more cleaning

The great cleaning project continues.  I am writing this earlier than usual just to get away from it for a bit.  I have vacuumed the bedroom.  Boy, have I vacuumed, all the bits of carpet and skirting board you can't reach in a normal session when you remain standing and just push the sweeper head around the floor at the end of its metal tube.  Assembling and disassembling the cleaner into different combinations of sweeper and tubes and wriggling on my stomach I have done under the very middle of the bed, and the skirting boards behind the chests of drawers, and the top of the wardrobe.  And the curtains, and the shades of both bedside lights.  Balanced on my dressing table stool with the vacuum cleaner I have done the lampshade of the central pendant ceiling light.  I took everything out of the wicker laundry basket and cleaned that, and vacuumed underneath it.

It began to feel as though I was going through the full Good Housekeeping routine recently lampooned by Lucy Mangan in her excellent Guardian column, except that I did not unscrew the bulb of the ceiling light and wipe it.  She is right, it is a ridiculous way for a sentient human being to spend their day, except that unfortunately houses do get so extraordinarily filthy, and in the end my Quentin Crisp-like disdain for dust cracked.  Something had to be done.

I took the shoes and fleeces out of the bottom of my wardrobe and vacuumed the floor, and in violation of the Systems Administrator's privacy removed the shoes, backpack and ancient computer bag repaired with a homemade knotted string handle (no, I don't know why either.  I expect it was something we took on the boat) from the SA's wardrobe and vacuumed the bottom of that as well. I took everything off the SA's bedside table and sorted it out.  The assortment of bolts, screws and an electric screwdriver bit are bound for the workshop, as is the instruction booklet for the leaf blower.  Nobody needs to keep a leaf blower booklet on their bedside table.  The assorted loose change went in the change pot in the study, and the test match tickets from 2013 went in the bin. I don't think the SA was keeping them as a souvenir, but I put all the old race cards in the spare room to be boxed away with the others when I get round to it.

I polished my dressing table and both chests of drawers and the bedside tables and the wooden boxes where I keep my sewing kit and necklaces with balsam flavoured wood cream.  They looked happier afterwards, and the room smelt reassuringly of cleaning, which was nice since last night's shepherd's pie must have dripped in the Aga making the clean kitchen smelt discouragingly of burnt gravy.  Actually, I was rather disappointed at how quickly Saturday's efforts were dissipating.  Joan Rivers hated housework because you make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again, but it would be good if it could last more than a day before the floors began to accumulate the next layer of gravel, cat hairs, and fluff.  When I came downstairs this morning I found a dead leaf in the middle of the kitchen table.  How did that get there?

I sorted out the pile of things that had been sitting on one of the chests of drawers since moving them out of reach of the cats months ago to stop them being broken.  I investigated whether the light bulbs I bought to replace one in a reading light that got broken when Mr Fluffy knocked it off a table fitted (they did) and decided to risk reinstating the bowl of wooden fruit on the dining table, and the mirrored boat shaped ornament that was a twenty-fifth anniversary present on the sitting room window sill.  That may yet prove to be a rash move since it isn't so very long since the cats destroyed a pair of binoculars knocking them off the window sill, but I thought we couldn't keep everything in storage for ever.

I vacuumed the slats of the bed, and put my pillows on to wash, one pillow at a time.  I dusted the tops of the picture frames, and as much of the ceiling as I could reach.  I wiped the tiny splatters of bird crap off the electric bar fire I keep for chilly mornings, and wondered what a bird was doing in the bedroom in the first place, and vacuumed the crevices behind the radiator and washed the top of it and the annoying little indentations along the bottom, while thinking how if only we had underfloor heating I wouldn't have to.  There is no way we are going to get underfloor heating, or a cleaner, which would be how I wouldn't have to do any of it.  One of the bargains you make when you downshift is that some of your newly free time will be spent making, mending, and cleaning things which when you were in full time gainful employment you paid other people to mend or clean, or bought new ones.  Actually, when we were both in full time employment we still didn't have a cleaner.  We tried once, but disliked the routine of having to tidy up before she came, and she hated the cats.  And I don't really want somebody else rooting around in the bottom of my wardrobe.  And unless you find a real treasure I darkly suspect they don't vacuum the bed slats or the tops of wardrobes.

I am now off to clean the bathroom.  Tomorrow I had better do something else, before we all give up with boredom.

garden wildlife wanted and unwanted

I saw a fox walk across the back garden today at ten past five in the afternoon.  It emerged from the island bed, calmly and confidently crossed the top lawn, and disappeared into the rose bed under the veranda.  I went outside to chase it away, but it was nowhere to be seen, already gone or else hiding.  I am glad the kitties are no longer small.  Luckily the hens were shut in their run, which has a wire netting roof, but Reynard's visit in broad daylight does illustrate the difficulty of letting them out.  I read the other day in the paper about somebody who opened his door every evening for the local fox and fed it sultanas in his living room, and was amazed.  Townies are different.  They do not understand.  The fox would have every one of the chickens, given the chance.

At least the cats are on the case with the rabbit problem.  Mr Fidget caught a baby last night, and Our Ginger has just come in growling furiously with another one.  The Systems Administrator shooed him out with it, closely followed by Mr Fidget.  I don't know if he will be allowed a share or if it will be like the little boy's request for a taste of somebody else's apple: ain't gonna be no core. Mr Fluffy did not try to join in.  He shows no interest in killing mammals at all, only birds, but fortunately he doesn't get those very often.

The starlings seem to be back this year nesting in the roof in the front of the house.  They didn't come last year, and we missed them.  There has been a lot of starling chattering from that end of the front garden, and this morning I saw a pair swoop down from the direction of the eaves, but didn't see them actually emerge from the hole since I was not looking up at the time.  I adore starlings.  They are such characterful birds, bustling about and making their strange staccato clicks and calls.  When they do nest in the roof they never seem to come out and forage in the garden, instead they shoot away in the direction of the farm.

Even a couple of days spent doing indoor things means I've missed things opening in the garden.  As I went out in pursuit of the fox I saw that the blue flowers of the Camassia leichtilinii had started to open.  They do excellently on clay, which is not the case for many bulbous species, but I am still trying to work out what can coexist with them to cover the space from the second half of summer onwards when their leaves have died down.  Whatever it is has to be happy with the clay, and able to tolerate having its emerging leaves shaded at this time of year, or else be very late to emerge itself.

The Paulownia is in full bloom, and while it is covered in its purple-blue candelabras of foxglove shaped flowers I feel the effort of trying to prune it afterwards must be worth it.  Last spring I swore to myself I'd cut it right down in the winter, but then relented as it had made rather a nice balanced shape and was already in bud again.  It can't be allowed to grow to full size, being too close to the house and in the middle of a rose bed, and it was not originally intended to be a tree at all, but to be coppiced annually for the huge leaves.  One stem of coppice escaped the pruning saw and produced buds, I soft-heartedly left it until it had flowered just to see it bloom, and it took it from there.  The way that it bounced back from last spring's pruning session suggests that conceptually it can be managed as a large standard shrub, only getting at it to prune it in the middle of the rose bed is so cumbersome.  We are not talking piddly little floribundas, you understand, but big sprawling shrub roses.  Parts of 'William Lobb' are currently lashed to the trunk of the Paulownia to stop them from flopping over everything else.

spring cleaning

Cleanliness is next to godliness.  So John Wesley preached in a sermon in 1778, though the idea is far older, and as I don't like cleaning very much and quite enjoy choral evensong on Radio 3 I was almost tempted by the injunction in The Times to go to church anyway on Easter Sunay, unbeliever or not.  The Church of England is certainly broad enough to accommodate my woolly brand of agnosticism, and sometimes when I am with with those of my friends and acquaintances who are practicing Christians I wonder if I should accept the past fifteen hundred years of my country's history and simply join in.  The brain's desire to reduce cognitive dissonance might mean that where behaviour went, belief would follow.

