painter of moonlight

I went up to London today.  I was still feeling sufficiently coldy that if I hadn't already arranged to meet some former colleagues for lunch I probably wouldn't have chosen to go today, but I wanted to see them, and it's mean to people who have gone to the trouble of organising something like that to blow them out at the last minute unless you have a very good excuse.  Week two of a cold doesn't really count.

Happily the trains were running smoothly, so I didn't end up spending half an hour standing around Colchester station, and I had time to call in at the Guildhall Art Gallery.  This has been running an exhibition since last September of works by a Victorian painter, Atkinson Grimshaw, which I'd been vaguely meaning to see and not got round to it.  Since it finishes in five day's time, if I didn't go today I wasn't going to, and an exhibition in Gresham Street fitted in nicely with lunch in Clerkenwell.  Atkinson Grimshaw was very popular in his day, and so went the way of Victorian painters in much of the twentieth century, becoming wildly unfashionable to the point of derision.  Then he began to come back into favour, and the last time Christies sold one it went for £169,250.  I don't know much about Victorian painters, but liked the sound him when I read a review in one of the papers.  Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight.

He was a self-taught artist, born in Leeds, and Leeds City Art Gallery still has one of the largest public collections of his works.  He painted northern scenes, of streets and harbours and landscapes, and big houses half hidden by leafless trees.  It always seemed to be November in the north.  In his forties, by then a commercially successful painter, he moved to London and painted more streets, and views of the Thames.  By then it always seemed to be night, around the time of the full moon.  His paintings are smooth and glossy, every leaf in place, no trace of brushwork.  His palette contains umpteen shades of greenish blue and pale gold.  And I really liked them.  I didn't feel I was gazing into the soul of humanity, or that a great spiritual truth was being revealed to me.  Atkinson Grimshaw was no Rembrandt.

It's just that I like Prussian blue harbours and moonlit water.  I like winter.  I like melancholy views of big Victorian houses lurking behind leafless trees, and dishevelled gardens strewn with dead leaves.  I've been to Whitby and Scarborough, and can imagine the horror of standing at the mouth of Whitby harbour at night watching as a ship founders (there was a strong onshore wind blowing when we were there and the entrance to the harbour looked beyond terrifying, even in daylight).  I can empathise with the vicarious thrill of watching the Scarborough spa burn down.  I've always had a weakness for rain on cobblestones, and I like bridges and riverbanks.  I suggested to a friend last autumn, when we were looking for an art exhibition to visit, that looking at Atkinson Grimshaw might be a sort of guilty pleasure, like eating a big box of chocolates while reading something by Philippa Gregory and knowing that it was not Middlemarch.  The suggestion was rejected and we went somewhere else instead.  But that is exactly what looking at Atkinson Grimshaw is like.  I'm glad I didn't miss it.

The Guildhall Art Gallery has a permanent collection of (I think mostly Victorian) art as well, and in the basement are the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, which you can go down and walk around.  I didn't due to lack of time, and had to content myself with peering at it through a viewing slit next to the cloakroom.  However, entry to the permanent collection and amphitheatre is free, and so are the special exhibitions, if you have got a national art pass.  I've just sent off for one (not in time for Atkinson Grimshaw) so more of that anon.

onwards and upwards

The holidays were finally over today, and it was back to work, where things are gently apace.  The person who was offered the plant centre job turns out to have accepted it.  In fact, he accepted it promptly upon being offered it, but his acceptance letter got caught up in the Christmas post and didn't reach us until December 28th.  I never actually saw or spoke to my employers when I worked on New Year's Eve, so didn't know what was going on.  I'm glad he's taken the job.  When I met him (briefly) I thought he seemed nice and genuinely keen, and I'd hate to think that my judgement had deteriorated that badly.  Besides, we need somebody, so it would be a waste to be back to square one.

They have installed a wireless link for a computer in the shop.  There's no actual computer as yet, but getting the connection for it is a start.  It will be very useful to be able to check and send e-mails without somebody having to leave the plant centre and schlep up to the office, and the manager will be able to use if for plant orders while remaining front of house.  It could be a useful sales tool, for example, when customers ask questions like 'can you show me a picture of the flower?' but I foresee that we will have to be disciplined about not spending ages googling details of plants for them.  I sometimes look up unfamiliar names for more info when browsing through seed lists, and it is possible to take an extremely long time trying to get the low down on one plant.  Plus, some sites are of dubious accuracy, and quite a few that come up are American and don't relate in a straightforward way to how that plant might perform in south east England.

The new plant list, that has been stalled for nearly two years, has been resurrected as a live project.  We don't run to a catalogue with photographs and descriptions (yet).  I'm not sure we ever will, as it would be the size of a hefty garden dictionary, given the range of plants we carry.  In early 2010 the boss sent me spreadsheets of the plants he buys in, and I spent a fair time deleting duplicate entries for plants bought from more than one supplier, or in more than one size, and pulled the whole thing together into a Word document, for the boss to check through and delete anything he thought we weren't going to sell in future for whatever reason.  Principle reasons being that we can't get it any more, or it sold very badly, or it kept dying before we could sell it.  The Word document was over 160 pages long, and the boss always seemed to have something else more urgent to do than look at it.  Probably the thought of looking at it made him feel the need to lie down in a dark room.  In the meantime, we went on using the 2006-7 list.  About a year ago we ran out of copies to give to customers (it is on the website, but not all of our customers like using computers).  It was embarrassing, although I'm not sure which was more embarrassing, giving people a list that was five years out of date, or not having a list at all.  Last autumn the manager announced that he was now authorised to update the plant list, following which nothing happened.  However, the Word document has finally made it off the office computer and into the light of day, and the manager has started crossing entries off in pencil.  Of course by now there will be other plants to add, as the list has grown since early 2010.  Still, it's progress.

The owner suddenly announced that we really were going to get on with the garden guide ready for the coming season.  The gardener drew a rather good map of the garden about two years ago, and last spring I produced some text, and the whole project quietly went into hibernation, but now we are on to a revised map to allow for changes that have been made to the garden since the original one was drawn, and revised text (including where I had put some trees in the wrong place, but I did write it at home without the benefit of a planting plan or the ability to nip outside and check).  The idea is to have a fairly plain guide in year one, that's not too expensive to produce, and go on to something glossier when we've tested it on the public, and had the chance to iron out any glitches.

A customer rang up wanting to reserve some plants, who turned out to be called Pennyfeather, which she carefully spelt for me saying it was ususual, and it turned out that she was not aware of the Eveleyn Waugh character Paul Pennyfeather.  How can you reach adulthood with the name Pennyfeather and not have come across your namesake in Decline and Fall?  She seemed pleased to hear that a Pennyfeather had been immortalised in literature, but maybe she was being polite and was privately bewildered.  Another customer rang wanting to pay for a plant that had been the subject of a protracted exchange of e-mails with one of my colleagues.  No plant had actually been reserved, but fortunately we still had some.  The e-mails appeared to have been deleted.  The manager asked me why my colleague should have done that, and I explained that if I were a cynical person I would say it was to ensure that things worked smoothly when they were there, and not so much when they weren't, thereby reinforcing their image of being indispensable.  However, as I am not a cynical person of course I did not think any such thing.

It's good to be back.  

visit from the sparrowhawk

Looking out of the sitting room window this morning, I saw a pile of grey pigeon feathers by the little oak tree.  We must have had a visit from a sparrowhawk, for I can't think what else would stop to pluck its prey that close to the house.  A fox, if it managed to get a pigeon, would surely take it away into the woods, and as I know from those odd times when the cats have caught pigeons (I'm sure they were very old and ill pigeons) cats don't bother to pluck them.  I noticed yesterday afternoon that there were periods when the bird table was suddenly completely deserted, and wondered then if there were some predator about, though it could just have been one of the cats.  Some people who feed the birds get very upset when sparrowhawks take any of 'their' birds, but while I'd rather sparrowhawks ate pigeons than blue tits or robins (there are too many pigeons around here.  They cause damage to crops and gardens, and although it is a strictly subjective judgement, I find the noise they make quite annoying), I think to have raptors in your garden is thrilling.  The owls were calling vigorously last night, and I like them too.  They eat voles, which are the enemies of gardeners as they eat crocus bulbs and chew through bark and kill branches, if not whole young trees, so the vole's enemy is my friend, but I like owls anyway.

