pruning and pots

This morning, as I probed with a sewing needle at the rose thorn lodged in the pad of my left thumb, I wondered why it was that so much of the equipment available for gardeners is so rubbish. Other hobbies have embraced modern technology and materials.  What do we get?  Pruning gloves still made out of leather, that aren't thorn proof and go as stiff as a board the first time they get wet, while dyeing your fingers orange for good measure.  Why can't we have gloves made out of kevlar or something that actually works?  Gardening is supposed to be one of the biggest leisure activities in the UK.  Perhaps gardeners are viewed as hopeless reactionaries, people who make their own cold frames out of old windows and wouldn't spend the money to buy decent kit, lacking the commercial potential to sell boys' toys of cycling or even cookery.

Once I had dethorned my thumb and failed to get a tiny, tiny prickle out of my finger I returned to the pruning, and pollarded the orange twigged lime, following which I felt like a tree murderer. The trunk was studded with adventitious shoots and there were visible little dormant buds at the point on the trunk which I have arbitrarily decided is going to be the top of the pollard (it is not really arbitrary but driven by the height I feel comfortable working at from the step ladder.  If I were taller it might have been six or eight inches higher).  I left a few side branches to lessen the shock and give it some leaves for this spring to be going on with, and I am intellectually fairly confident that it will throw out lots of lovely new orange twigs, and that I will end up with a nice ball of bright green foliage for the summer and vivid twigs for the winter, that doesn't cast too much shade over the rest of the bed.  I have read Monty Don's account of the joy of pleaching orange stemmed limes after admiring the warm colour of the twigs all winter.  I know that as the old branches fade to a nondescript shade of greyish green and the brightest colour is on the young twigs that my trained shrub lime will be more colourful than if it were allowed to grow on into a full sized tree.  It is just that I really hate taking the top out of a fast growing, healthy young tree. Now the fell deed is done maybe it will feel better next year, just as I don't mind cutting the topiary yews and box.

Then I found a lot more dead material to come out of the shrub roses, really a surprising amount more given that I thought I was getting to the end of it yesterday.  In the course of removing the latest bits of 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' to have spread across the wooden steps to the bottom lawn I put my feet right through one of the treads.  It is fortunate that the Systems Administrator, having been rather resistant to the idea of having to rebuild the steps, suddenly agreed this lunchtime and even had a plan about what sort of wood to use and where to source it (scaffolding boards, available from Wickes in a small lorry and with a time specific delivery slot).

Finally I decided I'd chopped through enough branches for one day and spent a happy hour tidying up the auriculas and the pots of violets, picking off the dead leaves and shrivelled viola stems.  The auriculas have come through the winter with a one hundred per cent survival rate, eleven out of eleven pots.  I lost one last summer but that was due to soaking it until it was too wet after it had got too dry in a too small pot.  Now they are in classic five inch terracotta long tom pots, slightly bigger than you would see used for showing, but easier to manage for general garden use.  The vintage pots I bought unseen and second hand turned out to be critically too small.  The auriculas have wintered standing against the back wall of the conservatory facing the wall of the house, so in rain shadow from two directions, open to the sky overhead but out of the direct sun, tucked out of the line of the westerly gales but with plenty of air circulation.  The situation seems to suit them, and now I've found a supply of pots I might add to the collection in due course.  Exhibitors growing for show would divide the plants to reduce them to one rosette each, but I am not going to bother, since I'm not growing for exhibition and don't have time and anyway am quite happy with the idea of a bigger plant with presumably more flowers.

The violas did not fare so well, especially Viola cornuta where only one plant out of four looked entirely healthy, the other three looking very dubiously alive if not fairly certainly dead.  Six out of seven of the miniature pansy like violas were green and healthy but the brown remains of the seventh lifted clean away from the compost with no signs of life beneath.  The violas were in the same passage way as the auriculas, though the pansy types were against the house wall and so got more sun, and potentially more rain.  I cut them all hard down last autumn as the growers' websites advise, and don't yet have a theory on why some died.

As everything was in active growth, the auricula pushing out fat little new leaves and the violas making new shoots below the chopped down remains of last year's foliage, it seemed like time to apply a dose of Vitax Q4.  I opened my newly purchased tub, and as I darkly suspected it would be it was formed into little pellets, looking though not smelling just like rabbit food.  My searches on the internet seemed to suggest that Vitax Q4 as sold to the retail market was now pelleted and hence Dust Free.  Original Formula Vitax Q4 was available, but only in bags of twenty kilos or more, presumably aimed at professionals.  I thought that it would take me rather a long time to get through twenty kilos of Vitax Q4, even using it in the conservatory as well as the auricula pots, so opted for the pellets while wondering why I had to be protected from dust when it was apparently fine if only I bought five times as much of it.

I tried scattering a few pellets of rabbit food around a viola and it did not look right, the great lumps of plant food out of proportion to the size of the pot so that I had no idea how many to use, and I certainly wasn't applying them to the auriculas.  Instead using the pestle and mortar out of the kitchen I reduced the wretched lumps to the sort of granules I'd wanted in the first place and scattered them carefully around my plants with a teaspoon.  I don't suppose that's what the bright spark who decided I couldn't be trusted with powder and must have huge great pellets intended, but that's tough.

my safety glasses arrive

My prescription safety glasses arrived in the morning post.  That's pretty good going, since I ordered them on 8 February.  On 9 February somebody from the company rang me to check that I really had put the correct distance between my pupils on the online order form, and to suggest that a different choice of frames might be better.  She had worked out that if the measurements I'd given were correct then I must have a small face, while the frames I'd chosen were enormous.  With visions of my gigantic safety glasses sliding perpetually down my nose, weighed down by their fat extra strength lenses sticking out beyond the rim of the frame, I chose different ones.  The sales person spent ages explaining all this to me and the glasses I ended up with were cheaper than the ones I'd originally chosen, so there was nothing in it for her beyond a happy customer, and it is not as though I'm likely to buy another pair in the next year or two or be ordering them on behalf of my firm for my whole workforce.  The firm is safetyspecs.co.uk and they deserve ten out of ten for customer service.  I would unhesitatingly recommend them to any of my friends, except that none of them are planning to buy prescription safety glasses so far as I know.

The safety glasses I ended up with are almost exactly the same size as my normal glasses, but with the curved side pieces at the outer edge of each eye.  I wore them for most of the day, and they seem pretty comfortable.  At first you are acutely aware of the side guards lurking at the edge of your field of vision, like having dental work done and being unable to ignore the strange new contours of your teeth against your tongue.  After a while your brain filters out the novel but pointless stimulus and you cease to notice.  Opting for distance vision turned out to be the correct choice.  I can see perfectly clearly at arms length, which is where I'm mostly working, and can see where I'm putting my feet.  I would struggle to use a computer or check my phone wearing them, but I don't need to.

Emboldened by my new protective eyewear I went on pruning the roses.  I am on the home straight, I think, and not a day too soon.  Pruning shrub roses that are growing well is a pleasure, as all you have to do is take out any dead or moribund old stems, while the more recent growth emerges plump and shining green as the old, gnarled and twiggy brown is stripped away.  Cutting the buddleia back hard feels unkind, although I know they will bounce back, making six or eight feet of new growth by the end of the season.  Meanwhile their neighbouring roses will enjoy the extra light.  It feels very drastic to take so much off a woody plant, but buddleia can regenerate from the roots.  I know, since the only reason I have two is that I planted a second after the first was ripped out of the ground by a gale.  In due course the first came back.

I pollarded all the Paulownia shoots, of which there were many because it suckers.  Cutting them down feels drastic too, though not as poignant as cutting down the buddleia because they do not yet have any leaves.  The Paulownia will send up new shoots up to ten or fifteen feet tall by the end of the summer, clothed in gigantic furry leaves.  I haven't seen it generally used among shrub roses.  I put a couple into the bed, grown from seed, because the roses had such boring little leaves and I thought the Paulownia would make it more exciting.  A few years ago I let one hopeful shoot flower, and somehow never got around to cutting it down, so now have a foxglove tree in the middle of the bed.  After pruning it once as a standard flowering shrub I swore that it was going to have to come down, but somehow it is still there.  The flowers are such fun, like a cross between a foxglove and a horse chestnut, carried in mauvish blue candles in early summer, and the veranda gives such a good vantage point to look at them.  Staring up at bluish flowers against a blue sky can be an unrewarding experience, which is why you are advised to plant a foxglove tree downhill of your viewing point if you can.  By accident I have.  And the crown is conveniently placed to block the view from the sitting room of the next door farm's wind turbine.  If I just saw off one low branch to lift the crown and then keep at it with the pole lopper maybe I can manage it as a standard after all.

I have not yet pollarded the orange twigged lime but I must, as I really can't have a full sized lime tree growing that close to the house.  I should remember the notice in the extraordinarily good garden we visited in Richmond, explaining to visitors that a virtually leafless and branchless yew had been hard pruned to control its size, but would recover, and that they did a lot of that sort of maintenance in the garden to keep the plants in scale.  It would be nice to have tens of acres, though, and be able to let my trees grow huge.  They would like it, and so would I.

spring is in the air

The warm weather brought everybody out.  The Systems Administrator reported that bees were charging up and down the meadow.  The kittens raced around the garden.  Our Ginger sat magisterially on the front door step.  Business at the Clacton garden centre and the tip (sorry, recycling centre) was booming.

