I can't face spending Friday night grappling with hotel wi-fi in the Grantham A1 Travelodge, so will write all about my exciting travels when I get back, and spend tonight with Marcel Proust. I'm on to book two, about a quarter (or maybe ten per cent) so far is spent dissecting the snobberies, intrigues and cruelties of a provincial dinner party, and I'm still hooked. It is full of brilliant throwaway comments, as when Proust observes that his ghastly hostess, who despises anything learnt, has learnt to despise learnt things.
I am going to Grantham for a Woodland Trust 40th Anniversary Conference. I didn't bother to go to their last volunteer's jamboree, because it was such a long drive, but I thought that this time I would. Getting myself seated in a strange hotel outside Grantham in time for a 10am opening address was do-able but would be stressful, starting from north Essex the same morning, so I'm going up today, and will have a look at a National Trust house and Grade I listed garden in the area. Actually, I think they might be next door, judging from the names, and descriptions of how to get there.
The Woodland Trust e-mailed me a multi-page full colour Adobe brochure about the event, which I was too mean to print off in full. It doesn't include key bits of information, like what time you should arrive if the formal proceedings kick off at ten, and whether there will be coffee beforehand, or whether you have to wait for that until the first break. That doesn't matter so much to me, as I'm staying just up the road, but I hate conferences where you travel miles to get to them, starting very early, and find you have to wait until you've listened to an hour and a half of stuff before you can have a hot caffeinated drink. Still, I'm looking forward to a conference, with name badges, and role specific workshops. I'm pissed off I didn't get into the afternoon session with Ted Green on the Ancient Forest Myth. Ted Green is practically God, and I've been a member for over twenty years and a volunteer for over ten. Such things apparently count for nothing. Clive Anderson will be dropping everything to chair the panel debate in the afternoon and deliver the closing speech (according to a rather breathless e-mail two days ago). So he ought. He's the President, and this conference has been booked for months. It will be entertaining to see him, though.
So that's it. Time to hit the road. Have a nice weekend, everybody.
Friday, 11 May 2012
Thursday, 10 May 2012
LSO St Lukes and Lucien Freud
Today I went for the first time to LSO St Lukes for a lunchtime concert. I liked everything about it, and hope it will be the first of a series of regular visits. St Lukes is an arts venue in what was originally a church (the clue's in the name) half way down Old Street, a short walk from Liverpool Street, or a ride on the number 135 bus. The church was constructed in the early eighteenth century as part of a church building programme, presumably to provide for London's growing population. Unfortunately St Lukes was built on soft ground, and suffered from severe subsidence problems from early on in its career. By the mid twentieth century the roof had been removed for safety reasons, rather than through the action of the Luftwaffe, and it now has a new career with a modern metal frame and roof inside the old Hawksmoor designed walls, as a concert venue. (Apologies for any material errors in this mini biography of St Lukes. I read the educational display on the wall of the crypt cafe rather quickly as we were leaving to bag our (unreserved) seats in good time).
As a first time visitor to St Lukes you may find a few things useful to know. The building doesn't open to the public at all until mid-day on lunchtime concert days, even though the concerts start at 1.00pm, but a very kind and helpful man on the desk of the back entrance told us what time it opened up, and which door the entrance was when it was open, and recommended a cafe that did good coffee where we could wait for half an hour. The cafe in the crypt does self service hot food, quite tasty, before and after the concerts, and the staff were cheerful. The staff on the front desk were unruffled by my tale of tickets lost in the post, checked a list and gave me replacement tickets without demur. The table in front of them held a great many tickets for collection on the door, so that might be the way to do it another time, rather than risk having them posted. The concert, two Bach solo cello suites by a Dutch cellist I hadn't heard of (though I'd be hard pressed to name many extant cellists beyond Steven Isserlis) was well attended but not a sell-out, so we could have got tickets on the day instead of booking three months in advance. The Dutch cellist (who is probably well-known to people who actually know about classical music) was delightful (to my ears) and made the suites sound more like dance music than they sometimes do. The seats in the stalls are on one level in the part of the hall nearer to the stage, and raked in the back half of the auditorium. Wandering in twenty minutes before the concert started we got seats in the raked part, directly lined up with the central aisle so that we had a superb view. The acoustics are clean.
There are three more lunchtime Bach concerts, and then other lunchtime concerts in the autumn, and evening things I will probably not go to, though getting back from there would be easier than the south bank, let alone St John's Smith Square. I went with a friend and we both liked it very much, so it is a useful place to have discovered.
In the afternoon we went to the Lucian Freud portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. They are only on until May 27th, so that was leaving it late, but we wanted to fit it in with the concert. It is a large exhibition, which has been comprehensively reviewed by expert critics, leaving me not a lot to add, except to express my sincere personal belief that Lucian Freud was a genius and that it is a superb, wonderful exhibition. We looked at it for two hours, and then our brains were full. I don't understand why his pictures are so gripping, and could have done with an art expert to tell me how he did it, but he did. Several of his subjects are recorded as saying that being painted by Freud was exhausting, as at the end of it you felt sucked dry (apart from having to pose for an enormous number of sittings). David Hockney sat for Freud for 130 hours, at the end of which Freud had produced a small head (no shoulders, just the head). When it was Hockney's turn to paint his friend, Freud sat for two and a half hours. Freud's portraits are as revealing of his subjects as you would expect from a genius, but equally revealing of Freud. The picture he paints of himself, presented from a downward viewpoint using a floor mounted mirror, two of his children shown doll size tucked in the foreground, apparently oblivious to their father towering behind them, tells you that Lucien Freud lived to paint. His many children, and wives, and lovers, and friends, were all in the end secondary to the overwhelming fact of his being a painter. And a genius.
Back at Liverpool Street with three quarters of an hour before the cheap trains, my friend introduced me to the Pontis cafe at the end of the chain of shops above the concourse. I remember the Pontis name from my City days, when they had some sandwich bars, but had no idea that the Liverpool Street one was so big. It goes back a tremendous distance, with lots of tables, and so we were able to sit down and drink tea and eat wafer biscuits, which beats standing on the concourse looking at the indicator board and ducking out of people's way.
So all in all it was a good day out. Tomorrow I am on tour, so there may be a blog posting, depending on whether the Systems Administrator lends me a dongle, and whether I can get it to work, and if not whether I feel lavish enough to spend £5 on wi-fi access at the Grantham Travelodge, and if so can get that to work. Otherwise news of my travels will have to wait until Saturday, or for the details probably Sunday, since by the time I've driven back from Grantham I might not be feeling very literary.
As a first time visitor to St Lukes you may find a few things useful to know. The building doesn't open to the public at all until mid-day on lunchtime concert days, even though the concerts start at 1.00pm, but a very kind and helpful man on the desk of the back entrance told us what time it opened up, and which door the entrance was when it was open, and recommended a cafe that did good coffee where we could wait for half an hour. The cafe in the crypt does self service hot food, quite tasty, before and after the concerts, and the staff were cheerful. The staff on the front desk were unruffled by my tale of tickets lost in the post, checked a list and gave me replacement tickets without demur. The table in front of them held a great many tickets for collection on the door, so that might be the way to do it another time, rather than risk having them posted. The concert, two Bach solo cello suites by a Dutch cellist I hadn't heard of (though I'd be hard pressed to name many extant cellists beyond Steven Isserlis) was well attended but not a sell-out, so we could have got tickets on the day instead of booking three months in advance. The Dutch cellist (who is probably well-known to people who actually know about classical music) was delightful (to my ears) and made the suites sound more like dance music than they sometimes do. The seats in the stalls are on one level in the part of the hall nearer to the stage, and raked in the back half of the auditorium. Wandering in twenty minutes before the concert started we got seats in the raked part, directly lined up with the central aisle so that we had a superb view. The acoustics are clean.
There are three more lunchtime Bach concerts, and then other lunchtime concerts in the autumn, and evening things I will probably not go to, though getting back from there would be easier than the south bank, let alone St John's Smith Square. I went with a friend and we both liked it very much, so it is a useful place to have discovered.
In the afternoon we went to the Lucian Freud portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. They are only on until May 27th, so that was leaving it late, but we wanted to fit it in with the concert. It is a large exhibition, which has been comprehensively reviewed by expert critics, leaving me not a lot to add, except to express my sincere personal belief that Lucian Freud was a genius and that it is a superb, wonderful exhibition. We looked at it for two hours, and then our brains were full. I don't understand why his pictures are so gripping, and could have done with an art expert to tell me how he did it, but he did. Several of his subjects are recorded as saying that being painted by Freud was exhausting, as at the end of it you felt sucked dry (apart from having to pose for an enormous number of sittings). David Hockney sat for Freud for 130 hours, at the end of which Freud had produced a small head (no shoulders, just the head). When it was Hockney's turn to paint his friend, Freud sat for two and a half hours. Freud's portraits are as revealing of his subjects as you would expect from a genius, but equally revealing of Freud. The picture he paints of himself, presented from a downward viewpoint using a floor mounted mirror, two of his children shown doll size tucked in the foreground, apparently oblivious to their father towering behind them, tells you that Lucien Freud lived to paint. His many children, and wives, and lovers, and friends, were all in the end secondary to the overwhelming fact of his being a painter. And a genius.
Back at Liverpool Street with three quarters of an hour before the cheap trains, my friend introduced me to the Pontis cafe at the end of the chain of shops above the concourse. I remember the Pontis name from my City days, when they had some sandwich bars, but had no idea that the Liverpool Street one was so big. It goes back a tremendous distance, with lots of tables, and so we were able to sit down and drink tea and eat wafer biscuits, which beats standing on the concourse looking at the indicator board and ducking out of people's way.
So all in all it was a good day out. Tomorrow I am on tour, so there may be a blog posting, depending on whether the Systems Administrator lends me a dongle, and whether I can get it to work, and if not whether I feel lavish enough to spend £5 on wi-fi access at the Grantham Travelodge, and if so can get that to work. Otherwise news of my travels will have to wait until Saturday, or for the details probably Sunday, since by the time I've driven back from Grantham I might not be feeling very literary.
Wednesday, 9 May 2012
swamp fever
The Systems Administrator awoke with a strangled shout at 4am, and it turned out that something cold and damp had walked over the SA's feet. The thing advanced up the bed, purring, and was revealed as Our Ginger. The cats are not allowed in the bedroom, but the door couldn't have been latched properly. Four in the morning is too close to when I start to wake up anyway for it to be a good time to be woken, and it took me a long time to go back to sleep. When I got up it was drizzling, a fine mist of rain. The whizzer behind the house (that's a wind turbine on the farm behind the house. I have mentioned it before, but not for a long time) was stationary, and the air felt like cold soup.
By mid morning the temperature was up to 15 degrees, and the relative humidity was 90 per cent. I went and pricked out some pots of seedlings in the greenhouse, where the air still felt like soup but at least I was not being drizzled on. Fine rain and a temperature in the mid teens are bringing on growth at a terrific rate, including the weeds. The SA confessed to having no idea how to mow the lawns, given that they are too wet to put the lawn tractor over. If the rotary mower will cut the grass it certainly won't pick up the clippings, and every bit is going to have to be raked up by hand. Shrubs are collapsing and splaying apart under the weight of water on their abundant foliage.
My Pollyannish determination to enjoy life despite the weather is starting to be severely tested. In fact, I think the weather is driving me slightly mad. If anybody with materially less than an acre of garden to worry about tries to grumble to me about the state of it, they will not get a kindly and considered response. You think you have problems? Try walking a mile in my wellington boots. At least we are not opening to the public this weekend (or any weekend), unlike the treasurer of the music society who is participating in his village Open Gardens on Saturday and Sunday.
By late morning it had stopped drizzling. It was not exactly cheerful, but moisture was no longer exuding from the air, and the whizzer had started to spin again. I went and pulled weeds out of the gravel. One advantage of having extremely sharp drainage in part of the garden is that you can get on it ten minutes after the rain stops. I counted four different sorts of clump forming weed grass, including Poa annua, plus a broad leafed sprawling one, a very fine upright one, and a more vigorous upright one with shiny leaves. My two rare and precious pines, so rare I have forgotten what they are, are making new growth. They were tiny when I put them in, so small that never mind not making a landscape impact, they were liable to be accidentally trodden on, so I'm glad they're starting to move.
Great tits are using one of the starling boxes, which is nice, as the starlings have refused to since we put them up. They used to nest in the roof space above our bedroom, but last year the SA blocked the hole in the soffit board before they could start. They are incredibly noisy neighbours, banging on the ceiling very loudly during the night. Another lot always used to nest in the roof at the front of the house, and they have been left in peace as they are only over the spare room, so we still have some resident starlings. I think they are wonderful birds, and would be very sorry not to have any. We just didn't want them banging on the bedroom ceiling in the small hours, just as Our Ginger is a wonderful cat, but that's not to say that you want mystery cold feet walking over your own in the night.
By mid morning the temperature was up to 15 degrees, and the relative humidity was 90 per cent. I went and pricked out some pots of seedlings in the greenhouse, where the air still felt like soup but at least I was not being drizzled on. Fine rain and a temperature in the mid teens are bringing on growth at a terrific rate, including the weeds. The SA confessed to having no idea how to mow the lawns, given that they are too wet to put the lawn tractor over. If the rotary mower will cut the grass it certainly won't pick up the clippings, and every bit is going to have to be raked up by hand. Shrubs are collapsing and splaying apart under the weight of water on their abundant foliage.
My Pollyannish determination to enjoy life despite the weather is starting to be severely tested. In fact, I think the weather is driving me slightly mad. If anybody with materially less than an acre of garden to worry about tries to grumble to me about the state of it, they will not get a kindly and considered response. You think you have problems? Try walking a mile in my wellington boots. At least we are not opening to the public this weekend (or any weekend), unlike the treasurer of the music society who is participating in his village Open Gardens on Saturday and Sunday.
By late morning it had stopped drizzling. It was not exactly cheerful, but moisture was no longer exuding from the air, and the whizzer had started to spin again. I went and pulled weeds out of the gravel. One advantage of having extremely sharp drainage in part of the garden is that you can get on it ten minutes after the rain stops. I counted four different sorts of clump forming weed grass, including Poa annua, plus a broad leafed sprawling one, a very fine upright one, and a more vigorous upright one with shiny leaves. My two rare and precious pines, so rare I have forgotten what they are, are making new growth. They were tiny when I put them in, so small that never mind not making a landscape impact, they were liable to be accidentally trodden on, so I'm glad they're starting to move.
Great tits are using one of the starling boxes, which is nice, as the starlings have refused to since we put them up. They used to nest in the roof space above our bedroom, but last year the SA blocked the hole in the soffit board before they could start. They are incredibly noisy neighbours, banging on the ceiling very loudly during the night. Another lot always used to nest in the roof at the front of the house, and they have been left in peace as they are only over the spare room, so we still have some resident starlings. I think they are wonderful birds, and would be very sorry not to have any. We just didn't want them banging on the bedroom ceiling in the small hours, just as Our Ginger is a wonderful cat, but that's not to say that you want mystery cold feet walking over your own in the night.
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
field and garden
This morning I drove over to Great Cornard to see a friend. Great Cornard is an extremely spread-out village outside Sudbury. I think non-nucleated is the term. It doesn't have a centre, and the church and village hall are about two miles apart, though despite its diffuse geography it seems to have a thriving social life. My friend and I met when we were both mature students at Writtle, though her's was the more demanding task, as she spread a full degree over six years rather than three, while holding down a full time job, and with the youngest of her three children still in her early teens and living at home. Six years ago she was able to fulfil her dream of moving to a place in a rural setting with a large garden, and six months ago when the field next to their house came on the market she and her husband bought it, for fear of it being bought for development. They are not rich people and buying the field was a bigger deal for them than it would be for many of our customers at the plant centre, who probably own several fields as a matter of course, but they now own the view from their kitchen window to the horizon.
We walked around the edge of the field. We couldn't go in the middle because it is currently covered in somebody else's crop of wheat. Deciding what to do with the field in the longer term will be a major decision. Her husband would prefer for it to be farmed so that he doesn't have the responsibility of looking after it. She would like more insect life than you get with a wheat field, and having counted the sprayer go round six times since they bought the land is starting to think that she would prefer fewer agrochemicals next to her garden, on her land. The walk round the perimeter is half a mile, and she goes round it twice daily, still giggling at what they have done. My suggestion was to lay it to permanent pasture, plant some trees in places, and let the grazing. They would have to fence it, but after that sheep could keep the grass down, and they wouldn't be responsible for the livestock, except to rush up the hill and turn it over if they saw a sheep on its back.
My other suggestion was that they needed an obelisk at the top of the hill, as an eye catcher, and in reference to the English landscape movement, making the point that all the land between the kitchen window and the top of the hill was hers. They get pallets from the local silk mill to burn on their log stove, and after digesting the idea of an obelisk, she got into the spirit of things and suggested that the obelisk could be made out of pallets. She and her husband have just plumbed and tiled two bathrooms themselves, making a neater job of it than I have seen done by some professional tilers, and making an obelisk would not be beyond them. If the planners get funny, you put it on wheels and trundle it around, so that it is not a permanent structure. I'm not sure she really wants one, though. They have installed a garden bench at the top of the field, which has vast views far out over the Suffolk countryside.
