the king was in his counting house

I trundled round to the wildlife fair with two cash boxes and a float, and found myself roped into helping to erect our pop-up gazebo.  It is an extraordinarily ingenious contraption which concertinas down into a bag about the size of a golf bag.  There is no disassembly, you don't have to un-velcro the fabric from the frame, or take the frame apart like a tent.  Instead the frame is jointed, and collapses down.  Once we'd unfolded it out of its bag, it wasn't entirely obvious what was to stop it collapsing by itself under the force of gravity.  Even the secretary's husband couldn't see it, and he is a professional engineer, works in the oil industry.  When I'd got the secretary's counter-signature on some cheques, signed in my small offering of jars of honey for sale, and helped pick out some bee-friendly plants to decorate our stall, I scarpered.

As we were choosing plants for the stand, the secretary's husband casually remarked that the bees would probably be moving honey downstairs pretty soon, that is, taking it from the supers, where the beekeeper can harvest it, and stashing it away in the brood box where they will live during the winter.  This rattled me, since I'd been worrying about them swarming and taking the honey with them, but hadn't thought of them simply moving it from my bit of the beehive to their part.  When I got home I put a clearer board under the top two supers of the golden bees' hive.  There is a little bit of honey round the edges of some frames that still isn't capped, but they have been working on it for ages, and it wasn't dripping when I inspected them.

The garden is so, so dry.  One of the late Elmore Leonard's rules for writing was, Don't begin with the weather, but when you are a gardener, the weather matters.  A Euonymus planipes, planted last year, was drooping dangerously in the long bed as I went out.  I ran the hose on things that looked as if they desperately needed it, and on the spots in the gravel where I wanted to plant things out, my beautiful new fig with deeply incised leaves, a tall white lavender a friend gave me, and some seed raised Watsonia I am going to risk outside.  Watsonia is a south African bulb, and not awfully hardy, but I have six plants, raised from seed, in addition to the ones I potted up for display in a large terracotta pot.  They can spend the winter in the greenhouse, but I don't have room for all of them, and short of listing them on e-bay or one of the specialist plant sale and swap sites that are bobbing up, I can't think what to do with them.

The point of watering before planting is to make the ground soft enough to dig.  Otherwise, it is almost like chiselling holes in rotten concrete.  I managed it for the white lavender, but that was only in a one litre pot and was still hard work, while the fig was in a 7.5 litre container.  It is called 'Ice Crystal', and it is terribly beautiful. To see was to desire.  Figs do grow in pots, but they honestly seem so much happier in the ground.  My 'Brown Turkey' is making leaves twice or three times the size, now that it has been liberated from its pot, which was quite large.  It is now planted at the foot of a south-west facing retaining wall, along the edge of what was the vehicular access to the integral garage, when anyone kept a car in it (we never have).  The soil was packed with flints the size of a fist, which I had to lever out individually, but the fig loves it.  It took a year or two to establish, them romped away, throwing up luxurious new growth from ground level.  It even has some figs on it, though unless I put bags round them I'm sure the birds will get them before I do.

I went back to the wildlife fair at four, to collect the takings and any unsold honey.  It had sold, all eight jars.  I asked if the public had been behaving themselves nicely, and whether I could use what was left of the taster jar for cooking, or if they had been undisciplined and inclined to dip their spatulas back in after licking them, and was told it had all been very well controlled.  As one volunteer put it, if I didn't want my taster honey back he'd have it.  Counting and then recounting the cash took drove me mad, as we seemed to have fifty pounds odd more than the theoretical value of members' goods sold, when at last I remembered that we also did candle rolling and wooden bee colouring-in, proceeds of which go directly to the division and not members.  Panic over, though by then I'd given up and emailed the secretary asking whether anyone had brought extra honey for sale.  Hostilities will resume in the morning, as I still haven't counted up the proceeds of the last two raffles, which also need paying in to the bank, along with some tea money.  How the owner at work copes, counting up three tills a night, come rain, shine, and dinner parties, beats me.

talking and not talking

I went to check the bees this morning.  The golden bees are still not trying to swarm, but still haven't finished capping their honey.  I am chary of taking it too early, since if it still contains too much water it will ferment in storage.  The other colonies looked happy enough, and I might as well start feeding them and get that finished before we go on holiday.  Indeed, I bought some sugar later while I was in Tesco for just that purpose.  Given that it looks as though I will get the honey from the golden bees, I thought I might as well offer some of the crop from the dark, buzzy ones for sale at the Chatto wildlife fair.  If that had been all the honey I was going to get, I might have kept it for my own consumption and to give away.

I was looking forward to the wildlife fair, but have ended up having very little to do with it.  The person organising our stand in the Show Secretary's absence received numerous offers of help, which is not always the case when putting on displays.  I was not given a slot in the rota on the stand, but was supposed to be doing the first half of a talk about swarming, covering what a swarm is and why bees do it, before our General Secretary, who takes the calls from members of the public who have got a swarm and puts them in touch with a member who can help, talked about what to do if you do find a swarm of your bees on your property (make sure they are not wasps or bumble bees, call us, keep calm and carry on).  The organisers were very slow in telling us what time our talk was due to be, before finally announcing today that they weren't having talks after all.  The weather, apparently, was not conducive to talking.  So I have ended up with no role at all, beyond popping round in the morning with a couple of cash boxes and getting some cheques countersigned in my capacity as Treasurer.  Oh well, I could do with an extra day in the garden.

There is a wasp nest underground in the long border, underneath a sorry-looking Chaenomeles I moved last winter.  It is right by where I want to plant some other things, but I can't dig there with a live and functioning wasp nest.  I asked the Systems Administrator to get me some wasp nest killer on a run to the shops, but the foam sort we used successfully when we had a nest in the shed does not work on underground nests.  You are supposed to enclose the nest completely in foam, but it is impossible to get more than about a cupful to go down the hole.  After three or four treatments, at the end of which there were still wasps coming and going, I tried running the hose down the hole for a couple of hours to drown them out.  Still wasps.  I gave it another hour, and will have to see how it looks tomorrow.  Maybe I need to get some powder.  Maybe I need to be patient and just wait for them to die.  I would, if I didn't want to work in that part of the bed.

There is a great passage in Michael Pollan's book Second Nature, which he wrote before becoming a food guru.  He has gophers living in his garden, which he is initially indulgent towards, until he discovers quite how much damage a set of gophers can do in a garden.  I know the feeling: twenty years ago I had a similar live-and-let-live attitude to rabbits, but no longer.  His escalating efforts to see them off fail, and he realises he needs to reappraise his attitude to nature and man versus nature when he pours gasoline down the hole and sets light to it, and a great jet of flame shoots out of the burrow.  I loved Second Nature, but neither of the people I have given it to have seemed so keen.

vacancies

The owner is advertising for staff, after saying last Monday that there was no point until September.  That's not to say she has placed ads in Horticulture Week, but she has put notices by the till.  One vacancy is for a Plant Centre Assistant, full or part time, must work Saturdays, horticulture qualification, keen interest in plants.  That's all fair enough, but the other is for someone to run the shop and cafe, keen interest in plants essential.  I'd have thought that a food hygiene certificate and a keen interest in homeware and greetings cards was more to the point.

I had to serve a cafetiere of filter coffee while my young colleague was at lunch, and scrubbed my hands vigorously with a nail brush under the hot tap, but still had compost under my fingernails. Let's hope the new Plant Centre Assistant joins up on the basis of being willing to do the cafe when required.  I also foresee a grand spat between whoever they take on to run the shop and the existing member of staff who, although nominally nothing to do with the shop, moves the displays around on a weekly basis.

The bare root irises arrived for potting, but I wasn't allowed to go and help pot, because we needed two people in the plant centre.  Which we did, especially with the cafe, but it was a shame, as I like potting.  The young gardener never made it to work at all because his car had broken down, so the manager was one experienced potter down, although the proprietors' son, a potting novice, helped in the afternoon.

The cold tap in the staff room has been getting stiffer and stiffer to turn on and off, to the point where it has become impossible.  There are a couple of possible solutions to this problem.  The one most people would opt for is to get the tap mended or replaced.  The one we have adopted is to turn the tap off at the stopcock, which entails crawling into a narrow space under the work top between the fridge and the wall.  I am not awfully good at clockwise versus anti-clockwise at the best of times, let alone while squeezed into an awkward hole, and I wasted a good deal of water before managing to turn the tap off again, because initially I opened the stopcock to full on instead of closing it.

It felt very quiet, but the end of day sales total was surprisingly good, given how dry it is.  Maybe the economic statistics indicating the beginnings of an upturn are right.

fringe theatre

First thing this morning I modified yesterday's post.  As originally written it previewed our trip to the theatre today, then I decided not to do that, but forgot to change the title.  Never mind, I've seen worse errors on the websites of national newspapers.

We went to a matinee performance at a recently opened theatre in north London.  It was entirely the Systems Administrator's idea, which touched me deeply since I am normally the one who organises arty trips, and I knew nothing about this theatre, or the play.  The SA heard a review on Radio 2, and said that it sounded good.  After we'd gone through the pros and cons of getting ourselves to north London and back, the SA came up with the revised scheme of going to a matinee, this Sunday, which is also our wedding anniversary, and going out to lunch first.  I was utterly charmed.