I needed to call in at the garden centre since I wanted seed compost plus industrial quantities of blood, fish and bone, I was hoping they might have crushed oyster shell for the chickens, and one of my wellington boots had split.  I'd have like some Vitax Q4 as well for the pots of violas and auriculas, as recommended by the growers at Chelsea, but couldn't see any.  I got everything else on the list, though, and in a fit of extravagance treated myself to two new large propagating cases for the seeds.  The lids of my old ones have chipped at the corners and gone yellow with age, and while I managed to gaffer tape over the holes well enough to keep the mice off the small bulbs this winter, I thought I couldn't be messing around with taped together lids for seed pots where I need to check the watering daily, and the yellowing and crazing must cut down the light considerably.  Not so important when you're waiting for tulip bulbs to form roots, not so good when you're trying to prevent seedlings from becoming leggy.

The tip is just around the corner from the garden centre so I generally try to combine the two into one trip.  As I drove to Clacton a trail of bamboo prunings along the road told me I was not the only gardener going to the tip today.  Sure enough, when I turned off the main road into Jaywick lane there was another final piece of bamboo ahead of me on the tarmac.  Somebody didn't secure their trailer properly.  I wanted to dump the hellebore leaves, which filled several sacks by the time I'd finished cutting them off and are not supposed to go on the home compost heap to avoid spreading any hellebore leaf diseases.  If I had left the sacks for six months or a year the leaves would have shrunk down to nothing, but since I needed the compost and everything else I thought I might as well not be stuck with several large bags of decaying hellebore leaves for the summer.  A very polite, very helpful, very heavily tattooed young member of staff emptied most of my bags, for which I was duly grateful, though at the garden centre afterwards when the woman on the till seemed quite reluctant to believe that I could load my 25 kilo bag of fish, blood and bone into the car myself I began to wonder if I was looking particularly decrepit.

Actually, my hands were feeling it after yesterday's pruning session so to give them a break I started clearing the overwintering pots of herbaceous plants out of the greenhouse, and investigating the ones still on the concrete that never made it into the greenhouse due to lack of space.  Most of the Verbascum chaixii have overwintered successfully out in the open on the concrete, some in 1L and some in 2L pots.  It is a nuisance that they are supposed to be the white form but most flowered yellow last year.  The Lysimachia atropurpurea died, but they are basically annuals.  I raised them intending to plant them in the vegetable patch to use for cutting, but never got round to the planting bit.  It makes me a little cross when I see garden centres selling them alongside their perennial plants and priced at several pounds each, when they are generally very short lived.  The Linaria purpurea 'Canon Went' also mostly died, but not before seeding themselves into their pots and most of the neighbouring pots, so I shall not be short of pink toadflax this summer.  The Aquilegia that didn't manage to squeeze inside seem absolutely fine in 1L and 9cm pots.  A tray of rooted box cuttings look starving but have survived.

I looked online for Vitax Q4 and Amazon came up trumps, yet again.  If somebody can draft UK tax law properly so that they pay their fair share I don't even mind paying more for their products, but it is so useful to be able to press a button and have garden sundries you need urgently arrive the next day in a van.  After I lost the spring of my secateurs I ordered the replacement at half past three in the afternoon and it was with me by half past ten the following morning.

pruning the willow leaved bay

When I went to see the gardens of the Italian lakes and visited the Villa del Balbianello one of the things that intrigued me was how their evergreen oaks were persuaded to grow as such perfect mushroom domes.  The answer, it turns out, is that arborists clamber around inside them like monkeys carrying out high level pruning.  We don't manage anything so glamorous, but today I did prune the willow leaved bay.

Laurus nobilis 'Angustifolia' is a really good plant.  I got mine from Architectural Plants in 2002 and liked it so much I tried to persuade the plant centre to stock it when I worked there, but they didn't, dismissing it as not that different from ordinary bay.  They were wrong, but the RHS now lists fourteen suppliers so it would not be too difficult to track one down if you wanted to.  The leaves are much more slender than those of the normal bay, like evergreen versions of willow leaves, hence the name.  The growth habit is strongly upright, and with annual clipping it will make a dense, nicely tapered specimen.  According to Architectural Plants it is hardier than the type, and certainly mine came through the two successive very cold winters we had about five years ago with no more damage than some burnt and brown leaves.  Normal bay can be cut to the ground in harsh winters, and while it will generally sucker generously from the root and regenerate over a few years I did not want mine to sucker, because I wanted it as a fastigiate specimen on a single trunk.

Architectural Plants say it is not a particularly fast grower and the excellent Bluebell Nursery describe it as slow to moderate.  I'd say it was more moderate than slow, given that I've been lopping shoots up to two feet long off the top of mine, and as it was planted fifteen years ago it is no longer in the first flush of youth.  In that last sentence the misleading element is the casual use of the word lopping.

If the bay were standing alone in the middle of a lawn or a nice big patch of gravel, or even surrounded by something low growing like lavender, cutting it would be quite straightforward.  I would get a step ladder and the Henchman out and away I'd go with the secateurs and loppers.  The bay, however, is standing in a large border surrounded by shrub roses, a couple of buddleia, a rare and precious tree peony, the knobbly stems of Tetrapanax papyrifera, a deciduous ceanothus, and a couple of ludicrously expensive metal tripods with clematis on them.  Towards the edges of the bed are snowdrops and the emerging snouts of hyacinths.  Under the shrub roses is a ground cover of herbaceous plants just beginning to emerge from their winter slumbers.  The bed slopes quite steeply.  Getting any kind of scaffolding in there is completely out of the question.  I can wedge the step ladder against the uphill side of the bay to help me reach slightly further up it by hand, but the vast bulk of the pruning is done with a pole lopper.

It was ideal weather for pole lopping, not too cold, not windy, and overcast.  You do not want to be squinting into the sun as you try to locate a stem fifteen feet above your head with what is essentially a pair of heavily geared secateurs on a very long stick, and you do not want the stems to be lashing around in the wind while you do it.  It is hard work, though, holding up the pole and not letting it crash down across the very precious tree peony or anything else, and looking upwards all the time gives you a crick in your neck.  In an ideal world you would step back from any piece of topiary quite frequently while cutting it, to check how you are doing, but stepping back from the bay means wriggling out from among the roses and everything else, being terribly careful with every step where you are putting your feet.

I now feel rather stiff but with this mild weather there is no time to be lost with the rest of the pruning.  Buds are swelling, things emerging from below ground just waiting to be trodden on, and the sooner it is all done the better.

pruning

Now it's the second half of February I feel free to cut down all the herbaceous stems left standing over the winter so that the birds could eat the seed heads, and in hopes of getting some of those mornings you see photographed in magazines when every stalk and withered flower head is rendered miraculous by frost.  Or else heavy dew shining magically on the spiders' webs.  We had maybe half a dozen such mornings.  But now bulbs are coming through and the ground level buds of this year's herbaceous plants swelling, all waiting to be trodden on, and the sooner I am on those beds to do my work and off again the better.  The only problem is deciding what to do first.

I took a deep breath, steadied my nerves and reduced the shrub rose 'Sally Holmes' hard.  I've been psyching myself up to do the deed for months.  'Sally Holmes' is a modern shrub rose, with clusters of creamy white shading to soft pink, single flowers produced in successive flushes through the summer, with good hips if you aren't too enthusiastic about deadheading the final flush.  In the past couple of years she has not performed as well as she used to.  I tried taking her down fairly drastically once before and she did not like it and I vowed not to do it again, but then I began to remember how Christopher Lloyd wrote that you would not kill a middle aged rose by hard pruning, on the contrary it could be rejuvenating.  And I remembered the Systems Administrator's story of the SA's father performing drastic surgery learned on a pruning course at Wisley on the straggly hedge of the rose 'Elizabeth' in the front garden of their new house.  The neighbours were horrified by the Wisley chop, and the next year 'Elizabeth' had never performed so well.

I have not one but three plants of 'Sally Holmes'.  When I bought them I didn't grasp that they would grow quite so large, well over six feet tall and as much across.  Still, in a large garden you don't want the planting to be too bitty, so I am happy with the group of three.  The trouble was that after years of dead heading and taking out dead wood, the framework of branches was an awkward muddle of twiggy growth going in all directions above bare trunks.  As plants they were not beautiful, and they weren't flowering as freely as they once did.  My researches unearthed one contributor to an internet forum who said that as 'Sally Holmes' tended to flower best on new wood, owners who were continually removing most of the recent growth to limit its size could be left with few flowers.  I haven't been doing that, but in the past couple of years mine haven't made all that much new wood.  Growth, they say, follows the knife.  I shall feed my plants very generously when I top up the Strulch and keep feeding them through the season.

That kind of pruning takes concentration.  I normally listen to the radio while I'm working on the borders, but I can't while doing major pruning, it is too distracting when I am trying to decide where to place every cut and how much to take off.  A lot, was the answer.  A couple of hydrangeas next to the clump will be relieved to no longer have a stray arm flung across their heads.

It was so emotionally draining that when I finished I stuck to cutting down herbaceous stems in the island bed for the rest of the afternoon.  Tomorrow or the next day the Buddleja davidii 'Black Knight' are for chop, and I shall have to steel myself to cut down the dogwoods and willow grown for their coloured stems, and worse still pollard the orange twigged lime.  I am not a naturally enthusiastic pruner.  I like plants to grow, and it seems so ungrateful to lop their efforts off.  Some people enjoy it, causing ructions between couples where one (often though not always a man) loves chopping things down, and the other (frequently though not invariably a woman) is for a fuller, more natural look.  But it has to be done.  Our back garden is over twenty years old and in danger of getting dark and woody.  It needs a ruthless hand on the saw from time to time.

winter flowering shrubs and winter gardening

The Systems Administrator spent the morning cutting the hedge and the pile of debris waiting to be sorted and shredded is mounting, but I left it for another day.  Instead I spent a happy hour pulling goose grass seedlings out of the ditch bed.  It seemed like, and probably was, a gardening indulgence, but the snowdrops are out and looking good now, and I wanted to be able to admire the effect without the distracting presence of hundreds of bright little green weeds, each just waiting its chance to grow into a sprawling burr producing machine.  And it was very nice down in the bottom part of the garden.  Part of the point of having a garden is to be in it as well as to toil on it, even if being in it takes the form of some very light hand weeding.  Though weeding among the snowdrops is better exercise than you might think, because you have to be so careful not to put a foot down on a clump of bulbs that it ends up like a solo variant of Twister.

