gravel

This afternoon's anticipated rain barely materialised.  There were a few very light showers, scarcely wet enough for it to be worth packing up my tools and coming inside.  The garden's gain has been housework's loss, since I expected to have to give up gardening by lunchtime, and was resigned to spending the afternoon cleaning the kitchen.  Looking at the forecast I think I really will be stuck inside tomorrow, so I'll have no excuse for not doing it then.  The hall and the sitting room are looking pretty ropey as well, and the bedroom, en-suite bathroom and downstairs loo.  Though I do need to make up some brood frames and update my spreadsheet of things planted in the garden.

I still haven't finished planting my little tray of alpines in the gravel.  There is something seductive about weeding gravel, which produces a great temptation to do just another handful, then shuffle forwards until the handful has become another metre of clear ground.  The clear bareness of freshly weeded gravel is temporary, and illusory.  Unless planted up with ground covering plants, or dosed with the sort of persistent weed killers I don't use, it will soon be recolonised by a fresh crop of weeds, plus escapes from the borders like Geranium sanguineum.  I now have a template in my mind, taken from the Best-in-Show winning Australian garden at Chelsea, in which arid zone vegetation clustered so closely that no ground could be seen.  Obviously I can't use most of those plants, since they wouldn't be hardy in Essex, but I'm aiming for the same aesthetic.

So I have gone shooting half way up the back of the long bed, abandoning the tray behind me.  Further progress will be slower, partly because the gravel starts widening out so a linear metre of forwards progress covers two or three times as much ground, and partly because I have got to an area of thyme, which has been infiltrated by an annual grass, and that takes longer to weed out.  I don't know its name.  It is not Poa annua, but something taller and with more slender leaves.  The appearance of the grass popping up among the thyme slightly disproves the ground cover theory of weed control, since the thyme has not succeeded in suppressing it, but grass is persistent stuff.  If I can get it all out before it sets seed there should be less of it next year.

I'll finish planting out the alpines on Saturday, assuming it rains tomorrow.  I had to come in from the garden rather early tonight, because I'm off to the beekeepers monthly meeting, where the lecture will be on the subject of stings.  I have two requests for books from the library, and am concentrating furiously so as not to go out on autopilot without them.  The library is too large, and some of the books in it too out of date or downright unhygienic, for me to take all of them to meetings, but I will put a selection of the more relevant and sanitary books in a box and take them along, in case anyone wants to borrow anything.

a question of priorities

Seeing all those plants so beautifully grown and presented at Chelsea always inspires me to press on with my own garden.  It isn't that I want to copy anything in particular, though I did note down the names of a few plants I'd like to grow if I can find a suitable space, more that the day reminds me how good plants and gardens can be.  The alternative reaction would be to grumble that my garden could never be remotely as good as that, and give up.

The tricky question is where to start.  Planting out the little accumulated stash of recently purchased plants by the front door seemed a good plan.  They have all been chosen with particular beds in mind, where I know there are gaps, and the sooner I plant them the faster they can start growing.  Once a plant has filled its pot with roots, most don't honestly like sitting there for even another week.  My aim is to cover the ground, so that annual weeds can't find space to germinate, and difficult to eradicate perennial weeds will be hidden.

I began with a box of low growing, drought tolerant perennials destined for the gravel in the front garden.  Unfortunately the gravel has by now amassed a crop of spindly grasses and other weeds, which I had to pull out before I could plant, so progress was slow.  I told myself that once the perennials spread to form a continuous mat the weeds would get much less of a look in, but by lunchtime I'd only planted out a few handfulls from a big clump of un-named, seed raised sempervivum, which I'd had in a clay pan until the pot disintegrated in the frosts.  I thought that rather than repotting it as a lump, if I divided it up and used it as ground cover it would cover quite a lot of space.  Still waiting to go in are the three Antennaria, the trio of alpine Phlox, and the prostrate Gypsophila, plus three more pans of houseleeks, and assorted succulents rescued from a failed experiment in creating a green roof on the pot shed.

Maybe weeding and planting is not the most urgent thing.  There are mysterious patches of die-back in the prostrate juniper by the front door, a rosemary in the turning circle, and part of the ivy hedge around the long bed, while Malus x zumi 'Professor Sprenger' planted at the same end of the long bed has failed utterly.  Probably I ought to remove the dead wood as my top priority.  I don't know what is causing them to die.  The soil in the front garden is extremely odd, and the lettuce farmer ended up fallowing the next door field for several years to try and build up its fertility, after his first crop of lettuces on it proved uncommercially erratic.  He said that there were patches through the field where the crop simply refused to grow.  The deaths are not all down to it being a former orchard, which as I now know are notorious spots for honey fungus, in that the rosemary and juniper are close to the house and well away from where the apple trees were, in what was already garden.

The edges in the back garden are whiskery in places.  Letting the edges go undermines the whole look of the garden.  Perhaps, before planting out ground cover and cutting out dead wood, I should cut all the lawn edges.  Except that the goose grass is running up in places, and I should definitely remove that before it can seed, and because it looks so ostentatiously messy.  And a willow tree that was trimmed with the Systems Administrator's help back in the winter has suddenly flopped branches down in front of a couple of the hydrangeas in the ditch bed.  They are not getting enough light, and will grow out of shape, which is a structural problem more lasting than whiskery edges, so should I trim the willow before pulling out the goose grass?

It makes the idea of building a Chelsea show garden seem positively straightforward.

the greatest flower show on earth

The Chelsea flower show was wonderful.  We've been recording the TV programmes about it, and will sit down to watch them in a minute.  Really the media coverage nowadays is so comprehensive that there isn't a lot of point my adding to it on the blog.  Without photos.

Initial impressions.  The bag checks on the way in were perfunctory.  I could have had a small pearl handled revolver in my handbag and the security guard who glanced inside it would never have noticed.  And the RHS has doubled the price of show programmes to ten pounds.

Apart from that it was all jolly nice.  Recession seems to be biting slightly, either that, or the disinclination of large corporations to be seen to be associated with conspicuous consumption and elitist activities, since trade stands and catering occupied some spaces which I'm sure used to contain show gardens, in the sunny upland years before the global banking crisis.  This year's standard was very high, and the Gold Medal quota was higher than ever, but almost everyone played it safe in design terms.  Plenty of soft-edge modernist, interlocking rectangles softened with abundant but harmonious planting, some nods to the Arts and Crafts movement, nothing that represented a decisive break from gardens I've seen before at Chelsea, many times.

My favourite bit is the pavilion, and when the Systems Administrator and I divide forces for a while, as we always do, I spend my time looking at the plant stands rather than the show gardens.  I have no idea how you stage exhibits like those with clematis and why they don't break in transit or while you are trying to put the stand up.  Broadleigh Bulbs have ceased exhibiting, as they said they would, but Kevock are exciting new kids on the block, there for the second year.  This year I must buy some of their fritillaries.  Other favourites were still represented, thank goodness.  Auriculas, them reckless plants, as Margery Fish's old gardener used to call them.

I checked my phone mid morning, as I'd felt it buzz.  Bloms had sent me an e-mail to say they had won their 63rd Gold at Chelsea.  I already knew that, since I'd seen it.  Peter Beales and David Austin roses both got Golds as well.  Phew.  Poor Peter Beales is dead now.  He was too ill to attend for the past couple of years and used to be represented by his straw hat.  The hat was there again this year, with a nice photograph of him, presumably taken during the set up for a show, since he is wearing a high-vis vest.

We bumped into one of my friends from work, with her friend, who is a committed galanthophile and stalwart of the Suffolk branch of Plant Heritage.  I didn't meet the boss and the owner, but given the crowds it is fairly unlikely you'll run across anyone you know.  We sometimes meet former City colleagues, contacts and competitors, but not today.

It was quite cold.  It wasn't forecast to be warm, and we'd gone dressed accordingly, but I kept my wind proof coat zipped up for most of the day, over my heavyweight Icelandic sweater, and at times I wished I'd had a hat and scarf.  And gloves.  My hands got astonishingly cold at one point.  They tend to be chilly, which probably accounts for my relative success at making pastry.

I didn't buy or order any plants, though I did get a catalogue from Lockyers, purveyors of reckless plants.  They don't have a website.  Or accept credit cards or PayPal.  The Systems Administrator bought me a present, a Dutch stainless steel sharp thing with a cherry wood handle for scraping weeds out from between paving stones.  For the full Kiplingesque effect I ought to use a broken dinner knife, but a Sneeboer stone scratcher will be more effective.

Having arrived at nine, by half past four I had to admit that I'd seen most of it (though I managed to miss the iconoclastic gnomes) and that it was getting too crowded.  I left on a high, but after sitting on the tube all the way back to Liverpool Street, when I had to get up again I realised that my clockwork had run down.

capable of working without supervision

The manager informed us that our newest plant centre recruit has handed in his notice, as he has got a place on a training course at Cambridge Botanic.  He lasted eighteen months, which I fear is as long as we can expect to get from a sparky and competent youngster.  It is a great opportunity for him, since he'll learn a lot at Cambridge Botanic, and it will look good on his CV.  Working in the plant centre doesn't really offer any opportunities for career advancement.  It is a role for people who have done something else with their lives first, and have reached a stage when they can afford to hang out with plants for rather little money.  Since my shortly-to-be-departing colleague is thoroughly competent, and is the only full time member of staff in the plant centre, apart from the manager himself, the manager is understandably depressed about losing him.