Our destination was the Park Theatre, which has been shoehorned into an old office block very close to Finsbury Park tube.  It has two auditoriums, seating ninety and two hundred people, a space for rehearsals, workshops or what you will, a cafe and a bar.  Of these we saw the larger auditorium and the cafe.  It opened in May of this year and still smells of new carpet.  The play was a new play, too, Daytona, and this run was its world premiere, though it is now going on tour around the UK.  The three actors were Maureen Lipman, Harry Shearer (who I think were the main draws for the SA) and John Bowe (who almost stole the show according to the Telegraph review).

I do my best, but my life does seem to come out more Mr Pooter than Vita Sackville-West.  The small child lying on the seat across the aisle across us on the train to Stratford was suddenly and copiously sick shortly after leaving Colchester.  It was not a full train, as thankfully the army of teenagers on their way to Chelmsford's V festival had scrambled on to the intercity at the last moment, rather than getting the stopper, so we moved seats.  We got to Highbury and Islington without further incident, but couldn't get out of the station, because the barrier rejected our tickets and there were no platform staff at all.  We asked at a window saying Information, and were sent to a different window, where someone summoned a member of staff to the barrier, who expressed his extreme mortification that we were stuck inside the station with a gleeful, sarcastic humour that would have had Mr Pooter writing a letter of complaint to someone.  He then explained that the barriers could not cope with combined mainline and London overground tickets.

After that we could not find the restaurant.  It was only about a hundred and fifty yards down Upper Street, and we must have almost reached it, albeit on the other side of the road, before losing confidence and retracing our steps.  It was partly my fault, because I'd swapped two numerals when I wrote the number down, but the Systems Administrator has seen enough transposition errors to know that is a mistake that could happen to anyone (the difference between the two will be divisible by nine, but that didn't help us find the place).  The main problem is that the street numbers in Upper Street go up one side of the road and then back down the other, but we didn't know that, and expected 265 to be pretty close to 257, not several minutes' walk away on the other side of the road.  Having found 257 we spent some time searching around Highbury Corner, before doing what we should have done in the first place, and consulting the web.

The restaurant is called Gem, and specialises in Turkish and Kurdish dishes.  The food is very good, assuming you like eastern Mediterranean herby and garlicky food, which we do, or we wouldn't have gone there.  The prices are astonishingly reasonable for London, and I thought they deserved to be busier than they were (three other tables apart from us in all the time we were there).  Halfway through lunch a smiling Asiatic wearing dark glasses came in, disappeared out the back with the man I took to be the manager, and left saying he would see him next week, which was a bit Sopranos.

Finsbury Park is not a long walk from the top end of Upper Street, provided Arsenal aren't playing at home.  If we were going to the Park Theatre again we'd happily combine it with lunch in Gem.  The cafe at the theatre was very crowded and cheerfully chaotic, also rather hot.  We knew the auditorium would be air conditioned, though, because one of the actors had commented in the interview that it was just as well given that he spent the whole of one act wearing an overcoat.

I can't really tell you anything about the play, apart from the fact that Maureen Lipman is wonderful and the play is very good, since the plot twists around like an eel, and it is impossible to say anything about it without delivering the most massive spoiler.  We bought a programme as we filed in, and then discovered that rather than having the usual advertisements for local solicitors and schools like they do at the Mercury, it consisted of half a dozen pages detailing past work of the main contributors, and then the entire text of the play.  Or rather, the text as it existed at a late stage in rehearsals.  I read it on the way home, and saw a few places where it had been tweaked.

It was a lovely day out.  I guess that the fact that we navigated the vomit, the being locked in and the getting lost without once getting ratty and snapping or screaming at each other is one of the reasons why we are still married after twenty-nine years.

box sets

Last night, as it was not the weather for sitting out on the balcony and barbecuing, we returned to the box set of The Sopranos.  In order to avoid plot spoilers, the episode titles are cryptic to say the least, and we spent some time trying to decide whether we had already seen The Strong Silent Type, or had indeed got on to Calling All Cars.  It is about as middle aged as you can get, wondering on a Friday night how far you have got through The Sopranos, before settling down in front of the telly with a bowl of mixed bean chile con carne and a bottle of Portuguese red.  We guessed earlier rather than later in the series, to avoid missing any episodes, and it says something for how well they were made, that I knew within two seconds of the beginning that I'd seen both The Strong Silent Type and Calling All Cars before, and that we must therefore be on to Eloise.  It was more difficult for the Systems Administrator, who has already watched all five series, and had to disentangle memories of something seen six weeks ago from the vague familiarity of having watched it a couple of years ago.

It gave me an idea for an App, which I hereby offer to the world free and gratis, since I am not going to learn coding in order to write it myself.  I fancy a dinky little virtual abacus on my phone, so that I can slide a bead across each time we watch an episode, and another in the next row when we finish a series.  I know I could simply write it down on a piece of paper and keep it near the TV, but a virtual abacus would be so much more fun.  Plus I would be more careful not to lose the phone than to keep the piece of paper.  We have so many bits of paper.

Our latest generation flat screen television with built in blu ray player is so complicated that even the Systems Administrator, who is normally good with technology, has only a hazy idea of how it works.  The Sopranos' introductory music is brilliantly atmospheric and very apt, but not short, and once we'd listened to all of it and I'd instantly recognised that I'd already seen the opening dream sequence of a blue hairy caterpillar crawling down the back of a man's head, the machine refused to go back to the episodes index.  When eventually the SA persuaded it to play the next episode we had to listen to the entire theme tune again, then had the same problem getting back to the index. At one point the TV decided that we did not want to watch a DVD at all, but Gardeners' World on BBC2, and the SA was reduced to trying my suggestion of ejecting the disc and putting it in again. As a result I'd finished my chile before we started viewing the episode we actually wanted.

I have absolutely no idea how the TV works.  We must have had some instructions once, but where they are now is anybody's guess.  Once, when the Systems Administrator was away, I managed to play Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and was pathetically grateful when the machine worked, and I have occasionally played CDs, but if the disc I've inserted doesn't automatically start I'm more or less lost.  A drawback of being childless is that you cannot fall back on the usual middle aged support plan with digital technology, which is to ask someone between the ages of 3 and 13 for help.

wet weather jobs

It rained this morning as forecast, the first drops falling as I went out to let the chickens into their run, and measure up for a support for a herbaceous clematis in the sloping border.  I'd been saving up a list of wet weather jobs (which has not yet extended to the vacuuming or the ironing) so that was fine.

I went to B&Q first off, to buy a hose.  Our's is slightly too short to reach the far corner of the back garden, and I'm about to have to cut off the last ten feet because they are leaking through tiny holes, that put out a surprising amount of water in the course of an hour, making the greenhouse floor wet when I don't necessarily want it to be, and watering my legs while I'm trying to water the plants.  B&Q still had hoses, but no half inch hose to hose connectors that I could see.  Maybe there's a spare one in the shed.  I tried to stop the leaks by running duct tape round the hose, but that didn't do any good at all, apart from converting the fine spray to a heavy dribble.  Then I stopped at Marriages animal feed store to stock up on layers' pellets and mixed corn, and allowed myself to feel slightly smug that I can still lift 20 kilos.

After that I went into Colchester to pay two cheques into the bank, and call at the Arts Centre for tickets to a couple of gigs.  I had made sure to time the trip so as to arrive at the Arts Centre after ten-thirty, since their booking office doesn't open until then, and was rather bemused to push on their door at ten to eleven and find it still locked.  I fiddled with the door for a bit, in case I was being exceptionally dim about what I had to push, pull, or turn, then peered in through the window to see three people sitting at desks.  Good-oh, they hadn't closed for the day due to staff shortages, then.  They must have heard me rattling or seen my plaintive face at the window, and someone got up to let me in, remarking that the door was still locked.  The hand-made-out-of-tofu theme continued, as none of their computers would consent to print tickets, and I had to be content with a handwritten receipt on a compliments slip, and the promise that they'd be posted to me free of charge, today.  Assuming they can get the computers to work.

The way out of the multi-storey car park was blocked by a woman attempting to drive a large SUV into a small space, which she was approaching at the wrong angle.  Even I could see that she was too much on the diagonal, too close in, and wouldn't do it.  She gave up, and tried again with another bay barely wide enough for her gigantic car, this time next to a concrete pillar for added fear factor.  She made the little girl in the front passenger seat get out, and stand by the pillar. The child stood mutely, with an expression which combined a look of deep embarrassment about being seen out with this clown, with an ignorance of parking as profound as that of her mother.  At least she had an excuse, being no more than twelve years old, and not in possession of a driving licence, or in nominal control of a motorised vehicle in a public space.  The prospect of running the child over paralysed the driver, who gave up trying to get into the space, summoned the child back into the car, and spotted that another car a couple of bays along was about to leave.  She turned to me with an appealing smile and a wave, and gestured that she would go into the next gap instead, and there was a further delay as the driver of the second car did a seven point turn, because the SUV was blocking it in, while I ground my teeth and swore inwardly.  If she couldn't park her car she ought to drive a smaller one.  I'd have liked to hoot at her, but couldn't remember where the horn was.

Then I went up to the smith at Wakes Colne to collect the bean tendril sculpture.  I place the order in the third week of June, so it has taken rather a long time compared to his original estimate of three weeks, but that was because his forge broke down.  He rang to say it was ready about a week ago, and I said I'd be along to collect it soon, but might leave it until the next wet day.  He has made a wonderful job of it and I am thrilled.  I will post a photo in due course, once I've installed it. At the moment it is lying in the hall, where I must be careful not to tread on it and risk breaking any of the tendrils off.  Though I suppose wrought ironwork can always be mended.  I must have achieved the status of trustworthy regular customer, because I left an idea for a plant support with him, and this time he didn't want a deposit.

