a garden visit

I went this afternoon to visit a local garden that was open under the Yellow Book scheme, after a break of a year or two.  I'd arranged ages ago to meet a gardening friend there, since it is more or less mid-way between our two houses, and sounded as though it would be worth half an hour's drive to see.  I e-mailed her yesterday to see if she still wanted to go, trying hard to get the tone of the message right, so as to convey that I was enthusiastic about going, if she wanted to, but wouldn't be offended if she didn't.  I would have been genuinely happy either way, since on the one hand it would be nice to see her and visit a garden I'd never visited before, but on the other hand I had loads to get on with at home.  I know the feeling, when a week has already ended up very, very busy, if yet another request is made on your time.  You can be perfectly fond of your latest caller, and like the prospect of whatever is being proposed this time, while having a helpless feeling that it would be so much better if it could only happen later and not now, this week.

My gardening friend has a tough job, and a large garden that she is trying to develop on a shoestring budget, and was busy, but sounded relieved to have the excuse of a couple of hours off from it all, and we trundled around happily looking at trees and refreshed ourselves with mugs of tea and carrot cake.  The garden, Horkesley Hall, is not open again for the NGS this year, but is nice enough that it's worth making a note of the name, and keeping an eye out for openings next year.  Indeed, now I've looked at their page on the National Gardens Scheme website I see that they are open by appointment.  Whether or not you feel comfortable getting garden owners to open up especially for you is probably an individual taste.  I've been to a few by arrangement, and enjoyed myself every time, but if you dislike feeling conspicuous and would rather be allowed to wander at will than get the guided tour then you might prefer to go on a general open day.

Horkesley Hall garden wraps around an impressive brick built house which I took to be Georgian.  It has an enormous portico, and sash windows with very slender glazing bars.  The house is not open, but teas were served in a downstairs room which you entered via the bottom half of one of the sash windows, while the owner squeaked in case anyone banged their head on the frame.  A television somewhere in the background was set to a racing channel, and I don't think the owners bought their own furniture.

I was a little early arriving at the garden, and as I sat by the ticket desk, which was where we'd agreed to meet on the grounds that we didn't know the layout but there had to be one, I overheard the owner telling another visitor how after a previous open day, someone had written a letter of complaint, not even to her but to the NGS organisers, because there was a weed in the garden.  Of course there are weeds.  It is a private garden covering eight acres.  You can't expect every last little part to be manicured as if it were Chelsea.  Later on, when she served us our tea, I told her how I'd once known somebody whose reaction to their first visit to Great Dixter was to grumble that there had been a huge sow thistle, right in one of the borders.  Some people were never satisfied.

There are a lot of trees at Horkesley Hall.  Almost too many, in that their crowns are meeting into an almost continuous canopy, and you can't quite see them as individual specimens as it would be nice to do.  Somebody, around thirty or forty years ago, planted them a little too close.  It's easily done, indeed, I've done it myself on a smaller scale on our bottom lawn with the trio of river birches and the Zelkova grown from seed, and the not-a-swamp-cypress next to the golden deodar.  They look so tiny in their early years, and there are so many that you want to grow, you can't believe how they will fill out.

The star arboreal feature is the Ginkgo, which the owners say is the largest outside Kew.  It is large, and very lovely, with a great scaly bole.  It must be older than many of the other trees, and is planted at one corner of the terrace in front of the house.  When it gains a few more inches girth it will start to press against the retaining wall of the terrace, and they will have to decide whether to let the trunk deform as it wraps itself round the built landscape, or chisel the corner off the terrace.

In a field at the bottom of the garden were grazing a mare and foal, and a notice told us that this was the mare's tenth foal, and that she had been a winning racehorse in her youth, while the foal's sire had won the Epsom Derby.  We were duly impressed, as I was by the cards with the owners' racing colours on propped up on the mantelpiece in the room where they did the teas.

back to the fray

The black cat wasn't about when I got up.  This was mildly worrying, in that we didn't see him yesterday evening either, and he is normally around.  He used to be a wanderer in his younger days, which is how he got shot, but he is an old boy now, with a gammy leg, keen on his several small meals a day, and doesn't generally get further than the middle of the turning circle or the concrete parking area, where he snoozes.  I peered into some of his favourite spots in the gravel and looked in the shed, calling his name, but without conviction.  Cats disappear into the scenery as seamlessly as members of the Viet Cong into the Mekong delta, unless they want to be found.  I told myself that it was very warm weather, and if the cat wasn't feeling hungry or sociable then he could easily choose to stay outside.

I lit the bee smoker with a vague sense of ill luck.  The cat had disappeared, and so probably had half the bees.  There was a stiff little breeze, and it took several scrunched up envelopes and half a dozen matches to get the smoker to go.  One stray Chinese lantern was enough to start the Great Fire of Smethwick, but there was I trying as hard as I could to set fire to some torn paper and hessian scraps in a purpose-built metal cylinder with integral bellows and under-grate ventilation, and it wouldn't take.  Eventually the smoker was burning to my satisfaction, and the black cat suddenly appeared, looking as though he'd just popped out for five minutes and could fancy some breakfast now.

Conditions weren't great for a bee inspection.  It was warm enough, and dry, but overcast so that it was going to be difficult to see if there were eggs in the cells of the brood nest.  The lettuce workers had chosen today to do something in the field just over the hedge from the beehives, and I try not to open the hives when other people are around, just in case.  I was feeling stiff and out of sorts.  I considered leaving it until later, or another day, but I'd gone to all that trouble lighting the smoker, and more to the point the inspection was three days late already.

Time seemed to have been suspended when I opened the hive with the golden bees.  They were still making the play cups that are the first sign of swarming, but without the queen laying eggs in them, so they were not yet serious about it.  After thinking I saw an egg in the worker brood comb in one of the first frames I checked, and cursing the bad light, I definitely saw eggs in one of the last, so the queen was present in the colony and doing her job.  The bees seemed to have brought in no more honey than when I was last there ten days previously.

The top super on the colony of dark bees still had honey in it, which was encouraging.  If they'd swarmed they'd have taken that with them.  However, again they didn't seem to have done anything much since last time.  There was barely any more honey, and they still hadn't finished putting wax cappings over what they had collected.  Given the fine weather I'd thought they'd have been busier than that.  Perhaps it has been so hot that the nectar flow has dried up.  The brood box looked pretty full of bees, again suggesting they hadn't swarmed yet, but when I began to examine the individual frames I found a queen cell on the first one, and plenty more as I went through the hive. Once bees have made a queen cell, containing a grub that will develop into a new queen bee, and sealed it up, they are ready to swarm as soon as the mood strikes them.  Some of these queen cells were not yet sealed, but some were.

I'd decided in advance that if they were making queen cells, but had not yet swarmed, on this occasion I was going to destroy the queen cells.  That is not the best method of swarm control. Destroying the evidence of swarming only addresses the bees' behaviour, not the underlying cause of it, and so they will probably go on preparing to swarm while you are still putting your smoker away.  There is the risk that you fail to spot just one queen cell, in which case they can go ahead and swarm anyway.  I looked at each frame very carefully, and then as the bees were in a remarkably good mood I checked each again, and found one cell the second time round that I'd missed the first time.  However, the bees could have been standing on a cell both times and hidden it from me, or there could have been a second strange rogue cell like the one I found tucked in flat under the bottom of the comb.  The books say to shake the bees off every comb, but I didn't do that.  It makes them very irritable, and I had to think about the lettuce farm workers just over the hedge, who were busily banging spikes into the ground as they set up the irrigation system for a new batch of just-planted lettuce plugs.  Nor did I feel up to working in the middle of a cloud of seriously annoyed bees.  Finally, there is the risk that you got it wrong and the bees have already swarmed, in which case you are destroying their replacement queen, and without the means to make another they will eventually die.  I thought I'd take that risk, since on the basis of the intact stores and volume of bees present I didn't believe they'd swarmed, and if the worst came to the worst I had other colonies that could provide a queen.

I didn't attempt a better method of swarm control because I didn't feel up to it.  I wasn't entirely well, the light was bad, and I thought my chances of finding the unmarked queen were poor. Destroying the queen cells should give me another week before they'll be ready to try again, as long as I didn't miss any, by which time I should be feeling better.  Sometimes gaining yourself time is the best you think you can do.  I must mark my queens next season.