Meanwhile, the continued chilly and dull weather means that sales are below what they should be for the time of year.  Much, much better than they were in the winter, but falling short of the seasonal norm.  The loss of one of his more reliable members of staff, and the dismal reality of finding trade once again hit by the weather, after only a month of boom, and the misfortune of having put his back out, combined to depress the manager's mood.  A small miasma of gloom surrounded him all day, and threatened to spread to the rest of us.

I removed myself to a safe distance, and finished putting the roses out for sale.  I don't know how many there were, since I stopped counting when I got to forty pots, but there were lots.  They had been unloaded onto the lawn at the top end of the plant centre.  Before putting shrubs out on the beds you are supposed to sprinkle the top of the compost with a pre-emergent herbicide, to cut down on subsequent weeding.  If you sprinkle it on the lawn, the grass goes yellow, so it is better to work over a gravel path or other hard surface, since it is quite impossible to cover the top of a pot without spilling some granules over the side.  The only vaguely convenient hard surface was the manhole cover in the middle of the lawn, so I had to move every pot before I could treat it.  The furthest rows of pots were four paces from the manhole cover, and since the human opposable thumb is not designed to bear that much weight repeatedly, I used both hands to move them one at a time.  If the foliage had been dry, I could have simply loaded up a full trolley and then done all the pots at once working over the path, but since it was drizzling and the rose leaves were wet, I needed to be able to tip each pot and tuck the foliage back out of harm's way, so that the weedkiller landed on the compost instead of sticking to the plant.

Why do we not have deliveries put down on a hard surface instead of a lawn?  Discuss.

The manager showed no signs of directing me, so when I'd finished moving the roses I stuck prices on the morning's delivery of pretties off the weekly van, since he had left the list of prices on his desk.  Then I deadheaded the camellias, swept the mess off the tunnel floor, and arranged them in neat rows in alphabetical order, since that was on the list of jobs to do left over from the weekend. It is just as well that I am what used to be called in job advertisements A Self Starter, and Capable of Working Without Supervision.

It would have been nice if somebody had said thank you and well done for moving all those pots, but nobody did.  When I left at six, the unhappy manager was setting out tea cups, in preparation to show an evening group around the garden.

Addendum  The blog is hit from time to time by spam e-mails, most of which are correctly identified as such by the spam filter.  I erase them and you never see them.  I was tickled by this morning's example, though obviously I am not including the link to their blog.

Do you have a spam issue on this blog; I also am a blogger, and I was wanting to know your 
situation; many of us have developed some nice methods and we are 
looking to exchange techniques with others, be sure to shoot me an e-mail if interested.

the art of watering

This could be a short blog post.  I might go to sleep before I have finished typing it.  I left the house this morning just before half past seven, and it was twenty past seven this evening by the time I'd finished the watering here, after my day in the plant centre.  I have no idea how many pots I have shifted in the past two days, but it was a lot.  All the red trolleys and the silver trolleys and some of the roses.

Apart from running the automated irrigation this morning on the trees, and the roses because they looked dry, we watered everything else by hand.  The plant centre had got into that state where some plants were bone dry, while others were sitting far too wet in saturated compost.  The manager's list of jobs for the weekend told us not to over-water, or water things for the sake of it, since some had been over-watered and had died, but one of my colleagues set every bit of the automated system to run that could be set, before even opening the shop door and seeing the list. It would have been a better idea for the manager to have spoken to him about the watering on Friday, but that is the problem with management by leaving notes.  It's generally better to speak to people.

I like to believe that I am good at watering, better and more observant than some of my colleagues, but this is probably a fallacy.  When asked how good their driving is, most people who drive rate themselves as above average.  I consider myself a rather mediocre driver, and make allowances accordingly, but that's not to say I'm not delusional about my watering abilities.  Judging how much to water pots in a commercial setting is quite tricky.  At home you can test the weight of the pot, but when you have hundreds to get through, if not thousands, while you can lift the odd one you mainly have to do it by eye.

The colour and texture of the surface of the compost will tell you a lot, but sometimes the pots are packed together so densely that you can't see the compost.  Sometimes you can see the surface of the pot, but it is not representative of what's underneath, because the pot has been top-dressed with a fine layer of loose compost, or else a layer of crushed bark.  Top-dressings may make pots look smart, but in practical terms they are a damn nuisance.  First of all the plant centre staff can't see whether to water the plant, and then the top-dressing falls out in the customer's car.

Once a plant has started to wilt it is obvious it needs watering, unless the reason for it wilting is that it has been so systematically over-watered that its roots have died, but our aim is to catch plants before they are anywhere near that stressed.  Subtle changes in the colour of the leaves, and the angle at which they're held, can flag up thirsty plants to the practised eye, and after a while we get to know which are the usual suspects, the specimens which are either getting slightly pot-bound, or else from suppliers who have been using a special joke non-moisture retaining compost. As growers try to move away from peat, there are some truly horrible composts around.

I answered the phone to someone who wanted to know whether we had various plants in stock, and when I'd finished looking thanked me for my help and all the walking about.  We don't have a live stock system on the computer, so the only way to find out whether we have a particular variety at that moment is to go and look for it.  I'm there to help people, but it's nice to be thanked, nicer than yesterday's caller whose response to my answer that unfortunately we didn't have Daphne retusa in stock was a long, theatrical sigh followed by a faint and infinitely weary Thank you.

The village turns out to be twinned with somewhere in France.  That information is probably written on the road signs, and I have simply been ignoring it for the past decade.  This weekend saw a visit by some of the French twinners (twins?  Twinnees?) and the plant centre rang for a time with cheerful French voices.

The design journalist came in for some lavender plants, and we agreed that spring was a wonderful thing.  One of the local RSPB people called in on her day off, and we talked about birds.  We are at that stage of acquaintance where we know each other's names (though my surname has probably foxed her) and will chat in the plant centre and when we bump into each other at wildlife fairs.

The owner had a very successful day yesterday at the Hadleigh Show, much better than last year. This could be because the economy is picking up and consumers are more confident than they were twelve months ago, or because she had a better pitch this year, and more people could find her. Who's to say?  The Hadleigh Show doesn't run to supporting mobile credit card machines, and the owner manages by dint of simply taking people's card details, provided they look honest, and processing the sales the next day.  It works a remarkably high proportion of the time, though when I went home she was on the phone to somebody whose card wouldn't go through.  She didn't seem too fussed about that, saying that she had probably written the number down incorrectly.

too many pots

The cold, overcast weather has hit sales.  Or at least, sales turned down at the same time as the weather turned, and more than one customer has commented to me that they would have bought more, but it was too cold, or they had given up working in their garden because it was so chilly and grey.  The dip in sales has unnerved the owner and the manager.

There was a small row last Monday, because some Dodecatheon that were in full flower but not fully rooted in had been put out for sale in the manager's absence.  He was keeping them back until they had proper root systems.  I gather that since then the owner has been putting pressure on the manager to bring as much out for sale as possible, that's in flower or looking leafy and fresh.  When I arrived for work, there were two and a bit red trolleys to empty of plants, which are the multi-tier large ones we use to move stock around the plant centre, and three or four silver ones, which are the normal shopping trolleys the customers use, and will hold 18 two litre pots.  You may recall my calculation that a silver trolley's worth of plants in normally damp compost weigh around 20 kilogrammes.

The manager seemed to have responded to the owner's injunction to bring it all out extremely literally.  My job was to empty the red trolleys (and presumably the silver, though his long list of jobs to do over the weekend didn't mention those at all) and put the plants out for sale.  Some of them were already represented in the plant centre, and the benches were pretty full so there wasn't room for them.  The hardy geraniums ended up in a muddle, as I tried to find space for yet more pots, on tables that were so crammed there were no gaps to move rows up, so that I could keep everything in the right order.  Some of the overs and fliers were in bloom, and the manager's list of things to do said that I might need to ask my young colleague to use them in the ornamental displays.  On the basis that I've done dozens of display tables in my time, and that my young colleague was busy doing other things, I filled the gaps in the tables myself.

As well as putting out the contents of the red trolleys for sale, we were supposed to put out a fairly large delivery of David Austin roses, and some trays of plants that arrived on Friday from a van that calls weekly.  Some of the roses were on order for customers, so we needed to check which and contact them.  Then we were  supposed to go through the viburnums and cut the dead twigs out, go through the camellias and dead-head them, tidy the bedding, tidy the trees, top up the herbs from the overflow supply stashed in one of the tunnels, and half price the bulbs.  And operate the tea room, and the tills, and answer the phones.  With three people.  My young colleague had to box up a delivery of a hundred and twenty lavenders bound for a garden designer in Oxfordshire, which took five boxes and most of this afternoon, but that wasn't on the list.

I suppose that the manager is demonstrating the impossibility of the demands upon him, by placing impossible demands on us, but it is a pointless gesture.  He needs to demonstrate them to the owner, not the staff, and the owner doesn't read the list of jobs left for us every weekend by the till.  The only way she will get to know about the list is if the boss happens read the blog, and since it's a busy time of year, with the Hadleigh show today and Chelsea next week, he almost certainly won't be dipping into Cardunculus in the next few days.

