The evenings are drawing in. Half an hour ago the kittens were rather peeved when I lured them in with biscuits and then shut the glass inner door, but I told them they had to come in from the garden because they were only little and it was getting dark. And now, at not even a quarter to nine, it is dark. The serious kitten is lying in the hall, staring meaningfully out into the night, but I don't think the other two actually want to be outside.
They have been going though another rite of passage towards being adult cats, learning how to use the new cat door. The old one broke so that you couldn't lock the flap to stop cats going out or coming in, so the Systems Administrator removed it to get them used to going through the hole. They were quite happy with that after the first go, though I don't think Our Ginger approved at suddenly having a hole opened up in his hall. Now the SA has fitted the new flap they have a choice between operating it or waiting until one of us happens to be passing by and opens the front door.
Cats are inherently suspicious of new things (except, for some reason, cardboard boxes. I never yet met a cat that wouldn't immediately adopt a new cardboard box, without worrying about leaving it in the corner for a couple of days to check it wasn't a trap and let the strange smell wear off). Our Ginger did not like the new cat flap, which was exactly the same as his old one apart from being a great deal cleaner and not broken. He sniffed it grudgingly and ostentatiously, before consenting to poke his imperial nose through it with a martyred air, followed by the rest of him.
The serious kitten looked intently at the new door, and almost immediately got the hang of it once I'd flapped it for him with my finger a couple of times. He is by far the most outdoors of the kittens, and already an effective hunter, and probably wanted to go out more than they did. And that is the way he does things. He weighs them up, and once he's decided he just does it, be it ten minutes to using the new cat door or several weeks before trusting either of us to sit on our laps.
Mr Fluffy and the energetic kitten were not happy about the new door. They did not like it when I flapped it, and did not want to push it for themselves, instead preferring to sit by it and wail pathetically until somebody came and gave them what they wanted, which was to be let in or out. Eventually they consented to go through the hole if I held the flap up for them, though I dropped it as soon as they were half way through so that they'd get used to the feeling of the plastic flap on their backs. They must have been learning how the new door worked by watching Our Ginger and the serious kitten, even if they didn't like it, and by Saturday the lure of being the other side of the flap became too strong and they managed to operate it for themselves, though their technique is not what I would call confident. There's rather a lot of nervous scrabbling, then once they've got their nose under the flap they scuttle through at double speed before something dreadful can happen.
Addendum We never did hear back from Colchester Cat Rescue. We can't have been deemed suitable to look after kittens. Maybe that was because of Our Ginger, but really, if this place isn't suitable for kittens I don't know where on earth is. A quarter of a mile up a farm road off a lane, no traffic except the postman and the mail order delivery drivers, and somebody is here practically all the time. The kittens have the run of a vast garden, several rooms of the house, the conservatory and the greenhouse. They have been registered with a vet and neutered and microchipped. They have a litter tray indoors (though I'm hoping that won't last for ever). Apart from not having their own iPads with a butterfly swiping game I can't see what else we could have done for them. My hairdresser who failed to get a kitten from Colchester Cat Rescue because she lived on a road and went out to work said she thought the only people they'd give cats to would have to be retired, live in the middle of field and stay at home all the time, but we practically do, and we still weren't offered one.
Monday, 22 August 2016
Sunday, 21 August 2016
storm damage
The gale has done for my row of Coleus on the shelf in the porch. I bought them as a pack of six small plants and put each into an individual five inch terracotta pot which initially seemed overly large, and has recently seemed rather small relative to the height of the plants. They had two-tone leaves, with a lime green outer zone and a dark red heart, and I enjoyed the way the ones at the back where it is shadier grew tallest and with more and brighter green in their leaves, while the one at the front was the shortest and reddest. I liked the way they grew into and around each other, neatly fitting together into one tiered whole. They soon told me if they needed watering, by drooping pathetically, and they needed water most days, but they did pretty well.
And then a gust in yesterday's gale sent the pots crashing to the ground, just as it did the begonias* last year. Two of the pots broke, and most of the plants were smashed past saving. The stocky specimen from the front was relatively uninjured, and I took it down to the conservatory in a fit of sentiment and because it will look quite at home in there, but the rest are now set to become crocks and compost. Alas. The Systems Administrator asked me the other day if they were OK up there, and in truth they were not, but short of standing them all down on the floor which rather negated the point of having them there wasn't a lot I could do about it.
The SA suggested that what I needed was a box to stop them tipping over. A half hour's search on the web over a mug of coffee produced precisely one trough that was the right size, long enough without being too wide. It was as it happened quite an attractive design, a fairly plain affair in glass fibre. I discovered two web sites selling it, one pricing it at £96 and the other at £105. The cheaper of the two said that there was a six to eight week delay on that product, and the only phone number given was a mobile. I didn't feel totally reassured, and anyway I didn't want to spend as much as ninety six quid to stop half a dozen flower pots falling off a shelf.
Help is at hand. The SA on hearing how much window boxes were has agreed to make a neat, plain restraint out of wood for next summer's pots. Winter is not an issue, since I'll probably do cyclamen again and they don't get top heavy like Coleus and begonias. With any luck once the SA starts the project can expand to include a little stand for the auriculas as well. There are some nice wooden ones in some of the catalogues, but they are phenomenally expensive for what is only, when you strip it down to essentials, a few pieces of wood.
*The begonias were the variety 'Glowing Embers', with dark leaves and orange flowers. They had made tubers by the autumn, and I kept them in their individual pots over the winter in the greenhouse, watering them very sparingly. One died and four lived. The survivors were moved into one big pot and have made a vast and gaudy mound of bronze and orange in a sheltered, shady space by the conservatory. They were slow to come back into leaf, but then made up for lost time. If you have been tempted by 'Glowing Embers' in your local garden centre and can store them frost free, and more to the point have somewhere to start them into growth in the spring, it's worth bothering, since three plug plants from Thompson and Morgan would set you back £9.99.
And then a gust in yesterday's gale sent the pots crashing to the ground, just as it did the begonias* last year. Two of the pots broke, and most of the plants were smashed past saving. The stocky specimen from the front was relatively uninjured, and I took it down to the conservatory in a fit of sentiment and because it will look quite at home in there, but the rest are now set to become crocks and compost. Alas. The Systems Administrator asked me the other day if they were OK up there, and in truth they were not, but short of standing them all down on the floor which rather negated the point of having them there wasn't a lot I could do about it.
The SA suggested that what I needed was a box to stop them tipping over. A half hour's search on the web over a mug of coffee produced precisely one trough that was the right size, long enough without being too wide. It was as it happened quite an attractive design, a fairly plain affair in glass fibre. I discovered two web sites selling it, one pricing it at £96 and the other at £105. The cheaper of the two said that there was a six to eight week delay on that product, and the only phone number given was a mobile. I didn't feel totally reassured, and anyway I didn't want to spend as much as ninety six quid to stop half a dozen flower pots falling off a shelf.
Help is at hand. The SA on hearing how much window boxes were has agreed to make a neat, plain restraint out of wood for next summer's pots. Winter is not an issue, since I'll probably do cyclamen again and they don't get top heavy like Coleus and begonias. With any luck once the SA starts the project can expand to include a little stand for the auriculas as well. There are some nice wooden ones in some of the catalogues, but they are phenomenally expensive for what is only, when you strip it down to essentials, a few pieces of wood.
*The begonias were the variety 'Glowing Embers', with dark leaves and orange flowers. They had made tubers by the autumn, and I kept them in their individual pots over the winter in the greenhouse, watering them very sparingly. One died and four lived. The survivors were moved into one big pot and have made a vast and gaudy mound of bronze and orange in a sheltered, shady space by the conservatory. They were slow to come back into leaf, but then made up for lost time. If you have been tempted by 'Glowing Embers' in your local garden centre and can store them frost free, and more to the point have somewhere to start them into growth in the spring, it's worth bothering, since three plug plants from Thompson and Morgan would set you back £9.99.
Saturday, 20 August 2016
the beauty of the Persian silk tree
My Albizia julibrissin f. rosea is flowering for the first time this year. I am rather excited about this, since it is a very attractive thing, and I grew it from seed. I don't know why, but seeing woody plants flower that you've raised yourself from seed has an additional frisson, over and above the pleasure to be had from herbaceous perennials, or annuals. What started off as a parcel of seed packets dropping on to the doormat is on the way to being a tree.
Albizia julibrissin came originally from the near East, where it grows from Afghanistan to Korea, and has a distinctly exotic vibe. It is a member of the pea family, and looks not unlike some kind of mimosa, except that it has pink flowers. The leaves are large but airy and graceful, being divided into many sub-leaves which in turn are divided again into smaller leaflets. The full botanical description as given in W J Bean puts it thus: Leaves doubly pinnate, with from six to twelve pairs of main divisions (pinnae), each of which consists of twenty to thirty pairs of leaflets, the entire leaf being 9 to 18 inches long, half as wide. Each leaflet is 1/3 to 1/2 in. long, 1/8 in. wide, oblong, oblique due to the blade developing only on the side of the midrib towards the base of the pinna. Who knew leaves could be so complicated?
They are a middling shade of greyish green, and have developed an attractive bronze sheen in the sun. Garden centres offer named selections that have been picked out for their chocolate leaves, but I think the shading is prettier than all-over dark chocolate foliage would be. The pink flowers consist mainly of tufts of long stamens, and have been gradually opening over the past week, with plenty more still to come.
The original species, Albizia julibrissin, is included in Bean but with the proviso that it is not hardy at Kew in the open, though he mentions that a form introduced from Korea in 1918 is quite hardy in the open at the Arnold Arboretum, and is of a smaller, more spreading habit than the common form. I presume this is what has been dubbed A. julibrissin f. roseum, which has been awarded the RHS Award of Garden Merit. AGMs are only dished out to plants judged in trials to be reliable in a range of garden conditions, and when I ordered my seed the comment in the catalogue (probably Chiltern) was that it was hardier than the plain form.
Certainly my plant wants to spread. I first saw Albizia for sale at the plant centre, imported from an Italian nursery and a good ten feet tall with clean standard stems, and imagined my seedling would do that, but it is reluctant to make a main trunk. I chose the likeliest one and tied it to a stake, then pruned the others last summer, but they have defiantly grown again and apart from the stake you couldn't honestly tell which is supposed to be the leader. Last year when we visited the Hillier Arboretum I noticed a young Albizia in a bed near the house, a year or two ahead of mine and equally spreading. Maybe that goes with the type, along with the increased hardiness and pinker flowers. But, and here's a thought, it could be something to do with how the plants were raised. The self sown Genista aetnensis now growing in the gravel are making much less branched and more tree like shrubs than their parent, which I grew from seed and planted out. It was still quite small when I planted it, but started life in a pot, and through its life it insisted on making many more stems from low down than I wanted it to. And I have read that Zelkova in the wild make tall trees when in cultivation they generally make multi-branched specimens like gigantic besom brooms, which is just what mine (also grown from seed and planted out while still small) is doing.
According to the RHS sapling Albizia should flower in three years, so mine has been a touch slow, unless last year's pruning inadvertently removed what would have been the flowering wood. But it is to be flowering now on this year's growth, so I don't think that was the issue. Architectural Plants offer some cultivation advice on their website, and explain that in the wild it experiences hotter summers and colder winters than we do here. British summers may not be warm enough to ripen its wood, or to coax it into leaf before June, which can lead to problems with die back in the winter when the inadequately hardened growth is hit by frost. My plant went into the ground in May 2011, and I haven't noticed it being desperately late into leaf, nor has it suffered from die back to date. As I recall 2010-11 was the second of the recent hard winters, while 2011-12 was horribly wet, so it hasn't yet been tested in a really cold year. Architectural Plants do reassuringly promise that I can prune it as much as I like in spring and summer.
I don't have a spare wall I could grow the Albizia against as Architectural Plants suggest, but our garden would probably count as very sunny, which is one of the situations in which they suggest it should be OK in the open. The high light level was one of the factors cited by the lettuce farm in their decision to locate here. And areas mulched with gravel get hotter than the equivalent space covered in an organic mulch or grass (I know I've read articles on that, but can't lay my hands on one to refer you to at this moment). At any rate, after five years out in the garden the Albizia is coping nicely so far. I have a second, since two germinated, and that lives in a pot in the conservatory, is a fraction of the size of the one planted out, and shows no signs of flowering. True, members of the pea family can be funny in pots. An Acacia dealbata seedling given to me by a friend who germinated it from seed from her own tree (before the two successive hard winters killed it) never thrived, and eventually petered out and died, despite my very best efforts to care for it, and a Sutherlandia frutescens and several Lupinus 'Silver Fleece' raised from seed went the same way. Yet again it has proved easier to keep something in the ground than in a pot.
Albizia julibrissin came originally from the near East, where it grows from Afghanistan to Korea, and has a distinctly exotic vibe. It is a member of the pea family, and looks not unlike some kind of mimosa, except that it has pink flowers. The leaves are large but airy and graceful, being divided into many sub-leaves which in turn are divided again into smaller leaflets. The full botanical description as given in W J Bean puts it thus: Leaves doubly pinnate, with from six to twelve pairs of main divisions (pinnae), each of which consists of twenty to thirty pairs of leaflets, the entire leaf being 9 to 18 inches long, half as wide. Each leaflet is 1/3 to 1/2 in. long, 1/8 in. wide, oblong, oblique due to the blade developing only on the side of the midrib towards the base of the pinna. Who knew leaves could be so complicated?
They are a middling shade of greyish green, and have developed an attractive bronze sheen in the sun. Garden centres offer named selections that have been picked out for their chocolate leaves, but I think the shading is prettier than all-over dark chocolate foliage would be. The pink flowers consist mainly of tufts of long stamens, and have been gradually opening over the past week, with plenty more still to come.
The original species, Albizia julibrissin, is included in Bean but with the proviso that it is not hardy at Kew in the open, though he mentions that a form introduced from Korea in 1918 is quite hardy in the open at the Arnold Arboretum, and is of a smaller, more spreading habit than the common form. I presume this is what has been dubbed A. julibrissin f. roseum, which has been awarded the RHS Award of Garden Merit. AGMs are only dished out to plants judged in trials to be reliable in a range of garden conditions, and when I ordered my seed the comment in the catalogue (probably Chiltern) was that it was hardier than the plain form.
Certainly my plant wants to spread. I first saw Albizia for sale at the plant centre, imported from an Italian nursery and a good ten feet tall with clean standard stems, and imagined my seedling would do that, but it is reluctant to make a main trunk. I chose the likeliest one and tied it to a stake, then pruned the others last summer, but they have defiantly grown again and apart from the stake you couldn't honestly tell which is supposed to be the leader. Last year when we visited the Hillier Arboretum I noticed a young Albizia in a bed near the house, a year or two ahead of mine and equally spreading. Maybe that goes with the type, along with the increased hardiness and pinker flowers. But, and here's a thought, it could be something to do with how the plants were raised. The self sown Genista aetnensis now growing in the gravel are making much less branched and more tree like shrubs than their parent, which I grew from seed and planted out. It was still quite small when I planted it, but started life in a pot, and through its life it insisted on making many more stems from low down than I wanted it to. And I have read that Zelkova in the wild make tall trees when in cultivation they generally make multi-branched specimens like gigantic besom brooms, which is just what mine (also grown from seed and planted out while still small) is doing.
According to the RHS sapling Albizia should flower in three years, so mine has been a touch slow, unless last year's pruning inadvertently removed what would have been the flowering wood. But it is to be flowering now on this year's growth, so I don't think that was the issue. Architectural Plants offer some cultivation advice on their website, and explain that in the wild it experiences hotter summers and colder winters than we do here. British summers may not be warm enough to ripen its wood, or to coax it into leaf before June, which can lead to problems with die back in the winter when the inadequately hardened growth is hit by frost. My plant went into the ground in May 2011, and I haven't noticed it being desperately late into leaf, nor has it suffered from die back to date. As I recall 2010-11 was the second of the recent hard winters, while 2011-12 was horribly wet, so it hasn't yet been tested in a really cold year. Architectural Plants do reassuringly promise that I can prune it as much as I like in spring and summer.
I don't have a spare wall I could grow the Albizia against as Architectural Plants suggest, but our garden would probably count as very sunny, which is one of the situations in which they suggest it should be OK in the open. The high light level was one of the factors cited by the lettuce farm in their decision to locate here. And areas mulched with gravel get hotter than the equivalent space covered in an organic mulch or grass (I know I've read articles on that, but can't lay my hands on one to refer you to at this moment). At any rate, after five years out in the garden the Albizia is coping nicely so far. I have a second, since two germinated, and that lives in a pot in the conservatory, is a fraction of the size of the one planted out, and shows no signs of flowering. True, members of the pea family can be funny in pots. An Acacia dealbata seedling given to me by a friend who germinated it from seed from her own tree (before the two successive hard winters killed it) never thrived, and eventually petered out and died, despite my very best efforts to care for it, and a Sutherlandia frutescens and several Lupinus 'Silver Fleece' raised from seed went the same way. Yet again it has proved easier to keep something in the ground than in a pot.
