still winter

Spring is taking her time to arrive, popping her head round the door every now and again, then deciding the party hasn't really started and retreating.  Yesterday it was a delight to be outside, while this morning it was raw.  I decided I didn't have time to wait until it felt nice, and put a coat on over my fleece.  It was originally my walking coat, bought in a sale in the Ludgate Hill Branch of Black's Leisure when I still worked in the City, and did me good service for many years.  It has been to the top of Scafell and Scafell Pike in February and proved adequate to the conditions. Once I started wearing it to work at the plant centre it gradually became so crusted with dirt that I was reluctant to wear it walking, or at least the kind of walking where you might conceivably wish to end up in a pub, or meet any other walkers and not be mistaken for an environmental activist currently living in a hole in the ground.  Eventually at work we were given the car park attendant uniform coats, but by then my red one was wrecked for anything except gardening.  It is still a quantum lighter and warmer than the uniform one, which goes to show that quality will out, since even in a sale close to fifteen years ago I paid three figures for it.

I weeded the damp bed in front of the rampant yellow bamboo, and spread out what was left of my last boot load of mushroom compost.  Five bags of mushroom compost don't go very far, and the Systems Administrator has offered to take me to collect a bulk load with the truck, once the back of the truck isn't filled with wood from the hedge waiting to be sawn into lengths that will fit in the stove.  I am not utterly sure why the SA stacked the wood on the back of the truck, and not on the concrete, but I expect there's a plan.

The bamboo is Phyllostachys aureosulcata 'Aureocaulis'.  I have just looked it up on my spreadsheet (which I must update from my garden notebook), and am telling you the name so that you can make a special note of it, and not plant one, unless you want it to cover a large area, or have put some sort of root barrier around the space you would like it to fill.  My retro-fitted galvanised lawn edging seems to be doing the trick so far, but I have found one section of rock-hard root outside it, that I failed to pick-axe up completely last year, and must dig out before it can make a break for freedom.  I pruned out some of the thinnest stems while I was working on that part of the bed, and think I should take some more out.  I'll look at the clump again over the rest of the week with a critical eye.  It's a shame to rush a task like that, and end up realising you've removed too much.  Far better to take it gradually, nibbling away until you decide you've done the right amount.  The stems do have a tendency to fall over, and I wonder whether that's due to a lack of light, although the bamboos in the Cornish gardens I've visited have often been growing in fairly shady conditions.

After lunch I went to my first Pilates lesson for three months.  First of all my teacher took some time off for Christmas, and then she was ill.  It's terribly easy to let your practice slide when you know you are not going to see your teacher for weeks and weeks, and part of the value of seeing her lies in her enforcer role to make me practice, as well as her feedback in the actual lessons.  She is a gentle and courteous person, who teaches by encouragement, rather than criticism when she justly suspects that I haven't been putting the hours in, so her enforcer role depends on my conscience being pricked.  I have heard of teachers who do bawl their pupils out, but I wouldn't go to one myself.  I'm not paying anyone to shout at me.  She was unable to solve the worrying question of why my right knee has started hurting slightly when I kneel on it.  I am hoping it will sort itself out if I am kind to it and very careful what I do.  I need to be able to kneel down.  Short of a Victorian housemaid I can't think of anyone who needs to be able to spend hours on their hands and knees more than I do.

The potholes on the route to her house were quite dreadful.  In fact, they made Tendring's roads seem good in comparison.  There were a few points in the lanes around Birch and Layer Breton where the holes in the road were so large they practically joined up, and were on the verge of ceasing to constitute a made-up road, while other holes with savage steep edges along the sides of the lanes threatened to send your near-side wheels crunching into them if you tucked close to the hedge to allow another car to pass.  Here and there water welled from the road surface, whether because a spring had spontaneously appeared under the road or because a water main had fractured I could not tell.  Which said, the potholes in the farm road leading to our house are getting very bad.  We need to do the ones on the last stretch that, although it belongs to the farm, only leads to our house and so is only used by us and our visitors, but I keep hoping that the neighbours will muck in and help with the ones in the lane outside their house, which we both use.  I suppose we should fill the holes in our stretch, and half of the ones in the part of the lane we jointly use, and see if they take the hint.

winter flowers

This morning I went to the Beth Chatto gardens.  A friend I'd only seen fleetingly since before Christmas got in touch a few days ago, and we decided we'd go this week on Tuesday or Thursday depending on weather.  By yesterday evening we'd narrowed it down to Tuesday, and today dawned so much brighter and more beautiful than the forecast early fog that we agreed to strike while the iron was hot, and before fog could roll in from the North Sea like it did on Sunday, and go this morning.

The famous gravel garden had that pinched look of plants that don't relish an English winter.  I was interested to see a young gardener digging large amounts of some sort of compost into one section.  I believe Beth Chatto when she says that after planting the garden is not irrigated, but what she does not say is that the soil is periodically renewed and improved section by section.  I know what the earth in that garden would look like without the addition of compost, since it is very similar to the sand in our front garden, and it would not be dark and crumbly to at least a fork's depth like the area I saw being dug over this morning.  That's fine, there's nothing wrong with improving the soil, but visitors should be aware that while they are looking at a genuine example of what can be achieved given low rainfall, no irrigation and sharp drainage, it is not representative of what you can expect to achieve on raw sand.

The snowdrops in the main garden were looking great, at their absolute peak in full bloom, while we were a week or two early for the hellebores.  There are lots of those to come, and I felt a pang that muntjac have eaten so many of mine.  The lawns were terribly wet, and odd corners and sections had been fenced off to visitors.  They must be desperately hoping we don't get much more rain in the next few weeks, to allow the grass to dry out somewhat before things get busier.  The garden was quiet today, despite the sunshine, with no more than half a dozen other people wandering around at the same time as us.

The only trouble with visiting other people's gardens on a nice day is that while you are doing that you aren't working on your own.  I was delighted to have heard from my friend, and genuinely pleased to see her.  I like the Chatto gardens, and it is much more pleasant walking around them in bright sunshine with birds singing than trudging around in freezing fog (which I have also done, on a pre-booked snowdrop walk).   However, I did find myself remembering a lunch in London several years ago, with someone who tended to be more interested in updating me about their life than hearing about mine, who suddenly observed with an unusual flash of insight that I must be disappointed to be spending the only dry day of the week in town.  They were right: I was.

After lunch the Systems Administrator and I finished clearing away the last of the hedge cutting debris from the back garden, so that I could finally admire the late winter flowers without the foreground distraction of piles of brush.  The Crocus tomasinianus are blooming in the middle of the bottom lawn, and look very pretty, only I need more of them.  Really lots more.  This summer when I'm putting together my order for autumn-planted bulbs I must forget articles I've read by gardeners who claim to have planted a couple of hundred bulbs a few years ago and now have sheets of thousands, and order lots, a thousand rather than two bags of a hundred each as I did last year.  Maybe our grass is too thick for them to multiply, but they are not bulking up quickly enough to make a real show.  The bees found them all right, and were busy in the sunshine collecting pollen.  As soon as the sun goes off the crocus flowers they close up again, and become almost invisible in the grass.

At four o'clock as I passed by the chicken run the hens all came rushing up to me expectantly, though not the rooster who had already gone to bed.  It was such a nice day, and they looked so hopeful, that I let them out for a run.  We got on pretty well except when they made a determined effort to scratch among the dwarf iris in the gravel.  I tried shooing them off, and bribing them with sultanas to play somewhere else, but ended up chasing the old lady Maran several times round the Mount Etna broom.  Once a hen has an idea in its mind it can be very difficult to shift.  I still remember the moment at which I first thought that chickens could be interesting animals.  It was on a visit to an open air museum with reconstructed houses, one of which had a chicken run which contained a hen, which had stuck its head through the bars of its enclosure and was trying very hard indeed to reach a piece of greenery just out of range of its beak.  I had only seen free range chickens outside farms wandering about in what seemed a desultory fashion, and it came as a revelation that a hen could want something so much.  I picked the coveted plant and gave it to the hen, and the germ of an idea was born that one day I would like to keep chickens.

I cleaned their roosting board first thing, before going to the Chatto gardens.  The ridge of the hen house is leaking slightly, and needs the SA to fit a new strip of flexible waterproof whatever it is over the hinges.  Chicken keeping is not only about sentiment and making yourself feel good by giving them tasty titbits.

back to earth with a bump

The Bellowhead concert was great.  We suffered some preliminary confusion because I hadn't grasped that the Ipswich Corn Exchange and the Ipswich Regent are two different venues, although they share the same booking office and ticketing system.  Fortunately we looked at the tickets before we were due to go out, and managed to work out where we were supposed to be, which wasn't where I thought we were going.  The Systems Administrator was duly impressed at my success in finding the car park I was aiming at without driving around Ipswich's one way system for fifteen minutes first in an increasingly erratic fashion as the starting time for the concert approached and my stress levels rocketed.

It took me a while to appreciate Bellowhead.  They are a titan among folk bands, a vast eleven piece group with a brass section, who have won umpteen awards in recent years.  Their material is traditional, or was before it was given the Bellowhead treatment, but their sound is folk-rock with the emphasis on rock.  I only began to like them once I gave up measuring them against traditional folk, and listened to them on their own terms, at which point they started to make sense.  Initially, faced with Bellowhead, I was like somebody who, loving Gothic architecture, appraises all cathedrals according to how closely they approach the Gothic ideal, and finds St Paul's sadly lacking, when the fault is not with Wren's masterpiece but in the blinkered eye of the beholder.

