mixed media

This morning I wrote the first draft of the piece on yesterday's garden visit.  I was gratified to see that the Explore Your Body Clock page on the BBC website confirmed my belief that the ideal time to do this sort of work is in the morning, the mind being most alert between 09.00 and 11.59 am. Once again, the allotted word count of six hundred or just over felt stingy, and I was regretful about all the interesting snippets I'd learnt and would not be able to share, but I got the bones of it down. After a slightly late start messing around with other things, it took me until lunchtime.

I looked again after lunch at my two pages of A4 spaced at one and a half lines, which is roughly what six hundred words equates to, and decided to leave revisions until the next day.  I have never found the graveyard slot after lunch conducive to clear thought, and looking at the BBC website I see that's because from 12.00 to 14.59 I am programmed to experience a biological siesta, with a post lunchtime dip in alertness reflecting my increased gastric activity.  OK, we only had cold meat and salad for lunch, but it certainly felt like siesta time.  I need to concentrate for the revisions, not just to make sure that I haven't accidentally left out any key points, but also to get the prose as clear and concise as it can be.  Each eight words used where three would do are taking up space that could otherwise make room for extra content.

Perhaps I should set myself a word limit on the blog.  Though I don't have time, when it's a hobby to be fitted in as and when.  Cutting paragraphs down so as to express yourself as simply and accurately as you possibly can is much harder work than allowing yourself to witter on at whatever length suits you.  The first requires skill and thought, while the latter is mere self-expression, and can be as flabby and indulgent as you choose.

Later on I had a cheerful email from the bookings secretary of the garden club I've been writing the presentation for, confirming their meeting and enquiring whether I wanted a couple of tables.  That was my cue to break it to her that this time I would be talking entirely from slides.  It is something we considered when she was originally going to book me for February, before deciding that month should be given to an address on pruning.  More to the point, I am no longer in a position to borrow the plants.  It's strange how resistant people can be to new ideas, since when I started doing talks, relatives whose only experience of garden talks was slide based wanted me to get a projector, and now they have got used to me talking from plants they ask whether I could not still borrow the plants, even though I no longer work for the plant centre.  I couldn't.  Apart from the faff of the twenty-two mile round trip to collect them and again to return the unsold ones, I don't want to take any responsibility for the performance of plants supplied by a business I am no longer anything to do with, and I don't suppose my former employers would be happy with me wandering in and out taking and returning stock unsupervised (though they might be.  On my last ever day at work I was left to till up and lock up by myself, my colleague having to leave early and my employer having other fish to fry on a Sunday afternoon).

I will admit, it was a deliberate decision on my part to leave telling the garden club organiser about the slides until near the time of the talk.  I thought that if I contacted her well in advance, informing her of the planned change in format and asking whether that was OK, she would probably start thinking of all sorts of reasons why it wasn't.  If, on the other hand, I presented it as a fait accompli and one that we had previously discussed, that would make the talk better, she probably wouldn't have the energy to start running around looking for an alternative speaker at two or three weeks' notice.  Cunning as serpents, us horticultural journalists.  If she throws a wobbly I'll know I've miscalculated.

towers and gardens

I went to see another garden this morning to do a write-up for the magazine.  It turned out to belong to a charming and resourceful owner, and was a good garden, and that's all I'm going to say on the subject at the moment.  I didn't even try to start my piece this afternoon, having learned from past efforts that the best approach is to save it until the following morning, then sit down straight after breakfast and produce the first draft in one continuous run.

It was in a pretty village just outside Bury St Edmunds, and rather than risk the vagaries of the A14, I took the A134 past Sudbury to Bury.  The A134 is growing on me.  It is not an especially fast road, but goes through very pretty countryside, and while the initial grind through Colchester and past the north station is a drag, it's more direct than looping all the way up to the Copdock interchange at Ipswich.  About two-thirds of way between Sudbury and Bury it passes through the gloriously named village of Bradfield Combust.  I managed to get a glance in at the village sign, as I sailed through at a sedate thirty, and saw it incorporated flames into the design.  Something burned, evidently, or at least local legend had it that there was a fire of some sort.  I was curious enough when I got home to check on Wikipedia (what would we do without it), and while the precise nature of the conflagration is open to question, and whether it really involved the local hall, certainly the name has existed since the very early 1300s.

I reached the garden with oodles of time to spare, having allowed for traffic jams, diversions and simply getting lost, none of which happened.  The house I was bound for did not actually have a name sign, as is often the way with rural houses (ivy has grown over our sign and needs chopping back), and as today was not a Yellow Book open day, the comforting advice in the booklet that the garden would be signposted from the road did not hold.  Since I had plenty of time in hand, and didn't want to spook the owners by sitting outside their gate in my car like a stalker, I went on up the road to see what there was to see, and to check that there wasn't another house fitting the description even more exactly just a couple of hundred yards further on.

I'd made a note in my route plan that if I got to the church of Saint Nicholas then I'd gone too far.  I soon did get to the church, without passing any more likely looking houses at all, which rather confirmed that I'd found the right place first time.  To my delight, the church was open.  It is an absolute sweetie of a church, with a round tower sporting fine, plain Norman arches, and a remarkable absence of Victorian mucking about.  I've seen another round tower church relatively recently, at Lamarsh, but that was locked.  A notice in the porch said that there were around 180 round tower churches in the UK, mostly in East Anglia, and sure enough they have their own society. That, and a rumbling dispute about how many of the towers are really Saxon, or whether they are later, and why they were built round and not square in the first place.  The Round Tower Churches Society, patron HRH the Prince of Wales, looks a useful body, and I can think of worse projects than to set out to visit every one of the one hundred and eighty something round tower churches.

song for Europe

We watched the Eurovision Song Contest last night.  It was the first time I'd seen it in I don't know how many years.  Looking at the list of past UK entries on Wikipedia, the last one I have a positive memory of hearing was Lynsey de Paul and Mike Moran's Rock Bottom, and that was in 1977.  I have a sort of vague recollection of a media furore in the year when the UK act was hopelessly out of key, but it turns out that that was eleven years ago.  I shouldn't laugh, the duo scored nul points, were dropped by their record company, had their album pulled, and split up.  How fickle is fate and the quest for fame.

We were only two out of a hundred and eighty million people around the globe who watched it, so were in good or at least plentiful company, but were probably justified in our decision not to bother to pick up the phone and vote for any of the acts.  I wouldn't have known who to vote for anyway, I found the whole thing so odd.  Was I supposed to root for the best musical effort (in which case the field would narrow down considerably) or the act that most entered into the spirit of Eurovision?

Why exactly was a man running on the spot in a giant hamster wheel while his female compatriot belted out a song?  Why did the anxious young man who looked like a younger and thinner version of Ed Miliband wearing an Eastern European assassin's coat score so many points?  Why was one act accompanied by a woman in red trousers swinging on a trapeze?  And why, oh why were the Greeks bouncing on a trampoline, accompanied by a gymnast?  Or the Russian twins performing with their hair tied together, standing on a giant see saw, and wearing melon coloured dressing gowns so hideous you felt their costume designer must have been a closet Ukrainian nationalist?

I was sorry the Icelanders didn't score a few more points.  I quite liked their song, in a noisy, retro way, though I'd have been bored stiff by it if I had to listen to it more than about five times, but I really liked their act.  The coloured suits were great, and their puppyish enthusiasm, and the intriguing claim by Graham Norton that one of them was an MP.  When you looked at them, they were all clearly too old to be jumping up and down in garish telly tubby themed suits, and I had a beautiful vision that in their day jobs they must all be accountants and lawyers.

