autumn leaves

The leaves are turning.  We've been exclaiming to each other for a few days what wonderful shades of red the maples in pots have gone.  Yesterday afternoon, with the low sun streaming on them, they looked positively luminous.  The field maples in the hedge are going butter yellow in irregular patches, and the vase shaped crab apple Malus tschonoskii is assuming bright shades of amber, though its leaves don't last very long before they drop.  The birches are turning pale yellow, and only the willows along the ditch refuse to play, dropping their leaves without any attempt at an autumn show.

The oak trees are more sombre.  They have started to turn a muted shade of brown, but don't have any truck with these bright bonfire shades, whereas driving through Elmstead Market today I noticed a tree on the verge turning to a beautiful medley of dark oranges and yellows.  It has divided leaves, but is not a common ash, and I should park up there sometime and wander along with my tree book to see if I can identify it.  Black walnut?

It's a good game, once you know what a local tree is, watching how it behaves through the seasons. If you happen to see it close up for any reason, at a point when it is doing something characteristic that allows you to work out what kind of tree it is, then you can give it a quick glance each time you drive past, or a longer one if stuck in traffic, and start to get the feel of its habit, the shape of its naked branches when it's out of leaf, what its fruits are and whether it suckers at the base.  So many keys to trees focus mainly on leaves and twigs, it's easy to forget the whole tree.

BBC Four showed a documentary a couple of weeks ago about a year in the life of an oak tree, which is still available on the iPlayer for another sixteen days.  It's worth watching, if you like trees, with some clever time lapse photography, and an impressive and painstaking excavation of the entire root system of a young oak, but I didn't agree with the presenter when he described the tree in winter as looking dead.  A healthy oak in winter is so clearly alive, with its ordered network of branches dividing to small twigs, each terminating in a cluster of solid buds.  Equating leaves with life, and the absence of leaves with death, is anthropomorphising the tree.

It's a shame we don't have room to plant any more trees at home.  Indeed, some of the ones we do have are too close together, while some that I tried to squeeze into particularly barren and inhospitable corners have died.  But no amount of space is enough, if you really want to plant trees. The Hillier gardens cover 180 acres, admittedly not all given over to the arboretum, and if they had more space I'm sure they could easily fill it with good, garden worthy species and without repeating themselves.  Maybe we should drag ourselves away from the garden at home and pay a visit to Marks Hall, now the leaves are turning.

substitute speaker

I was out again this evening, but home at a rather more civilised hour.  About three days ago I got a phone call from the chairman of a Colchester garden society, who had been given my details by somebody I know at another garden society.  He had heard that I did talks, and if so would I be able to do one at short notice?  Next Tuesday?  The speaker he'd originally booked was in hospital, and the replacement had called in twenty-four hours later with laryngitis.

I offered to do a woodland charity talk.  It's a few months since I've done one, after a rash of activity in the summer, and in the faintly terrifying two page letter detailing the role of the volunteer speaker, sent to me by my new Task Manager, was the requirement to market my talks. Since receiving it I have done precisely no marketing, being busy with other things and working on the basis that some bookings would probably turn up in due course, as they had fairly consistently over the past decade.  So I thought I had better seize the moment and promote the charity.

The organiser agreed.  I think that with three days to go until he would be faced with a hut full of garden club members and no entertainment for them, that if I'd offered to do a presentation on eelworms he'd have still said yes.  A talking person armed with a projector and screen willing to stand at the front of the room for an hour and make any kind of horticulture related noises would probably have done it.  But people like trees and ash disease is topical, while autumn is a fine time to go for a walk in the woods, all those nice piles of leaves to kick up, and the low sunlight glinting on  cobwebs and holly berries.

They turned out to be a very nice audience, though the hut was a tiny bit chilly because the previous group had ignored the instructions NOT to turn the heaters off, but only to turn them down to the lowest temperature setting.  The pilot lights, once extinguished, were very reluctant to ignite again, and the caretaker had to sit on the floor clicking the starter button repeatedly, then do it again when the flame cut out five minutes later, and so on.  Still, I could not actually smell gas so thought we were probably not all about to be blown to kingdom come.

Over the tea after the talk someone came and asked me for my details as she would like to book me for her ladies' group some time next year.  Bingo, I have done some marketing.  And feel a vague warm glow of virtue at having helped the club out of a fix, and slightly enhanced the image of my contact at the other garden club, who is a thoroughly nice bloke.  Clubs and societies sometimes pay less to charity volunteers than they do to speakers who are doing it for the money, maybe justifying it on the grounds that after all the charity is being given a chance to promote itself, and anyway it helps balance the books.  Tonight's donation, however, came in at a commercial rate, so I will be able to send the cheque off in triumph to the new Task Manager.  I'm on the case, you see, even if I haven't visibly done anything since June.

late post

There is barely going to be a blog today, because I have only just got back from the Colchester Folk Club and it's a quarter to midnight.  If I haven't pressed the Publish button in the next fifteen minutes then that's it, it will be tomorrow.  Why the folk club insists on arranging its affairs so that by the time I've dropped my father off in Wivenhoe and got home it is the middle of the night, especially as they meet on a Monday which is not a traditional late night given people have to be at work in the morning, is a source of perpetual mystery to me.

So my review of Nancy Kerr and James Fagan will have to wait until tomorrow.  Maybe not even then if something else catches my eye in the meantime.

As I drove up to the anti-rabbit gate just now a large and fat rabbit ran away into our neighbours' field, on the outside of the gate, proof that at least sometimes it does some good.  It is rather demoralising otherwise to think of the faff we go to trotting down to open it in the mornings before the postman can arrive, and going out in the rain to shut it at night, when there's no sign of marauding bunnies to demonstrate that it is at least protecting the garden from something.

dreams of lilies

I planted my Martagon lily bulbs, and they were neither shrivelled nor mouldy after spending a few days in their plastic bags.  I can see why the organisers of the lily study day were so keen that we buy bulbs from a specialist supplier.  I haven't much experience of growing lilies, not feeling I had the right garden conditions and being cautious about the pollen's toxicity to cats, but compared to the few bulbs I've had from garden centres and DIY stores, these were a revelation.

Lily bulbs are made up of layers of overlapping scales, without a surrounding outer jacket of any kind.  Compared to tulips with their tunics, let alone daffodils or hyacinths with their papery outer layers and general air of solidity, lily bulbs are fragile.  They are prone to drying out, and to scales being knocked off.  The scales of my Martagons were held tightly shut like a globe artichoke head, and out of the whole order of twenty bulbs I managed to break just one scale off one unlucky bulb. Compared to my past experiences of shop bought lilies with their scales gaping apart, sometimes with shavings of sawdust tucked between them, these were different plants.  They had roots too, which appeared to be alive and functioning rather than dead and dry appendages.

I marked the position of each bulb with a bamboo cane, which looks mad at the moment, but I will need a reminder of where they are.  The planting instructions warned that Martagons hate being moved, and that I might not see any growth in the next season, but that would not mean that they were dead, they could be establishing their new root systems.  In fact, the leaflet that came with the lilies said confidently that they would be busy growing roots, but it will be hard to remain entirely optimistic if nothing comes up.  So many things could go wrong.  The soil might be too acid.  Slugs and snails might eat them, or voles.  Or muntjac, or rats.  It might be too dry.  It could be too wet.  Or too dark.

Still, the only way to find out whether I can grow them is to try.  Fiona Edmond had some fine stands under trees at Green Island Gardens when we visited last year, and I can't believe her soil is materially less acid than mine.  I chose my spot carefully, rejecting the upper reaches of the slope where the ground was still dust dry under the top half inch, even though we've had enough rain recently to turn the top lawn squelchy.  The area just inside the wood does not have true woodland soil, a legacy of earth being shifted around when the house was built, and I didn't want to put my lilies in dubious subsoil.  A little further down the hill the earth suddenly became dark and crumbly, looking much more promising from a lily's point of view.

If they flower, and if they set seed, and if they like it in the end of the wood, they should spread, and I could harvest some seed and help them along.  Martagon bulbs take several years to reach flowering size, one reason why they cost what they do, but I'd feel happier about testing the drier edges of the wood with young plants I'd raised myself than bulbs I'd paid up to four pounds each for. Likewise, I thought I'd better try out the growing conditions with the ordinary species before going for any of the beautiful and expensive named varieties.

My supplier in this adventure is HW Hyde and Sons.  So far they seem to have been doing their bit beautifully, so it's down to me now.

harps ancient and modern

I went last night to the Colchester Arts Centre to see Seckou Keita, a Senegalese kora player.  I'd barely heard of him until I read in the arts centre brochure that he was coming to Colchester, didn't have a very clear notion of what Senegalese music was like, and had only a hazy idea of what a kora was, but the idea of a twenty-two stringed African harp was irresistible.  Not to the Systems Administrator, who is less enthusiastic about world music and who needs to want to see something at the arts centre very, very badly to be willing to spend an evening sitting on their chairs, but a friend agreed to come.

The kora is absolutely fascinating.  The body is made out of a gourd, faced with an animal skin on one side, standing on little legs like a stool, with a long wooden neck coming out of the top, a bridge protruding horizontally from the side with the skin, two long pegs on top that the musician holds lightly to steady the instrument, and the twenty-two strings running between the neck and the bridge in a great fan.  The tuning of the strings is like nothing else I have heard, and I got the impression that to switch the key or pitch of whatever you were playing or singing you changed instruments, as with a penny whistle.  One of the two kora on stage last night actually had two sets of strings on separate necks, but I never saw Seckou Keita play on more than one set within a single tune  (I'm not utterly sure about that, though, since unluckily we got two very tall as well as broad people sitting in front of us).