Friday, 19 August 2016
more art
I went to London today with a friend for more art viewing. The trip was born out of a good review she saw in Time Out about the Alex Katz exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. I'd never been to any of their exhibitions before, though I've been along to look at a few of their summer pavilions (2008, 2009 and 2011, I worked out from the photos in the gallery foyer). The Serpentine Gallery is not big, it is free to go in, but it is closed on Mondays. It was very nice, clean spaces and friendly staff. I'd go again, if I liked the sound of the featured artist.
Alex Katz was fun. Born in Brooklyn in 1928 he is still working in his 90s, and according to one of the helpful gallery staff goes jogging every day. The paintings were mostly huge so there were not very many of them, some done within the past few years and some decades old. We both liked some of the fairly abstract landscapes very much, and neither of us were convinced by his people. I hadn't heard of Alex Katz until my friend told me about the Time Out review, but I'm glad I went.
Nowadays the Serpentine Gallery has a second gallery space just the other side of the road bridge across the actual Serpentine. I saw on the gallery website that that was hosting another exhibition by another artist I'd never heard of, the Lebanese Etel Adnan. It seemed perverse not to go and see what that was about while we were there, and were glad that we did, as it turned out to be about colourful abstraction including some tapestries. I thought Etel Adnan inhabited the same visual world as Klee and Kandinsky, and must try and found out some more about her now that I've seen some of her work. The building holding the second branch of the Serpentine, the Sackler Gallery, was an interesting structure, consisting of a converted gunpowder store from the Napoleonic era, with a curved restaurant space by Zaha Hadid stuck on the back.
From there we went to Tate Britain to catch Painting with Light, an investigation of how early photography and British art fed off and influenced each other from the first days of photography to Edwardian times. It was very interesting, in a gentle and nerdy way, and not very full, since there were no Monet water lilies or other high status loaned items on offer. Instead there were paintings, many Pre-Raphaelite, from the Tate's permanent collection or on loan from mostly local sources like the City of London. I'd probably seen more than half the paintings before at one time or another, but not the photographs, and they were fascinating. There were so many different methods of printing, the possibilities of combining or messing about with negatives were realised so early, the spectacle of respectable Victorians dressing up in cod Medieval costumes to recreate scenes from Tennyson was so funny, and the later photographs of country life fascinating and poignant when you realised that they were taken at the same time as Munnings was painting gypsies and carters and Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams were frantically collecting folk songs. It is a really nice, low key exhibition, which will win you no brownie points for attendance from the sort of people whose idea of a worthwhile art experience is limited to blockbuster Impressionist exhibitions and the opera.
We debated on the way home whether we'd been to three exhibitions or if the two halves of the Serpentine counted as one and we'd only done two. Either way we were exhausted.
Alex Katz was fun. Born in Brooklyn in 1928 he is still working in his 90s, and according to one of the helpful gallery staff goes jogging every day. The paintings were mostly huge so there were not very many of them, some done within the past few years and some decades old. We both liked some of the fairly abstract landscapes very much, and neither of us were convinced by his people. I hadn't heard of Alex Katz until my friend told me about the Time Out review, but I'm glad I went.
Nowadays the Serpentine Gallery has a second gallery space just the other side of the road bridge across the actual Serpentine. I saw on the gallery website that that was hosting another exhibition by another artist I'd never heard of, the Lebanese Etel Adnan. It seemed perverse not to go and see what that was about while we were there, and were glad that we did, as it turned out to be about colourful abstraction including some tapestries. I thought Etel Adnan inhabited the same visual world as Klee and Kandinsky, and must try and found out some more about her now that I've seen some of her work. The building holding the second branch of the Serpentine, the Sackler Gallery, was an interesting structure, consisting of a converted gunpowder store from the Napoleonic era, with a curved restaurant space by Zaha Hadid stuck on the back.
From there we went to Tate Britain to catch Painting with Light, an investigation of how early photography and British art fed off and influenced each other from the first days of photography to Edwardian times. It was very interesting, in a gentle and nerdy way, and not very full, since there were no Monet water lilies or other high status loaned items on offer. Instead there were paintings, many Pre-Raphaelite, from the Tate's permanent collection or on loan from mostly local sources like the City of London. I'd probably seen more than half the paintings before at one time or another, but not the photographs, and they were fascinating. There were so many different methods of printing, the possibilities of combining or messing about with negatives were realised so early, the spectacle of respectable Victorians dressing up in cod Medieval costumes to recreate scenes from Tennyson was so funny, and the later photographs of country life fascinating and poignant when you realised that they were taken at the same time as Munnings was painting gypsies and carters and Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams were frantically collecting folk songs. It is a really nice, low key exhibition, which will win you no brownie points for attendance from the sort of people whose idea of a worthwhile art experience is limited to blockbuster Impressionist exhibitions and the opera.
We debated on the way home whether we'd been to three exhibitions or if the two halves of the Serpentine counted as one and we'd only done two. Either way we were exhausted.
Thursday, 18 August 2016
finally we visit the Munnings museum
We went to visit the Munnings Museum in Dedham this afternoon. I'd been vaguely meaning to go for ages, ages in this case being several years, without ever actually getting round to it, then when it appeared in an episode of Fake or Fortune we agreed we really would go. That was months ago, and today we finally went.
It occupies Munning's former home, a gracious house on the edge of the village that was steadily added to and adapted from the days of Dedham's riches and pomp as a wool town through to the Georgian era. The downstairs rooms open to the public are still furnished as a house, with Munnings' paintings on the walls, then there is more of his work displayed in the hall and in a couple of the upstairs rooms, plus photographs and memorabilia of his life. I am not sure whether in his lifetime he hung quite so much of his own work in his house, which seems a little akin to a musician going on Desert Island Discs and choosing eight of their own recordings, or whether he collected works by other artists. Either way, it is a very nice house and I can imagine Munnings and his well-connected second wife living the life of country gents there.
I really liked Munnings' paintings. He was one of those painters who was a commercial success in his own lifetime, and became very much part of the establishment in his later years after relatively modest beginnings as a miller's son in Norfolk. He received a knighthood and was president of The Royal Academy, and all I knew of his work originally was that he painted horses. My desire to see his museum was initially prompted mainly by curiosity, because it was there on my doorstep. Then we learned from Fake or Fortune that he was a fair landscape painter as well, but I still wanted to visit the museum largely in a spirit of enquiry, rather than any fixed conviction that I would love his work.
But I did. Sir Alfred James Munnings was a thoroughgoing Englishman, who liked horses and dogs and the English landscape, and liked painting them. I can see why the Establishment took to him and why he was so popular in his lifetime. His pictures are full of light and the effects of light, bright colours expressed in thick layers of paint. Roger Fry hated him, and the dislike was mutual. Munnings disliked modernism and mocked it. But I find it perfectly possible to like Barbara Hepworth and Alfred Munnings. I am myself a thoroughgoing Englishwoman who likes animals and the English landscape, and found his plein air oil painting of a sow and her piglets standing in the dappled shade of a tree on a hot day a very jolly thing which I would happily live with in my own house. I would happily live with a Hepworth bronze as well, while reconciled to the fact that I'm not going to get either of them.
Apart from his easy, breezy charm, I actually think Munnings was a far better painter than Fry gave him credit for. His local scenes were absolutely spot on in terms of catching the East Anglian light. It is a real thing, the fabled quality of the light under the big skies of East Anglia, and Munnings got it. He was no mere generic hedge painter.
There is a tea room at the museum, with plenty of big tables outside and two tiny ones under cover, so I don't know how they manage on wet days. The outside tables command a view over a paddock where a white pony and a mysteriously hooded horse were grazing. The pony nicely echoed the presence of other white ponies in several of the paintings, though the modern day equine is called Dinky. The mysterious hooded horse was Thomas. The scones in our cream tea were excellent but we weren't convinced by the Pukka Tea version of English Breakfast tea. It said English Breakfast on the tag, but the flavour was oddly herbal.
It occupies Munning's former home, a gracious house on the edge of the village that was steadily added to and adapted from the days of Dedham's riches and pomp as a wool town through to the Georgian era. The downstairs rooms open to the public are still furnished as a house, with Munnings' paintings on the walls, then there is more of his work displayed in the hall and in a couple of the upstairs rooms, plus photographs and memorabilia of his life. I am not sure whether in his lifetime he hung quite so much of his own work in his house, which seems a little akin to a musician going on Desert Island Discs and choosing eight of their own recordings, or whether he collected works by other artists. Either way, it is a very nice house and I can imagine Munnings and his well-connected second wife living the life of country gents there.
I really liked Munnings' paintings. He was one of those painters who was a commercial success in his own lifetime, and became very much part of the establishment in his later years after relatively modest beginnings as a miller's son in Norfolk. He received a knighthood and was president of The Royal Academy, and all I knew of his work originally was that he painted horses. My desire to see his museum was initially prompted mainly by curiosity, because it was there on my doorstep. Then we learned from Fake or Fortune that he was a fair landscape painter as well, but I still wanted to visit the museum largely in a spirit of enquiry, rather than any fixed conviction that I would love his work.
But I did. Sir Alfred James Munnings was a thoroughgoing Englishman, who liked horses and dogs and the English landscape, and liked painting them. I can see why the Establishment took to him and why he was so popular in his lifetime. His pictures are full of light and the effects of light, bright colours expressed in thick layers of paint. Roger Fry hated him, and the dislike was mutual. Munnings disliked modernism and mocked it. But I find it perfectly possible to like Barbara Hepworth and Alfred Munnings. I am myself a thoroughgoing Englishwoman who likes animals and the English landscape, and found his plein air oil painting of a sow and her piglets standing in the dappled shade of a tree on a hot day a very jolly thing which I would happily live with in my own house. I would happily live with a Hepworth bronze as well, while reconciled to the fact that I'm not going to get either of them.
Apart from his easy, breezy charm, I actually think Munnings was a far better painter than Fry gave him credit for. His local scenes were absolutely spot on in terms of catching the East Anglian light. It is a real thing, the fabled quality of the light under the big skies of East Anglia, and Munnings got it. He was no mere generic hedge painter.
There is a tea room at the museum, with plenty of big tables outside and two tiny ones under cover, so I don't know how they manage on wet days. The outside tables command a view over a paddock where a white pony and a mysteriously hooded horse were grazing. The pony nicely echoed the presence of other white ponies in several of the paintings, though the modern day equine is called Dinky. The mysterious hooded horse was Thomas. The scones in our cream tea were excellent but we weren't convinced by the Pukka Tea version of English Breakfast tea. It said English Breakfast on the tag, but the flavour was oddly herbal.
Wednesday, 17 August 2016
field of flowers
Late last winter my garden club hosted a talk by a local dahlia grower. It was a very good talk, full of useful practical advice from somebody who had actually done all the things he was talking about, and coming at the right time of year for people to order dahlia plants. And it was pleasant in the short cold days of winter to be reminded of the bright, confident flowers of late summer. Now that they are flowering in reality as well as memory the garden club staged a follow on visit to the grower's dahlia field, so that we could see them in the flesh.
The grower and his wife moved over to Suffolk from Worcestershire in 2012 and have crammed a truly exhausting amount of activity into the subsequent four and a half years, for two people who are nominally retired. They have restored and converted a traditional barn into a house, cleared and fenced a six acre site, turned part of it into a garden, demolished a concrete barn, relocated the entrance and driveway to the property, rebuilt two large derelict polytunnels and installed a thirty-five foot greenhouse, constructed a large fruit cage, kept up to fifty chickens (and lost the last of them to the fox), run a tea room until their daughter presented them with several grandchildren, survived four floods and two storms that took out several mature trees and a cart shed, built a new cart shed, planted hundreds more trees, and planted an acre or so of dahlias.
The dahlia field was great. I took my notebook with me, but rapidly gave up on the idea of writing down the names of any varieties I particularly liked, since odds were they wouldn't be available for sale anyway, and just enjoyed walking about looking at them. Red, orange, soft pink, white, purple, simple singles and huge shaggy doubles, tiny pompoms, two tone petals shading from flame to yellow, strange bicolours, every kind of dahlia you can imagine. The grower and his wife sell them as cut flowers, at the gate and to local florists, and out in the field there is no attempt to arrange them artistically. They are in rows for ease of cultivation, and some clash violently with their neighbours when viewed close up and in detail.
The massed effect was stunning, like a painting out of the RA's exhibition Painting the Modern Garden. Indeed, looking at them I realised how true the Impressionist paintings of massed dahlias actually were. I ended up making a little frame out of my fingers through which to view them, so that there would be no background of fence and grass and trees, just serried ranks of dahlias, their flowers dots of bright colour above dark green foliage. And the foliage was dark green. The dahlia field was on heavy Suffolk clay, and clay is a fertile soil. I realised I must feed my dahlias much more than I had been doing.
After the tour of the field came the refreshments, and wine and cheese turned out to be a sit down do with a plate each of a selection of cheese and crackers and a retro piece of celery and some Branston pickle. I'd been expecting to stand about nibbling a few bits off circulating platters, or else take a little sliver of cheese from a buffet like we do at the music society's AGM. This was supper, and gratefully eaten with great rapidity by somebody I know from our Writtle college days who had barely had any lunch. I declined the offer of wine on the grounds that I was driving, and was promptly given a glass of water followed up by the rest of the bottle. I bet they did good teas when they had the tea room.
Addendum I discovered that the garden in Lavenham I visited on Sunday with a different Writtle friend had over four hundred visitors, the most of any garden opening this year in Suffolk for the NGS.
The grower and his wife moved over to Suffolk from Worcestershire in 2012 and have crammed a truly exhausting amount of activity into the subsequent four and a half years, for two people who are nominally retired. They have restored and converted a traditional barn into a house, cleared and fenced a six acre site, turned part of it into a garden, demolished a concrete barn, relocated the entrance and driveway to the property, rebuilt two large derelict polytunnels and installed a thirty-five foot greenhouse, constructed a large fruit cage, kept up to fifty chickens (and lost the last of them to the fox), run a tea room until their daughter presented them with several grandchildren, survived four floods and two storms that took out several mature trees and a cart shed, built a new cart shed, planted hundreds more trees, and planted an acre or so of dahlias.
The dahlia field was great. I took my notebook with me, but rapidly gave up on the idea of writing down the names of any varieties I particularly liked, since odds were they wouldn't be available for sale anyway, and just enjoyed walking about looking at them. Red, orange, soft pink, white, purple, simple singles and huge shaggy doubles, tiny pompoms, two tone petals shading from flame to yellow, strange bicolours, every kind of dahlia you can imagine. The grower and his wife sell them as cut flowers, at the gate and to local florists, and out in the field there is no attempt to arrange them artistically. They are in rows for ease of cultivation, and some clash violently with their neighbours when viewed close up and in detail.
The massed effect was stunning, like a painting out of the RA's exhibition Painting the Modern Garden. Indeed, looking at them I realised how true the Impressionist paintings of massed dahlias actually were. I ended up making a little frame out of my fingers through which to view them, so that there would be no background of fence and grass and trees, just serried ranks of dahlias, their flowers dots of bright colour above dark green foliage. And the foliage was dark green. The dahlia field was on heavy Suffolk clay, and clay is a fertile soil. I realised I must feed my dahlias much more than I had been doing.
After the tour of the field came the refreshments, and wine and cheese turned out to be a sit down do with a plate each of a selection of cheese and crackers and a retro piece of celery and some Branston pickle. I'd been expecting to stand about nibbling a few bits off circulating platters, or else take a little sliver of cheese from a buffet like we do at the music society's AGM. This was supper, and gratefully eaten with great rapidity by somebody I know from our Writtle college days who had barely had any lunch. I declined the offer of wine on the grounds that I was driving, and was promptly given a glass of water followed up by the rest of the bottle. I bet they did good teas when they had the tea room.
Addendum I discovered that the garden in Lavenham I visited on Sunday with a different Writtle friend had over four hundred visitors, the most of any garden opening this year in Suffolk for the NGS.
Tuesday, 16 August 2016
figs
Suddenly the figs are ripening. Figs don't give you a lot of warning. One day they are starting to colour, but still too firm to be worth eating, for an underripe fig is a sad disappointment with little taste and less sweetness. A couple of days later and you find some have already shrivelled on the tree. In a typical year you also find that just as they reach the point of ripeness they are destroyed by wasps, which in turn takes the pleasure out of picking them as you hesitate to close your fingers around each fruit in case you get a handful of wasp into the bargain. But this year for some reason there are no wasps on the figs at all.
I ate some of the slightly shrivelled ones straight from the tree, sticky and tasting of utter distilled essence of fig. Experience teaches that they don't keep in the fridge so it's a case of eat them or waste them. And no, I didn't even wash them first, given they had never been touched by human hand and bore no marks of wasp or bird damage. In truth, though we are normally conscientious about washing raw fruit and salad I do wonder whether running something under a cold tap really makes a difference. The others that were ready to pick went into a wide, flat bowl in the fridge and I must eat them as soon as possible. The Systems Administrator does not share my love of figs, so they are all mine, to eat as many as I can before they go off. Or I could I suppose cook with them, but then I would be left with some sort of fig pudding that the SA didn't like either, which seems to expand rather than solve the problem.