The next time you see a jar of honey in a farm shop and think that five pounds is a lot of money for one jar of the sweet stuff, think of all the efforts that some beekeeper has made, just getting to the point of having a honey crop to harvest.  Though with the weather the way it has been there won't be much again this year, and there aren't many entries for our honey competition at The Tendring Show.

on the mend

It's a nice question, the pace at which you resume normal activities after a bout of fever, in the absence of external pressures.  In my City job I wouldn't have dreamed of taking today off.  Indeed, if there had been a sufficiently important meeting I'd have gone in on Monday, even if it meant spending the rest of the week in bed to recover from the effort.  If you are self-employed, or have small children, or don't get sick pay and simply can't afford the time off, you may have to make the effort and get back to work, even if you don't feel up to it.  It's probably not good for you, but my guess is that precious little research has been done on whether it is actually medically bad for you in the long term, or just makes you feel awful for the duration.  The medical profession seems split on whether illnesses like Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome even exist, and there are no profits to be had for pharmaceutical companies in recommending rest.

On the other hand, your muscles start to atrophy almost as soon as you stop exercising, so if you crawl into bed on a Thursday night feeling lousy, stagger out of bed two days later and spend most of your time thereafter sitting down, you are not going to be as fit by the following Tuesday as you were the previous one.  And if a heatwave (English style, modest by Continental standards but hot compared to what we're used to) has started in the meantime, you won't feel as bouncy as you did last week, even if your immune system had fought off every germ going.  So how do you tell whether your residual feelings of exhaustion are your body telling you that it is still convalescent and needs cosseting, or merely that you are hot (as is everybody) and out of shape?

The Systems Administrator had got a reunion lunch in London with some old colleagues, and as I obligingly gave the SA a lift to the local railway station I felt fragile enough to make me think that, since I didn't have to go to work or do anything in particular, another day of doing nothing might be a good idea.  On the other hand, I need to get moving again at some stage, so decided against trying to rearrange tomorrow's Pilates lesson.  Some gentle stretching might be a good idea by then, and as shifting appointments around is a nuisance to the teacher it is better to save her indulgence for the times when I really need it.

Having finished reading about the plant hunters I am now on to Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea by Donovan Hohn.  It is an entertaining account of ocean currents and ocean pollution, told through his investigation into the true story of a consignment of plastic toys lost from a shipping container, and how they began to wash up on beaches all over the place. Donovan Hohn is an American writer, one-time school teacher turned journalist, and I never heard of him until I came across Moby Duck, which I think was mentioned on Radio 4 at some point, but maybe it is simply the sort of thing that Amazon thought I would like.  Hohn's style is breezy and self-deprecating: I find him funny, but can see that some more serious-minded readers might detest him.  Also his initial curiosity about the floating toys expands like the narrative of Tristan Shandy to encompass the blow-moulded plastics industry, the ethics and efficacy of beach litter clearance, the iconography of the toy duck, and anything else that occurs to him along the way, which has upset some reviewers.  He has a little fun at the expense of other, more portentous environmental commentators, which is fair enough.  I clicked on the Kindle edition on my laptop yesterday morning, and so far should say it was £1.79 thoroughly well spent, though I did start off knowing a bit about about container shipping, sailing and the Beaufort scale, and have visited quite a few plastics factories.  If I had approached all of these as a complete novice I might have found his narrative more unmanageable.

Tomorrow normal life will resume, albeit very gently, and I will discover the awful truth about the bees.  In the end one of the ways you know you are getting better is when you actually want to do things, as distinct from feeling you ought to do things.  I think that by tomorrow I will probably want to do something, albeit nothing too strenuous.

confined to barracks

Yesterday, as I sat on the sofa, smelling the scent of roses wafting through the verandah door and the homely whiff of soot falling down the chimney (soot always makes me think of the countryside, home, or holidays.  It is the antithesis to the smell of an office) and feeling pathetically weak, I decided that there was no way I was going to be fit to go to work the following day, and rang to let them know.  We are not brought up to admire giving up in advance as a character trait.  It seems more heroic to have a go and do one's best, and positively British to have a go, fail, and keep a very stiff upper lip about it.  But I did not see how in less than twenty hours' time I was going to be fit to drag hoses around the plant centre for two hours, then spend the following six hours mostly on my feet, even if there hadn't been what passes in England for a heatwave.  If in the end I were not going to go in, or if my going in were going to result in an embarrassing episode of fainting in the plant centre followed by my colleagues scrabbling around trying to contact the Systems Administrator to come and collect me, then I thought I might as well let my employer know the previous day, so that she had the option of asking somebody else to cover for me, rather than wait until five past eight on Monday morning and then call work using my best, special, weak, I'm afraid I'm not well voice.

I spoke to a colleague who sounded vaguely worried, since it is Hampton Court Flower Show week, so the owners will be there, while the manager was due to go on a first aid course, and my young colleague was potentially going to be left on her own.  However, as she observed, if you're ill, you're ill.  I felt vaguely guilty, but also that arranging for the plant centre to be run by only two people with no backup plan on a day when hot weather was forecast would not be very clever, and if that was what was planned then it wasn't my fault. Given the choice I wouldn't have had flu.  Later on I got an e-mail from the owner wishing me well, thanking me for letting her know in advance, reassuring me that they had got someone else for Monday who could work the till, and reminding me that she wanted a newsletter drafted.  She wrote to me about that on Thursday afternoon, about three hours before the bug struck, and I will do it as soon as I can concentrate enough to write anything sensible.

I am very glad I didn't go in.  I was relieved last night, as the evening cooled down and we sat out on the verandah, that the decision was already made and I didn't have to dither about whether to set my alarm for six, and relieved again this morning when I woke at seven after the longest continuous bout of sleep I've had since Wednesday night.  After breakfast I did totter into the garden to water recent plantings in the borders, before it got too hot, since unless they were watered I was going to start losing them.  The SA has been very good about doing the pots, but the request to look in all the flower beds, find anything that looks as though it might not yet be established and could be struggling in this weather, and water it, is not a reasonable thing to ask of someone who wasn't involved in the original planting and isn't that keen on plants.  As it is, some newly planted box outside the conservatory has been beautifully watered, twice, and I had to confess that it was not newly planted, merely newly weeded, and that the box itself had been there for a good year.  I am sure it was glad of the water anyway.  Unless you are pretty familiar with the plants in a garden, the difference between something that was planted too recently to have got its roots down, and is about to die of drought, and something that is dying down quite naturally after flowering and is happy as Larry, is not going to be immediately and blindingly obvious in all cases.

After an hour of watering I realised I needed to sit down.  The spirit was moderately willing, in that I'd found a few plants that were struggling badly, and would have liked to check all the borders, but the flesh was calling it a day, with the same slightly wobbly feeling I had when discharged from hospital after surgery under general anaesthetic several years ago.  The rest of the watering would have to wait until I could do another stint in the evening, and I would have to trust to luck and the fine weather to keep the bees from swarming for another day.  Which probably means they have swarmed, but it can't be helped.

Instead I read about plant collecting in Asia.  I love stories of plant collecting.  I like plants and have always liked physical geography, while the reality of plant collecting is frequently very uncomfortable.  Even when you don't do a Tom Hart-Dyke and get taken hostage by armed rebels, plant collecting from Victorian times to the present involves an awful lot of dangerous air travel, dangerous road travel, cold and insanitary lodgings, peculiar food, insect bites and other minor flesh wounds, route marches up and down mountains carrying heavy loads, and infuriating conversations with officials.  Much nicer to read about it, and then go and admire the plants in a garden somewhere in Britain, where you can have a cup of tea and a piece of cake as well.

past the worst

When I woke up this morning I realised that I felt slightly better.  That wasn't saying a lot, but after more than forty eight hours of aching all over, suffering a constant headache, and an inability either to stay awake or to sleep for more than three hours at a time, there was a slight improvement.  I ached a bit, and the headache was reduced to a dull intimation that I might get a headache later.  As far as I could tell I no longer had a temperature, but I didn't feel strongly enough about the question to start looking for the thermometer.  For lay purposes, healthy adults only exist in three temperature ranges, normal, a bit hot, and frighteningly hot, and I'd never reached stage three.  The Systems Administrator did, last summer, but I didn't need a thermometer to tell the difference.