Bellowhead have a reputation as a superb stage act.  Indeed, they have won Radio 2 awards for best live performance.  That's one reason why I wanted to see them live, and was prepared to trek all the way to Ipswich, and buy two concert tickets, instead of just getting their last couple of CDs.  They lived up to their legend, with a proper light show, while the musicians danced (sometimes while still playing.  I can't work out how you play the fiddle while pogo-ing, but it can be done, unless the next scandalous revelation in the music industry is Bellowhead Mimes at Ipswich Regent), and the brass section posed theatrically with their instruments like members of Madness.  Lead singer and driving force Jon Boden was in full Freddy Mercury homage mode, arms flailing.  It was, as the SA observed, the only folk concert we've been to where there was a mosh pit.

The SA did overhear a fellow concert goer complain in the interval that they couldn't hear the words, but I don't think you should expect to in a live concert, or at least not all of them.  I knew versions of most of the songs so could generally work out what was going on, though it took me a couple of verses to realise that one was the familiar ditty of my teenage folk club-going years, The Old Dun Cow Caught Fire.  The audience spanned a wide age range, from children to the significantly senior, and as far as I could tell was solidly middle class, in that there were lots of neatly trimmed beards, I saw loads of rugby shirts, but only one tattoo even when the auditorium got warmer and men began to roll their sleeves up.

That was a nice evening.  At work this morning the manager was excited as we walked up to the office to see the pile of plants sold over the weekend and waiting to be delivered, then the owner announced that sales over the weekend had been busy, but not busy enough, in fact a bit disappointing, and we must all speak to any customers who came into the plant centre to help them find what they wanted so that they wouldn't leave without buying it.  The atmosphere deflated like a pricked balloon.

After that I was quite glad to spend most of the day sticking price labels into the little 9cm pots that were delivered last Monday.  This is a fairly straightforward job, provided you don't stop reading the plant names after the first word, and regard 'Sunrise' and 'Sundown' as interchangeable.  There is a physical knack to it, in that you can't push a flexible plastic label through compost, but have to slide it between the root ball and the side of the pot.  If it sticks you can make a space by gently squeezing the pot, but this takes much longer as you have to lift the pot, and if you squeeze too hard it will crack.  The easiest pots to label are the ones that are mostly showing compost, with a few small leaves or dormant buds in the middle.  The worst ones are those where the edges of the pot are completely hidden by overhanging leaves, which if you care about plants you will carefully part, instead of shoving the label right through them.  The whole job is made harder by the fact that the tunnel is so crammed with pots that you are working from walkways between 15 and 45 centimetres wide.  If you weren't fairly flexible you couldn't do it.  I am, and have a good enough sense of balance to have avoided falling over or treading on any of the pots, but I think I'm going to feel a bit stiff tomorrow.

tidying away the debris

I was all set to move the remaining branches, twigs and debris from the back garden, so that I could admire the full effect of the snowdrops before they go over.  The beds are actually quite tidy, so it seems a waste to have great piles of prunings in front of them.  However, the view out of the bathroom window when I got up revealed that there was a frost, so it was not possible to get anywhere near the heaps or drive the tractor over the lawn until it thawed.

I spent some time picking dead leaves and weeds out of the gravel in the turning circle, while I waited for the lawn to warm up.  There is definitely something meditative about fiddling around with gravel, and of course with all that Zen raking it would never get the chance to grow weeds.  Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat was dozing under one of the clumps of grass, but by mutual consent we ignored each other.

Once the grass was fit to walk on and I went to inspect the piles I discovered that one of them was not willow as I'd assumed, but pieces of hawthorn and field maple out of the hedge.  I originally helped put them there, so I must have known, but I'd forgotten.  The Systems Administrator had done such a massive amount of shredding that it seemed incredible that there was yet more to do.  Unfortunately the pile of brush to be shredded blocked my access to one of the piles of willow that I wanted to move.  The crocuses have just started flowering in the middle of the bottom lawn, not that they were open today, so I wanted to carry everything around the edge, which is kept mown all year round as a path, and not across the centre where the bulbs are.

Shredding woody prunings to make your own wood chip mulch takes ages.  Branch by branch I stripped off the twigs that were small enough to go through the shredder, shoved them through the shredder, stripped some of the tiny and really weedy remaining twigs off the main stem, and piled the trunks in a heap ready to be seasoned and chopped for firewood.  I enlisted the SA's help to move the existing trailer load of prunings destined for the bonfire, refilled it with willow twigs, and then twice with firewood, and then bonfire material again.  Willow does not chip, but winds itself around the interior of the shredding machine and jams it.  I need the SA to pull the trailer, not because I can't steer the lawn tractor (though in truth I am not very good with anything in tow), but because I can't start it.  It is nearly twenty years old now, has had a hard life, and has reached that idiosyncratic stage where only an understanding hand can make it go, since firing it up involves a strange home-made choke, copious quantities of Easy Start, and a portable jump-starter.

The SA obliged, but strained a tendon in the process shifting the wood, before abandoning logging operations to do battle with BT.  Something is wrong with our landline, so that the telephone doesn't ring when we get an incoming call.  The SA's oldest brother, who is an electrical engineer, has a theory involving The Fifth Line, which is something I never heard of but is apparently the part of a BT telephone line that makes your phone actually ring.  The rest of the line is all right, hence we can make outgoing calls, but a telephone that doesn't tell you when somebody is trying to ring you up is of limited utility.  I don't regard it as an absolute emergency, since most people I know use e-mail or text anyway, but it needs sorting.  BT will not give you a number on which to ring them to report the fault until you've done a line test.  The page of their website where you are supposed to do the line test is coming up blank.  The SA, half frozen and with a sore arm, is pretty annoyed.

I didn't manage to move all the prunings.  I hoped I would have, but I suppose I should have started earlier, if only it hadn't been frosty.

getting to grips in the utility area

Finally it feels pleasant to be outside.  In fact, today seemed much warmer than yesterday, when it was jolly cold at Fakenham, and I was baffled at how so many people could wander around apparently quite happily although not wearing hats.  Today was a thermal leggings, fleece hat, heavy-weight fleece and two shirts day, but it felt very nice.

The Systems Administrator was out supporting our nephew's rugby team.  I've just checked the score, and they lost, so that won't have been such a good day as it might have been, especially when the SA has had to trek all the way to Mill Hill to witness the family defeat.  As somebody who is truly and serenely indifferent to the outcomes of almost all sporting contests, I can't share the SA's pain.  I felt a rare pang at the result of the 2.45 at Fakenham yesterday, but that was only because I'd made discouraging noises when the SA proposed backing a horse called The Black Baron, along the lines that it had unseated its rider the last time it ran, come fourth the time before that, and been pulled up on its only other outing in the current season.  The SA was swayed by my doubts and didn't back the horse, which went on to win at nine to one.

I thought that today to show willing I'd better use up some of the bags of chippings the SA has been processing from the prunings we took out of the hedge.  The SA had started grumbling ominously that I still hadn't used last year's bags of chippings, and it wasn't very motivating to spend ages shredding wood that sat unused in the bags until it rotted.  Besides which, I am running out of bags to collect mushroom compost in.  I see the SA's point about it not being awfully rewarding to shred woody stuff instead of simply burning it on the bonfire unless it's used, though in practice wood chips inside a plastic bag take a very long time to rot down.  The problem last year was that with all the rain the weeds grew like stink, and I didn't have any clean ground on which to use the chippings.

Today I weeded in front of the compost bins and by the fruit cage.  Two of the rhubarb crowns are coming into life.  I seem to have lost a third, but I recall it was late into leaf in previous years and I thought it must have died by the time it finally appeared.  I think I found it today by dint of sticking my fork through it while weeding, since I hit something underground that wasn't soil, and felt uncomfortably as though it might have been a rhubarb crown.  Given that you can split established clumps I expect it will survive the fork, assuming it is alive.  I even reached the point where I had weeded all round one of the crowns and could mulch it with mushroom compost.  Rhubarb is a greedy feeder, and the endless rain must have washed most of the nutrients out of the sandy soil in the top part of the garden.  It looked very smart in its little island of dark compost, surrounded by wood chippings.

Unfortunately I'm not going to have enough chippings to cover the whole utility area, even with the bags saved from last year.  I'll weed all of it now that I've started, but it's difficult to keep the bare soil clean all summer, once the weeds start growing.  I've got a heap of prunings from the grape vine waiting to be chipped, but you need an enormous quantity of twigs to yield enough chipped wood to cover a single square metre of ground.

Beyond the rhubarb clumps lies the chaos of the vegetable beds.  I didn't try to grow vegetables last year.  I took the original decision in March, because there was still so much work to do in the rest of the garden clearing up after the ravages of two hard winters.  Various friends and relatives asked me periodically about my vegetables, and responded with surprise when I said I wasn't doing them, or even with faint affront as if my failure to join in was casting aspersions on their vegetable growing enterprises.  It wasn't meant to.  It was simply that I didn't have time given everything else there was to do, and as the spring drought gave way to the everlasting rain and concomitant lack of sunshine I was quite relieved I'd already decided not to bother.  While I like cooking, and vegetables, my real passion as a gardener is for the ornamental garden.  Those who were shocked by my status as a vegetable growing refusenik lectured me on how nice really fresh vegetables were, that you had grown yourself, and they are, but you have to admit that you can buy a week's supply of quite edible vegetables for less than the cost of employing a decent gardener for two hours.  Ergo, if you have a large and out-of-control garden it pays to spend your time tidying up the borders, and buy your food.

