sand surivors

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

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

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

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

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

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

a swarm of bees in May

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

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

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

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

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

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

outdoor housework

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

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

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

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

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

columbines

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

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

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

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

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

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

bluebells, how do they do it?

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

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

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

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

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

a taxing question

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

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

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

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

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

five flowers yellow

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

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

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

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

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

four flowers blue

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

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

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

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

pretty in pink

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

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

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

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

tales of the foxglove tree

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

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

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

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

all that jazz

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

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

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

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

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

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

minority report

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

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

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

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

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

cooking for the community

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

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

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

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

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

bluebell wood

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

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

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

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

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

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

return to Dulwich

I paid another visit today to the excellent Dulwich Picture Gallery.  I am very fond of this museum. Soane's building, the oldest purpose built art gallery in England, is delightful.  The permanent collection is good, and I have never yet been to a duff exhibition there.  The leafy streets of Dulwich Village make me feel I have slipped through a time warp, and am living inside a song by The Kinks.  It is only thirteen minutes by train out of London Bridge, with trains running every fifteen or twenty minutes.

I have persuaded a couple of friends to visit with me over the years, but both, while proclaiming it an enjoyable experience at the time, have shown no enthusiasm for a return trip.  Or as one put it in my hearing to another friend, it was very nice but I'm not sure we'll do it again.  Fortunately it is very convenient for one ex colleague who defected from North London to the expanses of Blackheath, practically on the doorstep, driveable and parkable, so when we were discussing where to meet today for an art viewing and some lunch, my tentative suggestion that I'd like to see the Hockney prints at Dulwich was seized on with enthusiasm.  Veronese at The National Gallery might have had it for magnificence, but Hockney scored for convenience, especially on a day when the builders were coming round that morning.

Due to the arrival of the builders, we met rather late, and so I had time for a proper look at my favourite bits of the permanent collection first.  There is a limit to how much fine art I can absorb in one day, but Albert Cuyp's Low Countries cows bathed in the romantic light of Italy, and Dulwich's splendid choppy Dutch seascapes, are so different to Hockney that the one doesn't spoil your appetite for the other.  The Gallery has some very good paintings from the Golden Age of Netherlands culture, and some splendid portraits.  I have a soft spot for Van Dyck's poor, beautiful, witty, scandalous Venetia Stanley, dead at the age of thirty three, and am always up for a couple of Gainsboroughs.

The Hockney is great.  I thought it would be, given that Hockney is a superb draughtsman with a lively sense of humour.  I hadn't realised that the Royal College of Art almost refused to let him graduate, a decision which if they'd gone through with it would have put them up there with the record executive who refused to sign the Beatles, or the one who said he'd take the Rolling Stones if they'd get rid of that awful lead singer with the rubbery lips.  I also admire Hockney because he keeps trying new things.  Some work better than others, but it's always more interesting than if he'd worked out how to do Hockneys by about 1985, and then just gone on churning them out for the next thirty years.

Having a late lunch at the gallery cafe works in that you get a table much more quickly than if you try to pile in at half past twelve, but is not so good in that by the time I got back to London Bridge it was already four o'clock, and I decided it was too late to try and fit in another exhibition.  I expect I'll be back in Dulwich at some point over the summer, since the next temporary exhibition is of Winifred and Ben Nicholson and their contemporaries in the 1920s.

chickens' issues

One of the Speckeldies has gone broody.  She's been like that for a week or two, sitting all day in the nesting box, and scuttling furiously back to it if lifted out at the start of chicken exercise time. It seems a waste for her to spend all her time sitting in a tiny box in the dark, and not what all those animal welfare campaigners worked for, but it's her choice.  Except that it isn't, of course, she is captive to her hormones.  Women may justifiably grumble that they have a rough time, what with menstruation and the menopause, but try being a hen.  Your life is not your own.

It made things tricky this morning when I came to clean out the chicken house.  Most of the time I just clear the old litter off the roosting board under their perch, and replace with fresh sawdust, but every now and then the whole house needs doing.  I was going to clean it yesterday, but doing the bees took so long with so little success, I couldn't face cleaning the hen house afterwards.  Broody sat in her nesting box glaring at me while I cleared four bags (four bags!) of sawdust out of the main body of the house, daring me to come near her.  I made reassuring noises every now and then in case she was scared, but she wasn't afraid of me, just hormonal and very cross.

