blackcurrant jelly.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator is unexpectedly taken with the ice cream making machine.  When I originally said I wanted one this was greeted with raised eyebrows, since you can buy a lot of Ben and Jerry's for the cost of an ice cream maker with inbuilt freezer, but now the SA is hooked.  I came home from work on Sunday to find raspberry sorbet, and got back from my assorted errands this morning to find the mix for a cornflour based ice cooling in the fridge.  That was the mark II mix, the first version having come to a bad end because it turned out that the SA had never learned how you boil milk without it catching, and was stirring the pan when suddenly black bits rose to the surface.  I explained that you did not stir milk, but watched the bubbles ready to remove it from the heat at the point when it would otherwise rush up the pan and boil over, and promised a demonstration the next time boiled milk was required.  Playing with an ice cream machine is at least a restful convalescent project.  It was a very nasty bug, and the SA is still extremely pale, and needs to be fit to get to Lords by Thursday, for the first day of the Test.

very sweet and incredibly dim

Watering in the plant centre this morning I could hear rather frantic quacking from the other side of the wall.  The manager told me that there was a mother duck and half a dozen ducklings in the small round pond, and the sides were too high for them to get out.  He found a plank of wood and propped it over the edge, but the quacking continued, as while the duck and four of the young ones had climbed out of the pond, two of them hadn't, and were swimming round and round like little wind-up bath toys.

We temporarily abandoned the watering to contemplate the ducks.  Shooing them towards the ramp was not very successful, because they swam around the edge even faster, and shot straight under the plank.  Catching them as they went past was pretty tricky too, as they jinxed away from our moving hands.  We debated whether to fill the pond to the brim, and float them out.  They made tiny peeping noises, and I thought they were probably upset, though it was difficult to tell.  They were also dabbling experimentally at pieces of duckweed.  Eventually one found its way up the plank, but instead of going to join its (still frantically quacking) mother, marched up some steps and set off towards the garden.

The manager, by dint of slowly lowering his hand towards the water, managed to snaffle the other as it went by.  As soon as it was put down on solid ground it went waddling off to find mama, while I set off into the garden in pursuit of the absconder.  The wandering duckling did not like being followed, and did not want to be caught, scurrying into a large bush.  I worked my way round the edge of the bush with a degree of caution, since having to put in the accident book that I'd scratched my eye while crawling through a shrub in pursuit of a duckling would be a ridiculous way to start the week.  The errant baby, showing a good turn of speed, toddled through a great arc and found its way back to the main pond, where the rest of its family was swimming, then dithered at the edge for several minutes before summoning the nerve to jump in.

They were very sweet, brown balls of fluff with black stripes on their faces, and incredibly dim.  I believe that ducks are the stupidest birds.  At any rate they have the smallest brains as a percentage of their body weight (parrots and corvids are top of the tree, though I don't know which would win in an IQ contest).

The telephones were barely working at all.  We have roaming handsets, so that we can talk to customers as we run around the plant centre looking to see what is in stock and how much it is, and try and explain over the telephone what the plant looks like and what condition it's in.  They are not special, robust handsets designed for the outdoors, but just ordinary ones very similar to the ones we have at home, and I think they find the physical conditions challenging.  They kept dropping out of contact with the internal phone network, and cover was desperately patchy, being very weak near the till which is where we keep supplies of scrap paper for making notes, and the list of plants that people are looking for.  I had one excruciating conversation that lasted for over ten minutes, most of the dialogue consisting of You're terribly faint...sorry, you're breaking up...I can't hear you...I still can't hear you.  I do wish that the owner would get some new phones.  Preferably better ones.

One caller was replying to our message left three days ago about sending two hydrangeas to Shropshire, which threw me totally, since the last time I heard we weren't doing mail order again until September, by official decree from the owner.  Maybe the owner changed her mind since then, or maybe this was an individual staff initiative to try and increase sales.  I do wish we could be run like a business, have a policy, and stick to it until such a time as we have a new policy.  It is so confusing, when the phone (which you can scarcely hear) goes and it is people wanting to do things that you didn't think you did. I don't really want to take somebody's details (and payment) for a mail order parcel, and then get a rocket from the owner because the box gets left in a hot warehouse over a weekend, the plants die, the customer demands replacements, we're out of pocket on the plants and an extra set of delivery charges, and why was I doing mail order in August anyway?  Equally I don't want to tell customers that we aren't doing mail order until September when one of my colleagues has just told her that we are.

The manager had a nice holiday, though I should think the beneficial effects started to wear off rapidly, as he tried to contend with the great pile of notes, queries, and samples of dead and dodgy plants that awaited him on his return, plus the telephones barely working, and the confusion over mail order.  I weighed in with requests for stocks of Gaura, Japanese anemones, Lespedeza, Eucryphia, Salvia uliginosa and Sedum in a zingier colour than white or brownish pink.  These are of course all plants I would like for my talk next week, but we need them anyway, because we have so little to offer to any customers who have discovered that their gardens are now completely green, and would like some plants that do something at this time of year.

sowing seeds of confusion

Even though I wasn't working yesterday I couldn't quite escape work.  I got back from a trip into Colchester to find an e-mail from the owner asking whether I recollected carrying out a sale on Friday for sixty five pounds something, which had been put through the credit card machine as six hundred and fifty something.  I couldn't, and I didn't think it was me.  I always look carefully from till to credit card machine and back again when I'm inputting card transactions, and again at the merchant's copy of the slip when I press the button to say that it's OK, tear it off and put it in the till.  This is largely to protect myself, since I remember the time that a former colleague managed to put through a hundred pounds odd of hedging as a credit card charge of one pound.  She was mortified when the mistake was discovered, and wrote the owners a cheque for the difference.  They never cashed it, but hung on to it for ages, and I didn't fancy doing a couple of days' work for free to compensate for a fat finger error at the till.  The other reason I am hot on checking and double checking is out of long habit in my former life.  Over-charging a garden centre customer by six hundred pounds is deeply embarrassing and unprofessional, and shouldn't happen, but not nearly as catastrophic as buying a million BP when you meant to buy a hundred thousand.  Later on the owner e-mailed again saying that one of my colleagues had confessed that it was probably him.

My working on Friday instead of Saturday seems to have caused confusion all round.  The person who obligingly swapped with me spent Friday and yesterday thoroughly bewildered about what day it was, and somebody who should have been at work yesterday forgot to go in and was an hour late.  Apparently, having spent a day working with me on Friday he was convinced that Saturday must be Sunday, and was happily pottering about at home until it struck him that the radio programmes were not right for a Sunday.  He told the owner that his car had broken down, but of course it meant that he wasn't there first thing to help with the watering.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and I got rather hot weeding the geraniums.  We were quite busy.  There were the usual customers asking for things now that we sold out of months ago, and won't get again until the spring, like Iberis, but we seemed to have a reasonable quantity of things that people wanted, which will please the boss.  I am still mystified why we don't have some of the plants that are in flower now, such as Gaura, also rather miffed about it, since I'm doing a talk next week on seasonal planting and am starting to wonder what I'm going to illustrate it with, when we are out of stock of quite a lot of it.  The manager is back from his holidays tomorrow, so I'm hoping the plant orders will come flooding in during the next ten days.