That said, I might give it a go this year.  I can feel the vegetable growing juices rising gently, and the prospect of fresh broad beans beckoning.  Or little baby turnips, if I fleeced them against whatever fly it was that sent grubs burrowing through the roots last time.  Or maybe some salad leaves.  We'll see.

out and about

The day has barely started, and is already being written up.  That's because we're going to the races at Fakenham.  We went last year and it was a hoot, with the finals of the greyhound race that descended into a fight halfway up the track, so that neither of the finalists ever made it to the finishing line.  We think there might be greyhounds and foxhounds again this year, but it's difficult to tell.  The Fakenham racecourse website is fairly Delphic on the subject, beyond confirming that there is a race meeting.

It even made the Today programme, as one of the runners at Fakenham featured in their racing tips.  I can't remember which horse or in which race, which given the accuracy of the 2012 Today racing tips is probably all for the best, but it suggests the meeting is on.  We've been tracking its prospects for the past few days, looking at the weather forecast and the declarations for what horses were running.  By lunchtime yesterday the Systems Administrator even thought that Ruby Walsh might be riding.  By yesterday evening he had been diverted to Sandown, but there are enough good class horses and jockeys for the SA to get quite excited.  I know very little about racing, so all the horses tend to look beautiful and glamorous to me, but the SA as somebody who has not missed a Cheltenham Gold Cup since 1986 did not want to drive all the way to north Norfolk to see scrappy fields of three third rate horses.

I will not be able to tell you about our grand day out when we get back because I'll be turning around and going out again to the music society lecture.  The Chairman sent out an e-mail reminder a few days ago, reminding us that we did refreshments after the talk, and that it was our duty to bring some nibbles.  She suggested small sandwiches, but I'm not at all sure there'll be time to mess around putting teaspoons of mackeral pate and smoked salmon on squares of rye bread in between getting in and going back out, so made cheese straws yesterday.  I have rolled them very thin and cut them quite small to make them seem more like a healthy eating option.  Transporting trays of open sandwiches in a car that earlier in the week you were using to collect half a dozen bags of overly fresh mushroom compost is a nightmare anyway.

The lecturer is Marina Warner.  It is rather a coup to have got her, given that her fame and status as a learned professor and past Reith lecturer is out of all proportion to the membership and resources of our society.  It was actually my idea to ask her, since thinking the unthinkable is one of my specialities, but the approach was made by a fellow committee member who knew her vaguely after being tutored by her on some course or other.  She is due to talk about St Helena.  I hope she turns up.  Assuming she does we will have to think as a committee how we follow that for next year.  I've been trying to work out how we could persuade Grayson Perry to do it, but without coming up with a convincing plan so far.

Last night's bee committee meeting was very long, which was fair enough as it was a new committee and we had a lot to get through, not least to breath life into the almost moribund remains of the old and terminally dysfunctional old committee.  The new Chairman is very keen, and proposes revolutionary methods such as having a a list of things we are supposed to do with deadlines to do them by, and then making sure they are done.  This is such a good idea, and so much better than the previous method of agreeing things at meetings and then doing nothing about them until the next meeting, when we either agreed them again, or changed our minds and agreed the opposite, or expunged them from history and never spoke of them again, that I can forgive him for talking about visions and journeys.  He did explain that he had a background in local government.  He has a vintage 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox in his sitting room, and anyone who has that and a collection of 4,000 singles on vinyl (which includes Manhattan Transfer's Chanson d'amour and Popsicle toes) to go with it is clearly a person of imagination and vision.

intimations of spring

The last of the very cold weather might be behind us for this year.  It was raining when I woke up, but I didn't mind that, because I was expecting rain, and with the rain came the warmer airflow.  It's not forecast to flip back to cold conditions in the next two or three weeks, and after that we'll be into March, and while frosts are still a possibility, we shouldn't get another hard spell when the thermometer hovers around freezing all day and dips below it at night.  Nothing of course is certain, except death, as they say, and taxes, but from now on I won't be holding back from pruning the bay, the overgrown Cryptomeria, and any other marginally tender or evergreen subjects I've been refraining from touching.

If we have indeed seen the worst of the winter for this year then the planting in the gravel garden has come off pretty lightly.  There are some frosted branches on the Phlomis italica, but there were last year, and it produced plenty of new growth come the spring.  The olive is unscathed, and the two myrtles, and tender form of Teucrium fruticans.  The lemon verbena looks quite dead, but it always does at this time of year, and I'm sure that it's poised to perform its annual act of resurrection.  The birds think that spring is coming.  The long-tailed tits seem to have started to pair off, whereas in winter they charge around the garden in a great gang.

Since it was raining I thought I might as well go to the bank to pay in one stray membership cheque that the beekeepers membership secretary passed to me before going on holiday.  She normally pays them into the bank herself, for which I'm very grateful, since I don't generally go anywhere near a bank from one month to the next, and am with a different bank to the beekeepers anyway.  Eventually I suppose we will all be paying our subscriptions by electronic bank transfer, or PayPal, or using our mobiles, but beekeepers are a gently conservative lot, and while the technology sections of the broadsheets keep running articles about modern and alternative payment methods, they don't seem to have much traction in the real world in north Essex.

I went to Brightlingsea, since it has a branch of the bank the beekeepers use, and parking is free and closer to the bank than it is in Colchester.  While I was there I visited the Brightlingsea superstore, as it is signposted from the main (and only) road into Brightlingsea, which is a reasonably large and fairly new Co-op approximately one twentieth of the size of the new Sainsbury superstore at Stanway.  That shows what a useful anchor for shops in a small town a bank branch still is.  If I'd had to go into Colchester to pay in the cheque I'd just have done my shopping at my usual Tesco on the way home.  Brightlingsea High Street has a knitting and sewing shop, and I went in and would have bought some black button thread, but the only assistant was taken up with some complicated enquiry involving knitting wool and dye batch numbers, which looked as though it was going to take longer to resolve than I wanted to spend buying button thread.  Another time.

We are not celebrating Valentines Day.  The Systems Administrator's father died on 14 February in our first year at university, so our initial Valentines Day after getting together would have been the second anniversary of the SA's father's death, and hearts and flowers didn't seem appropriate.  Celebrating Valentines is a ritual that, if you haven't started while in the first flush of romance, you are unlikely to take up when your thirtieth wedding anniversary is just over the horizon.  Anyway, I'm going to a beekeepers' committee meeting.  I have made the SA a ham, leek and mushroom pie and peeled some potatoes, as a quasi-romantic and charitable gesture so that the SA won't have to cook.  Originally I was just going to buy something in the Brightlingsea Co-op, then it occurred to me that since I was making cheese straws for the refreshments after tomorrow night's lecture, I could use some of the pastry to make a pie top.

two exhibitions and a railway station

Today was forecast to be as cold as yesterday was, so I went to London to look at some exhibitions, reasoning that as I hadn't liked working in the garden yesterday, I wouldn't like it any better today, and might as well use the time productively to catch things I knew I wanted to see.  It was jolly cold in London too, so much so that coming inside from the street I found it difficult to speak when buying my tickets, and my lunch.  London was shrouded in a dismal, grey mist, and anyone who spent nearly thirty quid booking their trip up the Shard will have been sadly disappointed.

My first stop was The Northern Renaissance: Durer to Holbein at The Queen's Gallery.  This is absolutely excellent, and it is on until 14 April, so you have plenty of time to go and see it.  I've never yet been to a dud exhibition at The Queen's Gallery, presumably because The Queen owns a splendid collection of artworks.  Also Her Majesty employs a good curator, who writes interesting and useful captions for every picture, in the same style as they use at The National Portrait Gallery, a place I adore.  My particular favourites were the three Cranachs, a masterly self-portrait and accompanying portrait of the artist's second wife by somebody whose name I've already forgotten, and a lovely little Durer sketch of a hound, but you can have your own.  If you buy your ticket at the gallery itself and get it stamped on the way out it gives you free readmission for a year.  It was very cold in the gallery's entrance lobby, and the security staff were wearing strange blue capes over the rest of their uniforms.

My second port of call was The British Library, via King's Cross, where I wanted to look at the new western concourse.  It is Europe's largest single-span station structure, and very impressive, a great glass latticework like the cap of a giant mushroom radiating out from an impossibly small stalk of columns.  The impression of space is slightly diminished by the fact that part of the dome is occupied by shops and restaurants, but I suppose it is a working railway station, and people need somewhere to shop, and eat, and Network Rail wants the rental income.  It is still marvellously uncluttered.

The British Library is showing Mughal India: art, culture and empire, which runs until 2 April, so again you have plenty of time to go and see it.  There are some wonderful objects, mainly books and pictures, as you'd expect in a library.  It is not especially clearly laid out as an exhibition, certainly not compared to similar shows at The British Museum, and there is a distinct lack of signposts about what order you are supposed to walk around in, so that at one point I found myself looking at portraits of all the Mughal emperors in reverse chronological order.  The Mughal succession was a bloodthirsty affair, making most English dynastic politics since the Wars of the Roses appear comparatively benign, but the Mughal emperors combined their tactics of murdering their brothers and imprisoning their fathers on their way to the throne with a great passion for art and literature.  If you don't read Persian script then the pictures are honestly more interesting than the manuscripts, after a while.  My favourites by a whisker were the animal pictures, in particular the squirrels chasing each other up a tree, but the seventeenth century portraits came a close second.  You can see how European iconography and perspective techniques gradually enter the Mughal artistic vocabulary, particularly if you manage to look at the paintings in chronological order, which I didn't.  A National Art Pass gives you half price admission.