There should have been a prize for best dancing, so that the Danes could have won it.  The Danish dancing was so good, it put all the earlier efforts in the shade.  The French do not really get pop music, we decided.  I don't know what the Germans thought they were doing, but somebody should have stopped it.  I thought the Norwegian contestant should have stuck to carpentry, and the Swedish power balladeer blonde was just very, very dull.  The Swiss might have been good, if they had stopped mucking about and cut out the whistling.  The Maltese entry was quite good, but not good enough to make me want to buy their latest album as an import, or even to check whether they have any albums.

The Dutch entry came as a surprise after all that had gone before.  I rather like country music, without having any, beyond Lyle Lovett, and a Kenny Rogers CD won as a raffle prize about fifteen years ago and still not taken out of its plastic wrapper.  I sometimes listen to the R2 Thursday night country music programme, and find myself enjoying the guitar intros, and then not liking the vocals.  However, I liked the Dutch song all the way through, a model of restrained economy.  I could imagine that if I had the album I would still be playing it occasionally in a decade's time, if the rest of it was in the same mould as their Eurovision entry.  I was even more surprised when the judges liked it as well, and it came second.

Beaten by the bearded lady, but who could grudge her the victory?  I thought it was a very encouraging marker for progress towards equal rights, and that gold dress and belting power ballad were certainly in the spirit of Eurovision.  I won't be buying the album, but well done her.  As to why the female member of the host team was dressed in a nude coloured fairy costume, and wandering about during the hiatus while the votes were counted offering food from home to random contestants, I couldn't tell you.  Or who any of the hosts were, or why one of them kept talking about China.  Still, it was good fun.  We might even watch it again next year.  It forms a nice seasonal counterbalance to The Last Night of the Proms.

moth attack

We have an outbreak of clothes moth.  Or to be accurate, at this stage the Systems Administrator has an outbreak of clothes moth, but I have no reason to believe that the moths will confine themselves to the SA's wardrobe.  I noticed one day that one of the SA's sweaters was peppered with holes.  The SA insisted that the damage had happened ages ago, but I was not convinced that the moths, having found a cosy berth in somebody's wardrobe, would have left of their own accord.

Fortunately, when I looked at my own small but cherished collection of alpaca and other luxury knits, the moths hadn't yet made it to my side of the room.  I have had some of those sweaters for fifteen years.  They are beyond fashion, and I fully intend them to last me for the rest of my natural days. I stocked up in a panic on lavender scented insecticide sachets from Tesco, which was all that Tesco seemed to offer in the way of moth treatment, searched the John Lewis website in vain, and struck gold with Robert Dyas.  Robert Dyas online customers obviously suffer from clothes moth big time, and I was able to equip myself with more cedar wood balls and cedar rings for slipping over the necks of my coat hangers, plus slow release orange, unscented, insecticide impregnated spheres, which will apparently turn white when they have run out of juice, more hanging insecticide tabs, some poisoned paper (not sure why I ordered that) and a can of spray.

I put a slightly random assortment of repellents and poisons in every drawer and cupboard, and gave them all a squirt of spray for good measure.  I don't greatly like using insecticide in the house, but we have done in the past, faced with flea outbreaks, and I like the idea of having to throw out most of my clothes even less.  As a natural fibre enthusiast I only possess five garments, at an outside estimate, that are not liable to be eaten by moths, and two of those are anoraks.

The SA's wardrobe still worried me.  We must be in the minority among English (or Western) couples in that I do not buy the SA's clothes.  I do not organise the SA's clothes.  Autonomous adults are in charge of their own clothes, and beyond making encouraging noises about how nice the SA's linen suit looks, and more generally what excellent taste in indigo workwear Monty Don possesses, I do not interfere.  But faced with the moth outbreak I could no longer view the dense piles of randomly mixed clothing in the SA's wardrobe with equanimity.  Spraying the front face of the wall of garments with insecticide was not enough.

I did ask permission to excavate the wardrobe, to be polite, though I fear it was a face saving exercise for both of us.  In the circumstances, a refusal to let me take everything out of the wardrobe and sort through it for moth holes would have gone down about as well as a farmer suggesting to the Man from the Ministry that he'd rather not have his cattle tested for foot and mouth in the middle of a foot and mouth outbreak, thank you very much.

I was justified in my suspicions.  There were quite a few holey sweaters in there, which are now all in black dustbin bags waiting to go to the dump.  Moths seem to prefer finer grade V neck pullovers, of the type you could wear under a jacket, over chunky knits, but to my irritation they had eaten a hole in the middle of the stomach of a rather good Scandi knit that was a present from me, long before Scandinavian noir became trendy.  Also they do not eat acrylic.  I was sorely tempted to add the acrylic jumpers I found to the contents of the bin bags, but remembered the autonomy of the individual and folded them up and put them away again.  All the knitwear that survived is now headed for the wash, though the hand wash only pile will take a while to get through, owing to lack of drying space.

The great wardrobe investigation also demonstrated that the SA possesses, at a conservative estimate, over three dozen pairs of mostly shabby cotton trousers, of which approximately two and a half dozen have probably not made it out of the wardrobe in the past decade.  The SA has offered to sort through these himself.

I, meanwhile, have just remembered that I have a genuine mid 1980s (and therefore vintage) Katherine Hamnett riding jacket in pure wool, soft red, with a red silk lining, and cuffs with real buttonholes, hanging in the spare bedroom wardrobe.  Time to apply another liberal dose of insecticide. 

Rock's peony

The Paeonia rockii in the back garden is just coming into bloom.  I picked one vast, rounded, almost-open flower this morning, and brought it into the kitchen to admire it more closely, setting it in solitary splendour in a glass vase, a glistening pink globe the size of my fist.  Over the next forty minutes or so the tissue paper flowers unfolded into a flower so wide that when I placed my palm over it, my outstretched fingers and thumb couldn't reach the edges.

It is an extraordinary thing, Rock's peony, even more so when you consider that it is a straight species.  It's not even as though a thousand years of plant breeding had gone into producing such an exotic beauty.  No, its ancestors simply grew wild in the mountains of China.  The flower has two rows of petals, with notched and ruffled edges, and deep purple blotches at the base.  Some flare upwards, while others curl down, giving the whole a lively air of movement.  In the very centre of the flower is a mysterious, cream-coloured boss with a crimped and pointed top, as if it were wrapped in tissue paper crumpled to a peak, and surrounding the boss are multiple rows of stamens, consisting of huge, burnt yellow anthers on purple filaments.

The flower is scented, a strong, sweet, spicy smell.  The single bloom is enough to perfume a room, and when I came in later on from doing some shopping, as soon as I opened the front door I was hit by the mixture of freshly ground coffee beans and Paeonia rockii.

It is without doubt one of the most fabulous plants I know, as exciting as the great tree magnolias, and with the flowers carried on a more domestic scale.  If you can find a space a couple of metres across then you can give a home to Rock's peony, if you can get one.  Normal rules of supply and demand don't seem to apply, and plants tend to be hard to come by and hideously expensive, the high price apparently never stimulating some enterprising nursery grower to make lots more. Perhaps they are difficult to propagate.  My plant grows happily in normal soil, on the light side but not either the lightest sand or the stickiest clay.  It faces west, with a hint of north in it, so does not get full sun, but is sheltered from the early morning sun and the worst of the wind.  According to Wikipedia the plants are extremely cold tolerant, on the other hand tree peonies come into leaf early, and I have read that it's better to avoid putting them in an east facing position.

