growing from seed

This morning I sowed the seeds of Ricinus communis, Ipomoea and Mina lobata that I remembered to put to soak yesterday morning before setting off for London.  I had a session in the greenhouse sowing other things on Wednesday, but when I looked at the seed packets of these three I found I was supposed to soak them for twenty-four hours first, and of course there was no point in putting them on to soak straight away because I was going to be out on Thursday.

Ricinus communis is the castor oil plant, source of the poison ricin, as used by the KGB to murder Georgi Markov, and also of castor oil, as spooned down generations of children and used as an engine lubricant.  How you end up with either a deadly poison or a medicine from the same plant I have not understood.  It makes a very fine foliage plant for the summer, and may produce fluffy flowers which may be followed by viable seeds.  I know they can ripen adequately in this country because I have had them germinate in other pots that had been standing close by, and a gardening friend has had them come up in her compost heap.  Last summer I saved a few to sow and put the others carefully into the dustbin, since the kittens were still at the chew anything stage and I didn't know quite how poisonous the raw seeds were*.  I therefore had two sets to sow this morning, a fine purple leaved variety called 'New Zealand Purple' which came from Chiltern Seeds and my own home saved seeds from a variety called 'Implala'.  'Impala' has beautiful lead coloured leaves and pink flowers, and it remains to be seen what its offspring will be like.  I must admit I never bothered with soaking Ricinus seeds before, but that is what the packet said and I'm not sure I got one hundred per cent germination last time.  They went into the heated propagator to encourage them, and I washed my hands carefully afterwards.

The Ipomoea or Morning Glory was the variety 'Heavenly Blue' which came free with a gardening magazine.  The seed packet contained more seeds than one could possibly want, unless raising in bulk for a plant sale or unless the seed company anticipated a very low germination rate.  I compromised and soaked eight or ten seeds, and when I looked at them this morning they were already sprouting.  I've never grown it before so am not planning how to dispose of my surplus just yet, in case it is one of those species that starts promisingly and then starts falling by the wayside with seedlings collapsing for no particular reason that you can fathom.  If they grow they will make rapid, tender annual climbers with blue (naturally) saucer shaped flowers.  I have space for one in a pot on the patio, and I end up with several then perhaps my garden club plant sale in May would like one.

The Mina lobata was another freebie.  Its common name is Spanish Flag and I have grown it before in the distant past.  It is another tender climber, producing upright spikes of yellow and orange two tone flowers which look vaguely as if they might be in the pea family, though it is actually a member of the Convolvulaceae and is now properly called Ipomoea lobata.  It flowers late in the summer and according to an old Telegraph article by Val Bourne does not mind a bit of shade.  She cautions that it doesn't do to give them too rich a soil or they will be all leaf and no flower, but that is not generally a problem in this garden.  If I have any success with my seeds I shall use the plants in pots alongside dahlias, and if I have any left over they could slot into gaps in the dahlia bed, or go to the plant sale.

The Cosmos seeds I sowed only a couple of days ago were already germinating in their clean and shiny new propagating cases.  I am trying a new (to me) pale yellow form I bought from Derry Watkins, and which I think I thought I was buying last year when I ended up with a vivid shade of yellow half way to orange.  In my head I'm already there with a tasteful pale yellow and blue colour scheme, using a pale yellow single dahlia (on order from Halls of Heddon), a pot of the tender blue Convolvulus sabiatus (available from Cottage Nurseries in Lincolnshire), and the Cosmos.  All I actually have as of this minute is some seedlings not even on to the first true leaf stage and a rather scruffy cutting of a yellow flowered Argyranthemum.

I'm also growing two sorts of pink, red and white Cosmos, both free with magazines, and these will be combined with dahlias in various shades of pink and mauve and the Ricinus, if they work out. After last year when I sowed far too much Cosmos 'Sensation Mixed' and then pricked out far too many seedlings because they were there and I hated to throw them away, then lacked the space in the greenhouse to look after them properly, this year I counted out the seeds individually and limited myself to twelve from each packet.

I'm using Westland's John Innes number one seed compost this year and am pleased with it so far.  I was taken aback at how deeply it settled in the pots when I watered them before sowing, but so far it has been retaining sufficient moisture without staying soggy, none of the emerging seedlings have gone yellow, sulked and died, and the surface of the compost has not gone green even on the first sowings I made over a month ago.  As all of these disasters have befallen my attempts at growing from seed at various points in the past, things are going pretty well in comparison.  So far.  One unseasonably baking hot sunny day when I'm out and not there to damp the floor down, or worse still have left the door shut, and the whole lot could still cook.

*Very, according to Wikipedia, but not especially digestible unless you chew them well, in which case four or five could kill you, unless you are a duck, which for some reason are highly resistant to ricin.

music and art

The year really is galloping madly towards summer.  I went today to the last of the LSO St Lukes lunchtime concerts I had booked.  The final music society concert of the 2016-17 season is this coming weekend, the following Sunday I'm going to hear a youngish quartet in the church at Wrabness, and then that's it, the end of classical concert going until October.

Today the Nash Ensemble were making an appearance.  I bought the ticket nearly six months ago, back in October of last year, and I'd forgotten what combination of elements from the Nash Ensemble to expect or what they were playing.  The answer turned out to be Bruch's piano quintet in G minor, and the four string players sans piano doing a late Vaughan Williams string quartet, number 2 in A minor.  Wearing my music society committee hat I was impressed at the idea of having a piano and then not even using it for half the concert, but I'm sure St Lukes has the piano anyway.  Out in the sticks by the time we've paid five hundred pounds to hire one we don't want any downtime.

I don't believe I ever heard the Bruch quintet before, or at least not knowingly.  The only bit of Bruch I would recognise is his violin concerto, which probably leaves me in the same boat as the majority of middlebrow music enthusiasts.  The quintet is absolutely lovely, madly romantic, and as the programme notes said belongs firmly in the tonal realm of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, which is one of the places I feel happier.  The notes said that Bruch despised the New German school of Liszt and Wagner.  I wouldn't dare despise Liszt, but I don't warm to him, and I find The Ride of the Valkyries plus the Liebestod between them provide quite enough Wagner (and I mainly like the Valkyries for their association with Apocalypse Now and The Blues Brothers).  So in a division of late nineteenth century German music I that puts me firmly in team Bruch.

The Vaughan Williams was first performed at the height of the second world war, and when I saw in the programme notes that it was in a tonal idiom with a sharp edge derived from its insistence on the dissonant interval of a tritone my heart sank, but in the event as it went on I liked it a lot.  The first movement was indeed agitated and dissonant and if it had gone on like that for twenty minutes I'd have been wishing that it could just stop, but having set his agitated scene Vaughan Williams progressed to quieter and spookier things (some recycled from earlier work on film scores.  The great Baroque composers recycled their material so why shouldn't Ralph?) and the whole effect ended up being very satisfactory and not too long, which is not meant to damn it with faint praise, only there is a limit to how much dissonance I can take.

The Nash Ensemble were marvellous and looked as though they were having a ball, and I think Lawrence Power is rapidly replacing Jon Boden in my affections.  Fiona Talkington of Radio 3 told us that today was a special birthday for him.  Well, that is one way to celebrate your fortieth.

In the afternoon I went to see Portrait of the Artist at The Queen's Gallery.  It's on for another month, and it is a really good exhibition, and was practically empty.  As I entered the largest gallery the attendant commented that I had it to myself, and I expressed my amazement and asked why it was so quiet and she said that was what she had been asking herself.  She thought the topic must sound obscure or dull, plus it wasn't very colourful and there weren't that many paintings by big names.  It is true that there is a high proportion of drawings and engravings in the exhibition, but they are of superb quality, and there are some fantastic oils, including a trio of self-portraits by Rembrant, Rubens and Daniel Mytens that once hung in the breakfast room of Charles I, and Artemisia Gentileschi's extraodinary foreshortened self-portrait in the act of painting.  I was greatly struck by Judith grasping the head of Holofernes by the hair as she stared straight out of the canvas, but had to read the caption to discover how it fitted into the exhibition theme, the answer being that the model for Judith was the artist's ex lover, and the head was his own.  Some of the works show artists and engravers depicting each other, until you end up with an engraving showing an artist holding an engraving based on a painting by somebody else (or something.  I lost track).   There are some nice miniatures too.  It is a great exhibition, and if you buy your ticket there and have it stamped before you go it will get you into the next two exhibitions as well, on Canaletto, and art of the Stuart court.

a trip to the apiary

Straight after breakfast I went to see the bees.  My first task was to cut back the brambles encroaching on the hives, which has been on the To Do list for a long time, with a note to do it on a cold day when the bees wouldn't come out to investigate what I was doing.  The hives are arranged so that their entrances face away from the centre of the patch of rough grass where I keep them, which is for my convenience during inspections so that I can move about the apiary without bees shooting out of their front doors and straight into me.  There is a corresponding disincentive to stand right in front of the hive entrances to trim the brambles, which had advanced on two sides until they were virtually touching the hives.  I wasn't sure how the bees would react to the prolonged sound of me moving about near their hives, even though I was only going to use secateurs and not a strimmer.  Bees can be funny about the noise of power driven machinery, and by this stage of the year the Systems Administrator keeps an eye out for them while cutting up the fallen tree at the far end of the meadow, in case they decide to take umbrage.