I distinctly heard a cuckoo this afternoon, the first one I've been entirely sure of this year.

three exhibitions

I went to London today.  I almost didn't go, because there is so much to do in the garden, but in the end I decided that weeding, like the poor, you will have always with you, and there were things I wanted to see, that finish soon.  In the grand sweep of things it seemed a pity to miss them, and I'll remember them long after the incremental amount of gardening I would have done has ceased to be of any consequence.

I started with Murillo at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.  That ends this weekend, on 19th May, so there is little point in recommending it, if you haven't already been.  I still have a slight psychological block about going to Dulwich, feeling that it is a long way away, being south of the river and on the overground instead of the underground, but in reality the train journey takes twelve minutes from London Bridge, and the trains go every quarter of an hour.  It's about another twelve minute walk at the other end, but in aggregate no worse than getting to the V&A.  Mind you, I always feel that is rather a long trek.

The Murillo is nice.  There are some religious paintings, some genre paintings of children, and some supporting evidence including X ray photographs that reveal which of the paintings Murillo got straight off, and which ones he fiddled around with, altering postures and moving props about as he went along.  I feel the same about Murillo's religious paintings as I did about Barocci's: I'm not a Catholic, or even a practising Christian, and I can't look at them in the same way as their original seventeenth century audience did.  But they are beautiful as paintings, the faces full of expression, the backgrounds glowing with a subtle light, the draperies billowing convincingly.  He was very good at painting children.

There was a group of small children seated in front of one picture, of a sleeping patrician and his wife being told in a dream by the Virgin Mary to build a church on the site of some miraculous snow that fell in August.  The children were being told a story, by a fat, bouncy woman with a very loud voice, that had absolutely nothing to do with the painting.  In her story, the sleeping people were dreaming of going to London town, and it was so long ago that there were no buses or taxis (which was true).  It does annoy me when people tell small children stuff which is essentially lies.  I can see that there are some subjects you would prefer not to broach at all with a six year old.  The Rwandan genocide, say.  And other things they are simply not going to get at that age.  Constitutional reform in the nineteenth century, for example.  But this was a Spanish painting, and dreaming that you have to build a church is a perfectly good story in itself.  Why drag London town into it?  The Mercury is doing something similar, with an upcoming show about a worker bee who is called Bertie, and is a boy.  Worker bees are female.  Even if you are going to invent stories about bees, why confuse the issue in the minds of small children by telling them that worker bees are boys?

After Murillo I went to Tate Modern, to see the Lichtenstein retrospective.  The walk from London Bridge took me through the corner of Borough Market, and I considered going to look for the Brindisa deli, to buy Spanish ingredients like salt cod, but decided against it.  The market was very crowded, I hadn't looked up their precise address, and I didn't really want to carry a piece of salt cod around the Tate.  The stalls selling street food looked appetising, but the queues were very long, so I gave them a miss as well.

It seemed a waste to be going to the Lichtenstein by myself, when I have just upgraded my membership to Member plus Guest, and know that at least two of my friends wanted to see it, but that was how things turned out.  It closes on 27th May, and I simply hadn't found the time to go before.  A tentative plan to go last week collapsed when the chosen day clashed with the funeral.  I have mixed feelings about Lichtenstein.  I thought I ought to go simply because he was an innovator, and is famous, and the retrospective would form part of my art education.  I liked his ideas much more than I was expecting to.  Seeing Picasso, or a trio of Monet Notre Dames, reworked in pop art dots, is extremely entertaining, and makes you think about the nature of art, which is what Lichtenstein intended.  However, I don't like Lichtenstein aesthetically.  I'm not good with dots: Seurat always annoys the hell out of me.  And I dislike bright, acid primary colours.  So if Rothko is my idea of twentieth century paint heaven, subtle brushwork and layers of masked colour in rich earth tones, Lichtenstein is the opposite.  I can see it is clever and sincere, but it makes me jittery.

From the Tate I walked along the south bank and over to Charing Cross and Piccadilly.  The Thames, which was still ebbing when I crossed London Bridge, and at slack water as I walked up to the Tate, had started to flood.  It is a slightly frightening river, its muddy waters swirling around the bridges and mooring buoys, and I know from taking boats on it as far up as St Katherine's Dock how strong the cross currents are.  Somebody I once worked with was on the Marchioness the night it was run down, which probably colours my view.  I don't like those party boats.  I would never even want to be on the Thames when I'd had anything to drink.  It is a river to be on your guard with, at all times.

The Royal Academy is showing the American painter George Bellows, and that's on until 9th June, so you still have time to go.  I really, really liked George Bellows.  He made his name painting boxing matches, at a time when boxing was still an illegal sport in New York, but he also painted the city, and seascapes, and landscapes, and people.  They are vigorous, fairly impressionistic paintings, and Manet's influence shows in some of the portraits, though elements of his most famous painting Stag at Sharkey seem to me to almost prefigure Francis Bacon.  There are lithographs and drawings as well, vivid and lively, sometimes touching on caricature, sometimes savage social comment.  He died in 1925, when he was only forty two, and western art was the poorer for it.

Three exhibitions in one day is really rather a lot, though these three were all very different to each other.  I liked George Bellows so much, I should have liked to look at his rain soaked park and snow covered hills for longer, only after an hour of looking at his pictures my brain was full.  Catch it if you can.

chicken feed

The problem we had with the chickens eating their eggs has ceased.  I can't be certain why this was, since we have changed more than one experimental variable at the same time.  I have started feeding them a diet of almost pure layers' pellets, instead of a mixture of pellets and mixed grain and probably more grain than pellets, which has considerably raised the protein content of their diet.  Simultaneously, with the warmer weather, the Systems Administrator has been letting them out in the evenings for chicken exercise time.  A run round the garden allows them to practice their natural foraging behaviours, and gives them a change of scenery.  If they were eating eggs because they were bored, perhaps they are now less bored, and foraging outside the run further changes their diet.  So we can't say definitively why the egg eating has ceased.

It stopped within days of switching their food, which is a salutary thought.  They are only chickens, not possessed of intellect or free will according to conventional theory, whereas we are.  But if a change in diet can produce such a dramatic alteration in chicken behaviour, why do we believe that human beings are immune to similar effects?

One of the Speckeldies has gone broody.  She sits in the egg box, wings outstretched, looking grumpy.  Yesterday, when we did not let the chickens out for a run because they might not have gone in again by the time we needed to go out, I went in the late afternoon to collect the eggs.  As I attempted to budge the broody over to the other side of the nest box to check under her for eggs, while she squawked in protest, one of the other Speckeldies suddenly tried to make a leap for freedom through the open lid.  I slammed it down hastily, then had to look to see if I'd inadvertently brained either of them, but they were both fine.  One of my colleagues once told me how his primary school had chickens, and one evening after they had just gone to roost somebody opened the roof above the roosting perch for some reason.  The rooster stood up to see what was going on, at which point the lid was accidentally dropped.  It got him full on the skull, and that was the end of him.

A broody hen stops laying.  That isn't an issue for us, since the only reason we have as many as five hens is to provide company for each other, and at this time of year they churn out more eggs than we can eat.  I give boxes of eggs to our friends and relations when I see them, but it's still hard to keep up.  The spring rush should start to subside fairly soon, though Speckeldies are bred to be prolific egg producers, and these are young birds in their prime.  The old lady Maran produces an enormous, dark brown egg two or three times a week.

When they are allowed out the chickens have taken to wading around in the mud at the bottom of the garden, where the water table has risen to form what is now a bog bed.  They go rushing down the slope with a great appearance of having a set purpose, and paddle.  Somebody needs to explain to them that they are chickens, and not ducks.  Still, they do less damage playing in the mud than when they are raking through the straw mulch, or eating the leaves of my plants.  One unlucky geranium was reduced to half its original size, before they lost interest in it.

a night at the theatre

The audience at the Mercury last night was the thinnest we'd ever seen it.  That was a pity.  We've enjoyed some good shows at the Mercury over the past few years, and with falling public funding the theatre needs all the bums on seats it can get.  That was clearly the management's view, as at the end of the performance one of the actors thanked us for being a lovely audience, and appealed to us to come to some of the other plays in the Ayckbourn series.

We were not an especially lovely audience.  An elderly couple who were sitting in splendid isolation in the otherwise empty row behind us talked to each other about switching off their phones after the play had started, and had another all too audible exchange about the play near the end of the first half, just as one of the actors was delivering a key speech.  There was a rather stuffy announcement before the play began asking us to turn phones off, because the lit screens as well as the noise were distracting to the performers and other audience members, so maybe they should have gone whole hog and reminded us not to talk as well.

I don't know why the play was so poorly attended, since I'd have thought that Ayckbourn was a natural for the Colchester audience.  Sharp but not too intellectually demanding comedy of middle class manners and misunderstandings.  That's normally right up Colchester's street.  Don't get me wrong, I admire Alan Ayckbourn.  His plays are funny, horribly accurate skits on human nature, and I am sure there is great technical skill in the way he makes his plots hold together and gets his actors on and off stage.