Both the Daphne bholua are out.  I have the white form and the pinky-mauve 'Jacqueline Postill'. The latter is the more vigorous grower.  The white one makes a much smaller shrub, maybe six feet tall but not much more than a couple of feet across, while 'Jacqueline Postill' is taller and is suckering into a thicket.  She seems pretty robust, while her white flowered neighbour is leaning on her as if it were not entirely root firm.  I hope this is not a bad sign of things to come, but the white one has been wonky for years.  My garden records show that 'Jacqueline Postill' was planted in 2005 and the white one in 2008, so they can be reasonably long lived if you can persuade them to settle.  The scent is wonderful, heavy and sweet, and by late morning had attracted some foraging bees.

There are clusters of small, dark red flowers like witch hazel on the Persian ironwood, Parrotia persica.  Since I have got my plant spreadsheet open I can tell you that this is coming up to its twentieth anniversary.  It has made a multi-stemmed tree, more upright than many I've seen in gardens I've visited, but maybe it will spread more with age.  I am not great at estimating heights and didn't think about trying when I was in the garden, but it must be fifteen or twenty feet high. The autumn leaf colour is splendid and is one of the reasons why you would plant a Parrotia.  The bark is not yet flaking in the beautiful way that mature trees do.  It is one of the least demanding trees I have met.  No pruning required, no litter of twigs to tidy up.  Just plant it somewhere where it will have room to spread and leave it to get on with it for a few decades.  It would like a nice fertile soil that doesn't dry out, and some shelter from the wind.  Tucked against the corner of the wood and close to the ditch ours seems happy enough, but I wouldn't rate its chances in the front garden.

Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' has been producing its scented pink flowers for weeks. Months.  It is a good value winter shrub if you can give it what it wants, which is much the same as the Parrotia.  I tried one on the sandy soil of the front garden and it very slowly dwindled and died. I like to think I would know better now.

Then I turned my attentions to pruning the roses, carefully because my safety glasses have not yet arrived.  A solitary rose bush is actually fairly unlikely to catch you in the eye as the twigs generally come straight at you.  If you don't wear glasses normally then I suppose you could step straight into a cut end, but I have never had one sneak in behind my spectacles.  A bed of roses growing within touching distance of each other gets trickier since you can have shoots coming at you from all angles.  I did not poke myself in the eye but I shall be glad when the glasses arrive.

Meanwhile the spring fell out of my heavy duty secateurs as I was working over a patch of Pachysandra, a shade tolerant evergreen ground cover that after a slow start is spreading well.  I conducted a fingertip search as well as I could without squashing it, but couldn't find the lost spring.  Thank goodness for Amazon Prime, which will have a replacement plus spare with me by one o'clock tomorrow.  I'll keep an eye out for the original and it may yet turn up, but until then I won't be without the number sevens.

By the time it got too dark to continue safely the lawn was a sea of rose prunings and I haven't nearly finished yet.  When the wind does turn to the east it is going to be a jolly long bonfire.

planting and potting

The Systems Administrator kindly moved the rest of the bits of hedge sawed out of the far bottom corner in the back garden up to the utility area, and lopped the smaller shreddable side shoots off the fatter main branches destined for firewood.  I protested faintly that the side branches had been put on top of the vast pile of bits to be burned when the wind is from the east and the Systems Administrator is in the mood.  The SA said I could still shred them and nothing else would be dumped on top of them as the pile was too high, but if they were still there by the time of the bonfire they were going to be burned with the rest.  I take the SA's point that the sheer quantity of woody prunings in the meadow and around the bonfire heap is becoming almost unmanageable, but need every bag of wood chippings I can get so had better have another shredding session before the wind changes.

I finally managed to extract the last piece of landscape fabric from the corner of the ditch bed. Soil must have washed downhill and settled on it to bury it so deeply.  I really don't see how a layer of decomposed bark mulch and even twenty years of fallen leaves could have produced four inches of topsoil.  The hedge had opportunistically started to send roots out into it forming a solid mat in places, which is why it took so long to get the fabric out.  I felt rather mean chopping roots off the hedge, but told myself that it had lots of others and would respond to my root pruning by growing more.

Then, at last, I planted the ten Cyclamen hederifolium which had been sitting in a box in the sink of the downstairs cloakroom for a full week.  They were very nice plants, and Pottertons had made a neat job of bagging up the tuberts to keep the roots moist while letting the leaves breathe, but they were starting to wilt and I felt a pang that I had not managed to get them planted as soon as they arrived.  I read recently that C. hederifolium keeps its roots even when the leaves die down, and that if the plant is dried out and loses its roots the tuber can be reluctant to make new ones. That would account for them being so hit and miss if bought as dried tubers.  I don't think my plants got to the stage  of total root death and I watered them in thoroughly, so they should be OK.  I have got some home grown seedlings of Milium effusum 'Aureum', Bowles Golden Grass, to go in that corner but ferns and anything else will have to be squeezed into the gardening budget somehow.  I fancy the white flowered form of Geranium phaeum, which if it is anything like the purple flowered blotchy leaved variety 'Samobar' will seed itself about.  I do have some spare 'Samobar' seedlings in pots, but white flowers would show up better in the gloom, and charming as 'Samobar' is I already have lots further up the slope.  I only potted up the seedlings because I was replanting an area and it seemed such a waste to throw them out.

Then I planted the three extra Cyclamen cilicium with the others by the wall of the house in the front garden, improving each planting area with a generous handful of home made compost.  I peered carefully at the tubers but could not see whether the tops dipped in the centre because the leaf stalks were in the way.  Their roots appeared to grow from the upper surface of the tubers in a ring outside the leaves, leaving a bald underside with nothing growing from it at all, and definitely convex rather than concave.  So if you found yourself in possession of a tuber of C. cilicium with no idea of which way up to plant it I should say put the bare side down and the side with whiskery remains coming out of it pointing upwards.  Then pray that C. cilicium does not resent being dried out too badly.  They were all very nice healthy looking plants and hats off to Pottertons.  It is not their fault I fiddled around trying to do ten things at once instead of planting them immediately.

I potted the rest of the order and made space for them in a greenhouse case by evicting two lots of dwarf tulips and some crocus that by now are in full growth, roots coming out of the bottoms of their pots.  I stood them on the concrete where I think the new cats now patrol regularly enough that mice will not bother them.  In the greenhouse in the depths of winter they can do dreadful damage to potted bulbs.  I have lost whole trays of tulips and fritillaries, the cost of the bulbs running well into double digits, apart from the disappointment and the wasted effort.  I hope I am right about the concrete now being a fairly pest free zone, but the greenhouse is bursting at the seams.

clearing up

One of the reasons why things always take longer than I think they're going to is because of my tendency to underestimate how long the clearing up is going to take.  Take the case of the hedge along the meadow.  I did my best cutting the front face with loppers and the bow saw a couple of years ago when the Systems Administrator had a frozen shoulder and was off hedging duties, but I had to leave the strongest upright branches along the centre line.  Since then and boosted by last year's wet spring the hedge has grown massively, to the point where it was not so much a hedge as a line of trees, and was beginning to grow into the telephone line.  The SA now restored to fitness announced last month that he was going to cut it, and has been taking anything up to fifteen feet out of the top with the chain saw and pole saw.  I promised to clear the trimmings so that the SA would have time to keep on cutting before the buds broke and the birds started nesting, while finding a series of other jobs to do that felt more urgent and more like proper gardening.  By Monday the piles of debris had got to the point where the SA announced it was becoming impossible to move, so while the SA was out for the day I busied myself dragging cut branches out of the meadow.

I shredded as much as I could because I need the chippings as a weed suppressing mulch round the compost bins, and stacked the fatter branches outside the SA's workshop to be cut up for firewood. I hadn't nearly finished by the time it was time to stop and get ready for my woodland talk, but I hoped I'd made enough of a dent in the great pile of debris for the SA to be happy.  It is going to take me several more full days to process all the hedge cuttings as the SA is still hard at work and there is an immense quantity of material to come out.  It needs doing, and yet dragging branches back to the shed and sawing them up and feeding the smaller ones through the shredder does not feel like proper gardening, not like pruning the roses and the buddleia and cutting down the herbaceous stems in the back garden and sowing the tomato seeds, and all the nice jobs fiddling around with plants that I should like to be getting on with.

Yesterday I thought I'd have an afternoon's gardening after my morning meeting, but ended up taking the duvet to the cleaners.  Never mind, there was always today.  I have been asking the SA to take the pole saw to some branches that are growing out over the corner of the ditch bed in the back garden to make it less preposterously shady so that I can plant it up with ferns and cyclamen. I have even got some cyclamen, which have been sitting in their box for days in the downstairs loo waiting for me to have time to plant them.  The SA obligingly cut the branches, but that left me with the best part of another day's work carting the pieces away.

In the same shady corner a long time ago I laid woven landscape fabric along the line of the rabbit fence.  At the time I had no plan to cultivate the area and wanted to suppress weeds.  Since then a couple of trees have started to mature and the shrubs that stood in front of the landscape fabric have been shaded out, leaving a fair sized area of deep shade with nothing much growing in it.  It seemed a waste, particularly as it is now overlooked by the SA's deck for listening to Test Match Special while sitting out of the wind.  But before I could plant ferns, cyclamen or anything else I had to remove the landscape fabric, by now buried to a depth of approximately four inches.  When it was new I probably covered it with chipped bark to hide it, which has since rotted down, but most of the four inches of loose, friable soil must be the effect of two decades' worth of fallen leaves and twigs.  It was surprisingly heavy, and made the task of lifting the fabric awfully laborious.  I ended up cutting it away in small sections, scrabbling the soil aside and back on to the area I'd just freed, while extracting the odd surface tree root.  The ground under the fabric was as hard as you'd expect after having no leaf fall of any kind of compost added to it for the past twenty years.