Then I came home.  It was simply too cold to be wandering about.  I didn't take my leather coat off all day, even indoors.

driven indoors

The time is just before five in the afternoon.  We've had the stove in the study lit since mid morning, and the temperature is up to twenty degrees Celsius.  In the sitting room it is twelve and a half degrees, and outside it is 1.2 C.

I told myself this morning that although it was not very inviting outside, still it was not actually raining, freezing or blowing a gale, and that I should get on with the gardening.  I went to the local garden centre and bought six bags of bag-your-own mushroom compost.  They'd recently had a fresh load delivered, and when I asked in the shop which pile of soil improver was the mushroom compost they laughed and said Follow your nose.  It was wetter than the last batch I bought from them, and reluctant to shake down through the bottomless 30L pot you are supposed to use as a measure down into my brought-my-own bags.

Then I found a spot in the back garden to plant out a potted camellia that keeps blowing over in its pot, and never looks so healthy as the ones growing in the ground.  I've been dithering over where to put it, and am not entirely sure that my decision made today in the teeth of the icy blast was the best one, but the job of planting it out before it died had risen to the top of my list of things to do.  Thinking about how you could prune something even as you plant it isn't the most encouraging sign that you are doing the right thing, but at least I made a decision.

Then I gave up.  It was simply too cold.  I felt chilled all over, and each time my breath blew up over my glasses they fogged up and blinded me.  As the Systems Administrator said, it is February and I have to accept that there are times in the winter when I simply can't garden.  The SA is reluctant to go outside more than necessary following the final spell of dental work, which still hurts in cold air from where the needles went in.

We had pancakes for lunch, since it is pancake day, the newspaper websites have all been full of articles about how to cook them, we both like them, and we have the equivalent of about a year's supply of WWII egg rations in the fridge.  The ladies started laying again almost as soon as it went past the longest night, and after a temporary blip are laying again.  I found six eggs in the nest box this morning.  The Telegraph told us that it was Shrove Tuesday, but not to panic, which betrayed a rather low opinion of its readers' culinary abilities or nerves.  Anyone who panics at the prospect of making some pancakes needs to get out more, or perhaps seek professional help for their anxiety disorder.  The SA's standard batter is from my vintage 1970s edition of the Good Housekeepers cookery book, and is the same one as used for Yorkshire puddings.  We take it in turns to cook our own pancakes, and eat them with lemon and sugar.  I like the sound of Nigel Slater's caramelised onion and cheese (without the spinach) but nothing beats lemon and sugar.

I am now halfway through Jerry Brotton's book on maps, A history of the world in twelve maps.  I like maps best when they tell you something about the world view and politics of the time, like the Spanish and Portuguese in the sixteenth century each clinging to their own, equally inaccurate, versions of where the Cape Verde islands were, after they'd signed a treaty that defined their overseas territories with reference to the islands.  I know that I ought to be interested in the mathematics of Mercator's projection, but can feel my mind wriggling in its chair like a bored child as I try to tell it about spiral loxodromes.  It is a good book, though, and mercifully free of that extrapolating the universe from a fairy bun tendency that you sometimes find with those Histories of X in Y books.

Before the maps, and after the history of Prussia, I romped my way through Jane Ridley's Bertie: a life of Edward VII in the course of a few evenings.  That is not to decry her biography of the last monarch to give his name to an era ('the new Elizabethans' never really caught on).  She is a professional historian, and her account of Edward the Caresser is based on solid research, while being thoroughly readable (not always the case).  Victoria and Albert come across as an appalling couple, not a bit like Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend in The Young Victoria, and Daisy Brooke was not so sweet as the publicity for the gardens at her old home Easton Lodge would suggest.  I was gripped throughout.  As well as the soap opera personalities and affairs you do get a thorough account of the changing nature of the relationship between politicians and the monarchy, the unfolding events in Europe leading up to the Great War, and other solid educational topics.

History is of course much easier to read when you are already familiar with the broad shape of the period or events being discussed.  That's probably one reason why twentieth century history is more popular than Medieval, and UK history more than European, let alone further flung places than Europe.  Battling your way through a history of Prussia when you don't know what the Holy Roman Emperor is, where he came from, or quite what Electors are, how the Holy Roman Empire relates to the individual German states or where the Habsburgs fit in, what Lutheranism entails and why people felt so strongly about it, and so on and so on, is quite hard, compared to Victorian and Edwardian England where the state boundaries and institutions are already broadly the same as they are today.  It is tempting to conclude, as the writers of school history syllabuses apparently have, that twentieth century UK history is therefore more relevant to UK children than other sorts, Medieval, say, or European, or Middle Eastern, or Indian.  Tempting, but misleading.

taking delivery

We had a tiny bit of snow in the night, but not enough to stop anyone going anywhere.  I was keen to get to work, since I had a feeling the potting was due to arrive today.  I missed last week's, and I enjoy potting, besides which it's one of those jobs that requires many pairs of hands to get it done.  They have to be skilled hands, though, and the manager let slip that one of my colleagues is not allowed to pot, being deemed hopeless at it.

The lorry from our supplier arrived with thirteen Dutch trolleys on it, all for us, though not all things to be potted.  Some were plants ready for sale, in 2L and 9cm pots, then lurking behind them in the back of the lorry were cardboard boxes of roots, waiting for us to put them into 2 and 3L pots.  We set the trays of 9cm pots down on the mypex fabric in front of the tunnel on The Other Side, passing them from one to another in a chain to get them moved as quickly as possible, and I mused that it must be possible to model a bucket chain mathematically, in terms of how far every member of it has to walk, and how the congestion point where someone is standing holding a tray of plants and waiting to pass it to someone else shifts up and down the length of the chain over time.

The ready-potted 2L plants had to be unloaded from the Dutch trolleys individually into our silver trolleys, which will hold 18 2L pots, to be carted over to the mypex.  Most wholesale growers follow the convention that they don't bother labelling each individual pot.  Instead one pot will have a label with the variety name and the information that the consignment includes thirty plants of that variety, or fifty, or eight, and pots containing the same variety are stood together on the Dutch trolley.  Fifty 2L pots take up more than one shelf, so as you unload you have to be careful to keep like with like.  Some plants are so distinctive even at this time of year that you couldn't confuse them, but one dormant hosta looks very like another.  There was a year we managed to get ourselves in a thorough muddle with some grasses, but today we were very systematic and disciplined.  It helps if the people doing the unloading have a keen eye for plants, and can see at a glance when they are mixing up dormant hostas and dormant rheums.

Having unloaded the lorry in super quick time we then discovered it was stuck on the grass.  The driver initially sounded optimistic, and said we needed some cardboard under the wheels.  Cardboard was duly fetched, and I waited to see whether, as I expected, the lorry was going to shoot the cardboard under the back wheels in the same way as our ex-builders' Transit did, the time we got it stuck.  It did.  The manager said we must push.  I was fairly sure you don't push lorries, since if you had done a risk assessment you would have concluded that there was a risk of someone slipping and ending up under the wheels, but I was fairly sure this lorry wasn't going anywhere.  I helped push, and as I expected all that happened was that the back wheels dug in a little further.  We needed the gardener to tow the lorry out with the tractor, but unfortunately the boss had sent both gardeners on an errand to Ipswich, so all we could do was give the lorry driver some coffee and wait for them to get back.  They returned, and tried towing the lorry out with the Landrover, which was not up to the job.  Eventually the big tractor came from the farm, and towed the lorry out, and the gardener quickly smoothed out the worst of the ruts with a garden fork before the owner could see them.

The owner was having a horsebox crisis, needing it to go to some big meeting in Lincolnshire on Saturday, and having discovered last night that the MoT expired last October.  He therefore needed to get it to the garage as soon as possible, except that it wouldn't start, so one of the gardener's jobs was to get the horsebox to go.  I suggested helpfully that if the owner set off now on the horse, he would be in Lincolnshire by the weekend.  The gardener, who is talented with machinery, did get the engine to fire up, and drove the horsebox away to the garage, while we all waved him goodbye.

The trays of 9cm pots, that had been set down in rows in a hurry and in no order whatsoever, had to come into the polytunnel out of the rain in alphabetical order, or at least with all the As together, followed by all the Bs.  Last year they went into the tunnel in a complete jumble, and the woman who was trying to stick price labels in them wasted an inordinate amount of time and went quite mad with frustration wandering around trying to find each variety.  I was given the job of locating them in the right order, which was initially desperately slow as the only way to do it was to work systematically along every row looking for A, and then looking for B, and so on.  By the time I got to E and F I'd got a better idea of what was there, and we speeded up.  The trays filled the space the manager had allocated to them before we were more than half way through, and the rest had to stand along the aisles in the tunnel, reducing them to little tracks no more than 50cm wide.  By the time the potting is finished the tunnel will be filled to bursting.