I returned home rather late in the afternoon and too full of lunch to start work on our own garden, though goodness knows there is enough that needs doing. I wandered about, seeing what was new since last week. Cow parsley is shooting up. It's been growing around the statue of the Buddha at the edge of the wood for a few years now, and I have to edit it ruthlessly in the spring, and is starting to spread out into the areas of long grass. I love cow parsley, so I'm happy with that, although strictly speaking it should not be allowed in the garden, and I am condemning myself to removing ever more of those albino carrot-like roots from the borders.
The Stylophorum in front of the Buddha has two yellow flowers. It looks like a yellow poppy, though it's happy in shade, and it was the only one of a packet of seeds to germinate, but I can't remember whether I have the Chinese or the north American species, and their photographs on Google images look jolly similar. I'll have to dig back through my gardening notes, and maybe while I'm at it I should remove the cow parsley that's growing right on top of it, since I don't know what it feels about competition, or if it requires its own space.
The lawn has grown like crazy, and is going to be a beastly job to cut. One for the Systems Administrator. Goose grass has sprung up in a fresh wave in the borders, and needs pulling out again, and the horsetail is starting to come up in earnest. The leaves of the Edgeworthia chrysantha are shrivelled in places, and I think a cold night nipped it at a crucial point when they were opening. I hope that's the explanation, since Edgeworthia suckers lavishly from the base, and can afford to lose some top growth, whereas if the dodgy leaves are a warning of a problem at the roots then that's more serious. A wintersweet nearby has no leaves at all, and the twigs don't look good either. In fact, it looks remarkably dead, yet it flowered last winter. I didn't investigate the ground beneath, since I wasn't dressed for gardening, but I hope this doesn't mean that the water table has risen below it and killed it. That happened to the previous Edgeworthia, and the pattern of random springs at the bottom of the garden is destructively variable. I once lost a fairly well established Corylopsis from a corner of the back garden, and an ash tree along the ditch suddenly died, and I think there are probably some fungal root diseases around in the soil, that strike periodically, especially in wet weather.
Still, the birds were singing like crazy, and while the garden was more leafy than floriferous (a common lament from people I've met who are committed to opening their gardens in the next couple of weeks), the view across from the new deck was very pretty, in an infinite number of shades of green. The ground at the back of the gunnera bed, that I'd mostly weeded before the heaviest of the rain, is liquid mud, peppered with tiny weed seedlings. I'm going to have to get in there and start planting soon, as the weeds are already planning their come-back.
We walked around the edge of the field. We couldn't go in the middle because it is currently covered in somebody else's crop of wheat. Deciding what to do with the field in the longer term will be a major decision. Her husband would prefer for it to be farmed so that he doesn't have the responsibility of looking after it. She would like more insect life than you get with a wheat field, and having counted the sprayer go round six times since they bought the land is starting to think that she would prefer fewer agrochemicals next to her garden, on her land. The walk round the perimeter is half a mile, and she goes round it twice daily, still giggling at what they have done. My suggestion was to lay it to permanent pasture, plant some trees in places, and let the grazing. They would have to fence it, but after that sheep could keep the grass down, and they wouldn't be responsible for the livestock, except to rush up the hill and turn it over if they saw a sheep on its back.
My other suggestion was that they needed an obelisk at the top of the hill, as an eye catcher, and in reference to the English landscape movement, making the point that all the land between the kitchen window and the top of the hill was hers. They get pallets from the local silk mill to burn on their log stove, and after digesting the idea of an obelisk, she got into the spirit of things and suggested that the obelisk could be made out of pallets. She and her husband have just plumbed and tiled two bathrooms themselves, making a neater job of it than I have seen done by some professional tilers, and making an obelisk would not be beyond them. If the planners get funny, you put it on wheels and trundle it around, so that it is not a permanent structure. I'm not sure she really wants one, though. They have installed a garden bench at the top of the field, which has vast views far out over the Suffolk countryside.
I returned home rather late in the afternoon and too full of lunch to start work on our own garden, though goodness knows there is enough that needs doing. I wandered about, seeing what was new since last week. Cow parsley is shooting up. It's been growing around the statue of the Buddha at the edge of the wood for a few years now, and I have to edit it ruthlessly in the spring, and is starting to spread out into the areas of long grass. I love cow parsley, so I'm happy with that, although strictly speaking it should not be allowed in the garden, and I am condemning myself to removing ever more of those albino carrot-like roots from the borders.
The Stylophorum in front of the Buddha has two yellow flowers. It looks like a yellow poppy, though it's happy in shade, and it was the only one of a packet of seeds to germinate, but I can't remember whether I have the Chinese or the north American species, and their photographs on Google images look jolly similar. I'll have to dig back through my gardening notes, and maybe while I'm at it I should remove the cow parsley that's growing right on top of it, since I don't know what it feels about competition, or if it requires its own space.
The lawn has grown like crazy, and is going to be a beastly job to cut. One for the Systems Administrator. Goose grass has sprung up in a fresh wave in the borders, and needs pulling out again, and the horsetail is starting to come up in earnest. The leaves of the Edgeworthia chrysantha are shrivelled in places, and I think a cold night nipped it at a crucial point when they were opening. I hope that's the explanation, since Edgeworthia suckers lavishly from the base, and can afford to lose some top growth, whereas if the dodgy leaves are a warning of a problem at the roots then that's more serious. A wintersweet nearby has no leaves at all, and the twigs don't look good either. In fact, it looks remarkably dead, yet it flowered last winter. I didn't investigate the ground beneath, since I wasn't dressed for gardening, but I hope this doesn't mean that the water table has risen below it and killed it. That happened to the previous Edgeworthia, and the pattern of random springs at the bottom of the garden is destructively variable. I once lost a fairly well established Corylopsis from a corner of the back garden, and an ash tree along the ditch suddenly died, and I think there are probably some fungal root diseases around in the soil, that strike periodically, especially in wet weather.
Still, the birds were singing like crazy, and while the garden was more leafy than floriferous (a common lament from people I've met who are committed to opening their gardens in the next couple of weeks), the view across from the new deck was very pretty, in an infinite number of shades of green. The ground at the back of the gunnera bed, that I'd mostly weeded before the heaviest of the rain, is liquid mud, peppered with tiny weed seedlings. I'm going to have to get in there and start planting soon, as the weeds are already planning their come-back.
Monday, 7 May 2012
slightly warmer and a bit busier
As I woke this morning I realised that there was sunlight filtering in through the curtains. When I got to work the sun was shining, and I joked with customers about the shock of seeing that big yellow thing looming at us in the sky, and one of them teased me that no, that was the moon.
The owner instructed the manager to rein back on ordering in more plants, given that trade was so quiet and we were already well-stocked. It's a tricky thing to manage. Plants go past their best in pots, in some cases quite quickly, so persuading customers to accept something you do have in stock as a substitute for something that you include in your catalogue but don't have at the moment is a good strategy. The trouble is that customers can be very firm about what they want. Some are knowledgeable plants people, others are simply determined to stick to whatever their designer told them to get. I have some sympathy with them. Even a large garden runs out of space for new plants, especially shrubs and big perennials that take up a fair bit of room, so why should you agree to live for the next decade with a variety that was not the one you really wanted, just to help your local plant centre adjust their stock levels? One of the key pieces of advice from some leading garden writers, like Robin Lane Fox, is to only to grow the best of anything. As to what is the best, well, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields.
The owner is partly concerned because she doesn't expect the second May Bank Holiday to be very good for trade, with the Diamond Jubilee. If people are busy baking cakes and holding fetes and street parties and special concerts, they won't be spending the weekend doing their gardens. Economic pundits on the radio seem to accept the Jubilee and the Olympics as a feel-good fillip to economic activity, if not a kick-starter for growth. I'm not so sure. I've already decided to boycott London for a couple of months, and here's the owner deciding that on balance the Jubilee jamboree will cost us sales. Hanging up bunting and bonding with the neighbours might be good for social cohesion, but not for the sort of activity that counts towards GDP. Our holding back on orders will in turn hit the small businesses that grow the plants, and so the pain ripples through the part of the rural economy that depends on horticulture. OK, it isn't very big, but it matters to the people who work in it.
Happily, with the sun visible in the sky, the thermometer several degrees above where it has been, and the rain holding off until 3pm, trade was brisker than over the weekend, suggesting that the problem isn't that everybody is now bored of gardening or bankrupt, and given more normal seasonal weather demand might be respectable, if not booming. I'm not too depressed yet. There again, keen gardeners are by nature optimists. If you didn't believe that although things had been rather a shambles this time around, next time they would work much better, you wouldn't bother.
The owner instructed the manager to rein back on ordering in more plants, given that trade was so quiet and we were already well-stocked. It's a tricky thing to manage. Plants go past their best in pots, in some cases quite quickly, so persuading customers to accept something you do have in stock as a substitute for something that you include in your catalogue but don't have at the moment is a good strategy. The trouble is that customers can be very firm about what they want. Some are knowledgeable plants people, others are simply determined to stick to whatever their designer told them to get. I have some sympathy with them. Even a large garden runs out of space for new plants, especially shrubs and big perennials that take up a fair bit of room, so why should you agree to live for the next decade with a variety that was not the one you really wanted, just to help your local plant centre adjust their stock levels? One of the key pieces of advice from some leading garden writers, like Robin Lane Fox, is to only to grow the best of anything. As to what is the best, well, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields.
The owner is partly concerned because she doesn't expect the second May Bank Holiday to be very good for trade, with the Diamond Jubilee. If people are busy baking cakes and holding fetes and street parties and special concerts, they won't be spending the weekend doing their gardens. Economic pundits on the radio seem to accept the Jubilee and the Olympics as a feel-good fillip to economic activity, if not a kick-starter for growth. I'm not so sure. I've already decided to boycott London for a couple of months, and here's the owner deciding that on balance the Jubilee jamboree will cost us sales. Hanging up bunting and bonding with the neighbours might be good for social cohesion, but not for the sort of activity that counts towards GDP. Our holding back on orders will in turn hit the small businesses that grow the plants, and so the pain ripples through the part of the rural economy that depends on horticulture. OK, it isn't very big, but it matters to the people who work in it.
Happily, with the sun visible in the sky, the thermometer several degrees above where it has been, and the rain holding off until 3pm, trade was brisker than over the weekend, suggesting that the problem isn't that everybody is now bored of gardening or bankrupt, and given more normal seasonal weather demand might be respectable, if not booming. I'm not too depressed yet. There again, keen gardeners are by nature optimists. If you didn't believe that although things had been rather a shambles this time around, next time they would work much better, you wouldn't bother.
Sunday, 6 May 2012
dank
It was drizzling this morning when I got up, and one of the cats had been sick in the upstairs sitting room. I suppose drizzling makes a change from raining, and at least there wasn't a dead partridge on the doorstep.
There wasn't an overnight frost. We cleared away the fleece from the most tender plants we'd covered up last night, and returned the ones we'd wheeled under cover in trolleys to their proper places. A colleague helped me finish emptying the red trolleys, and we had those done by lunchtime. My other designated job for the day was to move the Dierama and Crocosmia back under cover, not so much because of the cold as because they were getting too wet in their pots standing outside. Then I tackled one of the tasks on the list of general jobs, which was to clean up the box hedging plants in 2L pots, and then I managed to attach myself to the till in the shop and warm up a bit. It was really too cold to start sweeping down the tree line, after shifting all those pots. I had visions of my back locking solid, and not moving again for the rest of the week.
I never saw the goldfinches at all, but did notice a pair of chaffinches spending a lot of time in the border at the bottom end of the plant centre, and began to suspect that they were nesting in one of the wall climbers. Late in the afternoon a colleague spotted the female perching with a worm in her beak, which after a time flitted into the climber, so we were pretty sure there was a nest.
I never saw the sun at all either. It rained, lightly and persistently, for almost the entire day, the sky a dull grey. When we came to write up the weather record for the day, we decided the word to describe it was Dank. Very dank, Suffolk.
The dire weather is hitting trade hard, which is a great shame. The plant centre is looking really nice, with all the plants in lovely condition, and some very interesting and unusual things in stock. Normally the first May Bank Holiday would be a very busy weekend for us, but customers just aren't coming. I can't blame them. It is not much fun walking around in the drizzle, with the thermometer reading eight degrees and the air feeling like six, choosing plants, and their gardens probably aren't ready for planting. They probably aren't fit for walking on. It is discouraging for the owners, especially with the tea room just opening. I took some consolation from the words of an American (or Canadian. I have a tin ear for accents) who was on her first visit to us, and who said that it was the first garden centre she'd visited in my country that didn't make her depressed.
When I got home I asked the Systems Administrator how much rain we'd had so far in May. The answer is 53mm, and most of that fell in 48 hours at the start of the month. It represents over 10 per cent of the rain we'd expect in an average year, and 9 per cent of the actual rain we've had on a rolling twelve month basis. Don't you just love an English spring, and a May Bank Holiday?
There wasn't an overnight frost. We cleared away the fleece from the most tender plants we'd covered up last night, and returned the ones we'd wheeled under cover in trolleys to their proper places. A colleague helped me finish emptying the red trolleys, and we had those done by lunchtime. My other designated job for the day was to move the Dierama and Crocosmia back under cover, not so much because of the cold as because they were getting too wet in their pots standing outside. Then I tackled one of the tasks on the list of general jobs, which was to clean up the box hedging plants in 2L pots, and then I managed to attach myself to the till in the shop and warm up a bit. It was really too cold to start sweeping down the tree line, after shifting all those pots. I had visions of my back locking solid, and not moving again for the rest of the week.
I never saw the goldfinches at all, but did notice a pair of chaffinches spending a lot of time in the border at the bottom end of the plant centre, and began to suspect that they were nesting in one of the wall climbers. Late in the afternoon a colleague spotted the female perching with a worm in her beak, which after a time flitted into the climber, so we were pretty sure there was a nest.
I never saw the sun at all either. It rained, lightly and persistently, for almost the entire day, the sky a dull grey. When we came to write up the weather record for the day, we decided the word to describe it was Dank. Very dank, Suffolk.
The dire weather is hitting trade hard, which is a great shame. The plant centre is looking really nice, with all the plants in lovely condition, and some very interesting and unusual things in stock. Normally the first May Bank Holiday would be a very busy weekend for us, but customers just aren't coming. I can't blame them. It is not much fun walking around in the drizzle, with the thermometer reading eight degrees and the air feeling like six, choosing plants, and their gardens probably aren't ready for planting. They probably aren't fit for walking on. It is discouraging for the owners, especially with the tea room just opening. I took some consolation from the words of an American (or Canadian. I have a tin ear for accents) who was on her first visit to us, and who said that it was the first garden centre she'd visited in my country that didn't make her depressed.
When I got home I asked the Systems Administrator how much rain we'd had so far in May. The answer is 53mm, and most of that fell in 48 hours at the start of the month. It represents over 10 per cent of the rain we'd expect in an average year, and 9 per cent of the actual rain we've had on a rolling twelve month basis. Don't you just love an English spring, and a May Bank Holiday?
Saturday, 5 May 2012
peacocks and plant pots
It was a grey morning, but at least that meant there was no watering to do at work, except inside the tunnels, and even they were pretty damp, apart from a few odd things. The manager had left his usual list of jobs to do over the weekend next to the till, and mine was to empty the two double-decker red trolleys, plus three of the silver ones that customers use. That's what he left me to do the last weekend I was working, and I calculated then that it came to around 9.5 square metres of plant pots to put out for sale.
Moving that quantity of plants before left me absolutely shattered by Tuesday, and on Monday when the manager returned to work he didn't say anything encouraging, like gosh, well done for managing to move all those plants, or thank you, so I set about this weekend's trolleys at a more circumspect pace. When I was at infants school I remember writing my first story. The teacher gave me a gold star, and I was inordinately pleased, not withstanding the fact that the star had no value whatsoever. I mean, you couldn't hand it in for sweets or a book or anything. I immediately wrote another story. I didn't get another star, and experienced a massive sense of disillusionment. Managers take note. Even middle aged people have their inner six year old lurking not so very far below the surface, and if they make a considerable effort and you don't recognise it at all, next time they will probably moderate their energies accordingly.
The peacock's tail is vast and resplendent. I saw him perching on one of the finials over the door into the owners' private garden, looking very romantic, and the girl who runs the tea room at weekends found him displaying his tail outside the ladies' loo. She has a reserved attitude to large birds, but her nervousness about approaching the peacock was outweighed by her urgent desire to go to the loo. I heard a great deal of screaming while I was having my morning tea break, which was the peacock calling because it is the mating season, and the owners' child shouting at the peacock because he felt like it. I have never been threatened by the peacock and think it is quite good natured, although it might not stay that way if too many children shout at it.
The manager's schedule of things to do included a long list of plants to be covered with fleece if frost was forecast. One of my colleagues went up to the office to have a look at the weather forecast late in the afternoon, and returned baffled, since the forecast was for a minimum temperature of five degrees C, but with the possibility of frost if there were clear patches. We compromised on fleecing the most tender and succulent herbaceous plants, like the delphiniums, and bringing some under cover in trolleys, while leaving shrubs like the pittosporums, which ought to be able to cope with 5 degrees above zero. Really as a forecast it did not make sense, since if the minimum never dropped below five I wouldn't expect a frost, clear skies or no. It was quite breezy, and some of the plants we were supposed to cover had grown so tall that the fleece wouldn't tuck in all the way round, so most of it will have blown off the plants it is supposed to be covering by the time it gets dark, and it felt rather like a token effort.