I had not nearly finished lifting the fabric when it began to rain, and tomorrow at some point I have to go and collect the duvet.  Meanwhile the cyclamen bulbs are still in their box and the tomato seeds in their packets.  It just takes so amazingly long to get to the point of doing any actual proper gardening.

twice bitten

Mr Fidget has taken to scrabbling at the bedroom door and wailing pathetically in the corridor in the mornings.  He knows that we are in there with Our Ginger, and feels left out.  Or something. The first time we let him in did not end well when he peed on my bedside rug.  I was amazed at how well it washed out and that the rug did not smell of cat pee afterwards, but it wasn't something I wanted to make a habit of.  After that the bedroom was strictly out of bounds to Mr Fidget.  Mr Fluffy was included in the ban, despite not having done anything wrong, while Mr Cool never showed any signs of wanting to join in.

This morning we felt sorry for Mr Fidget, sounding so desperate and so left out, and let him in, closely followed by Mr Fluffy who thought it was wonderful and galloped around the bedroom.  Our Ginger thought it was a terrible idea and sulked furiously, in between bouts of thumping poor Mr Fluffy.  Mr Fidget peed on the bed.

The Systems Administrator was remarkably restrained on emerging from the shower to find piles of bed linen plus the duvet dumped in the upstairs corridor.  I took the question What happened? to be rhetorical since it was not hard to guess what had happened.  I put the duvet cover and sheet on to wash and investigated whether and how you could wash an electric blanket.  Ours has instructions on it, and the answer is that you can.  Meanwhile the SA had Googled How to wash an electric blanket and came up with what I was already doing, which was to hand wash the affected area and run it a great deal under the tap.  Then I had to go out, having draped the electric blanket over the kitchen table and blotted it as dry as I could with a towel.  Do Not Use When Wet, said the instructions.

When I got back the SA had turned it over a couple of times and it was almost dry.  I hung the duvet cover and sheet on the rack in the laundry room to dry and put the mattress cover on to wash, then set off out again with the duvet stuffed into a bin bag in search of somewhere to wash it. Originally I was going to try a launderette in Clacton I found on Google, but a friend at this morning's meeting told me there was one in Manningtree that did service washes.  Reader, I succumbed to temptation and left the duvet to be cared for by experts at vast expense rather than sitting watching it go round for an hour or two.  Once I'd given my details and booked the duvet in I did confess that the reason why I'd brought it now was that the cat had had an accident on it.  The woman in the laundry just looked at me.  England must be full of duvets that could probably do with a wash if only it wasn't such a hassle, and only finally make it to the launderette when something sordid happens.

When I got home the mattress cover had finished washing, and I had to drape it over two chairs in front of the Aga to start drying since there didn't seem any point in piling things three deep on the laundry room rack.  We do not have a tumble drier.

I grumbled about Mr Fidget's unpleasant behaviour to a friend who used to keep pugs, and she said yes, her pugs had to be kept out of her bedroom because they wanted to pee on her pillow.  It seems it is not just us and Mr Fidget, then, but something about their owners' beds that gets some animals thoroughly over-excited.  After two mishaps in the bedroom Mr Fidget is not going the given a third chance, pathetic scrabbling and wailing notwithstanding.  Our Ginger will be delighted.

charity talk

This evening I did a woodland charity talk.  They were a very nice group, who had warned me in advance that they were not very large, and they met in a church in one of the tiny roads off Colchester High Street.  I was relieved not to overshoot the end of the road, since you are only allowed to drive down the High Street and the tiny road was one way.  I was trying to work out the fastest way to try again if I missed the turning, and I think it would be about a five mile round trip, back to the inner ring road, through the roadworks and potential rush hour jam near Colchester north station, and back up Balkerne Hill.  Every so often Colchester borough council makes noises about wanting to shut the high street to cars.  How anybody is then supposed to access the Dutch quarter remains a mystery to me.  Tonight's group had their own screen and projector stand but I'm still not carrying the box containing my projector and assorted bits plus a Sussex trug of twigs on the bus.  Or the mile and a bit up an unlit lane to the bus stop.

I have a new piece of kit to add to the list since the charity just sent me a pop-up banner with their logo and a picture of trees on it.  It is an ingenious design with an aluminium box at the bottom, supported by two feet that swivel out, while the banner rolls away into the box for storage and the aluminium pole that holds it up breaks down into three sections that also fit in the box.  The banner is on a spring to make it disappear back into the box, like the vacuum cleaner flex, only this spring is much stronger than the one on the vacuum cleaner, and the total length of the pole when assembled puts the top of it slightly higher than I can comfortably reach.  I tried to hook the end of the banner over it and failed, so lay it on the floor and tried to assemble it that way.  The banner promptly tried to roll itself back into the box.  I rested a foot on the box to stop it winding itself on to the banner, which left me still struggling to reach the far end of the pole, until I accidentally let go of the top end of the banner and it wound itself all the way up with a mighty thump.  The assembled ladies gasped, and somebody kindly offered to hold the box while I sorted out the other end.  We agreed that it was a very fine banner, but I think I am going to have to find a volunteer each time to help me put it up.  Or perhaps it will work if I stand on a chair.  I managed to put it up by myself in the kitchen when it first arrived, but then I did not have an audience and was not working against the clock.

I couldn't find my smart new badge with my name on it and the word Volunteer, and feared it must have fallen out of the hole that had appeared in the bottom of the paper carrier bag of leaflets which was where I remembered putting it last time.  Fortunately it turned up in the bottom of the bag as I was tidying away the leaflets at the end, so I will not have to confess to my volunteer manager that I have lost it.  I put it in the padded case with the projector instead for safe keeping.

In sharp contrast to most church and community halls and meeting rooms this one was extremely well heated, and as I started to talk I began to think that I should not have worn thermals under my trousers and a polo neck wool sweater.  I wondered briefly if I could take the sweater off but decided not in mid flight, and not without the risk of displaying more of my vest to the audience than would be professional.

I always start the talk with a trug of twigs, and tell the audience a little about each species, the oak, the ash, the birch, the alder and the sweet chestnut.  I stole the idea from a couple of the lecturers at Writtle, and have kept it as the warm up act before going on to the slides because it seems to work well.  Tonight's meeting room was not very big and the front row was very close, so I was slightly anxious in case I should poke anybody in the face in my enthusiasm.  I didn't.  They all seemed pleased and grateful at the end, and the organiser told me that I had been recommended by somebody at a conservation group I spoke to last year.  One of them actually heard me last year at her garden club so it was nice of her to come along for a second dose.  It is true what they say, that volunteering makes you feel good.  Well, it does as long as everything goes smoothly.

we went to a marvellous party

There was no gardening today, nor any hedge trimming, because we went to an At Home in Dedham.  It was very kind of our hostess to invite us, and I have still not discovered why she hosts an annual drinks and nibbles party in February, since I have made discreet enquiries to check that it is not her birthday.  It is an inspired idea in any event since February can be a dismal month.  The festivities of Christmas were ages ago but spring still feels a long way off.  What could be nicer than to chat to people you know and some that you don't while kindly caterers ply you with glasses of fizz and miniature yorkshire puddings with slivers of beef?  They were lovely nibbles, but alas mostly too sophisticated for me to try and copy for the music society.  I tried making miniature profiteroles once but they didn't puff up.

News of our neighbour's death has spread.  A couple from half way to Hadleigh over the county border in Suffolk had heard.  It's a small world in the provinces.  He was once in business with our late neighbour's son, and she was very fond of our neighbour and said the funeral would indeed be huge.  Unfortunately I couldn't help her with the address of his daughter or any of his children.

Full of canapes, champagne and goodwill I didn't feel like venturing out into the cold when we got back, even though there would have been time.  People are not At Home for very long, so an hour and three quarters after the party starts the miniature sausages on sticks and neat slices of vegetable fritatta give way to little squares of chocolate brownie as a discreet signal that lunch is ending.

We called into the Co-op on Dedham High Street on our way back to the car in the hope that they would have fruit flavoured yogurt, since the Systems Adminstrator forgot to get any on the last supermarket shop.  As the SA said it has to be the poshest Co-op in the country.  But they only had giant pots of Yeo Valley strawberry and not the individual servings.

It is forecast to be warmer by the middle of next week, and as today's party was almost the end of my current social run I might finally be able to knuckle down to some serious gardening.  It is already practically the middle of February so really there is no time to be lost.

a dark cold day

I hadn't expected there to be snow on the lawn when I got up.  The last weather forecast I looked at yesterday evening before going out definitely said that Saturday was going to be overcast but dry.  It was due to be warmer, too, a whole four degrees, and I was looking forward to planting and potting up the box of bulbs that arrived yesterday from Pottertons.  Scant hope.  The Systems Administrator said snow had been expected, but all I can say is that the forecast must have changed.

After a while more snow began to fall, big wet flakes that barely settled.  The kittens are starting to work out that wet snow is no fun.  Mr Cool went and sat on one of the dining chairs, staring out of the window into the sodden garden with a resentful expression, and Mr Fluffy simply gave up and went to sleep in a cardboard box.  Mr Fidget occupied himself chewing at the log basket and began to eat a piece of twig he had managed to pull out of the weave.  I  did not fancy having to track down an emergency vet on a Sunday because Mr Fidget had a perforated bowel from eating dried twigs, and found an old toilet roll centre for him to chew instead.  Mr Fidget seized the cardboard happily in his jaws and ran around the house holding it.  Mr Fluffy became fascinated by the birds on the bird table and ran out to catch one, but by the time he had climbed on to the table they had all flown away.  Mr Cool tried going out but came in again with filthy feet and left black footprints over the kitchen floor.