Instead I started on the cleaning, which has been waiting for the wet day that never came.  Today's forecast looked about the rainiest, though in the event all we got was a miserable little spatter for a couple of hours from mid-afternoon, not enough to do the garden any good, but I resolutely ignored the sunny view from the kitchen as I wiped, scrubbed, and washed.  I'd warned the Systems Administrator in advance that cleaning day was on Sunday, and that it was going to be a big one, and the SA nobly volunteered to do the vacuuming and made a really thorough job of it, lifting up the furniture and the rugs.  The other kind of vaccuming is the rushed sort when you have people coming round and hastily do the visible bits, while knowing there are still drifts of cat fluff in the dim recesses under the desks.

I haven't finished.  I am prone to hopeless over-optimism about how long jobs are going to take, though that may not be uniquely my problem so much as part of the human condition, and by half past six when I was absolutely knackered with cleaning and needed to get the supper on to cook I'd finished the kitchen, or as much of the kitchen as was on today's list, but not nearly done the bedroom.  The SA showed further willing by wiping every flat surface in the sitting room with a damp cloth, removing a lot of cat footprints from the window sill in the process, so the sitting room is done, but not the hall, apart from cleaning the floor and washing the cats' blankets.

Apart from a general desire to be less scuzzy and tidier, and the fact that we have a guest coming round next week and I needed to clean the kitchen before jarring up some honey, my principal target this time is dust, which is why the limescale in the kitchen sink can wait to another day. After sniffing my way through the entire year so far I decided that this couldn't still be the effects of a cold, and Googled hayfever.  Hayfever leads you straight to rhinitis, which is not a diagnosis per se so much as a description, like when I asked a GP what conjunctivitis actually was and he said it was the latin for red eye.  What is causing the rhinitis is still a moot point, but the account of the symptoms on the NHS website could have been written to describe me.  Runny nose, blocked nose, watering eyes, facial discomfort, can lead to headaches. Yup, that's about it.

It is not uncommon to develop allergies in middle age, so it is possible that by now I do have hayfever, though if so it's a bit of a bugger because there is no way I am going to remain indoors or avoid picking up leaves.  Likewise if I've become allergic to cats that would be just too bad.  But I thought it was worth doing something about the dust, since a headache that comes on while I'm asleep could be triggered by something in the bedroom, and the cats don't come in there except for Our Ginger in the mornings, while if pollen were the main culprit I'd expect to feel worse when I went out of doors.  So vacuuming the bed slats is on the list of things to do, along with washing my pillows.  And a trick recommended on the internet is to rub a slick of vaseline inside your nostrils to trap irritants.  It sounds gross, but no worse than going around perpetually clutching a collection of grubby paper hankies.  And I will consult our local pharmacist when they reopen, though I already know she doesn't approve of having animals in the house.

rebuilding the steps

The Systems Administrator has finished rebuilding the wooden steps down to the bottom lawn.  The old ones lasted for years, but reached the point of rottenness where I wouldn't risk leading visitors up them, and then one of the middle treads broke, and the whole flight was rendered impassable by the sprawl of rambling rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', which has never seen why it should restrict itself to climbing up the wild cherry when there was all that lovely sunlight to be had by sprawling out over the deck, the lawn, the steps and anywhere its wild tentacles could reach.

I had made footling efforts to tuck the errant growths in rather than cut them all off, but that simply made the problem with the steps worse as the curved stems bulged out over the route, and I was even more loathe to cut them off because they were supporting growth somewhere inside the great mass of rose.  Then I steeled myself to give the rose a severe pruning to open up the steps, but it was not severe enough, so last autumn I gave it a second going over.  Then one day when I was using the steps to lead a hose down to the beds in the bottom part of the garden a second tread disintegrated, and I made an inelegant descent on my bottom.

As this spring's drought wore on I was awfully keen to have some usable steps, while not wanting to nag the Systems Administrator about it.  Domestic life is rarely improved by nagging, and after years of working with and for a series of wildly unreasonable and aggressive people I have an almost pathological dislike of trying to make people do things.  But the steps were jolly useful, because they gave a straight line of access from the corner of the house where the outdoor tap is right down the garden, ideal for pulling a hose along.  The only other route meant taking the hose across the lawn, being careful not to pull it into either rose bed, and through a one hundred and eighty degree bend before taking it back across the garden being careful not to pull it across the fritillary lawn.

Happily the SA announced that he was going to build new steps without the impetus of frequent reminders, AKA nagging, and it even turned out that we had some suitable wood in stock.  Years ago the SA bought a job lot of pine salvaged from some old pews that came out of a chapel that a colleague's father-in-law was renovating, not with any particular use in mind for it but because the SA had room to store it and they agreed it would be a shame to waste it and it would come in useful eventually.  And now it has.  The design proved more difficult than the SA expected, not being a regular at building steps, and the first attempt was too steep because the pews were slightly shorter than the existing flight.  If you make steps too steep then the useable width of tread is reduced because the one above it hangs over it, not so much of an issue when going up but tricky going down, and the only way round the problem is to increase the rise, which is not user friendly either. Also the two sides have to be absolute mirror images of each other, otherwise the treads will not be level.  The steps accordingly went through a couple of preliminary incarnations before coming good, and the sides are peppered with dowels filling the extra holes drilled during the earlier attempts, but that isn't a structural issue.  Painted with Sadolin to get maximum life out of the pews they look the part, and the supports for the treads will never rot because they are recycled plastic, left over from a garden railway project.

I am very pleased with them and have said so a number of times.  Come next week I shall be taking the hose down them.  And it is nice when walking round the garden to be able to come back by a different route, even if it's only a matter of reappearing at the opposite side of a not very big lawn.

spring cleaning in the garden

I needed to water the drought stricken bog bed, and thought that once I'd dragged the hose down to the bottom of the garden I might as well take the pressure jet down there as well and wash the Systems Administrator's sitting-out deck, and then I thought that if I was pressure jetting I could go whole hog and clean the bench on the terrace (or patio) and the two dining chairs as well.  The dining chairs were not actually too grubby, having spent the winter in the garage partly to protect them from the weather and partly to stop them blowing through the conservatory windows if we got a particularly severe gale.

The bench was a fiddle.  I got on better once I'd worked out that I needed to stand on the seat to clean it, since holding the lance up to do it from floor level was giving me a crick in my shoulder.  I don't really like the pressure jet.  I like it better than scrubbing that amount of wood by hand, but that's not to say that I like it.  The thin hose to the jet and the electric cable keep getting wound round each other and round my legs, the vibrations make my hands ache after ten minutes, the compressor is noisy, and the feeling of the water supply to the jet vibrating when it accidentally touches my leg is just weird.  A great deal of green scuzz came off the bench in the end, leaving two strange patches of greyish green on the ground once the patio dried, but I expect they will wash through the gaps between the slabs if I sluice them down each time I water the pots.

The deck really did take ages.  The Systems Administrator's sitting-out deck is at the very back of the bog bed, shaded on three sides by the hedge, a large clump of yellow stemmed bamboo that is currently kept in check by a perimeter of galvanised lawn edging after it began to wander alarmingly and I had to dig a chunk of it out with the pick axe, and the Metasequoia glyptostroboides that I planted under the fond impression that it was a swamp cypress.  The SA built the deck to have somewhere to sit sheltered from the wind and the sun and listen to the cricket on the radio.  It works for that purpose very well, being very sheltered, and gives a pleasant view over the bog bed, when it is flowering, and out past the bamboo and across the bottom part of the garden.

There are only a couple of practical problems.  Decking that's in almost permanent shade does get particularly green and slimy, and birds do like to roost in trees, and when birds roost they squit.  So the narrow walkway to the deck, which has a Japanese inspired bend half way across to the deck to encourage visitors to slow down and pay attention, commands attention in an additional and less charming fashion by having a permanent white streak of guano across it.  The birds also crap on a large clump of the yellow flowered form of Iris foetidissima, which I am rather annoyed by, and a blameless Lamium orvala.  Still, that's the reality of wildlife.  Sometimes it's pretty and fluffy, fluttering, buzzing and singing in a delightful fashion, and sometimes it's munching through plants and crapping on the place.