Unfortunately on the cold, damp days that we had I didn't feel up to doing much outside, and then suddenly it turned warm, and I realised that we were halfway through March.  Strulch or no Strulch, I needed to devote a couple of hours to the bees.  Cutting down the brambles was only the preliminary to opening up the hives, and I wore my bee suit, plus the Systems Administrator's welding gloves over my bee gauntlets while I tackled the brambles.  Cutting back brambles while wearing a net veil that you really don't want to tear takes a certain amount of concentration, and as I worked I realised that the morning was turning out much warmer than I'd expected and I had to retreat to a safe distance so that I could unveil myself while I took my fleece off.  The bees became very active, confirming that all four colonies certainly had live bees in them, and I was pleased to see that the foragers were bringing back pollen, suggesting that they were raising brood, but luckily they didn't seem to take much notice of me, even when I worked very close to the hives or at the point where sweat began to run down my face.  Bees hate the smell of sweat.

The next stage was the thing I have been obscurely worried about since last autumn, when I realised after deciding to leave the hives to over-winter with supers of their own honey that I would need to remove the queen excluders so that the cluster of bees could move up into the super without leaving the queen behind below the excluder.  The question that loomed in my mind was, what would I do in spring when it came to the time to put the queen excluder back if by then the queen was laying up in the super?  I tried asking a couple of other beekeepers at a dinner we had in Frinton, but they didn't have any definitive answer.  Work it out as you go along depending on what the bees are doing, seemed to be the consensus.

I started with the hive that contained the most bees when I trickled the oxalic acid on back in January.  There were quite a lot of bees in the super.  I blew smoke down into it until most of them had retreated, and removed a frame from the centre of the super to see what they were doing up there.  They had eaten some of their stores, but I could not see any brood, or even eggs.  Bee eggs are not the easiest things to see, especially wearing a black net over your face, but the light was good and I though I would probably have seen them if there had been any to see.  Besides, before the queen lays in a patch of comb the workers polish it for her, and the comb on the frame I was looking at hadn't been polished.  I checked some more frames, ignoring the outer ones because experience teaches that the queen always starts somewhere in the middle, and only ever uses the outer frames in high season when she is running out of space.  No brood, no eggs that I could see.  I smoked the bees a little more, thinking that since the queen normally runs away from the light that if she had been originally been up in the super she probably wasn't by now, and lifted it off.

Putting the queen excluder back over the brood box and under the super was not the swift, seamless action I'd anticipated, and it's just as well that it was a warm day.  The bees had been busy over the winter filling in the gap between the two sets of frames with brace comb, which needed scraping off so that the queen excluder would lay flat.  Bees kept popping up out of the box to see what I was doing, and since I didn't want to squash them I had to keep breaking off from scraping to give them further puffs of smoke or brush them gently aside with my finger.  Given that all the time the hive was open heat was being lost from the brood nest I really didn't want this stage to take too long.

I reassembled the hive, removed the strip of galvanised metal with bee-sized holes in it that had been pinned over the door all winter to stop mice getting in, and felt reasonably happy that things had gone well.  Then I went through the same process again with the other hives and did not find signs the queens had been laying in any of the supers.  Bees do like to store their food above the brood nest, so while the queens might have found their way upstairs eventually it seems it is not their first choice.  If we have a warmish day next week I could look in the supers again to double check that none have signs of a queen living in them, but I'm fairly confident.  Then I shall have to wait until it's warm enough to inspect the brood frames and find out what's going on, but that probably won't be this month.

a female pursuit

I was rather surprised to get into NADFAS this year.  I seemed to be one of the only people on the music society committee who was not a member of the not-so-snappily named National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies and a friend was keen I should join.  She took me along to a few lectures, and they were good.  When I protested that I did not have time to join another society one of the other music society committee members, who was also on the committee of the Colchester NADFAS, recommended that I get my name on the waiting list because it was long and growing, since as he put it, members were not dying as fast as they used to.  For the sake of five pounds to be on a waiting list I duly filled in my form, thinking that it would be nice for some hypothetical point in the medium term when the garden might be under control.  The following February I got an email informing me I had got in.

The current year's series of lectures really looked very good and I thought it would be worth squeezing one Thursday morning a month into my diary.  There was a form about the many volunteering opportunities, which I read and put to one side, and an invitation to coffee at the Chairman's house to meet him and other members of the committee plus other new members.  I dithered about that, being knee deep in post-flu outstanding gardening jobs.  Anyway, I already knew the Chairman and his wife to chat to because we all belong to the same gardening club and they quite often come to the concerts.  Then I thought I was being silly, since I didn't know any of the rest of the committee and almost none of the members apart from the ones I've met via the music society, and if you are going to join a club you might as well make a bit of an effort.  And I was curious to see the Chairman's garden in passing.

The other members of the committee turned out to be very pleasant, as did those of the other new members who came, and I discovered that one reason why I'd shot up through the ranks of the waiting so rapidly was because they had had an unusually high rate of non-renewals last year. People move away, or give up driving so that getting themselves to a church a way from the centre of Colchester becomes less attractive.  Or they die.  I was glad I'd made the effort to go.  The committee each told us in turn what they did, and there were appeals to join all sorts of sub-groups, but I held fast to my resolution that monthly lectures were one thing but I really did not have time to start archiving the Munnings collection or helping Colchester museum pack up objects for removal from the castle to a new storage unit at Severalls business park.

It was the Chairman who commented on one thing I couldn't help noticing.  Of the fifteen or so new members who had turned up, all but one were women, and he was the sole male representative on the committee.  They needed to do something to encourage men to join, he said.  I wondered where all the men were.  Still working when their female partners had retired?  Dead?  Given the historic tendency of women to marry men older than themselves who then die at a younger age you will find a fair sprinkling of widows at all the clubs I belong to locally, but these new lady members didn't all look that old.  Do men really not like art?  But the list of NADFAS approved lecturers has lots of men on it, and art historians like Andrew Graham-Dixon and Dr James Fox regularly turn up on BBC4, while some of our most famous museum directors have been men.  It can't be that men don't like art, they just don't like art societies for some reason.

The Chairman said that some men had told him that once they were retired they just wanted to have a rest.  That and play golf.  And I suppose that some interests are heavily gendered the other way.  The Systems Administrator has not yet taken the plunge and joined any of the local model railway groups, but I'd hazard a guess that the membership is predominantly male.  And those annoying lycra clad cyclists reenacting the Tour de France at weekends around the rural roads of north Essex are almost always men.  Maybe men play more golf, though I wouldn't know, having never belonged to a golf club.  My aunt used to play, and I knew a couple of female fund managers who did, but it seems more of a male pursuit, hence it took the withdrawal of rights to stage the Open to persuade Muirfield to vote today to finally admit women as members after 273 years. When I've done woodland charity talks to Rotary Clubs they have all admitted women, but it has been a predominantly male audience.  So the men are not all dead yet, but busy elsewhere.  It would be very interesting to do some research.  Asking people at random why they didn't belong to an art society or the Rotary Club might not be very helpful, but you could ask people who did belong to something whether they had a partner, and if so what their partner was doing instead while they were there.

At least NADFAS has addressed the issue of their obscure name, and as from May will officially be called The Arts Society.  My branch will become The Arts Society Colchester, not to be confused with the Colchester Art Society.  I expect it will be.

a lovely day

It was a lovely day for applying mulch, and the brown tide rose steadily up the border along the side of the back garden, as I spread Strulch after picking up several sacks of leaves and winkling out odd weeds, grass stems and the inevitable goose grass seedlings.  On the whole the bed wasn't too weedy, as I'd been over it once during the winter.

The little dark pink flowered Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori' is in full flower on bare branches.  Every year its leaves roll up, pucker, and look dreadful, and I wonder if a sap sucking insect has been at work and whether the tree will survive, but so far it has pleasantly surprised me each spring by coming back into flower.  I ought to try and find out what goes wrong with the leaves, except that as I don't want to slip into the pattern of spraying entire trees there isn't much I could do about it. It will have to make it under its own steam, or not at all, though I did give it a good sprinkling of fish, blood and bone when I Strulched it.  The flowers are really very pretty, though they don't last for very long.  Later in the season the tree plays host to a perennial sweet pea, giving a second spell of flowering in that stretch of the border and masking the horrible leaves, otherwise I should slightly grudge the space and more so in a smaller garden.

The Crocus tommasinianus in the bottom lawn are starting to go over.  The pale lilac ones have finished, while a darker purple variety is still flowering.  Unfortunately I don't know precisely which either of them are.  I see from my planting notes that I have at various times planted the straight species and the varieties 'Barr's Purple', 'Ruby Giant' and 'Whitewell Purple'.  That's one difficulty in naturalising bulbs, it is impossible to label individual clumps so you don't always know exactly what you've got flowering in the garden.  I think I like the pale ones best, but obviously it would be a good idea to plant a mixture to extend the season.  If I remember I could ask the specialist bulb suppliers at the Chelsea Flower Show.  A little persistence can be required to get the attention of whoever it is on the stand who knows the plants in that much detail, since often you find yourself at first asking somebody who normally works in the office and is only there to hand out catalogues.

The Iris unguicularis against the south wall of the house are still going great guns.  I ought to keep a diary of when they start and stop flowering, since I've a feeling it is quite variable.  This year they didn't really get going until the New Year and I was starting to fret that they hadn't liked something about last year's growing conditions and weren't going to put on much of a show this winter.  I'm sure that some years they have got going well before Christmas.  The flowers are very graceful, smaller than those of the bearded iris, and a good shade of mid purple.  I am extremely fond of them, and seeing them out now is a reward for all the time I spent last autumn grooming dead leaves out of the clumps.