The tree is a 'Brown Turkey'. I chose it because that was the variety I'd heard of, and it was supposed to be a reliable cropper in the UK. It lived for several years in a fair sized pot in the conservatory, where it never produced more than about three half-hearted fruit, and the undersized leaves and wavering branches had a defeated air. One summer's day, walking along a street in Southwold with friends and seeing a fig hanging over somebody's garden wall on to the pavement and laden with figs which our friend promptly ate, I had to admit that my potted fig was a travesty compared to this beauty. The huge leaves, the air of luxuriance and abundance, the fruit. This was how a fig should be.
In November 2009 I planted my sad potted specimen out into the narrow bed below the terrace (or patio), where it sat in a south-west facing corner between the retaining terrace (or patio) wall and the garage door, which is white so reflects any light going. It had a stretch of paving in front of it, to soak up and radiate heat, a brick wall at its back, and its feet in the stoniest soil you have ever seen. When I laid the paving outside the garage I had to winkle out flints with the point of a pickaxe, and filled buckets of them. They could not all have been native to the site, and I presume the people who built the house dumped them there to make a firm track to the garage, in the days when it might actually have been used as a garage instead of a gardening and beekeeping equipment store cum utility room. The soil was so awful I thought I could safely dispense with the received wisdom about putting paving slabs or old washing machine drums or anything else around the roots of the fig to restrict them and direct its energies into fruiting.
Maybe it was unkind of me to plant it out just ahead of winter. I imagine I had got fed up with having it in the conservatory, and anyway the corner it was going to was very sheltered and impeccably well drained. The fig felt the shock, though, after all that time in its big pot, and did nothing much for a year or so. Then it began to grow, giving up on the sad little branches that had seen it through its wilderness years in the conservatory, and throwing up strong straight shoots from ground level. The leaves on the new growth were double the size of the old ones, a better shade of green, closer together and everything you could desire from a 'Brown Turkey'. This year's crop of figs is the heaviest yet. Maybe a wet June followed by a baking period has suited it.
It has grown so much this season it is threatening to block the way into the garage. I bargained with the SA for it a few weeks back, pleading to be allowed to keep as much growth as possible until after the fig harvest. I might need to trim the longest ends tomorrow since I have been lobbying the SA to give the lawn a cut, and the fig really is blocking the garage door. The ends of the longest shoots don't have any figs on them anyway. At some point over the winter it will need a hard chop to keep it within bounds, which is what it had last year, otherwise as well as blocking the garage it starts to shade the terrace (or patio), and there's no point in having figs so high I can't reach to pick them. Figs seem to tolerate a great deal of training if they have to. You see them in old walled gardens now restored to fruit and vegetable production, where they have been tightly trained in against the wall, and looking at the base of the plant a whole forest of shoots must have come off to achieve that shape. I am not so strict with mine, because I enjoy the romantic, jungly look, but we do need to be able to get in and out of the garage.
I ate some of the slightly shrivelled ones straight from the tree, sticky and tasting of utter distilled essence of fig. Experience teaches that they don't keep in the fridge so it's a case of eat them or waste them. And no, I didn't even wash them first, given they had never been touched by human hand and bore no marks of wasp or bird damage. In truth, though we are normally conscientious about washing raw fruit and salad I do wonder whether running something under a cold tap really makes a difference. The others that were ready to pick went into a wide, flat bowl in the fridge and I must eat them as soon as possible. The Systems Administrator does not share my love of figs, so they are all mine, to eat as many as I can before they go off. Or I could I suppose cook with them, but then I would be left with some sort of fig pudding that the SA didn't like either, which seems to expand rather than solve the problem.
The tree is a 'Brown Turkey'. I chose it because that was the variety I'd heard of, and it was supposed to be a reliable cropper in the UK. It lived for several years in a fair sized pot in the conservatory, where it never produced more than about three half-hearted fruit, and the undersized leaves and wavering branches had a defeated air. One summer's day, walking along a street in Southwold with friends and seeing a fig hanging over somebody's garden wall on to the pavement and laden with figs which our friend promptly ate, I had to admit that my potted fig was a travesty compared to this beauty. The huge leaves, the air of luxuriance and abundance, the fruit. This was how a fig should be.
In November 2009 I planted my sad potted specimen out into the narrow bed below the terrace (or patio), where it sat in a south-west facing corner between the retaining terrace (or patio) wall and the garage door, which is white so reflects any light going. It had a stretch of paving in front of it, to soak up and radiate heat, a brick wall at its back, and its feet in the stoniest soil you have ever seen. When I laid the paving outside the garage I had to winkle out flints with the point of a pickaxe, and filled buckets of them. They could not all have been native to the site, and I presume the people who built the house dumped them there to make a firm track to the garage, in the days when it might actually have been used as a garage instead of a gardening and beekeeping equipment store cum utility room. The soil was so awful I thought I could safely dispense with the received wisdom about putting paving slabs or old washing machine drums or anything else around the roots of the fig to restrict them and direct its energies into fruiting.
Maybe it was unkind of me to plant it out just ahead of winter. I imagine I had got fed up with having it in the conservatory, and anyway the corner it was going to was very sheltered and impeccably well drained. The fig felt the shock, though, after all that time in its big pot, and did nothing much for a year or so. Then it began to grow, giving up on the sad little branches that had seen it through its wilderness years in the conservatory, and throwing up strong straight shoots from ground level. The leaves on the new growth were double the size of the old ones, a better shade of green, closer together and everything you could desire from a 'Brown Turkey'. This year's crop of figs is the heaviest yet. Maybe a wet June followed by a baking period has suited it.
It has grown so much this season it is threatening to block the way into the garage. I bargained with the SA for it a few weeks back, pleading to be allowed to keep as much growth as possible until after the fig harvest. I might need to trim the longest ends tomorrow since I have been lobbying the SA to give the lawn a cut, and the fig really is blocking the garage door. The ends of the longest shoots don't have any figs on them anyway. At some point over the winter it will need a hard chop to keep it within bounds, which is what it had last year, otherwise as well as blocking the garage it starts to shade the terrace (or patio), and there's no point in having figs so high I can't reach to pick them. Figs seem to tolerate a great deal of training if they have to. You see them in old walled gardens now restored to fruit and vegetable production, where they have been tightly trained in against the wall, and looking at the base of the plant a whole forest of shoots must have come off to achieve that shape. I am not so strict with mine, because I enjoy the romantic, jungly look, but we do need to be able to get in and out of the garage.
Monday, 15 August 2016
more honey
Today is an early blog post, as I take a breather after extracting another batch of honey, and before venturing forth to clean out the hen house. In the interests of health and hygiene I thought I should do them in that order, starting on the honey straight after breakfast, fresh from the shower and before I could make myself grubby again on anything except the products of the hive. I am now distinctly grubby, my left hand stained nicotine yellow from holding the lugs of the frames during uncapping. The sole of my right foot feels sticky, although I've washed it twice, and the inside of my Birkenstock. I have washed the extractor, and the worktop, and the kitchen table, and the kitchen floor. I have wiped the handle of the spare bedroom door, which had got unaccountably sticky, and cleaned up the smears along the upstairs landing left from my last extraction session when I didn't make a very good job of wiping it. The Systems Administrator has gone to Lords, but when the SA gets back things will doubtless still be pronounced sticky. It is lucky that the SA does not get upset about such things.
The Lands' End t-shirts arrived. I feel rather guilty nowadays seeing the Hermes courier on the doorstep, having read in the paper how badly they are paid. I washed my hands yet again, and carefully tried one t-shirt on. It was horrible, the arms and body seemingly designed for somebody at least seven feet tall, they were so long, while, while the fabric had a strange, clinging quality. I am not shy about my arms, which are in better shape than many women half my age thanks to a combination of lucky genes and all that time spent humping boxes of honey around or labouring in the garden, but I didn't think the clinging was a good look, especially when the garment was cut too wide across the back so that it gaped oddly away from the nape of my neck. The shade of orange I'd chosen that had seemed vibrant and cheerful in the catalogue in real life was so fierce I looked as though I was dressed to carry out some kind of community service order. There didn't seem any point in trying on the other two, and they will have to go back. I must make this my final lesson: no more cheap t-shirts. Ever. It must be top quality cotton or nothing. Pima works out cheaper in the long run anyway, taking a twenty year view.
It is too hot for the little cats, which are all lying asleep scattered around the sitting room. I came out of the kitchen this morning to take a quick breather from the honey, and found Our Ginger sitting in the hall with two of them. For all that he hisses at them and grumbles I am sure he likes them really, otherwise he could have disappeared into the garden. Mr Fluffy when he is awake and out and about has begun to explore the veranda, but is still trying to get his head round the idea that the door on the veranda leads him back into the house, when it is open. He stood outside at one point this morning mewing, but I had a heart of stone and left him to make his own way back to the cat door. Once a cat get the idea that you will open a door or window for them if they stand outside it squeaking, you are condemned to be jumping out of your seat like jack-in-the-box for the rest of the creature's life.
Ah well, there are a couple of minor corrections to make to the music society's website, now that our helpful designer has got it working again, and then there is no help for it, I'm going to have to clean the chickens,
The Lands' End t-shirts arrived. I feel rather guilty nowadays seeing the Hermes courier on the doorstep, having read in the paper how badly they are paid. I washed my hands yet again, and carefully tried one t-shirt on. It was horrible, the arms and body seemingly designed for somebody at least seven feet tall, they were so long, while, while the fabric had a strange, clinging quality. I am not shy about my arms, which are in better shape than many women half my age thanks to a combination of lucky genes and all that time spent humping boxes of honey around or labouring in the garden, but I didn't think the clinging was a good look, especially when the garment was cut too wide across the back so that it gaped oddly away from the nape of my neck. The shade of orange I'd chosen that had seemed vibrant and cheerful in the catalogue in real life was so fierce I looked as though I was dressed to carry out some kind of community service order. There didn't seem any point in trying on the other two, and they will have to go back. I must make this my final lesson: no more cheap t-shirts. Ever. It must be top quality cotton or nothing. Pima works out cheaper in the long run anyway, taking a twenty year view.
It is too hot for the little cats, which are all lying asleep scattered around the sitting room. I came out of the kitchen this morning to take a quick breather from the honey, and found Our Ginger sitting in the hall with two of them. For all that he hisses at them and grumbles I am sure he likes them really, otherwise he could have disappeared into the garden. Mr Fluffy when he is awake and out and about has begun to explore the veranda, but is still trying to get his head round the idea that the door on the veranda leads him back into the house, when it is open. He stood outside at one point this morning mewing, but I had a heart of stone and left him to make his own way back to the cat door. Once a cat get the idea that you will open a door or window for them if they stand outside it squeaking, you are condemned to be jumping out of your seat like jack-in-the-box for the rest of the creature's life.
Ah well, there are a couple of minor corrections to make to the music society's website, now that our helpful designer has got it working again, and then there is no help for it, I'm going to have to clean the chickens,
Sunday, 14 August 2016
a garden visit
I went to visit a Yellow Book open garden today. It was a new entry to the scheme this year, and the supply of NGS openings trails off markedly after mid July, so I was intrigued. It was in Lavenham, and my garden visiting chum who lives in that neck of the woods had spotted it. We agreed to meet there at half past two, the theory being that we'd have time to look at the garden and then have tea before the cake ran out.
It was on the very edge of the village, where the streets plunge down quite a steep hill to a little river, more of a stream after a dry spell at this time of year. Following its fantastically wiggly path downstream on Google maps I think it is an upper stretch of the river Brett, which passes through Hadleigh before joining the Stour south of Higham. And it turned out you got a very good view of the stream from the garden, because most of the garden consisted of a long thin strip along the river bank, a good three hundred feet long but no more than thirty feet wide and gradually tapering off to nothing.
It was clearly a real plant enthusiast's garden. We'd assumed it must be, because otherwise who would open in mid August in the dry expanses of East Anglia? A good garden has something to offer in every season, but in truth July and August can be challenging around here in a hot, dry summer. June more or less takes care of itself, which is why so many village Open Gardens happen then. Roses, hardy geraniums, some nepeta and a peony or two and you're away. The leaves are still fresh and the grass is still green. English gardens just fall into place in June. By mid August if you haven't done some planning there's not going to be a lot to see.
I hoped for exotics, and was made gently happy by what I found (both the plants and the fact that almost everything was labelled). The gravelled area at the front of the small, rambling cottage, given over for the day to the teas and plant sales, had some very interesting things in pots, and I imagined the elegant and almost empty greenhouse would be full to bursting come the winter. I was smitten anew by the charms of Amicia zygomeris, a strange half hardy member of the pea family with extraordinary leaves, and two different sorts of Erythrina as well as the usual E. christa-galli, with big, spiny leaves. In a little bed tucked up against the cottage walls were two beautiful specimens of Bergenia ciliata, their gigantic softly hairy leaves miraculously uneaten by slugs (as were the cannas). Christopher Lloyd raved about B. ciliata in his books, and I could see why.
There were flowers too. Although the plant palette was exotic, the planting style was more spaced out than mine, and being given their own space suited the many Echinacea very well. Somebody, and I think it was one of the tutors at Writtle, told me that the reason why so many people lose this species from their gardens was that it disliked being thrust into a mass of competing plants. Given that the many named varieties in vivid shades of yellow and pink that have been released in recent years retail at eight or ten quid a pop, it must be upsetting to buy them only to find the next year that they are nowhere to be seen. There were hydrangeas, and some roses and clematis, and a sprinkling of penstemon flowers though they were largely over (despite the claim for them in some quarters that they flower 'all summer'). There were quite a few grasses, and their seed heads were looking very good. There were yellow daisies, as there always are by late summer, and some dahlias but not as many as I might have expected.
The other name I wrote down in my notebook was Melianthus villosus which had made a handsome shrub about four feet tall and at least as wide. Its leaves are less grey than the more commonly seen Melianthus major, beautifully pleated, and it made a bush plant well furnished down to ground level. M. major can get very leggy. Spikes of brown seed heads showed it had flowered and we'd missed it, but I wasn't really worried about the flowers. The internet tells me they are brown. I was simply enchanted by the leaves. It's no good, though, I really don't have room for one unless I were to remove something else equally substantial.
By the time we got to the tea stall it looked almost as if the cakes were running out, but there was some chocolate sponge left which pleased my friend, and I got the tail end of an obviously home made lemon drizzle cake, which looked hideous but was a huge slice because of being the end of the loaf, and just deliciously slightly tart rather than super saturated in sugar. So the teas were a hit, and so was the plant stall. Rather than sell odds and bobs they'd raised themselves (which can be a good way of picking up really obscure plants) the owners had invited in a local nursery who were giving a percentage to the NGS. Initially I couldn't see anything I wanted as I looked over the plants on offer while waiting for my friend, then suddenly I realised that sitting on the ground was a sole specimen of Salvia 'Amistad'. It is a particularly handsome variety with purple flowers emerging from black calyces with black stems to reinforce the point. I bought one last year but it didn't come through the winter planted out in the border, and I wanted to try again, but balked at paying a full mail order delivery charge for a single plant. Most mail order suppliers seemed to have run out anyway. Suddenly a well grown specimen in a two litre pot was mine for six pounds. I haven't yet decided whether to risk it again in the ground or if it should become an honorary dahlia and live in a big pot in the greenhouse for the winter.
Lavenham is a very pretty little town. When the Systems Administrator and I went there to the church concert it rained, so we didn't wander about and look at it as much as we'd planned, but at least it meant I knew where the car park was. This time as I ambled through the centre from the car park to the banks of the Brett and back again I had a good look. The buildings are fabulous, and I rather enjoyed the quantity and variety of tubs and window boxes in the almost universal absence of front gardens. Top marks go to the square dark grey tubs planted with standard lavender and the tender blue flowered Convolvulus sabiatus, the booby prize to the display of dead Helichrysum petiolaris and dessicated lobelia. Best not to bother if you aren't going to water them.
It was on the very edge of the village, where the streets plunge down quite a steep hill to a little river, more of a stream after a dry spell at this time of year. Following its fantastically wiggly path downstream on Google maps I think it is an upper stretch of the river Brett, which passes through Hadleigh before joining the Stour south of Higham. And it turned out you got a very good view of the stream from the garden, because most of the garden consisted of a long thin strip along the river bank, a good three hundred feet long but no more than thirty feet wide and gradually tapering off to nothing.
It was clearly a real plant enthusiast's garden. We'd assumed it must be, because otherwise who would open in mid August in the dry expanses of East Anglia? A good garden has something to offer in every season, but in truth July and August can be challenging around here in a hot, dry summer. June more or less takes care of itself, which is why so many village Open Gardens happen then. Roses, hardy geraniums, some nepeta and a peony or two and you're away. The leaves are still fresh and the grass is still green. English gardens just fall into place in June. By mid August if you haven't done some planning there's not going to be a lot to see.