There is a pair of reclining seats that live on the deck in the summer.  I don't sit on mine very often, but like the idea that it's there and I could if I wanted to.  When not in use they fold up and rest against the back wall of the sitting-out deck, but even offering minimal surface area to the birds they do suffer from the odd strike.  A lounger that's got bird droppings on it is no use to anyone, and I didn't enjoy washing them last autumn before putting them away, so I have been saying that I would make a cover for them for this year, something that would be easy to run under the tap if it did score a hit.  Then I thought I might be able to adapt a readymade storage bag or suit holder, to save the trouble of trying to sow a double layer of PVC coated fabric, which felt as though it was going to be hard work, but I couldn't find anything suitable online.  The only purpose made chair cover was so startlingly ugly and tacky that I wouldn't have it in the garden.  The Systems Administrator proposed a far easier solution: buy a PVC coated tablecloth of the right size and attach battens to the two long sides to weigh it down, then simply drape it over the chairs which are leaning up side by side against the back of the deck when not in use.  Simples, and certainly much easier than sewing anything.

the dahlias arrive

I was crawling around the middle of the turning circle rootling weeds out from between the paving slabs when the post van arrived, so I uncoiled myself and went to take the post to save the postman from having to get out of the van and trudge up to the front door.  He had a small, flattish box ready for me on the dashboard which I realised with a little surprised thrill of pleasure must be my dahlias.  I ordered them from Halls of Heddon back in very early February, and left it to their discretion when to dispatch them, working on the basis that I had a frost free greenhouse.  They are what Halls call mini plants, that is well rooted cuttings, and it's handy that the next few days are forecast to be lightly overcast, so they will be able to settle in the greenhouse without my worrying that they are getting too hot.

I love the Halls catalogue.  I don't buy from them every year, since dahlias are fairly reliably perennial given a modicum of luck, but it's fun to try a few new varieties every now and then, and the choice Halls offer is massively more than you will find in any garden centre.  The young plants grow away very well, barring catastrophes with heatwaves or major watering errors.  In fact, if you know what you are doing you can get an enormous plant by the end of the first growing season, as shown in one of the slides at last year's garden club lecture by a local dahlia expert.  I've had some disappointing experiences with tubers, both mail order and packed in plastic bags at garden centres, that have turned out on close inspection and sans packaging to be desiccated or damaged, so I'm happy to take my chances with the mini plants.

I followed the enclosed instructions exactly, potting the little plants into nine centimetre pots using John Innes number 2 compost, and watering them in.  I am not supposed to water them again for a few days to give the roots time to settle, and I am supposed to shade them if there is a hot and sunny spell.  Fingers crossed, there won't be.  This is the trickiest part of acquiring a new dahlia.  If planting tubers you need to be careful not to overwater them in the early stages, or the developing root system may rot.  It can be tricky in hot weather, as they can make a lot of top growth quickly and you feel that they must need plenty of water, but if you've got one that's failing to develop or whose stems have gone brown and died back in mid season it's worth checking what's going on below ground.

It's long enough since I ordered the plants that it will be like a new shopping experience looking them up and reminding myself what each one is supposed to do.  I know there is a very pale yellow single, destined to go in a pot alongside pots of the pale yellow Cosmos I'm growing from seed, and the light blue Convolvulus sabiatus I haven't actually ordered yet.  There is a dark red single that will make a great pairing with the purple leaved and red flowering snapdragons that are coming along in a cold frame, apart from the fact that I haven't yet worked out where to put this pleasing display and the snapdragons are still only an inch tall.  Most of the others flower in shades of pink or mauve and are intended to go with the conventional pink Cosmos and existing pink dahlias.

As the tender things in pots that have been overwintering in the greenhouse begin to push out new leaves it is becoming pretty clear that some of them have quietly died at some point.  Could have been the cold, since we had a couple of sharp nights when I didn't set the heater, or overwatering, or leaving them too dry in an attempt not to overwater them.  It is hard to say.  A couple of silver leaved Plectranthus that were right up against the glass are not showing any signs of life, and I fear there is no life to be shown signs of.  They were raised from seed, and I still have some seed left, though it must be very old, plus one plant in the conservatory that's being very slow about leafing up but is definitely stirring, so I could take cuttings from that later in the season.

It's more annoying that Salvia 'Love and Wishes' has got no signs of buds at all, and worse than that has got the subtly dried out, angular look of death that comes to shrubs where there is no sap rising.  I got that at the Great Dixter plant fair, and thought I had been very careful with it. Various sources sell them by mail order, but it is galling to have to pay the delivery charge when you only want one or two plants.  I suppose, thinking back to the dahlia delivery, that if nothing died there wouldn't be room to try new things.

feeding and tidying

I looked again at the pots of by now going over dwarf tulips that should have been orange, and even in their faded state they were definitely pink and not orange.  I have a theory, which is that I was sent 'Little Beauty' instead of 'Little Princess'.  I have grown 'Little Beauty' in the past, and there are still a few scattered survivors around the gravel.  The flowers are dark pink or pale red, according to how you look at these things, with a dark blue centre, and I reckon that somewhere along the supply chain somebody read the words 'tulip little' and then didn't register any further.  I like 'Little Beauty' so it isn't a problem per se, except that it is nice to be sent what you asked for.

The best value dwarf tulips in the gravel have to be tulipa bakeri 'Lilac Wonder' which are naturalising themselves so that I now have more than I planted.  They wander around the fringes of some lavender bushes and a Euphorbia x pasteurii that is getting quite large, and are happy unless completely overshadowed by shrubs.  Tomorrow I shall plant my four little pots of the rare and precious Tulipa sprengeri, three bulbs bought at vast expense (from the chap who sold me the rogue princesses so let's hope they are the real deal) and a clump very kindly dug up for me by the couple whose garden I visited last autumn with the garden club.  T. sprengeri flowers late, for a tulip, in a vivid shade of red, and will naturalise if happy.  I should very much like to have them spreading freely in the turning circle.  They are extremely pretty, and in the wonderful world of garden one-upmanship you get bonus points for growing them.  Or at least, you used to.  Perhaps the oneuppers have moved on to a new target by now, just as growing the dahlia 'Bishop of Llandaff' no longer carries the kudos it did two or three decades ago.

Meanwhile, I fed the pots of dahlias in the greenhouse, and the potted box by the pond, and the rows of Dianthus on the terrace (or patio), and gave the merest dusting of food to the pots of alpines, since the garden club lecturer said they did not need much nourishment, coming from such rocky and inhospitable places, but in a pot I thought they might want something.  I fed the pans of Sempervivum and Sedum on the wall along the front of the terrace, trying to pull the rosettes of leaves carefully apart so that the fertiliser landed on the compost instead of lodging on the leaves. I fed the little collection of shade lovers in pots in the dark corner outside the conservatory.  I still could not bring myself to sprinkle whole pellets of Vitax Q4 on the smaller pots and laboriously crushed them with the pestle and mortar I have liberated from the kitchen for the duration, while cursing whoever decided to offer amateur gardeners the wretched supposedly easy-to-use pellets instead of good old-fashioned granules.

I also tidied the front corner of the garage where I keep my gardening tools.  It felt like a slightly bizarre priority, if not a displacement activity, when there were plenty of actual gardening jobs to be getting on with, but I was getting fed up with not being able to find things when I wanted them, and although the Systems Administrator didn't grumble about it I'm pretty sure he was fed up with having to scoop the mess out of the way every time he needed to get the lawnmower out.  I found all sorts of useful things, my second pair of swivel handled secateurs I haven't seen for ages, an entire bucket's worth of gloves that didn't have any obvious holes in them, two unopened packets of Rootgrow, and a spare lump hammer that the SA would like back for the workshop.  I like things to be tidy, it's just getting them that way that eludes me so much of the time.

No rain is forecast.  The house is unbelievably grubby because I have been saving the cleaning for a wet day, but sometime soon I am going to have to declare it an honorary wet day even if it's dry and devote myself to housework.  I am not alone in this.  Most keen gardeners will admit that their houses are cleaner and tidier and they finally get on top of the ironing when there's a run of wet or freezing weather.

spring feeding

Things are growing visibly by the day, apart from those things which are not growing, and it's a tricky decision which to focus on.  The growing things include the herbaceous plants, sending their expanding leaves out over the borders and making it harder to find anywhere safe to put my feet, and the weeds.  I need to get my last bags of Strulch down as soon as possible, to try and curb the weed growth, which will make the borders look better and save me a load of work next autumn and winter.  In an ideal world it would all have been applied by the end of March, but we have to deal with the world as we find it, which is generally not ideal.