Perhaps the Mercury was over ambitious in scheduling four of them so close together.  They are putting on a short run of four two-handers from a longer cycle called Intimate Exchanges, which according to Wikipedia was written when Ayckbourn had a season to fill at his Scarborough playhouse, and all except two of his troupe of actors suddenly left to do other things.  The same two actors play all the characters, six in total last night, and the same characters appear in more than one play, with the action diverging after five seconds, five minutes, five days, five weeks and five years to give a total of sixteen different unfolding plots and eventual outcomes.  The first couple of scenes are necessarily fairly short, otherwise audience members who did go and see more than one play from the cycle might start getting restive at having to go over the same material again.

As the Systems Administrator pointed out, the Mercury has to stage all four plays close together, because otherwise they couldn't get the actors back, and part of the point of it is to have the same actors in all the plays.  The trouble from our point of view is that while we like Ayckbourn, and the Mercury, we don't want to go and see his plays twice in the same week, or even weekly, so we booked one from the series.  The publicity material assured us that any play stood alone, so we simply chose a convenient date.  It may be that other people's appetite for regional theatre was about the same as ours, hence the empty seats.  Or maybe some people didn't believe that you could watch any one of the plays without seeing the earlier ones, and were put off.

I'm not entirely convinced by the concept of the two-hander, although I can see it helps keep costs down in these hard times to only have two actors.  Even with slick costume changes there has to be a lot of time when only one character is on stage, either soliloquising, or talking to somebody who can't be seen, because they are off stage, or as in last night's play because they are hiding in a garden shed.  That gets a tiny bit wearisome, and the temptation to guess which character the second actor is next going to appear as, and which entrance they are going to use, is irresistible but distracting.

It's a challenge for the actors to differentiate between the various people they're playing.  Last night's cast made a reasonable stab at it, though I thought the female actor relied a little too heavily on wig and costume to distinguish between the two middle class characters.  I suppose they were both brittle, unhappy people, so Ayckbourn hadn't made it easy for her, but I could have done with them walking and talking slightly more differently.  A friend who went earlier in the run said that the performances were dreadful, which seemed harsh, but they weren't compelling either.

So maybe word has spread among the theatre going public of north Essex that it wasn't a vintage effort by the Mercury.  Or maybe the fact that ticket prices have gone up is hitting sales.  The best seats are now £19 on a Tuesday, whereas when we started going a few years back they were more like £13.  Tickets for Spiers and Boden recently were around the £15 mark, and that was a sell-out, so the inhabitants of Colechester can afford to go out when they want to, but perhaps when a pair of good seats at the Mercury set you back closer to forty pounds than twenty-five it is enough to make people think about how many shows they book.

Anyway, I hope trade picks up for them, without feeling the need to book tickets myself for the rest of Intimate Exchanges.  It would be a great pity if the Mercury ran into the financial quicksands and folded.

in it to win it

I almost forgot to blog.  We are going to the Mercury later, and I need to do my back exercises, so there is not much time left for blogging.  The reason why I forgot is that I was tapping away at the keyboard all afternoon, doing something else.

The Garden Museum is running a Festival of Garden Literature at the end of June, at Tom Stuart Smith's garden, and as part of the festival they are running a garden writing competition for a memoir.  I am not at all sure what constitutes a memoir.  Sir Peter Smithers talked a bit about his life, and a lot about plants, but he had more than 2.500 words to play with, so I have done the same thing but on a necessarily more miniature scale.  I am not sure whether the memoir is supposed to be set entirely in the same garden, or whether a series of different gardens is permissible under the rules of the competition.  Unless you are Christopher Lloyd or Adam Nicholson (one of the judges) most people's lives span more than one garden, and mine certainly does.

Anyway, I started my essay a couple of weeks ago when the weather was foul, and then it perked up so I switched to gardening, and then I realised that the closing date for entries was the end of the month so I'd better get my skates on.  It took all afternoon to finish, and I forgot all about the blog.

I probably won't win, but if I don't enter I definitely won't.  And I do know one person who won a competition, for travel writing.  His essay is now available on Amazon, and I have read it, and it is pretty good, but I thought I could do as well.  When I was twelve, to the extent that I had any ideas about careers at all, which on the whole I hadn't, I probably wanted to be Bernard Levin.  Having your own column in the Times was not presented as a career option by my school or my family, and I thought it must be something that other people did, people with extra abilities and the right connections.  When I was in my first year at Oxford the girl in the next door room had a friend who was also reading English, who is now a novelist.  Not a novelist on track to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but well enough established that publishers bother to quote nice things he has said about other younger novelist's books on their covers.  He was a very pleasant man, quiet and gentle and unostentatiously gay at a time when being out was more of a statement than it is now, but he was not a super-human.  So on the basis of having met a normal person who won a competition, and another normal person who became a professional author, I am entering.  Somebody has to win.  It could be me.

It probably won't be, but if I do I will tell you.  So if I don't mention it again, you'll know that I haven't.  No need to ask.

a time of gifts

The cold turn the weather has taken is bad for trade.  In fact, it is a thorough all-round nuisance, since I have loads to do in the garden for the rest of the week, and need to check the bees for swarming, only it is not warm enough to open the hives.  Today in the plant centre I wore my fleece hat for the first part of the morning, and by mid afternoon was back in the NCP car park attendant's coat.  The wind blew incessantly, drying out the pots so that my co-workers will have a lot of watering to do tomorrow.  It is windy now, a bottom-end six in the gusts round the showers.

Somebody rang wanting to send a magnolia in lieu of funeral flowers.  Once I'd understood that she wanted a plant delivered locally, rather than sent by mail order, the conversation became much less incoherent, and I managed to find a specimen of the variety she'd chosen.  She wanted a card to go with the magnolia.  I suggested a photograph of a fritillary, whose nodding head and muted colours seemed suitably restrained but also beautiful.  She e-mailed us the message to go in the card, and I copied it out in my best handwriting, and explained to the gardener who will deliver it the importance of making sure it got there before Thursday.  As he is a quietly competent and kindly man, and lost his own father-in-law quite recently, I'm sure the delivery will be fine.

Another customer rang about a white Cercis siliquastrum the gardener delivered this morning, wanting to know who had sent it.  I had another incoherent conversation, before grasping that he hadn't bought it himself, and wanted to know who had given it to him.  I found the delivery book, but all it said was that it had been paid for by a third party.  I explained to him that unfortunately our records didn't say who had bought it, and that he must have a mystery benefactor.  He laughed, but went away puzzled.

A woman rang from Durham, who had fallen in love with Amelanchier, after seeing two growing on a slag heap.  She didn't know how they had got there.  I suggested that as the fruit were attractive to birds the seeds might have arrived that way.  She wanted to buy herself a small plant, and wavered over the different varieties described in the RHS magazine before settling on Amelanchier x grandiflora 'Ballerina'.  She told me that she had been given some money, and so didn't mind the delivery charge, but thought this was a wonderful way of spending an unexpected gift.  The whole transaction took rather a long time, and I suspected that she wanted somebody to talk to.  People who ring up the plant centre quite often do.

I have a slight cold.  I've had intimations that a cold was lurking around for days, so am glad it held off until after the funeral, supper, and the anniversary party.  The Systems Administrator had already got what sounds like the same cold, which is vaguely encouraging in that it remains slight, an ache and a snuffle.  We will just have to sniff our way through tomorrow evening's Ayckbourn at the Colchester Mercury Theatre.

old friends

We went today to a party to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of one of my school friends. She and I must have known each other for forty years, which is a solemn thought, and apart from her mother and brother I may have known her for longer than anybody else there today, though we don't see each other very often.  She lives in Bromley, which is not somewhere you can pop round for supper starting from north Essex, and manages to combine having three children with being a partner in a City law firm.  That doesn't leave a lot of spare capacity over for other things, especially given that her mother still lives in Devon.

We took the train.  My initial reaction, when the Systems Administrator said that we could go on the train, was one of complete surprise.  I am so used to there being engineering works at weekends on our line, and replacement buses for a stretch between Witham and Chelmsford or some such inconvenience, that the idea that trains worked at weekends and that you could use them to visit people did not occur to me.  The trains ran more or less to time going there and coming back, though as we de-trained at Liverpool Street I did hear an announcement that the next service to Stansted was cancelled, with apologies for the inconvenience caused.  No replacement buses for the Stansted bound passengers.  They'll just have to miss their flights.

I did wonder, as I groped in the back compartment of my handbag for my one day travelcard for the umpteenth time and then struggled to put it away again one handed, why it was that I had opted to take a white peony and a box of eggs as hostess presents, instead of buying a bottle of fizz or a decent burgundy and making life easy for myself.  Still, there were lots of bags containing bottles in their hall, while nobody else had brought plants and eggs that I could see.  A peony is a good present for people who are not mad keen gardeners, as long as they have a reasonable sized garden. Provided it is planted at the correct depth, which is the same depth it's already at in its pot, it needs nothing else doing to it, ever, except to cut off the dead leaves at some point in the winter, and it will live longer than the recipient.

The forecast rain held off, and it was sunny enough for us to stand out in the garden with our pre-lunch drinks and nibbles.  It was even sunny enough for me to need my sun hat, which I'd taken just in case, a retro style vaguely 1930s ruched number in white cotton, and warm enough for me not to be cold despite the fact that I'd forgotten my cardigan.  I had a raincoat, but standing around eating sausages on sticks wearing a coat rather spoils the atmosphere.