The goldfinches had finished their nest, or nearly done so. I didn't like to inspect it too closely, but could see without going right up to the shrub that there was a neat rounded structure inside, where last Monday there had been just a few feathers and some moss. I warned both of my colleagues, and put a Reserved notice on the plant. I never saw a goldfinch in the plant centre all day, and have no idea if they will use the nest or have abandoned it, on the other hand maybe once it is finished they don't need to be in the plant centre. The robins' nest in our greenhouse last year seemed deserted most of the time, once it was finished and she started laying, until the point where she started to sit on the eggs. It is strange the way that most bird books are so geared to identification, without telling you much (or anything) about what the birds are actually doing when you see them. I would like to have the nest, once the goldfinches have finished with it, or if they don't use it, because I would like to install it in the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone' in the conservatory at home, with a toy bird in it, a cheerful kitsch one made out of dyed feathers.
I got home to find that it had drizzled most of the day here, so we had the best of the weather to the north. Not very good weather, but still better than drizzle.
Moving that quantity of plants before left me absolutely shattered by Tuesday, and on Monday when the manager returned to work he didn't say anything encouraging, like gosh, well done for managing to move all those plants, or thank you, so I set about this weekend's trolleys at a more circumspect pace. When I was at infants school I remember writing my first story. The teacher gave me a gold star, and I was inordinately pleased, not withstanding the fact that the star had no value whatsoever. I mean, you couldn't hand it in for sweets or a book or anything. I immediately wrote another story. I didn't get another star, and experienced a massive sense of disillusionment. Managers take note. Even middle aged people have their inner six year old lurking not so very far below the surface, and if they make a considerable effort and you don't recognise it at all, next time they will probably moderate their energies accordingly.
The peacock's tail is vast and resplendent. I saw him perching on one of the finials over the door into the owners' private garden, looking very romantic, and the girl who runs the tea room at weekends found him displaying his tail outside the ladies' loo. She has a reserved attitude to large birds, but her nervousness about approaching the peacock was outweighed by her urgent desire to go to the loo. I heard a great deal of screaming while I was having my morning tea break, which was the peacock calling because it is the mating season, and the owners' child shouting at the peacock because he felt like it. I have never been threatened by the peacock and think it is quite good natured, although it might not stay that way if too many children shout at it.
The manager's schedule of things to do included a long list of plants to be covered with fleece if frost was forecast. One of my colleagues went up to the office to have a look at the weather forecast late in the afternoon, and returned baffled, since the forecast was for a minimum temperature of five degrees C, but with the possibility of frost if there were clear patches. We compromised on fleecing the most tender and succulent herbaceous plants, like the delphiniums, and bringing some under cover in trolleys, while leaving shrubs like the pittosporums, which ought to be able to cope with 5 degrees above zero. Really as a forecast it did not make sense, since if the minimum never dropped below five I wouldn't expect a frost, clear skies or no. It was quite breezy, and some of the plants we were supposed to cover had grown so tall that the fleece wouldn't tuck in all the way round, so most of it will have blown off the plants it is supposed to be covering by the time it gets dark, and it felt rather like a token effort.
The goldfinches had finished their nest, or nearly done so. I didn't like to inspect it too closely, but could see without going right up to the shrub that there was a neat rounded structure inside, where last Monday there had been just a few feathers and some moss. I warned both of my colleagues, and put a Reserved notice on the plant. I never saw a goldfinch in the plant centre all day, and have no idea if they will use the nest or have abandoned it, on the other hand maybe once it is finished they don't need to be in the plant centre. The robins' nest in our greenhouse last year seemed deserted most of the time, once it was finished and she started laying, until the point where she started to sit on the eggs. It is strange the way that most bird books are so geared to identification, without telling you much (or anything) about what the birds are actually doing when you see them. I would like to have the nest, once the goldfinches have finished with it, or if they don't use it, because I would like to install it in the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone' in the conservatory at home, with a toy bird in it, a cheerful kitsch one made out of dyed feathers.
I got home to find that it had drizzled most of the day here, so we had the best of the weather to the north. Not very good weather, but still better than drizzle.
Friday, 4 May 2012
a trip to the tower
It was drizzling when I went out to let the chickens into their run, a fine silt of moisture that collected in tiny beads on the black cat's fur, and clung to every leaf and blade of grass. I wasn't planning to do any gardening first thing, as I had a morning booking to talk about the woodland charity, but I got rather damp collecting my basket of twigs for the lecture.
The booking was made by somebody from the council for easily the most unusual venue I have ever talked in, the Martello Tower in Jaywick. It sits down just behind the sea wall, next to the caravan site, and as you approach it you can see Clacton, itself not the smartest town on the east coast, give way to Jaywick, the most deprived settlement in the entire country. The bungalows get smaller and more shanty-like, and by the time you get to the shed selling second hand car parts and used tyres, in a wasteland of rough grass, you feel as though you have driven on to the set of Fish Tank.
I arrived with plenty of time to spare, having allowed for getting stuck at the level crossing gates (didn't happen) and getting lost (ditto), which gave me a good chance to have a look at the tower. It is absolutely fascinating, and until the end of September it is open between 10am and 5pm, Wednesday to Sunday. Admission is a pound, and it is well worth a visit. Don't let Jaywick's position at the top of the deprivation stakes put you off. It's fine, and nothing happened to my car, which is more than you can say for the Systems Administrator's experience in the station car park at the leafy university enclave of Wivenhoe.
Martello Towers were built during the Napoleonic wars, as a defence against invasion. They take their name from a small circular fort at Mortella Point in Corsica, which successfully held off the British Fleet. Impressed, the naval authorities decided to copy the idea to guard their own shores. The first towers were built along the south coast in 1803, and in 1805 the east coast was added to the Martello programme, 29 being built between Brightlingsea and Aldeburgh. There are three around Clacton, at Point Clear, Jaywick and in Clacton itself, and they are the only three currently regularly open to the public.
The circular walls are enormously thick. You can see this at Jaywick, because in the 1960s a door was made at ground level through the thinnest part of the walls, and that is a good couple of metres deep. Access originally was via the first floor, which I think was characteristic of small defensible buildings (there was an entertaining Dan Cruickshank programme about a fortified house on the TV a couple of weeks back). You entered via a metal ladder, which could be pulled up behind you in case of attack. With its very thick walls, underground water storage tank and supplies, the Martello Tower was designed to withstand a sustained assault. Nowadays there is an outside staircase to the first floor door, as well as an internal stairway, not original, fitted with a chair lift (which was being mended when I arrived. I gathered from their website it had been playing up).
The first floor is where the troops would have lived, when the tower was fully manned. A hugely thick column runs down the centre of the tower, and the first floor roof is extraordinary and beautiful, consisting of a circular barrel vault. Imagine you are standing inside a hollowed out ring doughnut, and look up. That is the shape of the Martello Tower ceiling. The ground floor was originally used for storage, accessed via a trap door from above. It now has rather restricted headroom, not because everybody was short in Napoleonic times, but because during construction the entire tower in the space of just half an hour suddenly tipped five feet to one side. Built on very badly drained ground, one side had sunk. Local volunteers have photographed and transcribed the contemporary military reports of this mishap, and while there is no copy to buy, you can read their efforts on site. The tower was eventually righted, by dint of draining the ground under it, but ended up sunk five feet into the ground below where it should have been. It's a tribute to the builders (750,000 bricks were used in its construction, shipped up from Kent) that it didn't crack at all during its adventures.
There was no invasion, and while the tower had gun defences mounted on it during the early nineteenth century, and was used as a lookout station during both world wars, it never saw military action. Since 2005 it has been operated as a historical and cultural centre by Essex County Council. They will be doing a Napoleonic re-enactment of a military camp of the 95th Rifles on 19th and 20th May, and tomorrow an exhibition opens of photographs of derelict military defences and spent hardware that people have picked up, that looked rather interesting.
Nowadays the tower has a lookout post on top, with proper inclined glass to minimise reflections, but there weren't enough local volunteers to man it, and it is just used as part of the exhibition space. I went to have a look while I was there, and got a fine view of the Gunfleet wind array in one direction, and the caravan park in the other.
The tower has a website, so you can read all about it, and if you go there you can get a useful little booklet for £2.50, which is where I found the information about its history and construction. The booklet says that it is recognised nationally as an important monument. I'm not sure that all that many people would bracket it with Stonehenge or Whitby Abbey, or console themselves for the loss of the Euston Arch with the thought that at least the Jaywick Martello Tower was saved. But it is an interesting building. Jane Austen may not have mentioned the Napoleonic wars very much in her novels, but at Jaywick you can see a tangible reminder.
The booking was made by somebody from the council for easily the most unusual venue I have ever talked in, the Martello Tower in Jaywick. It sits down just behind the sea wall, next to the caravan site, and as you approach it you can see Clacton, itself not the smartest town on the east coast, give way to Jaywick, the most deprived settlement in the entire country. The bungalows get smaller and more shanty-like, and by the time you get to the shed selling second hand car parts and used tyres, in a wasteland of rough grass, you feel as though you have driven on to the set of Fish Tank.
I arrived with plenty of time to spare, having allowed for getting stuck at the level crossing gates (didn't happen) and getting lost (ditto), which gave me a good chance to have a look at the tower. It is absolutely fascinating, and until the end of September it is open between 10am and 5pm, Wednesday to Sunday. Admission is a pound, and it is well worth a visit. Don't let Jaywick's position at the top of the deprivation stakes put you off. It's fine, and nothing happened to my car, which is more than you can say for the Systems Administrator's experience in the station car park at the leafy university enclave of Wivenhoe.
Martello Towers were built during the Napoleonic wars, as a defence against invasion. They take their name from a small circular fort at Mortella Point in Corsica, which successfully held off the British Fleet. Impressed, the naval authorities decided to copy the idea to guard their own shores. The first towers were built along the south coast in 1803, and in 1805 the east coast was added to the Martello programme, 29 being built between Brightlingsea and Aldeburgh. There are three around Clacton, at Point Clear, Jaywick and in Clacton itself, and they are the only three currently regularly open to the public.
The circular walls are enormously thick. You can see this at Jaywick, because in the 1960s a door was made at ground level through the thinnest part of the walls, and that is a good couple of metres deep. Access originally was via the first floor, which I think was characteristic of small defensible buildings (there was an entertaining Dan Cruickshank programme about a fortified house on the TV a couple of weeks back). You entered via a metal ladder, which could be pulled up behind you in case of attack. With its very thick walls, underground water storage tank and supplies, the Martello Tower was designed to withstand a sustained assault. Nowadays there is an outside staircase to the first floor door, as well as an internal stairway, not original, fitted with a chair lift (which was being mended when I arrived. I gathered from their website it had been playing up).
The first floor is where the troops would have lived, when the tower was fully manned. A hugely thick column runs down the centre of the tower, and the first floor roof is extraordinary and beautiful, consisting of a circular barrel vault. Imagine you are standing inside a hollowed out ring doughnut, and look up. That is the shape of the Martello Tower ceiling. The ground floor was originally used for storage, accessed via a trap door from above. It now has rather restricted headroom, not because everybody was short in Napoleonic times, but because during construction the entire tower in the space of just half an hour suddenly tipped five feet to one side. Built on very badly drained ground, one side had sunk. Local volunteers have photographed and transcribed the contemporary military reports of this mishap, and while there is no copy to buy, you can read their efforts on site. The tower was eventually righted, by dint of draining the ground under it, but ended up sunk five feet into the ground below where it should have been. It's a tribute to the builders (750,000 bricks were used in its construction, shipped up from Kent) that it didn't crack at all during its adventures.
There was no invasion, and while the tower had gun defences mounted on it during the early nineteenth century, and was used as a lookout station during both world wars, it never saw military action. Since 2005 it has been operated as a historical and cultural centre by Essex County Council. They will be doing a Napoleonic re-enactment of a military camp of the 95th Rifles on 19th and 20th May, and tomorrow an exhibition opens of photographs of derelict military defences and spent hardware that people have picked up, that looked rather interesting.
Nowadays the tower has a lookout post on top, with proper inclined glass to minimise reflections, but there weren't enough local volunteers to man it, and it is just used as part of the exhibition space. I went to have a look while I was there, and got a fine view of the Gunfleet wind array in one direction, and the caravan park in the other.
The tower has a website, so you can read all about it, and if you go there you can get a useful little booklet for £2.50, which is where I found the information about its history and construction. The booklet says that it is recognised nationally as an important monument. I'm not sure that all that many people would bracket it with Stonehenge or Whitby Abbey, or console themselves for the loss of the Euston Arch with the thought that at least the Jaywick Martello Tower was saved. But it is an interesting building. Jane Austen may not have mentioned the Napoleonic wars very much in her novels, but at Jaywick you can see a tangible reminder.
Thursday, 3 May 2012
four exhibitions
It was raining lightly this morning when I got up. Looking at the electronic weather station I saw that we'd had 28.9mm of rain in the previous 24 hours (that's over an inch in old money, or more than 5% of our expected annual total). I'd been thinking I might go up to London to see some art exhibitions, unless the rain moved through unexpectedly quickly, and while it had rained a good deal in the night, it didn't look as though I was going to get a dry day to get on with the gardening, and the garden was going to be sodden anyway, so I thought I'd stick to Plan A.
The big tabby had a partridge last night. The Systems Administrator blocked the cat door so that he couldn't eat it in the hall, and when I went out to let the chickens into their run, I found that he'd eaten it on the doorstep. He'd left the wings, both legs (so I know it was a red legged partridge and not the rarer grey one) and, rather bizarrely, the head, which was sitting upright outside the front door like the head of John the Baptist upon a platter.
The A12 was blocked by rainwater at Kelvedon. I knew that from reading the news on the net before setting out, and the SA heard on the traffic report on R2. The electronic traffic news sign on the Colchester inner ring road didn't see fit to warn drivers of the delay, or alternatively let them know that the road was now clear, instead exhorting us to plan ahead for our journey during the Olympics. I have already planned ahead, my plan being that from mid July at the latest until after our holiday in September I don't intend to go anywhere near London.
The first leg of my art trip took me to Dulwich. I love the Dulwich Picture Gallery, a little gem designed by Sir John Soane and Britain's first purpose built art gallery. I like Dulwich, too, once I get there. It is reassuringly bourgeois and leafy. In general I don't like south of the river. The actual south bank is OK, along the stretch from Blackfriars Bridge past the Tate and the Royal Festival Hall and up to Hungerford Bridge, but I get twitchy as soon as I can't see the Thames and the north bank. Peckham makes me think of Alexei Sayle in a tight suit, and Damilola Taylor. Today everybody was very respectable, though the ticket inspectors on the train were hunting in pairs.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery has a nice cafe. When I went there on a sunny day not long after their Canaletto exhibition opened it was completely full, but today it wasn't, and I had a smoked salmon bagel and a pot of tea, then got on with the real business of the day, which was a show of Indian ragamala paintings, and a small assemblage of Van Dykes. Ragamalas are miniatures, painted to illustrate pieces of music called ragas. The pictures were tiny, detailed and jewel like in their colours and clarity, and we were encouraged to borrow one of the supply of magnifying glasses to examine them more closely. I did, and marvelled at the faces, clothes and jewels of the little people, and the animals and plants. I find Hindu mythology utterly baffling, when I have tried to read about it, so decided not to worry about why some gods were blue, and so on, and just enjoy the images. It is not a big exhibition, with a couple of dozen pictures in it, which is about the right number. My eyes and brain couldn't have coped with any more, and I was getting a stiff arm holding up the magnifying glass. It's lucky it wasn't busier, as only one person at a time could really examine each picture.
Van Dyke in Sicily is not a large exhibition either, and going into it from the Indian pictures you rather confusingly start in room 3 of three, and are confronted with half a dozen Saint Rosalias casting their eyes up to heaven as they intercede on behalf of Palermo in time of plague. Working my way back to the start, I found three splendid portraits, an early self-portrait, a merchant with magnificant curling moustaches, and Emanuel Philibert of Savoy in armour. In a coup de theatre the gallery had managed to borrow the original armour shown in the portrait, though by now the gilding has largely rubbed off and it does not look so gorgeous as it did in 1624. The room guide warned everyone coming in the front was that the armour was alarmed, but that you had to get very close to it to set it off, but coming in the back way via Saint Rosalia I escaped the warning. The armour is tiny, and Emanuel Philibert must have been a little chap, but he looks every inch the nobleman and governor, which he was, until dying of the plague only a few months after Van Dyke painted him. Then there are a couple of devotional portraits and a sketch and cut-down painting of a great woman artist in her old age, and the Rosalias. She was extremely pious and lived in a cave, and her bones were thought to be a defence against plague, though it doesn't sound as though they worked. I really like Van Dyke, and I liked this excursion into the Sicilian phase of his career, my only caveat being that there is an egregious misuse of the word 'decimated' in the introductory paragraph about the plague, and that the captions for some of the pictures are in a small font hung at hip level.
Both of these exhibitions are on until May 27th, so you have time to visit them, but not loads of time. If you are going all the trouble of getting yourself to Dulwich it's worth having a look at the gallery's permanent collection while you're there, as they have a fine set of Old Masters, some good eighteenth century English portraits, and some Dutch landscapes.