The rhythms of Seckou Keita's music were beautiful and strange and complicated, and not a million miles away from what I've heard of Malian music, which was not surprising since the countries are near neighbours.  The sound of the kora was wonderful and strange as well, though of course what we were listening to was the electric kora.  The unamplified arrangement of calabash and strings would barely reach to the back row of the arts centre, as was demonstrated when it briefly became unplugged.  I enjoyed his whole performance very much, while realising that I still didn't know anything about how he fitted into the broad scene of Senegalese music, and I had no idea whether I was listening to the folk-rock version, like a Senegalese Fairport Convention, or more of a Watersons hard core traditional take.

A twenty-two stringed instrument based on a large pumpkin does take quite a lot of tuning, and as Seckou Keita tended to his strings he told us that in his country tuning up was part of the performance.  I should think it is.  He was playing a westernised concert version of the kora, with metal tuning pegs, but in the accompanying background video the traditional instruments just had plaited leather wrapped around the necks to support the strings.  They must need tuning about every two minutes.

The koras were the second interesting musical instruments I've seen this week.  One of the exhibits in the British Museum's Celts exhibition was a medieval harp dating from around 1450, now sitting in splendid isolation in a large, ornate Victorian cabinet.  I was struck by how small it was, not even two feet high.  It was made of hornbeam, according to the museum label.  Hornbeam is a very close grained and dense wood, once used for making butcher's blocks and notorious for blunting carpenters' tools, and I wondered whether it was deliberately chosen for its density and if that contributed to the quality of the sound in some way.  Completely the opposite of a calabash, in any event.

It was quite a thought, trying to imagine where the harp might have played, before ending up as a family heirloom in a glass case, unstrung.  I'd have liked to see it with strings, even if they were left with no tension on them to avoid stressing the ancient frame.  It would have looked like a proper working instrument.  As it was, it looked mute and sad, stuck inside its elaborate cabinet. The koras, decorated with studwork and shining under the stage lights, were very much alive.

taking notes

It rained and drizzled all day.  Looking on the bright side, I've plenty of indoor jobs to be getting on with, and it's easier to discipline myself to do them when the outdoors looks so totally uninviting. But I hope the Martagon lilies aren't going mouldy in their bags.  Perhaps I should unpack them, but then they might dry out.  The rain is supposed to stop by tomorrow afternoon, and Sunday is forecast to be dry, so with any luck I'll be able to simply get on and plant them.  Of course if I were that worried about them I could have got on with it today, rain or no rain, but after my run of bad colds last winter I was reluctant to tempt fate crawling about in the damp.

The minutes of Wednesday's music society committee meeting were not really difficult, other than that the meeting covered all the right topics but not necessarily in the right order.  I decided to sacrifice real world running order in the interests of grouping the discussion points under the headings in the agenda, in case anybody ever wanted to refer to them ever again.  They probably won't.  Proper minutes are a good thing to have, in case of later debate over what it was that was agreed, and I would guess are a requirement of being registered charity, but I don't believe that half the members of the committee ever do more than skim through them.  When at each meeting the Chairman asks us if we agree the minutes of the last one, my reply is always that I believed them at the time when I wrote them.

The minutes secretary is potentially in a position of power.  It's my version of events being laid down for future reference, ready to be whipped out sometime next year when nobody can remember exactly what anybody said the previous October.  Since the music society committee is rather sensible, though, it is generally a purely theoretical power.  The most contentious thing I've recorded recently is who it was that offered to provide a sandwich lunch for a ten piece visiting German orchestra, and yesterday was mostly about various people updating the rest on ticket sales, changes to the programme and possible artists for next year's season.  About the most urgent thing we need to do is make sure the heating is turned on in the church for the first concert, since the verger is ill, and I scarcely got to write it was agreed (highlighted in bold type) at all.

A certain amount of lobbying goes on in committee meetings.  The member who likes jazz sought to establish a jazz concert as a regular extra event, to be staged in alternate years, while the member who is keen on education did the same for young musician's concerts, but upped the stakes and sought to instate one as an annual event.  The Chairman swerved giving an absolute commitment on either count, but so gracefully that you could easily have missed the fact that she hadn't actually said Yes.  I didn't like to lobby for more baroque music, suspecting that it was a minority taste and one already catered for by another local society, but couldn't resist slipping in a sly hint of a suggestion when emailing the draft minutes to the Chairman for comment.

There are two issues with staging concerts as a platform for young musicians.  One is the audience. Local people who are very happy to hear professional chamber groups with international careers performing conveniently on their doorsteps, saving them schlepping off to the Wigmore Hall or St John's Smith Square, are unaccountably less enthusiastic about giving up a Sunday afternoon to listen to an unknown fourteen year old, even if he has reached Grade 8 on the piano.  OK, he might be the next Stephen Hough and they saw him here first, but he might not be.  And the average performance slot in a young musician's concert lasts about three and a half minutes, so you need lots of them, and none of them have agents, so the Chairman has to negotiate with umpteen sets of parents and music teachers.

I have still not entirely recovered from listening to a quartet of small boys playing trombones at Dulwich College, but noblesse obliges, I shall be there, buoyed up by the thought of the Chairman's tiny scones at the cream tea afterwards.

music and history

I went up to London today (are there parts of the British Isles from which one goes down to London? North of Watford, perhaps).  Radio 3 record some of their lunchtime concerts at LSO St Lukes in Old Broad Street, and today's performance was by Florilegium, the opening concert in R3's first ever lunchtime concert series wholly dedicated to early music.  Well, that's what they say in the programme, though I don't really think of Handel as early music.  The theme of the series is music composed in London around the time that LSO St Lukes was built, and besides Handel we got Johann Christoph Pepush, Francesco Barsanti, and home grown composer John Bannister.  Bannister died in 1679 or thereabouts, and St Lukes was built between 1727 and 1733, but he squeezes in because he is thought to have been London's first ever concert promoter, charging people a shilling to hear performances in a room at a Whitefriars tavern.

I'd heard of Florilegium, but never seen them live before.  Now that I have I'd make the effort to see them again.  I rather think that the Suffolk Villages Festival booked them not very long ago, and I was too mean to pay the ticket price and too idle to drive to wherever it was they were performing.  Today's line up consisted of harpsichord, viola da gamba, violin, and their director alternating between flute and recorder, and they were great fun.  I love that kind of early eighteenth century music when it's done with a bit of bounce and panache, but it can be a bit twiddly diddly after a while, and an hour's worth is just right.  Today we got an hour and five because they gave a burst of Telemann as an encore, saying they weren't in a hurry if we weren't.

And the crypt cafe had millionaire's shortbread back on the menu, so I was happy on all counts. The only tiny blemish in the whole experience was that I found myself sitting behind a programme fiddler.  People who go to classical concerts should be made to swear a solemn oath when they buy tickets that they will not fiddle with their programme during the performance.  It is distracting to those sitting directly behind them to keep catching the flicker of moving white pages out of the corner of their eye, and creates an unfortunate impression that your fellow audience member might not be very interested, which detracts from the shared concert experience.  If you are not interested that's tough.  Just practice your best expression of polite neutrality.  It's bound to come in useful on other occasions, for weddings, speech days and so on.

From Old Street it's a short walk to the British Museum, whose exhibition about the Celts runs until the end of January, so you have ages to go and see it if you like the sound of it.  There are a lot of broaches, an awful lot of torcs, weapons, cauldrons, and a reconstruction of a Celtic chariot with a rather dinky leather suspension system.  I was pleased to discover that the first recorded Celtic stone  cross acquired the now trademark circle of stone because when it was initially made without it the cross arms fell off under their own weight.  I would really have liked to know how you put the torcs on.  Were they flexible enough to bend open enough to slip around the neck?  I couldn't see hinges on any of the British examples.

The trouble with interpreting Celtic history and culture is that so little is actually known about it. The purpose of the mysterious spoon with a hole in it may have been to drip liquid through the hole and use the pattern of the drops as a tool for divination but honestly, how d'you know?  The last section of the exhibition deals with the hokum cooked up about the Celts from the eighteenth century onwards and Celtic inspired trends in Victorian homewares and jewellery.  The Avebury stone circle predates any written reference to Druids by about two thousand years, by the way.

It's a good exhibition, though, and certainly worth seeing, and worth taking your time over because the details on much of the jewellery and pottery are quite faint and you need to look at them carefully to see them.  I don't think I ever did believe there was a homogeneous people called The Celts spread across modern day Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany, so the purpose of the exhibition to debunk that myth was a bit lost on me, and by the end of it I think my ideas of the Celts were still mainly derived from the novels of Rosemary Sutcliffe, but I enjoyed looking at the objects.

chilly days

Autumn is edging towards winter.  It's not there yet, and we still haven't put the central heating on, but the fire is lit in the sitting room after several attempts and much newspaper, because I forgot to buy firelighters when I was shopping and we only have one left, which the Systems Administrator is saving for later to light the stove in the study.  The fire eventually got going once we added a beeswax candle stub to the starter mix, but we need to get back into the habit of buying firelighters.  John, Susan, Titty and Roger may have managed with dry twigs and only one match, but we must have the wrong sort of twigs.

Tonight's supper is Chicken Marengo, another recipe from Good Housekeeping, chosen partly because it would use up some of the celery and carrots I'd already got, without leaving me with half a cabbage or three extra packets of spice.  I am still trying to work out how you add stock to flour that you've fried in the remains of the oil without it turning into a gigantically lumpy mess.  I ended up rubbing the lumps through a sieve, while making a mental note that next time it would be easier just to dust the fried vegetables and chicken with cornflour and give them a good stir before pouring the liquid in.