There was a quiet rhythmic knock at the front door before lunch.  I went to see who it was, wondering if the front door bell had broken, and it was one of the people from the cottages down the lane to tell us that our neighbour from the old farmhouse had died.  He had a fall, went into hospital and had a heart attack.  That's a shame.  I saw him only days ago when he brought the parish magazine around.  He did say then that his bronchitis had knocked him back.

News of a death spreads like ripples.  I began to think I should tell one of my beekeeping friends who knew him.  By a strange irony it is not so very long since he was telling me that he had seen her at another funeral.  She and I belong to the same women's group as his sister, and so she passed the word on to the group's chairman, plus a friend of hers who knew him  By chance the friend and I saw each other at the lecture last night, and she emailed me asking me to let her know if I found out when the funeral was.  As I know his sister I thought I had better send her a card, since while I've met his children I don't have addresses for any of them.  Our neighbour lived his whole life in the parish, used to be on the parish council and served as a church warden, and knew everybody.  I wonder where they will have the funeral.  A lot of people are going to want to attend.

nibbles

I have been making cheese straws for the music society's annual lecture.  I had never been one for making nibbles, visitors to our house only getting shop bought crisps or olives, or (my particular favourite) 1970s retro cheese puffs, but when I was recruited to the music society committee I discovered that catering was part of the brief.  I knew somebody who made delicious cheese straws who when complimented upon them would only ever say Oh, they're really easy, but without giving me the recipe. I ended up searching through my cookery books and online before settling on the method in the Good Housekeeping cookery book.  They turned out to be so nice that I never tried any others.  Some recipes had such a high proportion of cheese in them they were practically baked cheese, which sounded unpleasant and expensive.  The Good Housekeeping recipe calls for two ounces of salted butter and two of grated cheese per four ounces of flour, plus an egg yolk and a dash of cayenne pepper, with water to mix.  I roll them very thin and cook them briefly in a fairly hot oven, and do not mess around putting twists into them or anything else.  And it turned out to be true, they are very easy.

Presently I shall assemble some fishy things, small squares of rye bread with a little dollop of either trout or salmon pate, which I shall arrange in alternating rows of each on a small tray.  It will be almost as 1970s retro as bright orange cheese puffs.  Now I've discovered the joy of making my own nibbles I am keen to expand my repertoire, but so many recipes are for things supposed to be served hot, at once, straight from the oven.  What use is that to the home cook?  If we are entertaining at home I want to spend the time before supper with our guests, not toiling in the kitchen and occasionally rushing through to the sitting room with a plate of sizzling prawns, while for community events you need nibbles that can be served cold and made in advance without becoming soggy and disgusting.

Back in the 1970s my aunt used to serve vol au vents.  I remember helping remove the little centres, the tops of which were then replaced on the prawn in mayonnaise or whatever it was she had put in the middle.  Aged about ten I thought that was the height of sophistication, but I don't know if you can even buy ready made vol au vent cases now.  I have never noticed them in the supermarkets.  Waitrose had some ready made blinis next to their smoked fish which I eyed up, especially as they were reduced, but their expiry date was yesterday.

I am not keen on dips, having read too many articles about the proportion of people who double dip, going back for a second dollop after they have already taken a bite out of their carrot stick, just as I avoid bar counter bowls of peanuts and the curious Bombay mix they put out in some Indian takeaways.  Cheese straws are good from that point of view.  You can't dig your fingers into the bowl and scoop up a handful.

cleaning the decks

It is properly, bitterly, raw cold today, the sort of damp cold that goes through to your bones.  This morning I finished pressure jetting the decking which I started yesterday and then retreated inside. When I nipped round to the Chatto gardens after lunch to get a present for somebody the woman in the shop said it had snowed tiny snowflakes in Elmstead Market this morning.  Mind you, the Systems Administrator read in the newspaper that a foot of snow was forecast to fall in New York.

Decking now has much the same image as the avocado bathroom suite had by the start of the 1980s.  You could still wash yourself perfectly adequately in it, but your bathroom had become a byword for the out of date and ridiculous.  Decking, beloved of a multitude of Alan Titchmarsh and Groundforce inspired garden makeovers, now evokes at best a wince or a sneer from garden fashionistas.  Unless it is made out of green oak or an interesting exotic wood precision machined to the last millimetre, as used as Chelsea, and then they do not use the word Decking in the handout about the garden.

All this is rather silly.  Decking has its uses.  It is quick, easy and cheap to build, compared to laying hard paving on proper foundations, which is one reason why it was so popular on Groundforce.  This is especially true on a sloping site.  If made from wood from a certified source decking is environmentally friendlier than concrete, which takes a great deal of energy to manufacture.  If you change your mind about the layout of your garden for whatever reason decking is easy to take up, and the bits can be reused as new decking or for structures like compost bins, and eventually firewood.

I have just counted and we have six areas of decking in total, of which I have cleaned the four largest.  We have a deck outside the conservatory, creating a flat area for a table and some pots on a fairly steep slope without going to the trouble and expense of building a retaining wall and buying in aggregate to level the ground.  We have an L shaped deck on the far side of the lawn, built to cover a pile of subsoil excavated when the conservatory was built, which now houses a collection of Hamamelis in pots.  It squares off that corner of the back garden rather nicely, creating a feeling of enclosure, and is a lot better than trying to grow shrubs or groundcover on the pile of subsoil. We could have hired a skip and trundled all the spoil round to the front garden in about a hundred wheelbarrow journeys, but I wasn't feeling that energetic.

We have decking along the back of the house, which is partly cosmetic to cover some not very beautiful concrete and partly structural, to bridge a large hole.  The back garden slopes steeply away from the house, and so to keep construction costs down and also maintain the view from the study we ended up having the conservatory built away from the house instead of attached to it. The top of the back wall of the conservatory is at the same level as the bottom of the study windows, and there is a chasm between the house and the conservatory wall where the builders dug in to build the wall (which is on very substantial foundations).  I pay particular attention to the condition of the bit of decking over the hole.

We have a tiny bit of decking outside the front door, which hides a concrete doorstep and a drain cover, and allows some of the gravel stuck to people's shoes to drop off outside instead of in the hall.  There is another small bit of decking at the bottom of some wooden steps down to the lower lawn which I built myself.  The Systems Administrator did all the rest but was at that point fed up with building decking and resistant to the idea of doing any more.  I am rather proud of my two square yards, which took me ages.  I very carefully made sure it was level using a spirit level, and then discovered it did not line up with the steps because they weren't.  The steps are currently blocked by the rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' and several of the treads have rotted through, so I need to do some pruning and possibly order some wood so that the SA can replace them.  I didn't clean that bit of decking, and I didn't clean the most recent bit of deck that the SA built right at the bottom of the garden to provide somewhere shady out of the wind to sit and listen to the cricket on hot days.  It could probably do with a scrub in due course.

Decking has the reputation of being slippery.  It can be, especially in shade, but I'm not sure it is worse than other hard surfaces.  I have nearly gone over on real stone paving in somebody's drive and on a piece of concrete in the car park at the hospital's walk in unit (at least it wouldn't have been far to go if I'd broken anything).  Look how they put up signs on the Liverpool Street station concourse when it's been raining warning passengers it is slippery.  The designers must have known that the travelling public would tread water in, which makes me think it is simply difficult to find any kind of hard surface that is truly slip resistant when wet.  I have compromised on aesthetics and stapled fine grade chicken wire over the way to the bird table and the conservatory door.  The owners who have the kind of green oak decking photographed in the pages of Gardens Illustrated must just walk carefully.

Our current decks are made of western red cedar, except for my tiny one that is left over from the days of the previous, inferior timber.  Western red cedar is a nice wood, naturally rot resistant, that can be left untreated.  It is a slightly vivid orange when new or if varnished, which softens as it weathers to an agreeable soft brown.  It is not quite as swanky as the grey of weathered oak, but pretty good.  It doesn't look out of place in Essex, a county with no natural building stone.  In fact I think it looks more in place than Indian sandstone.  The Systems Administrator was originally rather unwilling to let me loose on it with a pressure jet, afraid that I would damage the grain of the wood, but once I'd explained that I really couldn't scrub that much deck by hand I was allowed to use mechanical aid, with instructions to keep the jet moving.

It isn't my favourite gardening task, but it isn't bad either.  You get the immediate gratification of seeing the colour of the wood come up strip by strip under your eyes as you blast away the layer of greenish algae and dirt.  On the other hand it is a bit like vacuum cleaning.  It is noisy, and there are too many cables and hoses.  There is the power lead from the house, and the flex that plugs into the power lead, and the big hose from the tap, and the thin hose from the compressor unit to the lance, and when I use them they all get tangled up with each other and my legs.  Cleaning around the Hamamelis is particularly fiddly, since they are in fifty-five centimetre terracotta pots and there is no way I am moving them.  As I squeezed between them I was very, very careful not to poke myself in the eye.

safety first

It was only when my mother rang up to ask if I was all right that I discovered I hadn't published yesterday's post.  I now have so today is a two post day, possibly the first ever.

After my recent adventures I thought I should take up the Systems Administrator's suggestion and buy some prescription safety glasses.  As and when they arrive and I have tried to do a morning's gardening wearing them I will let you know what they are like.  Buying them felt as though it took half this morning.