The pea hen and her chick were hanging around the plant centre, making really determined efforts to get into the shop.  She is large enough to trigger the motion sensors that open the doors, so even with the doors left shut she can get in.  Apparently the dog is teaching her remaining puppy bad habits as well.  The pair of them were caught the other day walking together down the road.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator is slowly on the mend, and made it as far as the village today to buy supplies.  A group of them have Test tickets starting on Thursday, so the SA needs to be fit by then to travel as far as Lords.

the joy of sport

So, the Olympics are nearly over.  I haven't watched much of them.  I saw the Jamaican team take their hat trick in the men's 200 metres, and watched some of the archery which was unexpectedly fascinating.  I was amazed to discover that wind surfing was an Olympic sport, and didn't understand what was going on half the time in the cycling.  But I didn't mind it, even when it bumped the R5 film programme off the air on Friday afternoons, and it was nice for the Systems Administrator to have all that sport to watch while ill.

No, what has upset me now is the rising crescendo of commitments to increase the amount of school sport.  A few days ago there were just a few pundits and Boris Johnson going on about it, but now the Prime Minister has weighed in.

“The idea of an Olympics legacy has been built into the DNA of London 2012 from the very beginning,” the Prime Minister said. “Now the London Olympics has been a great success and, as we turn our attention to the Paralympics, we need to use the inspiration of the Games to get all our children playing sport more regularly.

“I want to use the example of the Olympics to lead a revival of competitive sport in primary schools. We need to end the 'all must have prizes’ culture and get children playing and enjoying competitive sports from a young age, linking them up with sports clubs so they can pursue their dreams.”

That's what the Telegraph says he said.  For good measure on The Today Programme he dismissed alternatives such as Indian dancing, saying that he had nothing against it, but it wasn't a substitute for sport.

The enthusiasts for school sport produce various arguments in its favour.  There is the general health and fitness, anti-obesity school of thought.  That's fine.  I've no problems with that.  There is the We must build on the legacy to produce future generations of Olympic medals winners brigade.  That's rather more sinister.  Coercing your citizens into sporting excellence for glory of the nation is something I associate with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, and I'd rather we didn't take it up in this country.  Then there is the argument that sport builds your character.  Some of the men (they are always men) spouting away on the radio have gone so far as to claim that competitive team sport teaches you lessons you cannot learn elsewhere.  Not in acting in plays, or forming a band, or entering a school science competition, or founding a magazine, or helping out local old people, or entering a chess league.  Nope, if you don't do competitive team sport you will grow up a stunted human being, incapable of team work.

I hated sport at school.  It is thirty two years since I left, and my deep, searing hatred of rounders, netball and gym lessons is still burnt into my psyche.  I have poor eye-hand cordination, lousy proprioception, and an inbuilt tendency to become ten times more stiff, tense, and uncordinated if other people are looking at me while I try to accomplish any physical task I find difficult.  If they are commenting on and criticizing my efforts in public the torture is complete.

Rounders is a rubbish game.  You are supposed to hit a missile smaller than a tennis ball with a bat no thicker than a cucumber.  I could not hit the ball.  I couldn't even see the ball.  Then you have to run.  I never made it past first base, since I hadn't wacked the ball to the boundary.  The rest of the time while your team is batting you stand about in a queue, and when your team is fielding you stand about on the field of play, desperately hoping, if you are me, that the ball doesn't come anywhere near you, because if it does you will have to catch it.  I couldn't catch it, and if I did I couldn't throw it.  I never picked up the art of throwing overarm instinctively, like Palestinian children on the TV seem to have done when they hurl stones at the Israeli army, and nobody ever taught me.  As an aerobic workout it was useless, consisting of approximately 95 per cent standing about, coupled with 100 per cent humiliation and dire boredom.

Netball was worse.  The ball was much larger, almost as big as a football, and people were throwing it directly at your head.  And the captains got to pick teams.  I was invariably the last or second last child to be picked, sharing the honour of class dunce with a sweet natured girl called Debbie.  Hockey wasn't quite as bad since it happened mainly on the ground (it was a low grade girls' game) and I could just about follow the ball enough to make contact with it some of the time.  I played in defence, where having a stocky build and reasonably tough nerves came in useful.  Worse were the days when it rained too much for hockey, and we had to do country dancing instead.  There were 31 girls in the class, and I hoped desperately that someone would be ill, because if there were an odd number of pupils in the session I would be the one dancing with the gym teacher, having a couple of groups I sometimes hung out with, but no particular friend.

Tennis.  Ah, tennis.  Tennis bored me to idiocy.  It still does.  My grandmother used to watch it on the TV, and I was utterly, completely mystified as to why anybody wanted to spend their time looking at that stuff.  I could scarcely hit a tennis ball, even with something as large as a tennis racket, and when I did it might go practically anywhere.  I couldn't get the hang of serving.  I would have been unutterably crap at tennis under any circumstances, but was made slightly worse by the fact that my mother, having no interest in it herself and perceiving that I wasn't into it either, bought me the cheapest possible tennis racket.  It weighed a ton, had a handle so thick you could scarcely close your hand around it, and I don't think had a sweet spot on it anywhere.  God, I hated tennis.  The school only ran to one sports teacher for this class of 31, so the children that showed no interest or aptitude didn't receive any remedial instruction.

Gym.  I have saved the worst until last.  I once received a school report that said that my floor work was imaginative but that my vaulting lacked spring, which is the only amusing thing ever to have come out my time doing compulsory PE.  I was a fat child, the youngest, shortest and heaviest in the class.  Somersaults made me dizzy.  I presume they upset my inner ears.  I couldn't climb ropes, because my fat little legs lacked the strength.  The most frightening thing was the parallel bars, when we were made to drop from the upper bar to the lower one, catching ourselves with an outstretched arm.  Given my lack of eye-hand coordination and, at that stage, undiagnosed short sight, it is a marvel that I didn't ever miss the lower bar with my hand and land on it with my face instead.  The most humiliating thing was having to stand in front of the whole class, with my fat legs and fat bottom, in my knickers.  I did not get fitter, standing at the bottom of a rope I couldn't climb, but I learned the art of suffering acute public embarassment.

So, Prime Minister Mr David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Radio 4 pundits, and everybody else climbing on the Olypmics bandwagon and saying that all children must do sport every day, and that they must be team sports, not dancing, or Pilates, or Yoga, or spinning.  That is what your compulsory sport did for my fitness, my self-esteem, my ability to cooperate and my character while I was growing up.  That is what you would like to inflict on all of the unsporty children of today, instead of finding them an alternative that they do enjoy and that might improve their health and fitness.

Actually, sport was character building for me in one way, just  not the one that Boris et al probably had in mind.  Having learned at a tender age what it feels like to have a compulsory activity looming, which you cannot escape, which you hate, which you are bad at, which exposes you to ridicule, at which you never improve and nobody ever offers you extra assistance and coaching even though you find it so difficult and are so bad at it, I am more compassionate than I might be otherwise to the academically dull.  People who never learned to read and write, hated school, bunked off it sometimes, left as soon as they could, because every day was a repeated obstacle course of stuff that you didn't get and nobody helped you to get it, and you had to keep failing in public.  I see where they might be coming from, because I have been there myself.  But there should be better ways of teaching empathy than making children miserable for two hours a day, five days a week.