Broody hens do get awfully irritated.  I don't know if it would be better if the eggs were fertilised, and I didn't keep taking them away, and she could hear the developing chicks cheeping inside their shells and know that she was getting somewhere.  Perhaps it's the frustration, the sheer pointlessness, of having to start again every day with a couple of new eggs that never come to anything before the chicken keeper comes, hauls her off them, and confiscates them.  Or maybe broody hens are essentially bad tempered.  When we say that human beings are brooding about something, it doesn't imply obsession in a good way.  The other hens find her glooming presence in the nesting box quite off-putting, and have taken to making impromptu nests in the sawdust in the main house to avoid her, when they need to lay.

After I'd changed the sawdust in the main house and on the roosting board it was time for the final act, to change it in the nesting box.  Given that we are going to eat those eggs I'd like them to be laid on clean sawdust.  I gently lifted her through the door of the nesting box and into the main house.  She turned round and tried to come in again, grumbling.  I fended her off with my gloved hand, which she pecked.  I began to shovel the old sawdust out of the nesting box and into a plastic bag to put on the compost heap, while propping the hinged lid of the nesting box open with my head (this is a design omission.  It could do with a cleat on the side of the house so that I could tie it open.  We always tie the opening sections of the roof shut, to stop the wind flipping them up or foxes nosing them open, but we invented that ourselves, it wasn't in the Golden Cockerel book of poultry house designs).

The broody hen made repeated attempts to climb back into the nesting box before I'd finished, while I fended her off between shovelling with my dustpan, which she pecked vigorously.  Then she gave up, went and sat on the perch, and began to shriek.  You have not heard a bird express irritation until you've encountered a broody with a cob on.  Even when I'd finished changing the sawdust and tied the roof back down, she was still sitting on her perch, yelling with indignation.

It's a great waste that we don't want to hatch out a clutch of eggs, but we can't take the chance of them being cockerels.  Neither of us would have the heart to kill them, and we couldn't risk ending up with more than one.  At the moment we are holding off getting even that, since although they make fine, handsome pets, the hens are so much easier to organise without one, and while so far we've been lucky twice and had sweet natured birds, who's to say that third time round we might not end up with a vicious one?  You can tell that we are not true country dwellers.  I called at a friend's house once, who keeps chickens on a larger scale, and she pointed to a pen of young cockerels in the back garden.  That one's name is Dinner, she said, and that one, and that one.  Our cockerels were called Mr Rooster.

trouble with bees

This afternoon was bee inspection day.  I was sure that the two colonies that had started to think about swarming last time round wouldn't have given up on the idea, and they hadn't, though nor had they swarmed.  There were queen cells in both colonies, sealed and ready for the bees to go, but also eggs.  That implied they weren't about to leave imminently, since the queen normally stops laying a few days before they do, and slims down ready for the flight.  Or so the books say.

I was all prepared to swarm them artificially.  I'd got the kit, and had even bought a little bottle of green water based queen marking paint.  It came packaged in what looked remarkably like a nail varnish bottle, and quite probably was, since the queen marking paint market must be so small that nobody is going to manufacture special glass bottles for it.  It's important to use the proper paint, and not nail varnish, since you need something that won't dissolve the chitin carapace of the insect, otherwise your poor queen will meet a grisly end.  I used to have a queen marking pen, but like all seldom used felt tips, it had dried up by the time I needed it, and I thought the paint might last better.

I could not find the queen of either colony.  I went through them each twice, very carefully, and they were remarkably good about it, but I simply could not see her.  The queen is larger than a worker bee, but not so fat as a drone, with a long abdomen and long legs, and she tends to stride about purposefully on the comb.  I looked and looked, moving my eyes across each brood frame inch by inch, and letting my attention flick round the edges in case I caught sight of her out of the corner of my eye.  It's important to know where you are looking, or you can do what I've done in the past, which is to see the queen, but let your eye travel on and then not be able to find her again.

In the end they had been open for quite long enough, probably too long, though I remembered how long my bee tutor had allowed his colonies to remain open during lessons and tried not to worry about it.  But I was worried that the brood would get cold, and the bees were getting agitated.  All I could think of to do was to split the brood, moving the old box to a new position and putting the second box where the original was, so that the flying bees would return to the new box while the nurse bees remained with the brood in a new site, and I would split the bees between boxes as evenly as possible.  The idea is that if they find themselves suddenly with fewer bees and less brood, this can be enough to change their minds about swarming, for the time being.  It wasn't a very good idea, but as the CIA man says in Argo, it was the least bad idea I had.  Of course it may be that they are merely trying to replace their old queens through supercedure.