It was very welcome to have a shower, given that the last time I took one of those was on Thursday morning, and since then I'd spent a full day in the garden, including spreading 6X (stinkies) on the dahlia bed, and two full days running a temperature on the hottest days of the year.  I walked downstairs, concentrating very carefully, and made some tea, and ate some muesli, which seemed to go down pretty well after two days sustained by a piece of toast, a bowl of yogurt, two glasses of apple juice and some packets of mini-cheddars.  The mini-cheddars were the Systems Administrator's offering, based on years' experience of North Sea crossings.  They are dry, savoury, pack quite a few calories for the effort of eating them, and tend to stay down even when you're not in the mood for food.

I'd heard the SA, who had decamped to the spare room for the duration, get up to let the chickens into their run and then go back to bed.  As I sat at the kitchen table drinking tea the SA appeared wrapped in a dressing gown, looking doleful and saying that he too seemed to be going down with the bug, and would have a turn with the bed if I'd finished with it.  This was not a total surprise, since the SA was quizzing me yesterday about the onset of my symptoms, and after a while I grasped that this was not to check on Google in case I had anything really serious, but to compare with the SA's own state of aches and snuffles.  However, after another couple of hours the SA got up again, announcing that the headache had now passed and the SA no longer felt wobbly and maybe didn't have what I had.

And that's it.  Today I am not attempting to do anything, except shuffle between the sofa and my steamer chair on the verandah, with occasional expeditions to the kitchen, and they're quite tiring enough.  It is a sad waste of a lovely day, like yesterday and the day before were.  We were going to get the train up to Norwich today, to see the Bishop's garden and Will Giles' Exotic Garden, which both have fairly limited opening times.  We had it all planned out, to get an early lunch in a nice pub by the river so as to be through the gates of the Bishop's garden when it opened at one, then go on to the Exotic Garden, which doesn't open until two and serves very good cake.  Not a hope.  I couldn't walk as far as the postbox, and if I tried to eat a piece of cake I'd probably be sick.  Today is the last theoretical day for inspecting the bees, ten days since the last one, and I had been planning to do them on Friday, but I'll have to take a chance with them swarming, unless I rally remarkably this afternoon.  Which seems unlikely, given how viral infections normally go through the day, and is why I'm typing this now.

Enjoy the nice weather.

cardunculus is unwell

Last night as I was cooking my supper I began to ache far more in my arms and legs than a day's gardening would warrant, and realised that I was going down with something.  I'd been a trifle snuffly and sore throaty for a few days, and put it down to middle age late onset hay fever, but maybe the bug was brewing.  Now I have a temperature and a headache, so I am going back to bed. It's rather a waste, just as summer finally arrives, and I was supposed to inspect the bees today.  Bother.

penny pinching

The quotation for the new window arrived the other day.  Or at least, a quotation for a replacement double-glazing unit arrived.  That is not what we had decided to go for, and so it was a waste of somebody’s time calculating it for us, but still it was interesting to see how much it would cost, the answer being almost two grand.  That would be an annual capital cost on a straight line depreciation basis of almost four hundred pounds, if it lasted for the five years that Kent Blaxill would guarantee it for, or two hundred if we got ten years out of it, which is about how long the old one lasted.  That’s too much.  Forget savings on your energy bill, I don’t believe that having a double glazed window instead of a laminated one in the sitting room would save us two hundred pounds a year on heating.  We don’t even use that room in the colder months, except at Christmas, and on weekends when we’ve got people round or are suffering from cabin fever living in the study.

Meanwhile, the papers today are carrying the story of how much energy we waste in our homes on heating water, based on an investigation carried out by The Energy Saving Trust.  According to the Guardian, the Trust has found that an average shower lasts for seven and a half minutes, and Britain’s households could save £215 million per annum by shortening their showers by a minute.  Or £125 million if you believe the Telegraph.  Overfilling our kettles costs us an additional £68 million.

£215 million, or even £125 million, is a large amount of money.  It would pay for a lot of hip operations.  It doesn’t sound quite so big when you express it in terms of annual cost per household, though.  There were 26.4 million households in the UK in 2012 according to the Office for National Statistics, so that comes to £8.14 (or £4.73) per household.  Including all those over-filled kettles we can say that the Energy Saving Trust’s survey has shown that households on average waster around a tenner a year on taking over-long showers and boiling too much water in their kettles.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a clue how long I spend in the shower, and I have no intention of timing myself.  I do turn the water off while I soap, just as I turn the cold tap off while I’m brushing my teeth, which must save a bit, but it isn’t at the top of my list of things to worry about, in an environmental or financial sense.  It isn’t even in my list of the top fifty things to worry about.  I enjoy taking showers.  I find my morning shower calming and invigorating in equal measure.  I use the time to wake up, and consider what the day ahead has in store for me, or I for it.  I have absolutely no intention of worrying about whether I spend a five minutes, six and a half minutes or even seven and a half minutes in there with the water running, so that I can save approximately 1.1 pence per shower (based on £8.14 divided by 365 times two showers.  That is a very approximate calculation).  Nor do I intend to start sluicing pieces of lime scale from the bottom of the kettle into my tea, or finding I haven’t boiled enough water to cook the pasta, in my efforts to only heat the absolute minimum amount of water necessary for whatever it is I have in mind each time I boil a kettle.  I don’t fill the kettle right up unless I know I need a whole kettleful of water, because apart from anything else it takes longer to boil, and that’s as far as I intend to go in the kettle-energy saving department.

When we needed a new boiler, we bought the most energy efficient boiler we could get.  The increase in the price of petrol and diesel has brought about a shift among UK drivers towards buying smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles.  People are not daft.  Of course we alter our behaviour when conditions change, but most of us prefer to make changes that are simple to apply, and yield significant savings.  Choosing to cruise at 55 miles per hour instead of 75 on a motorway makes a big difference to fuel consumption.  Agonising about whether you have spent an extra minute in the shower doesn’t.

after the rain

After all the charging about, the charity talk, the long working weekend, the gallery trips and visits, I woke this morning to the prospect of an entirely blank diary for the rest of the week so that I was free to garden.  Even the weather forecast was favourable for working outside.  It was an almost infinitely enticing prospect.

There was rain last night, enough to refresh recent plantings and make weeding easier.  The day was humid and overcast, so that great drops of moisture hung on every leaf and were slow to clear, and I looked at my list of things to do for tasks that wouldn’t leave me with a wet shirt and spectacles, until things had had the chance to dry out.  It seemed worth postponing my next trip to the dump as well, rather than put wet bags of weeds in the car.  Cutting the edges of the lawn and pulling horsetail out of an area of what will in due course be ground covering clipped box seemed a good place to start, though I still had to stop periodically to wipe beads of water off my glasses, and my gloves were soon soaked.

The rain had beaten down some of the old roses, which drooped over the edges of their iron supports.  I hope they’ll perk up somewhat, once they dry off.  I was reading David Austin’s book on Old Roses and English Roses at the weekend, in quiet moments between serving customers during my stints on the till, and he recommended pruning the once flowering old roses as soon as possible after they’d finished blooming, to encourage them to make new growth that would flower the following season.  I tend to prune all our roses in the winter, but it makes sense to do them in summer, given that you prune other summer flowering shrubs immediately after they’ve flowered (which reminds me, I must do the deutzia tomorrow).

A hazel tree at the end of the wood had grown out too far across the deck in the back garden, and was starting to smother the witch hazels in their pots.  Hamamelis resent too much shading, and any branches enveloped in the growth of rival shrubs respond by dying back.  It was time to bring the new pruning saw into action, and remove the encroaching hazel.  I cut off the new long strands of the rambling rose ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ too while I was at it, those which were growing so determinedly away from their supporting tree that I would never be able to train them into it.  The pile of prunings in the middle of the lawn grew to a couple of trailer loads, ready for the Systems Administrator to collect.