Some of the things that are not growing are simply natural late starters, like the little oak tree that is only just breaking bud.  I'm not worried about the little oak tree.  It will get going in its own good time, along with the coppiced Paulownia and the Rhus.  Some things, on the other hand, need feeding and I am more concerned about them.  The witch hazels in pots that were looking rather sparse last year, the dahlias that were not so green as they should have been, the hornbeam hedge on its diet of miserable thin sand, the tired looking pots of Dianthus on the terrace (or patio) and the frankly disgraceful pots of what were supposed to be box balls, but look more like Before photos in an advertisement for some kind of rescue remedy plant food, the unhappy roses in the front garden that are not nearly so leafy as the ones in the back that are on stiffer soil to start with and have had a dose of blood, fish and bone this year, all of these need feeding, and they need feeding now because now is when they will make their rush of spring growth, not in August.

Today feeding won, and I weeded the potted shrubs in the back garden, the Hamamelis and Acer and the one solitary Camellia and single Hydrangea, and gave them all a dose of Vitax Q4.  I don't like the pellets, I really don't.  It is so much easier to judge the amount and get even cover with granules.  I wonder whether the Q4 is really better than blood, fish and bone, or if I should go back to using that for everything?

I used to have more Camellia in pots.  I must have been up to six or seven ranged outside the study window, and they did reasonably well there in semi-shade, but the pots always blew over in gales, especially the bigger plants.  Then came the two successive cold winters and all except the largest plants died.  I planted them out into a border, where one took immediately and the other turned chlorotic yellow and lingered at death's door for a good two seasons before regular watering and doses of special camellia food persuaded it to rejoin the land of the living.  It is not easy moving large plants out of pots into the ground, and if I were buying in a garden centre to plant out I would always go for the smaller specimen given a choice.  In fact, growing Camellia in pots is not that easy.  I say mine did reasonably well, and they did in the sense that they had leaves all over and flowered, but they never looked nearly as glossy and luxuriant as three growing in a nearby border, that were equally exposed to the wind but had the luxury of their roots in the ground.

I had a vision this morning of how the Hydrangea could and should look, going along the riverside walk in Wivenhoe with my parents.  The houses along that stretch look out on to the river and have no front gardens as such, but apparently own the land to the river with merely a requirement to keep a two metre walkway accessible to pedestrians, so most have put tables and chairs outside and many have pots.  The pots range from the tragic and neglected to the thoroughly excellent, and the most impressive were two massive, fat, bronze leaved hydrangeas in big pots.  They were bushy.  Boy, were they bushy, bursting with health and new growth, and the owners must have got them like that by loving care and diligent maintenance.  I have never seen hydrangeas that big offered for sale by any garden centre or nursery, ever.  In contrast my purple leaved hydrangea in a pot has more of the form recommended for a correctly pruned apple tree, in that you could throw a wellington boot through it.

tulip time

It's tulip season.  I do pots holding a dozen bulbs each to go by the formal pond opposite the front door.  For many years they were a confetti of hot colours, chosen to try and get some colour over as many weeks as possible, then I shifted tack to fewer varieties to get more of a massed display while they were out.  Last year I experimented with pink and yellow, but this year it's back to the reds and purples.  I like them, and any bulbs big enough to be worth planting out when I come to empty the pots can go in the dahlia bed with all the other red and orange tulips from earlier years.

'Ile de France' is a new one for me this year.  It is a Triumph type, a very tulip shaped tulip with classic, flat bottomed goblet shaped blooms.  Described by supplier Peter Nyssen as cardinal coloured, I would call them a deep cherry red.  Backlit so that the sun shines through the petals they absolutely glow.  They opened at the same time as 'Jan Reus', a variety I have grown before and like very much.  Its flowers are a deep, satisfying burgundy.  Opening a couple of days later but overlapping enough for it not to be an issue came 'Havran', another Triumph, providing a sombre bass note of dark purple.  It provides a nice contrast of shape with the other two, having elegantly pointed petals.

The only one I am not quite sure about is 'Cairo'.  The orange petals with subtle bronze streaking looked so pretty on the screen, but in the flesh are slightly muddy, and opened significantly later than the others.  Maybe next time I will go back to the elegant, lily flowered 'Ballerina', a beautiful warm orange and a good doer, with the corresponding advantage that the bulbs are relatively cheap.  I must think carefully about dates.  Two or three years ago I grew an absolutely beautiful, clear, soft orange variety so if I looked back through my old orders I might be able to work out what it was and when it would come out.

In the gravel I've been planting out the pots of Tulipa hageri 'Splendens' to add to the existing display.  They are relatively tall for dwarf tulips, which used to bother me slightly whereas now I like them better than the ground hugging Tulipa batalinii varieties.  Ones tastes vary, and in a couple of years I may change my mind again.  T. hageri 'Splendens' has burnt orange flowers with buffy yellow streaking and a jaunty growth habit, slightly more relaxed than the big hybrids.  I have it growing next to a large and wandering patch of Libertia peregrinans, which has bronze and orange streaked foliage that goes very well with the tulip flowers, apart from the way that the Libertia, which is well named being very peregrinating, tends to wander across the clumps of tulips.  The Libertia's habit of growth it to send up discrete clumps of its sword shaped leaves at intervals, and if the tulips were content to live in the gaps all would be well, but they find the competition a bit much.

I'm also planting the more dwarf variety 'Little Princess', or rather bulbs supplied to me as 'Little Princess'.  They have been flowering away in their pots by the greenhouse and the flowers were perfectly attractive but had quite a lot of pink in them, whereas 'Little Princess' is described as being orange-red, copper-orange, or dark orange with a rosey flash, according to which catalogue you believe.  Flower colours are difficult to describe or photograph, and can vary depending on growing conditions, and perhaps they are 'Little Princess', but I'm not convinced.  I am no tulip expert, though, and don't honestly know.  I didn't get the bulbs from Peter Nyssen but from a small firm that started up fairly recently, and somebody whose garden I visited last year mentioned that they had had a mislabelled bag of tulips from that firm.  They knew enough about tulips to know from the appearance of the bulbs that it was the wrong variety, even before planting them and seeing what came up, and the supplier refused to admit that the customer might know about that particular plant and might be right that it was mislabelled.  Of course, most UK bulb merchants don't grow their own tulips but import them from Holland, and as the expert gardener said, when you are the new kid on the block you aren't going to get the pick of the crop from the Dutch growers.

On the terrace (or patio) I've got tulip 'Fur Elise' flowering away.  This is a Greigii type, smaller than the Triumphs and starting earlier, and is extraordinarily pretty, with flowers in a soft shade of yellow tinged with apricot, not acid at all, and nice purple markings on its leaves.  I am very fond of the Greigii and Kaufmanniana tulips, the only trouble is finding anywhere in the garden where they might naturalise afterwards.

sprucing up the bog bed

Today's papers brought a warning that farmers in the eastern counties were going to have to start irrigating their crops two to four weeks earlier than normal, and those that did not have farm reservoirs but took their water directly out of the rivers could be limited in how much they could extract, while there have been couple of heath fires in Suffolk over the weekend.  A Met Office spokeswoman was quoted in The Times as saying that we had been spoiled by having such good weather and would notice when temperatures returned to normal next week.  It depends on what you regard as good weather.  I damped down the greenhouse and cold frame several times during the day, and watered some flagging seedlings at lunchtime, but I am afraid that some of them have still cooked.  Freak hot days in early April may be good if you want to sunbathe on Brighton beach, but they are something to dread when you have trays of tiny plants grown from seed.