The wind had dropped and the air outside suddenly felt pleasant to breathe again.  Shoots of the dwarf iris are visible through the gravel, and the buds on the two shrubs I bought eight days ago, that have been sitting in the front garden waiting to be planted, have swelled visibly since I brought them home.  The world is stirring.  I would not call it spring, exactly, not on 8 January, and there could be cold weather to come (I do hope not.  It could cause a lot of damage, the way plants are coming out of dormancy), but things are on the move.  I never know how to respond to non-gardeners who blithely assume that of course in January I won't be doing anything outside.  Weather permitting, it is always a busy time of year, and the earth feels anything but dead.

As I was feeling stronger and the weather was kinder I did a run to the dump at Clacton.  It is just off Jaywick Lane, not the most salubrious spot.  There was an armed robbery at a farm shop in Jaywick Lane five days ago, and Jaywick itself was the most deprived place in England in 2010 according to the Multiple Index of Deprivation released last March.  That places it bottom among 32,482 neighbourhoods, based on statistics for income, employment, health, disability, crime, and living standards.  As the leader of Tendring District Council said, that's quite an embarrassment for somewhere only sixty miles from London.  Jaywick has a beautiful beach, and if history had worked out differently it could be a thriving retirement or commuter town.  Unfortunately, it has a legacy of very grotty (though historically interesting) housing left over from the interwar Plotlands movement, which by now are homes to some very troubled people.  Still, everybody at the dump was carefully putting their carloads of stuff into the right containers like exemplary citizens.  I did a woodland talk at Jaywick, a few years ago, and the audience were perfectly nice.  In fact, they gave me a donation for the charity above the going rate, which was generous but unnecessary, and I did notice on the letter they'd sent me confirming the booking that they received funding from Essex Council.  Groups which have to raise every last penny themselves from membership dues and fund raising events tend to be more frugal about how they spend it.

Then, as the trip to the dump hadn't prostrated me, I move more iris, and some asters.  I am absolutely sure that now is not the right time to be disturbing asters, but I had a clump that turned out to be shorter than I was expecting.  Either I hadn't read the label properly, or the description at the nursery where I bought them was wrong, so they'd ended up too far back in a bed for their diminutive height, and I wanted to move them to the front of that bed, and replace them with another taller aster that I'd optimistically tucked in by a rose bush in the front garden and which turned out to barely see the light of day, poor thing.  I really don't want to save all this rejigging until March or April, when the soil would be warming up, the asters starting into active growth, and it would be officially the right time to do the job.  I want to get those two beds weeded, replanted, mulched and sorted, ideally by the end of February.  I'll let you know if the asters survive the experience. 

learning from experience

The birds have not eaten all of the seed bought from the farm shop.  It turns out to contain what looks like wheat, and some large round seeds I can't identify but which don't seem palatable to song birds, or even starlings.  I have encountered the same problem with what looked like a giant bargain bag of wild bird food I got in the feed store when I was buying layers' pellets for the chickens.  The Systems Administrator bought the current lot, believing that a bag of bird food for a pound was worth trying, despite my muttered warnings about the last batch of cheap seed.  Fortunately the farm shop bag is quite small, and a pound is not a costly experiment.  As we agreed, you only find out by trying.

The need to find out by trying seems deeply ingrained into human nature.  Tove Jansson, best known to many English readers for her Moomin stories (I still have my copies safely tucked away in the small spare bedroom) wrote for grown-ups as well, and one of her novels, The Summer Book, was serialised on R4 a while back.  I liked it so much I immediately bought a copy, and the unabridged original turned out to be even better than the radio version (not always the case, as with the memoirs of Robert Graves' son, which on the radio was an entertaining account of artistic expatriate life in the Med, and in full turned out to include the entire line-up of every jazz band he ever played in).  The Summer Book has also entranced everybody I've ever given a copy to, which hasn't always been the case with books I've liked and decided to share.  Not much happens, mind you.  A little girl and her father and grandmother spend the summer on the family holiday house on a small island.  That's about it.  One of the episodes which has always stuck in my mind as a universal truth is when the grandmother and little girl row over to a nearby island to introduce themselves to the new family there.  The recent arrivals announce their intention of building a landing stage, and the grandmother warns them not to do so, as the winter ice will saw through the legs and destroy it.  Rowing back to her own island she tells the child that they will build one, of course, because people always do.

I put out the last of the lard porridge, and put more lard in the Aga to melt to make some more.  Fortunately, given I forgot to mention it, this time the SA remembered to look in the simmer oven before putting the lunch in to heat up.  Look before you leap, in this house.  So never throw logs into a log basket before checking there isn't a cat curled up in it, and never sit on a chair in the dark.  The black cat has a tactful habit of purring if you come near him in the bottom of a basket or on a chair (black cat on black leather not the most obvious contrast), or squeaking politely if he thinks maybe you really are going to sit down.  His sister, the fat tabby, likes to lie in the middle of the steps between the upper and lower sitting rooms, which can be a trap to the unwary.

Today, for the second day running, I have taken the responsible course and stayed indoors.  This feels like (and is) a terrible waste of good gardening weather, but my cold has lodged firmly on my chest.  I would like it to clear up as soon as possible, and have to admit that staggering around the garden in a cold wind is unlikely to help.  The acid test is that I don't honestly feel up to it.  I picked up the camellia pots when I topped up the bird table, and watered them, and those few minutes outside were enough to convince me that this was not the right place to be.  I'd be happier if it were raining, because then I wouldn't feel I was missing out.  The cold can't be too bad, then.  The SA claims to only start seriously worrying about my illnesses at the point when I stop grumbling about them.  I try not to take the cold personally, and remember the words of Don Marquis (an early twentieth century American poet, unaccountably overlooked nowadays) 'Men curse germs, but a germ thinks of a man only as a swamp in which he has to live'.

Addendum  We watched Winter's Bone last night, one of last year's crop of films, about a seventeen year old girl from a desperately poor part of rural Missouri, searching for her father, who has skipped a court appearance for drugs offences after putting up the family house as bail.  It reviewed brilliantly at the time, and Dr Kermode regarded it as his third favourite for the Oscars.  It is a very, very good film at several levels, and I recommend it highly.  Admittedly, it is not very cheerful (the SA said it made Fish Tank look like Bambi, but I don't think it was that much more depressing), but it was that or an indie film about an Iranian rock band.

tempted by catalogues

The new year brings spring catalogues from Broadleigh Gardens and Avon Bulbs.  I see that this year will be the last that Broadleigh exhibit at Chelsea, as owner Lady Skelmersdale has decided that 40 Chelsea exhibits will be enough.  I have been to every Chelsea since the mid 1980s.  If I were to go down to the garage and check my boxes of old RHS magazines I suppose I could work out the exact year I started, but I think I narrowly pip the Systems Administrator's record of continuous attendance at every Cheltenham race meeting since 1987.  That means I've seen over 25 of Broadleigh's stands.  They have always been wonderful, and I shall miss them.  I can still remember Beth Chatto's exhibits, skilful displays of naturalistic planting, and she packed in Chelsea a good few years ago.  Still, I suppose somebody has to retire to make room for new blood.

The agapanthus are tempting.  Katherine Swift in The Morville Year has a clever trick for managing them in pots, which I pass on for those of you who aren't going to read the book, but might wish to grow potted agapanthus.  She says that once potbound they are practically impossible to extract, so she grows them in plastic pots already slit down both sides, placed inside a second plastic pot of the same size.  When she does need to get them out of their pot it just peels away.  It is such a reasonable sounding idea, I would adopt it myself, if it weren't that I grow everything for long term display in terracotta, which I like aesthetically and believe it helps keep the roots cool.

The Allium tuberosum, or Chinese chives, sound nice as well.  This is a late flowering, white form, excellent for wildlife, which I admired at the wildlife day at Beth Chatto last summer, as did a friend who liked it so much she bought a potful, and has kindly given me an envelope of seeds.  If they germinate as readily as ordinary chives I should soon have lots.  No need to buy Allium tuberosum, then.

Maybe I should have some more white Dodecatheon, commonly known as 'shooting stars' (although not at the plant centre where it is known as Dodecatheon.)  It is a woodlander with flowers like drooping cyclamen.  I have one, originally bought to go in the porch in spring close to eye level, so that I could admire it at close quarters, but it began to languish in its pot and was planted out by the ditch at the bottom of the garden, where it seems happier.  One looks a bit lonely.  Stingy, even.  Maybe I should have several.  The temptation always with catalogues is to want to try as many different and exciting plants as possible, when for maximum garden  impact it might be better just to choose one plant, and blow the entire budget on buying lots of them (or at least several.  Buying lots tends to require a bigger budget than mine).