We didn't finish the potting.  There was no way we were going to, in one day.  It amazes me the way that herbaceous plants can survive when their roots are out of the soil for so long.  Apart from those with the most fibrous roots they reach us with very little soil attached.  The grower must have a system to wash them, otherwise he'd have sold all the topsoil out of his fields by now.

on the tourist trail

Sometimes with weather you lose on the swings what you gained on the proverbial roundabouts.  Today was about as uninviting for walking around outside or at best in an unheated plastic tunnel as you can imagine, short of actually snowing.  It rained all day, up to the point where it started sleeting instead, it was windy, it felt cold, and the grey, leaden, sunless sky would have made the entire contents of Kew Gardens look drab.

It left me in a bit of a fix about what to do with myself.  I'd finished my jobs on the manager's list of tasks for the weekend, and there weren't any weedy pots of herbaceous plants I could take into the little greenhouse or the back of the shop and tidy up.  The first job on the list was to water anything that looked dry.  I checked the conifers and large specimen evergreens yesterday, so today I patrolled conscientiously up and down inside the tunnels, pouring water into any dry-looking pots from a plastic Haws watering can.  Even the plastic ones are better balanced than any other can on the market.

There is a limit to how long you want to spend trudging backwards and forwards in the rain with a can of water, getting another lungful of exhaust fumes from the boiler each time you refill it at the tap, and after an hour I thought I'd probably reached it.  I went over to the tunnel on The Other Side to see if I could bring out any more potted bulbs for sale, but the individual pots didn't have price labels, so I couldn't.

Then I thought I could check the e-mails, and deal with any that were straightforward queries about whether we had a particular plant in stock, but the internet connection to the shop wasn't working.  I spent some time searching for Lindera benzoin, since the year end stock take showed we had three in stock, and we have three customers waiting for them, two of the enquiries dating from such a long time ago that they have probably changed their minds, or forgotten all about it, or emigrated or died in the meantime.  I couldn't find the Lindera.

After that I gave up trying to find anything useful to do, and read Hilliers dictionary of shrubs while waiting for a customer to arrive, or the phone to ring.  There is always something new to learn in Hilliers, and I focussed on improving my knowledge of hydrangeas.  The owner came out to the shop to get the cafe ready for a coach party of Germans which was expected in the afternoon, and I did not have the heart to pretend to be doing anything except reading a book about shrubs.

She was accompanied by the young dog, which after it had finished making friends with the only three people having coffee in the cafe was happy to have its tummy rubbed for five minutes.  It is a nice little dog, with a very fine beard and eyebrows, and enjoys being fussed over.  On the negative side of the equation, it will roll in anything vile-smelling that it can find, and absconds whenever it feels like it.

The coach load of Germans arrived slightly late, and chaos ensued as to whether they were going to have a guided tour around the garden as originally booked, or not go round the garden because the weather was too bad, or those that wanted to go round by themselves, or nobody be allowed to go round unaccompanied because the garden was so wet and slippery.  The tour had been rearranged twice, having originally been booked in for Friday, then moved to this morning, then moved again to this afternoon, and the owners, having rearranged their weekend to accommodate them, while scrupulously polite to the tour leader were understandably irritated at the idea of the gate money for the garden evaporating.

Not going round the garden maybe worked for the best, since the tourists spent a lot in the plant centre and the shop.  I dutifully went and spent half an hour standing outside in the rain and smiling at them with an expression intended to convey that I was ready to help.  One person asked me where was Euonymus planipes, which goes to show the value of botanical Latin plant names.  I don't speak German, but I knew exactly what she was talking about, whereas the German equivalent of a common name like big budded spindle would have passed me by completely.  Apart from the Euonymus the only thing anyone else wanted to know was the whereabouts of was the loo, and after a while I went back inside to help with the tills, where there was a queue.

Into the middle of the chaos appeared a customer who was nothing to do with the tour, asking for help choosing trees and saying slightly plaintively that there was no-one outside to ask.  I thought the presence of a German tour bus in the car park and a large number of Germans in the plant centre and shop might have given her a clue what was going on.  We went and looked at trees and shrubs, and she proved to be not as difficult as I thought at first she might be.  It is so tricky having the right number of staff on duty in a business like ours.  There were two of us today, and in the morning we had almost nothing to do while in the afternoon we were rushed of our feet.  Yesterday there were three of us in, and more than enough for us to do, but it was a nice day.  At least with tour buses you know when they are coming, but you don't know what the weather's going to be like on a given day at the point where you set the rota.

When I got home I realised I'd forgotten to shut the tunnel doors on The Other Side, which was a bad mistake to make, since rabbits are liable to create havoc in there overnight.  I rang the owner to confess and ask if she could close the doors.  Fortunately she sounded quite relaxed about it.  In my defence, I never got a tea break in all the rush, and by the time I left it was sleeting.  Tomorrow we might be potting, if we aren't all snowed in, though I don't think we will be here.

signs of life

We were lucky with the weather at work.  A customer who'd travelled from somewhere else in Suffolk said they had snow, and when I got home I discovered it drizzled here, but in the plant centre it was dry, calm, and fairly bright.  Cold, but really quite nice.

The first of the spring flowering bulbs we potted ourselves were ready for sale, and it was my job to unload them from the red trolley in which they'd made the voyage across the car park, and set them out in alphabetical order by the entrance to the shop.  The only ones in bloom were a tiny iris 'Gordon', a dainty little thing with flowers in a vivid shade of mid-purple, splashed with yellow.  They were delightful, but even the pots that contained nothing yet but newly emerging tufts of leaves had a very hopeful, engaging quality.

After putting out the bulbs my next job on the manager's list was to move all the hostas lined up on the gravel in the shaded tunnel back on to their tables, now that the creosote substitute on the tables has dried.  This initially looked as though it was going to be an utterly baffling task, since the order of the hostas on the ground was not immediately clear, and they needed to be in strict alphabetical order on the tables.  Once I'd understood what the person who took them off the tables had done it became very straightforward, and simply involved lifting a large number of pots.  They were only two litre pots for the most part, so not individually very heavy, but collectively they must have weighted a lot.  It didn't seem worth putting them into a trolley to move them a few metres, so I had quite a thorough low-impact workout lifting a pot in each hand and carrying them several paces to the table.  I weeded them all, trimmed off any remaining dead stems, and topped the pots off with fresh compost.  They were not very weedy to start with, but I used about half a bag of compost, handful by handful as I levelled off the top of each pot.

By mid afternoon I'd finished the jobs allocated to me on the list, so in a spirit of co-operation did one of someone else's tasks and lifted the moisture loving plants back on to their table as well.  My colleague was working hard packaging up mail order deliveries, so I didn't mind helping out with something on his list.  My other colleague was supposed to do some more creosoting, but I drew the line at volunteering to help with that.

Now that the cafe people are not coming back they have taken their chiller cabinet away.  It was vast, hideous, horribly noisy, and blocked one of the windows, so I'm not sorry to see it go.  They have also taken their wall clock.  The owner bought a replacement in Hadleigh for an impossibly small amount of money, seven pounds and something for a largish wall clock, but it has a fussy face with Roman numerals, and makes me realise how much better designed the cafe people's clock was.  It probably cost more than seven pounds and something.  We have inherited the blackboards for the menu, which have been customised with our name on so are no use to them, and a scrappy oil painting of their original cafe which I hope they are coming back for, since I really don't like it.

The bright day and promise of spring around the corner brought out the customers.  Our tally at the end of the day was helped by the man who bought over five hundred pounds worth of trees, but even without him we'd have hit a respectable total.  Let us hope we don't get snow next week, otherwise it will all go quiet again.

minor missions completed

It was a productive day for getting things finished.  By lunchtime I'd managed to dig out the rootball of the misplaced Chaenomeles, snipping through the last two anchoring roots with secateurs just as the 12.57 weather forecast began.  I had to get the Systems Administrator to help me lift it into the wheelbarrow and out at the other end, then enlarged the planting hole I started yesterday once I could see how big a pit I needed, and slid it in, having dug in the last of my bags of mushroom compost and sprinkled the bottom of the hole with Rootgrow.  I hope it survives the move.  I trimmed the ends off its longer branches, on the basis that since the roots had been damaged the top had better be reduced as well, and watered it in.  The forecast is for pouring rain all day on Sunday, which should help it settle down.  It has a suckering growth habit, having thrown up quite a thicket of stems from the roots since I planted it the first time, and I'm pretty optimistic that it will recover.

After lunch the SA and I finished cutting the overhanging branches around the boundary in the back garden that required the use of the Henchman platform to reach them, and even put the Henchman away afterwards, instead of doing our usual thing and leaving it lying around for several weeks.  The snowdrops look more pastoral without a large aluminium scaffold in the foreground of the picture.  There are still piles of willow branches littered about the lawn, which are no use for anything except burning, since they bind and jam the shredder if you try to chip them, but maybe the SA will deal with those over the weekend.

I suddenly noticed that the Parrotia persica was in full bloom, its branches studded with small, deep red flowers similar to those of witch-hazel.  It's not surprising they look so similar, since they are closely related, both members of the family Hamamelidaceae.  Parrotia, the Persian ironwood, is a native of Iran, and is grown in gardens for its superb autumn leaf colour and flaking bark rather than its floral display.  The latter, while fleeting, is charming when it happens and I was glad to have caught it, and made the SA come and look at it.  I'm afraid the Parrotia didn't make a very striking impression, since the SA had to ask me what we were looking at.  It is somewhat obscured by a side branch from the wild gean, which I will ask the SA to remove, but leave that until cherry pruning time in May or June.  Standard advice is to leave pruning Japanese ornamental cherries and garden fruiting ones until early summer to reduce the risk of their contracting silver leaf disease.  I don't know if the wild gean is equally susceptible, but why take the chance?