One of the things that the sporty types don't get is that some of us non-sporty ones are really not interested in competitive.  Never mind learning that everyone can't have prizes and that it's not the end of the world if I don't get a medal, I don't even want a medal.  I just don't want to be there.  As well as not getting sport, I don't get card games, board games, word games, or pub quizzes.  The only computer game I like is Sim City, and that has no winners or losers and no fixed rules, apart from the fact that you mustn't go bust.  This complete lack of ritualised competitive ethos doesn't seem to have held me back.  I went to a good university, got a degree, had a series of fairly senior jobs, bought a house.  When I used to do the sort of job where you get appraisals I was regularly commended for my brilliant teamwork.  Enthusiasm for games, in any form, and ability to get on with real life don't seem strongly correlated.  Nor is lack of sportiness an inevitable predictor of obesity and sloth.  I have a BMI of 21.6, and can lift over a third of my own body weight or comfortably walk twelve miles in half a day.  I didn't get like that by doing sport, but by doing physical things that I enjoy, mostly gardening and walking about.  In fact, the key physical discipline I would like to see taught in schools is Pilates.  Most people are going to do sedentary jobs and a lot of them are going to develop back problems, so learning good posture and core muscle strength at a young age would be more valuable than any amount of netball and shinning up ropes.

The only comfort for today's non-sporty children is that once the rush of the Olympics is over, all this promised compulsory sport probably won't happen.

the wrong day

It was quite like old times, working on a Friday.  I used to do Fridays when I started at the plant centre, then at one point upped my days to Fridays and Mondays as well as alternate weekends, discovered that three days a week was too much, and dropped the Fridays.  We used to get a delivery most Fridays, though, from a local grower who has since ceased trading.  I visited their nursery once, on a trip organised by the Hardy Plant Society, and I wasn't surprised when they subsequently went bust.  It was a ramshackle affair, with assorted polytunnels and outdoor beds sprawling, weed-covered, in random directions, and compared to the huge, tidy, computer controlled multi-span greenhouses at Nottcutt's propagation side (since spun off into an independent company) that I'd visited with Writtle, it looked hopelessly amateur.  It might have just worked for a sole trader, doing it for the love of the thing and making a tiny income in exchange for working 52 weeks a year, but as soon as you started employing staff and having a wages bill to contend with it didn't look a runner.

I think they mostly grew shrubs on from liners, the industry jargon for cuttings rooted by somebody else specialising in propagation, and I rather think that their liner supplier ceased trading a while before they did, which wouldn't have helped matters.  This is only an educated guess, based on the unlikely similarity between the list of shrubs they supplied, some quite obscure, and those listed by the liner supplier, who advertised in Amateur Gardening and used to sell direct to the public by mail order as well as wholesale to the trade.  I used to shop with them, working my way through their list, and enjoyed growing their stuff on, so I was sorry when they packed up.  I think the owners of that business reached retirement age and couldn't find anybody to carry it on.  The plant centre's now defunct supplier also used to sell direct, and would bob up at plant fairs selling at incredibly low prices, undercutting the retail nurseries there, some of whom were their own customers.  This used to cause some ill-feeling, but it's all history now.

The boss told us how important it was to sell as much as we could, and how we should try and persuade customers to accept substitutes if we didn't have the variety they were asking for in stock.  I duly attempted to convince a woman who rang asking whether we had Escallonia 'Donard Radiance' that while we didn't have that one, we had lots of other nice Escallonia, but she was not convinced.  She wanted to know whether we could get it in for her, and I had to confess that while I could take her details, I wasn't sure that the manager would be ordering in more Escallonia in the near future given we already had a good choice.  She is going to ring and ask him next week, another thing for him to deal with when he gets back from holiday.

My presence on a Friday was rather disorientating to my colleagues in the plant centre, who were left with the uneasy feeling that it must already be Saturday.  Tomorrow when the person I swapped days with and who normally does Fridays goes in it will be even worse for them, as time will then appear to be running backwards.  The Systems Administrator was sitting in a deckchair when I got home, minding the chickens, but looking rather woebegone and admitting to having a headache.  I am not at all convinced that we will be going to any family barbecue tomorrow afternoon, but we'll see.  When life throws up unexpected events like illness then weekend working becomes even more complicated, having to decide 48 hours before the event whether to still arrange to take the day off, instead of just deciding on the day if the sufferer is up to going out.

the reluctant cook

When I got up at about half past seven there was fairly thick fog, so that I couldn't see the wind turbine at all.  You don't normally expect fog in August, and I saw later in the news that Manchester airport had to divert incoming flights, because they had turned off their guidance system for routine maintenance, not anticipating needing it at this time of the year.  The fog gradually cleared through the morning, but while the rest of the UK basked in sunshine we sat under a grey pall of low cloud in muggy air until lunchtime.

I am working my way up the top half of the sloping bed in the back garden, pulling out the weeds and adding a layer of mushroom compost from the garden centre in Elmstead Market.  Their fill-your-own bags is not an all-you-can-eat, or rather lift, buffet, unlike the mushroom farm.  Instead they give you a 30 litre pot with the bottom cut out, which you are supposed to wedge inside your bag and fill, then shake the contents out into the bag and voila, you have 30 litres of compost, give or take.  Nobody stood over me while I was filling my bags, and I could have added another shovel full to each undetected, but didn't.  They charge £1.50 a bag, the same as the mushroom farm, and at first I felt a slight pang that at the farm we were allowed to fill the bags up to the brim, or at least as full as we could heave into the truck, and got so much more compost for the money, but the stuff at the garden centre has rotted down more, so you are buying less water.  Anyway, it is very handy having it just up the road instead of twenty miles away, and it is easier to handle and probably better for the garden, and I don't have to enlist the Systems Administrator's help to get it, but can nip round and get half a dozen bags when I need them.  My seven bags didn't last me very long, and I shall be back there next week.

The Systems Administrator managed to sit outside the front door in the sun in a deckchair, reading, and later on volunteered to supervise chicken exercise time, which was handy for me, since I was nominated cook.  The SA is dead right that if I were left to do the cooking during the light evenings of summer we would live mostly on bread and cheese.  Well, I like bread and cheese.  However, the SA expressed a desire for something cooked, so after a fruitless search through the kitchen cupboard for a tin of corned beef I went down to the village for a packet of steak mince.

It threw my timings rather, since I also needed to water the pots this evening as I'm working tomorrow, having swapped my Saturday with someone else's Friday.  We are supposed to be going to a family barbecue on Saturday afternoon.  That's friends' family, not ours.  I presume family barbecue means an informal party at which children are present.  I really didn't think the SA was going to be up to it, but the SA said that by then things would be fine and anyway, we didn't have to stay very long.  It was good of my colleague to agree to swap days.  This year, almost everything I've been invited to at a weekend has coincided with one of my working weekends, and there's a limit to how many days I want to take off.  Next time you go out on a Saturday, shopping or eating lunch or whatever it may be, spare a thought for the staff.  They have friends and relatives too, and being there at weekends to serve you is sometimes as inconvenient and limiting for them as it would be for you.

owl heaven

Just when I was beginning to think that my conversation with an Essex Wildlife Trust representative at the Tendring Show had been a fruitless exercise, the Trust made contact.  Somebody rang yesterday, whose job is to liaise with small landowners who have expressed an interest in managing their plot so as to be more attractive to wildlife, and today they called round.  I was expecting two of them, and was surprised when a third person emerged from the back of their EWT van.  I wouldn't have thought it took three people to talk to one country gardener about owl boxes, but one was very young, and the second had been wearing a British Conservation Volunteers shirt and not an Essex Wildlife Trust one the last time I saw her, so I think there may have been some on-the-job training going on.