The blue Baptisia australis in the far, predominantly yellow rose bed had started to flop over, which annoyed me since staking the Baptisia was on my list of things to do, and it looked as though I was just too late.  However, when I experimentally scooped the fallen stems back upright, banged in some iron stakes around them, and tied string to the stakes to stop them falling out again, they didn’t look too bad.  The stakes are rather nice ones, bought from the firm Room in the Garden before they jacked their prices up to ridiculous levels, and are of rusted iron topped with a substantial ball.  Provided the blacksmith does a good job of my iron bean tendril so that I remain a happy repeat customer, I shall start commissioning plant supports from him every now and then, when I can afford to pay for them.  I could do with a tall spiral for a herbaceous clematis that seems to have flopped and disappeared into the undergrowth, instead of being poised to form an attractive late season feature between two rose bushes.

A robin followed me all day as I worked, even perching on my mud-encrusted garden radio at one point while it was on, darting in to where I was working to seize beakfuls of things to eat, and regarding me with beady, curious eyes.  It’s strange how they are so much bolder in human company than the other garden birds, given no extra encouragement.  The blackbirds seem to have had a good nesting season, and there are blackbirds furtively scuttling into the shelter of bushes everywhere that you look.  The big tabby came and ran about the garden for a bit, and peered into the dark gaps between plants, but I don’t think he caught anything.

talk the talk

This afternoon I gave a woodland charity talk in Romford.  The meeting started at two, which meant that I had to aim to be there by half past one, to give time to unload the car and get set up, and allow extra for delays on the A12.  There were no hold-ups, so I spent ten minutes sitting quietly in my car in a church car park, and another fifteen waiting for proceedings to start once I’d got the projector lined up and ready to go.  Better that way than staggering in five minutes after the chairman has called the meeting to order, sweating and apologetic, or five minutes before kick-off and having to get the projector set up with hands made clumsy with haste and embarrassment while everyone looks at me.

This was a return visit.  It is flattering to be asked back, and I was glad to be able to practice the new presentation on a group that I knew were friendly.  I recognised the church, once I got there, and the chairwoman, a tiny, charismatic and extremely self-possessed West Indian.  Actually, I’ve only ever met really nice audiences in south Essex, but that may reflect the fact that I do talks about nature conservation, and not stand-up comedy.  When we last saw Mitch Benn he had some rather harsh words to say on the subject of Romford.

The trouble with learning a new presentation on a familiar topic is that you have to simultaneously unlearn the old one.  The new one has some words on the slides, and not just pictures of trees, making it more obvious that now I’m meant to be talking about Ancient Woodland, or Native Trees, but that still means remembering how many slides the spiel on ancient woodland is supposed to spread over.  In my introductory remarks today I told them as much about the origins and current size of the charity as I was planning to, and then found there was another slide to go, a picture of a giant root buttress captioned Growing Strong, before I got to the three aims of the charity, Create, Protect, Restore, which threw me so that I forgot to tell them some of the specific aims, which are left over from the previous aims of Create, Protect, Inspire.  In an ideal world I’d write my own presentation and have the story in the order I’d have chosen to put it, and then it would be easy to remember, but I can’t face doing the artwork.  I did go through this one at home several times, but that’s no substitute for doing it for real with a live audience.  I could have printed off the notes that go with the slides, but believe that talking from notes is communication death.

I listened to a Radio 4 discussion on volunteering as I drove to Romford.  I missed the start of it, and never gathered quite which forms of volunteering were included.  The examples given seemed to be mainly instances of the charitable sector being expected to take over activities like running daycare centres and providing meals for older people, which were previously done by the local authority.  One disgruntled caller lamented that he had lost his paid position as a youth worker, and that volunteers should remember that they might be taking somebody’s job from them.  Another, who sounded as though they might have worked for local government, queried the expertise of volunteers, however well-meaning, but other contributors pointed out that retired volunteers might have been highly skilled and qualified in their working lives.

It’s a nice question, which tasks society pays to have done, and what it is happy to see done by the voluntary sector.  Organisations like the National Trust say that their garden volunteers don’t take jobs from paid gardeners, but make it possible to maintain their properties to a standard that would otherwise be impossible.  Nonetheless, I have noticed that industries where people will do it anyway for love tend to be badly paid.  Nearly all of my colleagues in the plant centre spend a great deal of their spare time gardening, or visiting gardens, and lots of people are happy to volunteer to do unpaid gardening for their local National Trust house or park.  I have yet to hear of bankers who spend their leisure time visiting other banks or doing pro-bono banking.

When I was a teenager I belonged to a drama group, which was run by a local drama enthusiast who liked young people.  No local authority assistance was received or expected.  I don’t know how we met the costs, since I don’t remember handing over a weekly fifty pence.  We met in the back of the church, so perhaps we had that for free, but there must have been some expenses.  The point was made by one of today’s callers that even if people are happy to give their time, there are always some costs.  Posters, stamps, booking a room, a bare minimum of equipment, insurance.  Which makes volunteering easier for affluent, middling types than the very poor.

My motives for volunteering are cheerfully and candidly mixed.  I love trees, and believe that the woodland charity does good work.  I like meeting people, and am willing to give up some of my spare time to entertain groups of strangers.  So far, so altruistic, but I also consider it prudent to keep up public speaking as a live skill on my CV, in case future economic circumstances dictate that I can’t afford to spend my life as a part time plant centre assistant.  And I think it’s good for me to have to navigate to strange venues, operate my own digital equipment without technical backup, and take on roomfuls of strangers who are not always as kindly as today’s Romford ladies of the church.  As for my presentation skills, they received some very expensive training from my City employers, and were deployed upon the UK’s top pensions consultants and several main board directors of FTSE 100 companies. 

required field must not be blank

There’s a glitch with the Blogspot website, which isn’t letting me save posts at the moment, so I am writing this in Word with the intention of copying it over before midnight, or before I go to bed, whichever is sooner.  If I don’t manage to do that then there won’t be a post for 1 July.  I don’t mind taking a blog holiday on my terms, but it would be a pity to start missing posts due to systems failure.  Still, there’s nothing I can do about it, and use of the site is free.

There was a long wheel based transit van already parked up when I arrived at work, which turned out to belong to the contractors who had come to re-skin the polytunnels on The Other Side.  They’d driven all the way from Maidstone, leaving at five-thirty.  According to the manager you are supposed to renew the covers on polytunnels every six years, and one of ours has lasted longer than that, but still I found it vaguely reassuring that my employers had decided to make the investment, in the current economic climate, rather than deciding that the tunnel would do another year.  I should have liked to see how they attached the new plastic skin to the metal frame, since large commercial tunnels aren’t like domestic ones, where you simply bury the edges of the plastic, but I wasn’t working over The Other Side, so can’t tell you.

The watering took three of us until ten o’clock.  The manager needed to run all the irrigation on The Other Side to get the plants watered ahead of the contractors working in the tunnels, so we ended up with too many things running at once, and low water pressure in the plant centre.  This had the unfortunate side effect of rendering the seal between the end of the hose and our lances ineffective, since normally it is the pressure of the water in the system that presses the lance down into its rubber seating.  This morning they dribbled and leaked over our trousers, and watering took longer than usual, because we only had the flow to cover a small area at a time.  The automatic irrigation didn’t work very well either, and after it had run there were still dry patches among the shrubs and in the tree line.

Looking on the bright side, I did not pick up a hose and find that the section I had grasped was covered with peacock shit, as happened yesterday.  It was a waste that we had two girls from the village in that day to run the café, as otherwise the horizontal streaks of what might have been compost but was probably bird crap on my uniform shirt would have provided the perfect excuse not to work with food.  Today I had a narrow escape, as somebody wanted refreshments while our usual conscript was at lunch, but I called the manager and then her companion declared that she didn’t want anything, and the woman who had wanted something from the café requested a sandwich.  We don’t do sandwiches.

Takings for the day were boosted by a customer spending over six hundred pounds on trees and three trolley loads of plants.  She had chosen them all herself, except for the trees, and while she asked for advice on those I think she essentially knew what she wanted.  Sometimes people don’t want advice, even when they think they do, so much as a sounding board while they talk themselves into doing whatever it is they want to do anyway.  We arranged to deliver the trees, but she managed to pack everything else into her car, which was larger than mine, but not that large.  She was accompanied by a cheerful and well-behaved baby, and as she painstakingly loaded the final three Stipa gigantea, complete with 2 metre flower spikes, I couldn’t see where the baby’s buggy was going to fit, but it must have gone in somewhere as we didn’t find the infant in the car park after she’d gone.