In between fussing over the greenhouse I carried on weeding and watering the bog bed, that has sadly ceased to be a bog.  I decided a while back that a large patch of iris that was spreading militantly far beyond anything I imagined when I planted it would have to go.  Due to less than perfect labelling and record keeping I am not entirely sure which it is, probably 'Roy Davidson' or 'Tiger Brother', but whereas I bought them fondly imagining that they had the yellow flag iris somewhere in their ancestry and would spread a bit, it turned out to have almost all the terrifying vigour of the straight species.  The flowers were lovely, yellow laced and overlaid with brown, and I am a sucker for brown iris flowers, but the plant itself was a menace, overwhelming another, more restrained iris, two or three clumps or Sanguisorba, and most of the Primula florindae.

I advanced on it with fork and pick axe, not sure how brutal a removal job it was going to be.  You never know until you try.  Some things that you think would dig out fairly easily turn out to have entrenched themselves with tough roots going half way to Australia.  Other things that you imagine are going to be a real battle to extract almost pop out of the ground with a neat, defined rootball. The iris turns out not to have very deep or strong roots, so although the rhizomes are fat and in the centre of the patch extremely congested, still with careful positioning of the fork you can lever them up one at a time.  I toyed with the idea of simply reducing the clump, since the flowers are so pretty, but decided that there was a limit to how many invasive plants I had time to keep on top of, and the iris did not make the cut.  Its other annoying habit is that the leaves spread rather than growing upwards in nice, near vertical accents.  It makes the shape of the plant less interesting than many other types of iris, and means that even a moderate area of root takes up a disproportionate amount of space in the bed.

I found a few valiant remnant Primula florindae hanging on to life in the middle of the clump, another reason to prise it out carefully with a fork rather than going at it energetically with an axe.  I couldn't help disturbing them, though, and watered them before packing up for the day.    I got three more from Long Acre Plants as I was paying postage on the ferns order anyway, but they set me back three pounds thirty each, and I should like several more than three.  Primula florindae has the common name of Himalayan Cowslip (though you are safer sticking to Primula florindae then there can be no ambiguity or confusion) and produces tall stems of scented yellow flowers towards the end of the primula season.  It does like it wet, though.  At the Edinburgh botanic gardens we saw them growing in the bed of an (artificial) stream in an area devoted to Himalayan plants, and when the bog bed was a bog P. florindae was very happy and seeded itself.  It remains to be seen if it will be satisfied with occasional watering, which is another reason not to go mad and buy loads all at once.

The balance of the bed began to look immediately better as the iris began to disappear.  I always feel a pang having to abolish a healthy plant, but it was too domineering, too big and coarse and spreading for its position.  I was surprised though relieved to find the Sanguisorba still clinging on to life under the suffocating embrace of the iris, and can already imagine how that corner could look with airier and more restrained planting.  At least realising that you have planted a stupid iris is not so bad as realising that you have planted a stupid and inappropriate tree.

weeding and watering

Today I weeded and Strulched the bog bed and picked goosegrass seedlings out of the ditch bed, partly because it needed doing but mainly because I had to be at the bottom of the garden to keep moving the hose as I soaked them.  Sure enough, there is an article in today's Times raising the possibility of hosepipe bans, after the driest winter for twenty years.  I said the other day that things were very dry.  The Systems Administrator reports that some of the wet flushes in the wood are no longer boggy.  I am probably in a minority in being quite relieved that after tomorrow's flurry of heat next week is forecast to be significantly cooler, since with any luck the soaking will last for some time before I have to do it again.

I tried to make sure I weeded each area before watering it.  I went over the bog bed during the winter so the weeds now are mostly small and piddling, tree seedlings barely beyond the cotyledon stage, tiny rosettes of hairy bittercress, and masses of an ornamental thing that started with a packet of seed from Chiltern Seeds.  I can't remember its name, but vaguely think that it is some sort of purslane and is edible, though I'm not going to try eating it.  It has pink flowers, fleshy leaves, and seeds like billy-ho and then some.  It is quite pretty and I left some towards the edges of the bed but I didn't want it everywhere, particularly as I needed to see what tree seedlings, tiny ivies and other nuisances were hiding in it.

Anyway, the best way to weed this lot was to scratch over the surface of the dry soil with the points of a hand weeding fork and gather up the loosened weeds, and of course dry soil is much more comfortable to kneel on and you don't make great footprints in it.  Since the bog bed slopes I needed to plan operations quite carefully and get a clean weeded and mulched strip down the middle before I started watering, which was partly where the ditch bed came into it because I continued watering that while working on the other.  It meant a lot of shuttling back and forth, but was worth it to get things done in the right order.  While pulling up goosegrass at the back of the ditch bed I trod on a couple of emerging shoots of Solomon's Seal hidden in among the Pulmonaria and broke them, which was annoying.

I made sure to water yesterday's fern plantings while I was at it, to settle them in.  I've got some golden millet, Milium effusum 'Aureum' to go in that corner, raised from seed.  The leaves are delicate and airy and I hope the little dashes of yellow will give a light and ethereal effect.  Then I want some white flowered Geranium phaeum, a great doer in dry shade, but will have to buy that to get the ball rolling.  If it behaves like the blotched leaved form 'Samobor' then as long as I start off with two or three plants I should have lots in due course.

I have some Disporopsis pernyi and Maianthemum dilitatum rooting in pots in a cold frame, woodlanders bought from Pottertons as part of my winter bulbs order.  The latter can spread aggressively according to some sources, but looking at the dry and uninviting patch where I planned to put them I should be grateful if they grew at all.  Soil that is capable from morphing from ten inches of liquid mud to the dry side of normal in a couple of seasons, depending on rainfall and the level of the water table, has to be one of the most difficult areas to plant in a garden.  The Mainanthemum will tolerate boggy soil according to one US nursery, which was one reason why I thought I'd try it.

settling in the new arrivals

I potted up my order of auriculas this morning while it was still cool in the greenhouse.  I did not strictly speaking need any more auriculas, but not for nothing did Margery Fish's old gardener refer to them as 'them reckless plants'.  For years I admired the auricula exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show, and played around growing border auriculas from seed and buying the odd named variety from nurseries, then last year decided to try doing it properly and ordered a dozen from a specialist grower.  Buying the plants turned out to be much easier than tracking down a supply of suitable long tom pots, but after a false start with a couple selling vintage reclaimed pots online (critically too small and very badly packed) I succeeded in tracking down a firm still making them at a sensible price, Littlethorpe Pottery in Yorkshire.

A year into the experiment, pots and plants having come through the winter intact, I succumbed to the lure of more plants.  At the moment they are having to make do with nine centimetre black plastic, but as some of them were barely filling their seven centimetre square pots I wouldn't want to move them up to the clay pots in one go anyway, even assuming I had any spare, which I haven't. I am using Littlethorpe's five inch pots, which are slightly larger than the ones traditionally used for showing at Chelsea, but easier to manage than the smallest ones, which dry out too quickly in hot weather.  For exhibition purposes they are only required to accommodate a single rosette, but I am letting my plants grow on into clumps, partly to get more flowers but mainly because tiny plants in tiny pots are so much harder to look after.

The reckless plants are so demure and so beautiful, who would not want more than a dozen varieties, or rather eleven because I drowned one last summer struggling to keep it watered in hot weather, before the proper pots arrived.  I have gone for some doubles in sumptuous rich colours, some named border types and some alpines with white or gold centres.  White eyes tend to go with purple or mauve petals and gold with red or tawny ones.  They are all beautiful.  The Systems Administrator has started to make noises about building me a shelf for them.  In the meantime the new acquisitions are on the shelf in the porch, so the postman will get a treat if only he has time to stop and look at them.

Once it got too warm in the greenhouse for pricking out seedlings I turned my attention to the ferns which arrived yesterday.  The nursery enclosed a page of growing instructions with them, urging customers to get their plants into the ground as soon as possible to reduce the chances of their roots overheating or drying out, and I thought that in this weather they were absolutely right.  I didn't want a collection of ferns hanging about in nine centimetre pots.  When I went to the bottom of the back garden with the ones destined for the shady far corner I discovered that the big patch of early, red flowered lungwort and the Ligularia in what should be the bog bed were collapsing with drought.  That is worrying.