They were greatly taken with the meadow.  I hadn't been up there for several days, and was pleasantly surprised myself at how good it was looking.  Field scabious, Knautia arvensis, which is a native wildflower much loved by bees, with pretty, pale mauve, scabious-like (as you'd expect) flowers has seeded itself into the areas of long grass in good quantities.  The plants are perennial, and numbers have been gradually building up, but I've never seen so many as this year.  There were quite a few butterflies fluttering about, in what has been a dreadful year for butterflies, and the whole place had a tranquil, other-worldly aspect.

On the downside, as I suspected, the trees along that side of the wood are not great for putting owl boxes on.  Barn owls need to be able to see the box as they fly past, and they won't go flapping and scrambling through a maze of branches to reach it, so the ideal tree is one with a solid but exposed trunk that you can fasten the box to.  The canopies of our trees are too wide, dense and low.  I'd thought maybe we could have a box on a pole, which barn owls will use, but I gather from the literature they don't like them as much as boxes on trees.  We had a quick look in the wood, at the wildlife officer's request, to see if the opposite face of the wood provided better sites, and I think because they wanted to see it anyway.  It is a nice little wood.  The side of the wood facing the field looked potentially more promising, apart from the fact that the EWT would need access to the field to put a box up, and we don't know that farmer at all.

We strolled down the lane to look at the neighbour's grassland, and the huge area of mown grass around the farm reservoir.  They'd had a look at the area on Google earth before coming out to us, as you'd expect, and pronounced it good potential barn owl territory.  Apparently a barn owl needs about 100 acres of rough grass over which to hunt, but that doesn't have to be one contiguous area.  A mosaic of farm headlands, field margins, and meadows belonging to non-farming landowners who just like wildlife will do perfectly well.  I was keen to get the Essex Wildlife Trust to look at our immediate area for precisely that reason, since it seemed to me that when you added together bits of grassland owned by half a dozen different people it added up to quite a lot.

They were very taken with a mature oak by the farm reservoir as a possible nest box site, and a couple of trees at the edge of a small woodland further down the hill.  I think they'd been hoping that I could mark on their map where the boundaries lay, and who owned what, but while knowing that all the neighbours have bought little bits of the farm, I don't know exactly how far each stretches.  However, the EWT is at the early stages of rolling out a barn owl project, and should have a leaflet ready in a month or so, so I promised that if they sent me some leaflets when they were available then I would go and talk to the neighbours and try and get their permission for the EWT to approach them.  Apparently they have a policy of not cold-calling landowners.  I can see they don't want to risk alienating people and being seen as interfering nosy parkers, by implication probably hell-bent on stopping people from enjoying their own land, but this must be quite a new policy, given that the first we knew of our wood being considered for designation as a local wildlife site was when a letter arrived telling us that it already had been.

When it comes to working with farmers they have a potential introduction if the farm is receiving any kind of countryside stewardship payment, or whatever those sorts of schemes are called nowadays.  The wildlife trust people know the subsidy-granting people, so can ask the latter to seek permission from the farmer for the wildlife trust to approach them.  The lettuce farm is signed up to something called LEAF, which promotes environmentally friendly farming.  Farmers have over the years developed an image as hedge-grubbing, money-grabbing, heartless, hard-nosed businessmen, with no interest in wildlife, but this seems to me unfair.  It is such a tough way to make a living that it you didn't like the countryside you probably wouldn't bother with it.  I presume the other reason for signing up to LEAF is to be able to tick boxes in supermarket's environmental and sustainability audits of their supply chain.  Anyway, I thought that the lettuce farmer had every reason to welcome an owl box or three, what with his LEAF membership and his urgent need to be seen to be a good citizen so that he can get permission for his polytunnels.

I mentioned to the wildlife officer that I'd wondered if the grass around the reservoirs wasn't cut rather early, from a wildlife point of view, and kept rather short, since it was a big area that didn't seem to be doing much with practically no flowers at this time of year, and the wildlife officer agreed wistfully that it could be made a lot more interesting.  It's great fun planning how to manage other people's land better than they seem to be doing it themselves, and I can see why the EWT has to be careful about how it approaches landowners.

I think we have left it that a local owl expert, who has put up hundreds of boxes in the Tendring peninsular, will come and talk to us and see if there is a good spot for one.  I'm unclear about whether this will happen before we've had a chance to try and get the neighbours interested, in case their trees are better than ours.  I would really like to have a box in our meadow, if we could, because if an owl took up residence I'd see more of it than if it was nesting in a box on the other side of the farm, and I should like to see it, flying along the edge of the wood at dusk.  But obviously from a conservation point of view the important thing is that the boxes are in good places for the owls, and it doesn't matter a blind jot whether I can see them or not.  Still, the wildlife officer said that if boxes were put up he confidently expected owls to find them within a year or two, so it sounds as though something will happen.  I asked whether barn owls and tawnies minded each other, but apparently they don't really.  They nest in different types of site, and eat different prey, barn owls living almost exclusively on voles while tawnies go for mice.  Pest control is actually one of the selling points that the wildlife trust uses when persuading farmers to let them put owl boxes up.  I don't know whether voles eat lettuces particularly, but I expect the lettuce farmer would rather have fewer voles than more of them.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator is now able to sit up and watch sport on the TV, but still gets dizzy walking about.  It was an extremely nasty bug.

shopping locally

The Systems Administrator was looking a little better this morning, still very pale but slightly more cheerful, and beginning to express an interest in having something to eat later on.  I decided it would be OK if I ran various errands leaving the SA alone, and went out having given strict instructions to be careful if attempting to go down the stairs, to sit down at any hint of dizziness, and definitely not to fall down them.

My first stop was the local Tesco express, to buy more isotonic sports drinks, and then the dump, where today's cheerful crusher operative on lifting my third or fourth bag of muddy weeds from the bog and decomposed bark from the path by the dustbins asked whether any were heavier than that.  I explained that I'd been weeding a wet area where every root came up with a blob of soil, and we had quite an entertaining conversation about topsoil and the price of mulch.  I still can't decide whether the staff are simply sociable, or trying to work out whether I'm a professional gardener passing off trade waste as domestic, but I think the former.  If you are going to spend your mornings lifting bags of garden rubbish into the jaws of a large electronic ram you might as well try and enjoy the human contact.

My route back took me conveniently close to the Clacton garden centre, to stock up on mycorrhizal fungus, Thomas treats and fly paper.  The fly paper is for the kitchen.  It looks absolutely revolting, but I'd rather use that than keep spraying insecticide into the air, which I then have to breathe, in the room where we store and prepare food.  The next planned stop was the Chatto Gardens, and finally the garden centre in Elmstead Market that sells soil conditioner, but my journey took me past the turning to the tyre shop where the Systems Administrator ordered a new tyre for the truck last week.  This reminded me that I'd promised to go and see what was happening about the tyre, and I began to wonder whether I'd planned the optimal route.  I didn't think I could fit the soil conditioner and the tyre in the car in the same trip, and had been meaning to go back for the tyre, on the other hand, if I had collected the tyre on the way home from the dump I'd have saved two trips across the railway, with the potential for delay if caught at the gates.  It was all too much like the logical problem about the river, the fox and the goose, which I have never been any good at, and anyway the SA hadn't told me how much the tyre was supposed to be, so I left it until later.