Rolling back into London Bridge station I debated whether to head home, and get a train ahead of the peak time ban on cheap day returns, or go to Tate Modern. I opted for the Tate, since I'm running out of time to see various things, and I thought I might as well get maximum value out of the train ticket. The SA is out tonight anyway for a curry (which should have been preceded by a cricket match, but rain stopped play for the second time in a fortnight). Tate Britain is showing the work of a Japanese artist I'd never heard of, until I heard about this exhibition, but is sounded interesting. Her name is Yayoi Kusama. She was born in 1929, worked in America in the 1960s, then returned to Japan, where after a few years she voluntarily admitted herself to a mental hospital, but continued to work. The booklet (I love it that the Tate gives its supporters a booklet with their free exhibition entry) says that she is perhaps Japan's best-know living artist, which proves that I know nothing about Japanese contemporary art. I found some of her work very interesting and beautiful, and some not, which wan't surprising. Some of her early monochrome paintings have an eerie calm that I could look at for a long time, and some of her late ones have a joyous vibrancy that reminded me strangely of the banks of brightly coloured late Hockneys in his recent show at the RA. My favourite thing was the Infinity Mirrored Room at the very end of the exhibition. Walls and ceiling are covered with mirrors, and strings of small globes hang from the ceiling, with a pathway for visitors to move through the room. Inside the globes are coloured lights, presumably LEDs, which change colour, interposed with brief periods of darkness. They turn red, yellow, pink, green, blue and green, and are reflected in the walls and ceiling, as are the viewers, so that one moment you see a dozen of yourself among a cheerful infinity of glowing yellow lights, then the lights turn yellow and green, or all blue, or blue and red. Mirrored installations, and indeed dots, are a recurring theme for Kasuma, who has experienced visual hallucinations since childhood, and the installation does indeed 'invite the viewer to suspend his or her sense of self and accompany Kusama on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration'. It is also quite extraordinarily pretty. You have until 5 June to catch this one, and it is worth seeing.
As I was there, and I couldn't get a train for another hour and a half, I wandered into Alighiero Boetti. The first room included objects like a roll of cardboard, and I began to nurse hostile feelings towards Boetii, though I liked the two illuminated red and white signs either side of a doorway which came on alternately, one saying Ping and the other Pong, but two rooms on came to some bits I really liked. Boetti was interested in maps, and politics, and came up with the idea of colouring in countries on a map with their national flag, but doing it a lot of times and on a grand scale. As politics move on and national boundaries and symbols change, so do the maps. Boetti drew up what he wanted, in terms of choosing which map projection to use and specifying the latest flags, then handed the whole project over to Afghan embroiderers, who made his ideas into huge embroideries. The end results were sometimes unexpected, as in the time when one world map came back with pink seas. Afghanistan is a land-locked country, the embroiderers had a lot of pink thread, and the idea of the sea didn't occur to them. I've always liked textiles and maps, and thought that these were completely wonderful, though I gather the Italian avant-guard art establishment wasn't immediately convinced at the time. In the next room a set of kilims were made using one hundred squares, arranged in a ten by ten grid, each square divided into one hundred smaller squares. One of the hundred larger squares had one black small square and ninety-nine white, the next two black, and so on. Boetti left it to the discretion of his kilim makers to choose their arrangements of large and small squares. The results, arranged within colourful borders, were almost infinitely varied, rhythmic and subtle. I really liked the kilims. Then there's lots more stuff, some quite interesting, some not, but it's worth going just for the maps and the carpets.
I'd love to hear Grayson Perry's or David Hockney's views on Boetti's textile works. Both of them believe that it is important for the artist to have physically made their work. Boetti's textiles don't even use studio assistants working under his supervision, but crafts people in a different continent, and he gave them guiding principles, but a lot of discretion about how they interpreted them. My hunch is that Perry and Hockney wouldn't mind, in Boetti's case.
I didn't go to see Damian Hirst, and I don't think I'll bother. I know you shouldn't condemn something without seeing it (although actually we do that all the time. Most right-minded liberals are against murder, torture, or cannibalism without having personally tried them first, and concluded that they are a Bad Idea). I think Damian Hirst is a Bad Idea, and I am going to vote with my feet.
The big tabby had a partridge last night. The Systems Administrator blocked the cat door so that he couldn't eat it in the hall, and when I went out to let the chickens into their run, I found that he'd eaten it on the doorstep. He'd left the wings, both legs (so I know it was a red legged partridge and not the rarer grey one) and, rather bizarrely, the head, which was sitting upright outside the front door like the head of John the Baptist upon a platter.
The A12 was blocked by rainwater at Kelvedon. I knew that from reading the news on the net before setting out, and the SA heard on the traffic report on R2. The electronic traffic news sign on the Colchester inner ring road didn't see fit to warn drivers of the delay, or alternatively let them know that the road was now clear, instead exhorting us to plan ahead for our journey during the Olympics. I have already planned ahead, my plan being that from mid July at the latest until after our holiday in September I don't intend to go anywhere near London.
The first leg of my art trip took me to Dulwich. I love the Dulwich Picture Gallery, a little gem designed by Sir John Soane and Britain's first purpose built art gallery. I like Dulwich, too, once I get there. It is reassuringly bourgeois and leafy. In general I don't like south of the river. The actual south bank is OK, along the stretch from Blackfriars Bridge past the Tate and the Royal Festival Hall and up to Hungerford Bridge, but I get twitchy as soon as I can't see the Thames and the north bank. Peckham makes me think of Alexei Sayle in a tight suit, and Damilola Taylor. Today everybody was very respectable, though the ticket inspectors on the train were hunting in pairs.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery has a nice cafe. When I went there on a sunny day not long after their Canaletto exhibition opened it was completely full, but today it wasn't, and I had a smoked salmon bagel and a pot of tea, then got on with the real business of the day, which was a show of Indian ragamala paintings, and a small assemblage of Van Dykes. Ragamalas are miniatures, painted to illustrate pieces of music called ragas. The pictures were tiny, detailed and jewel like in their colours and clarity, and we were encouraged to borrow one of the supply of magnifying glasses to examine them more closely. I did, and marvelled at the faces, clothes and jewels of the little people, and the animals and plants. I find Hindu mythology utterly baffling, when I have tried to read about it, so decided not to worry about why some gods were blue, and so on, and just enjoy the images. It is not a big exhibition, with a couple of dozen pictures in it, which is about the right number. My eyes and brain couldn't have coped with any more, and I was getting a stiff arm holding up the magnifying glass. It's lucky it wasn't busier, as only one person at a time could really examine each picture.
Van Dyke in Sicily is not a large exhibition either, and going into it from the Indian pictures you rather confusingly start in room 3 of three, and are confronted with half a dozen Saint Rosalias casting their eyes up to heaven as they intercede on behalf of Palermo in time of plague. Working my way back to the start, I found three splendid portraits, an early self-portrait, a merchant with magnificant curling moustaches, and Emanuel Philibert of Savoy in armour. In a coup de theatre the gallery had managed to borrow the original armour shown in the portrait, though by now the gilding has largely rubbed off and it does not look so gorgeous as it did in 1624. The room guide warned everyone coming in the front was that the armour was alarmed, but that you had to get very close to it to set it off, but coming in the back way via Saint Rosalia I escaped the warning. The armour is tiny, and Emanuel Philibert must have been a little chap, but he looks every inch the nobleman and governor, which he was, until dying of the plague only a few months after Van Dyke painted him. Then there are a couple of devotional portraits and a sketch and cut-down painting of a great woman artist in her old age, and the Rosalias. She was extremely pious and lived in a cave, and her bones were thought to be a defence against plague, though it doesn't sound as though they worked. I really like Van Dyke, and I liked this excursion into the Sicilian phase of his career, my only caveat being that there is an egregious misuse of the word 'decimated' in the introductory paragraph about the plague, and that the captions for some of the pictures are in a small font hung at hip level.
Both of these exhibitions are on until May 27th, so you have time to visit them, but not loads of time. If you are going all the trouble of getting yourself to Dulwich it's worth having a look at the gallery's permanent collection while you're there, as they have a fine set of Old Masters, some good eighteenth century English portraits, and some Dutch landscapes.
Rolling back into London Bridge station I debated whether to head home, and get a train ahead of the peak time ban on cheap day returns, or go to Tate Modern. I opted for the Tate, since I'm running out of time to see various things, and I thought I might as well get maximum value out of the train ticket. The SA is out tonight anyway for a curry (which should have been preceded by a cricket match, but rain stopped play for the second time in a fortnight). Tate Britain is showing the work of a Japanese artist I'd never heard of, until I heard about this exhibition, but is sounded interesting. Her name is Yayoi Kusama. She was born in 1929, worked in America in the 1960s, then returned to Japan, where after a few years she voluntarily admitted herself to a mental hospital, but continued to work. The booklet (I love it that the Tate gives its supporters a booklet with their free exhibition entry) says that she is perhaps Japan's best-know living artist, which proves that I know nothing about Japanese contemporary art. I found some of her work very interesting and beautiful, and some not, which wan't surprising. Some of her early monochrome paintings have an eerie calm that I could look at for a long time, and some of her late ones have a joyous vibrancy that reminded me strangely of the banks of brightly coloured late Hockneys in his recent show at the RA. My favourite thing was the Infinity Mirrored Room at the very end of the exhibition. Walls and ceiling are covered with mirrors, and strings of small globes hang from the ceiling, with a pathway for visitors to move through the room. Inside the globes are coloured lights, presumably LEDs, which change colour, interposed with brief periods of darkness. They turn red, yellow, pink, green, blue and green, and are reflected in the walls and ceiling, as are the viewers, so that one moment you see a dozen of yourself among a cheerful infinity of glowing yellow lights, then the lights turn yellow and green, or all blue, or blue and red. Mirrored installations, and indeed dots, are a recurring theme for Kasuma, who has experienced visual hallucinations since childhood, and the installation does indeed 'invite the viewer to suspend his or her sense of self and accompany Kusama on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration'. It is also quite extraordinarily pretty. You have until 5 June to catch this one, and it is worth seeing.
As I was there, and I couldn't get a train for another hour and a half, I wandered into Alighiero Boetti. The first room included objects like a roll of cardboard, and I began to nurse hostile feelings towards Boetii, though I liked the two illuminated red and white signs either side of a doorway which came on alternately, one saying Ping and the other Pong, but two rooms on came to some bits I really liked. Boetti was interested in maps, and politics, and came up with the idea of colouring in countries on a map with their national flag, but doing it a lot of times and on a grand scale. As politics move on and national boundaries and symbols change, so do the maps. Boetti drew up what he wanted, in terms of choosing which map projection to use and specifying the latest flags, then handed the whole project over to Afghan embroiderers, who made his ideas into huge embroideries. The end results were sometimes unexpected, as in the time when one world map came back with pink seas. Afghanistan is a land-locked country, the embroiderers had a lot of pink thread, and the idea of the sea didn't occur to them. I've always liked textiles and maps, and thought that these were completely wonderful, though I gather the Italian avant-guard art establishment wasn't immediately convinced at the time. In the next room a set of kilims were made using one hundred squares, arranged in a ten by ten grid, each square divided into one hundred smaller squares. One of the hundred larger squares had one black small square and ninety-nine white, the next two black, and so on. Boetti left it to the discretion of his kilim makers to choose their arrangements of large and small squares. The results, arranged within colourful borders, were almost infinitely varied, rhythmic and subtle. I really liked the kilims. Then there's lots more stuff, some quite interesting, some not, but it's worth going just for the maps and the carpets.
I'd love to hear Grayson Perry's or David Hockney's views on Boetti's textile works. Both of them believe that it is important for the artist to have physically made their work. Boetti's textiles don't even use studio assistants working under his supervision, but crafts people in a different continent, and he gave them guiding principles, but a lot of discretion about how they interpreted them. My hunch is that Perry and Hockney wouldn't mind, in Boetti's case.
I didn't go to see Damian Hirst, and I don't think I'll bother. I know you shouldn't condemn something without seeing it (although actually we do that all the time. Most right-minded liberals are against murder, torture, or cannibalism without having personally tried them first, and concluded that they are a Bad Idea). I think Damian Hirst is a Bad Idea, and I am going to vote with my feet.
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
it's hard to be green
Tendring District Council has gone over to segregated instead of co-mingled recycling. Their contractors have been delivering extra colour-coded recycling boxes, a chart to let people keep track of what has to go out each week, and an optimistic little booklet. We got ours a couple of weeks back. I was initially all in favour, since waste paper seems more likely to arrive at a depot somewhere as a material capable of being made into something else useful (cardboard? egg boxes? loo roll?) if it has not previously been chucked in the back of a lorry with people's washed out cat food tins, and the new regime includes food waste collection. A lot of energy has gone into producing that food, and I liked the idea that the left-overs could be fed into an anaerobic digestor and yield up some of that energy, instead of going to landfill and yielding up methane to add to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
I am a bit disappointed. I am worried about the paper collection, because our new red box, for paper, did not come with a lid. Paper has to go in a closed container, because otherwise it will blow all over the garden and down the lane in any sort of a breeze, and I am not spending an hour a fortnight litter picking my own recycling. Materials have to be placed on our boundary by 7.00am for collection, and in practice the dustmen get here pretty early, so as I'm not going to set the alarm for six on paper Thursdays so that I can rush to put the red bin out, it is going to have to sit out by the boundary all night, giving plenty of time for it to blow around. I found the lid of the existing green bin, and the red bin is slightly larger, so the lid will not sit snugly on the rim of the box. In a gale I'm not sure a brick is going to hold it all night. In the past I've managed by only leaving paper out for recycling on still evenings, and putting it in a bag, but under the new regime they will not accept bags.
More irritatingly, they will no longer accept quite a lot of sorts of recyclable plastic. Magazine wrappers, shrink wrappers from multi-packs of catfood and soft drinks, punnets that fruit or vegetables came in, margarine and yogurt pots. All of these have the little recycling triangular symbol on them, but under the new contract the waste company don't want them. They only want milk and soft drinks bottles (without lids). I know that milk bottle plastic lids are recyclable because someone was collecting them for charity in one of the local shops. Tendring seem to have done a deal, and allowed the waste company to cherry pick the most valuable bits of plastic waste, consigning the other recyclable materials to landfill.
They haven't given us an extra green box. The leaflet says that in future only the council box may be used, and that recyclable material placed in bags will no longer be collected. I know from driving around on days when people's recycling is out for collection that many households use bags as well as their box, because they generate too much to fit in a single box. I rang up the number at the council given in the leaflet and asked how I could get another one, given that I had four cats and there was no way that a fortnight's worth of cat food tins plus our tins and plastic bottles would go in one box, and was told I could go on the waiting list for one, as they didn't have any at the moment. They should really have worked that out in advance, given that if I can see how many people overflowed their green box before then so can somebody from the council, or the waste company. In the meantime I am allowed to use my red box for tins and bottles, as long as it goes out on the correct day.
That still leaves me with the shrink wraps and all. I asked at the dump, when I was dropping off some bags of nettle roots and other nasties, but the dump is run by the same firm that has the collection contract for Tendring, albeit the dump is an Essex County facility, and they don't want polythene either. It's true that we could partly solve this problem by buying less wrapped stuff, but there are only about two flavours of cat food in Tesco that don't come in multi-packs (quicker for them stacking the shelves) and the Systems Administrator is partial to diet coke and diet tonic water, which likewise come in packs of six. I'm a tea drinker myself, but if the SA prefers sugar-free soft drinks then denying them on the grounds that the packaging is not fully recyclable in Tendring seems harsh.
The food bin comes in two parts, an outside bin with a lockable lid to stand at the boundary, and a little caddy to go in the kitchen. Since getting our bins we haven't actually had very much to put in them. There were some cheese rinds, and some burnt pizza crust, and some Value onions that I bought and the SA was rather slow to cook with, some of which began to go off in the bag, so went into the council bin in case it was any sort of an onion disease I'd rather not have in our compost heap. Then there was the carcass of a chicken after it had been boiled for stock (having yielded a roast, a pie that did two meals and a retro curry) and had the remaining meat picked off for the cats. There were two slices of ham that slipped through the net in the fridge, contrary to our self-image that we don't waste much food. But we don't. The ham was an aberration. If we have boiled a bit too much rice or potato the chickens eat it, along with any ends of brown loaves. I haven't tried them on left-over pasta, because there never is any. Raw peelings and cores go straight on the compost heap, and the council certainly isn't having them. The kitchen caddy will be an interesting discipline, obliging us to notice things like the ham, and the end of a packet of butter that was never used for cooking before it became rancid, but I doubt we'll fill more than one caddy a week. The contents will look rather pathetic, rattling around in the bottom of our enormous sealed top outside waste food bin.
The leaflet from Tendring District Council said, smugly, that our black bin of non-recyclable should by now be tiny, but in fact it will be bigger than before, trading off one chicken carcass and some cheese rinds against all the plastic wrappers and grape and mushroom punnets. I'm disappointed.
I am a bit disappointed. I am worried about the paper collection, because our new red box, for paper, did not come with a lid. Paper has to go in a closed container, because otherwise it will blow all over the garden and down the lane in any sort of a breeze, and I am not spending an hour a fortnight litter picking my own recycling. Materials have to be placed on our boundary by 7.00am for collection, and in practice the dustmen get here pretty early, so as I'm not going to set the alarm for six on paper Thursdays so that I can rush to put the red bin out, it is going to have to sit out by the boundary all night, giving plenty of time for it to blow around. I found the lid of the existing green bin, and the red bin is slightly larger, so the lid will not sit snugly on the rim of the box. In a gale I'm not sure a brick is going to hold it all night. In the past I've managed by only leaving paper out for recycling on still evenings, and putting it in a bag, but under the new regime they will not accept bags.