I'm fairly sure I'll pass on the named varieties of snowdrops.  They are interesting, and beautiful, and I'm happy to look at other people's, and might even try and get organised to go this year to the RHS London show in mid February, where there are always excellent displays of rare and choice snowdrops and cyclamen.  But however delightful 'Ophelia', 'Straffan' and 'Green Brush' are (£7, £6 and £15 each respectively) I couldn't buy enough to make any difference at all to the garden.  And they'd probably get dug up by voles when I wasn't looking, or the birds would scratch out the label and I'd lose them.  Unless you have a collector's mind, and I haven't, despite loving many plants and being curious about them, a great big box of common Galanthus nivalis is a much better investment in a large, wild and woolly garden like ours.  I skipped a year of planting snowdrops last year, as there were so many other jobs to do clearing up after the damage caused by two bad winters on the trot, but this year I might get some.

Avon Bulbs catalogue opens with their named snowdrops, which look equally lovely and, from my perspective, pointless.  £25 each for 'Fuzz' and 'Galadriel', £20 for 'Welshway' or 'Wasp'.  I think not.  They have a wide selection of Eucomis, or pineapple flowers, so called because of the tuft of green leaves on top of each flower.  That presupposes that they do flower, and mine didn't, last summer.  I think I need to feed them, and maybe repot them into fresh compost each spring.  The bulbs are slightly tender, and need to be kept dry in winter, so mine are tucked away under the greenhouse staging.  I have to admit that there isn't a great deal of room under the staging, what with the over-wintering pots of dahlias, and lilies, and Eucomis, and the hyacinths that I'm keeping under cover this winter after their basal plates rotted outside last year.  Better not go mad buying Eucomis, then.  The alternative would be to get a second greenhouse, except that I don't have time to look after any more pots than will cram into the existing one, and I don't want to have to heat a second.  At least I have a greenhouse.  Katherine Swift hasn't, which means that in winter she shares her beautiful house with umpteen pots of orange trees and potted myrtles.

gales stopped play

Another lump of wind is blowing through, and the QEII bridge at Dartford is shut again.  Lucky we didn't want to go anywhere.  The gale was forecast, and I hadn't picked up the camellia pots since the previous one, on the basis that they'd be better off lying down.  My chest is worse too.  It's a nice question whether that is my own fault, for going out yesterday, or if it would have got worse anyway.  I suppose to find out you'd need to get a large number of volunteers to keep a diary each time they caught a cold, recording the duration and severity of each symptom (tight chest, sore throat, streaming nose, sinus pain, swollen glands, lethargy, enhanced stupidity) and what they did during that period (level of physical exertion, time spent outside, ambient temperature, exposure to air conditioning, stress level, diet) and see if you can find any statistically significant connections.  In the meantime everyone will go on believing what they want to believe, so I believe that activity is fine as long as you feel like it (because inactivity is dull), and somebody I used to work with always claimed to know who had given her the cold (which given that she travelled by public transport twice a day was quite a feat).

At least I have the Christmas books.  I've finished Katherine Swift's The Morville Year, a series of short essays about her garden based on her Times column.  The garden, which she created around an old and distinguished house leased from the National Trust, is beautiful and elaborate, with clipped evergreens, old roses, trained fruit, areas of long grass, bees in old fashioned WBC hives, formal pools and a turf maze.  Her prose is beautiful and elaborate as well, something to be taken a few bites at a time, like a box of very rich and expensive chocolates, rather than gobbled down in one sitting (like maltesers).  It was written to be read in small weekly doses, so that's fair enough, and it's much posher than anything I could do myself, as is the garden.  A nice book.  A paperback edition will be coming out in March.

Now I've turned my attention to Designing the Seaside by Fred Gray.  I'm not sure how I became aware of this one.  It's been out since 2006, and still has no reviews on Amazon.  I think it probably came up on a 'people who bought X also bought Y' Amazon initiated search, and I thought the subject sounded interesting.  I like the seaside.  Childhood outings were to Exmouth or Sidmouth more frequently than to the more iconic Dartmoor, and looking through the index of Designing the Seaside, the Systems Administrator and I have visited the following seaside resorts (that is 'visited' in the sense of having spent some time looking at them, rather than having driven through them on the way to somewhere else (Great Yarmouth) or used the marina overnight and pushed off first thing in the morning (Poole)):  Blankenberghe, Bournemouth, Brighton, Brixham, Clacton-on-Sea, Cromer, Eastbourne, Llandudno, Ostend, Paignton, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Ramsgate, Scarborough, Southwold,  St Ives, Wells-next-the-Sea and Weymouth.  He doesn't mention Aldeburgh, Bridlington or Whitstable, but I think they count as Seaside (Designed) as well.  I'm not sure about Whitby, or if it is more of a Port.

Designing the Seaside starts off with the development of Brighton as a resort and takes it from there, looking at seaside architecture, who went to the seaside, what they did, how it was marketed, and why it declined in the UK.  The book contains some interesting stuff, both facts and ideas, and is generously illustrated with really good pictures, of old photographs, contemporary drawings, postcards, promotional posters and leaflets.  It reads slightly stiffly, not with the easy narrative trot of a popular historian like Peter Hennessey or David Kynaston, and I began to wonder who Fred Gray was, and if he might possibly be a sociologist.  I tracked him down easily enough at the University of Sussex, where he is Emeritus Professor of Continuing Education.  That didn't really tell me a lot.  Prior to that he was The Academic Director of Local and Regional Relationships,  and before that the Dean of the Sussex Institute, which included the Centre for Continuing Education and the Departments of Education, Law and Social Work.  Finally I discovered that by training he is a geographer.  He must be astute in the dark arts of university politics, because despite being Emeritus he still has an office in university premises (Centre for Community Engagement).

I actually loved Geography at school.  I know it is not considered a real subject by rigorous academics, because it is all little bits borrowed from other disciplines, like geology, soil science, economics, history, archaeology, climate study, architecture and sociology (though if you take that attitude to geography you probably don't count sociology a real subject either).  I don't mind that at all.  The fashion for at least the past half century has been for experts to know more and more about increasingly narrow specialisms.  We need some people who will hazard a view about how the specialisms fit together.  And I would recommend Designing the Seaside, if you are interested in that sort of thing, though the pictures are better than the prose.

the wrong time to move iris

Yesterday's wind blew the camellia pots over, and ripped the staples holding the feet of the Zimbabwean recycled metal secretary bird clean out of the deck.  By this morning it had dropped, and I decided my cold didn't feel too bad, and I might as well get on in the garden.  This may have been a very silly decision, given that the temperature was below 8 degrees C at lunchtime, and there was still a brisk breeze.  If by tomorrow I am a lot worse I will have to blame myself for not taking more care, but I was very well wrapped up.  I generally take the view that if I feel like gardening, I'm OK to garden, and if I don't feel up to it, I'll stay inside by the stove and not force myself.  That is the luxury of doing gardening as a hobby rather than a job, and solely for your own private pleasure.  I don't have a Yellow Book opening date to meet, or an Open Gardens Weekend in six months' time to worry about, and I'm not trying to impress the neighbours.  In fact, I am reconciled to the fact that the garden will always be wild and weedy.  I have about three days a week maximum to devote to it, given everything else.  The Systems Administrator mows the lawns and weighs in with heavy pruning and construction projects, and bonfires, but doesn't get involved with the plants.  In all it gets four person days a week, tops, and it could easily do with double that, given its size and complexity.

I am still working my way down the long bed in the front garden.  The leaves of some of the grape hyacinths are showing in great tufts, and I tucked mushroom compost carefully around them.  I started replanting the bearded iris.  Early January is quite the wrong time to do this.  The books say July is the optimum time, after flowering, or that it may be done in March but will affect that year's flowering, but I decided to dig them up anyway.  In the first place, they were mixed up with the roots of that wretched running grass, and the only way to get the bed clean was to lift them, and I didn't want to leave odd weedy patches until July, or even March.  Secondly , I think beared iris are pretty tough.  Whenever I've divided them there have always been bits left over, and the scrappy rhizomes thrown on the compost heap, not even planted, cling to life for an extremely long time.  Also, the soil can't be that cold.  It has been a very mild winter, and we've scarcely had any penetrating frosts.  Finally, the drainage in that bed is so sharp I reckon I can get away with a lot when it comes to rhizomes.  If they all die, I'll have learnt something, and so will you, if I confess to it on the blog.  I'll have to get some more, or else decide that two to three weeks of sublime flowers and nothing else for the rest of the year is not a good use of the space, and plant something else.