Big set piece parties are like weddings and funerals, bringing together people from different stages and aspects of their hosts' lives.  At work based events most people more or less know each other, and you can exchange politenesses with members of other departments before gravitating towards your particular mates.  At beekeepers gatherings there are easy, if formulaic, questions to get a conversation going.  Do you have  bees?  How many hives?  Where do you keep them?  Are you finding swarming really bad this year?  Following which you can gravitate towards your particular mates.  For weddings, and anniversary parties, I suppose the nearest equivalent is enquiring which of the couple other people know, and how, plus how far they've travelled, but you don't necessarily have any particular mates to gravitate towards, so you have to hope you'll strike lucky.

Fortunately we did, with a former housemate of my friend whom I recognised vaguely from our Oxford days, and her husband, who turned out to be kindred spirits.  Keen gardeners, large garden, cats, liked poetry, arty people with a practical streak.  It's a pity they live near Dorking.

So it was a very nice day, and we even managed to spend some time talking to our hosts, which doesn't always happen at parties, and I discovered how you combine being a partner specialising in intellectual property with having three children, which is that you have a formidably efficient nanny. The nanny was very nice, unmarried herself and with no children, and probably the nearest thing to Mary Poppins you will find in Bromley.  I tell myself encouragingly that as my school friend and I have managed to stay in touch for this long, if we can keep it up for another ten or fifteen years she will have retired, and we'll have time to have lunch and go to an art gallery.

last of the daffodils

It is just starting to spit with rain, so I have come inside for a cup of tea, while it decides whether it is going to rain properly or stop.  The Systems Administrator's view is that the cloud is so high and fast moving that we won't get much in the way of rain just yet.  In fact the ground could do with a proper soaking, since the top few centimetres of soil is starting to get quite dry, but I'd much rather (not that my preferences will have any bearing on what actually happens) that it did that at night.

I have been planting out more of the daffodils, carefully potted up last September.  It is late and slightly mad to be doing it, since they have almost finished flowering and I have missed getting the benefit of them in situ for this year.  However, I haven't had time to finish the job before now, and there are advantages to planting them as they start to fade.  I can see what else is flowering around them, and avoid colour clashes like the orange and yellow 'Jetfire' with the pink and purple Pulsatilla, and I can see how tall other foliage has grown by this stage, and how much leaf deciduous shrubs are carrying, to make sure I don't plant the daffodils in a spot where they are going to be concealed and invisible by the time they flower.

'Pipit' is lovely, with strongly scented pale yellow flowers, the trumpet almost white, held in clusters of two or three blooms on one stalk.  'Cheerfulness' is a white double with a muddled yellow centre, also scented, though I don't find the fragrance as free on the air as 'Pipit'.  I am dropping them into the island bed, between the clumps of asters.  I suppose there is a risk that the aster foliage will grow too tall and shading before the daffodils have finished dying down, and that the bulbs will not be able to store sufficient energy for next year, but the way to find out is to try.  You often see daffodils planted in borders among herbaceous plants and shrubs, and they seem to last from year to year.

I planted out the pale yellow tulips 'Concerto' from their terracotta pots as well, breaking them down into groups of three bulbs.  The bulbs look hugely fat and healthy, and I'm hopeful of flowers next year.

In the sloping bed the Exochorda x macrantha 'The Bride' is breaking into bloom.  It has white flowers (what other colour could they be?) and is well named, with a pendulous, mounding habit that means the ends of the branches seem to trail along the ground like a train.  By a lucky chance it is planted at the feet of a double gean, Prunus avium 'Plenum', which flowers at the same time, so that from a distance you see a cascade of white running from the top of the tree to the ground.  If you should plant Exochorda x macrantha then watch its neighbours carefully, and curb any that crowd in upon it, since if any of the Exochorda's branches are shaded out they will die.  Many roses behave in the same way.

There is lots of basal foliage on the tall growing, slightly tender Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue', and it is starting to run about with new isolated shoots some fifteen centimetres from the central mass of shoots where I planted the original potful.  I take this as a sign that it is happy.

Anyway, it seems not to be raining, so I shall go back to it, though the sky has gone very grey, and the wind is howling dismally in through the garage door, the gusts banging the cat flap open.  The forecast for the end of next week is starting to deteriorate, to the dismay of the Systems Administrator who has tickets for the second day of the test match.  Tomorrow we are going to a lunchtime party to celebrate an old school friend's silver wedding anniversary, and on Monday I have to go to work, so I'd better make the most of it while it's not raining, even if it is grey and blowing half a gale.

three cricket matches, a flower show and a funeral

The Systems Administrator was comparing notes with a friend, as they made arrangements to go to the cricket, and the contents of the SA's diary were three test matches, the Chelsea Flower Show, and a funeral.  Today is the funeral.  I don't suppose I'll feel like doing a write-up of what is anyway a private affair when I get back, so I will tell you about my father's cousin's late wife now, to help fill the odd couple of hours until it is time to go out.

She was called Ann, and she was ninety, so had a good innings.  She went as I should like to go, fully active until hospitalised with a bout of pneumonia, and that was it.  Only twenty four hours in hospital.  Musician and individual.  Wife of Derek.

Ann studied at music college, where she was so poor she became malnourished, and contracted TB, which she survived.  As a young woman she made her way out to Africa.  She met my father's cousin, and they ended up running an outward bound school in (I think) Rhodesia.  Unusually for the time, it was fully mixed race.  We've seen photos, and it developed into quite a large operation, but in the early days it didn't run to a bathroom, so Ann took her baths in a pool under a waterfall, while the (almost entirely male) staff discreetly absented themselves.  One of the photos was of her sunbathing (decorously in a bikini) on a rock by the waterfall, and in her day she was a stunner.

Back in England she taught the piano, and when they moved to Aldeburgh she persuaded the authorities at Snape to let her play in their practice rooms sometimes.  That's pretty good going for an octogenarian, getting access to a concert grand in one of England's premier music venues. Kindly, sociable, a fount of stories about her own life, interested in other people's, deaf as a post, discreetly silent on whatever other ills of old age affected her.  The SA always said she was as mad as a box of frogs, which was intended as a compliment.

I remember two stories in particular.  As a young woman she went on holiday to Scandinavia with a group of friends.  I suppose this must have been soon after the war, and that exchange controls were still in place.  Standing on the deck of a ferry they debated whether to visit Denmark, but none of them had any Danish kroner.  A man overhearing their conversation told them that he worked for a bank, and that if they decided to come to Copenhagen if they should call at his bank and he could exchange some money for them.  He gave them a card, and as he seemed quite respectable and they were young and blithe and wanted to see Denmark, they went to Copenhagen and called at the address they'd been given.  The doorman seemed surprised to see them, but took the card and let them in.  It did not seem quite like a normal bank, but they were able to exchange sterling for kroner and were not pounced upon by white slave traders.  Afterwards they realised that they had just visited the Danish national bank, and that their acquaintance on the ferry was the Governor.

Later on, in Africa, Ann needed to take her driving test.  Tests were administered by the local police chief, so Ann set off to the testing site, a police station surrounded by bush, taking one of her music pupils with her as a chaperone.  In my day in England you had to reverse round the kerb on a corner.  Ann had to reverse round a rose bush, which she ran down.  In her defence she pointed out to the police chief that it was over anyway, to which he replied 'Madam, it is now'.  When the test was over Ann's chaperone began to complain that she was hungry.  The police chief sighed and said 'I suppose you had better stay to lunch'.

Today's funeral is intended by her husband to be a celebration of her life.  There was much to celebrate.

rose, thou art sick

The wind has been getting up through the day, and is now blowing close to a full gale, while out at sea the Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic is recording a force nine on the Beaufort scale.  That's a severe gale.  Once it gets up to force ten it is a storm, a storm being bigger than a gale in technical weather terms.  Not all advertising copywriters know that.

A gale is enough to make large branches in the ash trees in the wood wave about, while the alder seems to sway almost down to the coppice stools.  It's not weather for working underneath trees, unless you have to, and the Systems Administrator had to put plans to remove more of the fallen ash at the far end on hold.  I crawled around trimming the edges of the top lawn, where the largest thing that could fall on me was a rose bush.

There is a lot of sudden die-back in some of the roses.  They looked healthy when I pruned them back in the winter, and the leaf buds began breaking normally, but in recent days many of the leaves have shrivelled, and the ends of stems, and even some whole stems down to ground level have blackened.  I don't honestly know why.  Sudden death of the visible parts of a woody shrub is often down to root damage, so has last year's endless rain rotted their roots so that they can't support the bushes?  Or is there a soil-borne infection?  Or did a cold night coming at a critical time just as the sap was rising burst the cells and kill parts of the plants that way?  Is it old age?  They can't have been in for more than a dozen years, and roses ought to last longer than that.

I pruned poor Magnolia grandiflora 'Samuel Sommer' extremely hard.  It is a case of kill or cure, and I fear it will be the former, but it looked so terrible with its great bare defoliated branches that it was doing no good as it was.  Our neighbours' gardener, the one who is still using our spinney as an off-site compost heap since we still haven't got round to fencing it, cut down their M. grandiflora hard.  I know this, because I noticed it had disappeared at the same time as some evergreen magnolia branches appeared in the spinney.  The other day as I was going past I saw a fresh crop of magnolia leaves rising above their fence, so the stump is clearly shooting again.  I'm afraid that 'Samuel Sommer' has picked up a fungal infection following cold damage in the recent hard winters, and am not at all optimistic that it will respond in the same way as next door's plant.  I washed the pruning saw when I'd finished, and wiped it with Dettol.