The Chatto gardens had more Primula florindae and still had sensitive ferns, Onoclea sensibilis, which was what I went there for.  The Onoclea is supposed to able to live in boggy ground, as I discovered when I looked it up after my previous visit.  The clue was that the nursery had the pots of plants for sale standing in a tray of water.  It is a deciduous fern for partial or full shade that runs if happy and can be invasive, which sounds fine for where I want to put it.  While there I was seduced by the beauty of another fern, Blechnum chilense, which the label said was good for moist sites, but my dictionary says not waterlogged, so I'll have to think about where I put that, having bought one anyway.  It has stout, handsome fronds, quite prehistoric, and grows tall.  My book says 2 metres, but the Chatto label suggests a more continent 75 centimetres.

The garden centre at Elmstead Market turned out to have a pile of organic mushroom compost tucked away at the end of the yard, available for the same price as the composted green waste, so I bought some of that, being very careful as I filled my bags and making a mental note not to come for the next lot wearing shoes with white laces.  Their plant offering is fairly modest, and I hadn't gone there for plants, but was delighted to see that they had just one of the mat forming, drought tolerant, low growing forms of Erigeron that I remember from my childhood, so I bought that.  They seem completely out of fashion and terribly difficult to get hold of.  The woman working there said that they had enjoyed a period in fashion a while back, under the Derek Jarman influence.  I must have missed them.  I shall use my solitary plant as ground cover in the long bed in the front garden, and hope that as it grows I will be able to chisel pieces off the outside of the clump to make more.  You see huge sheets of the stuff in front gardens, often covering those awkward little banks you can get when the garden is higher than the pavement, and I remember masses of it from childhood, so it must spread easily.

The SA couldn't remember exactly how much the tyre would be, and the young lad in the tyre centre couldn't remember what he'd quoted, though he was glad I turned up because he'd had to order the tyre in specially, and then found he'd written our telephone number down wrong and couldn't get hold of us to tell us it had arrived.  He fitted it to the wheel, which the SA had left there with the old tyre, in what seemed like extraordinarily little time, and since neither of us knew whether it was supposed to be eighty quid or eighty-five we agreed to split the difference.

Tendring District Council the other day sent us a permit giving us free parking until next March in any Tendring public car park, apart from the one at the Naze.  This is in order to boost the local economy by persuading people to shop locally.  I don't see how it really helps in the grand scheme of things whether I spend my hard earned cash (such as it is) in the Tendring peninsular or five miles up the road in Colchester, and everywhere I went today provided free parking anyway.  Still, today I did my part helping the local economy.

in sickness and in health

The Systems Administrator had a bad night.  The SA decamped to the spare room on Saturday for peace and privacy, but I was woken at about four last night by the sound of heavy rain, and realised I could also hear catastrophic noises from the bathroom.  I shuffled down the corridor to offer moral and practical support, by which time the SA had tottered back to bed and was lying there sweating profusely.  I found the SA a dry towel, mopped up the bathroom, and sat with the SA until the worst had passed, deciding that while there was no immediate need to call for an out of hours doctor (faced with a sleep-deprived foreigner with inadequate grasp of English I'd sooner wait until things were bad enough for an ambulance anyway.  You're less likely to be misdiagnosed and die that way) I wouldn't be able to go to work in the morning.

When you aren't accustomed to illness it's tricky to know at what point you are supposed to get medical help.  I could think of four reasons why we might need a doctor.  Firstly, if the SA had a dangerously high temperature.  Secondly, if the SA was badly dehydrated.  Thirdly, if the SA had a bacterial infection and needed antiobiotics.  Fourthly, if the symptoms so far were merely the precursor to some serious illness. I decided on the basis of the severity and duration of the attack that one and two didn't apply.  I didn't see how I could distinguish between viral and bacterial infection, but knew that many vomiting bugs are viral.  I was pretty confident that the SA didn't have meningitis, or jaundice.  You can never rule out the sudden onset of serious illness, and I have known people who were struck down overnight and are now dead, but it isn't very likely at our age, and I think you would have to look a lot worse than the SA did before the NHS would start investigating that possibility.  So on balance neither of us could see what a doctor was supposed to do.  The fifth reason to call for a doctor is so that you can pass the responsibility on to somebody else and not have to be in charge, but that's a bit feeble.

I rang work at quarter to eight, got the answering machine, and left an apologetic message.  I did feel mean leaving them in the lurch, but at that point I didn't know if the patient was going to continue to deteriorate, and I really couldn't leave the SA alone and untended in the house for ten hours.  There are quite a few people in at work on a Monday, even with the manager on holiday, and if needs be the gardeners would have to help with the watering, or the owner do a stint in the plant centre.  That could be a nuisance for her given it's the school holidays, but I'm afraid somebody who is ill in bed and too dizzy even to sit up takes precedence over helping at pony club camp, or whatever it was she may have been planning to do.  They are a good and understanding bunch of people when the chips are down, and I'm sure they will cope.  Of course, putting your family first is easier when you have a low grade job.  Supposing today had been a quarterly meeting with the trustees of an important client to discuss investment performance, or the final pitch for a big account that my firm really, really needed to win.  Would I still have stayed at home, or made sure my secretary's number was programmed into the SA's mobile in case of emergencies, and departed, leaving a stock of bottled water by the spare bed?

Some of the dizziness was probably due to the SA having last eaten a meal that stayed down long enough to do any good on Friday evening, but yesterday's request for packet soup and rolls turned out to be hopelessly ambitious, and fruit cordial, while containing sugar, was too acid for the SA's traumatised stomach.  I suggested trying a plain solution of sugar dissolved in water, a sort of DIY Lucozade, and that went down surprisingly well.  By lunchtime the SA was able to sit up in bed, and I was despatched to the village for real Lucozade, plus isotonic sports drinks to replace lost salt, because the SA had cramp.  By early afternoon the SA was ready to try again with the packet soup.  I expect it will all take a downward lurch this evening, as these things generally do, but it does look like a normal nasty bug, that will run its course, as bugs do.

In between playing nurse I spent some time shifting books around on the shelves, to make room for the ones we've bought or given each other since the last time we had a library sort out.  This time the Stuarts and the Seven Years War had to go upstairs from the study to the spare room, to allow me to slot new titles into gardening and cookery.  History is getting dispersed over too many shelves in too many rooms, and the SA is going to have to build a new run of shelving this winter, because we are running out of gaps to put non-fiction in.  Novels are OK for space for now, since I persuaded the SA that while I was not going to give all the Tom Clancys and Dale Browns left over from the commuting days to the charity shop, still there was no harm in putting them in boxes under the bed.  While I was at it some other airport blockbusters and Dick Francis went under the bed as well.  I have just finished reading an interesting little book by Jonathan Bate, a Very Short Introduction to English Literature.  It is only 167 pages long, and on page 24 he asks what English Literature is?  One test of whether something is Not Literature may be whether it gets put away under the spare bed in a box.  I think that Bate suggests that Literature lends itself better to re-reading, but I can't put my finger on the line where he says it.