I still haven't planted my lily bulbs in the wood.  I finished pulling up the brambles, and got as far as rounding up twenty bamboo canes to mark where I'd planted each one and taking the box of lily bulbs out to the wood, and then it began to rain, quite hard.  Just after the rain started I heard the SA's feet crunching down the path by the dustbins, and thought firstly how sweet that the SA was coming to see me, and then was seized with alarm that something must be wrong and the SA was coming to fetch me, but it was merely the SA going to retrieve the jump starter pack left out on the lawn with the ailing lawn tractor.

And now I must go and see how the supper's getting on.

more cheffy moments

The celery softened in the end, and I was rather pleased with the bean casserole.  The flavours of the bean and tomato filling had melded by the time the celery was finally cooked, without the beans collapsing, and the recipe included enough herbs for it to taste of something else besides beans.  Which are pretty bland, even a committed vegetarian would have to admit.  The instructions for the bread crumb and cheese topping were vague since Rose Elliot just said 'crumbs' without specifying how many, so I used a lot, having a leftover lump of unsliced wholemeal bread in the fridge, and it came out good and cheesy and very crunchy.  The Systems Administrator only took a small helping, blaming inactivity for the loss of appetite, but I fear the truth is that the SA is not awfully keen on bean casseroles.

Baked beans are allowed (I heard a great story about Jane Grigson, who was lamenting she found it so hard to think of things to feed her infant daughter.  Somebody asked why she didn't just give the young Sophie baked beans?  What a good idea, said Jane Grigson, only the trouble is, they take so long to cook).  Ours are tinned.  And the SA will eat dal once in a while, especially if it's offered up with some other curry as well.  But any kind of bake that looks as though it might have escaped from a Cranks restaurant is an object of polite suspicion.

Tonight we were back on the meat, with a pork stew from The Essential Goa Cookbook by Maria Teresa Menezes.  I have never been to Goa, and have only the haziest idea of what their food is supposed to taste like, but I think I must once have eaten something described as Goan in a curry house and liked it enough to want to find out more  The flavours of southern India are overlaid in Goan cooking with the traditions of Portugal, but I have never been to Portugal either.  Never mind. The pork stew is very straightforward  There is a list of ingredients, pork, onions, garlic, ginger, turmeric and cumin, chilli and vinegar.  You are supposed to grind cloves and cardamon seeds finely, but I just put the whole spices in, and substituted ground cinnamon for grinding my own stick.  The instructions are concise: Mix all the ingredients and cook on a low heat till done.

I like the economy of Maria Teresa Menezes' style.  You feel it belongs to a previous age, yet the book was originally published as recently as 2000.  Maybe she wrote the recipes down decades ago then they languished unpublished in a drawer, as she was born in 1926 .  The Systems Administrator liked the pork stew a lot, and said so.  I thought it would have benefited from really slow cooking, and if I'm doing it again I'll try putting the ingredients together at lunchtime and letting them spend all afternoon in the simmer oven of the Aga, which sits just below boiling.  It would probably taste good reheated the next day, to give the flavours a chance to develop.  They are pleasantly sour, because of the vinegar (the only added liquid), and quite hot, though how hot depends on your chillies.

I made a pudding as well, using some of our own apples, and served with what the SA considers to be proper custard, that is made with Bird's custard powder rather than eggs.  Wanting something simple and traditional, I turned to the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book.  Although I refer to it quite frequently when I want to know the answer to a question like how to make saute potatoes, I hadn't really looked at the illustrations for ages.  Blimey, those glossy colour photos of food served up in round wooden bowls laid out on a brown hessian cloth, brown wooden salt and pepper mills in view.  Food styling dates as quickly as hairdos and cars.  My copy of Good Housekeeping is definitely from the same era as The Sweeney.

job done

I finished cutting the back of the hedge.  Cue fanfares of trumpets, streamers, fireworks, and a vintage biplane chugging across the sky pulling a banner proclaiming She Has Finished Cutting The Back Of The Hedge.  It might need a little tweaking and tidying here and there once we've cleared the great piles of prunings out of the way and I can get a proper look at it, but it is essentially Done.  It took me the best part of three weeks to do the other side of it last autumn, and I was braced for the back to take at least half as long as that.  I haven't cut into it so hard, since losing a couple of feet of the daffodil lawn isn't the same as losing two feet of the drive and being unable to ever receive another delivery of heating oil, so it was less of a fiddle.  It looks bad, but not nearly as bad as the front did by the time I'd finished.  Fingers crossed it survives.

I found three old bird nests while I was working, and was frequently supervised by a rather peeved looking robin.  First of all we chopped down his singing post on top of the Cryptomeria japonica, and now I've massacred his hedge.  When the revolution comes robins will receive the respect they deserve.

After lunch I returned to clearing brambles out of the end of the wood.  My lilies from Hyde arrived this morning, so I need to get on and plant them tomorrow.  I thought I might get to the end of the brambles as well, but that was pushing my gardener's eternal optimism too far.  By five it was getting to that stage of the darkness before dusk where I'm liable to end up poking myself in the eye on a cut stem I didn't see in time, so I gave up for the day before that could happen with quite a few clumps of brambles still to go.  Our Ginger, who had been sitting waiting for things to come out, came in with me.  I don't think he really does the wood when he's by himself.  If so it's all to the good.  He is very fox coloured, and I wouldn't like a passing rabbiter to take a shot at him.

Now I am back on chef duties.  I volunteered, since the Systems Administrator cooked all last week and has now got a cold.  Tonight is supposed to be a butter bean bake from Rose Elliot's Bean Book, but I have been caught out by how long celery takes to cook, not for the first time.  Her instructions assume you soaked dry beans, and need to boil them for ages, but Waitrose only had tinned.  I checked the cooking time on the side of the tin and saw that they only needed heating for five minutes, without focusing on the fact that even if the beans didn't need cooking for ages, the celery did.  I have been caught out by celery before, it's an awkward customer.  Fortunately I thought to check whether the bean filling was cooked just before doling it into the greased casserole dish and sprinkling the cheese and breadcrumb topping over it, so it is still bubbling away in its saucepan.  I shall be irritated if the beans disintegrate before the wretched celery is done.

While we were on holiday we ate ready meals some evenings.  When you are used to cooking from scratch it is actually a massive treat just to stick a prefab mushroom and ham pasta bake in the oven without guilt.  We did rather feel we'd done pasta by the end of the week, mind you, and I have put the plan to make my own egg lasagne sheets on hold for now.  We don't possess a pasta rolling machine, but after all that hedge trimming and pick axing I feel I'll be up to rolling it out by hand, no problem.

it will be tidy when I've finished

The pile of Eleagnus prunings is growing.  One more day of hedge cutting should do it.  I say that about all sorts of jobs, and then they end up taking half the week, but in the case of the hedge I think it's true.  I've pretty much finished taking out the great overhanging lumps by the terrace, and at the other end where it's shaded by the oak tree it hasn't grown nearly so much.

The shade cast by trees, or competition from their roots, will slow hedges down.  We saw the effect on a visit to East Ruston Old Vicarage, where clipped holly hedges passed close to trees, and dipped as they passed.  It's something to bear in mind when designing any formal scheme.  You can use a run of the same kind of plant across a site, but if growth conditions are more favourable in some parts than others, you won't necessarily end up with a uniform feature.

Cutting the hedge hard back where it was bulging out most dramatically has left a couple of large holes in the back.  I hope they fill in over time.  The front did, so fingers crossed, but next spring's daffodils are going to be displayed against an extremely mangy backdrop.  It had to be done, though.  Next time I think that planting a hundred yard hedge of Eleagnus x ebbingei would be a good idea I must lie down until the feeling passes.  Yew is the answer, or hornbeam in a damp site.

Tidying the garden has so far made it a quantum messier.  Branches of elder and dead holly are scattered over the lawn outside the conservatory, together with the wire netting and stakes I removed from the shrubs at the end of the wood.  There are piles of dead tree lupin stems and perennial pea stalks on the path down to the lower lawn.  They've been there a while, because I forgot about them when clearing up the last time the Systems Administrator cut the lawn, so when I do move them the grass will have gone yellow underneath.  The daffodil lawn has almost disappeared under the avalanche of Eleagnus prunings, and my work seems to have spread another layer of dead Eleagnus leaves over the lawn, after I'd carefully raked the first lot up.  The dead leaves are large, brown, obvious and persistent, another good reason to plant yew or hornbeam.

The lawn edges have been trimmed at intervals in random stretches, dictated by where the hens had got to and so where I was working while I watched them.  I still haven't finished cutting the long grass on the bank, or clearing away all the grass I have cut.

Out of chaos will come order, I tell myself, and anyway there's only us to see it.  Goodness knows how gardens manage that are open to the public full time.  They must be better organised than I am, and not trying to simultaneously make black bean soup and keep an eye on a flock of vagrant chickens.

slow food

I made black bean soup with tomato and avocado relish for lunch, since I had some black beans, and some tomatoes, and half a pot of coriander that needed using up, using a recipe from Lindsey Bareham's big red book of tomatoes.  It was quite nice, but possibly not nice enough to justify the effort, or at least not on a fine sunny day when I could have been outside in the garden.  You have to dice the onions, which is a fiddle, and later in the process you have to liquidise half the beans. The book said to push them through a sieve after pureeing them in a food-processor or mouli-legumes, but if life is too short to stuff a mushroom it is definitely too short to mess around trying to poke cooked pulses through a sieve.  And I'm a reasonably adventurous cook, but I do not possess a mouli-legumes.  Or a food-processor, so I used the blender, but you still have to wash it up afterwards.