As we were about to close I answered the phone to a panic stricken regular customer, who wanted to know whether there were Muntjac in the area, as something had bitten through the stems of several shrubs in her garden.  It sounded like classic deer damage, and again she knew the answer already.  I commiserated and talked her through the basics of life with Muntjac.  Yes, they can jump three feet.  If your garden fence is already that high you could run extra strands of wire above the top of it.  Yes, I have seen them, the last one lying dead in the road.  The only way to kill them, apart from running them over, is to shoot them with a rifle.  Even if you know somebody with a rifle, or hire a pest controller, there are legal safety limits on where they can use a rifle, to do with proximity to roads and neighbours and so on.  Muntjac are primitive deer.  They bark.  They have tusks.  They do not come every night, but pass through.  You could get a lot of damage, set night cameras to see where they are coming in, and not see another for a week.  Their numbers are growing rapidly in the UK.  They are a curse for gardeners and woodland owners.  Not good news.  Sorry.

Addendum  The site relented and let me post at half past nine.  Obviously.

the heat is on

I learned this morning that somebody who used to work in the plant centre had died, in her fifties, of cancer, a little over three years after the diagnosis.  I only met her a handful of times, because we were never rostered to work on the same day, but it was a sombre thought, and sadder for my two colleagues, who did work with her.  They will go to the memorial service next week.  I can't remember who it was who said to me recently that we were reaching the stage of life where invitations to funerals started to outstrip those to weddings, but I'm afraid they were right.

The watering took until ten, when we put the hoses away.  I spent the rest of the day wandering about with cans of water looking for odd dry pots, and putting very dry ones in buckets of water to soak for a quarter of an hour, in between helping customers and stints on the till.  Sun and strong wind are a lethal combination for plants in pots, drying the compost out in no time, blowing the pots over, and sending the water everywhere when you try to use the automatic watering system.  Just before five I resumed watering by hand, which allows you to direct the water on to the roots and pick up any rogue pots that have blown over.  We covered the herbaceous section, roses, herbs, and some of the display tables, and were able to use the automatic irrigation on the trees because the nozzles are so close to the ground that the spray has less chance to blow out of the bed before it hits the compost, but there wasn't time to do everything.  At five to six we stopped, tilled up, locked up and went home.  One can only do so much.

A stray late customer queried whether it wasn't too hot to water plants, and wouldn't they get brown spots on their leaves.  I read an article somewhere recently debunking that particular widely held gardening belief.  Certainly the farmers irrigate their crops at all hours of the day.  My colleague's rather tart response was that it was a choice between watering the plants when it was hot, or leaving them to die of thirst.

The robins fledged yesterday, or the day before.  Last night when I was watering in the greenhouse I looked at the nest and it was empty, and the SA said they weren't there earlier in the day.  They made their escape just in time, as today's scorching sun really would have given them heatstroke.  I remember that they made an equally abrupt disappearance last year, and since every last pot was exactly where I left it in the greenhouse, with no signs of disturbance, I think they must have gone voluntarily rather than the nest being robbed by a magpie or cat.

When I got home I had to do my own watering, though at least the Systems Administrator helped, and check my new woodland charity digital slides for a talk on Tuesday, to avoid last minute panics. The charity sent them out as a PowerPoint presentation, which the SA has kindly converted to a sequence of JPEGs on a USB stick which is what my digital projector uses.  Number 27 has rotated ninety degrees anticlockwise on the stick, though it looks fine in PowerPoint on the laptop.  This is a mystery to the SA.  All of it is a mystery to me, but the SA has all of tomorrow to fix it.  Thank goodness today was the last six o'clock finish.  That gives me a whole three quarters of an hour spare after work tomorrow to mug up on the new presentation.  I really don't have the energy now.

winding down for summer

It was the last day ever of a six o'clock finish in the plant centre for my colleague who is off to Cambridge Botanic this autumn, and he was gloating about it as we trooped into our staff hut this morning.  I have one more to go, but he has done more of them than I have, being full time.

The owners were nowhere to be seen, but were about somewhere, since when I answered the phone mid-morning to a caller asking to speak to the boss, and warned him as I reached for my radio that I hadn't had sight or sound of the boss so far, the caller said that he was returning the boss's call of five minutes ago.  However, apart from a muttered 'thanks' on the radio, and human cries from the garden late on after the paying visitors had gone home, we heard nothing of our employers all day.

My task was to put some climbers out for sale, which didn't take very long, especially since one of my colleagues kindly picked them up off the grass and loaded them into silver trollies for me before I could get that far.  There was a red trolley to do as well, though not on my list, but I did most of it anyway, since the chances of my colleague finishing tidying all the roses and then having time to deal with the red trolley seemed remote.

Trade is tailing off for the summer.  I was surprised, looking at the tills first thing, to see how much they did yesterday, given that it drizzled most of the time, but we scarcely did any better today, despite the fact that it was the weekend, and quite a nice day.

A beekeeping friend called in, following a visit to the RSPB wildlife garden at Flatford.  He gave me a nesting box for wild bees last year, which he assembled himself using hollow tubes bought by mail order from a specialist wildlife supplier, packed inside a length of drainpipe and stoppered at one end with a plastic bottle end.  Some species of wild bees lay their eggs in hollow stems, for which the tubes are a substitute, provisioning them with food and sealing each tube up to protect the young bees.  Experiments in his own garden had convinced him that it was essential to mount the drainpipe where it would receive full sun.

I sincerely meant to put it up come the spring, and then failed to get round to it, because there were so many other things to do.  I had to confess to my omission yesterday, because he e-mailed asking how many tubes were in use.  The good news is that although I have missed the red mason bees for this year, leafcutter bees are only just emerging now from their winter quarters, and looking for places to lay eggs.  Apparently mason bees complete their development to adulthood in the same year that the eggs are laid, and overwinter in their nesting tubes as mature bees, while leafcutter bees spend the winter as grubs, and only pupate and complete their development shortly before they emerge.

Addendum  The letter O has suddenly got very sticky on my laptop, so if you n*tice any missing Os in this p*st, that's where they've g*ne.

a visit

Today was earmarked for a visit to my father's cousin, recently widowed.  That left time before and after the trip for some more housework and an hour's worth of ironing.  Now that the beeswax polish has dried on the dining table, I can see where I missed a few little patches.  It has recently collected a large number of short clawmarks at the far end, testament to the cats' increasing age and decreasing ability to make a clean jump.

My poor cousin once removed certainly can't make the jump, because his hip is giving him severe grief, a sad decline for a man who has always remained a healthy weight, and used to be a keen walker and skier.  He declined the offer of a lift from his flat to the restaurant where we were having lunch, saying that he could walk as long as we didn't mind walking at his pace.  Having a bad hip sharpens your perception of your locality, and by now he knows which side of the road to walk on, to avoid stretches of pavement with a camber, since walking across a slope is worse than being on the level.  Two years ago we were striding along the beach.

He made me the incredibly touching present of his late wife's wedding ring, saying that he didn't know who else in the family would like it, or had the right hands.  Her's were incredibly tiny.  It won't fit anywhere near over the knuckle of my left ring finger, and is a touch loose on my right little finger.  I could keep in a box and look after it, as I have promised to do, but rather like the idea of adopting it, signet ring style, for my pinky.  It is on my finger as I type, while I test within the safety of the house whether it will slip off, but I suspect that to feel secure it would need taking in very slightly.

Aldeburgh was surprisingly quiet.  I'd thought it would be heaving, during the Festival, but my cousin explained that during the day the festival goers were all at Snape Maltings.  We ate in The Lighthouse Restaurant, which I thoroughly recommend.  The front window is almost obscured by awards from Hardens, Michelin and others dating back years, but it deserves all the plaudits it receives.  It was almost a waste to be going there for lunch rather than dinner, since my system is not geared up nowadays to large lunches, and I was full up after my fish and chips despite foregoing bread, starter and puddings.