I hoped for exotics, and was made gently happy by what I found (both the plants and the fact that almost everything was labelled). The gravelled area at the front of the small, rambling cottage, given over for the day to the teas and plant sales, had some very interesting things in pots, and I imagined the elegant and almost empty greenhouse would be full to bursting come the winter. I was smitten anew by the charms of Amicia zygomeris, a strange half hardy member of the pea family with extraordinary leaves, and two different sorts of Erythrina as well as the usual E. christa-galli, with big, spiny leaves. In a little bed tucked up against the cottage walls were two beautiful specimens of Bergenia ciliata, their gigantic softly hairy leaves miraculously uneaten by slugs (as were the cannas). Christopher Lloyd raved about B. ciliata in his books, and I could see why.
There were flowers too. Although the plant palette was exotic, the planting style was more spaced out than mine, and being given their own space suited the many Echinacea very well. Somebody, and I think it was one of the tutors at Writtle, told me that the reason why so many people lose this species from their gardens was that it disliked being thrust into a mass of competing plants. Given that the many named varieties in vivid shades of yellow and pink that have been released in recent years retail at eight or ten quid a pop, it must be upsetting to buy them only to find the next year that they are nowhere to be seen. There were hydrangeas, and some roses and clematis, and a sprinkling of penstemon flowers though they were largely over (despite the claim for them in some quarters that they flower 'all summer'). There were quite a few grasses, and their seed heads were looking very good. There were yellow daisies, as there always are by late summer, and some dahlias but not as many as I might have expected.
The other name I wrote down in my notebook was Melianthus villosus which had made a handsome shrub about four feet tall and at least as wide. Its leaves are less grey than the more commonly seen Melianthus major, beautifully pleated, and it made a bush plant well furnished down to ground level. M. major can get very leggy. Spikes of brown seed heads showed it had flowered and we'd missed it, but I wasn't really worried about the flowers. The internet tells me they are brown. I was simply enchanted by the leaves. It's no good, though, I really don't have room for one unless I were to remove something else equally substantial.
By the time we got to the tea stall it looked almost as if the cakes were running out, but there was some chocolate sponge left which pleased my friend, and I got the tail end of an obviously home made lemon drizzle cake, which looked hideous but was a huge slice because of being the end of the loaf, and just deliciously slightly tart rather than super saturated in sugar. So the teas were a hit, and so was the plant stall. Rather than sell odds and bobs they'd raised themselves (which can be a good way of picking up really obscure plants) the owners had invited in a local nursery who were giving a percentage to the NGS. Initially I couldn't see anything I wanted as I looked over the plants on offer while waiting for my friend, then suddenly I realised that sitting on the ground was a sole specimen of Salvia 'Amistad'. It is a particularly handsome variety with purple flowers emerging from black calyces with black stems to reinforce the point. I bought one last year but it didn't come through the winter planted out in the border, and I wanted to try again, but balked at paying a full mail order delivery charge for a single plant. Most mail order suppliers seemed to have run out anyway. Suddenly a well grown specimen in a two litre pot was mine for six pounds. I haven't yet decided whether to risk it again in the ground or if it should become an honorary dahlia and live in a big pot in the greenhouse for the winter.
Lavenham is a very pretty little town. When the Systems Administrator and I went there to the church concert it rained, so we didn't wander about and look at it as much as we'd planned, but at least it meant I knew where the car park was. This time as I ambled through the centre from the car park to the banks of the Brett and back again I had a good look. The buildings are fabulous, and I rather enjoyed the quantity and variety of tubs and window boxes in the almost universal absence of front gardens. Top marks go to the square dark grey tubs planted with standard lavender and the tender blue flowered Convolvulus sabiatus, the booby prize to the display of dead Helichrysum petiolaris and dessicated lobelia. Best not to bother if you aren't going to water them.
Saturday, 13 August 2016
computer says no
This will be a brief and late blog post as I was wrestling with another internet posting challenge after coming in from the garden, trying to update the music society's website. The template was put together for us practically pro-bono by a helpful chap who does them for various small arts organisations plus his local pub. I haven't entirely worked out why he should go to such trouble on our behalf, and can only think it is his way of charity volunteering. I do talks for the woodland charity because I would like to support it and after my previous career I know how to talk. He must wish to support the arts and know how to do websites. We are limited to variations on his basic template, and you can see the family resemblance between his various clients, but it looks very nice and for our purposes is ideal. The way he does links is actually more elegant than the links facility in Blogspot.
Unfortunately a couple of weeks ago the site went into mini meltdown, which was not his fault but something to do with the server. It began to scramble dates, which is pretty terminal when you are trying to advertise concerts. I could understand the process whereby Sunday 5 March was transmuted to 3 May, but why 9 October turned into 29 September had me stumped. Our adviser became very cross with the host provider, and the whole site had to come down for a time and when it reappeared had initially lost all the input data, which upset the Chairman a good deal and me quite a bit as it took me the whole morning to input the 2016-17 season last time.
Unfortunately the introduction to our bargain website designer came via the Chairman's other arts connections, and when I tactfully enquired whether I might communicate directly with him so as not to have to route everything through her or whether she would prefer to manage the relationship herself, the designer did not sound keen on my contacting him. He is doing us a massive favour producing our site for practically nothing, so if he wants to speak to the organ grinder rather than the monkey I can't complain.
The server problem was supposed to have been fixed, and I sat down this evening to input an extra concert we are staging for local amateur musicians, conscious that I had promised to do it yesterday, and go through all the pages to check that everything was all tickety-boo. Alas, it is not. The site has eaten the ticket order form which was stored as a PDF, along with the other stored documents, and it will not let me input it again. Or at least, in edit mode it says the document has been uploaded, but when I click on the booking form in the list of documents it says Server Error. As I am not supposed to approach the designer directly I have had to lob the whole issue back to the chairman, who has quite enough other things to do.
Unfortunately a couple of weeks ago the site went into mini meltdown, which was not his fault but something to do with the server. It began to scramble dates, which is pretty terminal when you are trying to advertise concerts. I could understand the process whereby Sunday 5 March was transmuted to 3 May, but why 9 October turned into 29 September had me stumped. Our adviser became very cross with the host provider, and the whole site had to come down for a time and when it reappeared had initially lost all the input data, which upset the Chairman a good deal and me quite a bit as it took me the whole morning to input the 2016-17 season last time.
Unfortunately the introduction to our bargain website designer came via the Chairman's other arts connections, and when I tactfully enquired whether I might communicate directly with him so as not to have to route everything through her or whether she would prefer to manage the relationship herself, the designer did not sound keen on my contacting him. He is doing us a massive favour producing our site for practically nothing, so if he wants to speak to the organ grinder rather than the monkey I can't complain.
The server problem was supposed to have been fixed, and I sat down this evening to input an extra concert we are staging for local amateur musicians, conscious that I had promised to do it yesterday, and go through all the pages to check that everything was all tickety-boo. Alas, it is not. The site has eaten the ticket order form which was stored as a PDF, along with the other stored documents, and it will not let me input it again. Or at least, in edit mode it says the document has been uploaded, but when I click on the booking form in the list of documents it says Server Error. As I am not supposed to approach the designer directly I have had to lob the whole issue back to the chairman, who has quite enough other things to do.
Friday, 12 August 2016
viola cornuta
I said I would return to the subject of Viola cornuta, or at least I said that was another story, the implication being I might return to it. I bought four different varieties as part of my viola order. Originally I was going to buy them in sets of three of each type, as I planned to use them among the roses and one plant doesn't go very far, but then I thought that maybe I could propagate my own and went for a single one of each type to use as a stock plant. Now, looking up how to make cuttings, I see that I should have cut them back in July to promote a strong flush of regrowth, since what I want are strongly growing basal shoots two to three inches long. Perhaps subconsciously I delayed getting on with them because until the rabbit problem is resolved there doesn't seem an awful lot of point going to much trouble to make new viola plants for the flower beds, since they will probably get eaten. As it is I've got a batch of plants raised from seed that came free with a magazine languishing in a cold frame, because I can't enthuse myself to plant them out.
Ah well, I will just have to get my four stock plants through the winter and try again in the spring. I shall follow the advice given in an article I found by Val Bourne (written for Saga. I wouldn't think of the Saga magazine as the first place to go to for gardening advice, but Val Bourne is a sensible journalist who writes on the basis of having done stuff herself, rather than regurgitating ideas out of books). She says that I should cut my plants back in September so that they make some new growth before they stop growing and go into winter as nice tight, weather resistant domes of foliage.
There will be a lot to cut back, because Viola cornuta has a rambling growth habit, making long trailing arms that continue to lengthen and flower as the summer progresses. They will weave through other plants, and hoist themselves a little way up the stems of shrubs, and are altogether delightful (when not eaten by rabbits). I already have an un-named blue form, and did have a rather nice light blue named 'Belmont Blue', though I am not sure if it has survived the combined onslaught of the rabbits and the rampant growth of its neighbours. Meanwhile, the plants in pots have got a bit straggly by this stage of the summer, but not disgustingly so.
They are 'Victoria Cawthorne', with flowers in a clean shade of mid mauve with delicate purple rays, 'Victoria's Blush', a pale pink with mauve staining on the lower petals and purple rays, 'Alba' which is white (as you'd expect) and 'Clouded Yellow'. The latter is very pretty, having pale yellow petals mottled with soft purple, on the other hand it is not what I ordered. I wanted 'Pat Kavanagh', a plain yellow I've admired often at Chelsea and thought would look well under yellow roses with the plain blue form. Ah well, next year. All are delicately scented, not the sort of strong perfume that carries on the breeze, but a subtle fragrance that's clearly there if you put your nose close to them.
While I was at it I potted on a tender salvia bought at last year's Dixter plant fair, which is flowering but not increasing in size or looking as happy as it should. It seems as though shrubby salvia can be very miffy about being given an inadequate root run, or at least being potted on cheered up S. confertiflora enormously, and my 'Stormy Pink' also bought at the plant fair doubled in size seemingly overnight when it was finally released from its pot into the freedom of a border.
I'm not sure where else the day went. I took a super off the big colony, put a clearer board on another, peeked into two more and decided the honey was still not quite ready. I washed the kitchen floor since it still seemed to be rather sticky, dead headed the pots and some of the lavender, did the watering including feeding the pots that get liquid feed at this time of year, and planted all of two Dianthus carthusianorum into the gravel. And looked at the wildlife camera card (foxes, one muntjac, one sighting of Our Ginger at three in the morning, blackbird, squirrel, no rabbits) and wrote out a cheque for an order of auricula pots from a Yorkshire pottery that doesn't use PayPal (why on earth not?). How can that be a full day's work? August always feels as though normal life had been suspended, no Pienaar's politics and the film review programme presented by stand-ins. It is very ungrateful not to be revelling in the lovely hot weather, but I look at the asters wilting and feel that they and I would be perfectly happy if the thermometer didn't rise above about twenty-two degrees.
Ah well, I will just have to get my four stock plants through the winter and try again in the spring. I shall follow the advice given in an article I found by Val Bourne (written for Saga. I wouldn't think of the Saga magazine as the first place to go to for gardening advice, but Val Bourne is a sensible journalist who writes on the basis of having done stuff herself, rather than regurgitating ideas out of books). She says that I should cut my plants back in September so that they make some new growth before they stop growing and go into winter as nice tight, weather resistant domes of foliage.
There will be a lot to cut back, because Viola cornuta has a rambling growth habit, making long trailing arms that continue to lengthen and flower as the summer progresses. They will weave through other plants, and hoist themselves a little way up the stems of shrubs, and are altogether delightful (when not eaten by rabbits). I already have an un-named blue form, and did have a rather nice light blue named 'Belmont Blue', though I am not sure if it has survived the combined onslaught of the rabbits and the rampant growth of its neighbours. Meanwhile, the plants in pots have got a bit straggly by this stage of the summer, but not disgustingly so.
They are 'Victoria Cawthorne', with flowers in a clean shade of mid mauve with delicate purple rays, 'Victoria's Blush', a pale pink with mauve staining on the lower petals and purple rays, 'Alba' which is white (as you'd expect) and 'Clouded Yellow'. The latter is very pretty, having pale yellow petals mottled with soft purple, on the other hand it is not what I ordered. I wanted 'Pat Kavanagh', a plain yellow I've admired often at Chelsea and thought would look well under yellow roses with the plain blue form. Ah well, next year. All are delicately scented, not the sort of strong perfume that carries on the breeze, but a subtle fragrance that's clearly there if you put your nose close to them.
While I was at it I potted on a tender salvia bought at last year's Dixter plant fair, which is flowering but not increasing in size or looking as happy as it should. It seems as though shrubby salvia can be very miffy about being given an inadequate root run, or at least being potted on cheered up S. confertiflora enormously, and my 'Stormy Pink' also bought at the plant fair doubled in size seemingly overnight when it was finally released from its pot into the freedom of a border.
I'm not sure where else the day went. I took a super off the big colony, put a clearer board on another, peeked into two more and decided the honey was still not quite ready. I washed the kitchen floor since it still seemed to be rather sticky, dead headed the pots and some of the lavender, did the watering including feeding the pots that get liquid feed at this time of year, and planted all of two Dianthus carthusianorum into the gravel. And looked at the wildlife camera card (foxes, one muntjac, one sighting of Our Ginger at three in the morning, blackbird, squirrel, no rabbits) and wrote out a cheque for an order of auricula pots from a Yorkshire pottery that doesn't use PayPal (why on earth not?). How can that be a full day's work? August always feels as though normal life had been suspended, no Pienaar's politics and the film review programme presented by stand-ins. It is very ungrateful not to be revelling in the lovely hot weather, but I look at the asters wilting and feel that they and I would be perfectly happy if the thermometer didn't rise above about twenty-two degrees.
Thursday, 11 August 2016
reflections on ironing: quality will out
There was a light sprinkling of rain this morning, just enough to make the prospect of gardening thoroughly uninviting without doing the garden any good at all. Instead I tackled the pile of ironing which had been growing on the spare bed. I don't actually mind ironing, since I can listen to music while I do it and the results are gratifyingly instantaneous, big pile of crumpled clothes reduced to small neat piles of usefully wearable garments, but I generally save it for days when it's raining, or I need to go out mid morning and need something I can do until then without covering myself in mess. But it hasn't been wet recently and I haven't had any appointments requiring me to hang around at home in a presentable state until ten thirty or so, and I was starting to scrape the barrel in terms of wearable t-shirts.
Seeing most of your shirt collection laid out before your eyes is a reminder of how quality pays. The oldest of my Peruvian Connection pima cotton long sleeved t-shirts must have been in my wardrobe for over twenty years, but are still wearable. Faded though pleasantly so, some stretched to slightly odd shapes or mildly bobbled, I wouldn't put them on display under a jacket for a day out, but layered under other clothes I don't plan to take off they're fine. I used to wear them two or even three thick on winter's days working at the plant centre, and goodness knows how many times they have been washed. One had started to fray visibly round the neck and was chucked into the drawer of gardening clothes without being ironed, but the rest are good for a few more years yet.
Boden have reduced the quality of their t-shirts, I'm sure of it. Three rather nice scoop necked ones with a very fine rib and narrow satin trim around the neck which I know I bought while I was still working in the City are still going strong after at least sixteen years, a bit faded but otherwise intact. The next generation of Boden t-shirts have all descended to the garden clothes drawer as they got shorter and broader while their hems came unstitched, then they started unravelling into small holes. The most recent Boden purchases turned out to be in a lighter weight jersey which I can't think will last anything like sixteen years and is a sod to press. It gathers under the iron and ends up getting creases ironed into it. The seams on the arms aren't straight either. Boden's prices do not seem to have dropped in line with the decrease in quality of their t-shirts, and I've rather given up with them.
Boden also developed an unfortunate mania for stripes. Now stripes can be great fun in their way, but a working wardrobe is not made of stripes alone. If you are planning to wear a cardigan or scarf with a pattern, or a tailored formal jacket and a necklace, you don't want stripes but a plain coloured base layer picking out one of the colours in the pattern or your jewellery. Not a fun t-shirt trying to get in on the act. I have sat drinking tea in the atrium cafe at the British Museum and seen so many other middle aged ladies wearing striped t-shirts, you would think there had been an edict that we had all got to wear them on pain of fine or imprisonment.
I went through a brief phase of supermarket ultra cheap t-shirts, but have given up on them as well. You don't expect cheap goods to be built to last, but they don't age gracefully, and shabby chic works better if the item was chic to start with. Lands' End garments are almost entirely lacking in panache, but built to last. I have just sent off for three more on special offer as a stop gap, hoping that the scooped neckline might make them more elegant than the crew neck version, so that I will have some more vaguely tidy ones. My absolute favourites of the current crop are two from Peruvian Connection with three quarter length sleeves, one in black and one in bluish green, but alas those were the only colours they did in that design and now they've stopped doing them at all. Those and the John Smedley sea island cotton polo neck bought to wear to a winter wedding are definitely the nicest things in my t-shirt drawers. In the long run you can't beat sea island cotton and pima.