The Arbutus x andranchnoides is looking terrible.  The last few hard frosts hit it hard, and most of the leaves have gone brown and crispy.  A few green ones are left at the very top, indicating that the wood is not entirely killed, but I expect there is a lot of dead wood in there.  I have a dark suspicion, based on how it behaved in the previous couple of winters, that if it manages to produce a new crop of leaves it will take most of the summer over it, and that I'll have to do a lot of fiddly pruning out of dead twigs.  It was doing beautifully, up to the winter of 2010-2011.

out and about

We had a good evening at the Italian restaurant.  With five of us it was better than meeting at somebody's house.  Nobody had to assume the role of hostess, which would have altered the dynamics of the group, and left the other four with a vague obligation to reciprocate, so that our get-together ballooned remorselessly to five suppers instead of one.  And going out avoided the dilemma of partners left creeping about trying to watch TV while remaining invisible and excluded, or being unceremoniously evicted for the evening.  One person did have to cook two lots of supper for her family before she could escape to meet us.

Pizza cooked in a proper pizza oven is difficult to reproduce at home, even if you make your own base.  I don't know how the professionals manage to stretch it so thin and then move it in and out of the oven without it disintegrating, and the Aga doesn't reach those temperatures anyway.  I went for one with anchovies and capers, as the Systems Administrator is not keen on either so I avoid cooking with them at home.  Those who had linguine said that was very good as well.  There was a narrow majority vote for pudding, and the two non-pudding eaters were persuaded to squeeze down some fruit salad.  I had a crushed raspberry semifredde, which I could probably have made myself, on the other hand I've had been eating it for a week, since you can't really prepare one helping of something like that.  The building is attractive, the staff are cheerful and efficient, parking is easy.  It's called Lucca Enoteca if you want to try it for yourself. It's in Manningtree High Street, and for those social occasions when a restaurant is called for I recommend it highly.

It was followed by lunch today to discuss the looming funding deficit of the music society. Somebody who used to sponsor us will not be doing so in future, while ticket sales are trending gently downwards, and the society's taste in musicians has crept upmarket in recent years.  We can address the latter by booking younger musicians at an earlier stage of their careers, which is very satisfying if you get it right.  Long before I was involved they had Alison Balsom, who was then newly out of music college, and is now a mandatory feature on Classic FM, where a week rarely goes by without her.

The issue of the falling audience numbers produced a rather more free-wheeling discussion, where ideas thrown into the pot included doing different kinds of concert, or concerts at a different time of the year, or a festival instead of a concert.  Eventually, after the treasurer had left, I managed to extract from the programme secretary the detail that to balance the books we need to sell around thirty more tickets per concert.  Thirty is not such a huge and terrifying number.  There must be more than thirty people around this part of the Essex-Suffolk border who like chamber music enough to go to a concert, if they knew it existed.  By the end of lunch we'd agreed to print more leaflets, make them more eye-catching, and distribute them more widely.  We'd also agreed to try and enlist the energies of existing supporters to attract new audience members, by dint of offering season ticket holders a free ticket so that they could bring a friend, and simply asking them if they could display posters or mention us online.

It was a very elegant lunch, in an extremely smart house with a fabulous view up the valley.  My trouble is that nowadays my stomach is really not geared up for lunch.  I can manage Christmas lunch, but salmon and potato and broccoli and salad and fruit is too much for me in the normal way of things at lunchtime, even though I had only one potato, and passed on the wine, the cheeseboard and the chocolate.  A new recruit to the committee suggested that if every committee member brought two or three people with them to the concerts, and had a rule that you could only come to Sunday lunch if you came to the concert afterwards, that would solve the numbers problem, but I thought she must have a wildly different life to mine.  I can't think when we last had anyone to Sunday lunch, or at least I can, and it was months ago, when the Systems Administrator's relations came over, and they certainly wouldn't have wanted to go to a concert afterwards, firstly because they all had long drives home, and secondly because I don't think any of them like chamber music.

good hair day

My hair appointment was for nine o'clock.  Good, in that it meant I'd be home earlier and it would take up less of the morning.  Bad, in that I had to time my arrival during the tail end of Colchester's rush hour, when the traffic would be heavier.  I made it with five minutes to spare.  At five past the hairdresser called in to say that she was ill and would not be coming to work.  My hair is not easy to cut.  It is thick, it curls naturally, and it grows in semi-random directions over my head.  An inept cut can leave it flopping outwards from the crown from a flat spot through which the scalp peeps.  My hairline at the back was once described by a hairdresser with ruthless honesty as 'dodgy'. I don't like it when I have to change hairdressers, and resigned myself to having my hair cut by a strange one because I needed a haircut urgently, and didn't have time to come back another day.

She made a very passable job of it, maybe not quite as short as I'd like, but she was presumably taking a cautious approach with an unfamiliar customer.  She was the only one at work, and had to stop snipping a couple of times to answer the phone, but she had my sympathy there.  I know from first-hand experience how that feels.

An article in the Independent is headlined Is this the end of costly dyes? Scientists working on cure for grey hair.  Apparently if I were to rub my scalp with a topical, UVB-activated compound called PC-KUS ( a modified pseudocatalase) this would reverse the accumulation of hydrogen peroxide in my hair follicles which is bleaching my hair from the inside out.  Blimey, I never knew that was why it was going grey.  I thought the follicles were just not producing pigment any more, or something. Since I don't mind having grey hair, and don't want to smear modified pseudocatalase on my head any more than I want to cover it with hair dye, I'll probably give that treatment a miss, if it ever makes it to the mainstream.

Then it was back to the garden, where another few square metres got fed and Strulched.  So much Strulch, so little time.  Spring has been concertinaed in on itself.  The daffodils were barely out when they were over, the flowers on the 'Tai Haku' had scarcely opened before the leaves opened as well.  That was a pity, since the cloud of blossom on the bare branches is one of the glories of the tree.  The young leaves are an attractive shade of bronze, but they end the impression of dazzling, overall whiteness.  The bright yellow flowers of the Kerria japonica (the single form, more elegant than the double) seemed to have only just opened when they began to fade.

The bright pink flowers of Lonicera tatarica are opening.  This is an upright growing, medium sized shrubby honeysuckle.  It is not a shrub that connoisseurs would rate at all highly, and would win me no prizes in the choice, rare shrubs stakes (score additional bonus points for species not commercially available in the UK, double them if you collected the seed in the wild yourself, or were given the plant personally by Roy Lancaster).  L. tatarica is commercially available, although you will not stumble over one in B&Q.  The pink flowers are cheerful, the slightly greyish foliage mildly agreeable, the vertical habit useful where space is limited or screening needed.  However, its great virtue is its extreme toughness and willingness to live and look quite happy about life on very meagre rations.  Mine is in the entrance bed, graveyard of many a planting scheme.  On thin sand, exposed to the wind from all directions, periodically invaded by low level weeds and rarely fed, it contrives to grow and flower.  A colleague with a dry garden has found it equally obliging.  Hers suffers the additional indignity of being hard pruned to keep it to a more modest size.

And that is enough flower stories for one evening.  You probably don't want any more, and I am going out to a ladies' supper in an Italian restaurant that boasts a genuine wood fired pizza oven. After all that weight lifting over the weekend I feel I've earned a pizza.

a working bank holiday

This could be a short blog post, as I am absolutely shattered.  The sun shone, the customers came in droves, and we were busy.  That's good, we need the sales after the dire winter and last year's incessant rain, but it is hard work when they all come at once.  And I finished emptying my two red trollies, so I have lifted several times my own body weight in compost.

In a spirit of enquiry I have just weighed a plant in a 2 litre pot of normally damp compost, neither bone dry nor sopping wet.  It comes in at 1.1 kilos.  A silver plant trolley holds eighteen 2 litre pots, total weight around twenty kilos.  To put a trolley load out for sale you lift every pot twice, once when you transfer it from the big red trolley to the silver trolley, and again when you line it out on the bench or bed for sale.  I lost count of how many trolley loads of plants I moved, and they weren't all 2 litre pots.  Some were shrubs in 3 or 5 litre pots, and some were little nine centimetre pots that hold less than a litre of compost.  But taking twenty kilos per trolley as a benchmark estimate, and assuming I moved a dozen trolleys of plants, that comes to 480 kilos lifted, or approaching nine times my own weight.  That's not counting the bag of compost I loaded into somebody's car for them, or the trees I put to one side, or the pots already out for sale that I moved up to make space for the extra stock, or the reserved plants I fetched from behind the scenes for customers who'd come to collect them.  It's quite possible that I've lifted twenty times my own weight in the past three days, and that's not counting the physical effort involved in dragging the hoses around during watering.

I don't have flabby arms.  Back ache, but not flabby arms.