My father's cousin is waiting to hear whether his general health will permit him to have the hip done.  I hope it does.  He had his heart done at the age of eighty, and got five years' of active use out of that.  Reading the East Anglian Daily Times website over a cup of tea I saw that Ipswich Hospital was over two million in the red two months into the financial year. so I hope that whether my father's cousin gets his hip depends only on his clinical circumstances, and not the state of NHS finances.

failure to finish

Earlier in the week I received a slightly plaintive e-mail from my Japanese gardening friend, asking whether I'd received her letter, enclosing some pages from a Japanese English language newspaper giving an update on the situation in Japan two years after the tsunami and nuclear disaster.  I had, and had been meaning to reply when I had time to sit down and think about it properly.  To my shame, when I dug out the envelope on my desk, I realised that she wrote to me in March.  Oh dear. I hadn't noticed how long it had been, but that's no excuse.  I never get the year right on Pop Master, even when I know the song and bought the album, so I should probably recognise that I have a poor sense of time, and plan accordingly by making it a rule to reply to people the same week. Being busy is not really an excuse, since if I have time to write a blog entry each day, I have time to write to my friends.  Although when you write a blog you set the agenda, and can burble on about anything that occurs to you, which is different to having to read and intelligently comment on Japanese current affairs.

I checked the bees, and the two small colonies I messed up in my failed attempt at swarm control had eggs at last, both the one that seemed contented last time I looked at them, and the colony that I wasn't so sure about.  The golden bees are busy making bees, and not swarming, but haven't brought in any surplus of honey in the past nine days.  They were buzzier than usual, but it was slightly humid weather with rain in the offing for later, which doesn't generally put bees in the best frame of mind.  The little dark bees still hadn't finished filling their mostly-complete super of honey, or sealed it with wax, a sign that the honey is ready for harvest.  I found several very early queen cells, but no more advanced ones.  Since they already have a young queen and plenty of physical space, there wasn't a lot more I could do at that moment.  I scraped the eggs out of the queen cups, and hoped that if it was nice weather over the weekend they'd change their minds and focus on foraging, but I fear I'll have trouble with them before the end of the season.

Bees and apologetic e-mail to Japan safely out of the way, I could spend the rest of the day gardening, at least up until an early finish because there is a beekeeping meeting tonight.  I wasted ten minutes searching for my Tilley hat before discovering I'd somehow mixed it up with my bee suit, white on white, not easy to spot. I finally finished moving the pots of dahlias down to the deck in the back garden for the summer, and put the last couple of pots of geraniums and Tulbaghia out in the Italian garden.  Moving the pots has been on my list of things to do for ages, and I have noticed before that I appear to have a neurotic tendency to not quite finish tasks, so that the list never gets shorter even though I have done quite a lot.  One of the current jobs is to put two defunct conifers on the bonfire heap, which are only sitting in pots so no digging out is required.  It would take all of fifteen minutes maximum, and the concrete and the space in the back garden by the conservatory would both look much tidier without large, nine-tenths dead conifers standing there, so goodness knows why I haven't done it.

When I worked in an office, and had to do personality tests of the sort that friends who are academic psychologists sniff at, my scores were consistently low on the dimension called Completer-Finisher.  By now I suspect that for whatever reason I don't like completing and finishing. Unfortunately the Systems Administrator's weakest score was also for Completer-Finisher, so while we rub along relatively happily because neither is driven mad by the other's disorganisation, we are the sort of people who go out to buy curtains without having measured the window.

two very good exhibitions

I went to London today, for my rescheduled trip to the British Museum's Life and Death in Pompei and Herculaneum exhibition, after the funeral fell on the original date in April.  My companion was hit with a departmental meeting, after I'd booked for the second time, but extracted from her managers a promise that it would be over by one, backed up by a threat that if it wasn't then she was leaving anyway.  The earliest admission I could get in late June, even booking in early May, was half past three, which left us time for lunch before Pompei.

I thought that I'd go early enough to see something else before lunch, to maximise the value of my lost day of gardening, and my ticket, now over thirty quid including parking for an off-peak day return.  That's about 25 pence a mile.  I don't think my marginal cost of driving is as much as that, and a friend who lives outside the congestion charge zone would let me park in her drive, so I'd only have to pay the tube fare to Islington and back.  Anyway, I let the train take the strain, and went to the Courtauld to see their current exhibition, Collecting Gaugin.  This was much smaller than the Gaugin exhibition held at the Tate a couple of years ago, and blissfully quiet in comparison, except when a party of school children trooped through, being shushed by their teachers and shushing each other.  They were mostly carrying sketch pads, but I didn't see a single one in use, or many of the children looking at the pictures.

Two of the largest and most polished canvases are in the permanent collection and can be seen any time, as can Gaugin's marble head of his long-suffering wife, and the two canvases sold by Samuel Courtauld before gifting his collection to the gallery and borrowed back for the duration wouldn't have made Gaugin's reputation, if he hadn't done anything else.  What made this exhibition really worth catching for me was the series of wood block prints, part of the Courtauld collection, but not on permanent display.  They represent Gaugin's ideas about Taihiti, some gleaned from books, and embellished with borrowings from other traditions.  He worked on his blocks with an eclectic set of improvised tools including razor blades and needles, rather than classic wood engraver's equipment, and the resulting pictures, printed by his son two decades after his death, show an extraordinary range of textures, and seemed to me far closer to Henry Moore than Eric Ravilious.  I really liked them, and would call again if I'm in that part of town before it closes on 8 September.

The Pompei exhibition was marvellous.  That wasn't very surprising, since it has reviewed superbly, and is proving one of the BM's biggest blockbusters ever.  As you enter you are greeted by a plaster cast of the void left in the ashes by a poor tormented dog, and a carbonised table, then given some scene setting maps, information panels and a film, neatly done in sections so that you can join and leave at any point, before you reach the main body of the artefacts.  It is astonishing what remained intact, or virtually unbroken, beneath the ash and boulders.  The contents of a Roman villa are revealed, room by room, in the form of furniture, frescos, carbonised food and furniture, pottery, glass (how on earth did glass survive), mosaics, jewellery and statues, interposed with photographs of Pompei and Herculaneum themselves.  Only at the very end do you reach a few more casts of the unlucky inhabitants.

The Romans didn't do good taste, most of the time.  We were both very taken with a small sculpture of a small boy, seated in a posture so reminiscent of the Buddha that we both felt the artist must have seen and been influenced by eastern art.  Some of the mosaics are beautiful, very lively and skilful.  A lot of it is fascinating Roman bling.  The papers have all got very excited about the graphic statue of Pan having sex with a goat, in the missionary position, but I actually preferred the side table held up by a stone panther.

It took a long time to get round, partly because there was a lot of it, and partly because it was crowded, but it was a civilised crowd, and you could see everything, if you waited your turn.  We left at five fifteen, having slightly rushed the last couple of rooms because it closed at half past, and also because after an hour and a half our brains were beginning to fill.  The staff were very helpful about warning us from five onwards how long we had left, and how far through the exhibition we were in a given room.  My only, tiny criticism was that I would have liked the labels to each exhibit to be in a slightly larger font, given that it was crowded and people were trying to read them from quite a distance.

We returned to Liverpool Street via the Postman's Park, which my friend had never seen before and was very taken with.  There again, she hadn't seen Colchester North station car park before either, when I gave her a lift home to save her waiting for the branch line connection.

in a bind

Working on the basis that you can prune anything in late June, and certainly cherries, I prevailed upon the Systems Administrator to come and remove a substantial branch from the wild gean, which was obscuring the Parrotia persica.  I'd like to remove some of the higher branches as well where they are crowding the end one of the trio of birches, but that would require the Henchman, if not the scaffolding platform, and I thought that getting rid of the cross branch was a start, and would let some more light into the ditch bed.  The SA duly ran out two reels of cable and plugged in the electric chainsaw.