After the amazing flowers are over the plant is frankly dull for the rest of the year, but I forgive it that.  By then it has more than earned its space.

man and machine

We are each grappling with technology, in our separate ways.  I'm booked to talk to a garden club next month about how to garden so as to be friendly to bees, and since I can't borrow plants from the plant centre, it will have to be with slides.  I was originally going to do it with slides anyway, since I was due to go in February when most of the plants I wanted to talk about would have been unavailable or not doing anything, but they switched me to June so that they could have a talk on pruning in February.  And at least with slides I'll know in advance what I'm talking about, instead of finding on the day that the plant centre has run out of some key plant I want to talk about.

It's a great deal easier giving a talk when you've written it yourself, and chosen visual aids that will help you remember what you are supposed to be talking about as each slide comes up.  The internet is a marvellous resource for finding pictures of practically anything, honey bees on the comb, a close-up of one bee with a pollen load on her leg, a bumble bee nest, an aerial view of suburban gardens, you can find an illustration for practically anything, given a little lateral thinking.  Finding a picture for Nectar proved quite hard, given that it is a practically colourless substance flowers exude in small quantities, which wouldn't be obvious from a picture of a whole flower, but a hummingbird hovering in front of an exotic flower did nicely, with a snappy title.  I'm keeping the words to a minimum, just enough to act as cues for me, since this is meant to be an entertaining evening for the audience, not death by Powerpoint.

I'd kept notes from the last time I put a slide presentation together, and after checking with the Systems Administrator I'm fairly sure I'm doing the right thing.  If, when I've finished and the SA transfers the whole thing to a memory stick for me in JPEG format, it doesn't run correctly then that will be a blow.  Which is another good reason for getting on with it now and not leaving it until the week before the club meets.

Meanwhile the SA has invested in a bean-to-cup coffee machine.  It grinds the beans up, makes coffee, and has a spout for heating and frothing milk, a multitude of dials, and a little electronic display that tells you what it is doing or what it wants you to do.  I am still slightly terrified of it, but there again I haven't invested any time in reading the booklet, being busy with the presentation.  I bought three different packets of coffee beans in readiness for its arrival, in the mild state of panic of someone who normally lives on instant, or tea, and knows that they know nothing about coffee beyond ordering a latte in Pret or a filter coffee after a meal, and the French roast we have tried so far is ferociously strong.  I am actually more excited by the prospect of infinite supplies of hot frothy milk, and by extension proper drinking chocolate and Horlicks.

It will have to be absolutely the last gadget, though, because we are running out of space on the kitchen worktops.  I suggested banishing the toaster, since the Aga makes very good toast (provided you watch it), but that didn't get us any further forward, since the coffee machine can't go where the toaster is because it is too tall to fit under the cupboard on the wall.  The ice cream machine can't budge over to where the toaster is either because it needs clear space on either side for the air to circulate when it's running.  At the moment the only place we can see for it to go is on the one worktop that doesn't currently have any equipment living on it.  If I had to lose one piece of kit it would be the microwave, which we use once in a blue moon, but that's in a corner without headroom enough for the coffee maker.

It is a very First World problem.

sand surivors

I did my random act of kindness today, donating a paper hankie to the stranger in the Waitrose car park who asked me hopefully if I had a tissue on me, love.  He was standing by his car parked next to mine, a frail and elderly man propped on two sticks, and since I had just bought a box of hankies I helpfully rifled through my shopping, found the box, opened it, and gave him a tissue.  He said he only wanted the one.  I expected him to blow his ancient nose or wipe his eyes with it, and the beautiful atmosphere of neighbourly goodwill was rather punctured when he tottered around his car on his sticks, and began to use the tissue to polish the rear bumper of the Mini in the next space along, which I deduced he must have scraped while attempting to park.  I left him to it.

In the garden I am still working my way along the long bed, weeding and mulching, except that I have run out of spent mushroom compost, so today was weeding only.  I have got to one of the most barren spots in the entire property, where the soil is so light, sandy and mere that it's amazing it manages to support any plant life at all.  One species that thrives is a fine leaved annual weedy grass, whose name I do not know except that it is not Poa annua.  It is mainly a weed of light soil, not really bothering me in the back garden where the soil is heavier, and generous lashings of mulch and Strulch reduce it considerably, though of course that technique is no help in the gravel. It seeds itself in among the crowns of other plants, and will pop up through any gaps in the canopy of supposedly ground covering plants.

Verbascum nigrum also seeds itself generously, but as it is a handsome plant and I am very glad for anything ornamental that will volunteer to live in such meagre conditions, I leave the seedlings in peace, apart from pulling out those that have planted themselves right on top of any cherished specimens.  It throws up spikes of deep yellow flowers that are a good pollen and nectar source for insects, and sets lavish seed, which provides food for the birds and lots more mulleins.  Plants may behave as biennials, or short lived perennials, and in fact on our incredibly light soil are not all that short lived.  I recommend it highly to anyone racking their brains for things that will flourish on the lightest sand in a low rainfall area.

Dorycnium hirsutum is another drought resistant self seeder.  This is a small, hairy, silvery shrub, yet another member of the pea family, which bears little pinky pea flowers in the summer.  It used to be called Lotus hirsutus.  Plants are not always the longest lived, and branches on mine have died back during cold winters, for all that Burncoose rate it down to minus 15 C, but there will be more plants coming up somewhere, if it likes you.

The sand has been too much (or rather not enough) for the Sedum I've tried there, and a mixture of poor soil conditions and winter cold has finally seen off a Callistemon salignus.  I levered the remains of the rootball up with a fork, and there wasn't much resistance.  Perovskia isn't coping either.  I was deceived by its grey foliage into thinking that it would be happy in dry places, but have since come to the conclusion that it likes good living.  Certainly there were some huge and fine specimens at Scampston, a Yorkshire garden planted on heavy clay.  Centaurea 'John Coutts' is undecided, even though the RHS website says it prefers poor soil.  I suppose there's poor, and then there's poor.  This knapweed has jolly, mid pink thistle flowers.  My plants got off to a slightly iffy start in that the chickens insisted on dust bathing on them for their first season, but I don't think that's the only reason why they're struggling.

Artemisia ludovicana produces quite attractive upright stems of silvery leaves, but has the twin disadvantages of running at the root fast enough to engulf other things you'd rather it didn't while your back is turned, while not forming a dense enough canopy to suppress weeds.  I suspect it would be better on richer soil, since it possesses the capacity to grow a metre tall, according to Wikipedia, and mine don't make a third of that.

a swarm of bees in May

This afternoon I watched a swarm of bees disappearing into the wall of my house, and I have a nasty feeling that they are probably mine.  Well, they are certainly mine now, in the sense that they have taken up residence in my house.  Years ago at the county beekeeping conference a barrister who also kept bees gave a thoroughly entertaining talk about bees and the law, which covered the rights of a beekeeper who had lost a swarm out of their hive to retain ownership of the absconding bees.  I forget the details, but vaguely recall that keeping the swarm in your sight at all times came into it.  I have a sort of feeling that you are supposed to bang a saucepan during the chase, but maybe I invented that bit.  Nobody appeared hot foot in pursuit of these bees, banging a saucepan or otherwise, so wherever they came from I have now taken possession, but I darkly suspect they came out of one of my hives.