The foliage of the Watsonia in the gravel looks dreadful, brown and more than half dead, in one case nine-tenths dead.  They were doing pretty well, but the last set of frosts hit them hard.  I am hoping that new growth will emerge from within the clumps, and in the meantime I am leaving the old leaves on as protection.  Tidying them up if it does is going to be a fiddly job.

a garden talk

I missed my garden club's February meeting because of poking myself in the eye the previous day on a rogue Cornus twig and being in no fit state to drive.  A gardening friend spotted that the same lecturer was appearing this afternoon at the Quay Theatre in Sudbury, and asked if I'd like to go.  I was initially rather startled.  I didn't know Sudbury had a theatre, Sunday afternoon is not a traditional time for garden lectures, and she and I normally go garden visiting, but then I thought, why not?  We hadn't been out together for ages, and a lecture would probably be as entertaining as going together to solemnly stare at some hellebores.

It proved to be an entertaining hour.  Chunks of what he said were not new to either of us, but his technique for clipping topiary was much faster and neater than mine.  Hold one blade steady, guiding it to form the shape, and move the other blade to cut against it, was his advice.  I'm not quite sure how topiary got into the mix, as most of the talk was on green gardening techniques and the talk was promoted by a group called Greener Sudbury, but he started off as a tree surgeon and part of his message was to always use sharp cutting tools, be they shears or the blades on your lawnmower.  His epiphany against the practice of tree surgery as a full time occupation came when he was walking around the Windsor Great Park, admiring the specimen trees there, and realised he could not stop himself from mentally calculating how to fell and section every one of them.

At home we already practice most of the green techniques he advocated, having trees, ponds, long grass and lots of flowers, trying to avoid having bare earth and cramming plants in to bursting point, and doing as little digging as possible.  Where I mainly fell down was in my failure to grow my own vegetables, but that's not because I don't like the idea in theory, merely that in practice I haven't managed to find the time to mend the broken beds, clear them of weeds, sow them and then keep the crop weeded and watered until harvest.  Some years I have got to a later stage of the sequence before failing, other years I haven't even attempted to start.  I know that home grown vegetables are nice, it's just that cultivating them takes ages and there are only so many hours in the week.  The ornamental garden is visible from every window of the house and is my passion.  If I gave it up to grow vegetables instead, the amount we would save each week on buying vegetables would not pay for even two hours of a skilled gardener's time to keep the rest of the garden in good trim.

Something I did already do, and get right albeit at a glacial pace, is to make my own compost.  As of this moment all of our bins are bursting at the seams with garden debris, free of weed roots and more or less free of weed seed, plus green kitchen waste, slowly and magisterially rotting own to nice, crumbly garden compost.  They would rot faster if we put the lawn clippings in, but the Systems Administrator doesn't do that because they are full of weed seeds.  The lecturer would like us to use the compost on our vegetable patches so that the minerals contained in them, harvested by our plants from our own soil, could be recycled and taken up by our food crops and eaten by us to the benefit of our health.  He might be on to something there, since I think I've read that organically grown crops tend to contain more trace elements, and selenium, molybdenium and the rest of them are supposed to be very goo for us in small amounts.  On the other hand home made compost does wonders for the borders.  It is an entirely theoretical choice in any case until the time when I manage to try again at growing vegetables.

I fear I won't be using the wool and bracken base potting compost produced in the Lake District. He passed a bucket of it around the auditorium and it felt lovely, and apparently in use the wool slowly decomposes and feeds the plants with nitrogen, while retaining moisture.  The snag is that it costs ten pounds for a thirty litre bag.  I still feel bad that my normal compost contains peat and is contributing to the destruction of peat bogs, but I would feel less bad about it if I didn't know that peat is still being burned in industrial quantities in power stations.

The chap is called Darren Lerigo, and he is entertaining in a light-hearted way, to be recommended if he crops up at a garden club near you.

feed and mulch

It was a great day for mulching, calm, warm and dry.  Calm is good because then the fish, blood and bone falls where I sprinkle it instead of drifting everywhere, the Strulch doesn't blow about, and I remain calm.  Warm is good because it is more comfortable.  You don't exactly work up a sweat mulching, and it's much more pleasant crawling around the borders being careful where you put your hands and knees as you pull out tiny goose grass seedlings when you have the sun on your back and balmy air in your lungs.  And dry is good for the same reason, and because then the fish, blood and bone don't stick to the leaves of your plants.  Today was perfect, and I was disappointed when it got to a quarter to six and I had to admit that I could no longer see as well as I did and the dew was falling.

I finished the smaller of the two rose beds around the top lawn, and started on the big, sloping bed that runs from the entrance gate to the bottom of the garden.  The middle section is edged with a gaudy display of polyanthus and primrose hybrids.  Some have been recycled from winter pots, some grown from seed, some were bought at a bungalow gate en route to a Pilates lesson, and some were incredibly good value at B&Q.  There is no colour scheme to speak of.  They are predominantly yellow towards the top of the slope and mainly pink and purple towards the lower end of the patch, but that's about it.

The effect is extremely un-Tom Stuart-Smith, and would not win a spot in Gardens Illustrated, but I am fond of them.  They remind me of childhood hours playing with my plastic toy animals in the flower beds, they are cheerful, and the Systems Administrator likes them, proclaiming them a splash of colour.  There are patches of Muscari too where the mice haven't eaten them, some dark purple and some Cambridge blue that might be 'Valerie Finnis', though I have a feeling she disappeared and I ordered a second pale blue variety.  There are a few hyacinths, recycled from pots, and this afternoon I added last year's 'Splendid Cornelia', which were potted up again last autumn and have made such good flowering plants I could have reused them in the big containers.

I started by mulching around the polyanthus on the grounds that their leaves are expanding by the day so it will be easier now than in a week's time, and because since they are doing their thing for the year now they might as well do it against a tidy, weed free background.  The next low growing plant at the front of the bed as you go down the hill is a big patch of Omphalodes verna, a perennial forget-me-not type with bright blue flowers that runs more aggressively than you would want in a bed of treasures.  Occasionally I fret that it is a bit of thug, but on the whole I am grateful to it for covering the ground for much of the year, and the blue flowers are very pretty.  It dies away to nothing but stalks and bare, stringy runners in the winter, but the leaves are now expanding fast and need their covering of Strulch directly.

Pieris japonica 'White Pearl' is full out at the front of the bed.  It is well named, the individual flowers being brilliant white and round so that they look like clusters of pearls.  It was an impulse purchase from the plant centre when I worked there, and then I began to think that it was a tiny bit vulgar, but as it grows I like it more.  It has proved very slow growing, which may be its nature but is probably also because the soil in the lower part of that bed is a sort of horrible, stagnant, stony clay that is less horrible than it was after years of mulching but still not very nice.  The fat clusters of flowers practically cover the bush at this time of year, and the result has more presence and for some reason is less vulgar now the plant is not so absolutely tiny.

survivors of the Great Fire

I went today on a guided walk around the City of London's surviving churches from before the Great Fire of 1666.  Of the ninety-seven churches that stood before the fire, only eight survive today, and some of those later suffered severe damage from the blitz and IRA mainland bombing campaign.  I thought I had poked around a lot of the City's architectural nooks and crannies during my years working there and subsequent visits to London, but I had never looked at half of them, so it was a day well spent.

We started at St Ethtelburga's on Bishopsgate.  I must have walked past its modest front hundreds of times, and was aware of its almost-destruction in the bomb blast of 1993 and subsequent restoration, but had never ventured inside.  It is tiny, plain and beautiful, and still a consecrated church, though now it is home to the Centre of Reconciliation and Peace which has a modern steel and glass office behind the church, plus a little garden and incongruous but charming Turkish tent.

Just around the corner is St Helen's Bishopsgate, the largest surviving parish church in the City, with massive roof beams and a fine collection of tombs and memorials.  I particularly liked the medieval couple in alabaster lying side by side, she with her feet resting on what looked like two tiny pet dogs, and his on a lion with a magnificent mane but whose rounded snout looked more like a sheep or a guinea pig.  St Helen's Bishopsgate is an evangelical church, so there are chairs instead of pews, a baptismal bath sunk in the ground, carefully walled off with some of the chairs so that people wouldn't walk into it, while there was a drum kit piled in one corner.

We didn't go into St Andrew Undershaft.  The name derives from the large maypole that stood outside before being banished by the puritans.  We did go into All Hallows by the Tower, a large, gaunt building near the Tower of London and Trinity House.  Pepys watched London burn from its tower, having buried his Parmesan cheese in the garden.  It was badly damaged in the blitz, but possesses a marvellous Grinling Gibbon font cover, and I liked the stained glass windows commemorating various shipping companies.

St Katherine Cree was rebuilt on the site of a Medieval church just before the Great Fire.  It is quite restrained by Baroque standards, with a fine rose window, partially restored following blast damage in 1993.  The organist in our party looked longingly up at the organ, which was not accessible. Apparently it is a very good one, played in times past by Purcell and Handel.  My favourite of them all is St Olave Hart Street, the sister church of St Katherine Cree.  Pepys is buried there, and the maritime and Trinity House connection is apparent in the ship models.  It was badly damaged in the war and has been restored, but has a lovely warm atmosphere, and there are some wonderful seventeenth century memorials.  It hosts lunchtime concerts, and I have heard my aunt play the cello there in the past, which is another reason why I like it.