More irritatingly, they will no longer accept quite a lot of sorts of recyclable plastic. Magazine wrappers, shrink wrappers from multi-packs of catfood and soft drinks, punnets that fruit or vegetables came in, margarine and yogurt pots. All of these have the little recycling triangular symbol on them, but under the new contract the waste company don't want them. They only want milk and soft drinks bottles (without lids). I know that milk bottle plastic lids are recyclable because someone was collecting them for charity in one of the local shops. Tendring seem to have done a deal, and allowed the waste company to cherry pick the most valuable bits of plastic waste, consigning the other recyclable materials to landfill.
They haven't given us an extra green box. The leaflet says that in future only the council box may be used, and that recyclable material placed in bags will no longer be collected. I know from driving around on days when people's recycling is out for collection that many households use bags as well as their box, because they generate too much to fit in a single box. I rang up the number at the council given in the leaflet and asked how I could get another one, given that I had four cats and there was no way that a fortnight's worth of cat food tins plus our tins and plastic bottles would go in one box, and was told I could go on the waiting list for one, as they didn't have any at the moment. They should really have worked that out in advance, given that if I can see how many people overflowed their green box before then so can somebody from the council, or the waste company. In the meantime I am allowed to use my red box for tins and bottles, as long as it goes out on the correct day.
That still leaves me with the shrink wraps and all. I asked at the dump, when I was dropping off some bags of nettle roots and other nasties, but the dump is run by the same firm that has the collection contract for Tendring, albeit the dump is an Essex County facility, and they don't want polythene either. It's true that we could partly solve this problem by buying less wrapped stuff, but there are only about two flavours of cat food in Tesco that don't come in multi-packs (quicker for them stacking the shelves) and the Systems Administrator is partial to diet coke and diet tonic water, which likewise come in packs of six. I'm a tea drinker myself, but if the SA prefers sugar-free soft drinks then denying them on the grounds that the packaging is not fully recyclable in Tendring seems harsh.
The food bin comes in two parts, an outside bin with a lockable lid to stand at the boundary, and a little caddy to go in the kitchen. Since getting our bins we haven't actually had very much to put in them. There were some cheese rinds, and some burnt pizza crust, and some Value onions that I bought and the SA was rather slow to cook with, some of which began to go off in the bag, so went into the council bin in case it was any sort of an onion disease I'd rather not have in our compost heap. Then there was the carcass of a chicken after it had been boiled for stock (having yielded a roast, a pie that did two meals and a retro curry) and had the remaining meat picked off for the cats. There were two slices of ham that slipped through the net in the fridge, contrary to our self-image that we don't waste much food. But we don't. The ham was an aberration. If we have boiled a bit too much rice or potato the chickens eat it, along with any ends of brown loaves. I haven't tried them on left-over pasta, because there never is any. Raw peelings and cores go straight on the compost heap, and the council certainly isn't having them. The kitchen caddy will be an interesting discipline, obliging us to notice things like the ham, and the end of a packet of butter that was never used for cooking before it became rancid, but I doubt we'll fill more than one caddy a week. The contents will look rather pathetic, rattling around in the bottom of our enormous sealed top outside waste food bin.
The leaflet from Tendring District Council said, smugly, that our black bin of non-recyclable should by now be tiny, but in fact it will be bigger than before, trading off one chicken carcass and some cheese rinds against all the plastic wrappers and grape and mushroom punnets. I'm disappointed.
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
rain, rain
We watched the news footage last night of the stall holders at the Badminton Horse Trials packing up to go home before they had the chance to sell a thing, as the entire event was cancelled due to waterlogging, and I hoped that some of those London based journalists who sneer at politicians and retailers who ever dare to suggest that severe weather might, just might, have an impact on economic activity were watching. There is an awful lot of surface water around. I know that we are still in drought, but surface water isn't the same as ground water.
The Systems Administrator downloaded our rainfall statistics for the year from the weather station, and gave me the edited highlights. In the year to the end of April 2012 we had 573.5mm, give or take. I don't suppose that the electronic rain monitor is accurate to the last half millimetre, but it's probably a more reliable figure than taking readings from a plastic rain gauge. That's quite a lot, by our standards. The Chatto Garden's website gives the regional average as 500mm, and they are barely more than a mile from us. Wikipedia identifies St Osyth, four miles or so up the road, as the driest place in the country with average precipitation of 513mm. It is curious that the driest place in the country should have 13mm more rain than the regional average, but it goes to show that statistics are tricky things, and that there is a certain amount of competition for the lowest rainfall (I have heard a spokesman for Cambridge Botanic claim the honour for that city).
Anyway, 573mm is quite a lot, for us. To put it in context, the average for England and Wales for the period 1971 to 2000 was 926.9mm, so we got a whole 62% of the national average. You can amuse yourself trying to guess which places in the Mediterranean get the same annual rainfall as coastal Essex. Our long term average is slightly below that of Jerusalem, and in the past twelve months we've had a little less than an average year in Palermo.
It gets really startling when you look at when the rain fell. In April 2012 we had 95.3mm. That's 17% of our annual total in one month. By way of comparison, in April 2011 we had 1.4mm. Yes, 1.4mm. This April it rained sixty-eight times as much as it did last year. In March 2012 we had 39.5mm, 7% of the year's total, giving us nearly a quarter of the whole year's rain in those two months. In March 2011 we had 6.3mm, bringing the grand total for March and April of last year to 7.7mm, versus 134.8mm in the same two months of this year. Since midnight last night we've had another 20mm, so May 2012 is off to a flying start.
The gunnera bed is a swamp. I walked around the back garden this morning to see what it was doing, because I hadn't been out there for such a long time, and the lawns squelched beneath my feet. Until it dries out a bit I really shouldn't walk on it at all. Every step will be compacting the soil.
Addendum I heard a cuckoo calling, the first I've heard this year, though a colleague thought they'd heard one at work. This one sounded loud and close, from the direction of our wood. The swallows and house martins are back, hunting for insects above the garden, though they don't nest here.
The Systems Administrator downloaded our rainfall statistics for the year from the weather station, and gave me the edited highlights. In the year to the end of April 2012 we had 573.5mm, give or take. I don't suppose that the electronic rain monitor is accurate to the last half millimetre, but it's probably a more reliable figure than taking readings from a plastic rain gauge. That's quite a lot, by our standards. The Chatto Garden's website gives the regional average as 500mm, and they are barely more than a mile from us. Wikipedia identifies St Osyth, four miles or so up the road, as the driest place in the country with average precipitation of 513mm. It is curious that the driest place in the country should have 13mm more rain than the regional average, but it goes to show that statistics are tricky things, and that there is a certain amount of competition for the lowest rainfall (I have heard a spokesman for Cambridge Botanic claim the honour for that city).
Anyway, 573mm is quite a lot, for us. To put it in context, the average for England and Wales for the period 1971 to 2000 was 926.9mm, so we got a whole 62% of the national average. You can amuse yourself trying to guess which places in the Mediterranean get the same annual rainfall as coastal Essex. Our long term average is slightly below that of Jerusalem, and in the past twelve months we've had a little less than an average year in Palermo.
It gets really startling when you look at when the rain fell. In April 2012 we had 95.3mm. That's 17% of our annual total in one month. By way of comparison, in April 2011 we had 1.4mm. Yes, 1.4mm. This April it rained sixty-eight times as much as it did last year. In March 2012 we had 39.5mm, 7% of the year's total, giving us nearly a quarter of the whole year's rain in those two months. In March 2011 we had 6.3mm, bringing the grand total for March and April of last year to 7.7mm, versus 134.8mm in the same two months of this year. Since midnight last night we've had another 20mm, so May 2012 is off to a flying start.
The gunnera bed is a swamp. I walked around the back garden this morning to see what it was doing, because I hadn't been out there for such a long time, and the lawns squelched beneath my feet. Until it dries out a bit I really shouldn't walk on it at all. Every step will be compacting the soil.
Addendum I heard a cuckoo calling, the first I've heard this year, though a colleague thought they'd heard one at work. This one sounded loud and close, from the direction of our wood. The swallows and house martins are back, hunting for insects above the garden, though they don't nest here.
Monday, 30 April 2012
here comes the sun (for one day only)
Driving to work I noticed a lilac coming into flower in somebody's front garden, and had an odd feeling that I'd missed April. With all the rain, I've seen so little of the garden in recent weeks that it came as a shock to realise that it was already lilac time. At work it was a beautiful bright morning, and we exclaimed to each other about the novelty of seeing the sun. The manager remarked that it would probably rain at ten, when we opened, and strangely, it did, though not very hard or for very long.
I saw a bird hopping around on the grass at the back of the plant centre that looked like some sort of wagtail, but was not a pied wagtail, being larger, and having a conspicuous flash of yellow over its rump (and it was on grass. I only ever seem to see pied wagtails on tarmac and asphalt, to the point where I am almost convinced they must eat tarmac). The manager and the young gardener are both keen on birds, and they thought it was a grey wagtail. It was around throughout the day, and they first saw it (or one) last week. There were also a couple of goldfinches flitting about the plant centre, perching on the potted apple trees. I saw one disappear into a standard variegated Eleagnus, which prompted me to have a look inside the crown, and sure enough there was a little heap of moss and feathers, the beginnings of a nest. I warned the manager that we potentially had goldfinches nesting in the plant centre, and showed him where. I don't know whether goldfinches try out quite a few nest sites for size and abandon the less desirable ones early on in the building process. I think some other birds do. The plant centre is a slightly odd place to choose, being full of people throughout the day, but I suppose that acts as a deterrent to birds of prey, and there isn't a cat.
The garden was very wet, and there was some confusion about whether we were supposed to let people have garden tickets or not. The answer seemed to be that determined visitors who were wearing proper shoes or boots could talk their way into buying tickets, and the less keen or more nervous allowed themselves to be put off. The young gardener said that some of the hydrangeas were under water. A pair of friends who'd driven down from Norfolk with a van to go plant shopping reported that it was looking beautiful.
The engineer came to mend the shop doors. I felt slightly sorry for him, as the owner gave him rather a hard time about the fact they'd been playing up all winter, and he said that the last time he'd been called out it hadn't been to service the doors, but to report on what was wrong with them. The door at the front of the shop was a clear-cut case. It needed a new motor, and once that was fitted it worked perfectly. The door at the back of the shop, that has given us so much trouble refusing to open, proved a harder nut to crack. The engineer changed the lock in the door frame where you insert a key to open the doors from the outside first thing in the morning when they are set to shut from the inside. That made them quite a lot better, but he said they still weren't quite right. He changed a wiring loom, and then, after initial efforts to keep the cost down by not changing the sensor, he changed the sensor. The customers found it fascinating, and hung around in little gaggles, watching. It was still not absolutely right, in his view, and two hours after refusing the owner's offer of a cup of coffee he changed his mind. Telephone calls were made. Eventually he changed something else as well, and it seemed that two components, neither of which were individually faulty, were interfering with each other when both fitted as part of the same system. I didn't gather what these bits were, not being an automatic door engineer, but eventually he pronounced himself satisfied. I thought it was good at him to stick at it for as long as he did (though the boss will be paying for the privilege), since it is in human nature, once you have found one thing that is wrong and fixed it, to discount the possibility that something else might be wrong as well.
The coconut buns were well received. I only made them because we had half a packet of dessicated coconut left over from a curry, and it seemed a shame to put it in the cupboard and just leave it there for the next year until it went off, and I thought that making buns would be something amusing to do while I waited for the first coat of gloss to dry (that is positively the last reference to painting the hall).
The gardener from one of the nearby large and expensive houses picked out three silver trolleys of plants, and told me the address, and that we invoiced them. Her face was familiar but I couldn't place her until she said where she worked, at which point I remembered when I'd spoken to her before, and recognised the name of her boss as somebody I used to work with three City jobs ago. I thought he must have done better than I had, to have a house like that, but then it turned out that nowadays the gardener's employer was actually his ex-wife, the pair of them having divorced, so he hadn't done so well as that after all, poor thing, having lost wife and house into the bargain.
Trade was rather quiet (though the invoice for the three trolleys will help), and my young colleague and the manager were cast down. I thought it was a pity, but after the wettest April ever in the history of meteorological records (according to the six o'clock news on R4) it is a bit optimistic to expect that come one dry day everybody will immediately be ready to buy lots of plants. Work on people's gardens will be badly behind, with areas that should have been cleared and ready to receive new plants not ready, and anyone with heavy soil won't be able to get on it at all. As plants can sit in their pots, going out and shopping can be nice horticultural therapy on days when you can't do any actual gardening, but if you are doing or redoing part of your garden, planting comes very late in the process, and if you are still not even half way through preparing the site then plant buying may not have risen to the top of your agenda.
Addendum We set the trail camera on the chicken house last night, but the fox never came back, and the only pictures the Systems Administrator got were me letting the chickens into the run this morning, followed by about 500 photographs of chickens.
I saw a bird hopping around on the grass at the back of the plant centre that looked like some sort of wagtail, but was not a pied wagtail, being larger, and having a conspicuous flash of yellow over its rump (and it was on grass. I only ever seem to see pied wagtails on tarmac and asphalt, to the point where I am almost convinced they must eat tarmac). The manager and the young gardener are both keen on birds, and they thought it was a grey wagtail. It was around throughout the day, and they first saw it (or one) last week. There were also a couple of goldfinches flitting about the plant centre, perching on the potted apple trees. I saw one disappear into a standard variegated Eleagnus, which prompted me to have a look inside the crown, and sure enough there was a little heap of moss and feathers, the beginnings of a nest. I warned the manager that we potentially had goldfinches nesting in the plant centre, and showed him where. I don't know whether goldfinches try out quite a few nest sites for size and abandon the less desirable ones early on in the building process. I think some other birds do. The plant centre is a slightly odd place to choose, being full of people throughout the day, but I suppose that acts as a deterrent to birds of prey, and there isn't a cat.
The garden was very wet, and there was some confusion about whether we were supposed to let people have garden tickets or not. The answer seemed to be that determined visitors who were wearing proper shoes or boots could talk their way into buying tickets, and the less keen or more nervous allowed themselves to be put off. The young gardener said that some of the hydrangeas were under water. A pair of friends who'd driven down from Norfolk with a van to go plant shopping reported that it was looking beautiful.
The engineer came to mend the shop doors. I felt slightly sorry for him, as the owner gave him rather a hard time about the fact they'd been playing up all winter, and he said that the last time he'd been called out it hadn't been to service the doors, but to report on what was wrong with them. The door at the front of the shop was a clear-cut case. It needed a new motor, and once that was fitted it worked perfectly. The door at the back of the shop, that has given us so much trouble refusing to open, proved a harder nut to crack. The engineer changed the lock in the door frame where you insert a key to open the doors from the outside first thing in the morning when they are set to shut from the inside. That made them quite a lot better, but he said they still weren't quite right. He changed a wiring loom, and then, after initial efforts to keep the cost down by not changing the sensor, he changed the sensor. The customers found it fascinating, and hung around in little gaggles, watching. It was still not absolutely right, in his view, and two hours after refusing the owner's offer of a cup of coffee he changed his mind. Telephone calls were made. Eventually he changed something else as well, and it seemed that two components, neither of which were individually faulty, were interfering with each other when both fitted as part of the same system. I didn't gather what these bits were, not being an automatic door engineer, but eventually he pronounced himself satisfied. I thought it was good at him to stick at it for as long as he did (though the boss will be paying for the privilege), since it is in human nature, once you have found one thing that is wrong and fixed it, to discount the possibility that something else might be wrong as well.
The coconut buns were well received. I only made them because we had half a packet of dessicated coconut left over from a curry, and it seemed a shame to put it in the cupboard and just leave it there for the next year until it went off, and I thought that making buns would be something amusing to do while I waited for the first coat of gloss to dry (that is positively the last reference to painting the hall).
The gardener from one of the nearby large and expensive houses picked out three silver trolleys of plants, and told me the address, and that we invoiced them. Her face was familiar but I couldn't place her until she said where she worked, at which point I remembered when I'd spoken to her before, and recognised the name of her boss as somebody I used to work with three City jobs ago. I thought he must have done better than I had, to have a house like that, but then it turned out that nowadays the gardener's employer was actually his ex-wife, the pair of them having divorced, so he hadn't done so well as that after all, poor thing, having lost wife and house into the bargain.
Trade was rather quiet (though the invoice for the three trolleys will help), and my young colleague and the manager were cast down. I thought it was a pity, but after the wettest April ever in the history of meteorological records (according to the six o'clock news on R4) it is a bit optimistic to expect that come one dry day everybody will immediately be ready to buy lots of plants. Work on people's gardens will be badly behind, with areas that should have been cleared and ready to receive new plants not ready, and anyone with heavy soil won't be able to get on it at all. As plants can sit in their pots, going out and shopping can be nice horticultural therapy on days when you can't do any actual gardening, but if you are doing or redoing part of your garden, planting comes very late in the process, and if you are still not even half way through preparing the site then plant buying may not have risen to the top of your agenda.
Addendum We set the trail camera on the chicken house last night, but the fox never came back, and the only pictures the Systems Administrator got were me letting the chickens into the run this morning, followed by about 500 photographs of chickens.