I've been worried since the failed inspection when I couldn't find the queens in the colonies that were showing signs of swarming, and had to resort to simply splitting each colony in two.  I knew then that it wasn't a very good solution, but didn't have a better bad idea.  I don't think it's worked this time.  Bad ideas don't always.

I was suspicious that something was going on earlier in the day when I had to keep evicting bees from the hall and the kitchen.  The apiary is at quite a distance from the house, and they don't normally come inside.  Mid afternoon I noticed a number of bees fussing around the timber cladding on the south east corner, just above the way through to the patio (or terrace) and darkly surmised what was to come, but there was nothing I could do about it.  At about five o'clock, which is surprisingly late for a swarm to be on the move, I heard that tell-tale humming sound as I was kneeling weeding the long bed.  A swarm of bees in flight makes a noise like nothing else, a dense, busy drone unlike the steady buzzing you hear if you stand underneath a large tree that's being worked by bees.  I looked up, and sure enough there was a swirling mass of bees over the gravel at the southern end of the house.

It isn't so unusual to get swarms entering gaps and cracks in buildings.  The space behind the timber cladding of our first floor, or the gap under the floorboards, or wherever they have gone, will not be so very different to a hollow tree or a crack in a rock.  It was only last week that I received a message from a non-beekeeping friend worried he had seen a bee go into his roof, and asking whether that were possible.  My reply then was that it was, and that they wouldn't do any harm per se, but there was a risk that the weight of the nest might eventually cause the ceiling to collapse.  I suggested contacting his local beekeepers, to see if they could remove the colony, but stressed that if he were to use a pest controller he must make sure it was a reputable operator who would block access to the roof completely so that other bees couldn't find the remains of the nest, and in robbing out any honey take the poison back to their own colony.

Sadly, I fear that this swarm will have to end with an appointment with the pest controller.  The entrance to the gap under the cladding is right by the main route through from the gravel by the front door to the back garden.  A tallish person's head will pass within a metre of the bees' front door each time they walk by.  That is too close for comfort, should the bees turn out to be a defensive lot, or on a thundery day when they're feeling tetchy.  None of my colonies are nasty, but there's always the potential for change with each new queen.  It's a great shame, but we simply can't afford to have the cladding removed in order to try and extract the colony alive.

Of course they may not be my bees at all.  When I next open the hives, if I see that they've swarmed even then I'll never know where they went.

outdoor housework

Today I weeded along the front of the house.  It's not a glamorous job, but somebody has to do it. At one end is poor old Pileostegia viburnoides, which suffered badly when I let the Boston Ivy grow over it.  The vine has been curtailed, but the Pileostegia is taking its time making good the spectacular die back it went through during its period of perpetual darkness.  Apparently learning from experience it was sending one new shoot outwards away from the wall, but I managed to twiddle that round so that it was pointing in again.  They are supposed to like rich living, so I am asking a lot planting it in our sand, and must give it another can of liquid seaweed tomorrow.

I removed a generous crop of oxalis and sow thistles from that stretch of gravel.  The thistles shot up from almost ignorable to unmistakably present in the space of about a week.  I left the self sown crop of bladder campion, or Silene vulgaris, to get on with it.  I originally introduced the campion as an addition to the daffodil lawn, but it didn't want to live there at all, much preferring the gaps in the patio (or terrace) and the gravel along the front of the house.  This makes me think that it either dislikes competition from grass, or likes lime, or both.  The white flowers are pretty, and having a wildflower (or weed) running along the footings and bumping into the trimmed box dome by the front door is quite amusing.

There was lots more oxalis by the front door step.  That went in the bag of weeds to go to the dump.  Also one self-sown juniper, which I'm not sure if I want to use elsewhere or not, so left for now.  The juniper under the cloakroom window has grown into a terrifying monster, regularly spreading beyond its allotted space so that visitors parking by the door find the passenger trying to climb out into a knee deep mat of juniper.  It's for the chop, to be replaced by something more architectural and restrained, but not at this moment.

Then came assorted species of grass, all weeds, and a lot of goosegrass, and some kind of bittercress relative that had, alas, already seeded.  Also a gigantic dead nettle, name unknown.  I am better at recognising my weeds than naming them.  The dead nettle hadn't yet flowered, so its stems could go on the home compost heap.  Finally I got to the true nettle by the outside tap, which I should have dealt with weeks ago, since it has stung me every other time I used the tap for weeks.  I couldn't extract all the roots of that one from the Chaenomeles, so will have to treat the regrowth with poison.

The Chaenomeles, which had to be butchered so that we could get at the blocked drain, is sprouting again from ground level, as I hoped it would.  For good measure I finished scraping up the remains of the rotted down bark mulch from in front of the woodshed, and replaced the mypex fabric over the manhole cover.  Once I've collected enough stones to cover the rest of the fabric it will look quite tidy.  I've grumbled about it before, but it bears repeating: do not use chopped bark over landscape fabric for paths.  It will decompose, and weeds of all sorts will grow in the composted remains.  I felt a sort of domestic satisfaction when I'd finished, though it was scarcely high horticulture.

columbines

The Aquilegia, or columbines, are just opening in the back garden.  Strange that the same flower can be named after both an eagle and a dove.  They are also called Granny's Bonnets, though I don't remember my grandmother ever wearing a bonnet, and certainly not one that looked like an Aquilegia.  I love them and have planted many over the years, mostly raised from seed.  Since they are not the longest lived plants, but cross breed promiscuously and seed generously, I don't recognise most of the existing population as being anything I planted, and have no idea what they should be called.

One looks as though it might be a surviving A. clematiflora.  The flowers are a dusky pink, about four centimetres in diameter, with four rows of fairly narrow petals held wide open around a yellow boss that's dusty with pollen.  A few of the petals have green tips, and it does look for all the world like the flower of a double form of Clematis viticella.

Its neighbour could also be taken for a small, late flowering clematis, if you only saw the flowers in isolation.  They are little dusky purple bells formed of two gappy rows of green-tipped petals, again surrounding a bright yellow centre.  I am fairly sure that this is one of nature's inventions, and not something I got directly from a seed catalogue, but it is extremely pretty.  Aquilegia do tend to revert to plain mid purple bells over time, but this flower is unusually dark.

Round the corner is another plant whose flowers show traces of spurs, the nectar bearing tubes sticking out behind the petals, which some varieties don't have at all, and others have so deep that it would take some long-tongued moth, if not an actual humming bird, to exploit them.  The inner row of petals are ivory white, their edges rolled over and fused at the base to form the spurs, while the five outer petals are pointed, slightly ruffled, and streaked and mottled with violet.  It is very pretty, but not especially scented.  According to my gardening notes, which admittedly are not always one hundred per cent accurate, the only forms I've planted in that bed are A. clematiflora and A. fragrans, but the latter is supposed to have long spurs, and to be yellow and white rather than tinged with pink, so the plant must be yet another home made hybrid.

Aquilegia specialise in combining yellow and pink in the same flower, but do it so nicely that the result is never anything but charming.  The last two flowers I picked are both typical columbines, with an inner cup of five smaller, more rounded petals leading down to long spurs, and an outer ring of five longer, more pointed ones.  The first has a yellow cup and pink outer petals, again with that greenish tinge.  The spurs are pink, each ending in a little bulbous base.  The cup of the second is larger relative to the outer petals, and its bright, soft yellow carries right down the spurs, while the outer petals are melon pink.  A further examination of the rose bed would yield umpteen variations on the theme.