We popped into a couple of Wren churches while we were at it, to see the model of the Medieval London Bridge in St Magnus the Martyr in Lower Thames Street, and the display of pattens in St Margaret Pattens.  And we climbed up the Monument, though only four out of our party of ten would attempt the 311 steps.  In all my years of working in the Square Mile I had never once been up the Monument, but it is worth the climb.  The view may not be as panoramic as it would be from the Shard, but right in among the glass towers of the City you have a bird's eye view.  London is still changing at a great pace: to the west the horizon was rimmed with cranes.

When we got back to Liverpool Street the party unaccountably did not have any appetite to go and look at Smithfield, and we agreed to catch a train back to Colchester.  I could not have absorbed any more information about any more churches, but it was a good day out.  And one final snippet of church lore:  St Botolph is the patron saint of innkeepers and hoteliers, and the church of St Botolph is always outside the walls.  Sure enough, the one in Bishopsgate is just north of the line of the old city walls along London Wall, while the Colchester St Botolph's Priory is just beyond the remains of the Roman town wall.

job finally done

I put a fresh straw bale into the chicken's run before letting them out of their house.  With the rain of recent days the soil had suddenly churned, and it can't be very nice for them sliding around in the mud all day, besides which their feet then make the eggs dirty.  We are getting to the end of our supply of small bales, and one of the loops of baler twine had broken on this one, making it difficult to lift into the wheelbarrow without it entirely disintegrating.  I managed by dint of standing the bale on end and leaning it against my shoulder while I trundled it round to the hen run. The Systems Administrator looked at me doubtfully as I reappeared in the kitchen for breakfast and said You've got grass on you.

I only bothered breaking the bale down into rough chunks, leaving the chickens to do the rest of the work, and by lunchtime they had spread it over most of the run and looked quite happy bouncing up and down on it.  They would really like to come out, but they can't.

In the afternoon I finally finished trimming the hornbeam hedge, a job which has been on my list of things to do since last August.  This year I must try and do it in August, or at least before we go on holiday.  Last year it got a top-dressing of home made compost as I spread the remains of the great neolithic compost burial mound around the utility area, and some fish, blood and bone, and that cheered it up a lot.  It thickened somewhat, but still keeps sending up strong vertical shoots from the top instead of growing all over with nice little shoots that I could snip with shears, rather than needing secateurs if not a pruning saw.  I don't know what I have to do to it to make it behave more like a Tom Stuart-Smith designed hedge and less like a temporarily thwarted row of incipient trees.

I still haven't got to the origin of the theory that hornbeam should be cut in August.  It is not at all tender and I don't see why you shouldn't do it at any point during the winter.  I read somewhere recently that it shouldn't be done in the spring because it can bleed, but I have cut mine several times in spring in complete ignorance of this theory and never noticed any signs of bleeding.  I'm left holding to my own pet theory that August became the traditional hedge cutting period in the heyday of the grand Edwardian garden because at that time of year there weren't all that many other jobs for the garden staff to be getting on with, and that the idea of the August cut for hornbeam and yew persisted into books and articles aimed at the amateur owner-gardener.  Yew is as tough as old boots, and from my own practical experience you can trim it with impunity at pretty much any time you fancy.  If it looks whiskery and is annoying you then by all means give it a haircut, it doesn't seem to mind.

Our topiary yews are a he and a she.  I did not know this when I bought them as little knee high plants, but as they grew the one to the south turned out to bear berries, though not many due to all the clipping.  The other is a male plant.  Yew flowers are not showy, but on a windy day you may see absolute clouds of pollen blowing off the plant.  Ours was in full flower a few weeks back, releasing clouds as thick as dust blowing off a ploughed field in response to a couple of especially brisk gusts of wind.

I would very much like a yellow berried yew, ever since seeing one in a great garden open to visitors.  I can no longer remember which garden, but alas, they did not offer yellowed fruited yew in their plant sales area, and I have never been able to track down a supplier.  It irritated me rather when one of the magazines recently included it in their list of ten plants with ornamental fruit for winter, given none of their readers were likely to be able to get one.

the big chop

Today we took down the large field maples that had been allowed to grow up in the hedge behind the greenhouse.  Acer campestre is a lovely plant, turning butter yellow in the autumn, but it is quite vigorous for a hedge, perhaps over-vigorous.  The Systems Administrator had topped out the ones by the greenhouse in the dim and distant past, but not for several years, during which time they had recovered to a good twenty feet.  At that size the prospect of cutting them back was daunting, what with the greenhouse on one side and the telephone line not too far away across the field on the other.  In fact, the prospect of reducing them had been getting steadily more daunting for a couple of years, which is one reason why they had been allowed to go on growing unchecked for so long.

The only good thing about trying to reduce a twenty foot hedge with trees in it to a ten foot hedge is that the tree trunks provide something solid to lean a ladder against.  The Systems Administrator roped each trunk in turn as far up as possible, using a boat hook to drop the rope over a likely looking high branch, then cut the main trunk at the ten foot mark while I kept tension on the rope from the field side.  That left a long list of things that could go wrong, a trunk swinging back into the garden despite the rope and hitting either the SA or the greenhouse, a trunk falling further outwards that we had judged it could and landing on the telephone wire, an accident with the chainsaw, or the SA falling off the ladder, but the SA had spent a long time weighing up the situation, and we were both very considered in our movements.  Even so I was relieved as each trunk crashed into the field where it was supposed to fall with no breakages or accidental amputations.

We were so pleased to have got the field maple down without incident that after lunch we tackled a second one by the fruit cage, slightly smaller but closer to the telephone line, and a large hawthorn behind the polytunnel.  The whole thing left us with an enormous pile of debris in somebody else's field.  Fortunately the farm maintains a wide uncultivated strip around the outside, perhaps as part of some arcane EU grant system for wildlife friendly farming, and at this stage of the year they haven't started cultivating lettuces and the field is still sown with a winter cover of rye grass, so we weren't going to do any harm being there, but still the pile of branches, with the odd vicious rose stem thrown in for good measure, had to be cleared away.  The quickest route was to drag it sixty yards further up the field to where there is a thin patch in the hedge, chop it down into pieces small enough to fit through the hole, and pass it through, so that was what we did.  I was on the receiving end of the bits and by the time it was all through I had built two piles of brushwood each about the size of a transit van.

The next step will be to trim off all the side branches small enough to go through the shredder and shred them, and cart all the larger wood down to the workshop and section it for firewood.  I am hoping the SA will do the lion's share of shredding, though I have promised to help, since I still have about forty-two bags of Strulch to apply.  There are still some smaller tall bits of hedge to come down, which the SA might be able to do from ground level with the pole saw.  And then we have vowed to each other that now we have such a clear line to cut to, the hedge is not going to be allowed to get that out of control again.

garden society talk

At last I made it to a meeting of my garden club.  In January I was laid low by the aftermath of flu, and in February I poked myself in the eye the day before the meeting, but third time lucky, tonight I got there.  Which was just as well as it was the annual celebrity lecture.  There are some gardening celebrities I'm not so keen on, and I didn't go last year, but this year's famous guest was Anna Pavord speaking on the subject of the tulip.

I have already got her book The Tulip so perhaps I didn't need to go to the talk, if I'd been paying attention when I read it, but as I liked the book I thought it would be fun to hear the author talking about it.  And Anna Pavord always comes over in her books and articles as a thoroughly scholarly individual.  And one of the committee members told me she has a most beautiful voice, though I think that was after I'd already bought the ticket.  In fact, so keen was I to go that the Systems Administrator would have been willing to drive me there, if the celebrity talk had been last month when I couldn't see to drive.

Poor Anna Pavord, she arrived with five minutes to spare before the start after a nightmare seven hour journey.  The M25 was at a virtual standstill due to a crash, so she cut off up the A1 and found herself taking forever to get through Hertford, and she was clearly mortified to be late, assuring us that she always built in a margin for delays and normally she and her husband were left kicking their heels for a couple of hours waiting for things to start.  I believed her.  That is what travelling in the south east is like, and looking on the bright side the meeting began only ten minutes after the advertised start time.  If she hadn't allowed that extra couple of hours she wouldn't have arrived until the time when it normally finishes.  Then the remote control for her slide projector wouldn't work, and I felt for her again, knowing from personal experience how that feels.

Once she settled into her topic of tulips she cheered up, and gave a very entertaining talk, and I took pages of notes.  I expect all the information is somewhere in her book, but I always take notes, an old habit left over from years of taking notes at work of every meeting and telephone call.  Sometimes I refer back to them, but mainly the act of writing helps me concentrate.  It was very much a talk about the wild origins of tulips and the history of their cultivation, so by the end of it we hadn't learned much about growing them in the garden, but that wasn't the point.