The cafe once again absorbed most of my young colleague's energies, plus the owner's for a chunk of the day, and the owner is starting to sound more convinced about the need to get help, at least at weekends.  It's a funny thing, the cafe.  If it were mine I'd want more management information about it.  Today it seems to have taken up between thirty and forty per cent of the staff hours worked in the plant centre.  I'm not sure of the exact proportion, because I don't know how much of the day the owner worked when she wasn't in the cafe, and quite how much other stuff my young colleague managed to get done.  I do know it contributed around seven per cent of the takings.  It's hard to ratchet up the sales when you are serving tea and cake.  Supposing it takes five minutes to serve each couple, including preparing the drinks, dishing out the cake, rounding up the dirty crockery, wiping tables and washing up (the washing up appears non-stop) and supposing they spend eight pounds or ten pounds per couple, you don't get beyond a hundred and twenty pounds per hour per staff member.  You can put that value of shrubs or flower pots through the till in a couple of minutes.

I was pleased to see a customer I hadn't seen for so long I was beginning to think he must have moved away.  He is a journalist, and since he requested a free copy of a friend's book on tube maps and then didn't write a review, I am theoretically cross with him.  However, he is one of those engaging people who lift the energy level of the room when they come in, and he has a charming and pretty wife, an extremely cute daughter and two amiable dogs, so I was glad he hadn't vanished from the Suffolk scene.

And that's me done at the plant centre for another week.  And now I am going to go and change out of my grubby uniform and collapse on the sofa with a cold beer.  At least bank holidays pay double time.

still busy

The watering in the plant centre took until ten o'clock this morning.  In fact, we hadn't quite finished by the time the first customers arrived, and had to keep an eye on them to make sure that nobody tripped over the hose we had stretched across the exit from the shop, in order to water the plants on the reserve bed.  The last little section of watering seemed to take a very long time, like the arrow that slows as it approaches its target, because the phone kept ringing.

We could initially only find two telephones between the three of us.  The phone chargers that used to live on the floor of the office had disappeared, apparently because the boss got tired of tripping over them and moved them, but when I tracked them down to the table in the outer office where the walkie-talkies live, they were empty.  I found a third charger somewhere else, that did contain a phone, which turned out not to be working.  I wasted some time hunting around the office before giving up.  Later on one of my colleagues spotted a stray phone in the cafe, so one of yesterday's shift must have left it there instead of remembering to take it back up to the house.

The owners were not around all day.  They'd warned me yesterday that they'd be away.  A fifteen year old from the village had been hired to help with the tea room from noon until five, the owner airily assuring me that her mother sometimes helped in the house and the girl was of good working stock.  For a moment I thought I might have slipped into an episode of The Village.  Even with the services of the fifteen year old to wash up, collect trays and make pots of tea, the cafe seemed to absorb most of my young colleague's time, and my older colleague and I spent three solid hours operating the tills in the middle of the day while we were busiest, leaving no staff members outside in the plant centre to help customers at all.  Still, you can only do what you can do.

Some of the large magnolias are coming out in the wrong colours.  A man rang up from Bedford, who had bought a yellow flowered 'Elizabeth', only to find when the first bud coloured and the flower opened that it was pink.  My colleague inspected the remaining stock, and discovered another alleged 'Elizabeth' that was coming out purple, and a supposedly pure white variety that had pink flowers.  They were very pretty, with different colours on the two sides of the petals, but definitely not 'Manchu Fan'.  That is deeply embarrassing.  At least they have flowered wrong at a young age, so there is time to put things right for the customer. When we visited Caerhayes a few years ago we read in the guidebook how an earlier member of the Williams family bought some magnolias from the great house of Hillier, of the sort that don't flower until they are twenty years old or more.  When, eventually, one opened its first flower and it was not the expected variety, Hillier kindly refunded the original purchase price.

The woman who works in the office had volunteered to look after the dog for the day.  She came and collected it in the morning, took it for a nice walk around the garden, and then she and her husband spent the rest of the day admiring it, as far as I can gather.  She would have liked one of the litter, I think, but her husband was not convinced that the family needed or could cope with a dog, so maybe this is her campaign to convert him.  I only discovered recently that he has written a book, about a walk he made through Spain a few years ago, following the tracks of a famous Spanish poet, which was e-published after winning a travel writing competition.

When I got home I had to water all my own pots, which took me until half past seven, after starting in the plant centre at eight this morning.  If tonight's blog post lacks any verve and sparkle it is because I am absolutely knackered.

busy

It was another busy day at work, which is what we need.  I noticed a sign by the till advertising for part time assistance in the cafe, so the owner has changed her mind since last Monday, when she told us firmly that she could not afford to employ anybody else this year, while fixing me with a firm stare as if the boss might have been reading my blog request for a tea shop girl.  I also noticed, when I went over to check what watering needed doing on The Other Side, that the pink primula which the manager had been saving to split, and that the owner had told him to get out for sale while they were in bloom, were still blooming away unseen.  He wanted to split them because he couldn't get any more from any of our suppliers this year.  Maybe he just hasn't had time to get them out, or maybe the owner has relented on her sudden policy to maximise sales and no splitting.

The manager and his behind-the-scenes helpers had managed to load up two full red trolleys of plants for sale.  The list of jobs to do had my name chalked up against the red trolleys to unload them, plus so many other jobs, some unallocated, that we'd have barely had time to finish them even if we hadn't had any customers.  By the end of the day I'd cleared roughly three quarters of one trolley, and it was so windy today that there will be a lot of watering to do in the morning, so I'm unlikely to manage to move more tomorrow than I did today.

A man rang up saying that he had box blight in his Buxus suffruticosa, but not his B. sempervirens, if this was possible, and that he was going to bring us a piece of infected box to look at.  I said that if he really thought he had box blight then we would very much prefer it if he did not bring infected samples on to the premises, and if he wanted help confirming the diagnosis he could e-mail us some good quality photographs.  I explained that as the dwarf box, Buxus suffruticosa, has a more dense and congested habit than common box, it was more prone to fungal infections which thrive in damp, close conditions, and so it was entirely possible that he had blight in one but not the other.  Unfortunately there was no chemical treatment available, or at least not one that either he or I could buy.

He wanted to replace the dwarf box with ordinary.  Personally, once I had box blight in my garden I'd be thinking about replacing with something other than box, like Teucrium chamaedrys, but he didn't ask my opinion about that.  Instead he asked whether we had any common box available, and requested me to reserve our entire stock of five and a half trays, each tray holding twenty plants, and he would be in later in the day.  He did not come in.  He may yet show up tomorrow, but otherwise is the leading contender for Most Inconsiderate Customer of the Weekend.

A smiling woman came to the till who obviously knew me, and I was racking my brains trying to work out who on earth she was, when she put me out of my misery and asked me how my bees were.  At that it fell into place and I could even remember her name, but I fear she saw my confusion and was tactfully helping me out.  I have a very transparent face.  It's tricky, when you've worked for a long time in a shop, trying to recall why it is that you recognise people.  They could be regular customers, or I might have met them at the music society, or they could work somewhere where I'm a customer, like the vets, or be connected by any number of routes.  In the past decade I've bumped into my physiotherapist, my former GP, the local Woodland Trust officer, two former colleagues (one of whom didn't recognise me so I kept jolly quiet, the other of whom I was delighted to see), a couple of stockbroking contacts, the editor of a gardening magazine whom I failed to persuade she wanted a regular beekeeping column, though we remain on friendly terms, and assorted staff members from Writtle.  I was once at the tip, and recognised one of my fellow recyclers as the man who rounds up trolleys in the Tesco car park.

We made the budget last month, so the owner bought a box of cakes for the staffroom.  It's such a long time since that happened that I'd practically forgotten about the tradition.  However, by today all that remained was the box, my co-workers having eaten the cake.

odd jobs

Today should have been a full day in the garden, but little bits of other things got in the way.  It is a friend's birthday next week, so I needed to post her card and present.  I got her a book.  I am not sure she reads books nowadays, but I couldn't think what else to get her, since she is one of those people who is very keen on her career to the point of having no discernible outside interests.  My finances and the nature of our relationship don't run to jewellery, trophy handbags or an i-anything, so a book it was.  I wrote her a short letter to go with the card and the book, and schlepped off the post office.  When you live in the country it is a five mile round trip to the post office.

The birthday is not until next Wednesday.  I asked the man in the post office whether second class post would get there in time, but he replied that nothing was guaranteed except guaranteed overnight delivery.  I said that I didn't expect a guarantee, just an indication of whether, given normal service, it was reasonable to expect that a parcel posted second class to London this morning would arrive by next Wednesday, and whether I was right in thinking that if there was a monumental screw-up and not normal service then the package was equally likely to be delayed whether it went first or second class, but he replied again that nothing was guaranteed except overnight delivery.  With a helpful attitude like that to customer service it is no wonder that the Royal Mail is the fast-growing, profitable success story that it is.

Then I had a look at the bees, as it was finally warm enough and not windy.  The books say not to open bee hives unless the outside temperature is sixteen degrees C, to avoid chilling the brood, and although it was sunny earlier in the week and last week it never got within three or four degrees of that.  I've gone well over the ten day limit between inspections since I last opened them, and was getting worried that they might have started thinking about swarming.  None had, though as I feared one hive was queenless.  I gave them a frame containing eggs from another colony, which theoretically gives them the opportunity to make a new queen and sort themselves out, but I'm not optimistic that they'll do anything with it by now.  Still, to have kept three colonies out of the four through the long winter wasn't too bad, and they all looked healthy.