The similarities between come columbines and clematis are less surprising when you remember that they are both members of the family Ranunculaceae, or buttercup.

bluebells, how do they do it?

I am amazed at the number of bluebells that have sprung up around the garden.  Charmed, given that they are very pretty, and I like the idea of the wood spilling out into the rest of the property, but surprised, given that I was taught as a mantra at horticultural college that bluebells are weak colonisers with poor dispersal mechanisms, slow to move out of their original site.  According to the website of Trees for Life, Scotland's leading conservation charity, which I looked at first simply because it came at the top of my Google search for 'bluebell seed dispersal', the wild bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, simply drops its seeds on the ground, and so they are slow to spread.

Nonetheless, something is spreading them.  There have been some clumps in the gravel by the blue summerhouse for several years.  They are growing under the canopy of a crab apple, which makes me wonder if a bird is involved, eating the seeds, then perching and squitting.  There are a couple of good clusters in the back garden right next to a conifer whose fibrous roots must suck most of the moisture out of the soil.  The earth where they have chosen to live by the summerhouse is pretty mere sand, so bluebells must be able to take it dry.

There is a nice little patch developing in thin grass under the little oak at the end of the daffodil lawn.  Bluebells under a tree canopy again, so are birds indeed involved?  We were also taught at horticultural college that bluebells did not require shade per se, they merely grew in woodland because they could not compete with grass, and grass could not take shade.  Observation around the garden shows that bluebells will grow in grass, not necessarily the thickest and tallest sward, but they'll cope in turf as long as it's not too vigorous.  Parts of the grounds of the local St Osyth's Priory are thick with bluebells, where it abuts the road, growing densely in grass and almost full sun, a testament to the fact that this ground has been parkland for hundreds of years.  Alas, part of it must have been quarried for sand at some point, since the bluebells come to an abrupt halt just where the level falls away twenty feet or more.

We have quite a few groups in the rose bed nearest the house.  They don't have to compete with grass there, though the leaves of Brunnera, Pachysandra and other shade lovers are starting to cover the ground fairly fully.  Still, it's up to the bluebells.  If they can fight their corner and reinvent the rose bed as a bluebell wood, among other things, that's fine by me.  I am still curious about how the seeds get there, though.  And why I never seem to notice young developing plants, as I do with the self-seeding Camassia, but only flowering clumps?  Unless it is not seeds that are spreading, but the bulbs themselves.  Do jays or any other food storing creature eat and cache away bluebell bulbs?  I must ask the next time I find myself among wildlife experts.

Meanwhile a bird or birds have been eating and squitting some sort of fruit on the terrace (or patio), since there are several splashes of dark purple and liquid droppings, each with a cluster of large seeds at its centre.  I suspect pheasants, given the size of the seeds, and the proximity of the piles of purple crap to the house.  Or it could be blackbirds.  The seeds are as large as grains of wheat, brown, rounded and pointed at one end, and after passing through some animal's gut they are presumably primed for germination and ready to go.  I was almost tempted to sow a pot full, just to see what they turned into, but the thought struck me that anyone who goes around randomly sowing seeds collected from unknown bird mess probably needs to get out more.

a taxing question

I thought that the Inland Revenue was supposed to be zeroing in on tax evasion schemes, to bring in some billions rightfully due to the Exchequer, so that we could close the fiscal deficit, before starting to actually pay down the however-many-it-is trillion dollar debt.  And I vaguely thought that the current administration were ideologically committed to cutting unnecessary red tape, to enable enterprise to flourish.  And wanted to encourage the Big Society, in which citizens beavered away helping each other in a myriad of ways, large and small.

Apparently not.  HMRC and the Treasury could choose to devote their finite resources to catching some big fish, redrafting tax rules to clamp down on avoidance schemes by large multinationals, or applying a modern day Morton's Fork to the oligarchs of Kensington.  They could, or they could decide to tighten the Gift Aid rules for small charities.

Hanging over me in my role as Divisional Treasurer of the local beekeepers is the requirement to supply details of our Gift Aid claim for 2013, when total subscriptions and donations were £3,707.40, deriving from over a hundred members.  Some have signed Gift Aid declarations, some haven't.  Maybe they don't want to, or maybe they don't hit the income tax threshold and aren't eligible.  You would think that would be fine, tag the subscriptions that qualify and add them up, easy peasy.

Not so.  According to the County Treasurer, the Inland Revenue have now tightened up the rules and require the following information:  title, forename, surname, first line of address, postcode, amount and date paid.  How long do they think it will take a volunteer, amateur accountant working with piles of handwritten membership forms and a spreadsheet that wasn't designed to produce the information in that format to pull it out?  I should say it was a full morning's work, if not a day's worth, especially given that we had a new Membership Secretary half way through the subscription renewal season.  It isn't management information that we require in any way, shape or form to run the association.  I check who has paid their subs, but I don't need to reconcile the date their cheque was paid in to their postcode.

And more to the point, what is the Inland Revenue going to do with the information once they've got it?  How much time and effort are they going to expend in matching these titles, forenames, surnames, addresses, post codes and dates to other data they hold, to check up on a claim which would be for less than four thousand pounds even if every single member had ticked the Gift Aid box?  Suppose that we are wildly overstating our claim for Gift Aid, how much money are we going to fraudulently claim from the public purse?  It reminds me depressingly of the great Inland Revenue clamp down on the cricket clubs of Hertfordshire which I wrote about a year or two back. Legitimate tax due successfully clawed back, diddly squit to a jam tart.  Non-taxing make-work for Inland Revenue staff that saves them from having to deal with something more difficult or nasty, ten out of ten.

five flowers yellow

There are still plenty of yellow flowers, as spring reaches its full flush.  In the dry soil at the top of the garden are two sorts of yellow flowered shrubby members of the pea family.  The first is Coronilla emerus, or Scorpion Senna, a graceful thing with smallish, compound mid-green leaves like a vetch.  The flowers are likewise quite small, carried in numerous clusters, and each has a warm brown stripe on the back of the top petal, which I have just learned from Wikipedia is called the banner in peas.  The shrub can reach up to a couple of metres, given time, and mine is being loomed over by a bird-sown Portuguese laurel which I allowed to stay, as it provided useful shelter. The catalogues say that the Coronilla requires shelter from cold winds, and it seems quite happy cuddling up to the laurel.  It is supposed to need free drainage, and the laurel experience proves that it can cope with root competition once established.

The second shrubby pea is Caragana arborescens 'Lorbergii'.  Its flowers are more slender and elongated than those of the Coronilla, which have the chubby, cheerful look of a lupin.  The edges of the Caragana petals are slightly rolled in, adding to the narrow, pointed look of the flowers, and the leaves are slender too, reduced to narrow strips.  It is the filament-like leaves that distinguish 'Lorbergii' from the usual species.  The common name of Caragana arborescens is Siberian Pea Tree, and according to the Bluebell Nursery website it is hardy in Finland almost to the Arctic Circle. It can make a small tree, and is tolerant of very poor soil and cold winds, which is why I chose it for the particular spot it occupies in our garden, though it's taking its time reaching tree size.