As I weeded I collected the stones I forked up.  Irregular ones go on the path by the dustbins, which is making steady progress, and it no longer seems a ludicrous idea that I might collect enough stones to cover it completely.  Round pebbles go in the middle of the turning circle, at the end loosely themed as beach.  Flints go in the dry garden by the entrance, which I have decided needs to be much flintier.  I know I have a cache of flints nestling under a hedge, where I put them after digging them up in the course of laying some paving, so I must go and retrieve some more of them.  I found a beautiful very large one in the root plate of a tree that fell years ago in the wood, though sadly it has some chips.  My cousin who is a retired geologist has a fine one, and so had a farmer I knew, which I think he found ploughing, so it seems to be a widespread interest.  Henry Moore collected them.

I had a very nice day.  I don't know how to explain that to anyone who is not themselves a keen gardener, since objectively speaking it ought to be miserable, forking roots out of wretched poor soil and spreading handfuls of wet and smelly straw and manure over it, on a cold windy  day, stopping sometimes to stoop and pick up stones, with a chest cold.  If it weren't my own garden and I'd been doing it as a job I'd have been counting the hours until it was time to pack up.  And yet it is largely the process that I enjoy, since the product will never be perfect, or finished.  It is a project.  An idea.  A dream.  It is how I play.

after the party

The remnants of Christmas have been cleared away.  The last four cheese stars went on the bird table.  The cards have been taken down, the greenery put on the bonfire, the festive tablecloths put in the wash, the tree dismantled, and the radiator in the sitting room turned off as we retreat to the study.  Does anybody wait until Twelth Night nowadays?  The Christmas season seems to begin so long before Christmas these days that by the end of the New Year Bank holiday it ought to be over.  The shops have probably got their Easter stuff in by now.  Tradition is all very well, but the decorations would have overstayed their welcome by Friday.

Even so, it's sad taking them down.  I checked one last time through the cards, putting aside those that have useful bits of information in them, like new addresses, telephone numbers, and reminders of what stage of schooling and university people's children have got to (or indeed their names).  It's particularly sad taking down the tree, though it shouldn't be.  Apart from the fact that the needles would have started to fall off pretty soon (they hung on well.  Fresh tree, cold house), it was already starting to shower the room with small winged seeds as the cones opened.  And I'd get bored with it, if it were there all the time.  So the special glass baubles all went back into their dedicated boxes, the red and clear drops from Heals into long thin trays with internal card dividers and a concertina of tissue paper, the big Polish balls into a square box like a cake carton.  The heavier and scratchier decorations go in the bottom of another box, the bread and butter baubles on top of those, and the most delicate of the rest form the top layer, along with a red Ikea cookie cutter that we found as we were taking the tree outside.  We always find one after taking the tree out, sometimes not spotting it for days.

I saved the cones in case they came in useful.  I'm not exactly sure what they will be useful for, and in the meantime they will emit a steady stream of seeds, but it seemed a dreadful waste to burn them.  If we were suddenly to build a rustic folly anywhere in the garden we would definitely need fir cones.  All the best rustic summerhouses are decorated with them.  The branches will be shredded, and used as mulch for the blueberry bushes, since conifer litter is acid and blueberries like acid conditions and dislike manure.  The trunk will be sawn up and burnt in the stove, unless we have something that needs propping up, in which case it could have a second career as a pole.  A couple of branches of the wild gean, that were sagging badly under the weight of the climbing rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', are supported with old rhododendron branches, to stop them from collapsing over the Mahonia japonica that was supposed to be growing in the shade of the gean (the Mahonia itself is collapsing over the clipped box that was supposed to be surrounding it as ground cover).

There is a last bit of Christmas food to eat up, as I made the chicken carcass into stock.  That is one reason for buying free range birds, the fact that they have good strong bones and make proper stock that sets to a jelly when cold, quite apart from the welfare argument.  I used half the stock just now for leek and potato soup, with an experimental squeeze of lemon juice, and the Systems Administrator was muttering about using the other half in a Thai soup or stew.  It is blowing a hooley, and raining extremely hard from time to time, mixed with hail.  I've never seen the surface of the pond whipped to a chop like that before.   The cold I felt I might be fighting off through most of December began to develop on New Year's Eve and has got to a Dame Celia Molestrangler level of huskiness, so it could be an afternoon for the Christmas books.  I am befuddled by not working yesterday and the day before, plus the cold, and keep feeling as though it should later in the week than Tuesday.

unfortunate failure of a Mexican orange blossom

The plant centre was closed again today, too.  Pity, as Bank Holidays count for double pay.  Still, I don't suppose we'd have got much trade, and I can't blame the owners for trimming wage costs where they can, in these hard times.  I used the time in the garden instead.  Radio weather forecasters kept saying that today was much colder than yesterday, with a chill wind, and it was.

I'm still working my way down the long bed in the front garden, and am getting into my stride.  This is on extremely light soil in full sun, and some of my original plantings failed to thrive, while others that were good for a time got old and hideous, and so it's been a renovation project in places over the past year.  A Choisya x dewitteana 'Aztec Pearl' came out more easily than I feared it might.  It was a pick axe job, but an easy one.  The poor thing never prospered from the outset, despite being periodically dosed with 6X, pelleted chicken manure and other stimulants.  (Plants that have never done well tend not to have very good root systems, so it was not a total surprise that it didn't take all afternoon to dig out, but you never know.  The worst shrubs to remove are generally things that have got huge, and are not yet dead).  'Aztec Pearl', well grown, is a vigorous shrub with dark green leaves.  The firm who built my parents' house planted a couple in the front garden, and they have grown prodigously, and would entirely block the window of the downstairs loo without regular pruning.  'Aztec Pearl' has narrow leaves, and masses of scented white flowers, and when I planted it I liked the idea of it very much.  However, for all that the RHS says that it's suitable for well drained soil and full sun, and drought tolerant, mine was an abject failure, stunted with yellowing leaves despite my encouragements.  I think our front garden does take 'well drained' and 'drought' to new levels of meaning sometimes.

'Aztec Pearl' is one of those plants which the gardening establishment has mysteriously not taken to its bosom.  I think that must be due to the enthusiasm with which mass housebuilders and supermarket car park designers have used it.  OK, it doesn't have astonishing grace and poise, but a fast growing (in the right conditions) evergreen shrub with slender, divided, glossy dark leaves and scented flowers in spring that are attractive to insects is a reasonably pleasant prospect.  However, Graham Stuart Thomas, having praised Choisya ternata, says sniffily 'As to the new hybrid 'Aztec Pearl', I can see little to recommend it'.

Most of the bearded iris seem to need dividing again.  I feel that iris ought to be happy in the front garden, but mine seem to go straight from freshly replanted rhizomes to congested mats with stunted leaves, without bothering  much about flowering in between.  Whatever it is that they really, really want, I don't seem to be providing it, and I don't know quite what it is.  Feeding?  The soil is free draining, but also exceptionally infertile.  It has done for Ballota before now, that are supposed to be such good dry garden plants.

There is a creeping weed grass here and there.  I forked out what I could, but it has taken refuge over the years in the ivy hedge and under the yews, whose roots are so dense I could never extract all of the grass.  I hit it with glyphosate, when I can avoid spraying the legitimate inhabitants of the bed, and keep it in check, but I never manage to eradicate it.  I am almost an organic gardener (organic purists would reject that claim as meaningless, since to deviate even slightly from the righteous path is to fail entirely.  Sometimes they chuck in the adage about how 'you can't be a little bit pregnant' for good measure).  Anyway, I very rarely use chemicals in the garden, but spot treating creeping and difficult to get at weeds with glyphosate is one instance where I do find them helpful.

The sun shone beautifully, and the wind was frankly cold, and as I worked I mused on what to put in the gaps, without coming to any firm conclusions.  I might try a shrubby, twisty branched Japanese cherry next to the golden pine.  Another Japanese cherry, one with double flowers that I bought as a tiny rooted shrub from a now sadly defunt firm up in Norfolk, is doing quite well elsewhere in the bed, despite the sandy soil, and I think the twisty cherry and the pine would complement each other.  I might leave some room for annuals.  I don't normally do annuals, except for self seeding ones, mainly in the gravel, but I have a yen for some Cosmos, and they do very well in nearby gardens.  In the winter I could have wallflowers.  I adore wallflowers, which are one of the fondly remembered plants of my childhood.  I'll see how much room is left by the time I've finished shuffling the iris about.

a new year's day garland

The plant centre is closed today and tomorrow, so this morning I got my wish and was out in the garden.  I'd be there now, except that it has just started to rain, moderately hard.  A colleague said yesterday that on Christmas day he'd counted twenty different flowers out in his garden.  I don't go in for counts per se.  They raise the question of how open a flower has to be to count as 'out', and how far over it can go and still be included in the tally, and the odd battered rose doesn't contribute anything to the garden scene, even if it is technically 'out'.  However, before settling down to the fingertip weeding and mushroom compost spreading, I did wander around the garden looking at what was making a good display at the moment.