After lunch I finished putting patches on my latest gardening trousers.  This is a highly experimental project.  My trousers always go at the knee, while the rest of the garment is still perfectly good, zip working, seams intact.  I have scoured the internet, and the army surplus stores of Colchester, trying to find either women's work trousers in a really heavy twill, or genuine combat trousers in a 28 inch waist, and failed utterly on both counts.  Men seem to have the same problem, since most of the customer feedback on the internet about recently purchased work wear trousers grumbled about the flimsiness of the material.

My latest experiment is to buy two pairs of chinos in the Lands' End sale.  They have an elasticated back waist, which earns nils points for style, but will be comfortable for crawling around in the garden, and I ordered them un-hemmed.  This allowed me to chop fully six inches of both legs, from which I have extracted two patches about six inches square.  Rather than try to retrofit the patches after the knee has already gone, I have sown them on in advance.  Knee patches on gardening trousers tend not to last very long, because kneeling down puts such a strain on the stitching round the edge that it breaks in next to no time.  This time I have sown them on using rows of running stitch in button thread across the entire area of the patch, and instead of trying to turn the edges of the patch under, I have laid the patches on flat and over stitched the edges to prevent them fraying too badly.  The result looks very odd, though I suspect that if I never used them for gardening, but kept them immaculately clean and told the hipsters in Shoreditch that they were based on Japanese work wear, they might almost believe me.  As long as I wore a long shirt to hide the elasticated back waist.  That would be a dead giveaway.

small tortoiseshells

I have identified one of the mystery butterflies in the garden as a small tortoiseshell, Aglais urticae urticae, with the help of an excellent website, UK Butterflies.  It's a bit of a cheat really to even give you the link, since if you wanted to know more about butterflies you could find it for yourself in about five seconds with the aid of Google.  It lists the species found in the UK, tells you which ones are flying this week (though not necessarily where you are), and has a comprehensive page of information about every species.

I recognised the small tortoiseshell from its photograph, having looked hard at one that perched in front of me for a reasonable length of time, and made a mental note of the bold yellow and black stripes up the leading edge of the front wing, and the row of brilliant blue dots along the trailing edge of the rear one.  It turns out that numbers in the UK have declined in recent years: they have always fluctuated from year to year, but now the UK population is being parasitised  by the larvae of a fly which feeds on the larval and pupal stages of the butterfly.  How depressing, though I suppose the fly is as intrinsically interesting as the butterfly, just not as highly valued by most people, because it is not pretty.

Adult tortoiseshells hibernate over the winter.  I didn't know that, and browsing around the UK Butterflies site made me realise how singularly little I know about their life cycles.  I'd have thought they could overwinter equally well as pupae, but according to the phenology table, all the small tortoiseshells have emerged by mid September, with only the adult form (or imago) persisting through the winter.  The name gives a clue to the favoured food plant, nettles.  I was brought up to believe that nettles were essential for butterflies, and in honour of the small tortoiseshells (and because the label on the glyphosate bottle says to spray new growth in spring) I will leave it until then to start spraying off the nettles which have sprung up all along the side of the wood on the way to the compost bin.  I feel there will still be enough for the butterflies elsewhere in the garden.

UK Butterflies has a Twitter account, @ukbutterflies.  I don't use Twitter, having no desire to follow a condensed running commentary on life from Stephen Fry or any other celebrity, while if I wanted to communicate with anyone I knew I'd send them an email, or write to them, or in an emergency ring them up.  I'm not even sure whether any of my friends have Twitter accounts.  If they have, they haven't invited me to contact them using that medium.  But I could see the point of it for a specialist interest group like lepidopterists.  How useful to be able to post a picture of a butterfly you are trying to identify in an open forum where people with above average interest in the subject will see your query, and can respond.

There are many more species of moth in the UK than there are of butterflies.  I know enthusiasts who set out their traps at night, luring moths in with light, but in general people find butterflies far sexier.  They fly by day instead of night, do not invade your house after dark and flap around the light bulbs, making an off-putting scratchy noise, and they are generally prettier.  A French au pair we had when I was about twelve was afraid of moths, and from her I learnt to be scared of them too, for a time, but who ever heard of anyone who was scared of butterflies?

drought

The long, dry, hot spell is really starting to hit the garden.  It coped pretty well for the first few weeks of no rain and relentless sunshine, because the soil was so wet to start with, and perhaps at the margin because I've put a lot of mulch down, compared to the last drought in July 2006. However, by now the soil is as dry as a bone, and so hard that trying to plant anything leaves you chiselling at the soil rather than digging in the conventional sense.  An increasing number of plants are showing their distress, the leaves of the asters grey, puckered and drooping, the hellebores and primroses collapsed, the Omphalodes prematurely shrivelled and dormant, and the perennial pea giving up on flowering.  The leaves and shoot tips on some well established shrubs, planted several years ago, have begun to flag.

I gave the water meter a hammering.  I don't waste water on the lawn, which will come back by itself when we get some proper rain, but I don't want to lose plants, or stress them so severely that next year's flowering is compromised.  I didn't feel even vaguely guilty about it, since the amount of water I use through one domestic hose is so utterly dwarfed by the amount that is pumped out daily on the lettuce farm, and the expense so small relative to the value of the plants.  Gardeners are always being told to feel guilty when they use water.  I don't hear golf enthusiasts being lectured about giving up the game in favour of clay court tennis, because of the strain that irrigating golf courses places on the environment, or motorists being warned that it is wasteful and vain to wash their cars more than once a year.

I would feel guilty if I were trying to grow thirsty flowers like Monarda and Phlox on pure sand, and finding myself watering them twice weekly, but I'm not.  Many of the things I watered today haven't seen a hosepipe for years.  Recent plantings that haven't yet got their roots down have been watered oftener than that, obviously, but in general the choice of species is about as ecological as you could get, short of sticking to a very limited palette of gorse, broom, Mediterranean shrubs and herbs, and Agapanthus.  And creeping sorrel.  And the trouble with Mediterranean shrubs is that in a bad winter three quarters of them die.

I was shadowed all day by a robin, which nipped in where I'd been working to snap up unconsidered trifles, and regarded me with a bold, enigmatic gaze.  The butterflies were out in force as well.  I need to work out what some of them are, since the only ones I know are peacocks, commas and red admirals.  I spotted one small toad, but I've seen very few this year compared to last.

happy anniversary

It is twenty years to the day since we moved into our house.  Friday 13th, an easy date to remember.  It was a busy week, the week we moved.  We were at the top of a chain about four houses long, so it's a miracle that it ever happened.  Somebody in the chain wanted accelerated completion, so we had a week from exchange to completion, seven days in which to find a removal firm and pack up all our belongings.  The Systems Administrator was fired on the day that we exchanged contracts, and my brother's wedding was two days later.  We decided it would put a damper on the proceedings to tell my parents that the SA was without job at the precise moment that our mortgage was about to more than double, and the SA remained mute as my uncle held forth at the reception about the uncertainty of City employment.

The City had such a hire and fire mentality that there was no shame in being sacked.  Indeed, I'm not entirely confident that I knew anyone working in a front office capacity who hadn't been, at some point in their career.  In the end it proved a great move for the SA, whose next job introduced him to the future boss, great friend, and cricketing companion, under whose auspices the SA ceased to be an investment manager and shifted to the middle office, with generally satisfactory results.

The move was unexpectedly painless.  Friday 13th August 1993 was a bright, sunny day.  The little one-van removal firm we managed to find who were free at a week's notice proved competent, nothing was broken apart from one house plant, and they were obliging about carrying boxes to the right rooms.  We had a lot of books even then, so there was some heavy lifting, but they were delighted to be able to back their van right up to the double doors leading into the downstairs sitting room.  I was impressed at how they knew, among the chaos of boxes, exactly where the one had gone containing the cans of beer bought for their benefit.  After they'd left we stood in our new, incredibly shabby house, gazing out through the huge curtainless windows at the view, and the mixture of bad turf and ploughed ground that was going to be our garden, and were very happy.

They could not back the van right up to the doors now, because the grass turning circle has become a gravel garden, and there is a pond in front of the double doors, besides all the plants, and a breakwater built out of timber recycled from actual coastal defences.  We have an awful lot more books as well, compared to twenty years ago.  In fact, when I think of what a palaver it is going to be moving out, I rather hope we manage to die first, leaving other people to sort it.

The garden after twenty years is a real garden.  I look at it sometimes, and am faintly astonished that everything in it was conceived of, constructed and planted by us, apart from the bad turf, and some of that has been moved.  Some of the first shrubs to be planted are now magnificent specimens, some reached their natural span in far less than two decades and are no more, others succumbed to cold, drought, waterlogging, rabbits, or disease.  There are some good bits of design, mostly the Systems Administrator's, and some glaring errors of layout.  I wish I had known twenty years ago what I know now, but of course it has taken me those years of trial and error, reading and study to reach the point I'm at now, and in another couple of decades I'll regret how ignorant I still was in my fifties.