I don't know about other glasses wearers but I had never really looked at my prescription.  The optician gives me a copy after each eye test, which I take home and put in a filing tray where it stays until it gets thrown away about two years later, some time after the next eye test.  I was aware in theory that you could buy glasses on the internet, but having fairly severe short sight with astigmatism thrown in, and being a convert to varifocals, I always felt I wanted a trained person to fit my glasses, in a proper opticians where I could go back and complain if I didn't get on with the result.  Specifying glasses myself off the web felt too much like Caveat Emptor.

I don't think Vision Express does safety glasses, though.  One chap who used to do my eye tests tried hard and on repeated visits to convince me that as well as glasses for everyday I would like contact lenses for special occasions.  Eventually I managed to convince him that I very rarely went to those sorts of dressed up parties, and that when I did I wanted to be able to concentrate on the other people there and having a nice time, not on managing some unfamiliar in-eye hardware.  Another told me I should always wear goggles to garden.  He didn't look like somebody who did a great deal of outdoor physical work himself, otherwise he would have known why that wasn't a good idea. Nobody has ever tried to sell me safety glasses.  Maybe they are missing a trick.  Or maybe it is a strictly minority interest.

The Systems Administrator, whose eyes are not as bad as mine and who is more confident about technical specifications, has bought glasses online and assured me it was easy.  I thought I wasn't going to drive in them, so really how hard could it be to copy some numbers from my prescription to an order form?  It turned out the SA was more worried I would have lost the prescription, but I had not.  It was in the same filing tray where I always put it, and I saw it only last month when I was doing my annual desk tidy as part of filling in my tax return.

Starting on the basis of zero knowledge of safety glasses I chose a firm that came near the top of the Google search, and the CAT brand because at least I'd heard of it, and they did a model with sprung arms.  My current main glasses (which were from the children's section at Vision Express) have sprung arms and stay on my face so much better than all previous, trendier and more grownup glasses that I would never buy unsprung ones again.  I asked the optician once why my glasses always slid down my nose and was told that it was because I had a petite bridge.  I always think of safety glasses as being worn by people operating lathes and Michael Portillo visiting factories by train, but looking at the website I realised there was another whole market for people who play sport, and man sized wraparounds were not what I was after.

I did not understand the prescription at all but carefully and mechanically copied over the numbers of Sph, Cyl, Axis and Add, and gave it to the Systems Administrator to check.  The SA said very confidently that I did not have a Base or a V Prism, as if it all made perfect sense, and briskly measured the distance between my pupils using metal engineering calipers, which seemed much easier than trying to do it myself in a mirror with a ruler.  Then I had to make a decision about what sort of lens I wanted but the website quibbled over my choice.  Did I really want standard glass and not the lighter, scratch resistant and shatterproof polycarbonate?  The SA suggested that for ten quid extra I wanted lighter.  Did I want the glasses for distant or near vision or both?  I said both, and the website said I couldn't have both because I was too old and too shortsighted.  The SA said in that case I wanted Distant.  I protested that nothing was going to poke me in the eye from a distance and I wanted the glasses for close work, and the SA said that if I chose Close it would be like walking around all day in my reading glasses.  That did not sound very comfortable, and anyway for pruning I do need to be able to see where I am putting my feet.

After I fired the form off and got a confirmation email another email arrived later saying that I had failed to tick a box confirming that a number did not exceed 6.5 and would I go back to complete the form and authorise the extra payment.  I read this email twice in total bafflement and then rang them up, and at the precise moment that someone answered the phone Mr Cool jumped on to the kitchen table and walked across my keyboard.  The email disappeared.  The woman on the phone explained that I had to add two numbers together to get to the number they wanted, and as the total did exceed 6.5 it meant that I could not have normal lenses and needed extra strength ones.  That didn't surprise me.  Visits to the optician are like visits to the hairdresser in that there is no point in looking at all the current styles and choosing which one I like, instead I need to start by establishing all the ones I can't have, thanks to my bottle thick lenses or curly hair.  She sent me another email with a link to the supplementary order page and I meekly paid up for my super strength lenses.

You have to pay VAT on safety glasses.  Any guilt I felt at having made no direct contribution at all to the cost of yesterday's NHS treatment once the local pharmacist had saved me from paying a prescription charge vanished when I found out.  Delivery time is two to four weeks.  In the meantime I had better dig out the dreaded goggles before pruning the roses, and then I will let you know how I get on with the safety glasses.  Maybe they are something that GPs and the nurses at minor injuries units should gently suggest to people who come in with scratched eyes, particularly if they can see from your patient record that it isn't the first time it's happened.  But maybe there is a reason why safety glasses haven't caught on for general leisure use.  We shall find out.

a minor injury

Addendum  This post was written yesterday but I failed to press the Publish button.  For reasons which will become apparent.

There was no more gardening for me today.  It was a damp and drizzly day, for starters, but more to the point I scratched my eye yesterday.  I was very careful working among the shrubs by the oil tank, but as I leaned over the chicken proof picket fence to snip off the last few old hellebore leaves a small side shoot of one of the coloured stem dogwoods slid behind my glasses and glanced across my eyeball.  At first I didn't think it was too bad, but as the evening wore on it got worse rather than better.  I hoped a night's sleep would calm things down, but did not sleep very well, and in the morning as I looked at the puffy and dropping flesh over my eyelid and contemplated the stream of tears and snot I had to admit that I was going to have to see somebody about it.

We opted for the walk in centre in Colchester.  It seemed an easier prospect than trying to get through to the GP practice on the phone and then trying to convince the receptionist that I really did want to see somebody today rather than be fitted in on Thursday afternoon.  I had to ask the Systems Administrator to drive me, since the other eye was had got quite damp in sympathy and I really couldn't see well enough to drive, besides which I find it hard enough to judge distances even with two eyes.  And I knew the drill, having stupidly done this in the past.  In order to inspect the damage they put anaesthetic drops in the eye, followed by an orange dye that makes the scratch show up under blue light, and then they want to put a patch on the eye to protect it until the anaesthetic wears off.  The first question anybody will ask you when presented at a health facility with a minor eye injury is Did you drive yourself here?

The rolling information board at the walk in centre said rather discouragingly that the wait for walk in patients was three hours, which might make anybody who didn't honestly think they were that ill turn round and walk out again.  We were puzzled, since there weren't that many people in the waiting room, and in fact I was seen after forty minutes by a nurse.  I explained the accident and she made me go out into the corridor and do a sight test with each eye.  I could only get to the third line down with the injured eye, but only a couple of lines further with the good eye because it was weeping in sympathy.  Then the nurse went through the whole scratched eye drill and told me it was quite a big scratch and that she would give me a prescription for chloramphenicol and I must apply it four time daily for at least five days, and if the eye was not better by tomorrow or was worse I must go and see my GP as large scratches like that could become ulcerated, slightly stressing the word GP as if that was where I should have gone in the first place.  I asked what chloramphenicol was and she said it was an antibiotic, and called in a second nurse for a second opinion, who looked at the scratch and said cheerfully that it would be fine, they heal really quickly.  The first nurse apologised that as a medical professional she had to warn me of the worst case scenario, and taped an enormous wad of gauze over my eye.  I was slightly disappointed since I'd been hoping for a piratical black patch and it was so bulky that I couldn't get my glasses close enough to my face to be able to see with the remaining eye.  I thanked her and she told me to have a nice day.

We came home via the friendly local pharmacy and the pharmacist observed that I had been in the wars, and told me about her friend who had caught her eye on the corner of her car door while washing it.  I paid for my prescription and sat down in a chair waiting for it to be dispensed, although there is nothing very complicated about putting a tube of ointment in a bag.  Then the pharmacist said that she would refund the prescription charge since she had realised that it would be cheaper for me to simply buy the chloramphenicol.

The Systems Administrator had a very sensible idea which I shall act on as soon as I can see properly, which is to get some prescription safety glasses.  I can order them on the internet since I've got my prescription, and it's not as if they have to be fitted like varifocals.  Given that it is (ahem) the third time that I've suffered this particular accident I ought to do something.  An incredibly dapper optician once told me that I should wear goggles at all times when gardening. He can't have tried it.  They are uncomfortable and impede your vision at the best of times, and in hot weather they steam up.  I suppose I could go the whole hog and buy a welding mask, like the man who always sailed in one and said that the tinted glass cast a rosy glow on the world and made him think the weather was about to improve.

looking forward to the hellebores

I finally finished one gardening task on the list, cutting the old leaves off the hellebores.  It seemed a waste to let them blush unseen, when they have only one season of interest, starting now.  Not that they waste their fragrance on the desert air.  Hellebores are highly attractive to bees, but I have never detected any scent from them.

The hybrid hellebores, that used to be called Helleborus orientalis, carry their flowers on separate flowering stems.  First of all clusters of fat buds appear at ground level, then the stem gradually elongates.  Most of mine are still at the ground level bud stage, though a few flower stems have started to lengthen.  The mature stems are fairly leathery and tough, but the newly emerged buds are fragile and perilously easy to snap off, and it would have been much better to have done this whole project a month ago, but there you are.

Most of the plants are not very easy to get at.  The ones in the front garden by the oil tank live under the canopies of a large Mahonia, a Chaenomeles, and assorted dogwoods.  There is not a lot of space even for a small and nimble gardener.  I am pretty small, and flexible if not nimble, and can just about crawl and shuffle in there.  The key is to never touch the ground, not with foot nor knee nor steadying hand, without looking where you are going and making sure you are not about to step, kneel on or crush any of the emerging buds.  They are not very brightly coloured at this stage, and don't show up especially well.  The same principle applies in the back garden where those hellebores that are not nestling under the canopies of shrubs are surrounded by snowdrops, which by now are tall enough to be spoiled by treading on them.