Seeing most of your shirt collection laid out before your eyes is a reminder of how quality pays. The oldest of my Peruvian Connection pima cotton long sleeved t-shirts must have been in my wardrobe for over twenty years, but are still wearable. Faded though pleasantly so, some stretched to slightly odd shapes or mildly bobbled, I wouldn't put them on display under a jacket for a day out, but layered under other clothes I don't plan to take off they're fine. I used to wear them two or even three thick on winter's days working at the plant centre, and goodness knows how many times they have been washed. One had started to fray visibly round the neck and was chucked into the drawer of gardening clothes without being ironed, but the rest are good for a few more years yet.
Boden have reduced the quality of their t-shirts, I'm sure of it. Three rather nice scoop necked ones with a very fine rib and narrow satin trim around the neck which I know I bought while I was still working in the City are still going strong after at least sixteen years, a bit faded but otherwise intact. The next generation of Boden t-shirts have all descended to the garden clothes drawer as they got shorter and broader while their hems came unstitched, then they started unravelling into small holes. The most recent Boden purchases turned out to be in a lighter weight jersey which I can't think will last anything like sixteen years and is a sod to press. It gathers under the iron and ends up getting creases ironed into it. The seams on the arms aren't straight either. Boden's prices do not seem to have dropped in line with the decrease in quality of their t-shirts, and I've rather given up with them.
Boden also developed an unfortunate mania for stripes. Now stripes can be great fun in their way, but a working wardrobe is not made of stripes alone. If you are planning to wear a cardigan or scarf with a pattern, or a tailored formal jacket and a necklace, you don't want stripes but a plain coloured base layer picking out one of the colours in the pattern or your jewellery. Not a fun t-shirt trying to get in on the act. I have sat drinking tea in the atrium cafe at the British Museum and seen so many other middle aged ladies wearing striped t-shirts, you would think there had been an edict that we had all got to wear them on pain of fine or imprisonment.
I went through a brief phase of supermarket ultra cheap t-shirts, but have given up on them as well. You don't expect cheap goods to be built to last, but they don't age gracefully, and shabby chic works better if the item was chic to start with. Lands' End garments are almost entirely lacking in panache, but built to last. I have just sent off for three more on special offer as a stop gap, hoping that the scooped neckline might make them more elegant than the crew neck version, so that I will have some more vaguely tidy ones. My absolute favourites of the current crop are two from Peruvian Connection with three quarter length sleeves, one in black and one in bluish green, but alas those were the only colours they did in that design and now they've stopped doing them at all. Those and the John Smedley sea island cotton polo neck bought to wear to a winter wedding are definitely the nicest things in my t-shirt drawers. In the long run you can't beat sea island cotton and pima.
Wednesday, 10 August 2016
how the violas did so far
Continuing the theme of bigger pots, I have been moving my experimental collection of potted viola into larger accommodation, since the specialists who supplied most of my plants say they need a deep root run. In fact, their website said a minimum of thirty centimetres, although I'm not convinced that some of their photos of container grown plants show pots that deep. I haven't run to thirty centimetres yet, but invested in a stock of plain, utilitarian but not too bad twenty-five by twenty-one centimetre pots from my local garden centre, and will see how those go. For the potting medium I am using seven parts John Innes number two cut with one part perlite, as advised by the kindly chap from Victorian Violas at Chelsea, who will be in the frame for any further additions to the collection, after the five varieties of their selection debacle with my first choice of supplier.
While I was potting I noted down how each plant was doing by this stage of the summer. Of the hybrid viola varieties, and leaving Viola cornuta out of it for now, the top prize for still flowering in the second week of August goes to 'Dawn', a mid yellow, scented variety that is still blooming abundantly. I am pleased with 'Dawn', and have to admit that she was one of the substitutes. Also pretty good were 'Fiona Lawrenson', one of my selections with cream and lilac flowers and a delicate scent, and 'Julian', which for some reason keeps cropping up in the lists of alpine nurseries, which is where I bought it. The flowers of 'Julian' are a vivid purplish-blue, and it has been flowering its socks off for months.
'Ivory Queen', another substitute, is still doing pretty well, with lightly scented pale yellow flowers. I ordered 'Beshlie', which is a stronger shade of yellow as far as you can tell from pictures on the web. 'Ivory Queen' is nice, but similar to 'Dawn', which should in turn have been 'Glenholme', 'Josie' which was on my original list had a few flowers left by the time I'd finished dead heading it, in a pleasant shade of cream. Unfortunately cream on top of two kinds of pale yellow has ended up a bit samey.
'May Mott' was trailing in the floral stakes, with just one remaining flower, though that was large and handsome, two violet petals standing above three cream ones with violet edges. She should have been 'Maggie Mott' which is pale blue. There were no flowers at all on 'Mauve Haze', not even any faded ones to tidy off, since 'Mauve Haze' shot its bolt and finished flowering weeks ago. So far as I can remember it was mauve when it did flower. It should have been 'Mayfly', which is white edged with blue and strongly fragrant, according to the catalogues.
The plants until now have been growing in classic six inch plastic pots, which they had fully rooted into but not to the extent of becoming pot bound. They have stood under a house wall where they are in shade for part of the day and receive sunlight for part of the afternoon. They have been watered pretty faithfully, and deadheaded but not every few days as I perhaps should for maximum effect. I am still feeling my way with violas. I am growing them in pots because attempts to grow them in the open garden in years past have ended in failure: the garden is too big, too wild and woolly and too dry for the most part, and violas ended up being swamped, eaten or dying of drought. The container displays at Chelsea every year are so pretty I thought I'd try again in pots, and the space behind the house on the way to the conservatory seemed a good place to put them, where the plants would get some sun without being baked and could be incorporated in the normal watering routine.
The remaining pots contain Viola cornuta, but that's a story for another day.
While I was potting I noted down how each plant was doing by this stage of the summer. Of the hybrid viola varieties, and leaving Viola cornuta out of it for now, the top prize for still flowering in the second week of August goes to 'Dawn', a mid yellow, scented variety that is still blooming abundantly. I am pleased with 'Dawn', and have to admit that she was one of the substitutes. Also pretty good were 'Fiona Lawrenson', one of my selections with cream and lilac flowers and a delicate scent, and 'Julian', which for some reason keeps cropping up in the lists of alpine nurseries, which is where I bought it. The flowers of 'Julian' are a vivid purplish-blue, and it has been flowering its socks off for months.
'Ivory Queen', another substitute, is still doing pretty well, with lightly scented pale yellow flowers. I ordered 'Beshlie', which is a stronger shade of yellow as far as you can tell from pictures on the web. 'Ivory Queen' is nice, but similar to 'Dawn', which should in turn have been 'Glenholme', 'Josie' which was on my original list had a few flowers left by the time I'd finished dead heading it, in a pleasant shade of cream. Unfortunately cream on top of two kinds of pale yellow has ended up a bit samey.
'May Mott' was trailing in the floral stakes, with just one remaining flower, though that was large and handsome, two violet petals standing above three cream ones with violet edges. She should have been 'Maggie Mott' which is pale blue. There were no flowers at all on 'Mauve Haze', not even any faded ones to tidy off, since 'Mauve Haze' shot its bolt and finished flowering weeks ago. So far as I can remember it was mauve when it did flower. It should have been 'Mayfly', which is white edged with blue and strongly fragrant, according to the catalogues.
The plants until now have been growing in classic six inch plastic pots, which they had fully rooted into but not to the extent of becoming pot bound. They have stood under a house wall where they are in shade for part of the day and receive sunlight for part of the afternoon. They have been watered pretty faithfully, and deadheaded but not every few days as I perhaps should for maximum effect. I am still feeling my way with violas. I am growing them in pots because attempts to grow them in the open garden in years past have ended in failure: the garden is too big, too wild and woolly and too dry for the most part, and violas ended up being swamped, eaten or dying of drought. The container displays at Chelsea every year are so pretty I thought I'd try again in pots, and the space behind the house on the way to the conservatory seemed a good place to put them, where the plants would get some sun without being baked and could be incorporated in the normal watering routine.
The remaining pots contain Viola cornuta, but that's a story for another day.
Tuesday, 9 August 2016
a bigger pot
I said I might tell you something about the trio of exotics that did much better once moved to larger pots, Salvia confertiflora, Begonia luxurians and Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata. I don't think any of them have common names in English, so we will just have to bear with the botanical ones.
The Impatiens came to me courtesy of Dibleys. I love the Dibleys catalogue, and their stand every year at Chelsea. Choosing from the Dibleys list produces the sort of thrill that takes me back to the age of deciding how to spend my sixpence at the pick and mix counter in the sweetie shop. Some of the plants I've tried from them have not survived the winter in my frost free conservatory, some have struggled along, and some have been happy as larry once I worked out how to care for them. The Impatiens falls into the last category.
Dibleys send their plants out as plugs, little things that are vulnerable to over-potting, over-watering, and drying out in summer heatwaves. The order arrives with care instructions, and Dibleys always say to start the plants off in small pots, no more than nine centimetres. The Impatiens duly went into a small pot, and once it filled that into a bigger pot, maybe fifteen centimetres. It sent up a single juicy, tapering green shoot, produced a few side shoots, and flowered moderately. It did not look ebullient, and come the winter it dropped its leaves. The stems didn't die back, so it was not dead, but neither was it happy. Come the spring I moved it into a twenty-one centimetre pot, and the change was dramatic. The central juicy stem grew, side stems shot out, the leaves became twice the size, and it began to flower with abandon.
It is now eighty-five centimetres high and wide (I measured it in the interests of accurate reportage because I knew I wanted to blog about it). Every stem ends in a cluster of flowers, each flower consisting of a pointed hood in soft orange atop a soft yellow pouch. It is enormously cheerful, and quite exotic, and co-ordinates very well with the orange flowers of Begonia sutherlandii, which began life in its own pot and is gradually colonising as many other pots as I will let it. The Impatiens lives at the back of the conservatory so is in nothing like full sun, and seems very happy with its lot. I have not yet tried propagating it, since I don't really need any more frost tender exotics nearly a yard across, and suspect that none of my friends want one. Sometime in a spirit of enquiry I should sacrifice a cluster of flowers and stick the end of a shoot in a glass of water, just to see if it roots as easily as bizzie lizzies did when I was a child first getting hooked on gardening.
Begonia luxurians is also available from Dibleys, although I can't remember if I got mine from there or if it was cheaper somewhere else. This is another frost tender species happy in semi shade, and is grown mainly for its leaves. They are gloriously exotic, fans of many pointed leaflets radiating from a single point rather like cannabis, though glossier and more classy. The point where the leaflets meet the leaf stem is decorated with a second whorl of much smaller leaves, like a little ruff. The flowers are quite nice, open sprays of tiny white flowers with visible yellow stamens, but it is really for the leaves that you grow Begonia luxurians.
Mine was not initially so luxuriant as I'd hoped it would be, sending up one spindly stem whose lower leaves went brown and shrivelled as it grew. It made it through the winter, though reduced to about one functioning leaf at the top of the lanky stalk, but it did not create anything like the desired ambience of tropical abundance. Really it was rather an embarrassment. In my round of spring repotting I moved it up to a twenty-nine centimetre pot, and it responded in the same way as the Impatiens. It is now taller than I am, even deducting the height of the pot, and the leaflets on the biggest leaf are fully thirty centimetres long (again, I measured them). Best of all it is sending up a second stem from ground level, so in due course should start to look bushier and less spindly. It lives at the back of the conservatory, and rather than tie it to a cane I let it sprawl across its neighbours for support. Its upper parts are entwined with a jasmine and a tree aloe, and all seem happy with the arrangement.
I first saw Salvia confertiflora going around the garden at Kiftsgate, or at least that is where I first consciously registered it. I did not know what it was, other than that it was a salvia and presumably tender since all their specimens were growing in big pots, but I loved it. The flowers are individually tiny, carried in vertical spikes, and each small reddish orange flower sits in a hairy red calyx as large as the flower. The leaves are big and grey and slightly furry, and the whole effect is warm and exotic. To my delight they had plants for sale at the plant stall by the gate, so I found out the name of the object of my desire and was able to buy one. It spent the rest of our holiday standing by the window of our gardenless city centre flat, and I panicked each time we got back from touristing and it had wilted. It is a thirsty thing, despite the grey leaves giving a deceptive impression that it might be drought tolerant.
It grew, I potted it up, but it still had a skinny and unconvinced air about life. It made it through the winter in the conservatory, with some die back and botrytis in the ends of the stems, a common problem with tender salvia under glass. I cut it back as much as I dared in the spring, hoping that it would bush out, but it was still not nearly as good as the plants I saw at Kiftsgate. This spring I moved it up again into a thirty-five centimetre pot and it is getting bushier. Like the Begonia it is finally throwing up a second stem from ground level. I have seen it used at (I think) East Ruston Old Vicarage in an absolutely enormous pot, and next year I might move it up once more. It stands outside for the summer, rubbing along with the dahlias outside the conservatory, and goes back under glass for the winter, squeezed in as near to the front as I can manage so that it will get what light's going. You do not have to go all the way to Kiftsgate Court to buy it, although you are unlikely to run across one in your local garden centre. Ashwood Nursery lists it as part of their long list of salvia, and so do Burncoose and Great Dixter, and some others. I see in the photograph on Great Dixter's website that they have it bedded out for the summer, and give its height as two metres, which increases my suspicion that my plant would like a still bigger pot.
The Impatiens came to me courtesy of Dibleys. I love the Dibleys catalogue, and their stand every year at Chelsea. Choosing from the Dibleys list produces the sort of thrill that takes me back to the age of deciding how to spend my sixpence at the pick and mix counter in the sweetie shop. Some of the plants I've tried from them have not survived the winter in my frost free conservatory, some have struggled along, and some have been happy as larry once I worked out how to care for them. The Impatiens falls into the last category.
Dibleys send their plants out as plugs, little things that are vulnerable to over-potting, over-watering, and drying out in summer heatwaves. The order arrives with care instructions, and Dibleys always say to start the plants off in small pots, no more than nine centimetres. The Impatiens duly went into a small pot, and once it filled that into a bigger pot, maybe fifteen centimetres. It sent up a single juicy, tapering green shoot, produced a few side shoots, and flowered moderately. It did not look ebullient, and come the winter it dropped its leaves. The stems didn't die back, so it was not dead, but neither was it happy. Come the spring I moved it into a twenty-one centimetre pot, and the change was dramatic. The central juicy stem grew, side stems shot out, the leaves became twice the size, and it began to flower with abandon.
It is now eighty-five centimetres high and wide (I measured it in the interests of accurate reportage because I knew I wanted to blog about it). Every stem ends in a cluster of flowers, each flower consisting of a pointed hood in soft orange atop a soft yellow pouch. It is enormously cheerful, and quite exotic, and co-ordinates very well with the orange flowers of Begonia sutherlandii, which began life in its own pot and is gradually colonising as many other pots as I will let it. The Impatiens lives at the back of the conservatory so is in nothing like full sun, and seems very happy with its lot. I have not yet tried propagating it, since I don't really need any more frost tender exotics nearly a yard across, and suspect that none of my friends want one. Sometime in a spirit of enquiry I should sacrifice a cluster of flowers and stick the end of a shoot in a glass of water, just to see if it roots as easily as bizzie lizzies did when I was a child first getting hooked on gardening.
Begonia luxurians is also available from Dibleys, although I can't remember if I got mine from there or if it was cheaper somewhere else. This is another frost tender species happy in semi shade, and is grown mainly for its leaves. They are gloriously exotic, fans of many pointed leaflets radiating from a single point rather like cannabis, though glossier and more classy. The point where the leaflets meet the leaf stem is decorated with a second whorl of much smaller leaves, like a little ruff. The flowers are quite nice, open sprays of tiny white flowers with visible yellow stamens, but it is really for the leaves that you grow Begonia luxurians.
Mine was not initially so luxuriant as I'd hoped it would be, sending up one spindly stem whose lower leaves went brown and shrivelled as it grew. It made it through the winter, though reduced to about one functioning leaf at the top of the lanky stalk, but it did not create anything like the desired ambience of tropical abundance. Really it was rather an embarrassment. In my round of spring repotting I moved it up to a twenty-nine centimetre pot, and it responded in the same way as the Impatiens. It is now taller than I am, even deducting the height of the pot, and the leaflets on the biggest leaf are fully thirty centimetres long (again, I measured them). Best of all it is sending up a second stem from ground level, so in due course should start to look bushier and less spindly. It lives at the back of the conservatory, and rather than tie it to a cane I let it sprawl across its neighbours for support. Its upper parts are entwined with a jasmine and a tree aloe, and all seem happy with the arrangement.
I first saw Salvia confertiflora going around the garden at Kiftsgate, or at least that is where I first consciously registered it. I did not know what it was, other than that it was a salvia and presumably tender since all their specimens were growing in big pots, but I loved it. The flowers are individually tiny, carried in vertical spikes, and each small reddish orange flower sits in a hairy red calyx as large as the flower. The leaves are big and grey and slightly furry, and the whole effect is warm and exotic. To my delight they had plants for sale at the plant stall by the gate, so I found out the name of the object of my desire and was able to buy one. It spent the rest of our holiday standing by the window of our gardenless city centre flat, and I panicked each time we got back from touristing and it had wilted. It is a thirsty thing, despite the grey leaves giving a deceptive impression that it might be drought tolerant.