It serves me right for having unmarked queens.  All I can do is carry my green paint with me in future, and hope that eventually I see them and can mark them with a spot.  At the end of all this animal husbandry I was quite drained, mentally and physically.  I got back to the house to find that the Systems Administrator had been up to the apiary at one point to check that I was still alive, and not lying in a crumpled heap, a victim of anaphylactic shock.  The poor old SA had fared worse than me, having gone out to the workshop to finish making up spare frames for me.  It was a warm afternoon, the bees were flying, and soon found their way into the workshop, attracted by the smell of wax, and one stung the SA on the arm.  I should have sorted out my supply of frames in the winter, or else the SA should have left frame making until a cold day.  The first batch yesterday afternoon went fine, since it was chilly and the bees were not out and about.

the root of the problem

It was a grey and windy day, spitting with rain, so I retreated to the greenhouse to prick out seedlings.  The germination rate was pretty good, and I didn't have too much of a problem with mould, but I haven't been impressed by the growth rate in most cases.  I don't know whether they have got too warm, despite my reasonably timely application of shading paint, or whether the seed compost was so low in nutrients as to be unable to support growth, or whether some other factor is at play.

I found one culprit on two pots, in the form of root aphid.  These are tiny aphids that live, as the name suggests, on the roots of plants, where they suck sap and spread virus diseases just like regular aphids.  When you tip the contents of the pot out, you will see white, fluffy growths on the roots, and possibly sticking to the inside of the pot.  I had never even heard of them until about nine or ten years ago, when I first encountered them at the plant centre.

I looked at the RHS website to see what was to be done about them, but it didn't mention root aphids at all.  I might email them after the bank holiday asking for advice, since I am a member and providing advice to members is one of the services offered, if only to point me to some relevant page on their site which I have failed to find.  In the meantime I kept searching the vast resources of the world wide web.

Given that so many insecticides have been withdrawn, or made unavailable to amateur users, it's essential to get up to date advice.  A fairly recent article by Which concluded that there was no chemical treatment, and didn't say anything about biological ones.  I had a feeling it wasn't being as helpful as it might be.  Many of the articles I turned up were American, so I had no idea whether any of the products mentioned were available in the UK.  As well as conventional chemical insecticides, they mentioned Neem oil and lemongrass oil as being good aphid treatments.  I know that Neem twigs were used as toothpicks in places like India where it grows, partly because of their natural antiseptic properties, but have never noticed Neem (or lemongrass) oil for sale.  It seems that root aphids are an increasing problem for growers under glass, described as the red spider mite of the new millennium, and that as well as being a nuisance for salad growers, they are a problem for folks raising cannabis plants.  I am not too proud to take advice from a cannabis grower, if I thought they knew what they were talking about when it came to root aphids.

The symptoms you will see above ground are poor foliage growth, discoloured leaves, and wilting, all signs that the root system is not working properly.  I turned out the first of a tray of Geranium maderense I had planned to repot because they weren't growing too well and I thought they might need more space, but found that they had root aphid as well.  I considered for a while whether I could wash the compost, and the aphids, off their roots and repot them in fresh compost, but decided to leave it until I'd had a chance to go to a decent garden centre and see if any drench were available.  Apparently pyrethrum is effective agains root aphids (I think it is pretty lethal to most insects) but I would need a way of getting it down into the root system.

I almost never use insecticides outside, since I would rather leave the beneficial insects unharmed and let nature find its balance, and the birds do a very good job of keeping the plants clean, but I can't see that using pyrethrum on compost under glass is going to hurt.  It is based on a chemical defence found naturally in plants, and doesn't hang around in the soil for years like some of the artificial pesticides that had such a devastating effect on the environment.  Anyway, I'll have to go and see what's available, and what the RHS advises.

race day

We have just been to our first ever point-to-point, at Higham.  Neither of us really knew what to expect, but on the basis that the Systems Administrator has been to multiple Cheltenham meetings, and recently tried Newmarket for the first time, and that I like looking at horses as long as none of them fall over and get killed, and that there would probably be lots of happy dogs among the crowd, and it would be a thoroughly English rural spectacle, we thought we'd give it a whirl.

Entrance to the car park, or rather the field where you park, was up a single track lane which people were simultaneously trying to use as an exit.  We didn't think that was a good idea.  Even at Fakenham they have a one way system.  The field had until very recently been used to graze sheep. You could tell this from the liberal sprinkling of sheep droppings, and the flock of displaced sheep running about in the middle distance.  The lane was lined with bluebells, it was all extremely bucolic, and there were lots of dogs.