Then later on I wasted a quarter of an hour on the phone trying to get through to the British Museum to change some tickets I can't now use, and spent another quarter of an hour writing 100 words of gardening tips for June for work.  A regional glossy that the owner advertises with manages to largely save itself the expense of paying a garden journalist when it wants some gardening blurb, by dint of asking its advertisers to contribute copy.  The owner is more of a finance woman than a writer, so subcontracts blurb writing to me.  I was supposed to run off the one hundred words this morning, and clean forgot about them, until the owner sent me a plaintive e-mail at around five this afternoon.

I spent the rest of the time weeding the herb bed, which shouldn't have been that big a job, since it is not that large a bed, and I had a go at it back in the winter, but I didn't finish it.  It is annoyingly infested with a coarse but clump forming weed grass, which if I can prevent it from seeding should be possible to clear out given a year or two.  A paving slab and cobble path runs diagonally across the bed, and the cobbles had got clogged with moss and weed grass.  The path is edged with chives, and four iron tripods planted with Clematis alpina, one of which is flowering beautifully while another is completely dead.  I'd like to get the area tidy before everything has finished flowering, and while there is still time to buy new herb plants at work.

The coming weekend is a working one, and then on Tuesday morning I have to go and get my hair cut, and won't have another potential full day of gardening until Thursday.  No wonder it is so wild and weedy.

a trip to the capital

Today I made a cultural foray to the capital.  I had tickets with a friend for an LSO St Lukes lunchtime concert, and had arranged to meet her at quarter past twelve at Liverpool Street, which meant that if I got organised I could go to the Whitechapel Gallery first.  It is only a ten minute walk from Liverpool Street, once you've found the way, and doesn't open until eleven.

I arrived at five to, and spent the time enjoying the sunshine and admiring the new Rachel Whiteread artwork on the front of the building.  She has designed a frieze of bronze leaves which now adorn what was a blank space at the top of the facade, originally intended for a mosaic that proved too expensive to install.  They are covered in gold leaf, and glittered splendidly in the sun.  I thought they were very pretty and elegant, while musing on why it is that they are classed as an artwork rather than decoration.  Presumably because they are by a famous artist.  They were paid for by the Art Fund, and voted the most popular acquisition of 2012 by its members.  Indeed, I voted for them myself, but mainly because I hadn't heard of most of the other candidates.

The Whitechapel Gallery is showing mixed media works by two Romanian artists, and some botanical photographs from the 1920s.  I'd never heard of the Romanian pair, Gert and Uwe Tobias, but liked the look of their brightly coloured, mixed-media pictures I'd seen in the adverts for the show.  I liked them in reality as well, and by a strange coincidence had been reading about life in Romania in the 1970s on the train travelling up to London.  Burying the Typewriter by Carmen Bugan.  The daughter of a dissident, life as a small child was idyllic, going for long stays with her beloved grandparents on their farm.  Aged around ten she increasingly began to perceive the disconnect between what the state media said about life in Romania and the West, and the realities of life as lived in Romania, and the West as portrayed on Western radio.  You were not supposed to listen to Western radio, or to have a typewriter that you used to produce literature protesting against the regime, hence the typewriter was buried when not in use.  That was synchronicity, and provided a good starting point for looking at the Tobias brothers' strange, folk art inspired, surreal and sinister pictures.

The plant photographs were by Karl Blossfeldt, and I'd never heard of him either.  Silver nitrate prints of close up shots of unfolding leaves, buds, tendrils, stems and flowers.  He said that anyone could photograph plants, the key was in the looking.  They were faintly disconcerting in their immense but soft detail, and I bought a postcard of pumpkin tendrils that if I am ever feeling rich I might ask the local blacksmith to turn into a piece of metalwork for the garden.

The concert was great, Joanna MacGregor playing Bach and Shostakovich preludes and fugues, pieces by each alternating in one continuous programme which we were forbidden to applaud until the end.  My companion said at the end that she had enjoyed it, but that it was music for the head rather than the heart.  I'm still grappling with Shostakovich, beyond the jazz suites, but JS Bach can come and play to my head any day of the week.  Despite the grandeur of Bach, I couldn't help wondering how she could play the piano wearing such spindly heels.  The Tim Minchin barefoot approach looks much more comfortable.

We had lunch in the cafe attached to the London Review of Books bookshop, just round the corner from the British Museum.  On the way there we bumped into two friends of my friend from Northumberland, who had just been to the museum and were rushing back to Euston.  That is quite an unlikely coincidence, even more so when I learned after they'd hurried off to get their train that the Alistair of Alistair and Rosie (or was it Liz?) was Alistair Anderson, the great Northumbrian concertina player. I've been a fan for around thirty years and have got several of his albums, and now I've met him, and didn't know it.  The cafe is really rather nice, good food, a very exotic list of teas (I stuck to assam, but my friend had an enormously elaborate concoction involving flower buds and three different containers), and a pleasantly bookish atmosphere.

We were going to the museum to see Ice Age Art, which does what it says on the tin.  It is a collection of ice age carvings on bone, stone and tusk, with a few pieces of twentieth century art interposed to show how modern the ice agers were, or alternatively how primitive art influenced artists of the last century.  It is not a big show, but I rather liked it.  Some of the objects were beautiful, and many were very intricately made, and  the whole idea that 20,000 to 30,000 years ago people were bothering to do that sort of thing, using stone tools, was incredible.  Each piece embodied dozens or hundreds of hours work, which meant that the society had to support the artists, who would have had to work during daylight hours instead of hunting or foraging.  It must have been important to them.  The difficulty from the curator's point of view is that we honestly don't have a clue why they did it, or what the objects meant to them.  This irritated my friend more than me.  I have always had a slack-jawed ability to marvel at things without worrying unduly if I don't at that moment see where they fit in to a broader narrative.

Then we met a friend of hers who is a successful producer of TV commercials, so that the friend could hand over my friend's camera, which she had accidentally left behind at a previous gathering, and we sat outside in a little square drinking a glass of chilled white wine, and I felt terribly sophisticated.  And then the trains ran to time on the way home, and I remembered to go and vote, and buy some cat food because we'd run out.

Addendum  Or do trains to Northumberland go from Kings Cross?

another day in the garden

I am beginning to think I have broken the back of the work in the island bed, and might get it finished given another couple of sessions.  This is just as well, since I need to carry out skirmishes, if not open new fronts, in the conservatory, the herb bed, the shrubs around the top lawn, and the gravel garden outside the Systems Administrator's blue summerhouse.

In the course of weeding I made a gratifying discovery, three strong new shoots at the base of the single stem the Romneya coulteri carried last year, which by now is resolutely dead.  Romneya coulteri is the Californian tree poppy.  There is a fine one in the gravel at Beth Chatto's gardens, between the lavatory block and the entrance to the plant sales area.  When happy it is a wonderful shrub, with grey leaves and papery white flowers like a poppy, and suckers and runs about vigorously.  Note the qualifying phrase.  It is notoriously difficult to establish in the ground, whether from a pot grown plant or a root you have begged from a friend who already has one in their garden, and this is my third attempt at getting it to take.  I had told myself, firmly, that if it didn't succeed this time then that was it, since my normal limit is that if something has failed to establish twice running it obviously doesn't like my conditions, and I should grow something else that does.  I bent the rules for the Romneya, given that they are known to be so tricky, and are so beautiful once they get away, and if it would just take it should like the free drainage and sun in our garden.  We are only a mile as the crow flies from the Chatto gardens.

The shoots are not even two centimetres high yet, and things could still go wrong.  They could be frosted, or something could eat them, or the Romneya could change its mind about the whole thing.  However, three chunky shoots at ground level the year after planting is better than I have ever achieved before, and I'm quite bullish.  I found some small but solid looking shoots as well which must belong to a couple of seed raised Amsonia I planted out last year.  I was beginning to wonder where those had got to, and if I'd see them again, or if the long winter had done for them.  The rich blue flowered and slightly tender Salvia guaranitica has new growth at the base, buds still held tight to the ground, but there are no signs of life yet from its pink flowered neighbour.  I don't understand why there is so much earth mounded over its base, and hope that doesn't mean there is an ant nest directly underneath.

Amelanchier x grandiflora 'Ballerina' has opened.  It has white flowers held in short erect racemes, if you are a botanist, and looks as though a cloud of white butterflies had descended on it, if you are a romantic.  The flowers are larger than those of some of the wild species Amelanchier, and although I love 'Ballerina', I sometimes have twinges of doubt when I look at the flowers of A. canadensis as to whether I chose the right one.  Amelanchier canadensis has a charming wild naturalness to it which I covet.

The season is marching on.  I had to clear away the pots of hyacinths, which were well and truly over, and found that two or three pots of tulips were ready to be swapped over with them for display in the Italian garden.  The olive tree has made it through the winter, and I'm beginning to dare think it might have escaped being cut back, though there's always next winter.  There are no signs of green on the Aloysia triphylla at all. This is an ungainly shrub with slightly negligible mauve flowers, and leaves that smell deliciously of lemon.  It is always late into growth, and this is a late year, but even so, I am not entirely confident it is alive.  We'll see.