I am not panicking yet, since we have had dry springs before now followed by grey, soggy summers, the weather generally breaking just at the point the media starts making dire predictions of hosepipe bans.  Tendring has never actually had a hosepipe ban, but our water is phenomenally expensive.  But the weather might not break, and it is worrying for the garden to be so dry so early in the year.  Staggering through a dry July and August is all very well, when there's the prospect of cooler weather in September and maybe some autumn rain, but for the garden to already be so dry with fully five months of spring and summer to go is daunting.  I dragged the hose out, being careful not to scythe it across the fritillaries in the lawn, and set it to soak the worst patches while I planted the ferns and the bog primula I got from the same nursery.  The bog is no more, alas, as the water table has fallen, but the bed is shady and I will have to see what I can manage with some irrigation, while remembering not to plant any treasures that will be drowned if we have another wet winter and the area goes back to mud soup.  I lost several shrubs there the last time it was wet.

two artists and some plants

I went to my first NADFAS lecture this morning as a paid up member.  As I stood in the lobby waiting for the friend who persuaded me to put my name down for it, the fact that I was still mentally in the garden running through the long list of jobs to be done must have shown in my face, for the chairman and then somebody else I know from the music society commented that I looked lost and asked if I was alright, and I had to explain that I was fine, I just had a vague resting face.  It is a very small world in the provinces, though.  My friend once she arrived tried to introduce me to another friend of hers, but we had already met because his wife helps run the Wrabness church concerts and the garden society, and when I saw the contact details for an art study day being run by the other Colchester branch of NADFAS I recognised the name of one of the people I went on the London pre Great Fire churches tour with, and when yesterday morning I met a different friend for coffee I discovered that they were friends too.

I do not think I will be going to any extra study days just at the moment.  It's enough of a panic making it to the monthly lecture.  Still, I enjoyed it once it started, as I thought I would.  It was about the artistic careers and lives of Gwen and Augustus John, though as the lecturer said, apart from the fact that they were brother and sister there was no particular reason why you should compare them.  Before the lecture I thought that on the basis of what I'd seen of their work I preferred Gwen, but I discovered during the talk that this is now mainstream artistic opinion. Indeed, Augustus himself said a decade after his sister's death that in the long run he would be remembered mainly as the brother of Gwen John.  My opinion of his work actually rose during the course of the talk.  I have seen one or two pretty idle and splashy paintings of his, one of his wife and mistress walking with assorted offspring across a lurid landscape that really quite annoyed me, but he could handle colour wonderfully when he was on form, to judge from the slides, and I like colour.  Gwen is interesting, though, less colourful but with a much more sophisticated use of paint.

I was expecting a box of plants for shade, which duly arrived during their booked one hour slot just after lunchtime.  It was a gentle relief that they turned up as planned so that I could open the box and reintroduce them to the world of light, air circulation and water.  It's not that hot yet, but quite warm enough to be driving around in a plastic container inside a cardboard box in a van, especially when you are a fern.  All are hardy, some that should be able to cope with relatively dry shade to go in the bottom far corner of the back garden where I was planting Cyclamen hederifolium earlier in the year, and some small ones to go in pots in the conservatory to replace the non-doing begonias.  I got them from shade specialists Long Acre Plants in Somerset, and they look very nice plants though I shall have a more definite opinion once I've had them out of their pots.

The bare root cyclamen were a success, by the way.  After spending a few more days waiting to be planted than they should have done because I was not very well and the weather was not very nice when they arrived, they all stood up like soldiers once they had been given a good soaking and had twenty-four hours to settle down.  If Pottertons are doing them again next winter I would happily buy more, if I wanted any more cyclamen.  I am increasingly a fan of mail order for plants, so that I can choose exactly what I need for the spaces available, without being seduced by the charms of things I don't have a place for that have been put in the front line to tempt me, and without having to try and make substitutions on the hoof because the garden centre doesn't have exactly what I'm looking for.

tidying the herb bed

The tripod in the herb bed with the only Clematis alpina that's doing really well blew over again.  I suppose it offers more wind resistance than the others.  It seemed a waste to leave it lying on the ground given it is in full flower now, so I had to excavate a hole to rebury the legs of the tripod. That's the trouble with using plant supports.  At just the point you really need them, when the plant is well grown, they have a habit of keeling over in the wind.  Part of the answer is that you have to bury more of the legs than you imagined you would, and I'm sure that a lot of ready made supports aren't designed with enough length below the first horizontal strut for proper internment.

The soil in the herb bed is horribly light for clematis, which is why even members of the Atragene group struggle.  Clematis alpina and C. macropetala demand good drainage and tolerate poorer soil and more drought than most clematis, but even they resent the sand of our front garden.  I feed them, and water them sometimes when I've got the hose out for the pots, but it often hasn't been enough.  If one wasn't doing so well I'd probably given up by now, but the solitary success on one tripod out of four acts as a spur to try and get the other three right.  The one plant that shows what they can do on sand is Clematis alpina 'Ruby', or at least was sold to me as that, but since the flowers are not the same as another 'Ruby' I tried, it might or might not be.  Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong.

Once I was working on the herb bed I thought I might as well get on and weed it, then I could give it a generous dose of blood, fish and bone.  A coarse clump forming grass, a fine leaved grass and a running grass, a big vetch, a little vetch, goose grass, a rosette forming thing and a little sprawling thing with blue flowers are the particular weeds in that bed, but scarcely any creeping sorrel for some reason.  If I were to take up wild flowers as an interest I would know the names of the weeds, but life is too short to learn about everything.  I recognise them, but don't have names for any of them except the goose grass.  Cleavers, Galium aparine, sticky willy, call it what you will.

The chickens all came to watch me weeding and stood behind their bars, and I felt sorry for them and experimentally gave them some young mint shoots, which they ate, so I tried them on parsley, oregano and lemon balm, which they ate as well, along with some dandelion leaves.  They liked their impromptu salad and began to burble to each other, and I thought I should make a habit of it when it took so little effort to make them happy.  They get a sprinkle of sultanas in the morning, and any leftover boiled potato or rice that's going.  Though I disgraced myself recently at a lunch where there was a great pile of plain rice left at the end of the meal, when I asked my hostess tentatively if any of the rice was in danger of going in the food recycling bin because my chickens would eat it, and she looked at me askance and said that the rest of the family would eat some and she always froze the rest.

an evening of alpines

This may be a brief post, as I was late back from the garden club meeting.  The talk was about alpines, and the lecturer had a lot to say about them growing in the wild and in gardens.  It was interesting, but lasted an hour and twenty minutes, which is at least twenty minutes longer than most people can concentrate.

Once he got on to the cultivation of alpines I realised how much I already knew, in theory, although in practice I am not awfully good at it.  I could blame the fact that the top of the garden where I try to grow them is almost pancake flat while he said they were much better on a slope, but I think the real issue is that the sand does not make a very good approximation of an alpine scree.  In spring when in nature they would be irrigated by the snow melt, most years in the Clacton coastal strip the soil is already getting dry.  And there is no protective blanket of winter snow to insulate them from frost.

There are lots of other ways of growing alpines besides in the ground.  I do have a few containers, though I use terracotta pots rather than making my own imitation stone troughs out of sand, cement and peat modelled around a cardboard box.  I have already empirically discovered the importance of good winter drainage and not planting anything that runs underground.  But most of the other methods are beyond me.  I am not going to buy tonnes of rock to build a rock garden, nor broken paving slabs to build a crevice garden, nor am I going to start constructing dry stone walls or use them to create raised beds.  I couldn't afford the materials, Essex is not natural stone country and it would look silly and out of kilter with the rest of the garden, and it is not going to happen.

And I wouldn't know where to source peat blocks.  The sad thing is that according to the lecturer, peat blocks are cut from the top one or two feet of peat covering bogs which are going to be mined to fuel power stations.  The surface layer of peat is not dense enough to use as fuel, but if it isn't sold to gardeners that doesn't save the peat bog, the top will simply be burnt off.  The blocks will last for decades in the garden without breaking down, as long as they are shaded and never walked on.  But garden use of peat is a sensitive subject, and I have never seen peat blocks offered for sale. Nor tufa, except by one firm online I'd never heard of, and something about their website made me reluctant to risk paying them money, let alone the large amount they were asking for very small pieces of rock.