I finally got my car fixed as well, since the e-tyres fitter came and put a new tyre on my spare, which was my near-side front until it got a slow puncture.  The SA fitted the old spare to the car, so I've been driving round without one since last weekend, or rather not driving, except to go to work.  It's a relief to have a spare tyre again, and the tyre fitter was very happy that one of his last jobs on a Friday afternoon did not require him to jack the car up.  When he rang this morning to say what time he was coming he asked me to make sure that the wheel locking nut was available, if I had one.  This made no sense at all to me, so I asked the SA, who said that my Skoda did not have a wheel locking nut, because the wheels were not sufficiently valuable.  The SA was consoling about the flat, saying that it was the oldest tyre on the car and I'd probably have been told to change it at the MoT in March anyway.  I blame the potholes.

The tyre fitter did throw me for a moment when he rang this morning, since he called me by my forename.  I happen to be one of those people who is always, but always, called by a nickname rather than my baptismal given one.  Seeing an unfamiliar mobile number on the phone and hearing a strange voice address me by a name nobody uses, I thought for a moment it must be a wrong number before remembering that of course Friday was tyre fitting day.  He'd obviously got my first name from my online booking, which I did using the name on my credit card, because that makes life so much easier.  As our surname is impossible to pronounce or spell I wasn't too upset about achieving such an instant level of familiarity with a strange mechanic, but it illustrates how using the first names of people you don't know can create the opposite of the friendly impression you may be trying to create.  Amazon do it in their e-mails, and some inept cold callers, but as soon as I'm ever addressed with a name that I never use it makes it utterly clear that the person first-naming me doesn't know me at all.

changing places

There is something slightly infra-dig about buying plants in flower.  It smacks of the impulse purchase, the oh-I-must have that reflex of the naive gardener who buys a plant without knowing where they are going to put it.  It implies ignorance or lack of imagination, an inability to visualise what the plant will look like when it is in flower.  True gardeners lay out their borders in late September, when the soil is lovely and warm and their new plants have months to root into the surrounding soil before the rigours of the next dry spring.  Such gardeners are superior beings who can plan ahead, confident of conjuring beauty from the uninspiring pots of semi-dormant twigs they are arranging in their borders.  They do not end up with gardens that flower almost entirely between Easter and June, because that is when they went to the garden centre and fell in love with whatever was out at the time.

Such is received wisdom in the horticultural trade, and I am guilty of thinking such thoughts about customers who buy the plants in full bloom that we have cunningly arranged just inside the entrance to catch their eye, the plant centre equivalent of sweeties at the till.  And I have been such a gardener, often, having a highly developed propensity to conceive violent passions for new plants.  But we in the trade should not mock so readily.  It may be a bad idea to buy a plant about which you know nothing, whose needs for sun, shelter or a reliable supply of moisture your garden will be totally unable to meet, but buying something when you can see the flowers has its good points.  Or rather, choosing its exact position in your garden and planting it at a time when you can see how it is going to look with its neighbours can save you from some horrible errors.

I have made such an error.  A couple of years ago I planted a salmon pink flowered Chaenomeles speciosa 'Geisha Girl' in the entrance bed by the way in.  This was not a purchase made on impulse and in complete ignorance.  I had a pretty good idea that it would grow there, since I have several other ornamental quince in the garden, and know they cope with the sandy soil and the wind.  I had seen and admired the flowers, so was not disturbed that they were a shade of pink that has a fair amount of orange in it.  Some people dislike orange-pink, but I like it myself.  I'd checked on the dimensions of the shrub, and knew it would fill the space it was destined for pretty well, not growing too large.

What I had utterly failed to take into account, when I planted it out of its flowering season, was how it would look in bloom against other plants flowering nearby.  I put it next to a Japanese crab, Malus floribunda, a small, round-headed tree with clouds of small, apple pink blossoms in spring.  I have always been very fond of Japanese crab apples since childhood.  This one would probably prefer better soil, and not to have been planted on a site where there was previously an apple orchard, but it battles along.  Unfortunately nowadays it battles against the ornamental quince as well as the miserable soil.  The two of them flower at exactly the same time, and large salmon pink flowers against small shell-pink ones is about as bad a combination as you can imagine.  It doesn't even have the panache of a violent Christopher Lloyd clash.  It is just bad.  Each plant diminishes the beauty of the other.  It is simply horrid.

I believe that Harold Nicolson told Vita Sackville-West that the reason why she was such a good gardener was that she had the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful plants ('believe' in this context means that I can't remember which book this comes in, and am not going to spend an hour trying to find the reference, but I'm pretty sure that he said it).  I don't want to abolish the crab, or the quince, but one of them is going to have to move, and clearly it's not going to be the tree.  The Chaenomeles has been in for around three years, and the top growth has developed nicely, which makes me nervous about how large the root system now is.  I suspect that digging it out will be a more protracted and brutal task than it appeared on Gardeners World, the last couple of times I watched and they moved mature shrubs.  It is also a task that should have been done a month ago, since the leaves are starting to emerge, but a month ago it was snowing.  I really don't want to leave it another season, which means it has to be done now.

The question was where to put it.  We have been here for nearly twenty years, and the borders in the front and back gardens are quite full.  Friends are incredulous when I say I don't have room for more plants, saying I have a huge garden and that can't possibly be true.  It is a large garden, but even so there aren't lots of empty spaces waiting to be filled with a long lived shrub growing to one and a half metres tall and wide.  Plus I needed to find a space where the salmon pink flowers would not clash with their new neighbours.  To make that mistake once is forgiveable, to make a habit of it would be just sloppy.

I tried to convince myself there was room at the south end of the long bed, but there wasn't really.  The quince would have ended up overwhelming an inoffensive potentilla, I'd have had another pink-on-pink combination, and the quince and the crab would still have been close enough to appear in the same view from most viewpoints.  Leaving the problem to mull while I got on with some weeding the solution occurred to me, which was to liberate the space from its current occupant, something that really had fallen into the ugly and unsuccessful category.  It was not always so.  Years ago I raised a lot of the purple leaved version of the common sage from cuttings, and used it as ground cover in part of the long border.  Soft greyish-purple is a good foil for other plants, and the sage combined well with all sorts of neighbours.  However, it is not the longest lived plant.  Mine have not died, because they have renewed themselves by rooting where the branches touched the soil, but the original cores are woody and unattractive, and the whole patch has spread to cover a larger area than was ever envisaged at the outlet.

The answer was now clear.  Make a space in the sage, in fact get rid of all the sage, and see what treasures were being overwhelmed by the rooting branches.  Refresh the soil, replant the space with the Chaenomeles and maybe one or two other feature shrubs.  There is space for the Chaenomeles between a topiary yew (dark green) and a white flowered Spiraea, where it should be safe from further hideous clashes.  Then maybe get some more sage, but not so much of it.  It will feel rather wasteful buying it, but I failed to take cuttings last year, and I know that in a few weeks time I will be able to pick up young plants in 9cm pots from work for not very much money.  They will grow rapidly, and young plants are far more attractive than old, tired, gnarly ones.

There is a general lesson to be learned.  Planting spaces in a garden are not just the tracts of bare earth, but the outgrown patches of old plants that have ceased to be as attractive as they once were, or have spread to take up more room than they deserve.  This approach can be overdone.  If you keep changing your mind about too many things then even a twenty year old garden won't have that comfortable air of establishment, because nothing has been allowed to grow to maturity, or even a tad beyond.  A tiny air of relaxed, overblown over-maturity here and there gives a garden character, a sense of reassuring permanence.  Ripeness is all.

under investigation

Our local hospital is among those being investigated in the wake of the Stafford Hospital report.  Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust is one of the five found to have a persistently high death rate over the past two years.  That's rather depressing, particularly as it sits halfway along one of the most dangerous roads in Britain, but doesn't come as a particular surprise, and I suspect the problems go back far longer than two years.

About ten years ago someone I know was on holiday over a bank holiday weekend when they began to experience severe pain in one of those parts of the body that it is not considered nice to discuss in public.  They are entitled to their privacy, and I won't say who they were or how I knew them, but this is a story of someone known to me personally, not just a tale about a friend of a friend.  They returned from holiday, and saw their GP first thing on Tuesday morning, GPs not operating on Bank Holiday Mondays.  The GP diagnosed an anal abscess and said that it was too serious to be treated in a GP's surgery, and they were to go straight to A&E.  The GP would telephone ahead so that they would be seen immediately.

The seeing immediately bit worked very well, and the GP's diagnosis was confirmed.  The patient needed surgery.  It was after the admission to Colchester General Hospital that things began to unravel.  The patient was by then in what they described as the most intense pain they had ever experienced, and the doctor who saw them prescribed a strong painkiller, but instead of being given pain relief they were sent to sit in a side room.  And left there for an hour, during which time no hospital staff paid them any attention at all.  After an hour the patient's companion went to look for a doctor or nurse, to find out whether the patient could have something now for the pain.  It turned out that they had not been given relief, because the injection had to be given when they were lying down, and the wards had not called to say a bed was available.

Eventually a bed was found.  By then the patient had begun to run a temperature and was showing symptoms of incipient blood poisoning.  The surgeons would not operate while the patient had such a temperature, and the medical staff tried to control the developing septicemia with drugs.  The patient had been put on nil by mouth as soon as they were admitted, but was not attached to a saline drip despite the fact that they were running a fever.