One of the main things I noticed on getting up when I opened the bathroom blind, and again as I walked around, was not the plants but the birds.  Tits and blackbirds flew in all directions, with an air of urgency as if they had business to attend to, and there was quite a respectable chorus just after dawn.  Once I started weeding the robins appeared.  Music and movement.  Birds add greatly to the garden scene, as well as being useful natural aphid controllers.  We are lucky here, to be next to woodland and in old landscape with numerous hedges and among farms that leave generous headlands and wildlife strips (all paid for by stewardship schemes, no doubt).  Customers at work who ask about insects on their roses are sometimes surprised when I ask about the bird life in their garden, and steer them to the bird food as much as the insecticides.  Some may suspect I am some sort of eco crank, or maybe even taking the piss, but they don't really need chemical spray, they need blue tits.

It has been a wonderful winter for berries (it was a bumper year for acorns, too, but the sweet chestnut harvest was pitiful).  Plenty of hips, berries and crab apples set, and the birds have been slow to strip the bushes.  I presume that is down to the mild winter.  In the front garden, Malus 'Red Sentinel' is still laden with little bright red apples, the crop so heavy that the branches are weeping under the weight.  'Comtessa de Paris' has a nice display of little yellow apples as well, though I see that a few are doing that irritiating thing of remaining on the branches after turning brown, instead of dropping.  The ever-popular 'Hornet' that grew at Writtle was a horror for doing that, and I made a mental note not to grow it.

Ilex aquifolium 'Golden Milkboy' has got one of its best displays of berries ever.  This is an intensely prickly variegated form splashed with yellow in the centre of each leaf.  It is quite prone to reversion, and painfully slow growing, admittedly on starved sand in the front garden.  I keep it clipped to try and make a nice, dense dome like those in the photos of the late Rosemary Verey's garden, but I think it needs feeding up.  The yellow berried shrubby ivy has a reasonable show, and in the back garden Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus' is still a smother of yellow fruit.  A crop like that has never lasted into the new year before (I hope that doesn't mean it's on its last legs and is trying to set seed before pegging it).  There's a nice crop of red berries on a slender leafed Aucuba too.  That may have appreciated my removing great chunks of a vigorous shrubby honeysuckle that had engulfed it.  The sea buckthorn still has plenty of orange-yellow berries.  They are never the birds' first choice.

Prunus subhirtella 'Autumnalis' is flowering, both the new one in the front garden, and the old one in the back scheduled for removal because it sits too wet and branches keep dying.  I feel as though the condemned tree is trying to reproach me, or spoof me into giving it a stay of execution, but when the leaves open I'm sure there'll still be too many dead twigs in there.  The Daphne bholua are almost out, the first few flowers on 'Jacqueline Postill' yielding their spicy scent.  Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' is studded with pale pink flowers, and has been for a while.  The winter iris are beginning to get into their stride.

More surprising, and showing the effect of the mild weather, a plain green leafed, pink and mauve flowered Pulmonaria is well out.  There are a few scattered primroses, and some cyclamen, though not sheets of them.  One oriental hellebore has started blooming, a pale greenish yellow form with plum spots on the petals, and a couple of stinking hellebore, Helleborus foetidus, are well under way producing their little yellowish flowers.  I collected these as self sown seedlings from the bottom part of the garden and tucked them in among the shrub roses, where they seem happy in the dark rootiness, and I hope that they will spread.

Mahonia japonica is opening but not in full flood yet in the back garden, and in the front M. x media 'Winter Sun' is still flowering, and has been for an incredibly long time.  Sarcocca confusa is well out, though the scent wasn't carrying as well as it did yesterday at work (or maybe I couldn't smell it because I am going down with a cold).  I noticed in passing that the leaves looked a bit pale and yellow.  I will give it a dose of Maxicrop with seaweed, which is a great tonic for most things.  The Hamamelis are not quite there.  Two flowers were just about 'out', if I'd been trying to boost my total, but the real garden display hasn't started yet.  Camellia japonica 'Alba Simplex' is still producing its incredibly elegant white flowers, a few at a time, and C. japonica 'Flame' is starting to join in.

The perennial wallflower 'Bowles Mauve' still had some flowers on it, but they were doing nothing for the garden, and the time really had come to tidy the plant, so I cut them off.  They just looked left over and tatty.  A self sown Euphorbia characias in the gravel is ahead of itself, its small lime green flowers just opening.  They were badly scorched by the last two winters, and are enjoying the mild one.  The leaves on the new basal shoots of my Euphorbia x pasteurii 'John Phillips' have visibly expanded in recent weeks, and the whole plant has developed a lush, confident air.  It will get a nasty shock, if things turn cold this month or next.  Leaves are an under-rated part of the winter garden.  Our various pines in the front garden are looking very handsome, Pinus sylvestris 'Aurea' turning a nice shade of dark yellow that is not at all sickly or ill-looking, and the leaves of the Cistus look very neat and trim.  They are good winter plants, when it doesn't kill them.

The first snowdrop leaves are through, and you can sense plants stirring and the garden getting ready to burst into life.  This is simultaneously heartening, and alarming, because there not now many weeks left in which to weed, mulch and get the ground tidy before everything's on the move.

happy New Year

The plant centre was open today, though we weren't very busy.  New Year's Eve isn't a day you'd expect lots of people to be out buying plants.  I did get myself an Oemleria as planned, and some galvanised lawn edging to try and keep the running bamboo in check, once I've dug the excess out (another pick axe job).  I hope the lawn edging will slow the bamboo's progress down, if not stop it, and at least it will give me a demarcation line to patrol and cut back to.

This is my last post of 2011.  I have done what I set out to do, to post something every day.  Most were written on the day, some in rather a hurry if I had things on.  A couple of posts were written the day before and copied in on the day because I knew there'd be no time at all to write anything, but no more than two.  I've enjoyed it, most of the time.  Why not give it a go?  Blogspot is free, and you will sharpen up your skills with the written word while you reflect on your life.  I'll read yours if you read mine.

You could say it was a record of a year in a dull life.  I haven't been the chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, or even a divisional managing director, or founded my own business.  I haven't published any learned academic papers, let alone run my own highly acclaimed research laboratory.  I haven't signed a book deal or got my own byline in a national newspaper.  I haven't become even remotely famous or achieved the faintest whiff of celebrity.  I haven't earned much, and so I haven't spent much.  I haven't bought an iPod, or an iPad, or an iPhone, or an It bag.  I haven't eaten in a restaurant reviewed by Giles Coren.  I haven't been on an exotic holiday or even a series of weekend breaks, apart from one night in Hitchin.  Clever people who are paid to write columns about their lives, instead of doing it as a hobby, would probably consider it a life so dull and obscure they would rather eat their own faces than live like that.

There again, I have spent a great deal of time working with plants and in the open air, which I like, and the conclusion at the end of Candide is that we must learn to cultivate our gardens.  I have been able to spend time with friends and family, and am still married to the same person as at the start of the year.  I've had the mental energy to read some books other than blockbuster thrillers, looked at some good pictures and listened to some first class live music.  I have (mostly) eaten proper food, and not suffered from any eating disorder, or felt the need to have my body surgically enhanced for cosmetic purposes.  I have slept well, most of the time, and not felt that my self-worth was threatened by driving a five year old Skoda Fabia.  I have managed to extract a honey crop from my bees, and enjoyed the company of my cats, and seen a robin sitting on her nest and a newt swimming.  I've done some work for charity.  That's not too bad, all in all.

The Systems Administrator and I aren't going to a party tonight.  Actually, we weren't invited to one, but I don't think that means that our friends are deliberately excluding us from the fun, more that none of them are holding one, or at least not within driving distance.  When I've been to New Year's Eve parties in the past I've mostly found them rather depressing, since I don't like forced jollity, or being socially obliged to stay up until midnight in order to see the New Year in after I'm tired and just want to go to sleep, or singing Auld Lang Syne while holding hands with strangers, or being kissed by anybody I don't already know and like a great deal.  The SA has made a posh beef stew, which we will eat, and then see how we go.  We might last until midnight, we might not.  My favourite way to spend New Year's Day is always, always to be able to get out and do some work in the garden, and not to start the year with a crashing hangover.