In the gravel the Asphodeline lutea is just starting to open.  This throws up flowering spikes from clusters of evergreen, greyish, strap shaped leaves.  The unopened buds initially cluster together in knobs at the tops of the spikes, each yellow bud showing green stripes, which remain up the centre of each petal as they open.  The open flower is wide and starry, with six petals, and the spike continues to elongate so that they end up quite nicely spaced out along the stem.  They start opening from the bottom of the cluster, but it is slightly haphazard.  Afterwards come fat, round seed pods in shiny green, which turn black as they ripen, and then lots more Asphodeline, if you don't dead-head.  I have seen them described as needing fertile soil, and maybe they would like that better, but they grow happily in the gravel, which of course is never mulched with extra organic material.

I have made a note to myself to get more Narcissus 'Sun Disc', because they have survived so well, and the flowers lasted so long, in a very dry and sandy corner close to a conifer.  This is a dwarf daffodil with neat, flat flowers, the inner layer of petals a small circle of bright yellow, the outer petals primrose.  Because it is difficult to label individual clumps of bulbs, without making the garden look like a hamster's graveyard (and anyway the birds would scratch them up) it can be difficult to keep track of which varieties are which, but having kept a note of what I planted along the edge of that particular bed, I have managed to match up the flowers in the garden to the catalogue description.

Down along the front of the bog bed is Geum rivale 'Lemon Drops'.  I grew them from seed, so don't know if they are strictly entitled to the name, when the internet tells me that the original 'Lemon Drops' was found as a seedling in the Chatto Gardens.  Keep a keen eye on pots of Geum if you are growing them in a greenhouse: vine weevils love them.  Slightly ruffled lemon yellow petals stand almost upright around a wide central boss of ginger anthers, so that the flower shape is more bowl than bell.  The calyx is softly hairy and flushed red at the base.  I haven't spotted any more self sown seedlings yet, but perhaps I have been too keen weeding, or overly generous with the Strulch, or maybe other plants shade them out at the time when they would be germinating.

four flowers blue

There are blue flowers among the pink, in some cases lots of them, since several have proved generous self seeders.  Camassia leichtlinii is one, producing tall spikes of slightly greyish blue, starry flowers with yellow anthers nodding on long filaments.  I started off by planting bulbs, but they spread themselves freely, at least in heavy clay.  Some people seem intimidated by the idea of growing bulbs from seed, as if it were a quantum slower and more difficult than growing any other sort of plant, but it isn't really.  I don't have to do anything to the Camassia to get them to spread, other than hold back from early dead heading and avoid weeding up the seedlings.

A shade darker, more vibrant and more purple is Centaurea montana.  I love this plant.  It grew like a weed in the garden of my childhood, seeding itself joyously about from the original plants left by the previous owner, a keen gardener.  Books of the 1950s and 1960s talk about it being a common flower of vicarage gardens, which are themselves not so common nowadays, but by the time I got my own garden in the early 1980s it was difficult even to buy seed of C. montana, let alone plants, it was so far out of fashion.  Now the pendulum has swung again, and fancy purple varieties are seen at Chelsea, but I like the blue.  The flower is like a large and lux thistle, with wide-spaced, fringed petals held around a conspicuous purple central boss.  The outside of the calyx is typical thistle, sawtoothed, black edged overlapping scales creating a diamond pattern.

Also with a distinct purplish tint is my blue North American species lupin, grown from seed, the one I had lost the name to, until a kind person at Chiltern Seeds identified it for me as Lupinus chamissonis, which they used to stock and no longer did.  I intended to save seeds from my one plant last year, before it was devastated by aphids and failed to set any, so I am glad to see it flowering again.  The whole plant looked so sickly after the aphid attack that I thought it was a goner.  I have got some young seedlings of a hybrid derived from it growing on the greenhouse, a variety called 'Silver Fleece' which I bought because I could not find seeds of straight L. chamissonis, and the seed catalogue claimed that the hybrid had a better constitution.  Our species plant so far seems quite resilient, but perhaps the light sandy soil and the arid climate of the Clacton coastal strip resemble its native Californian sand dunes more convincingly than growing conditions in other parts of the UK.

In a large pot is Gentiana verna, the spring gentian.  It has been in the pot for a few years now, standing outdoors all year round, winter and summer, and is gently spreading.  The small flowers are true blue.  Laid out on the kitchen table the gentian makes you see (now I have lifted Our Ginger off them) how purple the Camassia, the Centaurea and the lupin really are.  The gentian flowers are very graceful, the bases of the petals fused together into a long tube which emerges from an equally long calyx.  I rather wish I hadn't looked up its entry on Wikipedia, as I gather that I am likely to be struck by lightning for having brought it into the house, and that death will follow now that it's picked.  Ah well, it's too late now.

pretty in pink

There are so many new flowers to look at in the garden, I told you yesterday that I would never be able to describe them all, but here are some more.  Quite a few are pink: after March's blaze of yellow, pink is coming to the fore.  The Clematis montana that was already growing up the veranda when we moved in is in full flower.  I never found a label for it, and am not such an expert on C. montana as to have ever worked out which variety it is, but it ramps splendidly on poor soil. Indeed, it is almost too vigorous for its position, although in the past couple of years I have managed to keep it more or less under control, and it has not become such a tangled mess of stems as it was at one stage.  I shortened the branches that were escaping out into the rose bed back in the winter, and will give it another haircut as soon as it's finished flowering.

Our pink Deutzia is D. x rosea 'Carminea', though I had to look it up on my spreadsheet.  It is delightful while it is flowering, and then does nothing at all of interest for the rest of the year.  I don't even remember much in the way of autumn colour.  However, the flowers are charming, small bells opening from dusky pink buds to reveal a paler interior, while the backs of the petals retain a broad central blush of dark pink.  They are held in little nodding clusters, and there are enough of them to make a good show.  I am growing a late flowering clematis through it to provide interest at the other end of the year, though last autumn it wasn't entirely happy.  Rubbish soil again, but perhaps this spring's generous dose of old mushroom compost and 6X will do the trick.

Chamaecytisus purpureus is an agreeable, low growing little shrub.  Once happy it runs at the root, freely enough that it might become a nuisance in a really small border, despite its low height. There is a white variant, which with us is not so vigorous as the purple, but whether that's down to white versus purple, or merely reflects the fact that the white one is planted in one of the most arid spots in the entire garden, I don't know.  It would take a larger statistical sample than one plant to prove it either way.The flowers are typical of the pea family, in a soft pinky purple, and the buds while still tight shut are flushed yellow at the base.  The calyx is reddish, which makes the overall flower look darker than the pink of the petals would lead you to expect.  I find that some stems die back during the winter, so that it needs a good tidy with secateurs in the spring.

Down at the edge of the bog bed, Chaerophyllum hirsutum 'Roseum' is just getting going.  It is an umbellifer, with delicate, mid-pink carrot flowers over yellow-green foliage.  Pink and yellow is not always a good combination, but the leaves of this pretty cow parsley relative are a soft enough shade not to quarrel with the flowers.  My plant came as a souvenir of a visit last year to the gardens of Fullers Mill, which were so good that the friend I went with went back two days later to take her husband and brother-in-law.

tales of the foxglove tree

The hawthorn has come into full flower in the past couple of days.  Looking at our boundary hedge, I suddenly realised that David Hockney was right about hawthorn.  There were several paintings of it in his show at the RA a couple of years back, and at the time I found the heaviness of his great masses of white flowers too extreme.   However, this year our hedge is producing just such dense, clotted sprays.  A case of art teaching one to observe life, or simply that the hawthorn enjoyed the wet spring, and that in a typical year the thorn in Yorkshire grows more lavishly than that in north Essex?