Flowering highlights of the garden on the 13th August 2013 include:  A fine stand of Crocosmia 'Lucifer'.  A lot of Verbena bonariensis.  A large Yucca flaccida 'Ivory' in full bloom.  Finally, at the third attempt, a Romneya coulteri with several stems bearing white poppy-like flowers.  Two flourishing Zauschneria californica, a 'Dublin' and a 'Western Hills'.  A good Hydrangea aspera 'Mauvette', though I must trim the boundary willow which has yet again dropped down in front of it. A Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle', whose flowers I feel should be larger, but at least it has not flopped over this year.  A Hydrangea paniculata, which is supposed to be 'Limelight', though I am not entirely sure that it is, growing back strongly and blooming well after hard pruning in March. Hydrangea paniculata 'Vanille Fraise', crammed into a slightly too small and too dry spot, but flowering valiantly.  The pale straw coloured, floating heads of Stipa gigantea, the giant oat grass. Lots of Agapanthus, which has seeded around the gravel in the Italian garden, and this year is joined by the first ever flower on my potted 'Queen Mum', a giant dome of white flowers shaded blue at the base.  Dahlias.  In the conservatory a recently repotted Hoya has started flowering for the first time, extraordinary pendant clusters of fleshy pink flowers that scarcely seem real.

There are some good leaves too.  Leaves are with you for far longer than most flowers, so we have Japanese maples, the giant leaves of stooled Paulownia, ferns, the aromatic stems of rosemary, the silvery, twisted branches of the olive, purple Cotinus, the yellow stemmed bamboo now confined within a circle of galvanised lawn edging, plus the clipped forms of the topiary yew and domes of box, done freehand and slightly wonky.  There's some good bark too, three different species of birch, and the cinnamon brown trunk of Arbutus x andrachnoides, gamely leafing up again after yet another cold winter.

The collection of sculptures and garden ornaments has grown over the years, to the point where some areas of the garden couldn't accommodate any more without starting to look cluttered.  I'm quite proud of some of my cobble detailing in the paths, and the Systems Administrator's mark II decking in red cedar is as neat as a professional job.

I'm pleased with it.  It would be better if it were less weedy, and not infested with horsetail, and if we'd allowed for somewhere for loose loads of mulch and manure to be dumped, and thought more carefully about where to put the greenouse, but it has character, a feeling of energy, barely suppressed chaos, and playfulness.  Not bad for the first twenty years.

nudging and nurdling

The manager returned to work to find it had been all go in his absence, what with another burglary and a second member of staff resigning.  He looked very well after his holiday, though I don't suppose that'll last more than a week or so.  The owner announced breezily that there was no point in advertising for staff during the holiday season, and that she'd start looking at the beginning of September.  In the meantime we would muddle through.  We lose five man days per week in five days' time, and another four days a week from the end of September, both people who can operate the cafe.  There'll be a delay once she advertises while they wait for the CVs to come in, and hold the interviews, and whoever they select could be on as much as a month's notice, so we aren't going to have got anybody before the end of next month.

In addition, the cleaner has got the whole of the second half of August and all of September off, and the owner left the manager a note saying that we might have to form a rota to clean the loos and shop during that time.  The manager grumbled that he didn't want to clean the loos, it wasn't what he was paid to do, and he didn't even like cleaning his own loo, which were my feelings exactly.  Nor do I want to serve in the cafe.  If I'd wanted a job in catering, I wouldn't have bothered to spend three years at horticultural college, and I'd find myself a place at a good restaurant where I was going to learn about food, not dishing out tea and cakes in between watering and weeding.

The manager was occupied ploughing through the backlog of e-mail enquiries, and searching the plant centre to try and work out what else might have been stolen.  He was sure there had been an olive tree in front of the shop when he went away, and a couple of hollies, though it's always possible a member of staff moved them before the burglary.  I returned to the task of disentangling the climbers, since I'd run out of pretties to put on the display tables.  It went against the grain to remove nice, new, healthy growth from the honeysuckles, but they had all grown into each other so much that it was impossible to pick any of them up if you had wanted to buy one.  It proved a slightly expensive exercise, as I was so taken by Lonicera sempervirens, a beauty with narrow red trumpet flowers, orange inside, that I bought one to go at the back of the dahlia bed.  Looking it up now on the web I see that it is from north America, and in its native land provides a nectar source for hummingbirds.  Some of the web entries make it sound not so easy to grow as the boss's label suggested, so I hope it was not an unwise purchase.  I try not to buy plants on impulse, but could visualise exactly where I was going to put this one.

To my regret, somebody had deadheaded most of the Hemerocallis which had finished blooming before I could get to them.  Some varieties form small plantlets in the nodes of their flowering stems, whose bases gradually swell to the point where you can see rudimentary roots developing.  I have half a dozen of the dark red 'Chicago Blackout' from cuttings salvaged a couple of years ago, and was hoping for some of the lovely brick red 'Chicago Fire' to add to the collection, but all I managed to spot was one 'Lemon Bells'.  The old stems are going to be cut off and thrown away anyway, so it is not like taking cuttings of a shrub, which you should never, ever do in other people's gardens without their express consent.  The stem-bourne plantlets root very easily in moist compost.  If the swelling at the base is not yet pronounced, and doesn't look as though it is going to snap away cleanly, I have rooted them with a short section of stem attached rather than risk breaking them off, and that seemed to work equally well.

The Systems Administrator returned home from two days of watching the Test Match at Chester-le-Street, half an hour after I got in myself.  Although the blog does not give our address, and you would have to work moderately hard to identify the house, and despite the fact that only about five people read it anyway, and one of those is my mother, you will notice that I did not advertise the fact that I was home alone for three days.  It beats me why people plaster the fact that their property is standing empty all over Facebook and Twitter.  They would do better to brag about their new (and totally fictitious) Alsatian.

on thieves, customers and peacocks

I was the first member of staff to arrive at work, and as I opened the gate I was greeted by the owners' son.  He told me that last night they had reversed the horse lorry right up to the gate, so that you couldn't have opened it.  A car (probably stolen) might be a match for the door of the gardeners' shed, but you wouldn't have much joy using one against the horse lorry, which is vast, ancient and shabby.  The trouble with parking there on a regular basis is that the owner or the boss have to go out into the car park before the staff turn up just before eight, to move the horse lorry, so I can't see it lasting as a long term security measure.  There is also the risk that the horse lorry will refuse to start one morning, as it quite often does, blocking the car park to customers for the day.

It is an odd thought that whoever stole the standard shrubs on Friday night must have cased the joint first, to find what they were looking for quickly and quietly in the dark.  None of today's customers looked like thieves sizing us up, but how would we know what a thief looks like?  A dodgy-looking bloke with tattoos in a hoodie?  I read once of a small time American entrepreneur, who set out to sell donuts in corporate offices.  There was only one of him, and many floors of offices, so he put a tray of donuts on each floor with an honesty box.  His friends laughed at him and said it would never work as a business model.  Because he knew how many donuts he had put out, and how much money was in the box, he knew floor by floor how many people were stealing donuts instead of paying for them.  The loss rate was worse on the upper floors occupied by the more highly paid executive staff than on the lower ones where the less highly paid administrative underlings worked.

However, all of today's customers were very nice, and honestly didn't look like potential burglars. There was a solemn young couple interested in fruit trees, fairly new to gardening though experienced enough to have grasped that they had very heavy clay soil.  They seemed genuinely interested in the theory of why adding organic material to soil improves it, but perhaps they were simply very polite.  Another couple wanted to plant a hundred feet of yew hedging, and seemed grateful for advice on clearing the turf from the site (glyphosate it now for autumn planting.  Unless you have a very strong ecological aversion to using glyphosate you do not want to volunteer to lift four hundred square feet of turf, and where are you going to stack it if you do?  It is a horrible waste to put it in a skip).  By the time we'd gone through planting distances for yew, speed of growth, constraints on the dimensions of a hedge (do not create one that is so wide at the top that you can't reach the middle to cut it) and mulches, they'd practically had a tutorial.  The really rather posh owner of a famous garden in Cheshire was extremely charming, and after much agonising bought a pale cream banksia rose instead of the more commonly seen yellow pompom variety.

The pea hen had two chicks with her.  Peachicks are like ducklings, in that they emerge from the egg with downy feathers, and can walk almost immediately.  One of this pair is the usual mid brown, and the other a soft canary yellow, which makes me think it will be another white peacock, if it survives.  The survival rate in peachicks doesn't seem very good.  Of the five to hatch so far on the premises, one died immediately, one at a few days old, and one fell in the pond and drowned, while two made it to adulthood.  The peahen is an assiduous mother, pecking small pieces of leaves off the plants, dropping them down in front of her babies, and pointing to them with her beak.  I did have to shoo the three of them out of the shop at one point, and feared for a nasty moment there was going to be a peafowl stramash, because the automatic doors had closed behind her, and as I advanced on the door to get it to open, she began to panic, and stepped on one of the chicks. It bounced back, and they all ran down the ramp out of the shop, her clucking and the babies peeping.

When I got home I had to water all the pots in the Italian garden, the greenhouse and the conservatory, plus the dahlia bed because the dahlias had begun to droop, and I didn't want them aborting their flower buds at this stage.  I didn't finish until a quarter to eight.

we was robbed

As I pulled into the car park at work this morning, there were inklings that something had happened, four silver trolleys and a standard Photinia standing just inside the gate, where we would never leave them.  Walking across the gravel to the staff room, I noticed that the ropes under the oak tree, intended to prevent foot traffic across its root zone, had been dropped to the ground. One of my colleagues had arrived before me, and was lacing up his boots.  He said the front gate was already open when he got there.