Happy New Year, everybody.

bees, black currants and beetroot

My January 2012 Essex Beekeeper magazine arrived this morning.  I looked to see what amusements were in store over the next couple of months, and saw that in January we get a talk by Norman Carreck BSc CBiol FSB FRES NDB on the subject of recent research.  I don't even know what some of those initials stand for.  Later in the month there's the Colchester divisional AGM, but if I go to that it will be a first.  Saffron Walden division are following their AGM with a curry night at the India Villa.  They know how to live over in Saffron Walden.

My sub is due by 1st January.  The Systems Administrator asked how the local division related to the national association, and I had to confess that I didn't precisely know.  The SA looked at the subscription form, and said that it was all set out there, adding cryptically that I was a member of the Soviet.  Since the Arab spring began the SA has been reading about the history of the Russian revolution, which turns out to have many parallels with recent events in the Middle East, and now, apparently, the organisational structure of British beekeeping.  I am a member of my local Division, the Soviet, while the Essex Beekeepers Association sits above it as the Party.  The SA says that the Party has to prevent the Soviets from breaking away.  Thurrock division did actually secede from Essex some years ago, so the model holds up quite well, though I don't know how the SA would account for the third layer of the British Beekeepers' Association presiding over the counties.  The subscription splits between them with £7.50 going to the Division, a £7.00 capitation fee payable to the County and a £15 capitation charge going to the national association.

On the back page of the magazine were colour photographs of the Gilbert Louvre, a type of hive entrance designed by a local beekeeper called Mr Gilbert.  It was in commercial production at one time, and looks quite ingenious.  The SA asked whether it was fitted to the hive using the Gilbert Louvre Manoeuvre.  Sometimes I think my other half does not take beekeeping entirely seriously.

We are on to the final phase of Christmas entertaining this evening, as my parents are coming to supper.  I have made a black currant fool, since by this stage everyone has probably eaten quite a lot of cake and pastry-like things, fruit fool is a pudding that can be made in advance, we all like black currants, and I have some home grown ones in the freezer.  My mother does not eat pips, and the first pressing of the cooked currants through a plastic sieve looked distinctly pippy.  Here is how you get the last pips out.  Wash the sieve, tip the fruit pulp into it, and shake the sieve (over a clean bowl).  Juice will start to drip through.  As you get down to the last thick bits of pulp, if you press with a spoon you will be back to square one.  Instead vibrate the sieve, shaking it as hard as you can (while keeping it over the bowl).  Most of the juice does shake through leaving a remarkably dry residue of pips.

Black currants are potentially one of the messiest ingredients I've cooked with, but not as dangerous as beetroot.  I was once making borscht, and put too much cooked beet in the liquidiser at once, and did not hold the lid down hard enough.  It takes a long time to clean a fountain of beetroot juice off the fronts of cream coloured kitchen wall cupboards.

bookish pleasures

Last night I managed to do something I've never done before, and delete the task bar from my laptop.  This mystified the Systems Administrator, who asked what on earth I'd been doing, and I said nothing except try to open Windows Explorer.  The SA had to resort to the nuclear option of temporarily removing the battery.  The SA is not a fan of Windows 7.  One friend who is a Mac user says we should convert, but I couldn't face the hassle, unless I had to.

What I was trying to do was get into Amazon to buy something for my Kindle.  I was given the Kindle in the autumn for my birthday, and was thrilled with it (when the bewildered eastern European delivery driver finally managed to find our house), but the other books I was given at the same time kept me going until December, and the SA and I have a pact not to buy ourselves books in the run up to birthdays and Christmas, so once I'd finished Andrew Rawnsley's history of the last years of the Labour government on the Kindle I didn't like to get anything else.

I did download some poetry, some free and some very cheap.  Cheap poetry on Kindle turned out not to be a good idea, as the budget edition of the poems and prose of Ernest Dowson dispensed with the lines in the poetry and ran each verse together into a single paragraph.  I think that is down to inappropriate use of text recognition software, as distinct from scanning images into electronic book form.

Amazon are missing a trick when it comes to sales for Kindles, though I dare say they are working on it, because it still doesn't seem to be possible to buy a download as a present for somebody else.  A download purchased on my Amazon account is directed to my Kindle, and I can't find any option to present it to another person instead.  Amazon will let you print or e-mail gift certificates, and being able to do the same thing for an electronic book should be the next logical step.  True, you rob the recipient of the pleasure of choice compared to a gift certificate, but that's the case when you give a physical book, and part of the fun of giving and receiving books is hitting the right note, thus demonstrating how carefully you have observed and understood your loved one's tastes.

I decided to follow up the Andrew Rawnsley with Alistair Darling's memoirs.  Poor Alistair Darling, I don't think he has made it big time in the political biography stakes, as Back from the Brink is already down to £2.09 as an e-book.  The SA would like to read that as well at some point, and another area where Amazon ought to up their game with Kindles is that there needs to be a way of lending e-books other than by lending the reading device.  The SA and I share quite a few of our books, or at least we do in some subjects.  History, politics, food and some aspects of urban design are joint enthusiasms, though I won't be clamouring to borrow The Kronstadt Revolution when the SA's finished it, and the SA's familiarity with my gardening books stops at checking the covers very carefully to see which ones I've already got.  There was a new history of East London that we both eyed up and neither bought, in case the other did, and a book about skyscrapers that the SA thought about buying for me but felt embarrassed that it might really be a present to self.  The covering phrase when presenting a parcel of probable mutual interest is 'this is a bit of a present for both of us'.

Addendum  A late straggling Christmas card arrived this morning.  From the annotations on the envelope we gathered it had reached us via another house, whose occupants had kindly bothered to stick it back in the post with a note saying it wasn't theirs.  Our predecessors  probably thought the name they chose for this house was very appropriate and charming.  It is appropriate, though a bit naff, and it is unfortunate that there are at least two other houses with the same name in nearby villages.  Add in the English tendency to name a road after the place it goes to, and there's ample scope for confusion.  I was slightly indignant the card went astray as it had our full postcode on the envelope, but looking at that carefully I though the sender had probably written H as U.

all dressed up and no place to go

We went to our local pub yesterday evening.  When I say 'local' I mean one of the closest pubs to our house, about two miles away.  I'd heard that the bar was decorated with an amazing quantity of lights and decorations, so we thought we'd go up there in the early evening and have a drink, just the one round before supper, and admire the glitz.  We checked the opening times on their website and got in the car and drove over (a round trip of four miles is a long way to walk in the dark to see some Christmas lights), and it was dark and shut.  Whatever the website said about opening at 6.00pm on Tuesdays turned out not to apply to Christmas bank holiday Tuesday.  We drove home again.

Pubs have a lot to contend with, quite apart from the issue of drink-driving.  If the Systems Administrator and I want to have a quiet drink we know a splendid venue.  There is a log fire for winter evenings, and a secluded garden for summer.  We always get seats, and the chairs are comfortable.  There is free wi-fi, the music, if any, is to our taste, and there is no giant television screen on the wall showing football.  A friendly cat is likely to come and see us.  The drinks are relatively cheap, the food is genuinely home cooked, not out of a food service company van, and nobody will try and charge us £7.95 for sausage and mash.  You can see the punchline coming.  It's our house.  Our friends have equally pleasant and congenial houses, so when we meet up it's generally for a meal in somebody's home.

I do actually like pubs, or at least I like pubs in attractive buildings with quirky characterful decor that doesn't smack of the pub designer's formula, that keep their beer well, don't play loud music, and don't make me feel as though I'm intruding into somebody else's boozer.  That rules out a lot of pubs, but still leaves quite a few.  When the SA and I are on holiday we go to pubs for lunch or for a pre-supper outing to see some fresh faces before retreating to the self-catering cottage.  A not too long country walk with relatives or friends ending at a pub can be very nice as part of a weekend visit.  The rest of the time I rarely go to a pub at all.  Several of my friends don't like beer, and by extension don't like pubs.  When we meet we are more likely to go to an art gallery or garden and a cafe than a pub.

Pubs are supposed to be at the heart of the community, bringing people together.  The trouble is, when I consider the people I know and would like to share my spare time with, they are scattered in an arc across Essex and London, and dotted across the rest of the UK.  Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, compared to the golden days of pubs when everybody lived two streets from where they were born, we can keep in touch by phone and e-mail and text.  If we want to see each other it's easy to arrange.  We don't have to go and hang about the local pub in the hope of bumping into each other.  I'm actually quite keen on community.  I take part in beekeepers' events, and the music society, and do talks for the woodland charity and sometimes about gardening or beekeeping, and so meet people living in my area, if not my village.  Some are good friends, some people I don't know well but see on a regular basis, others I probably won't see again.  Just the same social impulse that would have been filled in the past by going to the pub.