All sorts of things are flowering, too many to mention them all.  Once again we have a display of foxglove tree flowers.  I grew the Paulownia from seed (I don't remember it being very difficult) intending to grow the resulting plants as stooled specimens in the rose bed.  If you cut Paulownia hard back, it responds by sending up vigorous vertical shoots that produce extraordinarily large, furry, almost heart shaped leaves.  I wanted them as a counter-balance to the small, bitty leaves of the roses.  However, one year I left the pruning until late, and a stem had reached the size where it was ready to flower.  Going to cut it down, I saw the buds and didn't have the heart to chop that stem down.  Thus, we now have a small flowering foxglove tree in the near rose bed, amid the stooled stems.  There is emphatically not room for a large tree.  It would shade the roses, block the view, and is altogether too close to the house.  I have begun to wonder, though, if I could manage it at around its existing size as a sort of pollard.  Given how well they tolerate hard pruning I don't see that it would mind, so it is more a question of whether I have the time and energy to wobble around with ladder and pole lopper maintaining another shrub.

It is fortunate that the Paulownia lies downhill from the house, as we look out from the veranda directly into its large, pendulous, bell shaped bluish-mauve flowers.  We see them against a background  of other foliage, against which they show up reasonably well.  Peering upwards to view them against a blue sky they tend to disappear.

Meanwhile, the starlings nesting in the roof at the front of the house have hatched out their clutch of eggs successfully.  We know this because when the babies are being fed, the sound of excited cheeping carries to the far side of the drive.  It seems an odd thing to do.  I know that each chick is trying to out-do its brothers and sisters, to attract the maximum share of whatever food the parents have brought back, but making that much racket they would be advertising themselves as targets to every magpie in the neighbourhood, if it weren't that they were nesting inside the security of the roof.  The parents fly in and out of a ventilation hole in the soffit board that's lost its protecting grille, and it's a wonderful thing to watch them dart vertically upwards through the opening, wings clapped against their bodies at the last moment.  A magpie couldn't get in there.

all that jazz

It's no good, I don't like jazz.  Or at least, not the sort of modern jazz that jazz fans admire, only the 1920s retro style that serious jazz enthusiasts sneer at.  I gave it an honest go last night, and while two hours of Christy Moore flew by in a flash, one hour of modern jazz seemed to stretch on interminably.  The friends we'd asked to come with us said the band were very good, and one of them is a jazz drummer himself in his spare time, so it was my fault, not the performers'.  I just can't get into it.  I don't know why not.  Our friend said that jazz consists of variations on simple and repetitive tunes, but that's true of Philip Glass and Eno's ambient music, and I like them.  Taste is a very personal thing.

It didn't help that we had half a dozen women on the other three-fifths of our table who talked all the way through, including in the second half, when the committee member behind the jazz concert had introduced the band back on stage with a plea to belt up and listen, as the band had been playing their socks off and were now going to do some quieter material.  They said they were on a social night out and didn't want to shush.  The Systems Administrator said afterwards on the way home that the format of the event was probably too confusing, whether it was meant to be a formal concert, at which people were quiet and listened, or a club, in which they were at liberty to chat to their friends.  Sitting people down at tables with access to a bar for an hour before you give them anything to eat is probably not conducive to creating a reverential, concert atmosphere.

I wasn't convinced by the fish and chips, though some people ate them.  The fish was OK, but the chips were about as soggy as you'd expect after eighty-five portions had been put in cardboard boxes inside plastic boxes and driven five miles up the road.  My attempt to procure the SA a non-fish alternative backfired, since the chip shop ended up sending two helpings of deep fried chicken for the non-fish eaters.  After taking one sniff of the chicken, the SA refused to even take it out of its bag, and subsisted on chips.

There was enough cake left over to serve, at a rough estimate, fifty people.  Fortunately all the meringues went, so the SA and I are not left wrestling with the choice of eating or binning them.  I like them at a party, but not as normal everyday fare, and the SA barely eats sweet things at all. On the other hand, we both abhor food waste.  I'm afraid I ignored our Chairman's plea, or rather instruction, that we must all take a black bin bag of waste home with us.  I thought that making somebody allergic to fish, who had already been exposed to the rankest piece of fried chicken in Christendom, sit in a car for a half hour journey accompanied by an entire bin bag of discarded fish and chips was beyond the call of duty.

The pile of washing up was monumental, so at least the fish and chips saved us from having to wash plates as well as pudding bowls and about a million spoons.  The Treasurer's wife, who is not on the committee and doesn't like jazz either, nobly washed up all the dishes, while I dried until reinforcements arrived, and I ran out of dry tea towels, having taken five.  I'm sure that originally when we hiked the price up from fifteen pounds a head to seventeen pounds fifty, part of the justification was that we'd be able to afford some paid help, but in the event it never materialised, other than an immensely polite music student whose day job with the music society is as page turner.

A flurry of emails this morning congratulating ourselves pronounced the event a success.  I kept quiet.  I can't face another jazz concert.

minority report

I spent most of my childhood holidays in Cornwall.  Our family divided its patronage between the north and south coasts, so some years we dawdled among the lanes and gentle coves around Veryan, while other seasons we stayed outside Bude, within striking distance of grander and more rugged scenery.  I remember vast sandy beaches, not awfully nice public loos, learning to row on the Bude canal, where I developed a technique that had only limited application in later life when I didn't need to shed the accumulated weed from my oar at every third stroke, and drinking horlicks in steamed-up cafes while it rained.  I remember clambering across scree slopes on some hair-raising cliffs to get to the best beaches, which I believe have long since been barricaded off by the National Trust on health and safety grounds.  We visited Tintagel, and Boscastle, and stared into the slate mines of Delabole, and commented on the way that the hedgerow trees were sculpted by the wind.  One year we stayed in a bungalow instead of camping, and found little wriggly things in the private water supply, and another year the tent blew down.

We ritually asked the piskies for permission to come in as we crossed the Tamar, but I don't think we listened for the reply, and truly I was never conscious that I was in another country, or that Cornish people were different.  Perhaps I was an insensitive child.  It puzzles me, this business of minority status.  Would we get it, if we were to sell up in Essex and go and move to Cornwall, or is there an ancestry test?  Or would some minimum period of residence suffice?

If so, it would have to be a long time.  We have lived in north Essex for thirty years come December, but I'm not sure that makes us local.  Not local the way that people born here, or who went to school here, count as local.  Not like people whose parents and grandparents ran businesses or farmed here.  I used to work with somebody whose father ran the village bakery.  There was a black and white photograph of it in one of the village pubs, with him standing outside.  She was born in the village, went to school there, and in her sixties was in daily and weekly contact with at least some people whom she had known all of her life.  Another former colleague grew up in Dedham where her grandfather had been the miller.  That's local.  We would pass the Is Your Parliamentary Candidate Local? test that I heard about on R4 this morning, since we have lived here for more than five years.  We could claim a fair knowledge of local issues, after thirty years, but if we were to up sticks and decamp to Cornwall, our disappearance would make no difference except to the comparatively small number of people who know us, and the local culture would be essentially unchanged.