Sunday, 29 April 2012
choral music and a fox attack
I went last night to hear a performance of Haydn's The Seasons in Dedham Church by the Stour Choral Society. I never even heard of The Seasons before, but I like Haydn. It's probably true that I don't like his music so much that I would drive twelve miles in the pouring rain to hear an amateur choir perform a work I'd never heard of, if a friend hadn't been singing in it, but she was. The Systems Administrator is pretty indifferent to Haydn, and opted for the stay at home in front of the fire alternative. Several of us went, and opinions about abandoning one's spouse on a Saturday night varied. One husband apparently didn't like it, and as The Seasons turned out to be quite a long piece, even in its cut-down form (it took an hour to get through Spring and Summer), her mobile phone came out during the ten minute interval and she shot off as soon as the applause died, asking me to give her best wishes to the performer. The other married lady in the party took a more robust view, saying that she'd told him she was going out and he'd had his dinner. I thought the SA would be quite happy reading a book, or watching some film I didn't want to see, but as the full magnitude of The Seasons struck me I consoled myself with the thought that since supper was reheated goulash that was already in the oven, the SA could always tuck in before I got back if too hungry.
Arriving at the church was slightly confusing, as I pushed open the door to be greeted by the sight of a lot of men in dinner jackets, and a woman in black who demanded to know whether I was a member of the public. I thought I probably was a member of the public, since I was not a member of the choir, or a space alien. It turned out that what she wanted to know was whether I was general audience, or a patron of the Stour Choral Society. For a minimum annual donation of £25 I could have had a reserved seat (as I discovered once I'd managed to find a seat and read the notes in my programme). Seats were reserved by dint of putting notices that said Patron at the ends of the pews, which confused most of the members of the public, including me, who could not work out whether that meant that the whole pew was off-limits, or just the place with the notice on it. This meant that my husband-not-too-happy friend and I ended up sitting nearer the back than we need have done, though that didn't really matter, since you don't need to sit right on top of a choir anyway.
The Seasons is a rousing piece of music, most of the time, though I thought during Spring that Haydn was presenting an idealised view of that season, and we could do with a bit more bounteous sun rolling from Aries and Taurus. Come gentle spring, ethereal mildness, come - yup, I'm with Franz Joseph on that one, could definitely do with some ethereal mildness and a few lovely charms unfolding in a fragrant scene. Instrumental accompaniment was provided by an organ and a percussionist, and the organist was having a ball and pulling out all the stops. Hunting horn? Yes, I can do that. Oh, you want a flute and a string section, no problem. A couple of the music society committee members turned out to be in the choir. Chatting to the treasurer in the interval I said I didn't know he was in that choir, and he said he wasn't, always, but his arm had been twisted. It turns out there is a shortage of tenor voices for amateur choirs. More women than men want to join, and most of the men are older chaps whose voices, if they were ever in the tenor range when they were younger, have since dropped down to baritone. All the research I've seen shows that belonging to a choir confers enormous emotional and mental health benefits, and I don't know why men in the 30 to 55 age bracket are so reluctant to do it, when women aren't, but there you go.
One of the sopranos was blind, and sang from a braille score, her guide dog at her feet. The dog had been to all the rehearsals, of course, and apparently behaved impeccably except during the warm-up exercises, when he joined in by howling. It was the dog's birthday a couple of weeks ago (not the owner's), and the choir sang Happy Birthday to it.
I didn't get back until half past ten, and found a very hungry Systems Administrator who had waited supper for me to be sociable. I realised that if I'd rung when I left Dedham there would have time to cook the rice while I was driving home. We settled for brown bread.
This morning I discovered that at some point during the night something, presumably a fox, had tried hard to dig into the chicken run. When the snow was lying we'd seen a set of tracks that came out of the wood, went to the pop-hole, and round to the other side of the run to that particular spot, so maybe Charlie has had an eye on it for some time. The invader had not got all the way through, prevented partly by the roots of a self-sown hawthorn that I hadn't had the energy to dig out, and had just been cutting the regrowth off the top. The roots were deep and obviously very obstinate, so that was a fortunately placed weed. The wood at the base of the run that the wire was stapled to had rotted, and the SA is going to have to go out this afternoon in the rain and staple it to a new and larger piece of wood. We've got some sections of beam left over from the old deck that should do nicely. A bit of extra wire wouldn't come amiss either.
Foxes are at their most blatant and dangerous at this time of year, when they have cubs. I have seen them around the chickens in the garden in broad daylight twice, during the summer. As a precaution this morning I put the chicken gate we use to stop them wandering up to the meadow across the damaged section of run, with a large clay jar in front of it.
Addendum After lunch I am going to make some coconut buns and then the gloss I did this morning will be ready for a second coat (overcoating time six hours). You didn't think I was going to let the whole day go by without mentioning paint, did you? I really do need to finish the painting today. The cats are starting to go mad, with the rain and the doors locked at random and furniture and food in the wrong places, and in turn are starting to drive us slightly mad as well.
Arriving at the church was slightly confusing, as I pushed open the door to be greeted by the sight of a lot of men in dinner jackets, and a woman in black who demanded to know whether I was a member of the public. I thought I probably was a member of the public, since I was not a member of the choir, or a space alien. It turned out that what she wanted to know was whether I was general audience, or a patron of the Stour Choral Society. For a minimum annual donation of £25 I could have had a reserved seat (as I discovered once I'd managed to find a seat and read the notes in my programme). Seats were reserved by dint of putting notices that said Patron at the ends of the pews, which confused most of the members of the public, including me, who could not work out whether that meant that the whole pew was off-limits, or just the place with the notice on it. This meant that my husband-not-too-happy friend and I ended up sitting nearer the back than we need have done, though that didn't really matter, since you don't need to sit right on top of a choir anyway.
The Seasons is a rousing piece of music, most of the time, though I thought during Spring that Haydn was presenting an idealised view of that season, and we could do with a bit more bounteous sun rolling from Aries and Taurus. Come gentle spring, ethereal mildness, come - yup, I'm with Franz Joseph on that one, could definitely do with some ethereal mildness and a few lovely charms unfolding in a fragrant scene. Instrumental accompaniment was provided by an organ and a percussionist, and the organist was having a ball and pulling out all the stops. Hunting horn? Yes, I can do that. Oh, you want a flute and a string section, no problem. A couple of the music society committee members turned out to be in the choir. Chatting to the treasurer in the interval I said I didn't know he was in that choir, and he said he wasn't, always, but his arm had been twisted. It turns out there is a shortage of tenor voices for amateur choirs. More women than men want to join, and most of the men are older chaps whose voices, if they were ever in the tenor range when they were younger, have since dropped down to baritone. All the research I've seen shows that belonging to a choir confers enormous emotional and mental health benefits, and I don't know why men in the 30 to 55 age bracket are so reluctant to do it, when women aren't, but there you go.
One of the sopranos was blind, and sang from a braille score, her guide dog at her feet. The dog had been to all the rehearsals, of course, and apparently behaved impeccably except during the warm-up exercises, when he joined in by howling. It was the dog's birthday a couple of weeks ago (not the owner's), and the choir sang Happy Birthday to it.
I didn't get back until half past ten, and found a very hungry Systems Administrator who had waited supper for me to be sociable. I realised that if I'd rung when I left Dedham there would have time to cook the rice while I was driving home. We settled for brown bread.
This morning I discovered that at some point during the night something, presumably a fox, had tried hard to dig into the chicken run. When the snow was lying we'd seen a set of tracks that came out of the wood, went to the pop-hole, and round to the other side of the run to that particular spot, so maybe Charlie has had an eye on it for some time. The invader had not got all the way through, prevented partly by the roots of a self-sown hawthorn that I hadn't had the energy to dig out, and had just been cutting the regrowth off the top. The roots were deep and obviously very obstinate, so that was a fortunately placed weed. The wood at the base of the run that the wire was stapled to had rotted, and the SA is going to have to go out this afternoon in the rain and staple it to a new and larger piece of wood. We've got some sections of beam left over from the old deck that should do nicely. A bit of extra wire wouldn't come amiss either.
Foxes are at their most blatant and dangerous at this time of year, when they have cubs. I have seen them around the chickens in the garden in broad daylight twice, during the summer. As a precaution this morning I put the chicken gate we use to stop them wandering up to the meadow across the damaged section of run, with a large clay jar in front of it.
Addendum After lunch I am going to make some coconut buns and then the gloss I did this morning will be ready for a second coat (overcoating time six hours). You didn't think I was going to let the whole day go by without mentioning paint, did you? I really do need to finish the painting today. The cats are starting to go mad, with the rain and the doors locked at random and furniture and food in the wrong places, and in turn are starting to drive us slightly mad as well.
Saturday, 28 April 2012
another garden visit
It only rained lightly this morning, and I took the opportunity to clean out the annexe to the chicken house where the hens are supposed to lay. Only the old lady hen is on-lay at the moment. The new little hens haven't started yet, nor have they started roosting on the perch at night. Instead they all sleep crammed into the egg box, which means that they crap in it. Hens must be instinctively hygienic creatures, and the old lady hen will not lay in the egg box if it gets mucky. I am hoping that the Speckledies will discover how to roost like grown up chickens fairly soon, since it is a nuisance to have them shitting in the egg box. They are having a dismal time of it in this weather, with no free ranging in the afternoon, and nothing much to do but shuffle between the sodden straw in their run, and the chicken house. Chickens enjoy sunbathing, by the way, when there is any sun.
Then, as it was still only raining a bit, we went to see Olivers garden on the south side of Colchester, open today and tomorrow for the National Gardens Scheme. Lots of new houses have been built on that side of town, on what was MoD land. Turning off the new roundabout down Olivers Lane, within seconds you have entered a different world. It's a single track lane with passing places, fields on either side, and a livery stables. Two young women were riding down the lane ahead of us, one bare-back on a fat brown pony with a cream coloured tail. At the end of the lane lies the Roman River, its flanks lined with poplars, bronze new leaves unfolding. Towns that stop abruptly at the countryside are not the sole province of the north.
Olivers was looking very nice. I heard the chap organising the (badly signposted) car park telling the couple ahead of us that this was the last year they'd be opening. I don't know if that means for the Yellow Book Scheme, or at all. They're open tomorrow as well, so seize the moment while you can (taking an umbrella). There is a gravel turning circle in front of a plain, handsome red brick eighteenth century house, with a flower bed in the middle, currently home to a cheerful mixture of tulips and wallflowers. There is a plant stall, where I snapped up a well-branched black aeonium for six pounds (I have some cuttings in the conservatory, but they were struck very late and it has been cold in there all winter, so they aren't looking great).
You go through a gate in the wall into the main garden. In front of the house is a large terrace, paving reassuringly uneven and furniture cheerfully mismatched. There is a box parterre (new growth slightly frosted. Our box at home is the same) filled in with a really good display of tulips and wallflowers. They were serving teas in a charming Gothick timber arcade at the end of the house, though we didn't have any tea, because we'd gone before lunch to miss the worst of the forecast rain. A huge lawn sweeps down towards the Roman River, giving excellent views out over an un-built on and unspoiled landscape. On the right hand side of the garden are big curving borders and a yew corridor with planting bays along one side. Euphorbias, tulips and crown imperial fritillaries are looking good now, and there is more to come later. On the left hand side of the garden are two big ponds, stream fed, and beyond the stretch of mown lawn the grass is left to grow long, with paths cut through it, currently studded with cowslips.
The formal garden is fenced, as various notices put it, to keep the dogs in and the rabbits out. Gates in the fence let you through into a wood, which is a sheet of bluebells. There are some azaleas and rhododendrons, and some nice exotic trees. I noticed the peeling bark of Prunus serrula. But the real point at this time of the year is the bluebells. They are such an intense shade of blue. The woodland area is larger than I remembered from my previous visit one July, when I suppose it was not doing very much. The land gathers into a little valley, lined with bluebells, with a stream running along the bottom, with the leaves of iris and what might have been giant hogweed. I'm not that well up on umbellifers, but I didn't touch it to be on the safe side. It had bristly stems and didn't look like a plant you'd want to stroke.
There is a nice summerhouse among the formal borders, based on a William Kent design at Rousham, which echoes the covered arcade at the other end of the house, and some artworks around the garden and in the wood (along with memorial tablets to Dido and Homer, presumably dogs). I'd have liked to see a couple more statues, one to act as an eye catcher when seen across the garden from the yew walk, and another as a punctuation point at the end of one of the paths cut into the long grass.
A handout told us that the soil is mostly thin sand with bands of clay, which is what we have at home. We share storms and rabbits with them as well, and a disinclination to use much in the way of chemicals. Olivers is a much larger and grander garden than ours, with a house to act as backdrop which is in a different league, but one of the things I like about visiting private gardens is that they give some ideas about what can be achieved on a domestic scale. Gardens run as businesses, with full-time staff and eager horticultural trainees, or with the resources of major charities behind them, can be interesting and beautiful to visit, and there is always lots to learn, if you keep your eyes about you, but for inspiration for gardening at home visiting good private gardens still on a (large) domestic scale has a lot going for it.
By the time we left the owner, Gay Edwards, had taken over as ticket seller, and she hailed us cheerfully, as if she recognised me from my place of work (which is possible), but she may just have beautiful manners. I congratulated her on how good the garden looked, and commiserated that the weather was so unkind. It is a very nice garden, and I was pleased to go and support it, particularly if this is their last year of opening. It is such a pity that the weekend is so wet and grim. So many gardens are opening for charity, and I can imagine the work that has gone into planning things like pots of tulips since last autumn, and all the extra bits of planting being finished somehow in the past six months, and the last minute edging and weeding, as well as the friends and relatives roped in to help with the plant stall, and cakes, and car parking. And then if it pours hardly anybody will come. There are a couple of woods near us opening too, for the bluebells, to raise money for their respective churches, and as we drove home we saw a pair of cars with sopping wet white ribbon fastened to their bonnets, so people's weddings are being rained on as well.
Then, as it was still only raining a bit, we went to see Olivers garden on the south side of Colchester, open today and tomorrow for the National Gardens Scheme. Lots of new houses have been built on that side of town, on what was MoD land. Turning off the new roundabout down Olivers Lane, within seconds you have entered a different world. It's a single track lane with passing places, fields on either side, and a livery stables. Two young women were riding down the lane ahead of us, one bare-back on a fat brown pony with a cream coloured tail. At the end of the lane lies the Roman River, its flanks lined with poplars, bronze new leaves unfolding. Towns that stop abruptly at the countryside are not the sole province of the north.
Olivers was looking very nice. I heard the chap organising the (badly signposted) car park telling the couple ahead of us that this was the last year they'd be opening. I don't know if that means for the Yellow Book Scheme, or at all. They're open tomorrow as well, so seize the moment while you can (taking an umbrella). There is a gravel turning circle in front of a plain, handsome red brick eighteenth century house, with a flower bed in the middle, currently home to a cheerful mixture of tulips and wallflowers. There is a plant stall, where I snapped up a well-branched black aeonium for six pounds (I have some cuttings in the conservatory, but they were struck very late and it has been cold in there all winter, so they aren't looking great).
You go through a gate in the wall into the main garden. In front of the house is a large terrace, paving reassuringly uneven and furniture cheerfully mismatched. There is a box parterre (new growth slightly frosted. Our box at home is the same) filled in with a really good display of tulips and wallflowers. They were serving teas in a charming Gothick timber arcade at the end of the house, though we didn't have any tea, because we'd gone before lunch to miss the worst of the forecast rain. A huge lawn sweeps down towards the Roman River, giving excellent views out over an un-built on and unspoiled landscape. On the right hand side of the garden are big curving borders and a yew corridor with planting bays along one side. Euphorbias, tulips and crown imperial fritillaries are looking good now, and there is more to come later. On the left hand side of the garden are two big ponds, stream fed, and beyond the stretch of mown lawn the grass is left to grow long, with paths cut through it, currently studded with cowslips.
The formal garden is fenced, as various notices put it, to keep the dogs in and the rabbits out. Gates in the fence let you through into a wood, which is a sheet of bluebells. There are some azaleas and rhododendrons, and some nice exotic trees. I noticed the peeling bark of Prunus serrula. But the real point at this time of the year is the bluebells. They are such an intense shade of blue. The woodland area is larger than I remembered from my previous visit one July, when I suppose it was not doing very much. The land gathers into a little valley, lined with bluebells, with a stream running along the bottom, with the leaves of iris and what might have been giant hogweed. I'm not that well up on umbellifers, but I didn't touch it to be on the safe side. It had bristly stems and didn't look like a plant you'd want to stroke.
There is a nice summerhouse among the formal borders, based on a William Kent design at Rousham, which echoes the covered arcade at the other end of the house, and some artworks around the garden and in the wood (along with memorial tablets to Dido and Homer, presumably dogs). I'd have liked to see a couple more statues, one to act as an eye catcher when seen across the garden from the yew walk, and another as a punctuation point at the end of one of the paths cut into the long grass.
A handout told us that the soil is mostly thin sand with bands of clay, which is what we have at home. We share storms and rabbits with them as well, and a disinclination to use much in the way of chemicals. Olivers is a much larger and grander garden than ours, with a house to act as backdrop which is in a different league, but one of the things I like about visiting private gardens is that they give some ideas about what can be achieved on a domestic scale. Gardens run as businesses, with full-time staff and eager horticultural trainees, or with the resources of major charities behind them, can be interesting and beautiful to visit, and there is always lots to learn, if you keep your eyes about you, but for inspiration for gardening at home visiting good private gardens still on a (large) domestic scale has a lot going for it.