So I fear there are more pub closures to come.  I hope the industry will eventually reach an equilibrium, whereby those that are left are the best ones, with good beer and proper food and a nice ambience, which will be able to survive on the trade generated by people celebrating high days and holidays, boosted by extra events like live music and quizzes.  If, when the SA and I go out for the day, we can no longer find a pleasant pub to have lunch in, then my life will be diminished and it will serve me right for not having supported my local one, since every pub is somebody's local.  But it might make it easier for me by at least posting when it is closed on its website.

nice cheese, shame about the biscuits

We watched Silent Running with our cheese fest.  This is a 1972 sci-fi minor classic, or at least Dr Mark Kermode keeps recommending it on the R5 Live film programme, and the Systems Administrator was very keen for us to see it.  It is about an astronaut working in a fleet of space ships carrying biospheres containing all that is left of plant and animal life, after a catastrophe on earth has sent the surface temperature to 75 degrees C.  As a chronic biophile and pet lover I found the whole thing very upsetting, especially what happened to the plants and the robots.

The robots were waddling boxes about the size of an old fashioned TV, and according to IMDb they were played by actors without legs, walking on their hands in lightweight costumes.  These were remarkable performances, deserving more credit than they got.  I was reminded of an interview I'd heard on R4 with David Hockney earlier in the day, who recounted how he took his mother to an exhibition that included a work by Barry Flanagan, a rope snaked and coiled across the floor.  Mrs Hockney looked at this and asked 'Did he make the rope?'

The Carr's water biscuits bought to go with the cheese fest had a strong and insistent peppery taste that competed with and detracted from the flavour of the cheese.  On close inspection they had little black bits in, and the box said, in mauve letters 3mm high*, with roasted garlic and herbs.  I think manufacturers should put a large yellow exclamation mark on the packaging when they have introduced a fresh twist to an established brand, so that we could check we really do want the new version with added whatever, instead of the normal flavour we were expecting.  I suppose they're hoping that I'll like water biscuits with roasted garlic and herbs and buy lots more biscuits, but I don't, so the only effect is to devalue the Carr's brand slightly in my eyes as being unreliable.

If you want to sleep well and soundly then I don't think watching a disturbing film before bed while eating too much cheese is probably the best way to go about it, and I was rather slow to get going this morning.  Tidying the daffodil lawn, that was supposed to be a quick job just finishing it off, seems to be taking forever.  I badly underestimated how much there was still to do.  There are endless straggly bits of hedge to trim, and creeping tufts of grass that ducked under the power scythe in the autumn cut, and have now gone yellow and look unsightly.  The old dead leaves from the eleagnus take a small eternity to rot down, and in the meantime have worked their way down among the straggly grass and embedded themselves in the surface of the lawn.  The oak leaves would be very useful on the leaf compost pile, if I could get them out without carrying away half a bin load of weedy grass and rot resistant eleagnus leaves at the same time.  I was reduced to using the leaf vacuum machine.

There were honey bees foraging on the Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun'.  I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.  Honey bees don't hibernate, but they undergo metabolic changes for the winter, laying down extra fat stores, and ceasing to produce the bee milk they feed to their young, while the queen stops laying eggs.  In this winter state they can live for six months, instead of the six weeks which is all that workers manage in the height of summer.  If the weather is unseasonably warm does the colony remain in its winter state, or will the workers change metabolically to short lived summer bees too early, before the queen starts laying and it is warm enough for them to raise young?  And are they eating their stored food too quickly, if they are active when they should be resting?  I really don't know.

*Literally.  I retrieved the packaging from the recycling and measured the typeface with a ruler.  I find that vaguely disturbing.

working off the pudding

So, the presents were exchanged, and we are both the happy possessors of some books that we were hoping for, and some that we didn't know existed but like them now we've seen them.  I think the Systems Administrator was genuinely amazed to receive a copy of Revolution and counterrevolution: Class struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory, but in a good way, and I am looking forward to reading The Prince of the Marshes and other occupational hazards of a year in Iraq, though I did start yesterday with Gardens of the World.  It looked a less demanding read, after all that lunch, and it has nice pictures.  The big tabby tried to eat the string from the gammon, and apart from that all passed off peacefully.

It feels slightly odd not being at work today, it being a Monday, but the plant centre is closed.  Not for us the frenzy of the Boxing Day sales.  Since it was warm, dry and fairly calm, I got on with raking up leaves from the young oak tree in the back garden.  It was planted by our predecessors, not long before we moved in, and we always call it 'the little oak tree', although 18 years on it is not very little.  The leaves hung on until not long before Christmas, then the strong winds took them off and blew a lot of them into the borders, which is slightly irritating as I want them to make leaf mould, and it is far quicker raking them off the lawn than picking them out from among the plants in the beds.

Raking is good post Christmas lunch exercise.  I have a plastic lawn rake with broad tines, that can't spear leaves on their tips.  The secret is to grasp the handle with your palms and the flat, palm side of your fingers, all those bits of the hand that naturally and easily form callous in response to manual work.  Avoid running it over the soft flap between thumb and index finger.  It's easily done without thinking, and at the end of the session you will have removed a disc of skin from your hand, which will sting like hell.  The same thing holds true for holding brushes if you are painting a wall or fence.

I also went on cutting the remains of the long grass at the edges of the daffodil lawn.  That's a job that I started and half finished about two months ago, then got sidetracked into doing other things.  Some of the clippings are green, but I'm hoping that they'll burn OK on the bonfire, mixed in with the brambles I've been cutting out of the wood, and other woody debris.  They look too weedy to put on the compost heap.  The eleagnus hedge has ballooned out over the lawn, and I'm taking that back as well.  I can't believe that one is supposed to cut Eleagnus x ebbingei in late December, and if we have a sudden cold spell (not unlikely in January and February) the hedge may suffer and I shall wish I'd done things more by the book.  With the mild autumn the hedge has just kept growing, and if I leave cutting it until the spring I'll trample on the daffodils.  I haven't seen any emerging daffodil leaves yet, but I expect they'll be through pretty soon, if the weather continues like this.

Blackbirds and robins were singing all around the garden.  It's easy to forget that the worst of the winter is probably still to come.

merry christmas, everyone

Merry Christmas, everybody.  I took the picture of the tree yesterday, as I needed the System's Administrator's help changing the image to a size that would fit on the blog.  It looks sparklier than that in real life, with the lights on, but the camera insisted I use the flash.  Formatting a page with a photo in it is a skill that will have to wait for another day.  I can't persuade any text to sit in that blank space up there.

Presently the SA will get up and Christmas Day will commence, but in the meantime, having woken first as I usually do I have given the cats and the chickens their breakfasts, as per usual, and am now frying a leftover portobello mushroom I found in the fridge.  It seemed a pity to waste it.  Newspaper columnists with space to fill have asked What to wear on Christmas Day, to which my answer is, given that I'll spend most of the day with cats sitting on me, something that I don't mind getting covered in cat hair seems a good idea.  Same jeans and cardigan as last week, then.

The mystery Christmas CD turns out to be an acoustic cover version of Slade's Merry Christmas, I think by Karine Polwart, but I didn't write that anywhere on the disc or the box.  We listened to Thea Gilmore's album Strange Communion a couple of times yesterday, and it is very good.  I bought it for Christmas last year, and since it is a Christmas album we haven't played it in the meantime.  One track is an extract from Louis Macneice's long poem Autumn Journal.  I didn't know that when I bought the CD, as the only track I'd heard was That'll be Christmas (a bitter-sweet number).  One of the books I suggested to my mother last year when she was asking what I'd like for Christmas was Louis Macneice's Autumn Journal.  What are the chances of that?

Have a very nice day, everybody.

final preparations

With the rain last night came the wind.  We went for supper with my parents, and the sound of it gusting around the end of the house and over the conservatory took me back to childhood.  Except that then we lived in a stone built Victorian house on top of a hill, exposed to the full blast of the Devon south-westerlies, and when it blew hard the wind didn't just shriek, the whole house thrummed, like a sailing boat pushed hard in a stiff blow.  Driving home, as we turned into the road leading to our lane we saw blue flashing lights ahead of us.  This did not bode well, and I was afraid that there must have been a collision on the blind corner where our farm lane turns off.  Instead it turned out that there was a tree down across the road, and the police were on the scene.  We had to turn round and go the other way round the block, a detour of about three miles to cover about 500 yards.

This morning, going down to the village for emergency supplies of butter (one packet in the fridge turned out to be best before a date in late November, and did taste as though it had better be used to make bird food and not mince pies), the lane was already clear, with great piles of sawdust on each side of the road to show where the fallen tree had been, and some impressive lumps of timber in the ditch.  Our neighbour has lost a holm oak from his garden.  It was a fine looking tree, and the foliage didn't look sparse or diseased, at least to the casual eye passing by.  Lucky it didn't fall on anybody.