On my way out I collected my seed potato for the potato growing contest.  I didn't enter last year, thinking I had enough things to be doing already in the garden without worrying about a potted potato, and perhaps sensitive to the potential embarrassment of the pubic weigh-in when my pot was emptied out if it turned out to still have only one potato in it, perhaps diminished since planting by the effort of growing leaves.  Vegetables are not my strong suit, and I don't even know if I am supposed to chit this potato or if I should have done that last month and should now get it straight into its pot (using what sort of compost?  And how do I feed it?).  But then I thought that wasn't the spirit and I should throw myself into club activities with more gusto, besides which people had told me that the organiser served a lovely tea at the ritual potato pot tipping out.  It is a Maris Piper.  That's a second early according to the label on the bag.  I expect there will be lots of advice available on the internet.

cutting down the coloured stems

This morning I cut down the coppiced willow in the ditch bed.  I've been putting it off, since the whole point of the willow is to enjoy its bare, egg yolk yellow stems in the winter, but the buds will be swelling and the leaves breaking any day now.  The best colour is on the young shoots, besides which left to its own devices it grows far too big, sticking out over the lawn and shading the other plants in the bed.  I left the smallest and thinnest stems intact, those of no more than pencil thickness (maybe a fat pencil) to soften the effect and give it a head start with at least some leaves to get it going.  There is a theory that taking off all the growth every year weakens the plant and that you can just remove half or a third of the oldest stems each year, but by the end of year two or three they are pretty massive.

The willow loves sun.  We have periodically allowed the trees growing along the ditch to grow out over the ditch bed, shading the back of the bed quite heavily.  The willow did not think much of this at all, and the back section of the coppice stool died in protest.  The part of the stool facing the lawn continues to grow, with the result that the shrub must have crept a foot towards the light since I planted it out of its two or three litre pot quite a few years ago.

Then I tackled the coloured stem dogwoods by the oil tank, a mixture of Cornus sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire' and Cornus stolonifera 'Flaviramea', which I see from the RHS website I should now call Cornus sericea 'Flaviramea'.  It was stonlonifera when I planted it in 2001, and the name is descriptive because once it gets going it runs at the root.  The young shoots are an attractive shade of bright pistachio green.  The old ones are dingy brown, and slightly prone to dieback, at least in our dry soil.  It's worth cutting out some of the old, dull growth every so often to encourage the new, besides which it will get fairly tall if left untrimmed, fully eight feet, and it was growing up into the crown of a Malus transitoria and through a white flowered Japanese quince.  I like my plants to mingle informally up to a point, but the Cornus has no manners, and I should like to be able to see the flowers of the Chaenomeles, while the crab apple would probably prefer its own space.

'Midwinter Fire' has slim young twigs in a vivid shade of orange-red, very pretty in winter.  You need to plant them where they get a reasonable amount of sun for the full colour to develop.  As the stems age they fade to a nondescript buff and the shrub needs pruning every so often to encourage the production of fresh growth and to make sure that it is produced at a sensible height and not somewhere above your head.  My plants are beginning to run at the root after a slow start.  Last year they were late coming into leaf and the leaves did not look awfully well, while quite a few young stems turned black and died before the plants pulled themselves together and began to grow properly.  After that they were fine for the rest of the season, though it is generally worth giving plants a quick tidy after the leaves have fallen and trimming out any dead twigs so that the effect of the red glow is not diluted.

Side branches of Cornus are produced in opposite pairs, and on Cornus sanguinea they are held at right angles to the main stem, and are thin and flexible.  Designed, in fact, to slip around behind people's glasses and scratch their eyes.  My recent accident happened while I was cutting down the leaves of the hellebores growing under the 'Midwinter Fire', and this time round I did not go anywhere near them except when I was wearing my safety glasses.  That's a third reason to chop them down now.  I need to apply Strulch to that bed, and it will be much easier to get at the soil and I shall be much less likely to poke myself in the eye again if I'm not crawling through a thicket of Cornus twigs.

a village concert

The music society hosted its concert for young musicians this afternoon.  The village hall was booked, a real piano hired and hauled on to the stage thanks to an educational grant we managed to get from a charitable trust, chairs were put out, a rota of teenage performers was lined up, no fewer than five accompanists were required as some of the young performers preferred to play with their own music teachers and in one case the performer's father, the committee had produced an array of small cakes and scones, and the chairman's cleaner and the cleaner's daughter came to pour out the tea and do the washing up.

One difficulty of staging a children's concert followed by tea is that you don't have the foggiest idea how many people are going to come.  It's safe to assume that most of the young performers will be accompanied by one parent, if not two.  Maybe some siblings and grandparents or uncles and aunts.  Eight young performers might get the audience up to twenty or more.  Eight people on the committee plus the more devoted spouses might bring the total to thirty.  And then how many more?  Will the hall look painfully empty, and how many scones should you make?

According to the person in charge of ticket sales we only sold twenty before the event.  When she told me that I thought that twenty was quite encouraging, since we give the performers tickets for their families, and I knew I hadn't bothered to pay in advance.  In the event the hall filled up astonishingly and we had to put out two extra rows of chairs.  Some of the audience were music society stalwarts who come to every concert and believe passionately in music education.  Indeed, some are former committee members.  I wondered if others simply fancied getting out of the house for the afternoon.  It's been a long winter, it had stopped raining by half past three, and why not stroll down to the village hall for an hour of music and some tea, and to see some different faces and have a chat?  The vicar came, with her guide dog.

Apart from the lady vicar, and the dog, it could have been a scene from an English village at practically any point during the past one hundred and twenty years.  All sorts of people were there. I met a gardening acquaintance from my plant centre days, who turned out not to have been to the other concerts recently because she was waiting for a new knee and couldn't walk as far as the church in the meantime, and one of the ladies from my ladies group, while the youngest of the performers turned out to be in the same class at school as my niece.

The performers were really pretty good, and all looked very composed as they stood up on the stage, while the only person to lose their place was the accompanying father.  It was only a short programme, then there were presentations for everybody, handed out by the youngest performer's younger sister.  As the young artists stood eating cake afterwards they all suddenly looked much younger, and you remembered that for all their poise on stage they were still only children.

I had offered to do sandwiches, because they would be quick to make, and because not everybody likes sweet things and it is disappointing for those that don't to find there's nothing on offer but cake and scones with jam.  After I'd offered I began to think it hadn't been the best call, since I could always bring any leftover cake home with me but a leftover ham sandwich is no use to anybody, and as we had no idea about numbers we had no clue how much food to take.  I decided to limit myself to one packet of Co-Op ham, and as it had five slices of ham in it that translated to twenty sandwiches, which turned out to be almost exactly right, with just one triangle left over at the end.  I ate it.

five down, forty-five to go

It was raining this morning when I got up.  I wasn't sure at first if it was actually raining, or had been raining and was now just grey, but when I opened the bathroom window I could hear the tell-tale drumming of raindrops on the conservatory roof.  Bother.  The garden is lurching into life now, bulbs poking up, the new leaves of herbaceous plants unfurling and all-too-easily snapped off new shoots swelling on the roses, and I had fifty bags of chopped straw mulch to apply to the borders.  I could very much do with it being dry.  Apart from my own aversion to getting damp, it is near to impossible to apply fish, blood and bone around wet foliage without it sticking to the leaves, which burns them.  Dry days in early March are the gardener's friend.

After a while it stopped raining.  I weeded the gravel until lunchtime, hoping that the borders would dry off enough for me to make a start with the Strulch.  The Libertia peregrinans has run tremendously, a true pilgrim.  The bronze and olive green leaves are very pretty but I'm beginning to wonder if there might be too much of it.  There are places where the gravel is very thin and needs topping up, but it seemed silly to order more gravel when I was so far off having used the mulch I already had.

By the afternoon the weak sunshine had dried off the foliage in the borders, even though the lower part of the garden was still evilly squishy, and I set to work tucking Strulch around the Camassia leaves in the far rose bed before they could get any taller.  By the time it got too dark to see what I was doing I'd finished something over half the bed, which is by far the smallest bed I need to do, and used five bags of Strulch.  The garden would probably happily absorb two pallets' worth of bags, if only I'd bought them, but I probably wouldn't have time to apply it all before growth was too far advanced.  Fortunately last year's application is still quite thick in some places.

We had guests coming over to supper tonight, so while the Systems Administrator toiled in the kitchen I put new beeswax candles in the holders.  We dipped them ourselves at a friend's candle making day, and they are undeniably hand made but so lumpy and irregular that no self-respecting artisan would admit to them.  As a final flourish I tried to comb Our Ginger, who managed to moult a quite enormous quantity of hair over the last visitor he sat on.  He purred all the time and seemed to enjoy being groomed but refused to roll over so that I could do the other side and then began to bat at the comb until I thought I'd better stop, so he remained primed to moult over the next guest to offer him a lap.

Moulted animal hair can have its advantages, though.  One of yesterday's visitors once lent the family car to her son to take his stuff to university in Birmingham, where it was promptly stolen. The police caught four youths running away from the stolen car and arrested a fifth later on.  All denied their involvement, but the evidence was incontrovertible.  The five had dog hair on their clothing, which matched the dalmation hair stuck to every seat of the car.

a tea party

I had friends round for tea today.  I announced yesterday that I would like to use the study instead of the sitting room because it is so much easier to heat at this time of the year, and is fairly tidy at the moment, apart from the sort of normal surface mess of a room that gets used for hobbies besides eating and watching television.  The Systems Administrator vacuumed in the morning, and lit the fire after lunch so that it would be warm.  I moved an extra chair and a little table from the sitting room, washed the teapot which I hadn't used for such a long time that it was dusty, and dug out a milk jug.