And then you have to dice half an avocado, if you are making soup for two people, which leaves you with the other half, and skin some raw tomatoes for the relish.  And skin and chop up enough tomatoes for the soup, if you are using up home grown ones and not just opening a tin like the book tells you to.  The end result, served with a dollop of soured cream, is probably fresher tasting than a pot of ready made soup from the supermarket, but I wasn't convinced the difference was so marked it was worth taking half the morning over it.

I was going to make some pitta to eat with the soup, then wimped out when I got the recipe out and remembered how much fiddling around pitta takes, telling myself there was already a lot of soup, then back-tracked thinking that if soup was all there was for lunch, the Systems Administrator would probably like some sort of side plate of carbohydrate with it, and made chapatis instead.  They are much quicker to do than pitta, not involving any yeast or repeated kneading, and I thought they weren't a million miles from tortillas and would be fine with spicy tomato soup.  They were, except that I tried rolling them out half an hour before lunch and stacking them separated by squares of greaseproof paper, so that I could wash the pastry board and finish wiping the table before cooking them quickly at the last minute, and they stuck to the paper and ended up looking peculiarly wrinkled and horrible.  They tasted fine, though, and we agreed that griddle cooked flatbread was handy if you suddenly fancied some sort of hot bread with soup.

In the afternoon I started reducing the back of the Eleagnus hedge.  The middle section had not fallen out on to the lawn so badly, and gave me a sort of false optimism that the job was not going to be too long winded, or too brutal, but now I'm getting to the stretch by the terrace (or patio) and things are getting much trickier.  Great long branches have flopped out of the top of the hedge, and by the time I've taken those back so that the hedge skirts politely around the paving as it's supposed to, instead of half smothering it, I'm afraid it is going to look very bald indeed.  Will it recover, or will this be year I finally kill it?

woodland gardening

By this morning the wallflowers I potted up yesterday were looking a bit happier.  Not standing up like soldiers exactly, but less limp and a better shade of green than they were yesterday afternoon. I had to go and buy some more compost before I could finish planting the final bundles, and the second lot looked worse than the first.  If they don't revive then I'll reuse the compost for the tulips, since the wallflowers won't have had any goodness out of it.  Still, they might surprise me.  It will be a little moment of revelation tomorrow morning, skipping across the concrete and seeing whether they have perked up or collapsed entirely.

Back in August I placed an experimental order for some Martagon lilies, fired up by my Plant Heritage lily study day and remembering how nice they had looked under trees at the Green Island garden we visited last year.  They were due to be delivered in September, and for the past few days I've been vaguely wondering where they had got to, while reminding myself that I was probably at the end of the list as somebody who'd ordered my lilies very late in the day.  This morning I got an email to say they had been despatched and were now in transit, so I thought I'd better get on with clearing the brambles out of the end of the wood where I want to put them.

It was quite dark in the wood, darker than I remembered or imagined.  That's the thing about clearing small gaps in woodland cover, the surrounding trees go rushing in to the new patch of light and soon fill it.  Magnolia campbellii 'Charles Raffill' has grown a lot, and I allowed myself to indulge in a brief, wistful hope that maybe next spring it would finally flower.  It was planted in 2003 and was not a tiny twig then, so must be fourteen or fifteen years old by now.  Isn't that old enough to hope for one or two flowers?  Apart from anything else, I'd like confirmation that I've got the right thing, since muddles with magnolia varieties can and do happen in the trade.

The alder and hazel coppice have been busily growing as well, and an entire elder bush had sprung up where I didn't remember there being one at all.  That soon went with the aid of the pick axe.  I made a mental note of which hazel stems needed to come out this winter once it gets to the right season for coppicing, but I might mark them tomorrow with a dab of red paint rather than believing that I'll remember until the New Year.  Things always look so different once the leaves are off, it can be difficult to remember how ruthless you meant to be.

I removed the protective wire circles from some of the shrubs while I was at it.  Oemleria cerasiformis had started to sucker as it's supposed to, and was growing outside and through its wire guard without anything eating it as far as I could see, and I think Daphne might be toxic to browsing animals anyway.  I partly put the wire surrounds on when they were very small young plants partly to remind myself where they were.

The Eucryphia x nymansensis was looking green and healthy inside its protective circle of netting, but hadn't grown very much.  I never got round to cutting down an elder bush I meant to remove because it was shading the Eucryphia, so must do that tomorrow.  I stopped work in the wood after tea, since fiddling around with brambles in fading light is a sovereign recipe for scratching oneself in the eye, but ended up crawling around weeding under a large Cotoneaster in the back garden instead, because that was where the chickens insisted on going.  It will soon be too cold to sit out with them, so we thought we'd better make the most of the last warmish days and let them out for a run.

wallflowers

Flushed by the relative success of the pots of Cosmos, and caught at the strategic psychological moment by an advertisement from Mr Fothergill for bare root wallflower plants, I am attempting to do pots of wallflowers.  I adore wallflowers.  I like their smell, and the range of tawny, tabby colours they come in, and the whole old fashioned vibe.  Each year I sigh over pictures and descriptions of them in the seed catalogues, and then don't order any seed, and if it ever comes free with a magazine I always forget to sow it at whatever odd stage of the summer you are supposed to sow biennials, just when it's hot in the greenhouse and you are busy with other things. And all the borders are densely planted up with permanent residents, except in the odd gaps for renovation where things have died or got too big for their boots, so there is nowhere suitable for bedding out.

Wallflowers in containers were clearly the answer.  True, I would then have to buy more compost, and it would be yet more pots to water, but still, that scent, and those velvety, four petalled flowers.  I ordered a bundle of dark orange ones and a bundle of purple, which entitled me to a third free bundle.  Yesterday an email arrived saying they had been dispatched, and this morning the postman appeared at the front door carrying the box carefully in both hands like a chalice, and the right way up.

I was planning to buy some more absolutely plain, straight sided, traditional flower pot shaped pots of 33cm diameter.  I'll need some anyway next year for the dahlias, and I thought I could get them now and use them in the meantime for the winter bedding.  It's a good, practical pot design in any case, allowing you to slide the root ball out for repotting.  The Salvia confertiflora in the conservatory needs to go into a bigger pot next year, though I won't do it now.  Altogether some more 33cm pots would be useful.

Except that the local garden centres have stopped doing them.  I went first to the one where I got a couple of straight sided pots back in the summer to repot some Agapanthus, but the stand where they used to be had been restocked with a different brand, one using rather bright orange terracotta and whose classic flower pots only went up to 11 inches.  It was the same at the other two places I tried as I doglegged my way home.  That was a blow.  I've been using that type of pot for the past twenty years.  They weren't totally frost proof, and did tend to crack if they fell over, but they were easy to handle and relatively cheap, and their mirror smooth interior finish helped when potting on.  It is much, much harder extracting a root ball from a pot whose inside surface is rough, or worse still ridged.

Instead the wallflowers are going into an eclectic collection of whatever medium sized pots I had in the shed.  They are in umpteen different designs, all with curved sides and many with mouths narrower than their maximum diameter, which makes them unsuitable for anything you might ever want to remove intact, but OK for bedding.  The initial result was not promising, since the plants seemed to have ridiculously tiny roots compared to their tops and had wilted in transit, so stood at odd angles looking pathetically floppy, but I told myself that wallflowers were traditionally sold bare root wrapped in newspaper, members of the cabbage family had a great capacity to wilt when transplanted before recovering miraculously overnight, Mr Fothergill knew what they were doing, and it would be fine.  I went on planting until I ran out of compost, watered my poor drooping plants into their new homes, and left them to it, thankful that it wasn't windy.

That leaves the longer term question of where to find 33cm straight sided pots with a smooth interior finish.  The siren voice in my head is saying that it is time to start collecting them from Whichford Pottery, now that I've got enough tulip pots.  I bought those over the space of about three years, and the cost was eye watering at the time, but of course now I've got them they'll last for the rest of my gardening career, unless I drop them.

gone on her holidays*

When I slid the door of the chicken house open this morning only one hen came out.  That wasn't normal.  Usually they all come tumbling out one after another, eager for their sprinkle of porridge oats with sultanas.  I could see another through the window, bouncing up and down on the roosting board.  I thought there must be something down on the floor she was afraid of, and wondered if a rat had got in, but when I opened the big door at the end of the house to have a look one of the hens was lying dead, face down on the floor.

It was the one with the funny tuft of feathers on her neck, and I wasn't completely surprised.  She's been reluctant to flock with the others for a few days when the Systems Administrator has let them out, preferring to hang about near the hen house instead of going to scratch around under the Eleagnus hedge, and retiring early to bed.  She used to be an adventurous creature, the one that once got locked out of the run all night by mistake because she was very late returning to the chicken house and we lost count and thought they were all inside.  She has been less venturesome for a while.  We wondered if perhaps she'd had a fright out in the garden, but evidently she was ailing.

The body was lying near the chicken house entrance, but not blocking it, so the other two hens could have got out into the run if they'd wanted to.  I thought it showed more sensibility than you might expect from chickens that they didn't like to pass that close to their late companion's corpse, and appeared agitated by the death, or the body.  On that basis keeping hens in sheds in huge flocks where the farm workers routinely have to go around each morning picking up the bodies is even worse than it would be anyway.