Still, I liked the sound of Ashwood's Carousel series of Lewisia.  Apparently they will produce repeat flushes of flowers instead of only one, and they can cope with moisture in their crowns without rotting, which is the problem with most Lewisia.  I have been trying to get over that problem by growing them in terracotta herb towers, though I do bring them under cover for the winter and water them sparingly, and can report that 'Little Peach' and 'Little Plum' both made it through with no losses.  Actually, L. cotyledon 'Snowstorm' which I grew from seed has survived for over six years in an ordinary clay pot with a top dressing of grit.  The plants were beginning to look stunted and unhappy about a year ago so I broke down the group of four, potted them individually with plenty of grit, and grew them on in the greenhouse until they recovered.  I have just regrouped three of them into a bigger clay pot, and two are flowering.  So maybe Lewisia are not so rot prone as all that if you live in a dry part of the country, and keep them under cover for the winter while being very stingy with the watering can.  Repeat flowering would be nice, though.

hedges and gravel

The eleagnus hedge has been a mixed blessing.  In its favour, Eleagnus x ebbingei grows fast so you have a functional hedge without having to wait too long, it is incredibly resilient to wind, it survives and grows on dry sand, its greenish-grey leaves and especially the new little silvery leaves are a pleasant colour and less oppressive than that much yew or laurel might be, the flowers in autumn smell sweetly of clove scented carnations, and the fruit are food for birds.  That's quite a long list of positives.  On the negative side, it grows fast so needs a lot of clipping, the constant nibbling away at it means you don't always get the flowers at least down at nose level, it has a fairly lax habit so is difficult to clip to a tight structure and after every gale you find the top has sagged to leeward, and the old leaves blow around the garden and make a pale brown leathery mess that takes years to rot down and disappear.  That's a quite long list of negatives.  The books warn that it has a final trick up its sleeve that I have not yet had to contend with, which is that after couple of decades plants can randomly start to die.

At the moment it's the old leaves that are concerning me.  I scooped as many of the fallen leaves as I could reach out of the base of the hedge a couple of months ago, and picked them out of the gravel after the next gale, but recent strong winds have dislodged lots more, which are now caught among the emerging growth of the beach garden in the middle of the turning circle.  Lodged between clumps of thrift, piled beneath the spreading arms of Euphorbia myrsinites, there is no quick way of raking them up.  After grabbing the bigger handfuls you have to resort to a fingertip search to get most of them, holding up the sprawling stems of the euphorbia with one hand while raking leaves out with the fingers of the other and picking them individually out of the burgeoning tufts of Asphodeline lutea.

The warm weather has brought the weeds on as well.  There is a very coarse leaved clumping grass and a fine leaved one, neither of whose botanical names I know, but which seem to prefer light soil since the weed grasses in the back garden are different.  There are freshly sprouted shoots of creeping sorrel, and a very fine leaved vetch whose botanical name I don't know either.  And there is a cultivated grass, whose name I ought to know since I originally planted it, which has seeded itself by degrees without my quite noticing how far it had got, until I realised this afternoon that it must be taking up practically a full quarter of the entire area.  Most of the clumps have collapsed badly during the winter so there is a lot of old dead grass to clear away, following which I think I shall take a border fork to the clumps and edit them severely.

I was hoping that the Echium vulgare I planted last year and which flowered would have spread themselves, but haven't come across any likely looking seedlings so far.  It has the splendid common name of Viper's bugloss, and produces a spike of bright blue flowers beloved by insects in its first or second year, following which it will die.  Life is too short to keep raising them from seed and planting them out from pots, and I hoped that once I'd got it growing in the gravel it would persist like the Californian poppies or love-in-the-mist.  Maybe it will pleasantly surprise me in due course.

Gravel makes an excellent seed bed, and fallen leaves become a major issue if you have any source of leaves in the vicinity as soon as you start planting in your gravel and can't simply rake it clean like a monk in a Zen monastery garden.  My aunt very sensibly ignored the garden designer who wanted her to turn her (large for London) back garden into a gravel garden, reasoning that she did not want to spend her spare time crawling around picking the leaves from her neighbours' trees out of it.  After an afternoon spent collecting eleagnus leaves I do have a dark suspicion that I should have planted yew.  It would have been a slow wait at the beginning to get the shelter from the wind, but I'd be laughing now.

flowering cherries and daffs

The Great White Cherry 'Tai-haku' is out and we are trying to remember if it is earlier than in some years.  It is a beautiful tree, holding its branches out horizontally, and for a few days every year it is smothered with flowers, and humming with bees.  The young leaves open a nice shade of bronze before turning green, and the autumn colour is good though not especially long lasting, and it is altogether an excellent tree.  Flowering cherries enjoyed massive popularity in the middle of the last century and you will see them in numerous mature gardens and lined up as street trees.  The predictable backlash followed, and I have heard them excoriated as boring, shapeless trees with only one season of interest, but this is mere prejudice.  You still don't generally find them as specimens in the sort of modernist garden beloved of upmarket garden magazine editors and trotted out at the Chelsea Flower Show, though I have noticed something of a vogue in recent years for planting avenues of them.  Never mind.  Garden fashions come and go, and I predict that in a few years having a small grove of white stemmed birches crammed into your suburban garden will be as badly out of fashion as flowering cherries have been in recent decades.  Meanwhile, having resolutely ignored fashion and planted 'Tai-haku' twenty years ago we are now enjoying it in its prime.  Japanese cherries are not generally the longest lived of trees.

We equally couldn't remember whether the daffodils were early, or going over faster than usual. It's probably a bit of both with the warm weather.  The white 'Thalia' are fully out and I have snipped off the first dead heads.  There are still some buds left to open on the soft yellow 'Pipit', not many, but the bright yellow Narcissus obvallaris finished a few days ago.  It's only the second of April, and that does feel early for the main daffodil display to be ending.  The fritillaries in the bottom lawn are pretty much full out, and I'm pretty sure that they were still blooming for a party we held for my father's birthday some years ago, which would put them in the middle of April.  I have tried keeping records of when things are out, but I always get bored and give up.  It varies, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I planted some pots of N. obvallaris into the daffodil lawn to top up the display, now that they and the ones already in the ground have finished flowering.  I deliberately held off until they'd gone over and I could dead-head them, because I like to plant them deeper than there's room to in their pots, and the brilliant yellow flowers look odd closer to the ground than the existing stock, plus it is difficult to get the leaves and stems to look entirely relaxed.  Once they are just bundles of plain green foliage you don't notice.  I've got some more 'Pipit' to go in as well once they've finished. 'Pipit' has a strong, sweet narcissus fragrance and would be worth doing in pots for its own sake.  As it is I enjoy the scent each time I go near the greenhouse.  'Pipit' seems to last well in the grass in fairly meagre growing conditions, on light soil and partially shaded by the eleagnus hedge and the little oak tree.

I passed on the opportunity today to go on a Plant Heritage daffodil workshop.  Part of me thought I should go.  It would have been enjoyable, and what keen gardener would voluntarily miss the chance of a day's tuition with a former Sissinghurst head gardener?  And it was remarkably cheap. But there is so much to do in the garden at the moment, and after trying numerous daffodil varieties in practically every bed and border I know from bitter experience that most of them don't persist in most places, and since I can't alter the fundamental soil type or the rainfall, and am not going to materially reduce the amount of shade or thin out the herbaceous planting in the borders to suit the daffodils, it seemed silly to go and get myself too excited about a group of plants that I know don't do especially well here.

right plant, right place

Plants will put themselves where they want to go.  Years ago I tried the little hoop petticoat daffodil, Narcissus bulbocodium, in the bottom lawn, but I never got more than a couple of flowers. Maybe it was too dry, or perhaps the grass was too rank, but they just didn't take.  In 2015 I tried again, and ordered fifty bulbs of the named variety 'Golden Bells', which were started off in pots and planted out once they were in leaf.  You should learn from your mistakes in gardening, and not keep killing the same plant in the same way repeatedly, but my general rule is to allow myself up to three goes, as long as the idea is not clearly bonkers.  The bottom lawn is dampish, and hoop petticoat daffodils seemed sufficiently within the bounds of possibility for it to be worth investing a further £9.50 on bulbs plus my time and the compost in trying to make the idea a reality.