I pulled up a lot of goose grass seedlings while I was at it.  Every year I pull up seedlings and then more seedlings and then rip at the mature goose grasses that have slipped through the net, and hope that I am beginning to make inroads into the goose grass seed bank, but every year more come up. It seems the supply of goose grass seed is inexhaustible.  I also cleared a mixture of Mahonia leaves and fallen flowers off the hellebores in the front garden, none too soon, since a few buds had started to rot under their smothering cover, not the black hellebore disease rot but the white fluffy rot of poor ventilation.  I nipped off the diseased buds and binned them along with the old leaves and the goose grass.

At least the buds have not been eaten by voles or mice this year.  A few years ago as I was walking around the back garden in late January or early February, looking to see how things were getting along, I discovered a strange litter of pink and white fragments in the ditch bed that on closer inspection turned out to be the remains of the emerging hellebore flowers.  I was annoyed, and at a loss what to do about it.  Either that year was a boom year for the vole or mouse population, or the new cats' patrols are having a salutary effect, but this winter things seem OK.

problem corner

I really thought I was going to finish tidying the messy corner just inside the gate today.  It has never been a very good corner.  It sits on top of part of what used to be the drive to the integral garage and a sort of stony track between the edge of the previous owners' lawn and the apple orchard.  Then we used the space to dump some builder's sand, and there was some left over, so the soil is even more thin and miserable than in most of the rest of the top of the garden.  The Systems Administrator did not want me to plant any long term trees or shrubs in the gap, in case we ever needed to get a digger or other heavy machinery round to the back of the house.  I compromised with sea buckthorn, thinking that if we ever did need to get anything down the old track (we haven't so far) it wouldn't break my heart to coppice the sea buckthorn and it would probably regenerate afterwards.

One of the sea buckthorn has just died, for no particular reason I can discover, and another has tipped over in the prevailing wind which may not be a good sign.  I thought the clue would be in the name and something called sea buckthorn would be able to cope with sand and the full blast of the south westerly gales.  Meanwhile brambles keep growing in from the other side of the rabbit fence. Just in case the corner was not horticulturally challenging enough it is heavily shaded at ground level, since the old track slopes to fully two feet below the level of the drive to the front garden, so is largely in the shadow of the bank up to the drive as well as the sea buckthorn and the invading brambles.

I have chopped out all the brambles and most of the dead sea buckthorn branches, and dug out most of the brambles that had taken root on this side of the rabbit fence with a pick axe.  I have scooped up buckets and buckets of dead leaves, twigs, grass stems and goose grass, pulled up more buckets of wild ivy stems that were setting out across the ground, and grubbed out the self seeded clumps of weed grasses.  I have extracted the dead remains of a rather weedy cotoneaster that seeds itself in that part of the garden, one of the only plants left to us by the previous owners, together with several young plants of it that were encroaching out into the bed.  The only useful plants at ground level are a self seeding euphorbia and I tried to leave those intact.  There used to be some common foxgloves, but they died after flowering and have not left many seedlings.

The rabbit fence used to be hidden by some rather smart willow and hazel hurdles, but they have rotted away.  I'm still musing on whether to get a roll of some cheaper brushwood cladding, or if that would simply draw attention to the area.  And I need to think of a ground cover plant that will grow in shade and almost pure sand and is not too expensive, since it is quite a large corner when you come to express it in square metres and then think of a number of plants per square metre where the number is more than one.  Evergreen would be nice.  Ivy will not do because it climbs into everything else and strangles it.

There is a tamarisk, which I thought would be happy there, based on memories of family holidays in Cornwall where they used to grow practically on the beach.  It is not happy.  Maybe by the time you got to the tamarisks from the beach the sand had stopped.  Maybe I should try a columnar juniper to replace the dead sea buckthorn.  They take drought pretty well.  It would be nice to screen the view of the neighbour's field and the lettuce farm a little more, since the former currently houses a small but brilliant white portable football goal and a large black container that they said they were going to clad and turn into a summerhouse.  They have not got round to cladding it yet, and in the meantime it coordinates with the two more distant containers in the field behind the packing shed on the lettuce farm.  I don't know what it is about farms that they always collect debris around the farm buildings.

I really thought when I began this morning that I'd finish the corner today.  That I could tick it off the list of Things To Do and order a couple of bags of gravel to be delivered to the newly de-brambled space at the edge of the drive.  Why is it that jobs always take longer than you expect?

playing catchup

I have been planting tulips.  They are left over from last year's pots.  I let them die down in their containers after flowering, watered them and even fed them once or twice, then picked over the contents, throwing out the tiny offsets that would take years to get to flowering size if they ever did, and saving the big bulbs.  It was a good harvest and I planned to use them in a corner of a bed I'm revamping in the back garden.  They should have been planted in November.  November slipped to December, which would have been OK, but then I went down with flu and then the chest infection and it just never happened, along with lots of other jobs in the garden.

I wasn't sure whether by this stage it was worth planting them, or if I would simply be wasting a couple of hours of my time in addition to wasting the bulbs.  They hadn't shrivelled and looked fat and healthy enough, but would they be hopelessly confused by the mismatch between the temperature and daylength they must be primed for as spring flowering bulbs and the growing conditions they would experience if planted now in early February?  But then at the Plant Heritage meeting last weekend they were selling bags of tulips cheaply that had been donated by a local bulb merchant, being left over at the end of his selling season.  There are some very knowledgeable plantspeople on the committee and I thought they would not sell bulbs that had no chance of success, and the donor would not want to spoil his reputation with his local customers by offering them useless bulbs, even at a pound a bag.  So I started planting mine.  It will be an interesting experiment to see how they turn out, although not a very scientific one.  There are too many variables, since tulip bulbs that have flowered once in a pot can't be relied on to perform as well as pristine stock fresh from the bulb fields of the Netherlands even if planted in perfect soil, which the little sandy corner where I'm putting them certainly isn't.

Another job that should have been done before Christmas is picking all the leaves off the lawn.  I got some, but not all of them, and by now those that are left have stuck to the wet grass, while around the birch trees in the lower part of the garden the self seeded cyclamen and snowdrops have emerged.  The grass under the birch trees is fine and fragile with running stems that barely cling to the earth and liberally interspersed with moss, and I know that if I try to rake up the wet leaves I'll end up raking off half the lawn as well.  I don't want to do that.  The fine mossy lawn that is what you get if you try to grow grass under the shade of three birches, a huge wild gean and a Zelkova would not meet with the approval of the sort of lawn enthusiast who believes in stripes and scarifying and spiking but it is very pretty, with primroses and violets following on from the snowdrops and cyclamen.  In fact, weeding out some of the coarser wild flowers I don't want there is on my list of things to do, though not rated as urgent.

In the meantime the brown smear of cherry and birch leaves and the litter of narrow, toothed, dark gold leaves from the Zelkova looks messy and is making the thin grass even thinner.  They need to be cleared, on the other hand I don't want roots of fine running grass in the leaf litter bin, ready to set up new colonies of grass in whichever bed is lucky enough to get some leaf mould in a couple of years' time.  I ended up picking out handfuls of leaves from the wet grass, then combing through the lawn with my fingers to dislodge more leaves, before picking out stragglers with my fingertips. It was not a garden maintenance technique I'd ever have specified for a Writtle College module on landscape management, but I couldn't think of any other way of doing it, given I needed to clear the leaves and couldn't use a rake.  If only it had been done weeks ago as soon as the leaves fell and before everything got so wet and mixed up it would have been much easier.

I started cutting the leaves off the hybrid hellebores as well, now that they are coming up to flower.  The old foliage was bagged up to go to the tip rather than putting it on the compost heap, to avoid recyling any disease back into the garden.  Hellebores are prone to leaf infections, and the advice from the experts is to avoid putting the leaves on a domestic compost heap.  The council one should in theory heat up more, being so much bigger, and so get rid of disease spores and other nasties.  Of course other experts say you shouldn't cut all the leaves off at all, to avoid weakening the plants.

The Systems Administrator has voluntarily started reducing the overgrown hedge along the side of the meadow.  Bits of it have got too big for me to tackle with the hand saw, but in any event I am hugely grateful the SA has taken on the project, since goodness knows when I'd have time.  Jobs like that need doing inside the next month, before the buds start to break and the birds start thinking about nesting.

a day out

I went to London yesterday for the first time in six weeks.  Indeed, it was one of only handful of times I've been anywhere apart from Colchester since mid December.  An AGM just over the Suffolk border in Stratford St Mary, a garden lecture in Stowupland, and coffee in Mistley has been about as far as I've ventured, and I was exhausted by the trip to Stratford St Mary.  But I had a ticket for the lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes, bought months ago, and a keen desire to catch the Opus Anglicanum exhibition at the V&A.  One of the exasperating things about lingering chest infections and colds is the way you go through a phase when you feel a lot better as long as you don't do anything, then discover you aren't really better at all as soon as you do.  But I was feeling as though I might be quite a lot better, so set off to the concert on the basis that if I began to flag I could come home afterwards.  That would have been a terrible waste of a rail ticket, but the alternative was to give up before I started, and I didn't want to turn into a hypochondriac.

The concert was the first of four Radio 3 lunchtime concerts focused on the Russian piano repertoire written before and after the 1917 revolution.  Revolution is in the air: the Royal Academy has just opened an exhibition of Russian Art 1917-32, and Tate Modern will be opening Red Star Over Russia in November.  I hope to go to both.  Russian piano music is not necessarily my thing, but the pianist yesterday was Elisabeth Leonskaja, and I had a feeling that I had heard of her.  She is now in her early seventies, born in Georgia and resident in the Soviet Union for the first half of her life, and she was twice the age of the other three pianists in the series.  They will doubtless go on to have long and glittering careers, but I fancied seeing a major figure of the last century.