So we are down to three hens.  Three is OK, but if we lose any more we'll have to think about getting a couple of new ones.  We couldn't risk ending up with just one on her own.  They are social animals, and it would be very cruel.  I don't know how on that basis we ever stop when we decide to give up poultry keeping, unless a mass fox catastrophe proved the catalyst, which is how quite a lot of people end up stopping.  Give the sole survivor to a hen keeping friend, I suppose, and not ask too many questions about what they would do with her.  We are basically escaped townies with a taste for gardening, and leave all our hens to live out their natural span until infirmity or the fox get them, long beyond their productive egg years, but true country dwellers are not so indulgent.

Poor old hen.  Still, she had a pretty good life as hens go, and she was mourned by her companions, at least briefly.

*If you don't get the reference, re-watch Chicken Run, which is in any case a work of genius.

real ice cream and art

When I got to Liverpool Street the concourse was as wet and slippery as if somebody had thrown buckets of water over it, but when I cautiously stuck my nose outside the station it was only drizzling very lightly.  The rain storm had evidently passed, leaving behind it the sort of muggy air that almost makes you long for winter and a crisp frost.

I walked over to Covent Garden as I had oodles of time before I was due to meet my old university friend for lunch, feeling relieved that I'd decided against wearing an extra layer on top of my tee shirt, since it was quite sweaty enough in my raincoat as it was.  We were meeting in Tavistock Street, which is wall to wall full of chain restaurants.  You would not think there were so many people wanting bistro food, but there must be.  My friend had chosen Cote (as in coast, there should be an accent over the O but I don't know how to do it), which was a new one on me, but there are dozens of them all over the place.  Well, all over London, and we could have eaten in one in Dorchester when we were on holiday.  Only three in East Anglia, but that's the Eastern counties for you.  There are none in Essex.

We went on somewhere else for pudding.  When the idea was floated in advance this struck me as being the height of metropolitan decadence.  Bistro chain puddings not good enough for you, then? But I was swayed by the promise of excellent ice cream, and if anything my friend undersold the wonders of Gelatorino.  It is a tiny little shop in Russell Street, selling real Italian ice cream made by real Italians.  There are a few tables at the back, or you can have a cardboard pot of ice cream to go.  The pot come in three sizes, and even the smallest seemed pretty generous by the time the ice cream has been piled up.  If you were going for the largest one I definitely wouldn't have any other lunch first.  You can choose your combination of flavours, and since it's dished out by the pot rather than rigidly by the scoop you could make your mix of flavours as complicated as you liked. Overwhelmed by choice I followed my friend's lead and opted for hazelnut and chocolate, which was delicious, but they also do salted caramel.  And pistachio.  I shall have to go there with everybody I ever go to London with, apart from the one person who doesn't eat sweet things. Maybe with her too, and I'll have her share.

Then I went to Tate Britain for another look at the Barbara Hepworth before it closes.  This time I sat all the way through a vintage BFI film about the links between her work and the Cornish landscape, complete with shots of her wearing huge jewellery and no safety goggles, bashing away vigorously at blocks of wood and stone.  Having the link spelled out to me between some of her forms and the surrounding natural landscape did make me go back and look at them more carefully.  There are at least ten or a dozen works in the exhibition I should like to take home.

wet days and favourite colours

Today was devoted to housework so not terribly exciting.  I try to save the cleaning for a rainy day, and it was fortuitous that today was rainy since I had to clean the house in any event for the beekeepers' committee meeting (or at least the downstairs bits).  I'm stepping down as Treasurer at the next AGM on the grounds that four years is long enough for anybody to be Treasurer, so that external source of motivation will soon be gone.  I'll just have to tell myself that the Systems Administrator and I deserve a vaguely clean and tidy house anyway.

I nipped out into the garden to pick a small posy, to try and brighten the place up.  My first thought was to use some of the hips from Rosa glauca, which were looking lovely the last time I noticed them, but when I looked for them this time I found they had all gone.  The birds had taken every last one.  They always do that with the holly berries about a week before Christmas, so that a fortnight before the day you think there are going to be lots for decorations, and come Christmas Eve the SA is left scrabbling about to find a token few.

There are still some late roses here and there, and with Cosmos and a dahlia or two they made a decent bunch, very pink, but pink is a good colour.  Rather inextricably linked in contemporary western culture with princesses and breast cancer campaigns, but a good colour nonetheless.  Are there any colours that human beings are truly hardwired to like or dislike?  Red is said to be the colour of danger, because it is the colour of blood.  I've heard it stated in a garden lecture that the eye is instinctively drawn to it, hence we should be careful how we used it in garden designs.  I've even read a theory that sports teams wearing red shirts win more often than other teams.  But in China red is the colour of luck, and how does luck equate with danger?  I think the lecturer (it was Lady Skelmersdale) was right about red in the garden.  Red Japanese bridges, gigantic red tree rhododendrons, they do act as optical magnets and you just can't help noticing them first.

The current marker of good taste is to dislike yellow in the garden.  I've never heard anybody say flatly that they don't like blue.  True blues are thin on the ground in the garden, and most blue flowers have at least a tinge of purple.  Nobody seems to dislike purple, either.

It is due to rain tomorrow, but I'm due to meet an old friend in London so wouldn't be gardening anyway.  As we were making the final arrangements she did ask whether I wanted to rearrange, given that the weather forecast was so awful, but I said I didn't mind the rain as long as she didn't. Living in England if you start cancelling your social life each time it's due to be showery you'll soon be a hermit.

my new plants

I spent part of this afternoon fussing over my newly acquired plants from the Great Dixter plant fair.  Some are destined for pots long term, others for the garden borders but I don't want to plant them out until spring.  A couple merely need planting and are sitting outside the greenhouse having received nothing more than a drink of water and a dose of admiration.

I bought Pelargonium sidioides after seeing and being instantly smitten by a grey leaved, tiny flowered deep red pelargonium in one of the pots outside the front door at Great Dixter.  Needless to say, it was not labelled.  Nothing in the garden is, Christopher Lloyd disliking the look of labels and finding that visitors stole them, moved them or trampled on things to get to them.  There is a whole anti garden label policy displayed in the shed where you pay for your plants.  So I don't know whether the Dixter pot plant was P. sidioides or something else similar, and I don't know enough about species and near species pelargoniums to know whether there is anything else that resembles P. sidioides that closely.  It doesn't matter, since once I saw that I could buy P. sidioides I was happy with that.  According to the interweb (that the young people use) it should grow quickly, make a nice mat of leaves and flower profusely.  I have moved it into a clay pot, for the look of the thing and because I think clay allows more air to the roots which is helpful with anything needing good drainage, but I only moved it up the bare minimum of pot size to convert it from square pot to round, given the time of year.

Salvia 'Love and Wishes' is so posh it has its own website.  I was instantly charmed by its rich reddish purple flowers, thought that they would go well with the fuschias by the front door, and when I read that it would be happy with shade for part of the day and made a medium sized plant it was a done deal.  It was being offered by Dyson, who are specialist salvia growers, and they introduced it to the UK at Chelsea this year, though I have now learned that it was bred in Australia.  I did check with Mr Dyson that it would over-winter happily in a pot in a frost free conservatory.  I am slightly worried by the prospect of it succumbing to fungal diseases as salvia are martyrs to botrytis, but took courage from the fact that the Salvia confertiflora bought last autumn at Kiftsgate survived last winter in the conservatory.  It got a slightly larger clay pot than its existing plastic, just to give it some space to play with over the next couple of weeks as it's still in active growth, but I didn't want it sitting in too much extra compost.  I'll move it on again in the spring, if it survives.

Erysimum 'Parrish's' was an impulse buy in that I'd not heard of it, but I knew I can grow Erysimum in our soil and thought it was a very good shade of purple, plummier than 'Bowles Mauve'.  I moved it into a somewhat bigger plastic pot since the other varieties I grow seem to fill 9 centimetre pots very quickly, with the aim of growing it on between now and next spring then taking some cuttings and planting the original specimen out.

Begonia scharfii, on the other hand, went down a couple of pot sizes.  This purchase was frankly a punt.  I fell for its big fleshy leaves, hairy on their undersides, and thought how nice it would look at the back of the conservatory, or in a shady corner just outside it in the summer months.  Visitors to the plant fair had the full run of the regular nursery, but in addition Great Dixter had a stall, and the tray of Begonia scharfii were sitting next to their stall, looking ignored.  I knew from their catalogue that they will not send begonias by mail order because they are too fragile to post, so it was a question of grabbing one when I saw it or abandoning the idea.  The girl on the stall did not seem very clear whether or not the begonia would overwinter in a frost free conservatory, saying she thought I'd be OK, but not with the authority of somebody who actually knew how they were overwintered at Dixter.  I decided that for six quid I'd risk it, and the begonia travelled all the way back on the coach tucked between my feet, because I didn't dare trust its fleshy stems and brittle leaves to the luggage hold.

When I came to move it into a clay pot lumps of compost fell away, and for an anxious moment I thought its rootball was rotting, before seeing the outline of a perfectly solid, normal pot-shaped but smaller rootball within the compost.  It had evidently been repotted very recently, maybe in an attempt to stop the plants from toppling over.  I'd noticed walking around the nursery that some groups of pots were marked as having been recently potted on, and was mildly irritated that the begonia hadn't been, but thought it would be much better off over the winter without all that extra compost sitting round its roots, and found a clay pot that fitted the actual rootball exactly.  Great Dixter's catalogue doesn't give any advice on how I'm supposed to get it through the winter, and I can't find anything else about it on the web apart from one old newspaper article by Christopher Lloyd that's equally silent on the subject of winter treatment.  I'll just have to try it and see. Begonia luxurians came through last winter in the conservatory with its stems intact, so I must be in with a chance.  B. scharfii looks so watery that rot attacking its stems and those big hairy leaves must be my biggest risk.