I had a box of chocolate Liebnitz but nine biscuits seemed rather mean among four people, even if they were posh biscuits, so I made a honey loaf.  It was rather a long time since I'd done one, and I couldn't remember whether it needed a baffle over it in the bottom oven of the Aga.  Turns out it did, or at least the top caught.  The risk of cooking sponge cakes at too low a temperature is that they don't rise properly, so it was a gamble either way.  It is a good recipe, pleasantly moist, keeping for days and tasting of honey, but lacks kerb appeal even when you don't singe the top because it looks so plain.  When I've made it for club events I've brought back more than half each time, and yet people who do try it like it to the point of asking for the recipe.  You melt four ounces of soft brown sugar, five of butter and six of honey with a tablespoon of water, add two eggs and seven ounces of self raising flour, and cook it in a lined two pound loaf tin at 180 C for fifty minutes to an hour depending on your oven.  Use a large saucepan to melt the butter and you can mix the eggs and flour in the same pan, leaving you with very little washing up.

My friends insisted they had never been in the study before.  One of them knew the people we bought the house from, and she had never been in the study when they lived here either.  It seems to be a fundamental feature of domestic architecture, holding across time and cultures, that dwellings have a hierarchy of rooms.  There are relatively smart rooms, used for formal entertaining or business, and there are less smart (and possibly warmer and cosier) rooms, used for informal entertaining or reserved for private family use.  Human nature being what it is we get a buzz from either the first time we are promoted to dinner in the grand dining room after a diet of coffee in the kitchen, or invited into the private sanctum and allowed to see the books and personal clutter instead of the tidy face of the house normally presented to outsiders.  Upstairs is another country, rarely visited in other people's houses except for the loo.

Our Ginger who adores visitors planted himself firmly in the lap in front of the fire, and spent the rest of tea purring massively and moulting prodigiously.  The artists formerly known as kittens believe that visitors are an appalling concept, and made themselves scarce.  Even after our friends had departed and the kitties had been called in for their supper, Mr Cool was unnerved by the sight of the tea tray, and ran out into the garden when the Systems Administrator moved the little table back into the sitting room.  The spare chair is still here in the study.  We thought we'd better wait to move it until Mr Cool was out.

who's the lucky birthday boy

The kittens are one year old today.  None of our other cats have had birthdays.  We must have known the date the Maine Coons were born because it must have been somewhere on their pedigree papers, but we never knew exactly when any of our other cats were born.  We don't even know for sure which year Our Ginger was born, since he gradually moved in with us as a grown cat, and our first splendid black cat came from an RSPCA rescue centre.  But the kittens came with a note from the kitten rescue place giving details of the worm treatment they'd received, and stating that they were born on 2 March.  It seemed too mean to celebrate their birthday when Our Ginger didn't have one, so from now on 2 March is his official birthday.

On Tuesday I roasted a chicken, so that yesterday I could boil the carcass and today they could have bits of cold boiled chicken for lunch.  The remaining flesh always seems pretty mere to me after it's been simmered for stock for eight hours, but cats love it.  I sang Happy Birthday to them as they ate it, but they ignored me.  The Systems Administrator laughed.

Now they are a year old they are officially cats according to the Channel 5 Secret Life of Kittens.  I have told them that they are supposed to be sensible from now on.  The recent episode in which a pair of binoculars that had got left on the sitting room window sill behind the curtain was swept to the floor and broke should be the last of its kind (keeping binoculars on the window sill is not especially odd when the main thing you want them for is to look at birds out of the window).  I expect to be able to leave paper handkerchief boxes the right way up without coming downstairs in the morning and finding that somebody has excavated all the hankies out of it.

They will probably be known as the kittens, or at least the kitties, for a while yet because we need a collective term that excludes Our Ginger when discussing acts of feline vandalism that he had nothing to do with.  Our Ginger has been too sensible to destroy any binoculars or boxes of tissues for a long while now.  I must admit that, birthday notwithstanding, I am not holding my breath in the expectation that The Artists Formerly Known as Kittens are about to become sober and upstanding citizens, and did not celebrate their anniversary by unpacking the china that's been safely tucked away in a box in the spare bedroom since they were let out of the study.

They have turned into lovely cats, even if the odd thing does still get broken.  Mr Cool has grown into a big beast, with long elegant legs and tail like an engraving by Eric Ravilious.  Mr Fluffy is immensely sweet-natured, purrs as soon as you pick him up every time, even if he wasn't asking to be picked up and you have interrupted him in the middle of doing something else, and washes his brothers and Our Ginger zealously.  Mr Fidget bounces relentlessly, in and out of the cat door and round and round the room when all the others are quietly snoozing.  He might prod one of them to try and get a reaction.  He can't sit still long enough to sit in a lap, barely manages to stop wriggling long enough to be picked up, and has no sense of time passing so he wanders off just before mealtimes, but he likes human company and hangs around with us.  Mr Cool has an impressive grasp of time.  He goes out as soon as he has had his breakfast, but will come strolling in at ten to twelve for his lunch at noon, and at five to four for his tea.

Roll the clock back to June last year, when Mr Fluffy kept hissing at us after trying to hide from us along with Mr Fidget inside the fitted bookcases, while Mr Cool was mute with misery and wouldn't purr or venture on to our laps at all for three or four weeks, and Our Ginger howled and tried to escape each time he was shown the interlopers, and you see that things have come on a long way. And Our Ginger finally has a birthday.

a question of priorities

I had to go into Colchester for a haircut.  My hairdresser exclaimed about how much my hair had grown in six weeks, and I wondered if it really grew that much faster than other people's.  If so I put it down to all the healthy exercise lugging piles of stuff around the garden.  When I got home I moved the bags of Strulch in the back garden from off the grass on to the paving outside the garage.  Each bag weighs 13.5 kilos according to the Strulch website, so the whole pallet's worth of fifty bags weighed 675 kilos, which equates to 1,485 pounds or 106 stone.  No wonder we ached a bit after moving them all out of the gateway yesterday.

Before changing into my gardening clothes I vacuumed the bedroom.  I didn't really feel like it, but there was rather a lot of grit in the carpet, most of which fell out of the hems of my gardening trousers where I rolled them up because I was too idle and impatient to cut off the six surplus inches of material and hem them properly.  Since it was mostly my dirt I thought I had better clean it up, though the vacuum cleaner and I do not have a good relationship.  It cut out and blinked its red light at me twice, demanding that I clear its filter.  I keep thinking I ought to dust the bedroom, but that really is waiting for a wet day.

In the afternoon I sowed seeds in the greenhouse.  The Strulch needs spreading, the prunings need shredding, but I thought I had better try and get the seeds out of their seed packets and into pots so that they could start growing while I was doing everything else.  I don't understand why I only bought two packets of tomato seed, one cherry variety and one long Italian type for cooking.  I have some 'Sungold' left from last year, an F1 variety with eye-wateringly expensive seeds, not to be wasted, and some 'Black Russian' that's getting a bit old, but what else was I planning to do? There is room for six grow bags in the greenhouse, and The Range does a better deal on them if you buy them in pairs, or was it sets of three?  Either way I am sure I meant to do six bags this year.  I should probably trial a second plum variety, to try and find one that does well here.

When I visit private gardens open to the public, not grand acres attached to an historic house but good everyday gardens open for the Yellow Book scheme or the Red Cross, I am surprised at how few of them have a greenhouse or show any signs of propagating activity.  Raising your own plants is such fun, it is surely an intrinsic part of gardening for the true enthusiast.  And if you have a lot of space to fill it is a significantly cheaper way of getting a lot of plants than buying them all from a garden cente or nursery.  And you would have surplus plants to sell to visitors in aid of your chosen charity.  Then at this time of year I remember how much time it takes, with the sowing, the pricking out, the lining up of pots and keeping them watered and weeded until you are ready to use them out in the garden.  I guess maintaining a garden to the standard where you would feel comfortable charging people to go round it is a whole art form in itself, and probably doesn't leave enough time over for much in the way of propagation.

the mulch arrives

The Strulch arrived today.  Strulch stands for straw mulch.  It consists of chopped up straw, treated with a mystery mixture of minerals, that prevents annual weeds from germinating in the borders, helps keep moisture in the soil, and lasts for about two years before rotting down.  It is very useful in the garden, though not so exciting as some new plants or a sculpture would be.  None of the local garden centres stock it.  You can buy it by the bag from Crocus, but it is much cheaper per litre if you buy it by the pallet load direct from the manufacturers.

This must have been my fourth or fifth order, which represents an awful lot of plants and sculptures I could have had, but also an awful lot of hours I could have spent weeding and watering.  I ordered by phone, to make sure I got my five per cent off for ordering before the end of February and to try and give precise delivery instructions.  The company founder, who still answers the phone herself by name when you ring up, balked at the instructions, saying plaintively that the delivery company only gave her a very small box in which to write anything.

It is the delivery stage that is most problematic when buying a pallet of Strulch.  Ordering it is fine. The company founder is always polite and very pleased that you are buying her product, the Strulch always arrives on the day you have specified, the correct amount is always charged to your credit card.  Persuading the carrier to communicate anything about the delivery to the driver is another matter.  Add that to the unpredictable and congested roads of the south east and you have a perfect witches' brew.  There was the time the lorry didn't arrive until dusk due to catastrophic traffic delays on the M25 and the A12, and still had more deliveries to make after unloading ours.  There was no working interior light, and as the driver lowered the tail lift with the pallet on it the whole thing collapsed, scattering bags all over the drive.  There was the time the driver could not get the pallet jack off the tail lift because it bogged down in the gravel, and we ended up breaking down the pallet in situ.  He was jolly grumpy about that.  It does say in the terms and conditions that the driver is not obliged to handle the bags.  There was the driver who drove in forwards, having not read my instructions to reverse up the track because they were taped to the pallet with no copy in the cab.  We had to give up with the tail lift that time and offload every bad individually off the side of the lorry.  I think that driver was quite cheerful about it.  The others blur into a composite of wing mirrors sticking in the eleagnus hedge, and the jack never, ever working on the gravel.  I know they don't, but gravel is what we've got.