It grew, I potted it up, but it still had a skinny and unconvinced air about life. It made it through the winter in the conservatory, with some die back and botrytis in the ends of the stems, a common problem with tender salvia under glass. I cut it back as much as I dared in the spring, hoping that it would bush out, but it was still not nearly as good as the plants I saw at Kiftsgate. This spring I moved it up again into a thirty-five centimetre pot and it is getting bushier. Like the Begonia it is finally throwing up a second stem from ground level. I have seen it used at (I think) East Ruston Old Vicarage in an absolutely enormous pot, and next year I might move it up once more. It stands outside for the summer, rubbing along with the dahlias outside the conservatory, and goes back under glass for the winter, squeezed in as near to the front as I can manage so that it will get what light's going. You do not have to go all the way to Kiftsgate Court to buy it, although you are unlikely to run across one in your local garden centre. Ashwood Nursery lists it as part of their long list of salvia, and so do Burncoose and Great Dixter, and some others. I see in the photograph on Great Dixter's website that they have it bedded out for the summer, and give its height as two metres, which increases my suspicion that my plant would like a still bigger pot.
Monday, 8 August 2016
second extraction
I extracted the honey from the three frames off the big, lively colony, that had been sitting in the spare bedroom since last week. They were impressively well filled, with honey on both sides of every frame in every box. I think that's a record in my beekeeping career. Normally they don't bother to go right to the outside of the box before moving upwards to start on the next box. Bees like working upwards.
I meant to start straight after breakfast, but by the time I'd done all the watering it was nearer noon, and I didn't finish extracting until well gone six. OK, I took over an hour for lunch because I was getting so hot in the kitchen, but that's still about ten minutes per frame. I'm getting faster than I was, but it's just as well I'm not trying to do it commercially. The wax cappings have to be cut off both sides of each frame, then every frame has to be reversed during spinning so that both sides take a turn facing the outside of the centrifuge, and there's all the intermediate fiddling about, trying to mop up drips of honey as I go so that I don't tread them everywhere, and having the wash the sieve mid way through because it has become clogged with fragments of wax, and try to dry it.
If I rest the sieve on top of the bucket I'm pouring the extracted honey into then I can't fill the top couple of inches of bucket space with honey, because the sieve dips down into it, so I have to rest the sieve's little arms on three carefully constructed towers of tinned food. Until you've done this you don't realise how much it matters that some manufacturers don't put indentations round the bottoms of their tins so that they slot securely into the tin underneath. This is moderately annoying when trying to stack food in the larder but much more worrying when you have a sieve holding a couple of pints of honey resting on the result. Heinz soup is bad, Ambrosia tinned rice pudding and Waitrose own brand butter beans are good.
I managed not to drip very much, except for one accident when I didn't fasten the honey gate on the extractor tightly enough after releasing extracted honey into a bucket, and there was a small flood. I wiped it up as best I could at the time, and when I'd finished I washed the kitchen floor, and the soles of my Birkenstocks, and washed the kitchen floor again with a fresh bucket of water. I wiped the kitchen worktops, and the doors of the cupboard under the sink, and the Systems Administrator's chair that I'd rested the extractor on while tapping the honey into buckets. I wiped the outsides of the honey buckets. I washed the extractor, and the pyrex dish I'd been using to collect the cappings, and the board I'd been resting the frames on. I put the sieve and the knife I'd been using in the washing machine. I put the empty frames back in the spare bedroom until the morning, on the grounds that it was too late and I was too hot to start messing around with the bees this evening. I washed the spare bedroom carpet where a small puddle of honey had managed to drip on it. The clearing up must have taken another hour.
As I was wiping the last bits of honey I could spot at that moment I heard a bee buzzing. I tracked it down to the study window, caught it under a glass and put it out of the front door. Two minutes later there was another bee in the study, followed by a stream of bees in the hall. I began to get bored with collecting bees, since I had other things to do, and also worried in case they came en masse for the colander of cappings that were dripping into a big pot on the Aga simmer plate (honey saved from cappings isn't the best quality, but perfectly good for cooking and three full supers' worth will yield a jar or two). I took each successive bee further from the front door to release it, and eventually stood and watched the last one carefully to see where it went. Almost straight back into the house through the cat door, was the answer.
The cat door at the moment is nothing but a square hole in the wall, since the SA removed the actual flap to encourage the kittens to start to use the hole pending installation of a new cat door with a working catch, the old one having disintegrated years ago under the pressure of five cats coming and going. As an immediate measure I propped a piece of cardboard over the hole, which kept the bees out but also the cats. As the evening drew in it began to feel like the time when bees might no longer be foraging and the kittens ought to come inside, so I removed the cardboard and another bee came in. I caught it and decided to leave it under the glass for a while, to find out whether there was really a stream of bees coming in or whether I had removed the same one from the house half a dozen times.
The Systems Administrator was ready to start cooking supper and wanted to open the kitchen door because it was so infernally hot in there, meaning one less door between the pan of cappings and any marauding bees. However it was getting late for bees to be flying, and the SA released the bee under the glass some distance from the front door, and watched as it flew back to the cat door. The bee spent another sojourn under the glass, and no more bees appeared. Once it was really quite dark outside the bee was released for the final time, and left to find its way home, or not. Tomorrow morning I must jar up the honey from the cappings and stash the wax away with my secret supply of old cappings which I am going to melt and purify and turn into a candle any year now. Then the kitchen will not smell so strongly of honey and with any luck the supply of visiting bees will stop.
I meant to start straight after breakfast, but by the time I'd done all the watering it was nearer noon, and I didn't finish extracting until well gone six. OK, I took over an hour for lunch because I was getting so hot in the kitchen, but that's still about ten minutes per frame. I'm getting faster than I was, but it's just as well I'm not trying to do it commercially. The wax cappings have to be cut off both sides of each frame, then every frame has to be reversed during spinning so that both sides take a turn facing the outside of the centrifuge, and there's all the intermediate fiddling about, trying to mop up drips of honey as I go so that I don't tread them everywhere, and having the wash the sieve mid way through because it has become clogged with fragments of wax, and try to dry it.
If I rest the sieve on top of the bucket I'm pouring the extracted honey into then I can't fill the top couple of inches of bucket space with honey, because the sieve dips down into it, so I have to rest the sieve's little arms on three carefully constructed towers of tinned food. Until you've done this you don't realise how much it matters that some manufacturers don't put indentations round the bottoms of their tins so that they slot securely into the tin underneath. This is moderately annoying when trying to stack food in the larder but much more worrying when you have a sieve holding a couple of pints of honey resting on the result. Heinz soup is bad, Ambrosia tinned rice pudding and Waitrose own brand butter beans are good.
I managed not to drip very much, except for one accident when I didn't fasten the honey gate on the extractor tightly enough after releasing extracted honey into a bucket, and there was a small flood. I wiped it up as best I could at the time, and when I'd finished I washed the kitchen floor, and the soles of my Birkenstocks, and washed the kitchen floor again with a fresh bucket of water. I wiped the kitchen worktops, and the doors of the cupboard under the sink, and the Systems Administrator's chair that I'd rested the extractor on while tapping the honey into buckets. I wiped the outsides of the honey buckets. I washed the extractor, and the pyrex dish I'd been using to collect the cappings, and the board I'd been resting the frames on. I put the sieve and the knife I'd been using in the washing machine. I put the empty frames back in the spare bedroom until the morning, on the grounds that it was too late and I was too hot to start messing around with the bees this evening. I washed the spare bedroom carpet where a small puddle of honey had managed to drip on it. The clearing up must have taken another hour.
As I was wiping the last bits of honey I could spot at that moment I heard a bee buzzing. I tracked it down to the study window, caught it under a glass and put it out of the front door. Two minutes later there was another bee in the study, followed by a stream of bees in the hall. I began to get bored with collecting bees, since I had other things to do, and also worried in case they came en masse for the colander of cappings that were dripping into a big pot on the Aga simmer plate (honey saved from cappings isn't the best quality, but perfectly good for cooking and three full supers' worth will yield a jar or two). I took each successive bee further from the front door to release it, and eventually stood and watched the last one carefully to see where it went. Almost straight back into the house through the cat door, was the answer.
The cat door at the moment is nothing but a square hole in the wall, since the SA removed the actual flap to encourage the kittens to start to use the hole pending installation of a new cat door with a working catch, the old one having disintegrated years ago under the pressure of five cats coming and going. As an immediate measure I propped a piece of cardboard over the hole, which kept the bees out but also the cats. As the evening drew in it began to feel like the time when bees might no longer be foraging and the kittens ought to come inside, so I removed the cardboard and another bee came in. I caught it and decided to leave it under the glass for a while, to find out whether there was really a stream of bees coming in or whether I had removed the same one from the house half a dozen times.
The Systems Administrator was ready to start cooking supper and wanted to open the kitchen door because it was so infernally hot in there, meaning one less door between the pan of cappings and any marauding bees. However it was getting late for bees to be flying, and the SA released the bee under the glass some distance from the front door, and watched as it flew back to the cat door. The bee spent another sojourn under the glass, and no more bees appeared. Once it was really quite dark outside the bee was released for the final time, and left to find its way home, or not. Tomorrow morning I must jar up the honey from the cappings and stash the wax away with my secret supply of old cappings which I am going to melt and purify and turn into a candle any year now. Then the kitchen will not smell so strongly of honey and with any luck the supply of visiting bees will stop.
Sunday, 7 August 2016
how the summer bedding's done so far
I have been considering the success of the summer bedding, now that summer is squarely here. I don't do much bedding, and only in pots since we really don't have the sort of borders where you can slip ephemeral half hardy annuals into the gaps for extra late summer colour. I've tried it and it didn't work. They all died of drought, or were eaten by slugs, snails or rabbits.
Top prize goes to the traditional Cosmos. I am growing a white strain called 'Purity' and a mixture of dark and mid pinks called 'Sensation Mix'. These are the two varieties most commonly given away with gardening magazines, and as the open packets keep well from year to year I never feel the need to buy any additional seed. The plants are attractive in all their parts, with feathery foliage in a bright shade of mid green, and the simple pink and white flowers are carried abundantly over a long season. Indeed, I may have fed some of my pots too generously, as some plants have formed monster bushes almost a yard tall and are taking their time getting into their full flowering stride.
Cosmos seed germinates quickly and is easy to grow on. As long as you keep them frost free the seedlings are tolerant of being allowed to dry out or accidentally over watered, and fairly forgiving about when you prick them out and pot them on. I always sow too much seed, forgetting what good-natured plants they are and worrying that I won't raise enough to fill all my pots. The resulting overcrowding on the greenhouse bench of course makes failure that bit more likely.
New for the first time this year I've grown Cosmos sulphureus 'Bright Lights'. It has slightly more substantial foliage than the pink and white sorts, finely divided but less feathery, like lightweight flat leaf parsley. The flowers are a little smaller than the other, in a slightly more orange shade of yellow than I was imagining, and very generously carried. Again, germination was rapid and the growing on was trouble free. I have them grouped with various frost tender permanent inhabitants of pots, all flowering in shades of orange and yellow, and find the whole combination cheerful. I like orange and yellow flowers, in moderation and provided they are the right shades of yellow, and do not subscribe to the school of thought that takes banning them from your garden as a marker of good taste. I wouldn't go so far as to put them with pink, though.
Altogether less satisfactory was Zinnia 'Purple Prince'. This was another magazine freebie, and since the stiff, double, daisy like flowers in a bright shade of purple looked rather jolly on the seed packet, and would go nicely with the pink Cosmos and pink dahlias I was planning to stand outside the garage, I gave Zinnia a go. They have a reputation for being tricksy, and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly they germinated. However, losses set in from the potting on stage onwards, with plants collapsing overnight as their stems developed brown dead patches that buckled under the weight of the top growth. Those that made it to be planted into the final display pots have an annoying habit of dying back at the tips, while individual leaves further down the stems have crisped and browned. The purple flowers are fun, reminiscent of the cut Gerbera flowers beloved as table decorations by chains like Pizza Express, but there are not nearly enough of them to compensate for the grotty leaves and general difficulty of cultivation. I presume they are unhappy with my watering regime, but I have a lot of pots to get round. I need plants that will be happy just to get some water, thank you. There isn't time to heft every pot each time and put every one on its own individual diet.
A few Ricinus communis 'Impala' have made rather skinny plants after not being potted on as fast and lavishly as they would probably have liked. At least, I think that's the problem. Maybe they will surprise me and keep growing on through the autumn to end up as large as the ones I've seen bedded out in London's parks. What there is of them is pretty, and the pink of their flowers and pinkish-grey of their leaves goes very well with the pink Cosmos flowers.
All the other pots contain tender perennials or sub-shrubs. I am pleased this year with Dicliptera suberecta, a grey leaved shrubby little thing that sends up vertical shoots with dark orange, tubular flowers. I was immensely taken with one I saw at a garden we visited in Worcestershire a few years back, but Dicliptera is not the easiest thing to get hold of. Then I found it on the list of a nursery in Lincolnshire I was using for hardy plants, and snaffled one up. It lived for its first year in the conservatory, and was not awfully happy, so this year I moved it to a bigger pot in case it needed more space to encourage it, and stood it outside for the summer so that it would get more light. Lo and behold, it sprang into growth and is looking much better and flowering much more. Some plants seem to need a minimum pot size to get them going, examples that come immediately to mind being Salvia confertiflora, Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata, and Begonia luxurians. Maybe I will tell you about them another day.
Top prize goes to the traditional Cosmos. I am growing a white strain called 'Purity' and a mixture of dark and mid pinks called 'Sensation Mix'. These are the two varieties most commonly given away with gardening magazines, and as the open packets keep well from year to year I never feel the need to buy any additional seed. The plants are attractive in all their parts, with feathery foliage in a bright shade of mid green, and the simple pink and white flowers are carried abundantly over a long season. Indeed, I may have fed some of my pots too generously, as some plants have formed monster bushes almost a yard tall and are taking their time getting into their full flowering stride.
Cosmos seed germinates quickly and is easy to grow on. As long as you keep them frost free the seedlings are tolerant of being allowed to dry out or accidentally over watered, and fairly forgiving about when you prick them out and pot them on. I always sow too much seed, forgetting what good-natured plants they are and worrying that I won't raise enough to fill all my pots. The resulting overcrowding on the greenhouse bench of course makes failure that bit more likely.
New for the first time this year I've grown Cosmos sulphureus 'Bright Lights'. It has slightly more substantial foliage than the pink and white sorts, finely divided but less feathery, like lightweight flat leaf parsley. The flowers are a little smaller than the other, in a slightly more orange shade of yellow than I was imagining, and very generously carried. Again, germination was rapid and the growing on was trouble free. I have them grouped with various frost tender permanent inhabitants of pots, all flowering in shades of orange and yellow, and find the whole combination cheerful. I like orange and yellow flowers, in moderation and provided they are the right shades of yellow, and do not subscribe to the school of thought that takes banning them from your garden as a marker of good taste. I wouldn't go so far as to put them with pink, though.
Altogether less satisfactory was Zinnia 'Purple Prince'. This was another magazine freebie, and since the stiff, double, daisy like flowers in a bright shade of purple looked rather jolly on the seed packet, and would go nicely with the pink Cosmos and pink dahlias I was planning to stand outside the garage, I gave Zinnia a go. They have a reputation for being tricksy, and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly they germinated. However, losses set in from the potting on stage onwards, with plants collapsing overnight as their stems developed brown dead patches that buckled under the weight of the top growth. Those that made it to be planted into the final display pots have an annoying habit of dying back at the tips, while individual leaves further down the stems have crisped and browned. The purple flowers are fun, reminiscent of the cut Gerbera flowers beloved as table decorations by chains like Pizza Express, but there are not nearly enough of them to compensate for the grotty leaves and general difficulty of cultivation. I presume they are unhappy with my watering regime, but I have a lot of pots to get round. I need plants that will be happy just to get some water, thank you. There isn't time to heft every pot each time and put every one on its own individual diet.
A few Ricinus communis 'Impala' have made rather skinny plants after not being potted on as fast and lavishly as they would probably have liked. At least, I think that's the problem. Maybe they will surprise me and keep growing on through the autumn to end up as large as the ones I've seen bedded out in London's parks. What there is of them is pretty, and the pink of their flowers and pinkish-grey of their leaves goes very well with the pink Cosmos flowers.
All the other pots contain tender perennials or sub-shrubs. I am pleased this year with Dicliptera suberecta, a grey leaved shrubby little thing that sends up vertical shoots with dark orange, tubular flowers. I was immensely taken with one I saw at a garden we visited in Worcestershire a few years back, but Dicliptera is not the easiest thing to get hold of. Then I found it on the list of a nursery in Lincolnshire I was using for hardy plants, and snaffled one up. It lived for its first year in the conservatory, and was not awfully happy, so this year I moved it to a bigger pot in case it needed more space to encourage it, and stood it outside for the summer so that it would get more light. Lo and behold, it sprang into growth and is looking much better and flowering much more. Some plants seem to need a minimum pot size to get them going, examples that come immediately to mind being Salvia confertiflora, Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata, and Begonia luxurians. Maybe I will tell you about them another day.