Penstemon 'Garnet' was another Great Dixter plant, since I thought that Dixter was very unlikely to sell mislabelled plants, and after having serious doubts about the identity of one I bought in a garden centre that was supposed to be 'Garnet' I wanted to have what I hoped was a verified 'Garnet' to compare it with.  Like the Erysimum it was moved into a somewhat but not extravagantly larger pot, to encourage it to keep growing in the greenhouse, with the intention of taking cuttings from it and planting the parent out in a border next year.

Abelia x grandiflora is not rare or exotic at all, but I knew I wanted one to go in part of the gap that will be freed up once I've taken the conifer stump out, and Great Dixter had some nice young plants for six quid.  Smallish young plants that are growing fast and haven't had time to think about getting pot bound are always a pleasure, so I thought there was no point in paying twice as much for one from a garden centre.  And at the margin I'd rather support Great Dixter than a multiple that's more interested in gas barbecues than plants.

Then I bought a kind of papyrus, said to be hardy, because I liked the shape of its seed heads and thought it would look just right outside the conservatory with the ferns, the hosta, and the huge felty leaves of Tetrapanax papyrifera 'Rex'.  That was another Dixter plant, and the label said Self Seeds, which I gathered anyway from the way they were scattered around the garden, but I thought it couldn't get up to too much mischief in the corner where I planned to put it.  It got a modestly larger clay pot.  I had better do some internet research and check whether it will be OK outside in its pot all winter.  I have twice raised true papyrus from seed, and lost it each time before discovering it really does need warmer conditions than frost free, but looking at the Papyrus vegetus scattered around the garden at Great Dixter it must be hardier than that.

a grand day out

Today I went on a garden club coach trip to Great Dixter.  I am not a member of the garden club, but I bumped into one of their committee members at the Plant Heritage lecture last weekend, and so when the next day they had a last minute drop-out, my name bobbed into her mind as she was thinking how to fill the spare seat on the coach.  I was chuffed to be asked.  I really like Great Dixter, and it's nice to think that acquaintances would like more rather than less of your company. It bore out my instinct that since I was a newish member of Plant Heritage I ought to make the effort to go to their meetings regularly, unless they clashed with anything important I really couldn't rearrange.  I didn't have anything else in the offing last Saturday but did have rather a headache, and for choice wouldn't have driven all the way to Stowupland, but apart from the fact that it was a good lecture, my efforts were rewarded in today's outing.

Anyone who believes that gardens can't be worth visiting as late in the year as September should pay a visit to Great Dixter in early October.  There is still a lot of colour.  Dahlias and borderline hardy salvias play a big role, but there are many other flowers still out, plus berries and the first of the autumn colour, and the architectural shapes of succulents and grasses.  I scribbled down almost two pages of plant names in my garden visiting notebook to remind myself, and that left much more that I didn't write down.

Just as interesting, though not as pretty, was noticing which plants had been meticulously deadheaded.  There had been a lot, when you looked closely, including all the phlox in the long border, and even an entire hebe.  Removing the spent flowers but leaving the bulk of the foliage intact makes the border look fresher than it would otherwise, though any autumn border is going to be somewhat browned and tousled, but keeps the height and volume.  It's a nice question, at what point and by how much to start reducing plants that have gone over.  Leaving everything in place on the basis that plants should be appreciated at all stages of their growth means late flowers appearing against a brown and black sea of dead petals and seed heads.  That can look pretty dingy, but the opposite extreme of cutting things right down as soon as they finish flowering to get the tidying all over in one go can leave the late performers looking ridiculously exposed.  Dixter steers a brilliant middle path, though having all those pairs of eager horticultural student hands must help.

The planting spaces around the circular Lutyens steps leading down from the walk by the long border are now planted out with succulents for the summer.  That was new since our last visit, which was years ago, and I liked it.  The exotic garden was quite absurdly jungly, and as well as the bananas and ginger lilies used young specimens of foliage shrubs that if left in place permanently would grow far too big for the space.  Acacia pravissima doesn't want to remain a cute fountain of triangular grey leaves less than three feet high, it wants to be a large shrub at least four times the size, and soon will be given half a chance.

As part of our coach trip we got a quick look inside the house.  It is surprisingly deep from the front to the back of the original hall, requiring long beams which must have originally been very tall trees.  It's an impressive piece of vernacular architecture, but I thought it must have been cold as originally commissioned by Nathaniel and Daisy Lloyd, and the main life of the building was going on elsewhere.  From outside you could hear dogs barking somewhere within, and there were little gaggles of young people standing around the nursery carrying bedding rolls, and talking to each other with that youthful combination of bravado and lurking uncertainty, while not having got the knack of stepping out of the way of the paying customers who were trying to inspect the contents of the sales beds, who I gathered were students come for the weekend.

For this was the weekend of the Great Dixter Plant Fair.  It was very nicely done.  Stands with simple galvanised roofs and hessian backdrops were ranged around the bottom meadow, with small straw bales providing additional display areas and seating.  There were other plant nurseries there, the criteria for being invited seeming to be that you had to be either a top notch specialist or extremely local, and assorted caterers, including the Bodiam WI who were operating their stand on a semi honesty box system in that you paid a lady with a cash box and then told the other ladies you'd like tea or cake or whatever it was.  The whole effect was charmingly Village Preservation Society.

I bought more plants than I'd imagined I would, though with a clear idea of where and how I intended to use each of them.  One was from Rosy Hardy, a low growing, drought tolerant knapweed relative she recommended in her talk, and while I was there I asked her why my Baptisia australis might have gone blind.  Answer, heavy clay soil not an issue, dry springs could be, likeliest cause that it had exhausted the soil after several years and should be given a high potash feed. Another stand specialised in Plectranthus so I picked their brains about how to overwinter my seed raised P. argentatus.

It was a good coach trip, though it was a shock to the system getting up in time for the shipping forecast.

out, damned vetch

Giving good advice is one thing, but taking it is quite another.  Today I actually followed my own sensible thought that I should pace myself with the shears and the hand trowel, to avoid ending up spraining my wrist or forearm.  Instead, I turned my attentions to rooting out the Coronilla varia from the island bed.  Probing at its roots with the border fork, and going after little pieces of root with the hand fork, ought to use different muscles to chopping with the shears and digging holes for the ox eye daisies in the bottom lawn.

I've been in two minds about the Coronilla varia for a while.  It is a herbaceous member of the pea family, with healthy looking mid green, mid sized leaves and pink flowers over a very long period. Bees love it.  It seems to suffer from no pests and diseases, unlike its pea family relatives the tree lupins that have their own huge and horrible form of aphid, so disgusting that even the birds won't eat them.  It tolerates drought.  All that makes it sound like a splendid plant, which it is, hence I've been in two minds about it.  The trouble is, it does not know when to stop.  Its roots run underground, at first looking small and innocent, but thickening rapidly.  They dive into the centres of other plants, and the stems wind their way up through any neighbours standing it its way.  Shade and the canopy of shrubs don't stop it, it just climbs through them.

I should have been warned by the plant centre's label saying Spread Indefinite.  That is nursery code for It runs, maybe a lot.  Since starting to see how much and how rapidly it spread I have read up on it on the internet, and seen it recommended for stabilising embankments, and I should think it would be very good at that, but it has no place in a mixed border.  In fact, I don't think my former employer should be selling it without a more explicit warning.  One reason why nowadays I am happy to buy most of my plants online is that I can check their requirements and peculiar habits from the comfort of my sofa, without being swayed by how pretty they look in their pots.

I tried weeding round the edges of it at the start of this season, to see if it could be kept to a reasonable area, but it can't.  It has delved deep beneath a Yucca, and infiltrated some Physostegia which I want to keep and which also runs but not insanely, and it is going to take me several years of weeding out or poisoning any regrowth I see before I've eliminated it entirely, but the bulk of it has now been pulled and dug out, heaped in great piles over the lawn pending a trip to the dump.  I wouldn't trust those roots in my compost heap, no Sir.  I briefly wondered if I could use it in a wilder part of the garden, but then thought that repeating the same action in hope of a different outcome was indeed a mark of madness.  I have learned my lesson.  No more Coronilla varia.  I would not honestly trust it even on an embankment, if I had one that needed stabilising, in case it spread out into the surrounding countryside.

Meanwhile I have come to the end of my present stint as chief cook.  We had the last of the roast chicken for lunch today, in the form of leek and potato soup made with the stock from the carcass. It was a good stock that set to a proper jelly, not just vaguely flavoured water that once had some chicken bones in it.  Free range birds definitely yield better stock than intensively farmed, not that I buy the latter nowadays.  I'd rather go vegetarian.  I used to put a squeeze of lemon in leek soup, before the Systems Administrator fessed up to not liking it, so now I don't.