The temperature abated, but surgery was delayed again as the air ambulance brought in more urgent surgical cases (from a crash on the A12, as it happens).  It was only when the nurses changed shift at nine in the evening that it occurred to one of the nurses on the new shift that the only fluid the patient had received since going to bed the previous evening was a glass of orange juice before going to the GP's surgery that morning.

Finally the abscess was operated on by whatever general surgeon was on duty at eleven or twelve at night.  The initial surgery failed to heal, and required a second operation, this time with a consultant specialist in bowel surgery.  The second operation was a success, however, the patient learned that if the abscess had progressed another centimetre before treatment, it would have attacked the patient's anal sphincter, and they would quite probably been left permanently incontinent.

It might be that things have improved in the past decade, and that this story has no bearing on Colchester General's excess death rate in the past two years, but I wouldn't count on it.  In the meantime, as Jane Eyre put it, I must keep in good health.  And not die.

more chainsaw work

It wasn't too windy when I got up, but when I checked the Colchester five day forecast over breakfast I discovered that the wind was due to return by lunchtime.  I thought I might as well have another go at pruning and tying in the climbers under the veranda before the gales resumed, since progress last time was limited to setting up the step ladder and watching it blow over.  An elder bush has taken root behind the house, which I don't mind, since it provides a handy support for the honeysuckle to climb up and the flowers are very pretty, but it has grown so large it obscures the view, and branches are growing out over the barbecue.

I was sawing laboriously through a large stem, perched at the top of the steps and wondering whether I needed a new, sharper pruning saw, when the Systems Administrator appeared round the corner complete with chainsaw, saying that we'd better have another go at this hedge before the wind got up.  This was an unexpected pleasure, since the SA doesn't generally do gardening before lunchtime.  The SA had suggested after breakfast (or rather after the morning cup of tea, since the SA doesn't generally do breakfast) that we could get on with the hedge after lunch, and my response had been that it was forecast to be too windy after lunch. I love people who can take a hint.

The SA isn't reducing the whole hedge to a flat top, as if it had been cut with a mechanical flail.  That would look too harsh, and would anyway be impossible since we can't reach all of it from our side.  The stems nearest the front, that the SA can reach from the Henchman platform, have been cut to the same height they were reduced to last time, around 4 metres, while some fat trunks in the centre have been reduced to about waist height.  The overall effect is to bring down the average height, and considerably reduce the density of the top third of the hedge.  It still looks natural and informal, and doesn't create a hard line between the garden and the surrounding landscape, but it should cast a lot less shade on the garden.  Certainly, looking at the enormous pile of prunings we'd produced and imagining each branch covered in leaves, the effect should be to admit much more light.

A sad but necessary task while the chainsaw was out was to reduce a contorted willow in the bog bed down to a low stump.  It used to be tremendously pretty, with curly orange branches weaving around each other in a delightful haze, but then a few years ago the slender leaves and smallest twigs began to turn black.  After researching the subject of black dieback in ornamental willows I had a nasty suspicion that it was suffering from a type of anthracnose, a fungal disease that attacks willows.  I cut out the affected twigs, a fiddly job which took a very long time, but more twigs kept dying.  The SA cut the willow's branches back hard, and I sprayed the sawn stumps with fungicide, but as it sprouted new growth the same black lesions appeared.  I had to regretfully admit that the plant would have to go, since a small multistemmed pollard crowned with weak and dying stems is no use to anyone.  I can't face digging the stump out, and will take the risk of leaving it to rot in situ.

We moved on to the tricky question of how to reduce a large branch on one of the native, wild willows along the ditch, that is sagging lower and lower over the garden, without it dropping on the shrubs growing beneath and destroying them.  The answer is to cut it off in small sections.  I am one of those people recently described by the head of UK Sport as physically illiterate, being practically unable to catch anything, but I can catch twiggy branches of willow when they are dropping on a Magnolia stellata.  I'm not taking the risk of a larger lump of tree falling on my head, but cut into short lengths the falling logs brushed past the magnolia stems without breaking them.  The odd bud may have been knocked off, but I can live with that.  The wind got up before we'd finished with the willow, and began to thrash the branches around so that they bound on the saw and it was dangerous to go on.  It quite suited the SA to stop by then, since both of the SA's wellington boots have split, so after working in the bog bed the SA had wet and very cold feet.

The vast heap of sawn branches reduced to a surprisingly small number of bags of chippings once put through the shredder.  That's a pity, since I need lots of woody shreddings to try and make a weed-proof mulch round the compost heaps.  The fatter branches will saw up into an equally pathetic quantity of logs, which once seasoned will keep the stove going for all of two evenings.

Addendum  The SA ordered some new boots at lunchtime.  You can get everything on Amazon.

monkey puzzle

There was a delivery of plants lined up outside the office from our new Dutch supplier, the one that sent us some extremely nice deciduous Euonymus last autumn.  They didn't look like much, just little pathetic heaps of twigs, but I was very curious to know what they all were.  Unfortunately the boss went out for the day without printing the labels, so I couldn't spend a happy albeit chilly morning fastening those on while taking the time to read them.

I did get to spend some time Googling the reproductive habits of monkey puzzles, which is something I'd happily do in my spare time even if I weren't being paid for it.  A potential customer e-mailed to ask whether we had any, and stated her preference for a female tree if possible.  I didn't know that male and female cones were borne on separate plants, since the general rule of thumb with conifers is that they are carried on the same plant, often with the female cones nearer the top and the male ones lower down, to reduce the chances of self-pollination.  Checking Hillier's dictionary before taking to the internet confirmed that our potential customer was correct, and Araucaria araucana runs contrary to the usual rule for conifers, with male and female strobili generally being carried on different plants.  Generally, but not invariably.  The sex life of the monkey puzzle leaves room for ambiguity.

The manager didn't think he'd ever seen monkey puzzle plants for sale labelled as specifically male or female.  He didn't believe they fruited at all until they were around thirty years old, and told me to go and check this, and compose some suitable reply to the would-be owner of a female tree.  Wikipedia said that they didn't fruit until they were between twenty and forty years old, which meant that it had to be true, but I checked for corroborating evidence on a couple more sites, just to be on the same side.

The seeds turn out to be enormous, and edible.  I think I should have known that they were edible, since I had a vague feeling that the first plants grown in England were raised from seed pocketed by a plant hunter in the course of a dinner.  On the other hand, the cones might have been part of the table decorations rather than the menu.  According to my researches, the seeds are nutritious and do or did form a staple part of the diet in some areas of Chile, being rich in starch and tasting pleasantly of pine nuts.  If it weren't that the trees take between twenty and forty years to come into production it would be worthwhile planting them commercially.

It sounds as though fresh seed germinates readily, while there are difficulties over taking cuttings, including the fact that cuttings taken from horizontal growing side branches refuse to make upright growing new plants.    I think that is fairly standard conifer behaviour.  If the bulk of young plants in commerce are seed raised, as opposed to cuttings or grafts taken from stock plants of known sex, that would explain why you never see young plants labelled as male or female.  Apparently they are indistinguishable until they start flowering.

The owner broke the news to me officially that the manager told me unofficially last week, but I wasn't sure I was supposed to know, that the people who ran the cafe are not coming back.  It was unlucky for them that they started in the worst year in decades for the horticultural trade, but they didn't make much of an effort, swanning in half an hour or an hour after we'd opened, and leaving half way through the afternoon.  Unfortunately it puts the onus of running the cafe back on us.  While some of my colleagues are fairly happy dishing out tea and cakes, I know a couple that aren't, and certainly I have no desire to operate a tea shop.  I don't want to do it at all, I wouldn't apply for a job doing it, and I particularly don't want to do it in tandem with nursery work.  It is embarrassing serving food while covered in compost and with dirt rimmed nails, and we'd get about one star out of five on the new catering hygiene ratings.  Maybe not even one star.

One till packed up mid-morning as well.  It suddenly locked, refusing to do anything except bleep when the manager pressed any key.  Turning it off and on again had no effect.  Advancing the receipt and journal paper rolls freed it, but later on it froze and beeped again when I was on the telephone to somebody who was trying to pay for some trees.  The manager thinks a key is stuck down.  I switched to the other till in mid phone call, but we it really is time for the owner to buy some new ones.

Now it is February we work until five, something I forgot to mention to the Systems Administrator beforehand.  Going into the office at the end of the day I was struck by a monumentally and staggeringly awful smell, a rank stink of excrement or decay.  It had been fine in there half an hour previously, when I went up to send an e-mail.  The boss blamed the dog, which had rolled in something disgusting.  I suppose they will have to wash the dog to get the source of the smell off, which will be a revolting job, much worse than just having to hose a bit of sick out of the SA's shoes.

hedges

I discovered this morning that one of the cats had been sick in the Systems Administrator's heavy walking shoes in the night.  In all the tidying up they were left in the hall next to the cat flap, and the culprit must either have not made it out through the door in time, or just thought the corner of the hall was a good place to be sick.  When I was a teenager you used to be able to buy those incredibly cheesy 'Love Is...' cartoon posters in Athena (remember Athena?) but I don't believe there was ever one that read 'Love is hosing cat sick out of your partner's shoes'.  There should have been.