Most of the books I've read in the past two years, that weren't history or gardening, were piled on a stool in the spare room waiting to be shelved.  There was nothing from the Booker shortlist, and indeed almost no novels published within the past fifty years, but a fair amount of travel writing, and autobiographies by people who were neither politicians nor celebrities, but led interesting lives and could write.  It's a nice question, whether to include such autobiographies among the novels.  That seems at first an arbitrary place to put them, but otherwise where do you draw the line?  My Family and Other Animals is a semi-fictionalised version of Gerald Durrell's childhood, while Sybille Bedford's novels are semi-autobiographical.  Where else should Peeling the Onion go but next to The Flounder and The Tin Drum?  Still, putting Sara Wheeler's excellent The Magnetic North, Robert's and Farley's curious Edgelands  and Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind into an impromptu travel section (travels in the Far East and Tibet have their own section on the other side of the room.  Don't ask) I saw that Sebald's strange, haunting Rings of Saturn had ended up with the other books on Suffolk and not with the rest of Sebald (which is among the novels and in a different room).

It is all very arbitrary.  Really we should use the Dewey decimal system and have a catalogue.  I don't know, can you look up the Dewey numbers of individual books, if you aren't a library and don't want to pay for the privilege?

best laid plans

Sometimes things just don't go how you plan them.  The Systems Administrator felt a bit grotty yesterday, but put the funny taste of the leftover chicken pie at lunchtime down to it having been left over too long, and tottered around with the vacuum cleaner then spent a quiet afternoon watching the Olympics alternating with the cricket.  Having taken a shower before our friends arrived the SA professed to be feeling much better, but by the time I came to dish supper the truth could not be hid.  The SA had some sort of gastric flu, almost certainly nothing to do with two day old chicken pie, and after pushing a very small helping of main course around a plate had to retreat to bed.

Our friends were very nice about it, emitting exactly the right amount of genuine sympathy and concern while not turning it into a crisis.  We ate the cheese course with the attention that Waitrose's nice piece of exactly ripe brie deserved, chatted for a few more minutes, and they gracefully departed early, to leave me to check on the sufferer.  The SA had a temperature and was sweating like a pig, but was compos mentis and didn't look about to die.  I enquired about headache, intolerance to bright light, stiff neck or anything else I could think of that might suggest it was worse than a nasty dose of flu, decided it wasn't, made sure the SA had enough water, left the patient to try and sleep, and went to clear up.

It is horrid to be ill and my main sympathies were with the Systems Administrator.  But it is only human, after you have spent the day cleaning and shopping and cooking, and been looking forward to a very pleasant evening with people that you like a lot, and that your partner likes equally so you don't have to worry that they might not be having such a jolly time as you are, to feel rather flat when by nine in the evening you are loading the plates into the dishwasher and scrubbing saucepans, all on your tod.  Stuff happens, though, which is one reason why I rather distrust pinning too many hopes on holidays of a lifetime, perfect days and other pre-planned high spots.  Aiming to make the everyday enjoyable is a more reliable strategy.  Some things will turn out to be unexpectedly brilliant, and the inevitable cock-ups won't come as such crushing disappointments.

At least having guests prompted us to do some cleaning, which needed doing anyway, and I got to go shopping in Waitrose.  I had a Damascene moment, in which I fundamentally downgraded my view of Tesco's prospects, when I decided I was going to Waitrose because Tesco's cheese offering had become so poor.  In the past I have listened tolerantly as various relatives and friends told me how awful the Hythe branch of Tesco in Colchester was, how the range was so limited, and the other customers so obese and chavvy.  It was easy to get to,  I knew the layout, and I didn't think it was that bad, but then I realised yesterday I didn't trust it to produce the makings of a decent cheeseboard for guests who like cheese, which meant I was doing my entire shop somewhere else.  And Waitrose was so nice.  It was quieter.  It smelt nicer.  The ends of the aisles weren't reduced to pinch points by standing piles of special offer bargain goods in them.  The store was decorated with faux bunting, instead of so many red and blue money off, special value banners that it looked like a grocer's Nuremberg rally.  I didn't have to find a pound coin to release my trolley from the rack, and I got to feel benevolent at the end deciding which of the three deserving local charities to support with my green token.

I have a few shares in Tesco.  I bought them when I still worked in the City, and it has done well enough since then that I should think they're worth more than I paid for them, though it's been pretty poor recently.  It's produced a rising dividend stream over the years, and I'm sure the payout is secure for now.  But I regard myself as a reasonable proxy for the mainstream grocery shopper, and yesterday I gave up on a fifteen year habit.  I went in there this morning, because I wanted something for my lunchbox, and the SA wanted easy to eat (and hold down) invalid food, and requested white rolls and tomato packet soup.  (My additional suggestion of mini-cheddars, on the grounds that they are relatively easy to keep down when you're seasick, was accepted).  As I put my pound coin in a trolley to release it another customer was waiting fretfully for help, since her trolley wouldn't give her pound back.  An alarm was sounding in the store, but nobody seemed to be alarmed, or to be calling for an evacuation.  It stopped after a while, then sounded intermittently.  It turned out the store was in mid refit, so my feeling of disillusion was compounded by the fact that almost everything had moved, and the new signage wasn't complete.  I eventually found the packet soups in what used to be the detergents aisle, still labelled Pre Wash.  There was a fair amount of rubbish on the floor, bits of paper and packaging.  And yes, I'm afraid a lot of the other customers were obese.  I don't know what rating the shares are on, but I'm pretty sure they're not a buy yet.

By this morning the SA still felt clammy to the touch, but was no longer running a temperature, or at least I don't think so.  (We must have a thermometer somewhere, but I have never been very good at reading them, so my usual method is to feel the patient's head to check how hot it is, see how ill they look, and start worrying if they feel very hot, look very ill, or have stopped making sense).  Given the poor old SA's flu it's lucky I didn't have to go in to work today.  I really wouldn't have liked to disappear at seven thirty this morning, not knowing if things had deteriorated in the night, and leaving the SA alone, in case it got worse, and without provisions.

once more unto the breach (or not)

I switched my mobile on this morning, for the first time since about yesterday lunchtime, more out of a sense of duty than any real expectation that I would have some messages.  It buzzed for texts, twice.  They had both been sent yesterday, the first from a colleague asking if I could possibly cover for her on Sunday because her grandmother had died, and the second saying not to worry, she'd changed her mind and would go to work as normal.  I sent my condolences, and promised that I'd fill in for her if she decided she wanted me to, feeling rather mean that I had taken so long to get the messages, and she might have thought I simply hadn't bothered to reply to the first one.

There are so many ways of keeping in touch nowadays, and so many timescales at which one can do so, that it can be quite tricky being on the same wavelength as the people one knows.  Anybody who knew me very well would probably not try to contact me urgently by text, knowing that I don't carry my phone with me around the house and garden, and don't even switch it on more than once or twice a day.  There are not many circumstances in which anyone would need to contact me urgently.  If my parents or the Systems Administrator were seriously ill then somebody would have to try and track me down, or if there was a domestic catastrophe while I was out then the SA might want me back ASAP to help deal with it, but on the whole the world carries on quite nicely without my urgent intervention.  Occasionally I get a panic stricken phone call from a garden club or friendship group who have found themselves without a speaker at very short notice and are wondering if I can help out, and sometimes whoever I'm due to meet that day is ill, but that's about it.  No children, no clients, no employees requiring my urgent support or supervision.