The house seemed fine, door locked and alarm set.  The owners were not there, having taken the children camping overnight, and the boss's mother had called round.  If I had a suspicious nature, which of course I have not, I would wonder whether she had only come round to let the chickens out, which after all we could have done, or whether she was checking that in our employers' absence we still turned up on time.  I didn't know they were away, though it wouldn't have made any difference to me if I had.  The boss's mother confirmed that the gate had been shut when she called round last night at eight to lock up the chickens.  Curiouser and curiouser.

At first sight everything looked normal inside the plant centre.  The Haddonstone reconstituted stone pots, which are not cheap, were still all there.  Three absolutely new teak tables, each with four teak chairs and an umbrella, and in one case a butlers tray, for the cafe customers, had appeared since the last time I was at work.  One of my colleagues nipped down to check the gardeners' shed, but the door was still attached to its hinges and locked.  Then he realised what was missing.

All of the Eleagnus standards, that had been tied to the uprights in the shade tunnel, had gone.  So had a couple of standard hollies, two standard bays, a Photinia lollipop, and a large Cordyline.  All expensive plants, retailing at around the hundred pound mark.  We huffed and puffed for a few minutes, trying to work out exactly what had gone, although my contribution was nil because I hadn't been there since last Monday, and couldn't remember what had been there five days ago, let alone yesterday.  As I child I loathed the game where you have to memorise playing cards you have turned over, and was very bad at it, and it is even more difficult with plants because my colleagues keep moving them and I don't know most of what we've sold.

We rang the boss to break the bad news, and then by common accord I was deputed to ring the police.  I must have a good ringing the police sort of voice, or else a residual air of authority from the long-ago days when I actually had some.  I told them that it was the second time in ten days that the business had been targeted, then had to spell Eleagnus for the policeman who took down details of the crime.  I think he may have taken up my suggestion of just calling the Cordyline a cabbage palm.  He said someone would be round that morning, and someone was, a scrupulously polite constable who looked at the entrances, and the unlocked gate, and noted the lack of security cameras and absence of a guard dog.  He said he would ring later to give us a crime number, but I got the strong impression that he thought the Suffolk Constabulary's chances of solving the crime were pretty much zero, and that they weren't going to devote any appreciable resources to it.

The boss rang several times through the course of the morning, sounding very irritable.  He was sure it was the same burglars as last time, coming back for a second bite at the cherry, and I thought he was probably right, having read in the papers that that is what burglars do.  He said that if he caught them at it a third time, he was going to shoot them.  The liberal intellectual part of my brain thought that was rather harsh, since the UK abandoned the death penalty for theft some time back in the nineteenth century, but another part of me had sneaking sympathy for the idea.  I conscientiously haul myself out of bed at six o'clock on a Sunday morning to water those plants, so why should other people simply waltz in and take them?  It takes me approximately two months worth of (part time) work to earn the amount we've had sold them for, if they hadn't been stolen.

Later on a police forensic van arrived, and an officer dusted the trolleys for fingerprints.  My colleague dealt with him, but it didn't sound as though the forensic specialist held out any more hope than the constable.  The boss and the police did seem to have drastically different views of the crime.  The boss considers the police to be useless at anything except policing motoring offences, and thinks they ought to be seaching car boot sales for stolen goods and catching criminals.  The police think there are so many possible outlets for stolen plants that it is useless to look for them, and that in any case how could they prove the identity of a plant if they found it. Although the constable didn't say so explicity to us, the staff, I got the strong impression he thought that citizens who left an entire walled garden of eminently saleable goods unlocked, unalarmed, and unattended by man or dog were pretty much asking to be robbed.

Apart from that, the white peacock hatched two eggs, but one of the chicks died in the nest.  It wasn't a successful day all round.

crisis in a compost heap

I have done something rather stupid.  I have let goose grass grow up around the compost bins and run to seed, and now some of the seeds have ripened and fallen into two of the bins.  I meant to clear it away before it got to the point of seeding, but failed to get round to it, and now I'll be spreading goose grass seeds with every barrow load of compost, just as I was starting to reduce the quantity that comes up each year in the back garden.

I suppose I let it get that far because tidying up around the compost bins is not very interesting, compared to working on the borders.  And because there were always urgent things that needed doing in the beds, weeds that were about to seed, or plants I'd bought languishing in their pots and looking sicklier with every passing day, that needed planting out.  And also because the compost bins are currently so difficult to get to.

They stand in a neat row, between the polytunnel (needs reskinning if we're going to grow anything in it, currently used as a wood store) and the bonfire site.  During the wet spring a pile of damp material for the bonfire began to build up, that didn't look as though it would burn very easily.  Also, once the first crop of lettuces were planted in the next door field, we only felt able to have a bonfire on a day when there was an easterly wind, so that soot from our fire wouldn't fall on the lettuces. Once the heatwave set in, the heap of things to burn (by then grown to gargantuan proportions) and the surrounding area rapidly dried out to the point where the Systems Administrator didn't dare set a match to it, in case polytunnel, hedges, fruit cage and the nearest shed went up in flames as well. So by now we have most of the year's output of woody prunings piled up in front of the compost bins.  They are not totally inaccessible, and I have been wriggling my way in there with buckets of leafy trimmings from the garden, and the contents of the kitchen green waste caddy, to add them to the compost heap, but it has been slightly a case of out of sight, out of mind, when it came to the goose grass.

Well, I shall have my comeuppance now.  All I can think of to do is to leave the bins unturned for now, and glyphosate off the goose grass seedlings as they emerge.  That is not a very good solution, since I wanted to use the compost this winter.  The affected bins hold relatively mature compost, and my normal routine would be to spread it on the beds at the end of this growing season, then move the contents of the other two bins into those I'd just emptied.  Stirring compost around a few times during decomposition mixes in air, and breaks up any solid lumps of the same kind of material that might be too woody to rot properly, or very soft green waste that's gone slimy. In principal, material arrives in the left hand bin, and is turned and moved along the row, until it ends up at the right hand end as mulch ready to go on the borders.  With two of the bins now contaminated with cleavers, the system is threatening to grind to a halt.  Alternatively, I could use the compost as usual and be very vigilant with the weeding next year.

The bins may have failed in the short run to produce good quality soil improver, but have proved unexpectedly successful as propagation tools.  The third bin from the left threw up numerous stems of a damp loving plant, Persicaria virginiana 'Painter's Palette', which I have had growing near the front of the bog bed for years.  It has dark coloured variegated leaves, red stems and small white flowers, and makes an agreeable clump, with the purple flowers of Thalictrum rising above it.  I have never noticed it set seed, and have not dug up and thrown away any roots.  All I did last year was cut it down in autumn, and throw the prunings into the compost, where they succeeded in rooting.  Given that they were not in compost, merely surrounded with other green waste collected at around the same time, and that they were never watered, that is quite an achievement.  In fact, it makes me think that under some circumstance Persicaria virginiana could be a rather terrifying weed.  I potted up four of the largest clumps, but had to admit to myself that I would never find a use for all of them.

nature notes

The birds fall silent in August.  If I didn't know that they do this every year, I'd be worried that something had happened to them.  As it is, I know that the breeding season is pretty much over, they have stopped defending their territories, and are skulking about as unobtrusively as possible while they moult.  Come autumn they will reappear, bright and shiny.

While the garden birds have almost disappeared, the wild geese are becoming more visible.  Small flocks have started flying past, honking, and this morning a line of them came over as I was letting the chickens into their run, not calling much, but so low that I could hear the beat of their wings.

I saw more ladybirds today than on any previous day this year.  Not that I was counting, but I had a distinct impression of ladybird, scuttling around on the mulch in the beds, and hopping on to my hand as I pruned.  It was a dreadful spring for them, according to the papers.  I think the cold weather meant that there was a shortage of prey for the nymphs.

Butterfly numbers are building up, too.  I am not good at butterfly identification.  I know peacocks, commas, and that's about it.  I can hazard a guess at speckled wood, and red admiral if I think hard about it, but they are not my field.  There were so many white ones fluttering over the Italian garden today, that use of the word 'cloud' would almost have been justified.  Do they emerge in mass hatchings?  I have a feeling that in the hierarchy of butterfly spotting, white ones do not score very highly, in the same way that gulls do not have the same status as ducks in the eyes of birdwatchers.  The white ones trouble me vaguely because of their association with damage to cabbages, but we don't have any cabbages.

The butterflies like the lavender in the front garden, and the buddleia in the back, as do the bumblebees.  The act of sticking a bumblebee identification chart on my kitchen cupboard door has not been enough to make me any better at identifying bumblebees, either, but I'm glad to see them.  As well as lavender and buddleia, they are very partial to agapanthus, and a rogue oregano which seeded itself among the asters in the back garden was thick with them.  The pink oregano flowers are intrinsically pretty, quite apart from their wildlife value, and given the plant seems to co-exist happily with the asters and flowers before they do, I think I might deliberately add some more.