Saturday, 6 August 2016
haphazard housewife
I went up to the bees straight after breakfast and took the top super off the big colony. The clearer board had almost worked, and as I hoped it was still too early and too cool for them to have got lively, and I was able to depart without a forest of stings hanging from my gloves, as happened when I was putting the first clearer board on. I half ran back down the meadow with my wheelbarrow and was free of bees by the time I got back to the house, except for a few that were still hanging on in the super.
After that bucolic start to the day things took a more prosaic turn, as the cleaning caught up with me. I began by thinking I'd have time to do the cleaning and then extract the honey, which is what I always think. By my age you'd think that this Pollyannaish tendency to hopelessly overestimate how much it is possible to do in a day would have faded. By the time I'd cleaned the kitchen floor and vacuumed the drifts of cat fur and Mr Fluffy's dead leaves out of the study it was all still going so well, but I always forget how long it takes to vacuum the sitting room, chasing the dust and fluff round chair legs and coffee tables. The kittens had dragged one of the sitting room curtains off its rail, so that had to be fastened up again with new hooks, a horribly fiddly task wearing varifocals as I couldn't tilt my head to an angle where I could look through the right bit of my spectacles to see what I was doing.
Wiping the kitchen units always takes longer than I think it's going to, especially this time because they were still rather sticky from the last time I extracted honey. It took the whole of three Haydn string quartets and Tinariwen's Radio Tisdas Sessions, and I still hadn't got all the way round the room, and at the end of it I still hadn't cleaned the sticky bits off the Aga because I'd run out of enamel cleaner. The cats must like Haydn, or cleaning, or both, because they lay a sword's length apart in the middle of the room while I worked. We were like a Grayson Perry tapestry of the middle classes come to life, a middle aged woman wearing Birkenstock clogs wiping ineffectually at an Aga while listening to Malian desert rock on an iPod that's so old it must count as vintage and played through a docking station, plus four sleeping cats.
The serious kitten has developed a passion for the vacuum cleaner. Not when it is on, but when it is left lying about. I dumped it in the lower sitting room after vacuuming the kitchen to do the first lot of honey, because I knew I was going to want it again and was too idle to lug it upstairs to the spare bedroom, and the serious kitten took to sleeping curled up next to the corrugated flexible tube. Is it a feline super stimulus, the equivalent of the most gigantic tail? Its sinuous curve did mimic the bend of the serious kitten's curled spine quite uncannily. None of them like the noise of the vacuum cleaner, but none mind the sound of the bean to cup coffee machine, another sign that they are middle class cats, or maybe an indicator of how often we clean the house (not very often) compared to how frequently we drink coffee (daily).
The serious kitten is getting better at hunting. He has stopped bringing shrews in, which I'm pleased about since I have nothing against shrews. They are carnivores, eating insects, worms, slugs and suchlike and they do not harm plants, while they taste disgusting so the serious kitten can't eat them. His next prey was what appeared at first sight to be a baby duck, which was distressing, but we really couldn't see where he'd have got a duck from and decided it was probably a pigeon squab that had fallen out of the nest and was doomed anyway. Then yesterday he caught a mouse, and ate it like a proper cat. I am hoping he will progress to rabbits, but things are moving in the right direction. The other two don't show any interest in hunting at all. Mr Fluffy collects leaves and gets very excited when he sees a bee or a butterfly, or indeed Formula One cars on the TV. The energetic kitten does not even want to go outside unless he has someone with him, and is still at the stage of wanting to chew my computer cable.
After that bucolic start to the day things took a more prosaic turn, as the cleaning caught up with me. I began by thinking I'd have time to do the cleaning and then extract the honey, which is what I always think. By my age you'd think that this Pollyannaish tendency to hopelessly overestimate how much it is possible to do in a day would have faded. By the time I'd cleaned the kitchen floor and vacuumed the drifts of cat fur and Mr Fluffy's dead leaves out of the study it was all still going so well, but I always forget how long it takes to vacuum the sitting room, chasing the dust and fluff round chair legs and coffee tables. The kittens had dragged one of the sitting room curtains off its rail, so that had to be fastened up again with new hooks, a horribly fiddly task wearing varifocals as I couldn't tilt my head to an angle where I could look through the right bit of my spectacles to see what I was doing.
Wiping the kitchen units always takes longer than I think it's going to, especially this time because they were still rather sticky from the last time I extracted honey. It took the whole of three Haydn string quartets and Tinariwen's Radio Tisdas Sessions, and I still hadn't got all the way round the room, and at the end of it I still hadn't cleaned the sticky bits off the Aga because I'd run out of enamel cleaner. The cats must like Haydn, or cleaning, or both, because they lay a sword's length apart in the middle of the room while I worked. We were like a Grayson Perry tapestry of the middle classes come to life, a middle aged woman wearing Birkenstock clogs wiping ineffectually at an Aga while listening to Malian desert rock on an iPod that's so old it must count as vintage and played through a docking station, plus four sleeping cats.
The serious kitten has developed a passion for the vacuum cleaner. Not when it is on, but when it is left lying about. I dumped it in the lower sitting room after vacuuming the kitchen to do the first lot of honey, because I knew I was going to want it again and was too idle to lug it upstairs to the spare bedroom, and the serious kitten took to sleeping curled up next to the corrugated flexible tube. Is it a feline super stimulus, the equivalent of the most gigantic tail? Its sinuous curve did mimic the bend of the serious kitten's curled spine quite uncannily. None of them like the noise of the vacuum cleaner, but none mind the sound of the bean to cup coffee machine, another sign that they are middle class cats, or maybe an indicator of how often we clean the house (not very often) compared to how frequently we drink coffee (daily).
The serious kitten is getting better at hunting. He has stopped bringing shrews in, which I'm pleased about since I have nothing against shrews. They are carnivores, eating insects, worms, slugs and suchlike and they do not harm plants, while they taste disgusting so the serious kitten can't eat them. His next prey was what appeared at first sight to be a baby duck, which was distressing, but we really couldn't see where he'd have got a duck from and decided it was probably a pigeon squab that had fallen out of the nest and was doomed anyway. Then yesterday he caught a mouse, and ate it like a proper cat. I am hoping he will progress to rabbits, but things are moving in the right direction. The other two don't show any interest in hunting at all. Mr Fluffy collects leaves and gets very excited when he sees a bee or a butterfly, or indeed Formula One cars on the TV. The energetic kitten does not even want to go outside unless he has someone with him, and is still at the stage of wanting to chew my computer cable.
Friday, 5 August 2016
another talk
My plan to go and take the super off the lively bees straight after breakfast today, before we could all get hot and bothered, was scuppered yesterday morning when I looked in my diary and discovered I was due to do a woodland charity talk this morning in Braintree. I knew I had a couple coming up, but had vaguely thought the first of them was next week. Normally the organisers contact me a week beforehand, or at least a few days, to check that all is well and I am expecting to be there on the day.
The talk was due to be to a support group for people with caring responsibilities. I remembered it being fixed up, because the person from the caring charity gave the volunteer coordinator at the woodland charity a whole raft of possible dates across four different venues in Essex, and I offered to do two of them. An email to the caring charity enquiring if they were expecting me tomorrow, since I hadn't heard anything more about it, produced a further flurry of emails and I was left with the distinct impression that they had forgotten all about me. They would be happy to see me on Friday, she said, though her group organiser on the ground said I needn't do next week as well as it would be a lot of the same people.
I must admit to experiencing a sense of relief at finding I didn't have to do a second talk, like being given an unexpected day off. What with the honey and one thing and another this week has felt rather truncated and I seem to have got remarkably little done. There again, I always seem to get terribly little done in August, as hot weather reduces me to a crawl. Braintree is not a town I know awfully well, and I recalled that parts of the one way system were utterly baffling. I asked the caring charity for any directions I might need to help me navigate my way to the hall, but the local group organiser said that the only way she could think of telling me was via Sainsbury's. Coming out of Sainsbury's I should do a right, go across some funny little roundabouts and turn right into the street with the hall. Since I was coming from the A120 and did not know how to get to Sainsbury either that was not a great help.
After studying Google maps some more I decided the one way section I remembered did not start until after the road I needed to take. I only drove past the hall once without seeing it, and there were still two spaces left in the tiny parking area. The group was very nice and rather small. The blinds across the skylights would not close so you could barely see the slides. The local organiser admitted she had indeed forgotten all about me until contacted by her manager yesterday. The drive home was extraordinarily hot. I suppose it was all worth it. The people with caring responsibilities seemed to enjoy the talk, and psychological research shows that volunteering is good for our well-being. But really I could have done with the day to sort out the honey and the cleaning.
The talk was due to be to a support group for people with caring responsibilities. I remembered it being fixed up, because the person from the caring charity gave the volunteer coordinator at the woodland charity a whole raft of possible dates across four different venues in Essex, and I offered to do two of them. An email to the caring charity enquiring if they were expecting me tomorrow, since I hadn't heard anything more about it, produced a further flurry of emails and I was left with the distinct impression that they had forgotten all about me. They would be happy to see me on Friday, she said, though her group organiser on the ground said I needn't do next week as well as it would be a lot of the same people.
I must admit to experiencing a sense of relief at finding I didn't have to do a second talk, like being given an unexpected day off. What with the honey and one thing and another this week has felt rather truncated and I seem to have got remarkably little done. There again, I always seem to get terribly little done in August, as hot weather reduces me to a crawl. Braintree is not a town I know awfully well, and I recalled that parts of the one way system were utterly baffling. I asked the caring charity for any directions I might need to help me navigate my way to the hall, but the local group organiser said that the only way she could think of telling me was via Sainsbury's. Coming out of Sainsbury's I should do a right, go across some funny little roundabouts and turn right into the street with the hall. Since I was coming from the A120 and did not know how to get to Sainsbury either that was not a great help.
After studying Google maps some more I decided the one way section I remembered did not start until after the road I needed to take. I only drove past the hall once without seeing it, and there were still two spaces left in the tiny parking area. The group was very nice and rather small. The blinds across the skylights would not close so you could barely see the slides. The local organiser admitted she had indeed forgotten all about me until contacted by her manager yesterday. The drive home was extraordinarily hot. I suppose it was all worth it. The people with caring responsibilities seemed to enjoy the talk, and psychological research shows that volunteering is good for our well-being. But really I could have done with the day to sort out the honey and the cleaning.
Thursday, 4 August 2016
sharp cuts and dry feet
I christened the refurbished secateurs today, tidying up a pair of hedges of Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' that had grown so whiskery with the June rain that they practically met down the middle of the small flight of steps they are supposed to flank. This shrubby honeysuckle makes a useful hedge in as far as it has small leaves, can be clipped to a neat finish, is long lived, quick growing and available in a jolly shade of yellowish green as well as conventional dark green. Its main drawback is that it is quick growing. To keep it tidy requires several cuts per year. and my little hedges are not tidy a lot of the time. It becomes deeply unhappy on poor sand, and will let you know it by growing thin and gappy with dieback at the tips of its twigs. Given a moister though not definitely not boggy spot it will make a dense, fat and healthy shrub.
The secateurs were wonderful to use, as I knew they would be. New or newly reconditioned secateurs are one of life's transient pleasures, like new shoes or the distinctive smell of a new car. The utter newness is but a brief moment in the overall period of ownership of the secateurs, or the shoes, or the car, to be savoured.
Also new is the spray head and end connector on the hose in the back garden, meaning that I no longer have to hold the hose carefully in a certain way to avoid ending up with a fine jet of water soaking my trousers or running down inside my wellington boot. It was a minor niggle, but made watering the container plants in the back into more of a hassle than it should have been. If I cupped my fingers over the leak and tilted the old spray head the right way it was fine and I didn't get wet legs, but if I had to put the hose down to sort out a kink or snag I risked ending up with water all over my spectacles, or an unpleasantly damp leg that would take a couple of hours to dry unless the sun was very bright.
The new spray head was five pounds in B&Q. They sell spray attachments of escalating complexity for anything up to fifteen pounds, but I wanted the budget one, and checked the stock code on the packaging against the label on the shelf to make sure that that was what I'd picked up out of the jumble of late season stock. I've already got the five pound basic model on the hose in the front garden and it works perfectly well, so I cannot see any use for the additional features you get for the extra tenner. In fact, the fewer bits to go wrong the better. Supermarket spray heads will last from one year to the next, as long as you don't leave them attached to the hose and full of water outside in the frosts, but after a year or two they begin to dribble and leak (so do the metal professional ones used in plant nurseries. The owner of the plant centre used to comment on my habit of wearing wellingtons throughout the summer, saying that they must be very hot, but it was practically impossible to do two or three hours worth of daily watering without the hose leaking on your feet, and I absolutely loathed spending the day in wet shoes. When the hoses leaked badly enough the manager would eventually order new rubber seals for them, and the leaks would reduce for a time, but they always dripped).
For the autumn I might treat myself to a new pruning saw.
Wednesday, 3 August 2016
bringing in the harvest
I have been taking honey off the beehives, in a slightly protracted and messy way that makes me think how convenient it would be to have a dedicated bee-proof hygienic hut where I could extract honey and store all my equipment. A honey shed. I do not have such a thing. It would have to be bee-proof, because if a scout once got in when there was honey about it would return in short order with a crowd of foragers and I would have a big problem. Professional honey farmers have honey sheds, and can stack their full supers inside them until they are ready to extract. I have the spare bedroom and the kitchen, and the doors and windows of both are kept firmly shut when there's honey in the offing.
I checked a few days ago and there were hives with honey capped with wax and ready for harvest. It's tempting, once supers are full, to tell yourself that the honey is ripe and ready if it doesn't drip when you lift the frames out, and to take it before the bees can swarm and take it with them, but honey that's taken while still too watery will ferment in storage. I made myself wait this year until the frames were sealed with wax, a sure sign that the bees believed it would keep.
Obviously you only want to take boxes of honey into your honey shed or kitchen, and not boxes of honey plus bees, so you have to get the bees out somehow. Commercial bee farmers give a squirt of some food-use approved chemical that the bees don't like into the top of the hive, and the bees scurry down below. I put an excluder board under the boxes I want to take, a day or two before I plan to take them. The board has a couple of holes into which I slot bee escapes, plastic tunnels with v-shaped passages of lightly sprung metal strips, through which the bees can force their way out of the point of the v, while finding it difficult to get back in. They will work it out in time, which is why you don't want to leave the boards on for too long. If the excluders have worked perfectly the box may be entirely free of bees. If they have worked tolerably well there will be a few bees, which can be dislodged by giving the box a few sharp bangs on a solid stand that you have got ready in the apiary for such moments.
I put excluders under the top boxes on two hives, and was unable to do a third because I couldn't find any more boards, though I was sure I had another spare somewhere. I didn't like to keep the bees out of all of their supers at once because they need space to live, and things were looking quite crowded already. I couldn't add any extra supers temporarily to give them the space because I'd run out of boxes, but told myself that by this stage of the year the queen wasn't laying as fast and they'd cope. Two days ago I removed those boxes, stashing them in the spare room, and yesterday I spun the honey out of them. One frame disintegrated in handling, a lovely fat one with lots of honey in it. I managed to wedge it into the centrifuge to extract the honey regardless, but there were a lot of drips around the kitchen and a few on the way up to the spare bedroom.
At the point when I took those boxes off the hives I put one of the excluders back under the top two supers of a four super column, having checked that they too were ready to harvest. This was my biggest colony, and as is often the way they were the tetchiest. Bees that are incredibly productive and also gentle and sweet to handle do exist, but the more usual combination is that the colonies that get the most done have slightly shorter fuses to go with their Puritan work ethic, while the really placid ones you'd give to a child to handle are true hippies, smelling the flowers and making more bees without bothering to store a surplus of honey the beekeeper can take. I didn't like to shut the big colony out of more than two supers at once, and they were getting lively enough that I didn't care to investigate further down the stack anyway.
Today I took the two top supers off the big colony, gave them the two empty supers out of the spare bedroom, and got the excluder under one more full super having managed to check that the frames were sealed. By that stage I'd been stung several times on the knee through my beesuit and trousers, and decided the bottom super would have to wait for another day. So the state of play is now that I've got two full boxes in the spare room, and the prospect of taking another off tomorrow afternoon or more likely first thing on Friday morning when it's cooler, at which point I will have to work quickly to check whether the bottom super is ready and if so get the excluder under it. After today I will wear thicker trousers. Before I razz up the big colony I will investigate whether I can take more honey off the original colony I first started with.
In order to have enough empty supers to go back on the hives so that all the colonies have enough room I think I am looking at two further extraction sessions, meaning two lots of washing up and two sets of honey drips through the house. And today I had to drive over to the bee equipment supplier in East Bergholt because I was running out of buckets to store the honey. As I said, it is all rather disorganised. It's just as well that the Systems Administrator does not get upset about the mess. Home beekeepers who do not have honey sheds need understanding partners, or they are sunk.