Dealing with the shoes got me nicely in the mood to clean out the chicken house.  It badly needed doing, and I would have done it last week if it hadn't been so windy.  Scooping up three sackfuls of sawdust mixed with chicken shit is a pleasanter job when flakes and fragments of it are not going to blow everywhere.  For those of you who have not seen inside a chicken house, and may not have thought about their design, chickens instinctively roost at night.  If you provide them with a perch they will spend the night sitting on it, unless they are very old and doddery, and while they roost they crap, quite a lot.  You therefore build the house with a roosting board under the perch, which keeps the rest of the house relatively free of droppings, and you can clean the board and put fresh sawdust on it more frequently than you change the sawdust in the rest of the house.  Today I cleaned the whole house while I was at it, since the sawdust on the floor was starting to look a bit grotty, and I always do the nest box when I'm doing the roosting board.  They are pretty good about not crapping in the nest box, but they tread dirt in there on their feet, and you obviously want the eggs to be sitting on pristine sawdust until you collect them.  The dirty litter goes on the compost heap, where by the time it has finished composting it is not offensive at all.

After lunch we started on the boundary hedge.  We managed to get the Henchman to the back of the border, by dint of collapsing it and sliding it under the branches of a couple of large shrubs that form part of the back row in that bed.  The feet are individually adjustable so that you can level it off to stand safely on a slope.  The hedge is a mixture of hawthorn, dogwood and field maple, and I can't remember how many years it is since we last took the top out, but they have shot up a good 3-4 metres above the point where we cut them last time.

We can never know what somebody else sees, when they look at the same thing that we are looking at.  The SA asked me where I wanted the hedge to be cut, and I said to about the same height as we did it last time. The shrubs had regrown with multiple leaders at the point where they were cut last time, so the previous cutting line was clearly visible within the hedge as a sort of ripple.  Clearly visible to me, that is, but not to the SA, until I'd explained what we were looking at.  If you are interested in woody plants, you see in their present form the evidence of how they have been trained in the past.  If you are less involved in plants and armed with a chainsaw, you see a thicket of branches that need reducing.  If we'd been looking at a steam engine the SA would have known the significance of every piece, while to me it would have been a jumble of metal and oil drips.

The operation was a joint effort, with the SA cutting and me clearing.  Each piece of debris had to be carried forward through the border without smashing any of the shrubs in the bed, or treading on anything.  Some of the occupants of that border are large enough to look after themselves, but a small and precious Acer aconitifolium that only went in last autumn, and a little Drimys lanceolata, could have been destroyed by a misplaced boot or carelessly wielded log.  There was one alarming moment when a rather large branch fell unexpectedly on a camellia, but no serious damage.

It was too much to do in one afternoon.  By quarter past four the light was going, the SA's arms were starting to ache, and we'd had to cut the electric saw out of one branch that closed on it, and reset the chain which had slipped.  The half hour before dusk, when visibility is poor and you're getting tired, is a prime time for gardening accidents, and we called it a day.  There is at least another afternoon's work to do in the back garden, with the rest of the hedge and a large willow branch that's hanging too low over the ditch bed.  Following that the hedge along the side of the meadow needs cutting back.  I'd better hope for some more dry and not too windy days.

Addendum  Muntjac have eaten most of the buds out the Mahonia japonica in the back garden, the flowers from the hellebores in the ditch bed, and half the leaves of some of my saxifrages.  The SA suggested I could try a deer scarer.  You can get battery operated ones, I think triggered by infrared, that you tune to a speech radio station, and the sound of human voices are supposed to scare them away.  I can forgive the cats for incidents like this morning's episode with the shoes, but I really do loathe those ruddy little deer with a passion.

guests

It was a good lunch.  A key rule of enjoying any meal you are hosting is that the food should not require too many last-minute interventions in the kitchen, and should be capable of keeping without spoiling until the party has reached the point where food is required.  On that basis I tend to serve my friends and relations boiled things or cold things, and the Systems Administrator opted for roast pork.  It isn't meant to be eaten pink so there's no anxiety about over-cooking pork, and it will sit happily for ages once done.  Beef was ruled out on the pinkness issue, and because although the SA's yorkshire puddings are excellent, they need too much supervision and demand to be eaten when ready.  It was a good piece of pork, and the roast potatoes were fluffy and crisp, the crackling crunchy but not teeth-breaking, and the vegetables cooked through but still with some bite to them.  My contribution was pudding, lemon syllabubs and a raspberry shortcake.  Everybody had one pudding and some tried both.  I only had one, but was part of the minority that still had room for a sliver of cheese.

It isn't natural to eat that much at lunchtime, and we very rarely do.  You certainly don't have the energy to do anything for the rest of the afternoon, or what's left of it by the time you've stacked the dishwasher and washed the things that have to be done by hand.  But we don't all see each other very often, and it was a party.

Our Ginger loves parties.  He loves all human contact, and cannot imagine that anybody doesn't love him, so a room full of extra laps to sit on, and new legs to cover in white and ginger fur, is very heaven.  We shut him into the outer hall while we served lunch, and apart from that he was a constant presence.  The big tabby is not too keen on visitors, but is extremely interested in the concept of roast pork and cheese, so he had to go out as well, otherwise we'd never have got all the food safely to the table.  Trying to get a meal from the kitchen at one end of the house to the dining table at the other end of the house is like solving the problem of the fox, the goose and the boat across the river at the best of times.  The big tabby and Our Ginger sat in the outer hall throughout lunch, staring accusingly through the glass door, Our Ginger doing his Simon's Cat act of scrabbling his paws on the glass when he saw anyone coming.

The original mogs disappeared for the duration.  We confessed to currently having four cats, when anyone asked, but we could easily have got away with only owning up to two, if we'd remembered to rearrange the food dishes and baskets in the hall to back up our story.  Within half an hour of the family departing the originals were back, without any apparent sign of resentment.  Indeed, to make up for his lonely day the black cat has now settled down beside me on the sofa, something he doesn't do very often, and is purring.

His sister has taken up residence in the middle of the kitchen table.  It is her new craze, and she's been doing it for a few days now.  She used to divide her time between lying in the doorway between the inner and outer halls, and lounging on the office chair in front of my desk.  We have got used to treading carefully through the half of the doorway that isn't taken up with the cat, and I have learnt to crouch in front of the desk when I need to plug my laptop into my printer.  She doesn't like being moved, and she is a creature of strongly held opinions.  Her expression from the middle of the kitchen table is thunderous.  So far I have managed to budge her up to one end in the mornings so that I can eat breakfast, but she doesn't like sharing her space with the computer.  The SA is hopeful that when the weather warms up she will go out more.  I am afraid that it will not be very convenient not being able to use the table, but remember that we managed for years without one.

the imperfect housewife

It was raining this morning when I woke up, but that was fine.  It was forecast to rain, and I was planning on doing the cleaning anyway.  I started with the kitchen, which I always do anti-clockwise, starting to the left of the Aga.  This might not be the best plan, since it means doing the Aga at the end, by which time I am thoroughly fed up with cleaning.  On the other hand, cleaning the Aga is one of those jobs that is capable of expanding to fill the time available, so maybe it is best to leave it until last.

I thought the kitchen couldn't be too bad, since I had a quick wipe round the other day, including the Aga, because the man who services the boiler was coming.  He is always delightfully cheerful, his charges are remarkably low, and the boiler so far has not broken down under his ministrations, so it seemed only polite to hoover up the cat fluff and wash the kitchen floor in honour of his visit.

The sinks took a bit of doing.  In fact, they still aren't very shiny.  I blame this on the fact that our water is laden with minerals that have a special affiliation for steel.  I scrubbed away with a green scourer and quantities of bicarbonate of soda and Mr Muscle, but couldn't face getting the limescale remover out.  I'm sure it's a scientifically proven fact that chemical cleaning products are bad for you.

After lunch I took a break from cleaning and nipped over to the beekeepers' Membership Secretary's house so that she could countersign a couple of cheques before she disappears on holiday for a fortnight.  I come across societies that circumvent their requirement to have two signatures on cheques by the co-signatory signing several blank cheques at a time, for the treasurer to use as required, but that makes me uncomfortable.  It would be more honest just to tell the membership that you want to go over to one signature only, if you're going to do that.

Though I say I nipped over, it would be more accurate to say that I drove over very carefully, since yesterday I discovered the front near side tyre on my car had gone flat.  I fear it was a casualty of the numerous potholes that have sprung up in recent weeks.  The Systems Administrator fitted the spare for me, and I must order a replacement, but am now driving ultra-cautiously, and slowing right down each time I see a potentially pothole-concealing puddle.  I realise that this is typical behaviour in the aftermath of an accident, as documented by LTC Rolt in Red For Danger (which everyone should read.  Its messages go far beyond the history of railway safety) and that as the weeks and months go by I will get gradually less careful of my tyres, until I find I've spoiled another.

The Membership Secretary gave me a cup of tea, and by the time I got home the SA had washed the kitchen floor, which was kind, since I was expecting to do that when I got back.  The remaining stretch of kitchen, which included a set of wall cupboards with glazed doors as well as the Aga, seemed to remain obstinately sticky with odd bits of cat fur attached despite a lot of scrubbing.  The SA, seeing me wiping furiously at the cupboard doors which had collected thin and apparently ineradicable lines of grease around each window, said reassuringly that it was only family, and went to wash the downstairs cloakroom, though I promised that was on my list of things to do, once I'd finished the Aga.

I wouldn't win any prizes for housekeeping, but console myself with the thought that a perfectly clean and tidy house is a sign of a wasted life.  We are scrupulous about the important things, and have never given ourselves food poisoning in thirty years.  The last time I had that was after lunch at the Savoy.