The first cut removed the end of the branch, which I caught before it could land on any of my shrubs.  The second cut took off a further section, which landed on the winter flowering honeysuckle before I could reach it, but fortunately the honeysuckle had a tough and elastic constitution, and did not break.  That still left a large amount of branch, including a side branch which ran back across a patch of ornamental Rubus and a second one growing vertically upwards.  Neither were at all easy to remove, since the SA would have to stand in the middle of a large shrub to reach them.  The SA proposed taking off another piece of the main branch with both side branches still attached.  I objected that there was a lot of weight in there, thinking principally of my shrubs, but the SA said it wasn't too bad.  I crawled to the back of the bed ready to try and break the fall.

The chainsaw got most of the way through and stuck.  With hindsight it would have been sensible of the SA to do an undercut, or take more time over it and work out how to get at the side branches to take more weight out of it before cutting the main branch, but there you go. The SA asked if I could reach the branch, to pull it back and get it off the saw.  I could reach it, just, but couldn't do much to free the saw, which the SA eventually wrenched loose.  The final cut took the branch off, and dislodged the chain from the saw.

Getting the chain back on a chain saw is an infuriating task, which even with two people seems to require more hands than you have between you.  I used both hands to hold the chain on its guide bar, while the SA tried to feed the chain back on the saw and tension it.  This left no hands over to hold the body of the saw, which kept moving as I was applying tension to it while the SA was applying pressure.  We gave up trying to do the job with the saw resting on the edge of the trailer, trooped back up to the top of the garden and stood it on a low wall, eventually wedging it against the retaining wall behind, which just about kept it still.  The chain cover wouldn't do up, and the SA discovered I had the guide bar  the wrong way up.  The clue is in the word BOSCH written down the side, which should not be upside down.  Eventually the saw went back together and we trotted back to the bottom of the garden.  The saw made nasty rattling noises when started.  The SA inspected it and pronounced that the chain was buggered, and a link must have got twisted when it was stuck in the tree.

That halted proceedings for the day.  A new chain will cost around twenty quid, which means that this afternoon's partial pruning job cost approximately seven quid a cut.

I don't like power tools.  I can see that they make relatively fast and light work of what would otherwise require days of brute physical toil, and I have seen saw pits and can imagine quite how arduous sawing wood was, and how unpleasant for the bottom dog down in the pit.  I know that using an electric screwdriver to assemble our decking saved the SA an immense amount of work, which would probably have ended in an acute case of tendonitis long before the decks were complete.  But chain saws are so annoying, with their ability to bind and break, and the noise.  I think I might buy myself a bow saw, so that I can remove small to medium branches myself, without recourse to the SA and mechanical aids.

summer lull

I gather that the dog at work ate something very bad last week, and made herself extremely sick, since when she trotted into the office this morning people commented on how she was looking better.  The boss also had a narrow escape, given that he was mowing around the beehives and knocked one over.  The bees belong to an Essex beekeeper who keeps them on a commercial scale in multiple locations, and is the judge at our local honey show.  He was over pretty quickly, and his bee suit disappeared under a great cloud of bees as he put the hive back together.  The boss hung around to watch, until Percy warned him not to stand too close, and bees started bouncing off his head.  I explained that when bees start flying into your head that is their idea of a tactful warning, and their next move will be to sting you.  The boss remained unstung, but it sounded to me like a close run thing.

Then it was rather quiet.  I thought today was supposed to be warmer, or at least dry and less windy, but it rained half the time, and was so cold I ended up wearing my fleece hat.  I was actually relieved it wasn't sunny, since I'd accidentally left my Tilley hat on the hall table at home.  While at an intellectual level I'm not that worried about a bit of sun exposure or wrinkles, at a physical level my body has decided for me that my face has had enough sun exposure for one lifetime, and nowadays strong sunlight makes it hurt.

The only thing the manager bought from the van that visits on Mondays was some grasses, which he'd ordered in advance, and as a sign that we really are approaching the slack period of summer, the van won't be back again until the autumn.  We are still getting some deliveries, increasingly of the impulse purchase sort of thing, such as large foxglove plants on the verge of flowering, and a consignment of clematis are due mid-week.  We have sold a lot of clematis.

I noticed while watering that the two trays of white marguerites bought to order a good month ago are still there on the reserve bed.  The manager had said to me that he thought he would stop ordering in bedding, as it was getting a bit late for it, and that same morning a customer asked me for white marguerites for the urns on his terrace.  He asked in a way that was slightly unnecessarily aggressive and alpha male for a trip to a garden centre, with an air of entitlement that made me distrust him, so I told him what the manager had told me.  He appealed to upper-middle class solidarity by asking the owner for marguerites, and she told the manager to order some in for him.  Four or five weeks later they are still sitting there, uncollected, and increasingly dishevelled as they need deadheading, and stunted because they should have been moved to larger pots by now.  We don't take deposits, unlike my blacksmith who very prudently asked for a deposit on my iron bean tendril, since it was a special.  Other people might not want a rusted iron tendril, and they probably don't want a load of by now pot-bound marguerites in late June.

I answered the phone to somebody enquiring about dark red climbing roses without a hint of orange in them, and after a while said he recognised my voice, and I had given his dog some water.  I confessed to remembering the dog, adding that I generally remembered dogs, and conversations about soil.  I do vaguely remember him, but only to the extent that, apart from not having his own dog bowl, he had messy hair.

When I got home the Systems Administrator was sitting out with the chickens, looking chilly, and the chickens were staring through the netting that the SA put up to stop them eating the dahlias, looking baleful.

the unenthusiastic housewife

The Systems Administrator tracked down the source of the mysterious clattering sound from the lettuce farm, and found that they had started excavating the extra reservoirs.  That's quite good, better than if it was due to some new method of cultivation, since once the reservoirs are dug the noise will stop.  We try to remember that the countryside is someone else's work place, and not to get too irritated by the comings and goings of the lettuce lorries, and evenings when the Lithuanians are still driving fork lifts around the yard at gone eight while we're sitting out on the verandah, but it's still a relief to find that the latest noise is only temporary.

Days of gallivanting around art galleries and gardens, and time spent in my own garden, have caught up with me, and apart from a couple of hours spent visiting a friend, today was devoted to cleaning and tidying.  My definition of tidying the hall extended to repotting the Meyer's lemon on the hall table, and glueing a couple of broken flower pots back together which had been sitting on the hall floor for ages, but apart from that it was bona fide washing and wiping, once I'd watered the greenhouse, and potted up a couple of evening primrose seedlings given to me by my friend. She has a pale lemon version with narrower leaves than my bright yellow one, very pretty.  They wilted rather pathetically after being pulled out of her gravel, but all I could do was water them in, put a plastic cover over them, and hope for the best.  If they don't survive I'll beg a seed pod in the autumn.

I really can't think of anything amusing to say about cleaning.  I don't like it, but it has to be done. The SA has promised to vacuum the sitting room tomorrow morning.  It was getting rather hairy and unpleasant anyway, and tomorrow afternoon a sales rep from Kent Blaxill is coming to measure up and quote for a replacement window.  This is going to be eye-watering expensive, since the double glazing unit which takes up most of one wall in the sitting room has failed.  The seal went back in the winter, and the interior has been getting foggier and foggier.  We left it until summer to do anything about it, because installing a new one essentially entails removing one entire wall of the sitting room, and we couldn't face that in the winter.  The thought of how much it was going to cost may also have had something to do with it, subconsciously, but we can't live with a giant fogged-up window for ever.

We checked in the show room with someone who went and double-checked with the manager, and the building regulations do allow us to have toughened plate glass if we want to, rather than replacement double glazing.  I was afraid that in this brave new energy-efficient world where I am no longer allowed to buy light bulbs that I can see by, I would be forced to have more double glazing. I think that a unit that size is pushing the technical limits for double glazing, and we can't afford to keep replacing the window every decade.  The salesman said we'd done well to get ten years out of it, since they only guarantee units for five.  He warned us that plate glass would push up our heating bills, but I don't think the amount we'd save sticking with a sealed unit would add up to anywhere near the capital cost of replacing another failed window.  The SA asked hopefully if we could get any credit on the glass from the existing window, but the answer was No.