Wasps have started coming into the house, though they have not been aggressive.  As their breeding season comes to an end, their thoughts turn to sweet stuff, a last taste of the good life before they die.  Most will die come the autumn,  only the queens will survive the winter.  There is a wasp nest under one of the shrubs in the long bed, right by where I want to plant out a couple of shrubs and an iris.  It will die out by itself, given a few more weeks, but I do really need to get on with the work.  One of the shrubs I want to plant is viciously prickly, and keeps falling over in its pot at every breath of wind, and I'm getting fed up with picking it up again.  Yesterday it fell on a blameless Darmera peltata and broke one of its leaves off.  I put on my protective bee clothing and sprayed wasp nest killer down the hole.  Poor wasps.  If only they didn't sting and just fluttered around like the butterflies they would be safe.

on the trail of the hemp-leaved hollyhock

I called in again today at the Beth Chatto nursery to pick up a plant which I admired yesterday, but held off buying until I'd found out a little about its cultivation requirements and habits.  It was an erect member of the mallow family, with slender grey leaves that put me vaguely in mind of Caryopteris, and flowers of a clear pink, about the size of a two pence piece.  The bed label with its name on had gone missing, and while I thought it was very pretty, I wondered if it would be a long-lived occupant of the garden, or keep itself going by seeding.  Hollyhocks are not the longest lasting plants, and nowadays I'm unwilling either to pay for things, or spend the time planting them, that are likely to disappear forever without trace at the end of the season, or fade away through the course of the next year.

There was a large patch of the mystery charmer in the gravel garden on the way out, and I saw that it was Althaea cannabina.  Back home I turned in confidence to Christopher Lloyd's Garden Flowers, but he had nothing to say on the subject, passing straight from Alstromeria to Amaryllis. That was not entirely encouraging, given he had an eye for a good plant (and was a friend of Beth Chatto).  His books have a great knack of telling you what you need to know, be it how to propagate something, a warning about its lack of hardiness, or a blistering condemnation of its tediousness for the fifty weeks of the year when it is not in flower.  Was his omission of Althaea cannabina a calculated slight on the plant's merits?  Or merely that at 384 pages he was running out of space?

The Royal Horticultural Society's Encyclopedia of Perennials was more helpful.  Althaea were described as tough, reliable, very colourful and generally trouble-free, which sounded hopeful. There was a physical description of A. cannabina, from which I gathered that the clump in Beth Chatto's dry garden was not reaching its full potential height in those conditions, but the book said nothing about the species' longevity, or whether it would spread by seeding and so keep itself going.  It was said to come from northwest Africa and southeast and central Europe, making it sound not necessarily the hardiest thing in the world.

Turning to the internet, Chiltern Seeds (so it could be grown from seed, though whether it would set viable seed in the UK climate or with only one plant remained unclear) described it as follows:

Deserving of a prominent site in the garden is this light and airy plant from the Mediterranean. With 5-lobed, hairy, green leaves, it bears in summer long, waving, flowering stems, many to a plant, each bearing several axilliary clusters of pinkish-lavender blooms with purple-red stamens. Whilst obviously related, no-one is going to mistake this plant for a Hollyhock. One little extra - for those wishing to play with their chemistry sets, this plant yields a useful fibre. 5-6 ft.

A typical Chiltern Seeds catalogue entry, that, with that Yoda-esque sentence inversion, and the snippet of information thrown in about a practical use of the plant.  I love the Chiltern Seeds Catalogue, one of the fullest and most idiosyncratic you will find anywhere.  I used to eagerly anticipate the annual arrival of their distinctive long, thin book around the New Year, before the information all went on line and I could see what was new any time I wanted.  However, they didn't mention whether Althaea cannabina was likely to be a durable inhabitant of my garden.

The BBC Gardeners' World site was another that came up near the top of my search, but their description of Althaea cannabina had a distinct familiarity:

This light and airy plant from the Mediterranean deserves of a prominent site in the garden. It is grown for its attractive, five-lobed, hairy, green leaves and pinkish-lavender blooms with purple-red stamens that appear throughout summer. Whilst obviously related, no-one is going to mistake this plant for a hollyhock.

Now where have I heard those phrases before?  Methinks I do not need anti-plagiarism software to detect that somebody is copying someone else.  I know which party my money is on.

Wikipedia gave an average height of 40 - 200 centimetres.  I am still not sure whether that means anything at all, but it is certainly not informative in the sense of information being that which reduces uncertainty.  Or at least, it is not much more useful than being told that a plant is larger than a lawn daisy, but smaller than an oak tree.  A nursery I'd never heard of described Althaea cannabina as being easy and incredibly robust.  Plant World Seeds, a supplier I have used and found pretty sensible, praised its late flowering season and gave instructions for germinating the seeds but didn't comment on its persistence in the garden.

Finally, Plants for a Future confirmed that it was hardy to zone 4 and not frost tender (I should think not.  Zone 4 is pretty damn cold), that it would grow in heavy or light soil, wet or dry, acid or alkaline, was easy to divide, and was self-fertile, meaning that it should set viable seed starting with one plant.  The only thing it seemed to resent was shade.  Sold to the lady at the back.  So today as I was passing by I went and bought one plant.  If all goes well I should have more in due course.  It is a light and airy thing, and I can imagine it dotted through the island bed in the back garden, along with the Verbena bonariensis.  That's a short lived charmer which seeds itself so merrily, at least on my soil, that I always have it.

helping out

Last week I generously volunteered the Systems Administrator to cut a friend's hedge.  She was being hassled by the council, because it had grown out over the pavement.  It was really not encroaching very much, no more than lots of other hedges and shrubs in Wivenhoe, and I agreed with her that the council were being unreasonable in imposing such a tight deadline for her to reduce it.  She doesn't even like the hedge, and wants to have it removed, along with some conifers, to create more light and space in her garden and reduce the root competition for her vegetables, but the council said it couldn't wait until then.  Neither she nor her partner are very happy using large power tools outside, and their local jobbing gardener had quoted a hundred quid for the job.  I said that was ridiculous, and that the SA could do it for them.

She was embarrassed in case I thought she'd been angling for the offer, which I didn't.  I just thought there was no point in her paying that much money for a job that would take the SA no more than a couple of hours, and probably significantly less, given that we have a hedge trimmer and a chainsaw.  It's not as though the hedge even needed to be faced up beautifully into a level surface, when it's destined for the chop anyway.

The main reason why the hedge is still there is that they need planning permission to remove it and install a fence in its place.  I found that even more preposterous than the idea of paying a hundred pounds to have the wretched thing cut.  I thought that putting up a normal domestic garden fence, in a road that is not in a conservation area, where none of the houses are listed buildings or anything like that, would be the sort of thing you could do under presumed consent, but no, you need planning permission.  I could see that if somebody took up breeding budgerigars and wanted to cover their entire garden with a shanty town of aviaries built out of assorted recycled materials, or proposed to construct a quarter scale replica of the Mittal tower, from the heights of which they could leer down into their neighbours' gardens, then they ought to have to obtain planning permission first, but putting up a six foot designed for the purpose larchlap garden fence, like you can buy in B&Q?

It is described by Colchester Borough Council as 'The carrying out of operations within the curtilage of an existing dwellinghouse, for the purpose ancillary to the enjoyment of the dwellinghouse as such, or the erection or construction of gates, fences, walls, or other means of enclosure along the boundary of the curtilage of an existing dwellinghouse' and it will set you back one hundred and seventy two pounds.  Bonkers.  I suppose the trouble is that since council funding is under pressure, they are raking in fees where they can get them, from parking fines and planning.  Of course Colchester Borough Council could manage its finances more sensibly, for example by not wasting money on half-cocked schemes to semi-pedestrianise the High Street.

This morning was hedge cutting day, the weather being fine, and it didn't take very long.  Our friends helped rake up the bits.  I didn't go, because I was meeting another friend for coffee.  We originally met through beekeeping, but have since bonded through a joint enthusiasm for wildlife, well-made craft objects, pets, and the discovery that we shared a similar degree of mildy bolshy libertarianism.  I hadn't seen her since April, and we spent a happy morning at the Beth Chatto gardens, exchanging news of our bees, her bloodthirsty cat, currently wearing a bucket on its head since its latest battle with some other creature larger and more heavily armed than itself, and the antics of her children.  Her daughter has taken up taxidermy, and she currently has a stock of dead rabbits, a baby woodpecker and a stoat in her deep freezer, though the daughter has been told she can't have more than one drawer to store her future subjects.  She has a fox somewhere, but that is in somebody else's freezer, though my friend had to restrain herself the other day from salvaging a muntjac that had been hit by a car.  Taxidermy is becoming rather popular (I suppose that is why David Sedaris has been regaling the R4 audience with the story of how he bought a stuffed owl for his boyfriend's Valentines Day present) and my friend's daughter was offered ninety pounds for a stuffed mole playing a miniature harmonica.

A narrative is shaped by what is left out as much as what is included.  I didn't go and help with the hedge cutting, because I was meeting another friend for coffee.  I hadn't seen her since April, because she has been otherwise occupied while her husband undergoes treatment for cancer.  He's already had one bout a few years ago, treated with a bone marrow transplant, but relapsed over last winter.  This is his second round of chemo.  Sessions are every four weeks, and he feels sick virtually all the time.  He has one more to go, and soon they will go for the post-treatment scan, and discover how much the cancer has retreated.  With any luck, it will have reduced quite a lot, and they will have a few more years of something approaching normal life before the next relapse. At some point I suppose chemo will no longer do any good, or he will be too weakened to tolerate another course.