They didn't produce much of a display last year, and I was beginning to think that this was really not going to work.  This year as winter wore on I peered at the bottom lawn, trying to decide whether any of the tufts of green foliage were daffodil leaves and not just grass.  A couple of flowers appeared, and then more, until there was quite a dense little patch.  The lawn is damper in some places than others, and when I planted them I concentrated on the naturally moister parts and ignored the dry uplands to one side, but I set them out across a wider area than is now flowering. Still, in their small chosen patch they seem perfectly happy.  It is a precarious existence, since the water table is not stable and they could easily find themselves too dry or too wet in a year or two, but for now they have found their niche.

At the opposite end of the garden tiny violets are spreading rampantly across the gravel.  I didn't plant them there, indeed, I didn't plant them deliberately at all.  They came in as stowaways on a pot of something from my parents' garden in Devon, which was planted in a nearby border.  I've forgotten what, and whatever it was it died years ago, but the violets live on.  I think of them as plants of lanes and shady banks and did not initially want them in the gravel, which I thought of as a place for spiky plants and hot, exotic colours, but the violets do not care what I think.  They like baking gravel and are going to live there, and after a while I grasped that it was easier to adjust my ideas to fit reality than to keep weeding the poor violets out or transplant them back into the border under a crab apple tree where I thought they ought to be.

The gravel is acting as a seed bed to primroses as well, but they will be moved once they are big enough since I want to use them up in the meadow, where the existing ones are flourishing (and will be split once they have finished flowering) but I want lots, lots more.

Now that rabbits are not grazing the front garden there are numerous fine, thread like bulb seedlings springing up in the gravel.  At the moment they are too small for me to have any idea what sort of bulbs they are, but there are fritillaries there, and scilla, and autumn flowering crocus, and I should be very happy to have more of any of them.

oversights and omissions

Poor chickens, I have accidentally mistreated them.  Before going up to London yesterday I rinsed and refilled their galvanised water dispenser, and topped up their food.  The food hopper lives in the henhouse, which is not conventional but stops it being rained on, and since the house is rat proof means vermin can't get at the food at night.  When I opened the end door of the house to get at the food a couple of the hens, seeing grass, made a charge for the exit.  I flapped a hand in front of their faces to shoo them back and shut the door rather hurriedly.  Hens lack the sense of purpose of Steve McQueen and co in The Great Escape, and they were easily persuaded to go back out into their run by dint of throwing down a small handful of grain, then I shut the pop hole of the hen house so that I could top up the food hopper without any of them making a run for it.

By the time I got home it was almost dark, and as I detoured to the hen house to shut them in for the night I saw from the protruding handle of the sliding door that the Systems Administrator had already done it.  It was only as we were about to go to bed and I was locking the front door that I ritually said You've shut the hens.  The SA denied having shut the hen house.  I was momentarily confused.  I had definitely seen the handle of the door pulled over, hadn't I?  I changed from my Swedish house shoes into my wellingtons, unlocked the front door, and went to check.

I found a pathetic huddle of hens trying to roost against the front of their house, and realised horribly that after filling their food hopper I must have forgotten to let them back in again.  Poor hens, at least they had had access to water all day, but they must have had very little to eat, and a nasty couple of hours sitting outside in the dark and listening to the creatures of the night.  The owls, although loud, were not so bad since owls don't eat chickens, but some of the other noises sounded more predatory.  Also, as I counted them I realised there were only five.  Surely a fox had not got into the run and taken one hen?  Or had she been shut in the house all day?  Casting my torch over the run I saw her sitting by herself in the furthest corner, body pressed low to the ground.

I opened the pop hole but the hens, even though awake, did not want to move.  While the main part of the run has almost got standing room for a human, the immediate six feet outside the hen house, built back in the early days when we thought they would be free range for most of the time, is built on the same lines as a guinea pig run and only has standing room for a hen.  Systems Administrator came out to see what was going on, and we made encouraging noises and shone our torches at the open door, but to no avail.  At last I tried opening the main door of the house and rattling their food, on the basis that although hens don't normally go for midnight feasts, on this occasion they might be hungry.  One went in, another followed, but there were still two who refused to move. There was nothing for it in the end but to crawl up the guinea pig run until I could reach them to prod them in.  The SA offered to fetch a stick, but I thought they'd had a bad enough day already without being poked with sticks.

Then I went to retrieve the straggler.  I was relieved when at my approach she got to her feet and began to walk quite briskly towards her house, since previous hens who have left the rest of the flock at night and gone to sit in that corner have done so as a prelude to dying, but it turned out that the corner's big attraction, apart from the fact that it was more out of the way and less obvious than staying right outside the pop hole, was the fact that a couple of eggs had been laid in it.  Of course as well as not being able to get at their food they had not been able to use their nest box.

I took the eggs, ushered the straggler home, and we shut the hen house door.  Poor hens.  I am an incompetent owner.  The Systems Administrator said he had been past the run several times and seen the hens pootling about normally, so had simply not noticed that their house was shut.  They hadn't made any noises demanding food, otherwise the SA would have investigated more closely.

This morning all six came bounding out of the pop hole for their morning snack of sultanas and left-over boiled potato as if nothing had happened.  I must pot up some clods of turf for them, though. They wanted that grass so badly, and they are still supposed to be kept in the run out of contact with wild birds.

a reunion lunch and an exhibition

I met some of my old fund management colleagues for lunch today.  It will be seventeen years come this summer since we all stopped working together, and there were moments when it felt as though it was going to take almost that long to find a lunchtime when we were all free.  In the event we liked it so much that we agreed a date for the next lunch before leaving, so much easier than endless rounds of texts.  We went to the branch of the Cote chain in St Christopher's Place, which has changed a great deal since my City days.  Then it was a sleepy backwater with a useful boutique where I used to buy suits, and a shop selling nothing but amber jewellery.  Now it is bustling with people and stuffed wall to wall with restaurants.  I couldn't believe there could be enough demand to fill them all, but it seemed there was.  Cote didn't even exist in those days, or if it did it was as two branches somewhere like Clapham, while now it has been rolled out all over London, but chains are about the only way to get a sit down meal in central London nowadays unless you are in serious expense account territory.  Cote does quite decent food, my only problem is that my stomach is no longer up to whitebait and steak and chips plus a quarter of a bottle of red at lunchtime.

Afterwards I went to see Revolution: Russian Art 1917 to 1932 at the Royal Academy.  Originally I was planning on going to the RHS spring show at Vincent Square, but then I realised that as the Russian show ends on 17 April then if I didn't catch it today I almost certainly wasn't going to.  It is a good exhibition, and quite large, and by the time we got to the end of it my old colleague who had volunteered to come too was gasping for a cup of tea.  There are paintings, posters, photographs, clips of film, textiles, and some pottery, and between them they give the impression of a time of great upheaval and intellectual fervour that didn't necessarily result in the production of world class art before Stalin's mad censorship really clamped down.  But as the Systems Administrator says, some artists and their work didn't survive and others fled, so it's very hard to tell exactly what was going on at the time.

There are some standout paintings, a couple of Kandinskys, a wonderful cubist inflected landscape by a painter whose name I've already forgotten, and a haunting portrait of a couple standing either side of a samovar.  He looks wistful, she looks away from him with arms crossed over the body and an enigmatic expression, the samovar is a wonder of impressionism.  There are some very good silver gelatin prints of industrial and domestic scenes.  There is some frankly incongruous porcelain, images of factories and workers painted on fine china much as Catherine the Great had scenes of English country houses.  I was particularly taken by the china figurine of a bourgeois selling her possessions, since what is more bourgeois than a china figurine?  Some of the portraits are haunting, with poet Anna Akhmatova, who lost two husbands and a son to the purges, theatre director Vsevolod Mayerhold, imprisoned and executed, and pioneering film maker Eisenstein looking exceptionally fluffy and unfit to be let out to face Stalin's Russia.

It's worth catching.  And no, it does not glorify Stalin, contrary to one newspaper review the Systems Administrator read.