When I meet friends who still have proper jobs and they keep their phone on the table throughout lunch and check it during the meal, or worse still take calls, I understand the reason for it, intellectually speaking, but I don't like it.  The great technological revolution has its downsides, and that's one of them.  One advantage of being downshifted is that on the whole, when you are with people, they can have your absolute undivided attention, without the little electronic box of tricks in the corner playing gooseberry.

With most of my friends we have a tacit agreement, e-mail or text.  I much prefer e-mails as the risk of confusion is so much less when you aren't trying to abbreviate things to the length of, at most, two linked texts.  Some of my friends are likewise e-mail minded, so that's easy.  They are all tech savvy themselves, and have partners who are technologically competent.  A couple generally use texts, in both cases people who are not really into computers, and I guess they feel safer not being dependent on a laptop and internet connection over which they feel imperfect control.  If I didn't have the SA I might be in their camp, though in practice I would have to get to grips with how our broadband works (when it does.  It's been very patchy in the last few days) and how my laptop connects to it.

My mother has worked out that the quickest way of intercepting me for urgent assistance if she doesn't manage to actually speak to me is to leave a message on the answering machine saying 'Your father has just managed to get an emergency dental appointment for this afternoon, can you give him a lift?' or whatever it is.  If I am at home I'll see the light flashing the next time I walk through the hall, and if I'm in London I won't be able to give him a lift that afternoon anyway.

My colleague and I haven't managed to mesh our preferred technologies.  She is of the generation that uses a smart phone for everything.  She doesn't even possess a wrist watch, just pulls her phone out of her pocket to see what the time is.  I have tried e-mailing her in the past, but given that up since she checks her hotmail account even less frequently than I check my mobile.  I left my phone switched on for the rest of the morning in case she texted again, sitting on the corner of the hall dresser while I cleaned the kitchen and worked my way through the whole of Trevor Pinnock's take on the Goldberg Variations.

Close to lunchtime the SA burst into the room holding my phone at arms' length, as though it might be a mildly radioactive source.  The SA is in all other spheres quite techy, but developed a hatred of incoming phone calls during the last years of being shouted at by hedge fund managers almost amounting to phobia.  'Your phone was doing something'.  I asked what the phone had been doing, and the SA said that it had been making that up and down noise like when it receives a call, which is a reasonable description of the Nokia ringtone.  It is so many months since anybody actually telephoned me on my mobile, it took me some time to find the call register, and when I did I found I had about eight missed calls, going back to 2009.  The most recent one was from a number beginning 0844, which I didn't recognise but thought an 08 number looked commercial and I probably didn't want to speak to whoever it was.  Only about six people have my mobile number, and their names are all programmed in.

I rather hope I don't get a call in the next four or five hours asking if I can work tomorrow.  We have friends coming to supper, and I was hoping for a congenial and late evening, followed by a lie-in, and then a return visit to Beth Chatto to buy a fern and an afternoon session with the ice cream machine.  But someone's grandmother dying is a major sad event in their life, so if I have to go in then I will.

sugaring the pill

One of the cats was sick again in the night.  We agreed that they might need worming, and I hunted around in the kitchen drawer to see if we had any pills, turning up a packet containing two.  We decided that the big tabby and the black cat were the most likely to have been sick, based on the arcane intuition of long-term pet owners (where was the sick, which cats hunt, which one has lost a little weight recently) and that we'd dose them first, then get some more pills when we were going near the surgery.

You don't need scales to tell if a cat that's normally a healthy weight has lost some, as you can feel the amount of flesh over the base of the spine and the ribs every time you stroke it.  I have sometimes surprised the vet by saying that one of the cats has lost weight, for the vet to say that it looks OK, but find when putting it on the scales that it has indeed lost 100g or so.  This only works with animals that aren't overweight, unfortunately, so when it comes to the fat indignant tabby and Our Ginger they would probably have to lose more like 400g before it would be obvious.

We started with the black cat.  I held him tucked against my stomach on the kitchen table and opened his jaws and the Systems Administrator threw in the pill, which was about the size of a tic tac, then squirted a little water out of a plastic syringe into his mouth to persuade him to swallow.  A vet taught us this trick a few years back, and it used to work much better than massaging the animal's throat for what seemed like ages, while it held the pill in the corner of its mouth and stared at you mutinously.  The black cat deftly spat the pill out again.  The SA retrieved the tablet, I opened the cat's jaws, the SA dropped the pill into his mouth, and after a moment the cat ejected it.  The pink colour was beginning to come off.  We tried again, several times, the pill getting stickier and more difficult to shake off the SA's finger.  We tried without the water, but that didn't work any better.

The cat closed his teeth around my thumb as I tried yet again to open his mouth, though without breaking the skin.  This shows he is a very nice natured animal, since if he had chosen to shut them with force, the pill session would have ended bloodily at that point for the Systems Administrator to drive me to the walk-in centre at Colchester General for two stitches and a week's supply of antibiotics.  Then the cat began to growl and wriggle, a warning that next time he might not be so polite about our digits.  The pill by now was reduced to about half of its original size, some of it presumably dissolved in the cat's mouth, and some stuck to the SA's fingers.

We were obviously going to have to come up with a Plan B, so in desperation the SA stuck the remains of the pill to a Thomas Treat using a dab of spreadable butter, and offered it to the cat, who ate it without demur.  We dosed the big tabby the same way without even trying to put the pill in his mouth, and he too ate his doctored treat.  Mental note to self: remember to do it that way next time.  The Thomas Treats are a marvellous invention.  A friend gave us the first packet as a joke, or rather gave it to Our Ginger because she adores him.  They come in little bags, and look just like ordinary dried cat food, but whatever is in them, cats find it irresistible.  We save them mainly for consolation prizes after a cat has had to put up with some sort of medical procedure, but they are great for getting pills down impossible to dose animals.  We originally came up with the pill-butter-treat sandwich for Our Geezer, who is insanely resistant to being given pills by any other method.  Normally placid and easy to handle, he transforms into a furious orange demon, lashing out with his claws on front and hind feet and wriggling so hard you fear breaking his neck.  But he is greedy, unsuspicious about food and crazy about Thomas Treats.  I had thought that the black cat was easy to dose and forgotten about the treats method, but he is either getting cunning in his old age, or we're losing our touch.

I don't know whether the pill-treat combination would work on the fat indignant tabby.  She is highly suspicious of anything novel, be it different food or the minutest alteration to her daily routine.  Since in her thirteen years we have never seen her eat anything that didn't come out of a cat food tin or packet* we have taken the coward's way out, and don't dose her for tapeworm.  We confessed this once to the vet, who admitted that she had an elderly, crabby, non-hunting cat that she didn't dose either.  Sometimes you just have to take a view.

*That is a slight exaggeration.  She will eat chicken meat (not skin) pulled off the carcass after you have boiled it for stock, but basically she believes that proper cat food comes from the supermarket in a container with a picture of a cat on it, and that any kind of meat left over from human food is highly suspect.  As for mice, forget it, the unhygienic little blighters.

fine tuning the bog bed

It was another fine, dry morning, and I trundled off to the bottom of the back garden to resume operations with the last bag of mushroom compost, and the plants to go into the bog bed.  First off I replanted the Iris graminea, which spent the night in a heap on the grass with a bucket over them.  Having seen how many days it takes us to finish the potting at work, some of which has already travelled from the Netherlands, I am far more relaxed than I used to be about leaving herbaceous plants out of the ground for a while, especially species with fat rhizomes which have the reserves to produce new roots.  I don't know if early August is the recommended time to move I. graminea, but July after flowering is a classic time to deal with bearded iris, and sometimes the right time to move something is when you need to.  They got a generous helping of the mushroom compost, all that was left of it after planting the geranium and the Trachystemon yesterday.