By the time we left the owner, Gay Edwards, had taken over as ticket seller, and she hailed us cheerfully, as if she recognised me from my place of work (which is possible), but she may just have beautiful manners. I congratulated her on how good the garden looked, and commiserated that the weather was so unkind. It is a very nice garden, and I was pleased to go and support it, particularly if this is their last year of opening. It is such a pity that the weekend is so wet and grim. So many gardens are opening for charity, and I can imagine the work that has gone into planning things like pots of tulips since last autumn, and all the extra bits of planting being finished somehow in the past six months, and the last minute edging and weeding, as well as the friends and relatives roped in to help with the plant stall, and cakes, and car parking. And then if it pours hardly anybody will come. There are a couple of woods near us opening too, for the bluebells, to raise money for their respective churches, and as we drove home we saw a pair of cars with sopping wet white ribbon fastened to their bonnets, so people's weddings are being rained on as well.
Friday, 27 April 2012
more paint (sorry)
Painting the hall is starting to eat into valuable gardening time, as it didn't rain today, and I could have been outside. The showers are extremely localised. People who went into Colchester tell me it poured, but out here in the Tendring peninsular it didn't. Still, now I've started painting I've got to finish, what with the top half of the dresser, all the things that normally live on the dresser, and the cats' food dishes and baskets being scattered around the study and kitchen and turning the downstairs into an obstacle course.
Gloss paint takes ages. I quite enjoy slooshing on emulsion, but fiddling around doing weentsy skirting boards with a half inch brush is not great fun. You don't realise how grey and tired white paint has got over the years, until you put fresh white paint next to it or over it, and I have realised I am not going to get away with one coat of gloss. Well, obviously I could. I could just not paint the hall at all, and it wouldn't make any difference to anything critical. It isn't like not getting a leak in the roof fixed and then watching as the Stramit board rapidly disintegrates and the entire roof falls in. The house is not going to collapse because I have grey skirting boards. But from an aesthetic point of view, one layer of white paint over the grey makes it worse, drawing attention to the greyness without covering it.
At least paint has got easier to handle over the years. Modern gloss doesn't drip nearly as much as when I first started painting skirting boards, and it is touch dry in an hour. Touch dry is important when you have cats, whose aim in life sometimes seems to be to seek out wet paint, and rub their fur against it. We opened the door onto the veranda so that the cats could get in and out of the house without going through the hall, but of course they want to get into the areas I want to keep them out of, and I had to stand a door stop in front of the cat flap.
I'm an idle cowboy decorator. If I were making a proper job of it I'd take down the rug in the hall and paint the wall underneath it, instead of which I have tied the ends together with string knotted into the fringe at each end, tucked the bottom third of the rug into the pouch made by the two ends and sellotaped pages of The Times over the top of it. This lets me paint far enough behind it that once it's let down again the unpainted patch doesn't show. That 's how I did it last time, because I couldn't face taking it down from the wooden batten it's tacked to and then tacking it up again afterwards. This time round I decided there was no point in painting the entire area that's hidden by the dresser either, as long as I went far enough in behind it for the edge of the unpainted area to be hidden from all viewing angles. If we were selling, the buyer would have a disagreeable discovery, once the furniture was gone, but we aren't planning to move in the foreseeable future, so that's fine.
Tomorrow will be yet more painting, and really I am running out of anything to say on the subject, but we might go garden visiting after lunch, as the Yellow Book season is hotting up, and Olivers on the south side of Colchester is open from mid-day until 6.00pm. That's a nice garden, which I visited back in 2006 during a very hot July and should like to see again in a more favourable season. At this time of year their bluebells should be out. If we make it then I won't have to compose a fourth blog post on the subject of paint. The Systems Administrator has just exclaimed that the forecast for the weekend is a shocker, so we'll see. The current plan is to be there when the doors open, if it's not already raining torrentially, as it's forecast to be worse later.
Gloss paint takes ages. I quite enjoy slooshing on emulsion, but fiddling around doing weentsy skirting boards with a half inch brush is not great fun. You don't realise how grey and tired white paint has got over the years, until you put fresh white paint next to it or over it, and I have realised I am not going to get away with one coat of gloss. Well, obviously I could. I could just not paint the hall at all, and it wouldn't make any difference to anything critical. It isn't like not getting a leak in the roof fixed and then watching as the Stramit board rapidly disintegrates and the entire roof falls in. The house is not going to collapse because I have grey skirting boards. But from an aesthetic point of view, one layer of white paint over the grey makes it worse, drawing attention to the greyness without covering it.
At least paint has got easier to handle over the years. Modern gloss doesn't drip nearly as much as when I first started painting skirting boards, and it is touch dry in an hour. Touch dry is important when you have cats, whose aim in life sometimes seems to be to seek out wet paint, and rub their fur against it. We opened the door onto the veranda so that the cats could get in and out of the house without going through the hall, but of course they want to get into the areas I want to keep them out of, and I had to stand a door stop in front of the cat flap.
I'm an idle cowboy decorator. If I were making a proper job of it I'd take down the rug in the hall and paint the wall underneath it, instead of which I have tied the ends together with string knotted into the fringe at each end, tucked the bottom third of the rug into the pouch made by the two ends and sellotaped pages of The Times over the top of it. This lets me paint far enough behind it that once it's let down again the unpainted patch doesn't show. That 's how I did it last time, because I couldn't face taking it down from the wooden batten it's tacked to and then tacking it up again afterwards. This time round I decided there was no point in painting the entire area that's hidden by the dresser either, as long as I went far enough in behind it for the edge of the unpainted area to be hidden from all viewing angles. If we were selling, the buyer would have a disagreeable discovery, once the furniture was gone, but we aren't planning to move in the foreseeable future, so that's fine.
Tomorrow will be yet more painting, and really I am running out of anything to say on the subject, but we might go garden visiting after lunch, as the Yellow Book season is hotting up, and Olivers on the south side of Colchester is open from mid-day until 6.00pm. That's a nice garden, which I visited back in 2006 during a very hot July and should like to see again in a more favourable season. At this time of year their bluebells should be out. If we make it then I won't have to compose a fourth blog post on the subject of paint. The Systems Administrator has just exclaimed that the forecast for the weekend is a shocker, so we'll see. The current plan is to be there when the doors open, if it's not already raining torrentially, as it's forecast to be worse later.
Thursday, 26 April 2012
still painting the hall
Today I got a second coat of emulsion on the outer hall. I think the estate agent's details may have optimistically described this area as an office, but you would be hard pressed to fit a desk in there. It is a lobby about 2 metres square leading to what is effectively the back door, except that it is at the front of the house quite close to the front door. A panel next to the back door houses the cat flap. A glass panel and door separate the outer hall from the inner hall, which is actually quite handy for us, as by shutting the inner door we can deny cats inside the house access to the cat flap if we need to keep them in for some reason, and stop cats intent on bringing their dead rabbits into the house from getting further than the outer hall. I'm sure the people who built the house didn't use it for that. I don't think they even had a cat, and I have no idea what the outer hall was originally for. I suppose that by shutting the glass door you had a slightly sound-proof space in which to make phone calls. When we moved in it had a telephone point, but no coat pegs.
The inner hall consists of another lobby, slightly larger, and a too-narrow corridor linking the original end of the house with the 1970s extension that now contains the kitchen and the study. The house was extended twice, and like a computer system that has had too many features added over the years, the end result is something that wouldn't look like that if you were starting again from scratch. The inner hall is quite useful, in that there is room in it for the cat baskets and food dishes, plus a dresser where I can put my slightly random collection of pottery. Altogether it is a lot of hall, since the downstairs sitting room has a distinctly hall-like character, and if you could aggregate their floor areas into a sensible shape they'd add up to a decent sized room. They don't build houses like that nowadays.
I also got a first coat of emulsion on the inner hall, and had to go back to B&Q as it had become apparent that one tin wasn't going to be enough. I was fortunate in that yesterday they had two tins of Natural Teal in stock, and today they still had the one remaining tin that I rejected yesterday because it was dented. It rained heavily in the morning, so I didn't mind that I was now committed to at least another day and a half decorating. In the afternoon it stopped raining and the sun came out and I did mind, slightly, though the Systems Administrator who went out to try and get on with the new deck reported that the gunnera bed had become a quagmire.
I looked up the paint company yesterday, partly because I wanted to check the name of the paint I was thinking about for the kitchen, and I was mildly curious about them. The brand name is 1829, and I'd assumed when I bought it that it was just another line from ICI or one of the chemical giants, but the name on the tin was Craig and Rose, and they had a website. There I discovered that I was dealing with an independent UK company. 1829 is the year they were founded, they have been independent throughout their history, with seven generations of the family involved in the business, and their red oxide paint was used for a hundred years on the Forth bridge (it isn't now. I saw a TV report about how that has been treated with some modern low maintenance coating, and the everlasting painting project is at an end). They have a couple of other ranges besides the 1829 one, which comes in colours to fit historic themes and buildings. It is available by mail order, or from B&Q, not a shopping destination calculated to appeal to the aspirational chattering classes.
This prompted me to look up the Farrow and Ball website. I have never bought or used Farrow and Ball paint, which seems to me quite fabulously expensive. A colleague who with his garden designer partner was engaged in some property renovation was slightly horrified by her loyalty to Farrow and Ball, and expressed doubts that a pot of (basically) light brown paint could cost quite so much. I know they have cult status among the inhabitants of Islington's muesli belt, and I have read adulatory articles about their paints in the Sunday supplements, whereas I never heard of Craig and Rose until I read their name on the side of a paint tin from B&Q. Farrow and Ball's website doesn't have a page on the history of the company, or any Victorian photographs of Mr Farrow and Mr Ball, so I looked them up on Wikipedia. (Where would we be without Wiki? Granted, you must not cite it as a source in your student essays, but isn't it great for gratifying idle curiosity about things that are not a matter of life and death?). According to Wikipedia, Farrow and Ball was started in the 1930s, lay dormant for about twenty years, and in its current form has a manufacturing history dating back to the 1980s. It is owned by venture capitalists.
It made me realise what a potent thing marketing is. Craig and Rose is the real deal, a Scottish family owned firm with over 180 years of history, making nice chalky emulsion in a range of historic colours. With a back story like that they should be the darling of every homes and interiors journalist in the country, instead of which almost nobody has heard of them.
The inner hall consists of another lobby, slightly larger, and a too-narrow corridor linking the original end of the house with the 1970s extension that now contains the kitchen and the study. The house was extended twice, and like a computer system that has had too many features added over the years, the end result is something that wouldn't look like that if you were starting again from scratch. The inner hall is quite useful, in that there is room in it for the cat baskets and food dishes, plus a dresser where I can put my slightly random collection of pottery. Altogether it is a lot of hall, since the downstairs sitting room has a distinctly hall-like character, and if you could aggregate their floor areas into a sensible shape they'd add up to a decent sized room. They don't build houses like that nowadays.
I also got a first coat of emulsion on the inner hall, and had to go back to B&Q as it had become apparent that one tin wasn't going to be enough. I was fortunate in that yesterday they had two tins of Natural Teal in stock, and today they still had the one remaining tin that I rejected yesterday because it was dented. It rained heavily in the morning, so I didn't mind that I was now committed to at least another day and a half decorating. In the afternoon it stopped raining and the sun came out and I did mind, slightly, though the Systems Administrator who went out to try and get on with the new deck reported that the gunnera bed had become a quagmire.
I looked up the paint company yesterday, partly because I wanted to check the name of the paint I was thinking about for the kitchen, and I was mildly curious about them. The brand name is 1829, and I'd assumed when I bought it that it was just another line from ICI or one of the chemical giants, but the name on the tin was Craig and Rose, and they had a website. There I discovered that I was dealing with an independent UK company. 1829 is the year they were founded, they have been independent throughout their history, with seven generations of the family involved in the business, and their red oxide paint was used for a hundred years on the Forth bridge (it isn't now. I saw a TV report about how that has been treated with some modern low maintenance coating, and the everlasting painting project is at an end). They have a couple of other ranges besides the 1829 one, which comes in colours to fit historic themes and buildings. It is available by mail order, or from B&Q, not a shopping destination calculated to appeal to the aspirational chattering classes.
This prompted me to look up the Farrow and Ball website. I have never bought or used Farrow and Ball paint, which seems to me quite fabulously expensive. A colleague who with his garden designer partner was engaged in some property renovation was slightly horrified by her loyalty to Farrow and Ball, and expressed doubts that a pot of (basically) light brown paint could cost quite so much. I know they have cult status among the inhabitants of Islington's muesli belt, and I have read adulatory articles about their paints in the Sunday supplements, whereas I never heard of Craig and Rose until I read their name on the side of a paint tin from B&Q. Farrow and Ball's website doesn't have a page on the history of the company, or any Victorian photographs of Mr Farrow and Mr Ball, so I looked them up on Wikipedia. (Where would we be without Wiki? Granted, you must not cite it as a source in your student essays, but isn't it great for gratifying idle curiosity about things that are not a matter of life and death?). According to Wikipedia, Farrow and Ball was started in the 1930s, lay dormant for about twenty years, and in its current form has a manufacturing history dating back to the 1980s. It is owned by venture capitalists.
It made me realise what a potent thing marketing is. Craig and Rose is the real deal, a Scottish family owned firm with over 180 years of history, making nice chalky emulsion in a range of historic colours. With a back story like that they should be the darling of every homes and interiors journalist in the country, instead of which almost nobody has heard of them.
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
painting the hall
There was no possibility of taking a walk today. The clouds so sombre and the rain so penetrating didn't even wait until after dinner*, but ensconced themselves before breakfast, and looked set for the day. I decided that it was time to paint the hall. This has been on my list of things to do for a very long time. I have even got as far as buying a glicee limited edition print from the Tate of an Edward Bawden lithograph of Liverpool Street Station (not full size. The original is in the Fry gallery in Saffron Walden and it is enormous) and having it framed, with the intention of hanging it in the hall, instead of which it has been sitting propped against the bedroom wall for the past year. In the depths of winter I couldn't face spending all that time in the freezing hall, and once the weather improved I was busy in the garden, but a wet and windy week in what passes for spring in England seemed the ideal time.
I have known people who buy little test pots of paint, and try them out, and spend ages agonising about the result. I had a colleague who didn't like the colour of his kitchen when it was painted and did the whole thing again. He may even have done it again twice, to get it exactly right. I'm not that patient myself. Choose a colour that looks hopeful, slap it on and live with the results is my method. We did once spend a few years living with a kitchen that was a rather nasty acid shade of yellow (it faced north. The yellow was supposed to brighten it up, but it didn't) but normally it works fine. After all, there is no right answer when it comes to paint. I would rather it made me feel cheerful when I looked at it, rather than depressed or physically ill, but that still leaves a huge range of colours that would do perfectly well.
One wall of the inner part of the hall is covered with a green and red ethnic style rug (from Habitat, not an antique tribal one) which is there partly because I like rugs, but partly to cover a particularly dodgy bit of plasterwork. It was quite tricky finding the rug, because it had to be large enough to hide the problem area, but not too large or it wouldn't fit on the wall. A paint colour to pick out one of the colours in the rug seemed a good starting point. Last time round I went for a bluish green that I think was described as Morris Blue, and staying somewhere in the blue-greens seemed the best bet, when I spent some time staring at paint charts about six months ago, the last time I was thinking about painting the hall. After spending ten minutes looking at what was on offer in B&Q I decided that Natural Teal chalky emulsion would be just the job.
The wall where the reproduction lithograph is going to go used to have a set of framed black and white photos of wooden boats by a local photographer called Den Phillips. They were cut out of her East Coast Calendar, which we have bought every year for more years than I care to remember. She is a good photographer, and it seems a shame not to use some of the pictures from the old calendars, but after umpteen years we were getting bored of them, and they had an annoying tendency to blow off the wall when the door was propped open in the summer, smashing the frame plus anything fragile that happened to be on the hall table at a time. I had the frame of the new print fitted with the side fastenings you can screw to the wall. I think the framer called them mirror brackets. It will be a challenge for the Systems Administrator to fasten the thing to the wall so that it's level, when I've finished painting.
The photographs were hung on substantial nails screwed into rawl plugs, the reason being that the hall wall was originally an exterior wall and there is solid brick 2mm under the plaster, so you can't bang in picture hooks in the normal way. The screws undid easily with a little pair of mole grips, but it took me a little while to work out how to extract the first rawl plug (with a small skewer, carefully). I filled the holes in with polyfilla, and while I was at it began to repair a gap in the door frame to the laundry that's been there since we had to remove the door frame to get the washing machine out when it finally broke down beyond all hope of repair. Actually, we wasted a lot of money getting it repaired, and should have scrapped it about two years before we finally did.