I wanted to tell today's driver to reverse up to the house, but the instructions on how to find the house and when to start reversing wouldn't fit in the little box, so I told Strulch that he (or she, but it is always a he) should ring us when they got to the farm and we would come and explain.  The message didn't get through, as usual, and I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen within earshot of the phone which never rang, until at noon I went out to do some weeding by way of a change, still within easy reach of the phone, and instead heard a lorry which seemed not to be part of the lettuce farm because it was getting nearer.  I scooted down the track and explained he would do better to reverse in then he could drive straight out, and it took him ages to turn round at the farm and come back up again.  I was slightly puzzled that the lorry belonged to a firm of sash window specialists, and the driver said that his lorry was being serviced and he had never driven this one before.

Then it took some time to unhook the rear curtain which was very stiff.  Our pallet was impressively guyed with several ropes and seemed to be the only cargo, and the pallet trolley provided was barely able to lift it off the floor.  The driver asked hopefully if the Systems Adminstrator could come up and push.  I stepped well back out of the way, wondering what the penalties for the driver would be if there was any kind of accident, and ready to shout if the SA looked like stepping backwards off the tail lift.  The pallet did not want to be pushed, and the tail lift was barely wide enough for it, but eventually they got the pallet to the ground, and then the trolley would not wheel off the lift, even though we were doing the whole exercise at the gate where it's mostly just tarmac.  I suggested they might be able to topple the whole thing off, since it wouldn't hurt the Strulch, but it was too heavy, and we ended up dragging all fifty bags off by hand as usual.

Fifty one hundred and fifty litre bags of straw mulch make an impressive barricade, and the driver now saw why I was so keen on him reversing in, if he hadn't before, while I was very glad we didn't have to move all fifty bags past the lorry before he could leave.  The SA set about hauling half the bags in the garden trolley over to the concrete by the greenhouse for later use, and I humped the other half round to the back garden to use more immediately, and luckily no other vehicles arrived before we'd finished.  Lunch was very late, and there were no pancakes left over for breakfast even though I'd made a pint of batter.

It rained in the afternoon, and I honestly felt as though I'd lifted enough straw mulch for one day. I'm all set to go, though.  I have fifty bags of Strulch and twenty-five kilos of blood, fish and bone. A full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes.  It's dark and I'm wearing prescription safety glasses. There is going to be some serious mulching going on in the next couple of weeks.

a grand send-off

The funeral was enormous.  We arrived half an hour before time, and had to queue to turn off the main road into the lane leading to the church because cars were stacked up nose to tail all the way down the lane to the farmyard that had been co-opted for overflow parking.  There was somebody on car park duty, and we were relieved to be given a spot that felt as though there was something reasonably solid underneath the mud.

When one of the neighbours told us that there was going to be a marquee at the church I didn't quite believe him, but there was, and even then there was not room for everybody to sit down and there were people standing all around the edges of the marquee.  We watched the service relayed to two screens by the same firm that does the sound system for the Tendring Show every year.  It was a good service.  There is something rather poignant about hearing about the early life of someone you only knew when they were old.  Our late neighbour used to play hockey as a young man, and I'd never have guessed that, or imagined him as tall and as thin as he was when he got married, several years before I was born.

Although the funeral service was held in the local church where he used to be a church warden the commital was held in the crematorium at Colchester, for family only, which gave us a breathing space to go home and dish out the cats' lunch.  As we turned up the track to our house we could see somebody down on the farm in a high visibility jacket frantically waving to us to let us know we were heading in the wrong direction and funeral parking was over here.  We gave it half an hour before walking down to the second marquee in our late neighbour's garden, and it was another hour before the family arrived.

At a big country funeral you see how different strands of life tie together.  We met another of the local beekeepers and his mother who did the teas when he hosted beekeepers' meetings in his garden.  The treasurer of my music society came with his wife.  There were a couple of ladies from my ladies' group, and the owner of the lettuce farm.  Even the caterer was a familiar face because he did the drinks and nibbles for the Dedham party we went to only three weeks ago, at which point our neighbour was still alive and comparatively well.  Our late neighbour was a sociable man who after his wife died went to a lot of trouble hosting lunch parties, including the odd gathering for the locals, and he continued the tradition even in death as we met the couple who live in another of the houses on the farm.  Tucked away down our separate tracks we don't bump into each other very often.

In the afternoon we performed a second social duty and went to help take down the stage in the church left from yesterday's concert.  There were four of us including the guardian of the stage who is eighty-six and has just had an operation for carpal tunnel syndrome so was not supposed to be lifting anything but seemed very keen to carry things anyway in his one good hand, and the stage came down pretty easily.  I persuaded the Systems Administrator to come and help in case we needed the extra muscle power or technical input from a person who was technically competent, since I and my fellow volunteer who writes the programme notes will both cheerfully admit that we are no good with machinery.  It was certainly faster with all of us, but we could have done it without the SA's help if we'd had to.  The chairman, who is forbidden to lift anything at the moment following a cataract operation, appeared just as we were finishing with the offer of tea.

It rained all day, so it's not as if I missed any gardening.  The cats were bored stiff.

out and about

I have been out enough that the cats look reproachful when I come in.  Last night soon after getting back from the lecture on Meconopsis I was off out again to a quiz night, organised by a friend to raise funds for her village hall.  Village halls do sometimes seem to take on a life of their own, existing to host events to raise the money needed to run the hall.  Though this one does hold external events as well.

Our table managed to turn in a solidly middling performance, so we did not win but neither did we disgrace ourselves.  We did very badly on the sports round and not much better on the TV soaps, which was not surprising given that nobody around the table followed either.  I was disappointed that we did so badly on the UK geography round, but they were hard questions.  Would you know which was Britain's second largest cathedral?  Or in which port Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Dickens were born?  I didn't, and I have read a biography of Brunel.  I can't have been paying attention.  But I did know that Pilsner was brewed in Czechoslovakia and make a correct guess that the Midlands town where Marston's was originally brewed was Burton-upon-Trent, based on the fact that I knew that something had been brewed there on account of Burton-upon-Trent's highly suitable water supply, and as nobody else around the table had any better idea then it might have been Marston's.  And I managed to dredge from the depths of my memory the name of the firm that Reginald Perrin worked for.  Sunshine Desserts.  Eleven minutes late, staff difficulties.

The cats were rather hurt when I got home at quarter to eleven and I had to sit up with them for a while.  Then this afternoon I abandoned them again for a music society concert.  I was slightly later than I meant to be getting there because as I got into the car I realised that the chickens were looking at me so had to go and check what it was that they wanted.  They had run out of food and since I couldn't drive off and leave them hungry until after chicken bedtime I had to unlock the front door again and sort out some food for them.  When I arrived at the church it was already quite full, but fortuitously there was a seat vacant next to my former colleague from the plant centre in a spot that gave a proper sight line to the stage, not hidden behind a pillar which is is the risk if you arrive late.

We had a string quartet and they played Shostakovich, Borodin, Beethoven, and two pieces by still living composers who I had never heard of, and one of which I spelled wrong on the website until the chairman pointed it out.  The third movement from Borodin's string quartet no. 2 is one of those bits of music that make you go Oh, this, when you hear it, because it is so familiar.  How it came to be so much more familiar than the other three movements of the same quartet I can't work out. Somebody told me it was used in Kismet, but I haven't seen Kismet so that can't be it.  The Borodin was immensely pretty, and there is nothing wrong with music being attractive sometimes, but it was the Shostakovich that made my skin prickle.  Beethoven was muscular and admirable.

The modern piece by the Irish composer was recognisably Irish and quite interesting, with fragments of My Lagan Love underneath the Radiophonic Workshop effects, or so it seemed to me. Whether it was more interesting than a straight set of Irish airs played by Martin Hayes is a moot point.  The modern piece by a Norwegian composer did not sound Scandinavian at all to me, more like Bloch, but maybe he wasn't aiming to sound Norwegian.

By the time I got home the Systems Administrator had returned from a racing mini-tour taking in Exeter and Chepstow, having had a very nice time but having caught a cold, possibly from getting rained on at Chepstow.  The SA had fed the cats, which was just as well as half way to the concert I remembered I'd forgotten to give them an advance on their tea to tide them over.  Apparently they were pleased to see the SA, a fresh face after two and half days of nobody but me.

dreams of blue poppies

I went to the monthly Suffolk Plant Heritage meeting this afternoon.  The lecture was by Christopher Grey-Wilson, former senior Kew botanist, plant hunter, authority on alpines, cyclamen guru, and expert extraordinaire.  He was talking on the subject of blue poppies, which don't really grow awfully well in East Anglia, but it doesn't hurt to dream of things you aren't going to do yourself.  After all, I enjoy the art documentaries on BBC4 despite the fact that I am never going to own a Rembrandt or a Rothko.