I checked a few days ago and there were hives with honey capped with wax and ready for harvest. It's tempting, once supers are full, to tell yourself that the honey is ripe and ready if it doesn't drip when you lift the frames out, and to take it before the bees can swarm and take it with them, but honey that's taken while still too watery will ferment in storage. I made myself wait this year until the frames were sealed with wax, a sure sign that the bees believed it would keep.
Obviously you only want to take boxes of honey into your honey shed or kitchen, and not boxes of honey plus bees, so you have to get the bees out somehow. Commercial bee farmers give a squirt of some food-use approved chemical that the bees don't like into the top of the hive, and the bees scurry down below. I put an excluder board under the boxes I want to take, a day or two before I plan to take them. The board has a couple of holes into which I slot bee escapes, plastic tunnels with v-shaped passages of lightly sprung metal strips, through which the bees can force their way out of the point of the v, while finding it difficult to get back in. They will work it out in time, which is why you don't want to leave the boards on for too long. If the excluders have worked perfectly the box may be entirely free of bees. If they have worked tolerably well there will be a few bees, which can be dislodged by giving the box a few sharp bangs on a solid stand that you have got ready in the apiary for such moments.
I put excluders under the top boxes on two hives, and was unable to do a third because I couldn't find any more boards, though I was sure I had another spare somewhere. I didn't like to keep the bees out of all of their supers at once because they need space to live, and things were looking quite crowded already. I couldn't add any extra supers temporarily to give them the space because I'd run out of boxes, but told myself that by this stage of the year the queen wasn't laying as fast and they'd cope. Two days ago I removed those boxes, stashing them in the spare room, and yesterday I spun the honey out of them. One frame disintegrated in handling, a lovely fat one with lots of honey in it. I managed to wedge it into the centrifuge to extract the honey regardless, but there were a lot of drips around the kitchen and a few on the way up to the spare bedroom.
At the point when I took those boxes off the hives I put one of the excluders back under the top two supers of a four super column, having checked that they too were ready to harvest. This was my biggest colony, and as is often the way they were the tetchiest. Bees that are incredibly productive and also gentle and sweet to handle do exist, but the more usual combination is that the colonies that get the most done have slightly shorter fuses to go with their Puritan work ethic, while the really placid ones you'd give to a child to handle are true hippies, smelling the flowers and making more bees without bothering to store a surplus of honey the beekeeper can take. I didn't like to shut the big colony out of more than two supers at once, and they were getting lively enough that I didn't care to investigate further down the stack anyway.
Today I took the two top supers off the big colony, gave them the two empty supers out of the spare bedroom, and got the excluder under one more full super having managed to check that the frames were sealed. By that stage I'd been stung several times on the knee through my beesuit and trousers, and decided the bottom super would have to wait for another day. So the state of play is now that I've got two full boxes in the spare room, and the prospect of taking another off tomorrow afternoon or more likely first thing on Friday morning when it's cooler, at which point I will have to work quickly to check whether the bottom super is ready and if so get the excluder under it. After today I will wear thicker trousers. Before I razz up the big colony I will investigate whether I can take more honey off the original colony I first started with.
In order to have enough empty supers to go back on the hives so that all the colonies have enough room I think I am looking at two further extraction sessions, meaning two lots of washing up and two sets of honey drips through the house. And today I had to drive over to the bee equipment supplier in East Bergholt because I was running out of buckets to store the honey. As I said, it is all rather disorganised. It's just as well that the Systems Administrator does not get upset about the mess. Home beekeepers who do not have honey sheds need understanding partners, or they are sunk.
Tuesday, 2 August 2016
cutting tools and cuttings
Today my swivel handled Felco secateurs arrived back from being serviced. Felco's UK agents Burton McCall will for a fee take back your secateurs, replace any worn parts, and adjust and oil them so that they are as good as new. My number sevens were returned with a new and wonderfully sharp cutting blade, while the swivelling handle once again turned smoothly in my palm. At £19.95 it is not cheap, indeed, you could buy a pair of secateurs by another manufacturer for less than the cost of getting the Felcos reconditioned, but they are superb tools. As I ran my thumb experimentally down the edge of the new blade and felt the handle rotate when I closed my hand I felt the small thrill one gets from really well made things. With a large and now mature garden there is a lot of pruning and cutting back to do and good cutting tools make a huge difference. I recently managed to blister the middle finger of my right hand cutting the ivy hedge with a lighter weight, non swivelling pair of secateurs because the number sevens were blunt and needed servicing.
Good tools make most practical tasks so much easier to do, and the results are often so much better, whether gardening or cooking. Garden centres and catalogues are full of costly and often twee objects that fail to meet this basic definition of a good tool. Recycled reply paid envelopes are fine for saving home collected seed, no need to pay £2.99 for a packet of ten arty ones printed up as Home Saved Seed. It is easier to tie the top of a tripod of bamboo canes together with string than to push every cane laboriously through a hole in a moulded circle of green plastic. Sharp, well balanced, low effort cutting tools are simply marvellous. I felt the same about my new shears, and made a mental note at the time to buy new ones every other year rather than going along with their imperceptible but steady decline in performance until jolted into action when they stopped cutting at all (I would get the shears serviced, but nobody does them).
Tonight's garden club meeting was about taking cuttings. The organisers had mustered piles of propagating material, and were keen to break down people's perception that taking cuttings was difficult and encourage everybody to have a go. We were given a pot of damp compost each, and after the introductory remarks it was open season on the heaps of bits of plants. I'm already happy doing fuchsias and geraniums, but hadn't realised you could propagate Gaura from stem cuttings, and stored away a second hand Raymond Evison tip on getting clematis cuttings to work for future reference.
The clematis trick was fascinating, and I would never have thought of it and have not seen it mentioned in any book. The club chairman, who is a keen propagator and active in Plant Heritage as well as her village garden society, asked Raymond Evison, who is one of the greatest living clematis breeders and growers, for advice on clematis cuttings that rooted perfectly well but then failed to make any top growth, as she'd suffered from that problem. He told her that once the cuttings had formed a good root system that if they didn't start making stems and leaves as well then she should tip them out of their pots, shake the compost off the roots, bunch them up and chop the bottom half off. That, said Raymond Evison, would jolt the plants into starting to make top growth as well. I have no idea why they would have refused grow stems before, or why losing half their roots would prompt them to do so afterwards, but that was Raymond Evison's advice and she found that it worked. The actual cutting looked very easy. Clematis are made from internodal cuttings, meaning that the lower part of the cutting that you stick in the compost is simply a section of stem rather than ending at the bottom in a leaf joint. You leave a joint and pair of leaves sticking out of the compost, and can reduce the size of large composite leaves to cut down on water loss.
Even in the case of the geranium cuttings I learned something new. I must have taken dozens of geranium cuttings through the years. They are easy to root, and I felt quite blase about it. But I have only ever used the tips, often when pruning straggly plants back, and it had simply not occurred to me that you can also use intermediate sections of stem. It turns out that you can, and I am now the hopeful owner of an as yet unrooted cutting of an old zonal variety 'Gustav Emich' as used outside Buckingham Palace, with a tall habit and flowers that match the guardsmens' tunics. I only took a very small piece because there were quite a few people queuing up for cuttings and only two stems to divide out between us. I see on the internet that it is not actually out of commerce as I could buy a young plant from Allwoods, so if my small bit does not take then I could still have one if I wanted to. But it would be fun if it grew.
Good tools make most practical tasks so much easier to do, and the results are often so much better, whether gardening or cooking. Garden centres and catalogues are full of costly and often twee objects that fail to meet this basic definition of a good tool. Recycled reply paid envelopes are fine for saving home collected seed, no need to pay £2.99 for a packet of ten arty ones printed up as Home Saved Seed. It is easier to tie the top of a tripod of bamboo canes together with string than to push every cane laboriously through a hole in a moulded circle of green plastic. Sharp, well balanced, low effort cutting tools are simply marvellous. I felt the same about my new shears, and made a mental note at the time to buy new ones every other year rather than going along with their imperceptible but steady decline in performance until jolted into action when they stopped cutting at all (I would get the shears serviced, but nobody does them).
Tonight's garden club meeting was about taking cuttings. The organisers had mustered piles of propagating material, and were keen to break down people's perception that taking cuttings was difficult and encourage everybody to have a go. We were given a pot of damp compost each, and after the introductory remarks it was open season on the heaps of bits of plants. I'm already happy doing fuchsias and geraniums, but hadn't realised you could propagate Gaura from stem cuttings, and stored away a second hand Raymond Evison tip on getting clematis cuttings to work for future reference.
The clematis trick was fascinating, and I would never have thought of it and have not seen it mentioned in any book. The club chairman, who is a keen propagator and active in Plant Heritage as well as her village garden society, asked Raymond Evison, who is one of the greatest living clematis breeders and growers, for advice on clematis cuttings that rooted perfectly well but then failed to make any top growth, as she'd suffered from that problem. He told her that once the cuttings had formed a good root system that if they didn't start making stems and leaves as well then she should tip them out of their pots, shake the compost off the roots, bunch them up and chop the bottom half off. That, said Raymond Evison, would jolt the plants into starting to make top growth as well. I have no idea why they would have refused grow stems before, or why losing half their roots would prompt them to do so afterwards, but that was Raymond Evison's advice and she found that it worked. The actual cutting looked very easy. Clematis are made from internodal cuttings, meaning that the lower part of the cutting that you stick in the compost is simply a section of stem rather than ending at the bottom in a leaf joint. You leave a joint and pair of leaves sticking out of the compost, and can reduce the size of large composite leaves to cut down on water loss.
Even in the case of the geranium cuttings I learned something new. I must have taken dozens of geranium cuttings through the years. They are easy to root, and I felt quite blase about it. But I have only ever used the tips, often when pruning straggly plants back, and it had simply not occurred to me that you can also use intermediate sections of stem. It turns out that you can, and I am now the hopeful owner of an as yet unrooted cutting of an old zonal variety 'Gustav Emich' as used outside Buckingham Palace, with a tall habit and flowers that match the guardsmens' tunics. I only took a very small piece because there were quite a few people queuing up for cuttings and only two stems to divide out between us. I see on the internet that it is not actually out of commerce as I could buy a young plant from Allwoods, so if my small bit does not take then I could still have one if I wanted to. But it would be fun if it grew.
Monday, 1 August 2016
gravel gardening
I have been planting more things into the gravel in the middle of the turning circle. Planting in gravel is a slightly tedious business. You scrape the loose gravel from the place where you want to plant. Then you peer closely at the exposed earth trying to decide whether you think there are bulbs down there, if you have bulbs naturalised in your gravel, which I have. If you decide to go ahead and start digging bits of gravel will start rolling down into the hole. You stop digging and scrape a larger area clear. As you keep digging you realise you have not got enough space to put the excavated earth down on more bare earth and not gravel. This is just to make a hole big enough to take a nine centimetre pot.
You do all this while kneeling in a very tiny space in between the other things that are already growing in the gravel, trying not to break any of them with your feet which are sticking out behind you, or kneel on any of the other things you have just planted, which now look absolutely tiny and lost in the sea of gravel. Eventually you are ready to plant your thing, dibbling any accidentally exposed small bulbs back into the hole beside it. You fill in the hole with soil which seems to be mostly gravel, scrape more gravel around the crown of the plant, and give it a dusting of fish, blood and bone. I use miccorrhizae in the bottom of each planting hole to give the new plants a helping hand as they attempt to establish themselves in a growing medium that takes the concept of free drainage to a whole new level. Generally speaking I give them a good watering, but as we are forecast to get a deluge of rain over the next twenty-four hours I skipped that bit today.
While in amongst the plants I also pull out the latest emerging shoots of creeping sorrel with as much root as I can extract. Sometimes a section of root pulls up beautifully and I get six or eight inches of it, but often the foliage breaks away and I don't get any root at all. I never get them all. The roots that run along just below the surface, if not virtually on the face of the earth under the gravel, give a false impression. There will be further layers of creeping roots an inch, two, three, and four inches under the surface, weaving across each other and through the roots of other plants, and the occasional fat root diving down vertically. By now I have given up any idea of eliminating the creeping sorrel: I merely seek to weaken it, and pick out most of the tufts so that it doesn't show too badly.
One of today's new inhabitants of the gravel was Argemone grandiflora, the prickly poppy. I raised the plants from seed, and do not recommend trying to raise it in pots as I did. It is a drought lover from southern US and Mexico with grey leaves and poppy like white single flowers, and is indeed a member of the poppy family. It is supposed to grow two or three feet high, but mine have made sad little spindly specimens that are now flowering at the six inch mark. There was a high attrition rate before even getting to that point, as quite a few of the seedlings damped off. Opinions vary as to whether it is a true annual or a short lived perennial, but the plants certainly don't look as though they will be long for this world, either way. With any luck they will seed themselves into the gravel, and with the benefit of hindsight I should simply have thrown the seed around the area where I wanted them and hoped they would germinate and grow in situ.
My other sowing intended for the turning circle has made more hopeful looking plants. I've admired Dianthus carthusianorum at Chelsea for several years on the trot, and this year finally got organised to buy and sow a packet of seed, which could well mark its high point at Chelsea as I'm not sure it was used in as many show gardens in 2016 as in the previous few years. It is a kind of pink, throwing up tall stems with small, vivid pinky-red flowers on top from low cushions of foliage. It is supposed to like sharp drainage, sun and its own space, a plant to dot around in gravel rather than ask it to compete in the hurly burly of a crammed border. That, at any rate, is how they were used at Chelsea and seemed to be the consensus of sensible opinion on the internet. I like the idea of little dots of bright pink floating above the gravel, and with any luck they will self seed. They are supposed to like alkaline conditions, and our garden is on the acid side of neutral, so we'll see.
Of course, you could spread your gravel over a membrane and not bother will any of the above, but that would be awfully dull. And I have yet to see any scheme with gravel atop any kind of landscape fabric where bits of the fabric didn't pop up and show. Planting holes cut into Mypex are the worst offenders, every plant surrounded by protruding wisps of black fibre, and you can forget self seeding.
You do all this while kneeling in a very tiny space in between the other things that are already growing in the gravel, trying not to break any of them with your feet which are sticking out behind you, or kneel on any of the other things you have just planted, which now look absolutely tiny and lost in the sea of gravel. Eventually you are ready to plant your thing, dibbling any accidentally exposed small bulbs back into the hole beside it. You fill in the hole with soil which seems to be mostly gravel, scrape more gravel around the crown of the plant, and give it a dusting of fish, blood and bone. I use miccorrhizae in the bottom of each planting hole to give the new plants a helping hand as they attempt to establish themselves in a growing medium that takes the concept of free drainage to a whole new level. Generally speaking I give them a good watering, but as we are forecast to get a deluge of rain over the next twenty-four hours I skipped that bit today.
While in amongst the plants I also pull out the latest emerging shoots of creeping sorrel with as much root as I can extract. Sometimes a section of root pulls up beautifully and I get six or eight inches of it, but often the foliage breaks away and I don't get any root at all. I never get them all. The roots that run along just below the surface, if not virtually on the face of the earth under the gravel, give a false impression. There will be further layers of creeping roots an inch, two, three, and four inches under the surface, weaving across each other and through the roots of other plants, and the occasional fat root diving down vertically. By now I have given up any idea of eliminating the creeping sorrel: I merely seek to weaken it, and pick out most of the tufts so that it doesn't show too badly.
One of today's new inhabitants of the gravel was Argemone grandiflora, the prickly poppy. I raised the plants from seed, and do not recommend trying to raise it in pots as I did. It is a drought lover from southern US and Mexico with grey leaves and poppy like white single flowers, and is indeed a member of the poppy family. It is supposed to grow two or three feet high, but mine have made sad little spindly specimens that are now flowering at the six inch mark. There was a high attrition rate before even getting to that point, as quite a few of the seedlings damped off. Opinions vary as to whether it is a true annual or a short lived perennial, but the plants certainly don't look as though they will be long for this world, either way. With any luck they will seed themselves into the gravel, and with the benefit of hindsight I should simply have thrown the seed around the area where I wanted them and hoped they would germinate and grow in situ.
My other sowing intended for the turning circle has made more hopeful looking plants. I've admired Dianthus carthusianorum at Chelsea for several years on the trot, and this year finally got organised to buy and sow a packet of seed, which could well mark its high point at Chelsea as I'm not sure it was used in as many show gardens in 2016 as in the previous few years. It is a kind of pink, throwing up tall stems with small, vivid pinky-red flowers on top from low cushions of foliage. It is supposed to like sharp drainage, sun and its own space, a plant to dot around in gravel rather than ask it to compete in the hurly burly of a crammed border. That, at any rate, is how they were used at Chelsea and seemed to be the consensus of sensible opinion on the internet. I like the idea of little dots of bright pink floating above the gravel, and with any luck they will self seed. They are supposed to like alkaline conditions, and our garden is on the acid side of neutral, so we'll see.
Of course, you could spread your gravel over a membrane and not bother will any of the above, but that would be awfully dull. And I have yet to see any scheme with gravel atop any kind of landscape fabric where bits of the fabric didn't pop up and show. Planting holes cut into Mypex are the worst offenders, every plant surrounded by protruding wisps of black fibre, and you can forget self seeding.
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