I am almost out of miccorrhizal fungus, and should have bought some more the last time I was at work, or when I was passing the Clacton garden centre on my way back from the tip.  This has only been available to the amateur market for a few years, though places like Kew were using it a while before that.  The theory is that if you add the beneficial fungus to the planting hole, so that it is contact with the roots of your new plant, they strike up a symbiotic relationship, the plant providing the fungus with food, since it is able to photosynthesise, and the fungus greatly extending the reach of the plant's root system, so providing it with extra water and dissolved nutrients.  The thinking is in nature most plants remain undisturbed and live in this way, but gardeners digging and fiddling about disrupt the normal soil structure including the beneficial fungus population.  I have hummed and hawed about using it, since it isn't cheap at around ten quid  for a bag that might only last me a week or two if I'm doing a lot of planting, but on balance I think plants dosed with it have generally established better and faster than those where I didn't bother.

I pulled a lot of weeds out of the bog.  Most were still small, though each came up with a wet blob of soil attached, and I was pleased to see how the leaves of the Primula bulleyana, which have grown a lot, were largely shading out weed seedlings around them.  I planted a white iris, I. sanguinea 'Snow Queen', which likes moist or wet soil and sun or partial shade, and if happy should be capable of indefinite spread.  One of my other indefinitely spreading iris is starting to get altogether too big for its boots, or at least the bog bed, and the patch will need reducing at some stage, but in general spreading is what I want, since I don't have time to keep wading around up to my shins in mud, pulling up a lump of topsoil with every weed.

Weeding the mud is actually rather good fun.  I'm not sure if it stirs up some ancient childhood memory of going for a walk through a wet wood during a holiday in Cornwall, or if it's the sheer novelty of having so much mud in a garden that is normally very dry, but I am enjoying mud gardening.  When we finally manage to renew the gutter along the back of the house I should like to fit a rainwater interceptor into the downpipe, so that I could use the water from the roof to top up the bog in dry spells, and keep my new array of moisture loving plants going.

I planted a Viburnum opulus 'Xanthocarpum', which is said to like moist or even boggy soil, and pulled out the remains of a poor V. sargentii 'Onondaga'.  This likes moist conditions, but definitely not standing in fifteen centimetres of liquid mud, and all of its roots had rotted in protest.  Pity, as it was a nice shrub, before the waters rose.  The boss's label says that the replacement grows to 4m tall and wide, which is far more than I want, but I'm sure I can prune it.  Viburnum opulus have translucent berries, very pretty until the birds eat them, and those of 'Xanthocarpum' are yellow (Xanthocarpum from the Greek xanthos, meaning yellow, and carpus, -a, -um, meaning fruited).

Then it was lunch time and during lunch, quelle surprise, it began to rain, and I had to rush out and rescue my fleece and tub of 6X composted chicken manure (or stinkies).  Rain showers lasted half the afternoon, sending me scuttling out and in again, so I nipped down the road to see if the Chatto Gardens had any bog primulas left, to fill in the gaps.  They did, so I bought some, to help cover the mud before it can grow yet another crop of weeds.  Having seen how well hairy bittercress copes in dust dry sand I should not have thought of it as a bog plant, but it seems to grow in liquid mud as well as anywhere else.

planting out the stash

The day dawned bright and calm.  Actually, I don't know whether it did or not, because I didn't get up that early, but the rooster was cock-a-doodling away in his chicken house, which he doesn't bother to do on dismal mornings, and when I looked out of the bathroom window over the back garden it was calm and bright at about half past seven.

After sorting out the cats' breakfast (clean dishes, tin of cat food) and the chickens' breakfast (left over brown roll broken into small bits) and collecting a couple of eggs (one on the floor of the house but I know it was fresh because it wasn't there yesterday when I filled their food up) and my breakfast (the usual), and clearing up a bit of cat sick that had appeared in the night, and tidying up the kitchen, I set out into the wood to plant the Eucryphia.

As I began to prepare the site I started to worry about the wisdom of the exercise.  The wood is such an established entity.  There were already roots crossing the spot where I planned to put the Eucryphia.  Would it cope with the competition?  Suppose the fungal disease that felled the ash tree (extremely spectacularly) is infectious?  I planted it, tied to a stout stake which is currently far heavier than it needs, but won't be if it succeeds, and stapled a cylinder of wire netting around it to deter the deer and rabbits.  They seem especially drawn to anything new, so once it has been there for a while they probably won't be interested, unless it turns out that Eucryphia taste especially delicious, and once it grows it will be less vulnerable to having its entire top taken out in one careless munch.

Planting shrubs into the end of the wood has worked in the past.  The tree magnolia, M. campbellii 'Charles Raffill', has put on a tremendous amount of growth this year with all the rain.  Who knows, by next year it might even be ready to produce a flower.  It was planted in November 2003 (not the optimal time of the year to plant magnolias, in fact diametrically the opposite since the boss says May is best) and must have been at least a couple of years old then.  'Charles Raffill' does not flower when young, but ten it is not an unreasonable age to start hoping for a flower.  Some of the other tree magnolias don't start until they are fifteen or twenty.

Then I did a little careful gardening of the sort which is intended to be invisible, trimming twigs off the  Arbutus x andrachnoides which had been killed by the cold snap in February or shaded out by the growth of the plant, and cutting out branches of a hazel that were growing into the Arbutus.  The aim was to end up with two distinct but completely natural looking crowns, so that the Arbutus had its own space, light and air and I could see its beautiful cinnamon coloured trunk, but the hazel didn't look chopped about.  The pole lopper came into play for this task.  The trick is not to try and do it at a time of day when you would have to look up into the sun, since you won't see a thing.

Then it began to rain.  The same old story.  If I were a professional gardener I would have put on my waterproofs and carried on, but since I am a small middle aged person doing this for fun, and I didn't want to catch a cold, I retreated to the house until the rain had passed, which it did, mid afternoon.  Back in the garden I lifted a struggling patch of Iris graminea, originally raised from seed, which has never done well but clung to life in the spot where I put it.  It is supposed to like a moist soil, but the place I chose seems to be too damp, cold, clayey and claggy.  The leaves of the poor iris never reached even half their expected height of 30cm, and I have not had one plum scented purple flower, which is the point of growing it.  I'll replant it tomorrow further up the slope, where the soil is a bit drier, and dig in a generous helping of mushroom compost.  I tried a vigorous looking geranium and a Trachystemon orientalis instead in the claggy patch.  Both were described by the boss as liking moisture, and they seemed like robust plants that might cope with rather heavy and revolting soil.  I will tell you all about them if they succeed in doing anything.  The Trachystemon is described as a rhizomatous spreader and good ground cover, so it may be that if it does anything it ends up doing rather too much.

I'm sorry if you aren't very interested in ornamental gardening, but that's what I have been mainly doing this week.