She played Shostakovich Piano Sonata no 2 followed by Tchaikovsky Grand Sonata in G major. Originally the programme was different, and LSO St Lukes wrote to me a while back to warn me of the change, but I was perfectly happy either way.  I didn't know either of the pieces on the revised programme and I don't think I knew the original programme any better.  I just wanted to see Elisabeth Leonskaja.  I was rather taken aback when reading the programme notes before the performance over my customary coffee and millionaire's shortbread to see that the Grand Sonata had been described by Tchaikovsky's biographer as 'a strong candidate as the dullest piece of music Tchaikivsky ever wrote', the Scherzo being judged the best movement partly because it was the shortest.  If Elisabeth Leonskaja and the LSO thought that then why perform it at all, and if not then why put it in the programme notes?

I won't actually be rushing out to buy a CD with the Tchaikovsky on it, but I was mightily taken with the Shostakovich.  Written in 1943, deeply creepy, melancholy, unsettling, it was music of its age.  And it didn't have too many notes so as a non-musical person I could follow what was going on some of the time.  My list of albums I'd like to get is rather long, but I'd like to listen again to Shostakovich's second Piano Sonata.  Elisabeth Leonskaja was magnificent.  She never spoke once through the entire concert, no slightly toe curling interview with Fiona Talkington for the Radio 3 listeners about her long career or what the music meant to her, and I never discovered what either of the two encores were.  Coming on to the stage at the beginning she sat down at the piano and began playing almost before the opening applause had died away, and continued in the same vein for the whole performance.  She played everything from memory, and when she hammered the low notes on the piano I could feel it through the soles of my feet.  At the end I thought as I left that I had seen greatness.  If you want to hear as much greatness as survives the medium of radio the concert will be broadcast on Tuesday 14 March at 1.00pm.

Then, as I was still feeling quite energetic, I went on to the V&A to see Opus Anglicanum: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery.  It's been on since early October, and I wanted to visit from when it was announced some time before that, after watching a very good TV documentary about Opus Anglicanum, but with one thing and another I never got there and thought I'd missed my chance, since it finishes this weekend.  The V&A always feels a step too far from Liverpool Street, as though my natural territory ends at The Queen's Gallery, even though it is only one tube stop further than Sloane Square on the Circle Line, and from LSO St Lukes you can do it with one tube change, Northern Line to Kings Cross and then the Piccadilly Line to South Kensington.  And those central London Piccadilly Line stops are really close together.  So objectively speaking it is not that far at all.  Maybe knowing that it is beyond comfortable walking distance makes it seem further.

Opus Anglicanum was one of England's great artistic contributions to the art of Medieval Europe, an embroidery technique that allowed an incredible amount of shading and detailing.  Not much survives now, textiles being inherently fragile and many examples having been destroyed in the Reformation or cut down and reused.  The V&A have gathered together copes and other ecclesiastical garments and fragments from across Europe's churches and museums.  They are very beautiful, once your eyes adapt to the low light they have to be displayed in, with extraordinary vivacity and detail.  Their main business is to tell stories from the bible and portray the saints, but lots of other things get included as well, birds and all sorts of creatures, and six winged seraphim, and angels playing musical instruments.  The cope is an interesting garment, being a semicircle when laid flat but designed to be seen as a cone when worn, and the Medieval embroiderers used various of patterns to divide the space, some taken from Islamic art.  The art form began to go downhill in the fifteenth century after the Black Death, as wages rose for the survivors and the cost of making the incredibly labour intensive Opus Anglicanum became too great.

I enjoyed the exhibition very much, although an hour of looking at such fine detail in such low light was all my eyes could manage.  So I came home, and the trains were running to time, and I was not shattered.  Onwards and upwards.

a night at the theatre

We went to the theatre last night.  It felt like a strange novelty not just because we don't go to the theatre very often, but because it was the first time I'd been out in the evening for six weeks.  We had tickets for The Play That Goes Wrong at the Mercury in Colchester, bought in about July of last year when the Systems Administrator spotted that it was on tour after rave reviews in London.  It's just as well we got them when we did, because I think it was sold out.  Certainly the auditorium was full last night, and I noticed when the Mercury's last brochure arrived that it wasn't included with the rest of the February productions.

It is a masterpiece, a quite howlingly funny farce.  An amateur group of thesps, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, are putting on a clunking country house murder mystery.  Unlike whichever Ayckbourn it is about a theatrical performance where we are shown the back stage lives of the actors, The Play That Goes Wrong deals entirely with the attempts of the cast and crew to stage the play, and their attempts, dogged, lackadaisical and hysterical by turn, to deal with misplaced props, missed cues, mangled dialogue, and disintegrating scenery,  The conceit of the play within a play is even kept up in the Mercury's programme, containing a programme within a programme, which was easily the best four quid I have ever spent on a theatre programme.

I laughed an awful lot, which made me cough.  There was a note on the back of the programme asking me not to smoke, take photographs, talk, rustle sweet papers or cough because it could spoil the performance for my fellow audience members, but it didn't matter that I was coughing because the rest of the audience were laughing so much as well.  It was a triumph, and virtuosically done with some splendid physical acting, including the funniest corpse I have ever seen.  The actors had to get it right, though.  A Play That Goes Wrong that really goes wrong would be worse than unfunny.

I love comedy, and have great sympathy with whichever actor it was who grumpily observed that Oscars almost never went to comedies, when comedy was one of the hardest things to do well.  But it would be pointless for me to big it up any more, since if you live around Colchester I fear you have missed your chance to see it at the Mercury unless you have already bought a ticket.

bulb therapy

It rained heavily in the night.  I heard it drumming on the roof each time I woke up, together with the shuffling about of the Systems Administrator who has another cold and did not sleep very well. Despite this the SA got up first, and reappeared from the bathroom a moment later to say that the boiler had not come on overnight.

The sky when I got up was leaden.  The forecast was for low cloud, then light rain, followed by heavy rain, fog (after lunch), some more cloud, and more rain in the small hours.  The relative humidity was forecast to be ninety-nine per cent all day, until mid-evening when it was due to fall to only ninety-six per cent.  And that was pretty much what we've had, so far, though it wasn't quite as foggy as predicted.  Oh, to be in England now that February's here.  It was not a day to be going outside even if you hadn't got a chest infection or a cold, and I found myself quite grateful that I managed to put in a short morning and equally short afternoon's work on the garden yesterday, when it was not so damp.  Our neighbour called round with the parish magazine while I was gardening, looking rather grey and small behind the wheel of his Volvo.  I asked him how he was and he said he had had bronchitis.  That's life in rural north east Essex in winter, just a swamp of respiratory infections.

Looking ahead to warmer or at least drier days, and glossing over the fact that I should be concentrating on pruning and cutting the hedges rather than messing around with even more plants, I put together an order for winter bulbs from Pottertons.  They describe themselves as specialist growers of Alpines, Dwarf Bulbs and Woodland plants, and I had an order from them a while back of plants for the railway.  That was very satisfactory, and I've kept an eye on their website since, while they have added me to their mailing list.  They still send out rather nicely produced catalogues, one of alpines and plants and one (looking ahead) of dwarf bulbs for autumn dispatch. I don't know if that tells you anything about their customer demographic.  Older, possibly, conservative with a small c, and not converted to internet shopping and email?  Mind you, quite a few bulb companies still send out printed catalogues, the one from Peter Nyssen generally arriving after I've placed my order online.  Most shrub and herbaceous nurseries don't bother anymore and stick to the odd promotional email.

Quite a few of the varieties offered bare root by Pottertons were also available throughout the year as pot grown plants, at no greater and in some anomalous cases a lower price than the bare root bulbs.  But cyclamen were significantly cheaper now, especially if you wanted several plants, and I ordered three more Cyclamen cilicium to fill in the gap in front of the house.  They should arrive at this time of the year with leaves on so I will know which way up they are supposed to go, and can make a careful mental note about any hollows in the tuber or other clues for future reference.  I shall plant them with small stakes of some sort alongside, to deter the cats from using the freshly dug earth as a lavatory.  In a fit of extravagance I ordered ten C. hederifolium to go in the far shady corner at the bottom of the garden, after toying with the idea of digging up some self seeded ones and trying to make do with what I had.  But I like the self seeded ones where they are, and while I am not a great believer in retail therapy I thought that after the dismal non-event of Christmas and the money I must have saved scarcely going out or doing anything for a month I would treat myself.

Mid pink and pale pink Hesperantha, which used to be called Schizostylis, were a snip at £2.20 if you bought three of a variety.  The common name is Kaffir lily, a clue to their South African origin, although best avoided nowadays.  They are easy going plants, flowering usefully late in the autumn, and despite what most books tell you they will put up with partial shade quite happily.  I shall pot up my bare root plants, and drop them into any gaps in the back garden later in the season.  It pays to handle them gently when weeding around them or cutting down the old foliage and spent flower stems, since even a light tug can pull the bulb clean out of the ground, but they don't seem to mind if replanted immediately.  They don't like it too dry, but if they like your garden they will self-seed and send out stolons.

The creeping, shade tolerant Disporopsis pernyi and Maianthemum dilitatum were likewise cheaper bought as bare root plants than potted, and at £1.30 a go I shall experiment with three of each in the shady corner at the bottom of the garden.  Both will tolerate full shade, and one US nursery website even described the Maianthemum as tolerating wet soil.  I shall try it in a spot that became absolutely sodden a few years ago when the water table rose in that part of the garden after a particularly wet winter.  I lost quite a few plants through drowning, and finding species that will survive through occasional waterlogging without requiring constantly wet conditions is tricky. Some websites warned that the Maianthemum could become invasive, but given how few things want to live in the place where I plan to put it that's a risk that I'll take.  If either or both do well I can buy some more, and if they don't the experiment hasn't cost me too much.

Addendum  The boiler ran perfectly this morning and is chuntering away normally now, so we are no further towards knowing why it didn't come on last night.