I rather like the idea of minority status within the UK for Essex.  Conveniently close to London yet never smart or in fashion since Tudor times, natural home of the great tribe of commuting clerks that keep the wheels of London commerce turning, and relocated Cockneys.  From the salon-tanned, hair-extended, varnished and vajazzled denizens of Towieland, to the immaculate blonde-helmeted matrons of the heights of Danbury, the chirpy retired cabbies of the coastal strip, and the assorted minor artists who settled in the north of the county where they could practically believe they were in Suffolk, it remains an endlessly amusing county.  Energetic, cheerful, go-getting, self-reliant, with the longest coastline of any English county and an astonishing dearth of stately homes, aristocrats, or Rothschilds, it is resolutely middling.  Our cathedral only achieved that status in 1914 when the Diocese of Chelmsford was created.  Chelmsford only achieved City status in 2012.  Not that we don't have a long history, Colchester being England's oldest recorded town.  Indeed, Essex is England's longest standing county name, Wessex and Mercia having been abolished before the Norman conquest.

I could see trouble ahead, though, Belgian style tensions arising between the urban south of the county, with its hustling ways and Estuarine glottal stops, and the slower paced, leafier north.  But given minority status we could all unite under our proud flag, three Saxon seaxes on a red field, and make a stand against our natural enemies, the men of Kent.  As the old bargeman's saying has it, Never give way to a Kentishman.  And for why?  Cause he'll never give way to you.

cooking for the community

I am making meringues for the music society's jazz supper concert.  The jazz supper is not a regular event, since the music society's normal fare is classical chamber music, and indeed the Chairman recently decreed that putting on the annual fund raising supper was too much work for the committee.  However, the newest member of the committee is a guitarist who knows some jazz musicians, and somehow it was agreed that a supper with jazz would be fun.  We are now serving bought-in fish and chips, after extensive lobbying by another committee member who didn't like the original idea of chilli, so I am saved the effort of making enough chilli for ten or twelve people, and just doing meringues.

I wonder how much longer village societies will be able to go on holding events at which they serve food made in the committee members' own kitchens.  A friend of mine runs a small business selling homemade shortbread and cakes at farmers' markets, and she was recently ticked off by the health inspectorate for washing the carrots for carrot cake in the kitchen sink.  They have earth on them, you see, and should be washed in a separate sink in a different room.  Bring back the scullery.  I am sure that eventually the authorities will catch up with us and clamp down on our home cooked cakes, let alone chillis, just as they will catch up with my former employers and their misguided belief that it is OK for plant centre staff to serve tea and cakes wearing their compost spattered clothes.

I think I was supposed to volunteer to make orange and almond tray bake.  It is a delicious cake, I ate a slice at the secretary's house, and she circulated the recipe, with the idea that we would do that or chocolate brownies.  The last time I made chocolate brownies they came out far too dry and thoroughly unappetising, and since I like to experiment with new recipes in small quantities at my leisure before making them in large quantities for guests, I was reluctant to commit to orange cake or brownies.  Oven space in the Aga runs at either less than 100 C, or 180 C and above, with nothing in between, so converting non-Aga recipes for home use can take several goes, and I didn't think the music society would want to reimburse me for that many bags of ground almonds, if there wasn't even any edible cake at the end of it.

The cakes are to accompany fruit salad, so I offered meringues instead.  I like doing meringues, which are extremely easy if you have a cool enough oven, and complete bastards to make if you don't.  By way of variety I have made one batch of Brutti ma buoni, as well as straight meringues, from a Sophie Grigson recipe cut out of the Evening Standard many years ago.  They got a favourable verdict from my beekeeping friend who runs the shortbread business, so I thought I'd try and look as though I'd made a bit of an effort for the jazz supper.  They have even more  sugar in them than normal meringues, three ounces per egg white instead of two, and you have to cook the whisked egg and meringue mix over hot water for around twenty minutes, until it has deflated and gone very sticky.  Then you stir in a little cinnamon and some toasted chopped nuts, and bake in little spoonfuls at a very low temperature until they are completely dried out.  Rather a lot of the egg mixture seemed to set on to the side of the pan during cooking, and I was reminded of the fact that egg white used to be a key ingredient of ornamental plaster work.

I did offer to make cheese straws, as I'd have egg yolks, but the chairman never got back to me on that, so I am keeping the yolks and making rich French vanilla ice cream for home consumption.

bluebell wood

I was taken this afternoon on a personal guided tour of a local wood, Hillhouse Wood in West Bergholt.  It came about because last year I did a woodland charity talk to one of the clubs in the village, and fell into conversation with one of the organisers of the Friends of Hillhouse Wood over tea and biscuits.  On hearing that I'd never actually visited their wood (though fortunately I had mugged up on some of the details beforehand, and knew a bit about it, including the fact that it had an active volunteers' group) he invited me to come back in the spring when the bluebells were in flower.  I accepted with alacrity.  It is always interesting walking around any landscape with somebody involved in looking after it, who knows it well.

Hillhouse Wood is beautiful, simply stunning.  My host had picked his timing for the bluebells perfectly, given that the date of our visit was fixed a month ago, and they were looking wonderful. The expression 'a sheet of blue' is a cliche, but that's what you get in Hillhouse Wood, great open expanses among the trees so thick with bluebells that you couldn't take a step off the path without trampling on them.  Our guide told us, though, that by Monday they flowers would be starting to fade, so if after reading this you feel that you want to see them for yourself you need to get up there in the next couple of days.

It is designated an ancient wood, which in woodland terminology has a precise meaning, that a site has been continuously wooded since at least 1600, though the locals believe Hillhouse Wood to be older than that.  Bluebells in Essex are strongly associated with ancient woodland, though that's not the case all over the UK.  It is around 40 acres, but feels larger as the paths cross and meander and the ground undulates so that you never see all of it at once.  The soil is light, acid sand, and the trees are oak, ash, alder in the damp parts, and sweet chestnut, plus hazel and field maple.  There were elms, before Dutch elm disease claimed them, and the friends of the wood are now worried about the future of their ash, as well they might be.  After the bluebells comes the bracken, and the woodland floor would be covered in a thicket of brambles after a couple of years if the volunteers did not go over it every autumn with a mechanical flail.

The bluebells have hybridised to an extent with Spanish ones.  Our host pointed out how some were more upright, or had one or two odd flowers on the opposite side of the stem to the rest, or even flowers all the way round.  The utterly wild British bluebell has a flower stalk that droops over at the tip, with the individual bells arranged in a line up one side of the stem only.

Before the bluebells come wood anemones, though they've mostly finished flowering by now, with only the leaves to indicate their presence.  There are purple orchids, whose precise location the friends don't advertise, red and pink campion, stitchwort, and ramsons by the stream.  There are two ponds, one with great crested newts, though we didn't see those, but we saw our first speckled wood butterflies of the year, and a thrush, which I thought was large enough to be a mistle, but but my friend who knows more about birds thought was a song thrush.  And there were nightingales, singing.  After my tour of the reserve at Fingringhoe a few years back, and subsequent purchase of a nightingale CD, I am more confident than I used to be about identifying those, but our host was clear that there were two.  Apparently the males arrive before the females, and start singing to advertise their presence and entice the ladies in.

It is a really, really good wood, and now I've galvanised myself to go there (another advantage of accepting the offer of a guided tour was that it forced me to take the time away from the garden) I'm sure I'll be back.  Though possibly not by 3.45 am for the forthcoming dawn chorus walk.  If you want to visit, you can park your car in the lane by the old church, taking care to leave room for agricultural vehicles to get by, and it's a short walk up a track to the wood itself.  There is space, but not loads, so I'd avoid peak times, though.