The only disappointment of the week, apart from some of my timings being a bit out, was the black bean charros from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian.  This a Mexican stew, in which you liquidize some of the cooked beans to thicken it.  The dividing line between a thick soupy mixture and a paste that stuck to the saucepan turned out to be a fine one, and so some of our bean charros remained uneaten in the bottom of the pan, but its main disadvantage was that it didn't seem to taste of much, beside bean paste.  It was flavoured with onions, garlic, green chilli and coriander, and I upped the amount of onion because the recipe sounded mean, but it still barely managed to come through the beans.  The SA said bravely that it was nice, just maybe needed some more vegetables like a chopped red pepper to give it some more taste and some texture.  I thought that by the time you'd stripped taste and texture out of a stew there wasn't much left to be said for it, but we agreed that red pepper and some sweetcorn would make it more interesting.  Four out of ten maximum for the black bean charros.  I might try again, with the extras, because I've still got most of the bag of beans left.

lawn care and cooking

If tidying up the daffodil lawn is proving a quicker job than I'd bargained for, the bottom lawn is taking longer.  I went trotting down there this morning with a wheelbarrow full of ox eye daisy plants, but despite the fact that the Systems Administrator put the lawn tractor over it after we'd finished with the power scythe, the grass was still very lumpy.  The problem was that in places the long grass had completely fallen over, the stalks lying so close to the soil that neither the power scythe nor the tractor had managed to cut them.  Pressed against the warm ground and after a nice bit of rain, they were beginning to go slimy.

I did not have the heart to shove my ox eyes in among the rotting, brown, fallen stalks, and imagined the scene as a background for next spring's crocus and fritillaries.  It was not a good look. I realised that what I was after was the scrubbed, pale biscuit colour of the meadow areas at Great Dixter, and that if I didn't get rid of the remains of the long grass I was going to be irritated for months each time I went to the bottom of the garden.

I set to with shears and rake, at times reduced to primping up the fallen stems with my fingers so that I could get the blades of the shears around them.  I'm sure they don't do that at Great Dixter (though on second thoughts with all those keen horticultural students perhaps they do).  I think we should have cut the lawn earlier, at the very end of August and before our holiday.  We have visited Dixter in mid September and the long grass was definitely cut down by then.  And I think our grass is too rank.  We've been removing the clippings without feeding it for the past two decades, but that has not curbed its enthusiasm.

I've tried establishing yellow rattle a couple of times.  This semi-parasite feeds on grass roots and is recommended for weakening the sward in areas where you want to grow wild flowers.  The rattle has not taken either time, and I was rather dismayed to read on one meadow gardening website that rattle did not always succeed in very long and thick grass.  Oh dear.  The grass would be weaker if it was infected with yellow rattle, and the yellow rattle would establish on the grass if only it was weaker.

Meanwhile my week as chief cook continues.  Tuesday was chicken, leek, and mushroom pie, since part of the point of doing a whole roast chicken is to have enough for a pie.  We had chicken sandwiches for lunch one day as well, and there's still a jug of stock in the fridge waiting to be made into soup.  Even the cats got a bowl of meat picked off the carcass after I'd made the stock. The short indignant tabby thought hers was delicious, then suddenly remembered that she only ate proper cat food out of a tin and not human left-overs.

Last night was a recipe from Lindsey Bareham's big red book of tomatoes.  I think I must have bought my copy several years ago when I managed to produce a positive glut of tomatoes in the polytunnel, then it got rather lost on the shelves and I haven't cooked from it much.  I can thoroughly recommend her Tomato Bredie, a lamb and tomato stew from South Africa.  You sweat a generous amount of onion until it's tender and starting to brown.  She says to use Spanish, but Waitrose didn't have any and I made do with small essential ones instead, and browned them in butter rather than oil since I'm going through a butter phase.  Then you brown some lamb, and add the onions, a big clove of garlic, a bayleaf, a smidge of sugar, a dash of lemon juice (not too much.  I have learned from bitter experience not to smother savoury dishes in too much lemon), and some chopped tomatoes which you have laboriously peeled and deseeded.

Actually, peeling them is not too bad because you can dunk them in boiling water without worrying about the flesh cooking, as it's going to be cooked anyway.  Use the juice from the seeds: it is one of the tastiest bits.  Once it's all starting to look near cooked add some potatoes cut into lumps and go on cooking until they're done.  Which in my case took an unexpectedly long time and we ate embarrassingly late.  The Systems Administrator was far too polite to grumble, having also been caught out that way, but a famished look in his eyes gave the game away.  Lindsey Bareham gives exact quantities, but I don't think it's the sort of dish where you have to weigh the ingredients.  Just use a sensible size packet of meat for the number of people you want to feed, and a proportionate quantity of vegetables.

pacing myself

Tidying up the daffodil lawn isn't taking as long as I was afraid it was going to.  That's a welcome change, since I generally err in the opposite direction, optimistically assuming that garden tasks will be completed by lunchtime only to find that they stretch out over two and a half days.  The Systems Administrator has managed to do a pretty thorough job with the power scythe, so that when I rake the cut grass off there aren't too many tufty bits underneath that need finishing by hand.  The fact that the Eleagnus hedge has spread out so far the lawn is only two thirds the size it used to be might have something to do with it as well.

The bank along one edge of the lawn still has to be cut entirely with shears.  In desperation once I tried using an electric hedge trimmer, but nowadays I stick with cutting it manually.  It's more peaceful.  Last year I managed to sprain my wrist quite badly through doing too much at once.  I remember the date and how I discovered I'd done it, because it was December 10th, and I did a woodland charity talk that evening.  As I tried to push the plug of my extension cable into a rather stiff wall socket my wrist twinged, and I realised to my horror that I'd done something to it.  I had to rest it until after Christmas.  Even using my finger to play Sudoku on my tablet hurt.

So this year I am being very careful and not spending all day on it, or even all afternoon.  At one end of the scale, by way of a change I sowed some pots of home harvested Leopard Lily seed. That's Belamcanda chinensis, only it's changed its name to Iris domestica.  It's the one with the charming yellow and orange spotted six petalled flowers, of which I planted half a dozen and only one came up the following year.  That one must have been self fertile, since the flowers were followed by bulbous seed pods, and these have opened in the past few days to reveal fat black seeds.  They looked like the sort of seeds that ought to be sown at once, before they could shrivel up, and so I did.

At the other end of the scale I have made a start chopping around the conifer stump with the pick axe.  It's fairly brutal work, but it probably uses different muscles to the shears.  So far all I have to show for my efforts is a pathetic little trench around the sawn off trunk, but I shall keep at it.  An hour of shears, an hour of swinging the axe and I'll be there in no time.

Once the lawn is cleared there comes the real brute of a job, which is reducing the back of the Eleagnus hedge.  A lot.  I got away with taking the front hard back last autumn, so let's hope that my second assault doesn't kill it.  There is a very funny little book by journalist James Bartholomew called Yew and Non-yew, in which he conclusively demonstrates that whatever your hedging conundrum, the correct answer is yew.  It is all tongue in cheek, but the worrying thing is that he might be right.  Sitting drinking tea today on the terrace (or patio), contemplating the swirls of dead brown Eleagnus leaves that have already accumulated on the paving even though I swept it quite recently, and the semi-disappearance of the daffodil lawn, I fear he was.

home cook

I have volunteered to do the cooking this week.  Or perhaps the Systems Administrator volunteered me, having remarked wistfully on holiday that it was nice not to have to cook for once.  I actually like cooking, especially in the darker months when it doesn't eat into so much good gardening time. I just need due notice, so that I can think about what to make and what I need to buy for it.  Faced with the question in the supermarket Could you cook tonight? my mind becomes a complete blank. Then we end up with chicken stewed in tomato with rosemary, but there's only so many times you can dish that up before it begins to seem like a nervous tic.

I decided that this week I was in a retro mood.  On Sunday night we had roast chicken, with saute potatoes.  And cauliflower au gratin.  I can't think when I was last in a restaurant that offered me cauliflower au gratin, certainly not a London one.  I think the only time I've seen it in years is as part of a medley of vegetables served to a large group booking at club events of the sort where you have to choose your menu in advance.  I turned to the ever reliable Good Housekeeping Cookery Book to remind myself how to make both.  Good Housekeeping is still the single most useful cookery book I possess.  Not the prettiest, or trendiest, but for telling you how to do something you might actually want to do, like making saute potatoes, as distinct from something you like the sound of but won't actually do, like spit roasting a whole suckling pig, it is the most comprehensive and reliable source.

The cauliflower came out rather solid, but that was my fault for not measuring any of the ingredients, and using up the whole of a small piece of cheddar that was sitting in the fridge on the grounds that keeping half of it would have been silly.  You evidently don't need that much cheese in a cheese sauce.  The basic white sauce was lump free, though, and it's ages since I made a roux. The saute potatoes worked perfectly.  I used butter as the book said, cooked them gently and refrained from poking at them before the first side was done, and they stayed in whole pieces and went a beautiful shade of golden brown.  I have never stopped cooking with butter, because I like it, but the recent about turn in public health advice that it will not clog your arteries and indeed might be better for cooking with than vegetable oils means I don't have to feel guilty while I do it.

Last night was a veal ragout from Gretel Beer's Austrian Cooking.  I loved my mother's copy of this book when I was learning to cook as a teenager.  So did my mama, who showed no signs of giving it up, and I was delighted to find it available as a facsimile reprint by Andre Deutsh in the early 1980s.  I was pretty pleased that Waitrose actually had veal in stock, since they don't always and I'd gone shopping with a contingent list of the vegetables I wouldn't need if I wasn't doing the ragout, and the extra ingredients I'd need instead if I was doing something else.  One of the things that puts me off the idea of internet grocery shopping is the impossibility of making contingent choices.  The substitutions you hear about are bizarre enough, but there's no hope of stipulating that if you can't have veal, you don't want a cauliflower.