We didn't spend much time talking about his illness.  She has lived with that practically constantly since the diagnosis in February, and been worried about the possibility of relapse since he started getting rather tired again last autumn.  I took my cue from my friend, and this morning's outing was a short respite for her from being the carer for a cancer sufferer.  Or at least, I hope it was, and that she didn't go home fuming that I hadn't shown the appropriate degree of curiosity and sympathy.  It's difficult to know what one is supposed to do, but being too shy to see someone because you don't know what to say must be the worst.

a working day

I arrived at work to find that last week we were burgled.  Late at night thieves broke the door to the gardeners' shed off its hinges by driving a car into it, jemmied open the box where the power tools are locked away, and took them, all smashed and grabbed in less than five minutes.  The boss heard the shed alarm going and went out to investigate but missed the intruders, and now says he should have parked his Landrover across the gate, first off, so that they couldn't leave the property. It is probably better for his personal safety that he didn't manage to intercept them.  The police were impressed at the quantity of locks, but it was all in vain.  Chainsaw, strimmers, hedge trimmers, all gone, with the exception of the chain saw on a pole, which must have been too unwieldy for them.  The boss holds out little hope of seeing them again, although as his name and postcode are deeply scratched into every one, nobody except an out-and-out crook would want them.

It was thus that the older gardener returned from his holiday to be greeted by the news that he had virtually no gardening tools, until lunchtime when boxes of new ones were delivered, but that left him free to mend the puncture on the boss's tractor, which the boss wants urgently.  Also he noticed that the water tank for the irrigation system was not filling up, which is more than I did, and fixed it by dint of switching the pump off and switching it on again (you see, it doesn't just work for computers).

The young gardener and the woman who normally works behind the scenes potting and weeding helped with the watering, and I thought we'd made a pretty good fist of it, but by mid-day pots seemed to be drying out again, and I ran several mercy missions with cans of water.  The woman who works in the office was back from her holiday too, and between us we managed to deal with the e-mails, though quite a few of the replies were really circuitous ways of saying Dunno, have to get back to you on that when the manager's here.  Lucky old manager, he is going to have a big pile of paper to get through.

I spent a fair part of the day filling gaps on the ornamental display tables and rearranging some of my colleagues' less satisfactory (in my view) plant combinations.  They still have four days when I'm not there to mess them up again, but I should have the last word, since I'm working next weekend and the manager will be back on the Monday.  It rained briefly at one point, and I had to take refuge in the climber tunnel and cut excess growth off the jasmines and Holboellia.  It goes against the grain to cut off nice healthy stems, but people won't buy them if they have grown into each other.

My young colleague who was supposed to be doing the cafe was suffering from the after-effects of food poisoning, and there was inexplicably no cake.  I was relieved when the owner returned, bearing cake boxes, and took charge of the tea room.

At the end of it all I just had to buy a fig for the Italian garden, a variety called 'Ice Crystal', with enormously pretty deeply cut leaves.  I never saw it until last week, when I was instantly seized with covetous longing, but thought I'd better go home and measure the space first.  It is new and rare, according to the BlueBell Nursery.  I'll be taking a chance growing it in the open ground, since BlueBell and the boss's label both talk about it being suitable for a wall, but our gravel is so free-draining I feel it's worth a try.  If it is occasionally nipped back in a hard winter that won't be a catastrophe, as long as it's not killed outright or severely maimed, since the space I've found for it is not as large as the twenty feet that Bluebell suggest it will need at maturity, or even the boss's more modest estimate of twelve feet.

honey jars and headlight wipers

Did you know that it is illegal to re-use glass honey jars?  Unless you are a beekeeper, you probably didn't.  As somebody who grew up in the era of doorstep milk, delivered in glass bottles which were rinsed and put back out for the milkman to return to the dairy, I thought this was preposterous, and said so.  The difference, according to one of the local professional beekeepers, is that milk bottles are made of a different grade of glass, intended for re-use, and that honey jars can chip too easily.

Now I would have thought that the solution to that problem was to apply a modicum of sense, not to mention marketing nous, and not re-use chipped or cracked jars.  Undamaged jars still seem fine to me, as long as they have been through the dishwasher and are squeaky clean.  But the law forbids it.  I presume this applies only to honey for sale, not for your own personal consumption, since I have not yet heard of any law prohibiting the use of chipped or scratched drinking vessels in the home.  Maybe there will be one soon, and the sanitary inspectors will come and confiscate our collection of elderly bistro glasses.

I assume that if second hand jars are outlawed for honey, they are equally illegal for jam.  All that marmalade at WI markets and school fund raising fetes is being sold in unlawful packaging, although the perpetrators, consumers and authorities seem uniformly blind to the infringement.  If anything, cracked jars are more dangerous when jam is involved than when it's only honey, since jam is sometimes bottled while still extremely hot, and the glass could break, whereas you should never heat honey too much.  Overheating honey not merely spoils the flavour, but produces chemicals that are toxic to humans.  I think they are only generated in small quantities, so a plot for a detective story in which a scheming wife poisons her husband by slipping teaspoonfuls of overheated honey into his food is not going to be a runner, but nonetheless there are laws about permitted levels.

I heated my honey and wax mixture by the less scientific method of leaving it overnight in a ceramic dish on the simmer plate of the Aga.  A beekeeping friend said that as long as it was only heated to a temperature at which you could leave your hand on the heat source and not have to pull it away, that was not too hot, and while I am not sure where the Systems Administrator's food thermometer is or how to use it, I do have a fully functioning hand at the end of my arm.  By this morning the honey was melted but the wax wasn't, which was the idea, so I ladled the gloop of wax and honey into the kitchen sieve over a basin and the honey dripped through, put the honey through a finer sieve to remove more of the small particles of wax, and jarred it up.  In total I got three jars from the heated gloop, just over half a jar from the wax cappings that spent the night in a colander on the Aga dripping through into a bowl, and just under half a jar from scraping out the extractor.  The drippings and scrapings aren't the clearest honey in the world, but taste very nice, and will certainly do for cooking.  When you think how much work the bees have done to make even a teaspoon of honey, you don't want to waste it.

Then there was a phenomenal quantity of washing up, what with the extractor, and umpteen bowls, and plates, and the jam funnel used for filling the jars, and the sieves.  And I had to wash the floor again.  Next time you see local honey for sale at four or five pounds a jar, do not bristle with indignation that it is so expensive.  Marvel at how cheap it is, given the work involved.

The kitchen got extremely hot while I was doing all this, but I had to shut the door to keep the cats out, and didn't dare open the window in case bees started turning up.  I put the supers outside late yesterday evening, leaving them in the wheelbarrow in a corner where they wouldn't cause a nuisance.  By the time I got up this morning they were thick with bees, scavenging out the last drops of honey that I didn't get.  Some beekeepers put them back on the hive, but I'm afraid I was too idle to suit up, walk all the way to the other end of the meadow, and disturb the bees.  They found them quickly enough anyway.  By lunchtime the cloud of bees was diminishing, and this evening I'll stack them away back in the garage, sandwiched between layers of newspaper.  There was a year when I naively left the wet supers just outside the front door, and the crowd of bees was so offputting that I ended up using the back door for the rest of the day.  The cats didn't really fancy the cat door either.  I now know not to do that.

Addendum  We got the jaguar back from the garage.  It turns out that if the headlight wipers on a car have failed, you can't merely remove them.  The law since March 2013 states that if they were originally fitted to a vehicle, they must remain in place, and must work.  This has caught people out who have modified their cars, and then found them failing the MoT because they no longer have their headlight wipers.  In order to fix ours, the garage had to remove the front bumper, so it was not a small job.  They didn't charge as much as they might have, so perhaps although they have despaired by now of ever selling the Systems Administrator a new one, they calculated that still a regular service customer was a customer in these hard times, and that if they didn't meet us halfway, the SA might start taking the jag to a non-specialist, who would not be so inconveniently knowledgeable about which models did and did not originally have headlight wipers.

Honey jars, headlight wipers.  The trouble with having too many civil servants employed at the centre (as distinct from teachers, nurses, firemen and people on the front line delivering a useful service to society) is not just that we have to pay their wages.  It is that they have to fill their days and justify their existences.  Inventing stupid regulations is one way of doing it.

weeds and honey

It wasn't as hot today, and a brisk breeze was blowing, strong enough to make me glad that nowadays I don't have to spend half of August bouncing across the Thames estuary or the southern reaches of the north sea in a sailing boat.  I carried on weeding the gravel in the turning circle, and cutting the old flowering stems out of the Euphorbia characias.  It was much more comfortable than yesterday, though at some point either the cut end of a Euphorbia stem managed to work its way inside my shirt and touch my stomach, or I was bitten by an insect, because at the end of it I found a livid red and purple spot just above my diaphragm.  That's another reason why I'm not as fond of high summer as I am of other seasons.  Bees and butterflies and stag beetles are great, but there are so many other things around at this time of year that want to sting or bite you.