Friends of ours took some time off over Easter to paint the upstairs of their new extension. They are doing it properly, sanding down between coats. I don't do that. I didn't even sand off the polyfilla, just smoothed it down with the knife and gave it a rub with a wet cloth when it had finished setting. The plasterwork in the hall is already pretty bad, pitted and scarred from fifty years' worth of hooks being hung and removed, and accidental contact with blunt objects. If I got into the sanding lark I'd be at it until midsummer. I have a theory that paint hides imperfections in the plaster, if it is strongly coloured enough. On that basis we have a turmeric coloured downstairs loo, and a deep red study. I also believe in taking the strongly coloured paint all over the ceiling. The very nice woman who used to do our interior decorating for a while, until she moved away from the area, believed as an article of faith or convention that ceilings were white, and was rather taken aback when she discovered that I didn't want a study with red walls and a white ceiling, but one that was red all over (the walls are mostly covered with bookshelves anyway).
The first few brushfuls of Natural Teal looked a worrying shade of bright turquoise, which is one of my least favourite colours, but I told myself that I'd spent £21.98 on this, and that paint darkens as it dries. It is darkening, to a good strong greenish blue, just as I'd hoped. It is several shades darker than the old paint. I thought that would be more exciting, and it might show the dirt less. It will need two coats, and then there's the gloss to do, but today I got the first coat of emulsion on the outer hall, so I've made an appreciable dent on the task. If it keeps raining into May as the Met Office is saying it could then I might even move on to the downstairs loo and the kitchen. The kitchen is currently a slightly dubious shade of apricot tinged yellow (an attempt to brighten up an east facing room) but I have my eye on something the paint company calls Etruscan Red. It is a soft reddish brown, just the thing to create a warming effect in a room that misses the sun for most of the day, and not clash with the Aga, or show the fly droppings on the ceiling too badly. Flyshit Brown. Now there's a name for paint.
*There is no cash prize, but award yourself a literary gold star if you get the reference.
I have known people who buy little test pots of paint, and try them out, and spend ages agonising about the result. I had a colleague who didn't like the colour of his kitchen when it was painted and did the whole thing again. He may even have done it again twice, to get it exactly right. I'm not that patient myself. Choose a colour that looks hopeful, slap it on and live with the results is my method. We did once spend a few years living with a kitchen that was a rather nasty acid shade of yellow (it faced north. The yellow was supposed to brighten it up, but it didn't) but normally it works fine. After all, there is no right answer when it comes to paint. I would rather it made me feel cheerful when I looked at it, rather than depressed or physically ill, but that still leaves a huge range of colours that would do perfectly well.
One wall of the inner part of the hall is covered with a green and red ethnic style rug (from Habitat, not an antique tribal one) which is there partly because I like rugs, but partly to cover a particularly dodgy bit of plasterwork. It was quite tricky finding the rug, because it had to be large enough to hide the problem area, but not too large or it wouldn't fit on the wall. A paint colour to pick out one of the colours in the rug seemed a good starting point. Last time round I went for a bluish green that I think was described as Morris Blue, and staying somewhere in the blue-greens seemed the best bet, when I spent some time staring at paint charts about six months ago, the last time I was thinking about painting the hall. After spending ten minutes looking at what was on offer in B&Q I decided that Natural Teal chalky emulsion would be just the job.
The wall where the reproduction lithograph is going to go used to have a set of framed black and white photos of wooden boats by a local photographer called Den Phillips. They were cut out of her East Coast Calendar, which we have bought every year for more years than I care to remember. She is a good photographer, and it seems a shame not to use some of the pictures from the old calendars, but after umpteen years we were getting bored of them, and they had an annoying tendency to blow off the wall when the door was propped open in the summer, smashing the frame plus anything fragile that happened to be on the hall table at a time. I had the frame of the new print fitted with the side fastenings you can screw to the wall. I think the framer called them mirror brackets. It will be a challenge for the Systems Administrator to fasten the thing to the wall so that it's level, when I've finished painting.
The photographs were hung on substantial nails screwed into rawl plugs, the reason being that the hall wall was originally an exterior wall and there is solid brick 2mm under the plaster, so you can't bang in picture hooks in the normal way. The screws undid easily with a little pair of mole grips, but it took me a little while to work out how to extract the first rawl plug (with a small skewer, carefully). I filled the holes in with polyfilla, and while I was at it began to repair a gap in the door frame to the laundry that's been there since we had to remove the door frame to get the washing machine out when it finally broke down beyond all hope of repair. Actually, we wasted a lot of money getting it repaired, and should have scrapped it about two years before we finally did.
Friends of ours took some time off over Easter to paint the upstairs of their new extension. They are doing it properly, sanding down between coats. I don't do that. I didn't even sand off the polyfilla, just smoothed it down with the knife and gave it a rub with a wet cloth when it had finished setting. The plasterwork in the hall is already pretty bad, pitted and scarred from fifty years' worth of hooks being hung and removed, and accidental contact with blunt objects. If I got into the sanding lark I'd be at it until midsummer. I have a theory that paint hides imperfections in the plaster, if it is strongly coloured enough. On that basis we have a turmeric coloured downstairs loo, and a deep red study. I also believe in taking the strongly coloured paint all over the ceiling. The very nice woman who used to do our interior decorating for a while, until she moved away from the area, believed as an article of faith or convention that ceilings were white, and was rather taken aback when she discovered that I didn't want a study with red walls and a white ceiling, but one that was red all over (the walls are mostly covered with bookshelves anyway).
The first few brushfuls of Natural Teal looked a worrying shade of bright turquoise, which is one of my least favourite colours, but I told myself that I'd spent £21.98 on this, and that paint darkens as it dries. It is darkening, to a good strong greenish blue, just as I'd hoped. It is several shades darker than the old paint. I thought that would be more exciting, and it might show the dirt less. It will need two coats, and then there's the gloss to do, but today I got the first coat of emulsion on the outer hall, so I've made an appreciable dent on the task. If it keeps raining into May as the Met Office is saying it could then I might even move on to the downstairs loo and the kitchen. The kitchen is currently a slightly dubious shade of apricot tinged yellow (an attempt to brighten up an east facing room) but I have my eye on something the paint company calls Etruscan Red. It is a soft reddish brown, just the thing to create a warming effect in a room that misses the sun for most of the day, and not clash with the Aga, or show the fly droppings on the ceiling too badly. Flyshit Brown. Now there's a name for paint.
*There is no cash prize, but award yourself a literary gold star if you get the reference.
Tuesday, 24 April 2012
turning Japanese
After my three day stint of pot lifting leading seamlessly into the committee meeting, I'd expected to luxuriate in a lie-in this morning, but woke up anyway at seven, my body announcing that while rather stiff it didn't want to sleep any more, thank you very much. I could hear the rain drumming on the roof, and didn't even bother to put on my gardening clothes when I got dressed. Each day when I get up I look at the view from the bathroom window down the back garden. It is one of the key views of the garden, though nobody ever sees it except for us, and it is amazing how in the past few days the leaves have opened in a great rush. Before I could sit down and enjoy my muesli I had to go across the back lawn and check that all was well with a couple of potted acers and some of the Hamamelis which did not seem to be so leafy as the others, but on close inspection they were fine. The new little leaves look fat and healthy, and haven't been caught by a late frost, nor have I been gulled by the frequent but light rain into letting the plants get dry at the root. It must be that those varieties are naturally a little later to leaf up than some of the others.
Then the rain stopped, so I moved some pots of tulips that were almost open from their spot by the greenhouse where they have been growing all winter to their destined display area in Italian garden in the turning circle. I got some green stains on my non-gardening jeans doing this. After that I wasn't quite sure what to do. The forecast was for heavy rain, and it was cold, and I had my monthly Pilates lesson booked for the early afternoon. On the other hand, it was not actually raining at that moment, and as we have seen, moments of not raining now can stretch to a whole morning.
I decided to have the day off. I was tired after the weekend, the thermometer read nine degrees, and the lawn had squelched with every step when I went to inspect the pots on the far deck. I could have crawled around weeding the gravel in the top part of the garden, and planted out the thrift I bought at Beth Chatto the other day, and the horned poppies, and some sempervivums whose pots disintegrated last winter and which I am going to recycle as ground cover. Instead I decided to light the fire in the study and settle down with a book. Our Ginger was very pleased with the fire, and spent the morning simpering on the hearth rug, and the fat indignant tabby came to see me and bounced on the arm of my chair and purred a lot, a rare display of affection that was only partly spoilt by the moment when she dipped her tail in my tea.
I have been reading about Japanese gardens, for no particular reason except that I had the books out to look at ideas for the path to the new deck, and leafing through them for relevant photos reminded me that I liked them and hadn't looked at them for a while. The book about Japanese gardens in North America is written as a design crib for western garden makers, and I can't remember why or when I bought it, but is a pleasant enough easy read with good pictures. Japanese Garden Design by Marc P. Keane is a more serious study of the origins, conventions and meanings of Japanese gardens in Japan. He is a trained landscape architect, from America, but lived and worked in Japan for years, researching and designing gardens. I think he knows his stuff, and his book featured on Writtle reading lists. My favourite tutor at Writtle wrote her doctoral thesis on Japanese gardens in the UK, and at one time it looked as though she had landed a book deal, but nothing seemed to emerge from that, which is a pity. I'd have bought a copy. The Gardens of Japan by Professor Teiji Ito has been on my Amazon wishlist since November 2004, which tells you that my enthusiasm for Japanese gardens has probably diminished slightly in the last eight years.
I am cautious about dotting faux Japanese lanterns about the place. I'd rather the objects in my garden had some cultural resonance for me. The museum copy of the head of a muse is fine. That relates to the European renaissance, the UK tradition of the grand tour and, if you like, the fact that Colchester was a Roman city, and sits comfortably, if rather vaguely, in my cultural hinterland. I mean, I did the hypocaust in primary school, and watched I, Claudius in the 1970s, so I grew up with the Romans. The pieces of driftwood are pretty sound. They refer to the picturesque tradition of the stumpery, and Derek Jarman's garden (haven't been there, but read the book, lots of times), and my own beach combing expeditions, and hours spent on the water. I know where I am with bits of driftwood.
The rest of the collection is equally grounded, apart from the museum copy of the buddha. Given that I am not a buddhist, and all I know about buddhism was derived from reading one book (by a retired catholic nun) and going along to a few meetings of the Friends of the Western Buddhist order, and a superb exhibition at the RA some years ago that left me feeling that whatever it was that those smiling buddha figures knew, I wanted to know it, according to my own aesthetic principles I should not have a statue of the buddha in the garden. And it is a western design cliche. But it is a good copy of an extremely nice statue, and I like it, and you do not have to be a buddhist to embrace the principle of mindfulness, which I have found a useful concept. Trying to pay attention to the moment makes the moment more interesting, and from a practical point of view curbs my natural tendency to clumsiness, since half the time when I squash, drop, break or tread on things I realise it was because I was thinking about something else at the time and not really noticing what I was doing. It is not even a solely buddhist or eastern concept, given that Montaigne talks about it, even if he (or rather his translators) don't call it that. So the buddha stays, because I like it. But I would not know what I was saying with a Japanese lantern.
The standard college essay answer about What Japanese Gardens Can Teach Us was that they taught us about the arrangement of space. They do. Also about attention to detail, in terms of all that raked gravel, and carefully arranged fallen leaves. Also restraint, in terms of the limited plant palette. Also about the tension between the growing and dynamic, and the static. Japanese gardens involve an amazing amount of pruning, to keep all those acers and pines and azaleas exactly the right shape, and as far as possible the same size for ever. It is explained in Niwaki: Pruning, training and shaping trees the Japanese way by Jake Hobson, another westerner captivated by Japanese gardening. Compare and contrast with the western assumption that it is in the nature of gardens to change, as trees grow and the amount of light in the garden decreases. If you want nice design details to inspire your own garden, I'd give the knots tied round pieces of bamboo a miss, as well as the lanterns (too self-consciously Look at me, I'm doing a Japanese garden) but some of the stone paths provide wonderful leaping off points for inventing your own thing. So do the clipped evergreens, and indeed our garden contains increasing quantities of mound-pruned box as ground cover, the idea nicked from the garden of Hugh Johnson, who in turn acknowledges his oriental source.
A day spent by a fire, with some cats, some books, and some healthy exercise in the middle, is a day well spent. I didn't make any physical progress on the garden, but I made some mental progress thinking about it, and gardens in general. It would be nice to be able to look at a Japanese garden from the standpoint of understanding the culture and history, and I don't, and I'm never going to, but even approaching them as an outsider, they provide much food for thought.
Then the rain stopped, so I moved some pots of tulips that were almost open from their spot by the greenhouse where they have been growing all winter to their destined display area in Italian garden in the turning circle. I got some green stains on my non-gardening jeans doing this. After that I wasn't quite sure what to do. The forecast was for heavy rain, and it was cold, and I had my monthly Pilates lesson booked for the early afternoon. On the other hand, it was not actually raining at that moment, and as we have seen, moments of not raining now can stretch to a whole morning.
I decided to have the day off. I was tired after the weekend, the thermometer read nine degrees, and the lawn had squelched with every step when I went to inspect the pots on the far deck. I could have crawled around weeding the gravel in the top part of the garden, and planted out the thrift I bought at Beth Chatto the other day, and the horned poppies, and some sempervivums whose pots disintegrated last winter and which I am going to recycle as ground cover. Instead I decided to light the fire in the study and settle down with a book. Our Ginger was very pleased with the fire, and spent the morning simpering on the hearth rug, and the fat indignant tabby came to see me and bounced on the arm of my chair and purred a lot, a rare display of affection that was only partly spoilt by the moment when she dipped her tail in my tea.
I have been reading about Japanese gardens, for no particular reason except that I had the books out to look at ideas for the path to the new deck, and leafing through them for relevant photos reminded me that I liked them and hadn't looked at them for a while. The book about Japanese gardens in North America is written as a design crib for western garden makers, and I can't remember why or when I bought it, but is a pleasant enough easy read with good pictures. Japanese Garden Design by Marc P. Keane is a more serious study of the origins, conventions and meanings of Japanese gardens in Japan. He is a trained landscape architect, from America, but lived and worked in Japan for years, researching and designing gardens. I think he knows his stuff, and his book featured on Writtle reading lists. My favourite tutor at Writtle wrote her doctoral thesis on Japanese gardens in the UK, and at one time it looked as though she had landed a book deal, but nothing seemed to emerge from that, which is a pity. I'd have bought a copy. The Gardens of Japan by Professor Teiji Ito has been on my Amazon wishlist since November 2004, which tells you that my enthusiasm for Japanese gardens has probably diminished slightly in the last eight years.
I am cautious about dotting faux Japanese lanterns about the place. I'd rather the objects in my garden had some cultural resonance for me. The museum copy of the head of a muse is fine. That relates to the European renaissance, the UK tradition of the grand tour and, if you like, the fact that Colchester was a Roman city, and sits comfortably, if rather vaguely, in my cultural hinterland. I mean, I did the hypocaust in primary school, and watched I, Claudius in the 1970s, so I grew up with the Romans. The pieces of driftwood are pretty sound. They refer to the picturesque tradition of the stumpery, and Derek Jarman's garden (haven't been there, but read the book, lots of times), and my own beach combing expeditions, and hours spent on the water. I know where I am with bits of driftwood.
The rest of the collection is equally grounded, apart from the museum copy of the buddha. Given that I am not a buddhist, and all I know about buddhism was derived from reading one book (by a retired catholic nun) and going along to a few meetings of the Friends of the Western Buddhist order, and a superb exhibition at the RA some years ago that left me feeling that whatever it was that those smiling buddha figures knew, I wanted to know it, according to my own aesthetic principles I should not have a statue of the buddha in the garden. And it is a western design cliche. But it is a good copy of an extremely nice statue, and I like it, and you do not have to be a buddhist to embrace the principle of mindfulness, which I have found a useful concept. Trying to pay attention to the moment makes the moment more interesting, and from a practical point of view curbs my natural tendency to clumsiness, since half the time when I squash, drop, break or tread on things I realise it was because I was thinking about something else at the time and not really noticing what I was doing. It is not even a solely buddhist or eastern concept, given that Montaigne talks about it, even if he (or rather his translators) don't call it that. So the buddha stays, because I like it. But I would not know what I was saying with a Japanese lantern.
The standard college essay answer about What Japanese Gardens Can Teach Us was that they taught us about the arrangement of space. They do. Also about attention to detail, in terms of all that raked gravel, and carefully arranged fallen leaves. Also restraint, in terms of the limited plant palette. Also about the tension between the growing and dynamic, and the static. Japanese gardens involve an amazing amount of pruning, to keep all those acers and pines and azaleas exactly the right shape, and as far as possible the same size for ever. It is explained in Niwaki: Pruning, training and shaping trees the Japanese way by Jake Hobson, another westerner captivated by Japanese gardening. Compare and contrast with the western assumption that it is in the nature of gardens to change, as trees grow and the amount of light in the garden decreases. If you want nice design details to inspire your own garden, I'd give the knots tied round pieces of bamboo a miss, as well as the lanterns (too self-consciously Look at me, I'm doing a Japanese garden) but some of the stone paths provide wonderful leaping off points for inventing your own thing. So do the clipped evergreens, and indeed our garden contains increasing quantities of mound-pruned box as ground cover, the idea nicked from the garden of Hugh Johnson, who in turn acknowledges his oriental source.
A day spent by a fire, with some cats, some books, and some healthy exercise in the middle, is a day well spent. I didn't make any physical progress on the garden, but I made some mental progress thinking about it, and gardens in general. It would be nice to be able to look at a Japanese garden from the standpoint of understanding the culture and history, and I don't, and I'm never going to, but even approaching them as an outsider, they provide much food for thought.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)