Christopher Grey-Wilson assured us that we could grow a few species of Meconopsis even in the dry flatlands, but since his suggested method involved half barrels filled with leaf mould over a base layer of manure I thought I probably wouldn't try.  I don't really have a sheltered, semi-shaded spot within easy reach of a tap where I could stand the half barrel, assuming that I had a half barrel, which I haven't.  I could always get one, or make do with the old log basket that's been sitting in the garage since the bottom fell out, in case it came in useful as a planter lined with an old compost bag turned black side out.  But I could not conjure up the damp air they would prefer. Blue poppies, and the white and yellow and purple and red flowered species of Meconopsis, are children of the monsoon.  They would like a great deal of rain between May and June, and to be shrouded in mist.  They are not going to feel at home in the Clacton coastal strip, the driest bit of land in England.

They all come from north Asia, the great mountainous sweep of Tibet, the western reaches of China, Bhutan, the far north of India and northern Myanmar.  The species from really high altitudes, eighteen or twenty thousand feet, are almost impossible to grow in the UK even for the experts at Kew.  Some species from lower altitudes and relatively low rainfall areas will grow beautifully in Scottish and Irish gardens and the Lake District.  I have seen blue poppies growing in an Essex garden, and their owner was very proud of them, but they did not honestly luxuriate like the ones in a photograph of a Scottish garden shown to us by Christopher Grey-Wilson in his talk.

Many species are not perennial even if you can get them to grow.  A plant that takes between two and six years to form a rosette up to a yard across before throwing up a magnificent spike of flowers, following which it promptly dies, is not going to be easy to incorporate into a normal smallish garden designed for low to medium maintenance.  I wish now I had asked Christopher Grey-Wilson what, if anything, people who grow them use to fill the gaps while the rosettes are building up to full size, since you would not want anything that competed with the poppies or that was so rare and precious that you would mind if the poppies' expanding rosettes smothered it.  The lovely little red flowered Meconopsis punicea, star of the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, almost always dies after flowering and to add insult to injury does not set seed in the Essex climate.

The cheerful little Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica, has been reclassified by the botanists and is no longer considered a member of the genus.  I have never introduced them to our garden because their reputation for reckless self seeding makes even me nervous, and because I am not sure I am so keen on that shade of yellow that I want it everywhere all summer.

So it was an enjoyable talk, and it was nice to catch up with a former colleague from the plant centre whom I hadn't seen for a while, but I think I will go on enjoying blue poppies in the pages of magazines and at Chelsea, and leave the challenge of growing them to other people.

shredding and sowing

As I pulled up the bathroom blind this morning it was a relief to see all the trees still standing in the wake of Storm Doris.  Overall the damage hasn't been too bad.  Some roof felt is flapping on the Systems Administrator's summerhouse, but it was due to be re-roofed with corrugated sheets anyway since the SA got fed up with mending it after gales.  Some felt has gone on my pot shed as well, which was more of a blow since the pot shed was not scheduled for a new roof this summer. The battens we installed to stop the felt ballooning up and ripping in a gale had snapped in one corner, so they must have rotted.  An acrylic pane popped out of the greenhouse roof but did not break and can be slid in again.  And that was about it.  I feared worse.

I spent the morning processing hedge trimmings between firewood and smaller bits for shredding. Truthfully I'd rather have been doing something that felt more like gardening, but I thought I'd better show my appreciation of the hours the Systems Administrator has put into cutting the hedge rather than appearing to ignore the meadow entirely.  Work got off to a slow start since pieces of willow from the far bottom corner of the back garden had got mixed up with everything else in the muddle of branches round the bonfire heap.  Willow doesn't go through our rather elderly shredder properly and wraps itself around the insides in long strips instead of emerging as chunky chips of wood ready to be used as mulch around the compost bins.  It is possible to tell the difference between willow branches and the rest, hawthorn, hazel, dogwood and field maple when they are all out of leaf, but it is not the easiest thing to do in a hurry.  The buds and habit of growth and texture of the bark are all different, but the buds are difficult to see clearly when you are as short sighted and middle aged as I am and wearing distance glasses instead of varifocals.

By lunchtime I'd got half a dozen big bags of chippings and made a pitifully small dent on the trail of branches in the meadow, but I decided that would have to do for the time being.  After lunch I set about starting to sow seeds in the greenhouse, after a long preamble moving pots around to make room on the bench for my new propagating cases.  Those Fritillaria meleagris that were in full growth were stood outside on the concrete, where I am hoping Mr Cool will defend them from attack by rodents.  Some bulbs had gone mouldy in their pots despite my best efforts not to over water them.  It is faintly surprising that they are so fussy about their watering regime in pots when you think that in the wild they grow in damp river meadows, but they are.

I rinsed the inside of the heated propagating case, wiped it with kitchen towel and sprayed it with Milton for luck.  Mould is one of the big problems when trying to raise plants from seed in a crowded multi-purpose greenhouse.  It is disheartening when nothing even comes up while a fuzzy layer of fungus spreads over the surface of the compost.  Mind you, sometimes you can see it started on the coats of the seeds themselves.  I used to water the seed pots with the copper based fungicide Cheshunt compound, but it was withdrawn a few years ago, and there is nothing now marketed to amateurs to treat pots of seeds.  Good hygiene and sparse sowing to avoid overcrowding the seedlings are about the best you can do.

I hope the seed compost will be all right.  Seed composts need to be low in nutrients and drain well while simultaneously not drying right out too easily.  I bought a new bag of a John Innes type compost last week, and fluffed it with my fingers to break up any lumps while avoiding tamping it down to leave the air in it, but was rather surprised at how much it settled in the pots as soon as I watered it.  I am using new pots as well, and only sowing half the packet if there are plenty of seeds in it so I can have another go if the first sowing fails.  I enjoy growing things from seed, and it is a great way of getting lots of plants if you need to cover the ground and of obtaining things you won't see offered for sale in most garden centres, but I am more relaxed about it a couple of weeks after sowing when I can see the first tiny shoots emerging and no mass outbreak of mould, and know that the compost was OK and I got the watering right.

stormbound

Storm Doris put paid to outdoor work today, and is upsetting the cats.  Strong winds always make them jumpy and reluctant to go outside.  Instead they spent the day mostly indoors, staring out of the window, sitting in boxes, wandering around aimlessly, creeping up to me for reassurance, and rioting in turn.

I occupied myself for the first part of the morning clearing out a cache of geriatric marmalade from the garage.  I made a great deal too much in February 2011.  I don't know what I was thinking of, except that I like making marmalade and I think the first batch had come out a bit too dark and I was keen for another go.  After six years what is left had darkened to a colour close to treacle, and crystallised rock hard on to the walls of the jars.  It would have been nice just to chuck the whole lot into a bin bag, but good citizen that I am I felt obliged to scoop out what I could and put it in the food recycling bin, and put the jars to soak until I could get the solidified shards of marmalade out prior to putting the jars in the glass recycling skip.

Then I began to sort out our CD collection, thus marking myself down as deeply nerdy on at least two counts.  But it needed sorting out because it had got to the point where it was very difficult to find whatever you wanted to listen to, because as I kept buying CDs work in the same genre and even by the same artist got split between different shelves and boxes.  And as I intend to go on buying CDs I needed space to slot future purchases in.  I know it wholly unnecessary and I could buy downloads instead and help save the planet, since I am so anxious about recycling jam jars and old marmalade, but I like CDs.  I like owning a physical thing that I can put in a machine and it will work, most of the time.  I still have all my old vinyl as well.  Some of my CDs date from the earliest days of the technology and they still play, contrary to some dire predictions, while no computer I have ever owned has lasted more than five years tops.  I know I could store downloads in the cloud, but it seems so much easier just to have a small box on a shelf.  And I am not the most computer literate person and can imagine myself getting in a real muddle by the time I'd bought downloads from Presto Classical and Amazon and direct from artists websites, trying to integrate them all into one collection and keep tabs of what was being safeguarded by whom.  I trust Amazon to look after the books on my Kindle, but they won't be interested in curating music bought from other sources.

As if to preempt my thought that I should sort out the CDs the cats got the ball rolling by tipping over one of the stands the CDs live in.  Once I'd picked those up off the floor I thought I might as well keep going, and took all of them from their various shelves, racks, boxes and carousels, and spread them out over the floor in a sort of cognitive map of music.  Early music, Baroque music, Irish folk, Scottish folk, English folk.  West African folk.  Welsh folk. German classical composers. Twentieth century British composers.  1970s and 1980s rock and pop.  Folk rock.  Klezmer. Comedy. Rhythm and Blues.  Blues.  Music of the American Civil War.  1990s pop, some slightly regrettable. Touches of Country.  The frankly unclassifiable.  In general I'm not keen on putting art in boxes, but there needs to be a system.  If you were looking for Gerry Rafferty or Trio Medieval or Satie how would you know where to look?

I am going to need more boxes, that's the conclusion.  Trying to file music or books at ninety-eight per cent shelf capacity is about as inefficient as trying to run a hospital with ninety-eight per cent bed occupancy.  It can't be done.  I stole a couple of boxes the cats had been sleeping in to hold the overflow until I can get to The Range and buy some more of their useful brown faux leather boxes.

Among the marmalade I found a jar of something labelled Apple Chutney 2009.  I don't know what was in it, but since emptying the jar and trying to rinse it I can't get the smell off my hands however much I wash them.