I weeded most of the patio, using the Sneeboer tool the Systems Administrator kindly bought me at the Chelsea Flower Show.  I am never quite sure whether it is the patio or the terrace.  Terrace sounds pretentious, although technically it is one.  The ground next to it drops away a good metre, behind a retaining wall.  But it doesn't feel like a patio.  There are no patio doors leading to it, and although it has a bench where we occasionally sit and drink coffee, it is not regularly used for dining or recreation.  In a linguistic world where we have a sitting room, not a lounge, containing a sofa, not a settee, it feels incongruous to have a patio.  Anyway, it is an area of rather uneven artificial stone paving slabs (I think that settles it, it's a patio) at the southern end of the house, which keeps the daffodil lawn at a respectful distance from the building, and is mainly used as a circulation route to get from the front to the back garden, though it is a pleasant place to sit away from the easterly winds, with a good view down the garden and out into the countryside.

At the moment it has rather a lot of ant nests underneath.  I am not so keen on ants.  I swept up the sand they'd excavated, and the fallen leaves from the Eleagnus hedge, and raked weeds out of the gaps between the slabs.  The Sneeboer tool for raking out the gaps between slabs is a wonder. It is made of steel, extremely sharp, with a wooden handle, and feels reassuringly rugged.  It is sensibly designed without any extraneous sharp points so that when it is lying down it is harmless, and you can't accidentally kneel on a cutting corner.  I have had disappointing experiences with English manufactured wooden and stainless steel hand tools, that looked exceedingly cute then fell to bits rapidly in use, either because the joint between the metal and the handle was poorly designed, or because the steel was of low quality.  I have great hopes of the Sneeboer.  Christopher Lloyd swore by them, and Great Dixter still sell Sneeboer tools in their catalogue.

Then it was time to extract the honey I took off the hive of little dark bees.  There is a great preamble to extracting honey, cleaning the kitchen floor so that it is clear of cat fur, keeping the cats out of the kitchen (not so easy when three want to go in there), finding the extractor, removing the revolving wire cage, washing and drying the constituent bits, reassembling it.  Finally I sliced the cappings off the first frame, and found that the honey had partially crystallised in the comb.

That was a real bind.  Honey from rape flowers is notorious for crystallising very quickly after the bees have collected it, but my bees don't normally go on rape, and I can generally spin my honey crop out of the frames, when I get one.  Once the honey has set in the wax, you have two choices. You can give up, and feed it back to the bees, or you can scrape honey and wax together off the frames and heat them gently, until they both melt and separate.  I was dammed if I was giving up any honey, after the trouble I've gone to in the past two seasons with scarcely any crop to show for it.  I spun what I could, and began to scrape.  It is a slow, laborious and messy process, about as sticky as you would imagine.

The Systems Administrator arrived home from Lords before I'd finished, and was warned not to go in or anywhere near the kitchen, not while wearing the best going-to-Lords linen suit.  I have now got to the point where the tail end of what liquid honey there was is dripping through a fine plastic sieve, a process that goes more and more slowly as fragments of wax clog up the sieve, while a bowl of mixed wax and honey is sitting under tinfoil on the cool side of the Aga.  I don't know how long it will take to melt, since I don't normally have to do this, but the SA has been warned not to bank on being able to use the kitchen tomorrow for any cooking involving garlic or fried onions.

august is the cruellest month

August is a tricky month.  I try not to have favourite months, any more than parents should have favourite children.  Christopher Lloyd's favourite plant was this one, that he was looking at now, at this moment, and so it should be with months.  Enjoy each in turn for its own particular qualities, and do not wish your life away wanting the present month to be gone, so that it can be some other month.  That's the theory.  But August is difficult to love.

I once worked with somebody who seemed to live between holidays for the next holiday.  Given that she spent far longer at work than she did away, this seemed a waste.  Mind you, the last time I saw her it was over a decade since she stopped working, and she had since qualified as a therapist, but wasn't seeing any clients.  When I asked why not, having done the training, she said she did not wish to commit to them, since once you had people under your care you couldn't just swan off and leave them, and if she had clients she would not be at liberty to go, should someone invite her somewhere exciting.  Nobody had invited her to stay with them in the Carribean or the south of France, however, and in the meantime she was not using her training.  Probably she didn't really want to.  She did let slip that she'd done it partly to understand herself.  Still, she could have done with the extra income.

So, it doesn't do to allow the potential delights of the future to interrupt the actual pleasures of the here and now.  But it is difficult not to feel that August is a fallow month, in which one merely marks time until productive life begins again in September.  It is so sticky, and dusty.  Breathing the humid air feels such an effort, it is impossible not to long sometimes for the cool, clean smell of the first days of autumn.  I shouldn't, of course.  I should be thrilled that I can sit out on the veranda in the evenings for a few more weeks, when I'll be huddled by the fire for so many months. The countryside looks dark and heavy, the garden sere and yellow after July's heatwave.  The flowers are not yet finished, the hydrangeas are just opening, and the asters still to come, where they have not shrivelled in the drought.  I ought to be delighting in each panicle of Hydrangea aspera, an elegant shrub as fine as any that spring has to offer, as fervently as I enjoyed the daffodils and primroses.  And I do like it, only part of me is itching for it to be time to chop down all the tatty foliage and tidy it away, and for the tired, dull leaves to fall from the trees.  I hanker for the crisp, pristine starkness of winter, the borders neatly trimmed and mulched, and the clean air slipping easily into my lungs.  I remember what it was like not to feel sticky, in fact not to sweat at all, and not to feel lethargic, but instead have muscles primed to go, snug in their layers of fleece.

It is very ungrateful of me.  I'll have to remember how I felt in November, when I'm stuck inside for days on end by rain, and in February, when it snows, and for all the six months between the two equinoxes when the nights are more than twelve hours long.  When we give up trying to heat the sitting room for another winter and decamp to the study, I'll remind myself how nice it was on those hot August evenings, when the sitting room doors were always open, and I lay on a steamer chair outside while the Systems Administrator barbecued steaks.  It was very nice.  It was now.  Now is very nice.

It would be even nicer, if it were less humid.  And less dusty.

what do you do with a problem like eight egg whites?

I went to the dump this morning, and got petrol for the lawn tractor, which ran out of fuel and ground to a halt by the bonfire heap the other day.  There was a cloud of black smoke arising from behind Clacton as I returned, and I hoped it was from a controlled fire, and not somebody's field of barley going up.  I wouldn't have chosen today for a burn myself: it was already hot by half past ten, with a strong breeze, for one day only, a hot wind from the south.

By afternoon it was too hot to work outside, and I retreated to the kitchen.  The strawberries and milk left unused in the wake of Tuesday's power cut had not gone off, and strawberry gelato beckoned.  The second half of the mixture is still churning, but the teaspoonful I ate from the first half as I put it in the freezer was very nice.  It is made with custard instead of cream, using whole milk and eight egg yolks, which is a lot, unless you happen to have twice as many laying hens as people in your household, and a surplus of eggs.  You make a rather sweet custard using yolks only, mix it with strawberries squished up in a blender, freeze it, and voila.  Strawberry ice cream.

That leaves the question of what to do with eight egg whites, other than flush them down the sink, which seems a waste.  Checking through my books and recipe file, most biscuit and meringue recipes using egg whites required two, so I put them two at a time into four separate bowls when I broke the eggs.  So far two are on their way to being meringues (whisk the egg whites until stiff, add two ounces of sugar per white a spoonful at a time, dry out in a very cool oven and voila again. The meringues of my childhood had fragments of rice paper stuck to the bottom, but nowadays I have discovered baking parchment.  I don't even know if you can still buy rice paper).  Two more went into some macaroons, Nigella's recipe, mix 150 grammes of ground almond with 200 grammes of caster sugar, stir in the egg whites, stir in a scant tablespoon of plain flour and some almond essence, dollop out in teaspoonfuls on a tray and cook in a cool oven.  She says 160 degrees, but the Aga doesn't do temperatures between just below boiling and about 180, so the macaroons get cooked like the meringues, for a long time in a cool oven.

The other two bowls of egg whites are still in the fridge.  Nigella suggests freezing them, but my suspicion is that in nine out of ten cases that is just a delaying tactic which ends in flushing them down the sink at a later date.  I was thinking of coconut buns (Good Housekeeper circa 1979) and a Sophie Grigson recipe for meringue-derived biscuits with hazelnuts in that I cut out of the Evening Standard a long time ago.  They'll have to wait until tomorrow, though, as I've run out of space in the oven.  The only snag is that we will never eat all this sweet stuff, which will contain in aggregate over a pound of sugar, but I'm sure my colleagues and nephew and nieces will help out.

Taking sole possession of the kitchen for the afternoon gave me another chance to work through some of the new things on my iPod that the Systems Administrator is not so keen on.  Africa to Appalachia was sitting on my Amazon wish list for a long time before a cheap second hand copy popped up.  I don't even know what it was doing on the wish list.  Well, obviously I put it there, but I no longer remember what radio programme I was listening to when I did, or if I read a review. Jayme Stone (he is a him and no, I never heard of him either) is a Canadian banjo player, who has made an album with a Malian musician called Mansa Sissoko on kora and vocals, sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

That is probably enough to send you wailing for the exit, but the banjo is a fine instrument, greatly under-rated and the butt of cruel jokes (What do you call a banjo in a skip?  A start).  I grew up listening (sometimes) to the music of Hedy West on vinyl (now re-released by Topic as a CD, I must get it) and have always liked the banjo.  I like what I've heard of Malian music, mainly Ali Farka Toure.  I am inherently suspicious of fusion music, but thought I must have put Africa to Appalachia on the list for some reason.  It is great, a really good album.  Africa and Appalachia meet very naturally, and seem to get on like a house on fire, Africa to the fore on most tracks.