The baby robins are growing, and look more recognisably bird-like.  As I was watering and potting, I almost collided with an adult trying to come in to the greenhouse just as I was going out.  It swerved off, and I felt guilty that I was preventing it from feeding its young, but I think it nipped in while I was filling up the watering can.  The starlings don't seem to be going for a second brood in the roof, which is a shame.  The broody hen has given up brooding at last, which is a relief.  Her comb was looking very pallid and unhealthy, and it will be much better for her to come out and get fresh air and exercise with the other hens.  Though they didn't get a run tonight, because there were showers, and anyway the SA was glued to the cricket.

gardening and a retail interlude

I thought I was going to be able to spend all day working in the garden, but after the first hour discovered that I'd lost my pruning saw.  I checked the garage where I normally dump tools in frequent use, and couldn't see it there.  The garage has got pretty untidy, and it's not beyond the bounds of probability that the saw will turn up in due course, but that wasn't much consolation when I wanted to use it immediately.  I looked in the hall, and the greenhouse, and checked in case the Systems Administrator had had it.  I didn't think the SA had been using it, but you never know, since the SA has been trimming the Eleagnus hedge and might have decided to take an over-prominent branch right out.  I searched again in the garage, and tried to remember what I'd been pruning recently, and looked around the edges of the bottom lawn, and the border near the shrub rose 'Nevada', but couldn't find the saw doing a babes-in-the-wood act among the fallen rose petals.

I came to the regretful conclusion that I'd lost it, or rather left it somewhere in over nearly an acre of ground and an untidy house.  It would presumably turn up eventually, though possibly unusably rusty if it spent too long outside first.  In the meantime I needed another.  I drove off to B&Q, feeling rather guilty that I was not supporting the Clacton Garden Centre, only B&Q is about four miles away, most of it on dual carriageway, while the Clacton shop is fourteen miles away, on winding roads.  Shopping in B&Q is generally a depressing experience, and for several alarming minutes I thought they'd stopped stocking pruning saws, before managing to find the right aisle.  B&Q stocks Fiskar, which is a very good brand, and I use one of their own brand trowels, which has proved more durable and comfortable than its arty, wooden handled and stainless steel bladed predecessors.  However, they have converted all except about two tills to self-service, and the whole process of paying is unutterably dismal.  The young man ahead of me in the queue trying to buy three tins of paint needed the help of an unsmiling assistant to work the scanner, and when it was my turn I saw why, as I too needed guidance to operate the thing, after she'd had to come and authorise the transaction at all by confirming that I was old enough to buy a sharp instrument like a Fiskar 25 centimetre retractable pruning saw.

Armed with my new saw, I trimmed a couple of low hanging branches from 'Tai Haku'.  They biff the SA in the face while mowing the lawn, and I'd promised to lift the crown a little, with the proviso that this should be done in high summer when the risk of silver leaf disease was least.  You are generally advised not to keep hacking at cherries or plums in case you admit infection, but if you have to then late June or July is the recommended time.  I regard it as the best default time to prune anything that I'm not sure when to do otherwise, reasoning that the spring surge of sap has finished so it shouldn't bleed too badly, while there is plenty of time for it to start healing before winter really sets in.  It's a theory I've come up with for myself, rather than learning it as received wisdom from the books, but I can't fault my logic.

In the garden the roses are opening, a good month late, and the tall, pale yellow Cephalaria gigantea is in full bloom.  This is an agreeable perennial with scabious-like flowers, which will self seed usefully but not too much if allowed to.  I have it on vile clay, and it seems to like it.  The Aquilegia, Brunnera, Centaurea montana and white form of Camassia are virtually over, and I started dead-heading them, since they too will seed themselves generously and while I like them I don't want any more.  Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus is out.  This is a delightful day lily with small, highly scented yellow flowers, which despite its earliness seems to escape the hemerocallis gall mite that has plagued my other early varieties in recent years.  Just along from it is a pale yellow iris, whose name I've forgotten, also full out and looking cool and poised.

In the island bed the pink Robinia hispida is blooming cheerfully, but keeps collapsing.  It is a desperately brittle shrub, and I'd like to know what it does in the wild.  The boss has his tied against a wall, but bits still break off.    Coronilla varia is not yet out, but has spread so far that I'm starting to wonder if it is going to turn out to be a noxious weed.  On the other hand its pink flowers are pretty, and beloved of bees, and I do want things to cover the ground.  When I'd doing the winter maintenance I'd better pull out some of its running roots to limit its spread.  It is mingling with, and slightly hiding, the foxy flavoured Phuopsis stylosa, which is in full bloom, and is doing so well in a dry border that I will probably plant more.  Maybe it comes from seed.  Christopher Lloyd regarded the rank smell of its foliage as reason not to grow it, but it only smells strongly when bruised, so as long as you don't trample on it there shouldn't be a problem.

Also flowering are Astrantia, foxgloves, a dark red ornamental thistle, and a little Orlaya grandiflora but not as much as I'd like.  The Orlaya resents transplanting and grows best when self-seeded, then dies after flowering, but I don't seem to have had many seedlings this year.  I think the conditions are getting too crowded in the end of the bed where it was.

The new saw is much sharper than the old.  I had been thinking that I was going to need a new one, and am left wondering whether I subconsciously lost the last one deliberately.

Tate part two

At Tate Modern I found myself liking Saloua Raouda Choucair more than I thought I might.  She is a Lebanese artist, and I never heard of her, but then I don't think I have heard of any Lebanese artists.  She was born in Beirut in 1916, studied in Paris, and her work seemed to me to inhabit the same Western mainstream as Picasso, Henry Moore and Naum Gabo, with a nod to the Vorticists. It is not a large exhibition, with only four rooms, and contains paintings, and sculptures and their associated maquettes.  I didn't go so much for the wooden and stone sculptures, though it wasn't that I thought they were wrong-headed or fraudulent, just that I didn't quite share her taste in shapes, but I really liked the delicate nylon and metal constructions in the last room, and many of the paintings, enjoying her use of colour and texture.  When I was a teenager in the seventies, reading romantic novels by Mary Stewart, Beirut was portrayed as a cosmopolitan place of glamour and allure, then suddenly it was plunged in apparently endless civil war.  The thought of it gently haunted me, and still does.  Coincidentally, Mary Stewart shares the year of her birth with Saloua Raouda Choucair.

After that I tried AxME by Ellen Gallagher, another artist I'd never heard of, but I didn't get it at all. Great sheets of cut out newspaper advertisements from the 1960s, decorated with stuck on yellow wigs, and repeated several times over in case you didn't get the idea the first time.  And lots of other stuff.  Maybe by then I was too tired, but I really couldn't be bothered.  On the other hand, I went and sat in front of Rothko's Seagram murals for some time, and found them as endlessly absorbing and beautiful as ever.

The Gresham College free public lecture was great fun, delivered with charm and panache by the college principal, no less, Professor Roderick Floud.  His topic was the making and running of great public gardens from 1660 to 1900, illustrated with four examples of gardens for which he had found extant archives.  He covered the cost of making them, which was mainly the hard landscaping and not the plants, as it still is today, and tried to demonstrate how large that cost was, compared to other capital projects of the time, and translated into current day prices.  Then he did the same thing for running costs, with data on how large an employer the horticultural sector used to be. There was a queue when the doors opened at half past five, and by the time he started at six Barnards Inn Hall was almost full.  Afterwards there were free drinks, and the opportunity to mingle for those who wanted to.  It was all marvellously civilised.

I delivered the Primula japonica  this afternoon, and was rewarded with my guided tour round the garden and a buddleia cutting.  I combined the trip with a visit to the blacksmith at Wakes Colne, who is going to make me a garden sculpture modelled on a postcard of a 1920s silver nitrate print of a close-up photograph of a bean tendril.  He didn't sound like a man who wanted a giant rusted iron bean tendril in his own flowerbeds, but he made a lovely job of the last thing he made for me, and I have confidence in his skill and his eye.  It always seems more economical of time and petrol to combine journeys when possible, so this morning as I needed to visit Barclays on behalf of the beekeepers I used the Manningtree branch so that I could also use the Manningtree tip.  The staff at Jaywick have started to recognise me, and while they haven't said anything so far I don't want to be drawn into an inquisition about whether all this material can really be from my own garden, or whether I must be a jobbing gardener bringing trade waste for disposal.  I'm not, but I don't want to argue about it, so sharing my favours between tips seemed a prudent move.