The ragout was very, very old fashioned, and made me feel quite nostalgic, though I'm not sure what for, since my central European ancestors would not have been dining on veal ragout in an apartment on Vienna's ringstrasse, but supping on cabbage in a shtetl in rural Poland.  Never mind, there is something delicious about the idea of bourgeois pre-war Vienna that veal ragout encapsulates.  You simmer the veal with onions, celery, cauliflower florettes and carrot, then discard the first two which are there for flavouring, and keep the carrot, slicing it up and putting it back at the end.  The cauliflower meanwhile has disintegrated into a sort of vegetable thickening agent.  Then you make a roux (another one!), add the juice from the meat to the roux, put the sauce back on the meat with some mushrooms you fried earlier and some frozen peas, and finish it off with an egg yolk beaten into some milk.

The quantities are all fairly approximate, since how big is an onion or a carrot, and when Gretel Beer talks about half cups I think she meant half whatever teacup you have to hand in your kitchen, rather than American measures, and the packets of veal in Waitrose weren't the same weight as that given in the recipe.  And I wasn't sure how runny the end mixture was meant to be, so lost my nerve before getting to the egg stage and used a teaspoon of cornflour to thicken things up a bit.  I was slightly dubious about adding the egg mixture, since the sauce already seemed rather liquid even with the cornflower, but stuck to the method (always a good idea for the first run through of a new recipe) and I'm glad that I did, since it had a transforming effect.  The sauce suddenly became far silkier, and the faintly worrying taste of cooked flour vanished.  Again, I can't think when I last ate a meal out that featured a flour thickened sauce.  The smell of it cooking took me back decades.

The main thing that caught me out was the cooking time for the veal.  I'd assumed that as it came from a little baby animal it would be ever so tender and done in three quarters of an hour, but the packet said one and a quarter to one and a half hours, and it needed the full one and a half before it lost its faintly rubbery texture and fell into melting pieces.  I should have read the instructions at the outse.  We ate rather late, but fortunately the SA has fallen into the same trap, and is anyway a forbearing sort of person.

As I said, I like cooking from time to time, especially in the darker months.

cutting the long grass

We have cut down the long grass in the back garden.  The daffodil lawn still needs tidying up by hand, as it's impossible to get the lawn tractor on to it, but this afternoon the Systems Administrator put the power scythe over the daffodil lawn and the bottom lawn, while I raked until my arms ached, and we carted away the long grass to the bonfire heap, then the SA gave the bottom lawn a final cut with the normal lawnmower.

It is a job the SA absolutely loathes, because the power scythe is such a beast to steer and vibrates so much, and the work has a sort of never ending quality as you can't tell which of the fallen grass has been cut through and which tussocks are merely lying down, so you have to go over it again and again.  Still, it's done now, and it only has to be done once a year.  Long grass is in general pretty labour saving, but like many garden features that don't require much routine maintenance it does need one annual burst of effort.  If you don't cut grass at least once in the year the old dead stems look very tatty, and over time tree seedlings and brambles would take over.

The power scythe, although it's a beast, is a big improvement on the previous method, which was that one of us would go back and forth with a petrol driven strimmer, swinging it in front of us in an arc.  I don't think either of us could manage that nowadays.  The twisting motion is very hard on the back.  I sometimes toy with the idea of acquiring a real manual scythe and cutting the long grass by hand a la Poldark, but was put off by my failed experiment with a lightweight scythe bought from an ad in a gardening magazine, that was incapable of cutting anything but merely knocked it down, which only made matters slightly worse.  There are people nowadays who run scything courses (numbers have probably leapt since Poldark*), so perhaps I should go on one of those and try out a scythe before buying one.  They are supposed to be set up to take account of your height anyway.

I like long grass in a garden of our size.  It cuts down on the mowing for most of the year, which is a good thing, saving time and petrol.  Petrol driven lawnmower engines are much more polluting, gallon for gallon, than petrol cars, so cutting down the hours makes me feel we're doing something for the environment, and the long grass is an excellent habitat for all sorts of wildlife.  And it is very attractive, while I like the contrast between the areas of regular mown lawn and the waving seedheads and flowers of the long grass.  It is a slightly ambiguous space in design terms, not quite mass because you can see over it, but while it gives a feeling of openness you feel inhibited about walking through it, so it is not quite pure void either as mown grass or paving would be.

Now that the bottom lawn is cut I can get on with planting the pots of ox eye daisies I've got sitting in the greenhouse, and some more Crocus tommasinianus should be arriving any day soon when my Kevock order comes.  It's good fun, long grass gardening, only of course I don't have to drive the power scythe.

*I did not watch Poldark, but Aidan Turner's polished torso was all over the media, with accounts of his topless scything.  I would not scythe toplessly myself.  It sounds itchy.

an autumn afternoon in the garden

We've been making the most of the last light evenings to let the hens out for a run.  It is still just about warm enough for the Systems Administrator to sit on the terrace (or patio) standing guard while they fossick about in the Eleagnus hedge.  The pots of Cosmos have a dishevelled, last gasp of summer air about them by now, and the dahlias are telling me that I should have staked them better, but it still looks pretty in the late afternoon light.

I learned something useful about dahlias in yesterday afternoon's talk.  The books say that you should leave them standing until they are blackened by the first frost, and I'd never understood why.  I often do, because there are always so many jobs to do in the garden that cutting down the dahlias ahead of time isn't generally top of the list, but it wasn't a rule I followed with any conviction.  According to Rosy Hardy the onset of cold weather prompts the dahlias to seal off their tubers from the remains of the stems.  Cut them down prematurely and you risk water running down inside the hollow stems and setting off rot in the tubers.  The hollow stemmed Salvia uliginosa, which I grow, should always be left to die down naturally and not chopped down while still in growth in a fit of premature tidiness, for the same reason.

There are still flowers to come in the island bed in the back garden.  The asters are just hitting their full stride, though after the botanists had their latest go at categorising the constituents of the vast daisy family most of them are not asters any more.   The taller asters (which are no longer asters) can go very bare and leggy at the base, and their gaunt, straight stems can look odd shooting up right at the front of the border, so I tend to put them behind other things.

One is a generous patch of Kniphofia caulescens, an exotic evergreen (though sadly battered in a hard winter) red hot poker, with clumps of lax, silvery leaves resembling a relaxed yucca.  Mine was planted during 2002, so has survived a fair few snow falls and plunging night temperatures, even if it looked dreadful at the end of them.  It is only now coming into flower, with pinky orange poker shaped flower clusters developing on fat grey stems.  It has spread a fair way from its original pot full, and must be a full yard across by now.  I was pleased to see the buds, since I'd forgotten quite how late it flowered and was starting to wonder if it was going to this year.

We'd been congratulating each other on how well the chickens were flocking together, only to realise this afternoon that there were only three in the hedge.  I found the fourth alone at the very bottom of the garden, scratching vigorously among the primroses under the Zelkova.  I chivvied her back up the hill to join the flock, while she ran rocking from side to side like the hens in Chicken Run, and shrieking her indignation at being herded, or mounting panic at being separated from the other hens.  She won't last if she goes sneaking off like that.  Charlie, you see, is in the tree line.

autumn flowering perennials

The new season of Suffolk Plant Heritage lectures has started.  Living in Essex it would have been logical for me to sign up to the Essex group, but I joined Suffolk because I was scooped up by a couple of energetic members.  They have a well organised annual programme, and living so close to the county border it's as easy to drive to Stowupland as Chelmsford.  Anyway, I have as many gardening friends and acquaintances north of the border as this side, after a decade of working at the plant centre.

Today's guest speaker was Rosy Hardy of Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants, multiple Chelsea award winner as seen at Chelsea and on TV, talking about autumn flowering perennials.  There are some very good plants that flower in September or later, and they need promoting, though probably less to a Plant Heritage audience than the average gardener.  The reaction of the friend I visited the Hepworth with to the fact that I'd just been to the Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens was to ask whether there was anything to see at this time of the year (he recently went to the Abbotsbury swannery, but the Systems Administrator's reaction on being told that it had a thousand swans was that when you've seen twenty, you've seen them all).

Rosy Hardy gave exactly the sort of talk that I like, telling us about the growth habit of each plant and its preferences regarding soil, light and moisture.  And she told us how to propagate them. Commercial growers have nothing to fear from telling their customers how to make more plants, since a real plant enthusiast will merely use any savings to acquire a new and different plant, while anyone who isn't pretty keen won't bother to try.  I love messing around with seeds and cuttings and divisions, and was always amazed when working at the plant centre by how many people who considered themselves keen gardeners seemed happy to buy all their plants, showing no interest in propagation whatsoever.

Rosy Hardy had brought enough pots for sale to cover several large trestle tables but I held off, conscious that I already had a backlog of home grown stock waiting to go out as soon as I can clear a place in the ground.  I took copious notes, though, and Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants has a website so if I find I have spaces for things I can always order them later.

Such discipline does not come easily.  I am still itching that I should have snapped up the very nice little plants of pink Gaura on sale at the Cressing Temple Barns at two pounds each.  My existing ones are doing so well in the gravel, I should rather like some more.  I had better try and find out how and if I can propagate from my two clumps (does the pink come true from seed, which is how I raised my original white ones, or will they split?).  In general, though, I am an increasing fan of internet shopping for plants.  There's no risk of being seduced by how attractive the plant is now, at this minute, in its pot, and there's all the resources of my bookshelves and the worldwide web to check what conditions the thing would like, and if it has any nasty habits I should know about before introducing it to my garden.  Of course you have to buy sight unseen, and there's the risk that the nursery could fob you off with something substandard, but I don't believe that reputable growers who have been going for years are going to do that.  It isn't a tactic you could deploy very often before word would get round, and your business would collapse.