I have laid out the red cloth, and the white lace one, and the large lantern, and made a wreath to go round the base of the lantern using a loop of ivy strands tied together with red raffia, decorated with holly, fruiting ivy, the great coral coloured fruits of the rose 'Meg', and sprays of little apples from the crab apple 'Red Sentinel'.  The Systems Administrator has twiddled white flashing lights up the banisters, and woven holly and ivy through them, and piled greenery and rose hips on the mantelpiece.  The SA's mother was Welsh, and the SA, normally a highly rational and definitely non-superstitious being, is adamant that the greenery must not be brought into the house until Christmas Eve.  Otherwise something bad happens, though I'm not sure what.

I have made mince pies.  It is a very long time since I made them, since last year I made a stollen (which was unexpectedly successful) and that looked so large that mince pies as well seemed de trop.  This year's pies are made with a jar of mincemeat bought last Christmas and never opened.  The year before that I made a fruit cake, finally discovering at about the third attempt how to cook a fruit cake all the way through in an Aga without burning the outside (there are several ovens, but their temperatures are not adjustable, so it is impossible to bake anything at a temperature between about 100 degrees C and approximately 180 degrees).  The answer turns out to be that you cook it for a very, very long time at a cooler temperature than I would ever have believed you could cook a cake at.  By the time it was iced it looked like a lot of cake, and the SA doesn't eat Christmas cake, so mince pies seemed excessive then as well.  So it is about three years since I made them, and I couldn't remember what depth tins I used, or what sized cutters for either the bases or the lids.  The filling hasn't run over the lids, so that is all right, though they are a rather odd shape.  Then I made cheese straws, and cut them out using a star shaped pastry cutter, as it's Christmas, instead of just cutting the pastry into rectangles with a sharp knife like I do for the music society nibbles.

At 3.00 it will be time for the festival of nine lessons and carols, and soon after that it will be time for a glass of sherry and a cheese star.  Merry Christmas, everybody.

stumps (day two)

The forecast rain didn't arrive until after dark.  We do need rain.  Down in Sussex they have a drought order, but when  I read the tips on how to save water they were all the things that we do as a matter of course anyway.  Don't run the tap while you brush your teeth.  I haven't done that for about thirty years.  Take a shower instead of a bath.  Always do, and I turn off the shower after the initial wetting while I soap myself.  Don't wash your car with a hosepipe.  I go one up on that, which is not to wash my car.  Well, maybe once a year, at winter's end to get the salt off.

As it wasn't raining I returned to the stumps.  One big rhododendron finally came out, when I managed to find the last buried root that was holding it and saw through it.  It is a satisfying moment, when you work out why a stump won't shift, and conquer the last point of resistance.  A lesser stump came out fairly easily, but a large elder root is proving intractable.  I could leave that where it is, except that there is a great deal of elder in the wood in toto, and I want the space close to the house for exotics.  Don't tell the Essex Wildlife Trust.  One of the things I want to plant is a couple of pots of Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill', which are rooted suckers from my original plant.  Bees love it, and it flowers very early on in the season, so it has some benefits for wildlife even though it does come from the Himalayas.

I planted out the Michelia doltsopa 'Silver Cloud' that has been sitting in its pot by the entrance to the wood all summer since being evicted from the conservatory.  It was looking rather sorry for itself, and on tipping it carefully out of the pot the rootball was far from solid.  It ought to find the soil in the wood to its liking, and I hope it manages to get going.  I have no idea how the gardeners at The Savill Garden keep their plant under glass looking so healthy, as mine was a constant martyr to red spider mite no matter what I did.

There will be space for an Oemleria cerasiformis, a large suckering shrub from North America with scented white flowers in late winter, which I have long coveted but lacked anywhere suitable to put one.  I think I am far enough along with clearing the ground to be safe buying one the next time I'm at work.  I try nowadays not to buy things unless the site is ready, as it's so easy to believe that it will soon be clear, and then it isn't for one reason or another, and the plant sits around in its pot for months or even years, degenerating.  Burncoose rates Oemleria as hardy down to minus fifteen degrees celsius, so I'd probably be OK planting it now.  Its common names include Oso berry, Oregon plum and Indian plum, but to get the fruits you need male and female plants, and I don't have room for more than one, and plants offered for sale don't seem to be sexed anyway.  I don't mind about the fruit, it's the flowers that do it for me.

As the Oemleria, the Daphne and the Michelia will all be close under our bedroom window, I hope that their scents will drift in.  Behind them, eventually, we should see the gigantic pink flowers of  Magnolia campbellii 'Charles Rafill', but that is one of those magnolias that doesn't flower at a young age, and although mine was planted in November 2003 and must now be a good 4-5m tall, it is quite devoid of flower buds again this winter.  There is a story in the garden guide for Caerhayes (one of the very great Cornish gardens) that they bought a magnolia from the Hilliers nursery, waited many years for it to flower, and when it finally did it was the wrong variety.  Hilliers refunded the original purchase price.  I hope mine will not turn out to be the wrong thing.  If it is straight M. campbellii then it might not flower at all until about the time that we're ready to move to the retirement bungalow.  The ground drops away from the house to the wood, and if all goes according to plan then the huge pink flowers should be at the same height as the bedroom window.  There is a plant of flowering age at the Blakenham Woodland Gardens, and it is a beautiful thing, very exciting.

the shortest day

I'd assumed that yesterday, 21st December, would be the Solstice, but it turns out that 2011 is one of those years when it slips forward a day, due to the earth's orbit of the sun taking slightly more than 365 days.  Next year the leap year will get it back where it belongs.  Although it was the shortest day it was splendid for gardening, warm, dry, and sunny, and it was a pity that I had to spend the morning shopping for food.  We have steak and chips and a giant portobello mushroom (each) for supper on Christmas Eve, always.  I think this tradition arose when we were still commuting, and wanted something luxurious and celebratory that was easy to cook, and not pork or poultry given the feast to come.  On Christmas Day we have a free range chicken with all the trimmings (except bread sauce.  Can't see the point of the stuff).  We used to dutifully roast a turkey, until deciding that a whole turkey was far too big for two people, and that neither of us particularly liked it anyway.  On Boxing Day evening we have cheese and watch a film.  The list of required foodstuffs is thus very precise, never changes, and we are terribly particular about finding everything on it.

I got the gammon to go with the chicken in Waitrose, because they do nice gammons while the Tesco ones are generally rubbish.  Then I went to Tesco because I know where things are there, and I thought it would be easier.  In Tesco it took me a long time to find any cream that wasn't best before 25 December.  My flexible attitude to best before dates does not extend to cream, because off cream tastes disgusting.  The only fresh orange juice was best before 23 December, and they didn't seem to have any decent cheese, so I had to wrap the frozen chips up in my work coat and go home via Wivenhoe, to get cheese at the deli and see if the Co-op had any longer dated OJ.  It did, also Price's candles, which I wanted to go in the candelabra (it's black painted metal from Ikea.  Don't get too excited).  Tesco seem to have given up selling what they used to describe as bistro candles.  Unwrapping four different cheeses in the deli, and chopping bits off them, and weighing and pricing them, took absolutely ages and there were two people behind me in the queue, and nobody else for them to pay except for the man who was busy serving me with cheese.  You can see why supermarkets took off, occasional stock glitches notwithstanding, although the Wivenhoe deli does do very good cheese, and stocks Oud Amsterdam, which I'm especially partial to.

I did wonder how it was that I was trecking around the grocers of north Essex while the Systems Administrator was eating potted cheese in a City chop house with some old mates, but given that I won't play any part in cooking the lunch, apart from making the rum butter and maybe offering to peel the sprouts, it only seemed fair.  And I get very neurotic if we don't have the right kind of stuffing, so it's probably better if I buy it.  There was one year we found we'd bought redcurrant jelly instead of cranberry sauce, which was a blow, but I was very careful today.

It was a pleasure and a relief to go out into the wood after lunch with the secateurs, saw and pickaxe, and get on with tackling the brambles and the rhododendron stumps.  I got one stump out, but that was an easy one.  I think a branch had layered itself at some point, and the root system wasn't all that substantial.  The stump I'm stuck into now is a real monster.  I've sawed through several side roots, and dug a 30cm trench all round it, and I can still barely rock it in the hole.  I haven't counted the others, but there are several to go after this one, possibly hraia (a very large number, more than five), or even funfty.