The near side of the course was lined with cars, mostly four wheel drives, and crowds of people in tweed jackets consuming picnics, red trouser quotient moderately high.  I was half expecting someone to tell us that we were on the wrong side of the rope and needed to go and stand somewhere else with the hoi polloi, but nobody did, and we worked out that there was no right side of the rope.  I guess you just need to be a registered hunt member to get your car that close to the course.  In between races, and even when the horses are on the far side of the loop, you can walk across the course to view from the middle, and we did, some of the time.

The atmosphere was very jolly, the crowd covering the full age range from three to ninety-three, and there were indeed lots of dogs,  mostly very well behaved, apart from one that ran on to the course during a race, and a labrador with a red lead that was found wandering, according to the announcements over the tannoy.  Terriers are definitely in vogue among the point-to-pointing set. It's as much fun looking at the dogs as it is the horses.  Like at Fakenham, you can go and stand right by the parade ring and see the horses before each race close enough to pat them as they go by, though you wouldn't.  And you can stand right by the jumps, so we did that, watching them take off for one race and land for another.

The race card was confusing, since several horses were entered for more than one race, the trainers and owners only deciding at the last minute which they were going for, and in the main ladies' race one jockey was down to ride three different horses, which would have been worth seeing.  No horses fell, though some riders were unseated.  The SA said that it was not quite the same as seeing them come over the last fence four abreast at Cheltenham, but agreed that it was lovely.  I just like watching them galloping about and jumping, and am happy when none of them get injured.  I suppose I am relieved when the jockeys get round unscathed as well, but after all they are volunteers, while the horses are conscripts.

The Systems Administrator placed one bet, putting twenty pounds on a second favourite at four to one, which the SA said was a good price.  It was more than I'd have bet myself, given that neither of us had a clue what was going on, but the SA had done OK at Newmarket and was betting with bookies' money.  The bookie immediately slashed his odds, followed by all the other bookies in the row.  Obviously a thin market.  I suspect the SA of having done it on purpose, in order to be able to recount the tale of single handedly shifting the odds at subsequent racing gatherings.  The horse lost, so that was the end of the day's betting.

We left before the last two races, the penultimate one having only two entrants anyway, to miss the worse of the fight to get down the narrow lane, and because the wind was getting cold.  As we left we passed one solitary car going the other way, trying to get in.  I shouldn't think they had a hope.

Addendeum  Shock, horror.  According to this evening's Telegraph, Branston Pickle is saltier than seawater, containing 4 grammes of salt per hundred grammes of pickle, equivalent to two thirds of your daily allowance.  But surely nobody eats 100 grammes of Branston at a time.  Out of curiosity I have just got our quite large jar out of the cupboard, and it is 520 grammes, so to get your 4 grammes of salt you'd have to eat a fifth of a jar in one go.  Er, I don't think so.  In a tablespoon or so of pickle there must be more like a gramme, which if you cook from scratch and don't add salt to most things is probably fine in the context of a meal.  The body does need some salt, just not too much of it.

a grand day out

Christy Moore was absolutely brilliant.  I was confident that the music would be good, having listened to enough of his recordings over the years, but I didn't know quite what a charismatic stage performer he was.  Though, given the rave reviews the papers gave his previous Royal Festival Hall appearances, and the Amazon reviews of his live albums that comment on the atmosphere at his gigs, I knew he must be pretty good.  He is extraordinary, part musician, part comedy Irishman, part shaman.  Declan Sinnott is a highly skilled guitarist, and they had signed up an excellent percussionist, but it was Christy's show.  They announced at the outset that there would be no interval, and I was amazed when suddenly it was the last number, and I looked at my watch and two hours had passed.  The encore stretched to four or five more songs.

Dramatically, one long sweep of music worked better than breaking the mood by having an interval. I did feel a twinge of sympathy, though, for anyone with a weak bladder or other bodily needs that meant they needed a loo oftener than two and a half hours.  I laid off the caffeinated drinks from lunchtime onwards, to be on the safe side.

We made a day of it, and kicked off with a swift visit to the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in Islington.  I've been meaning to go there for years without ever quite getting round to it, and their current exhibition of Georgio de Chirico ends this weekend, so it was my last chance to see it. I have had a soft spot since childhood for his vaguely surreal paintings of deserted classical squares, with their architectural ambiguities and incongruous details.  The temporary exhibition focuses on his sculptures.  Suffice to say that Il Duce would probably have liked them.  We didn't, but I'm glad I saw them, finding them ugly and vaguely repellent, but interesting.  The same went for the permanent collection.

The Systems Administrator's reward for indulging me in a visit to a small gallery of twentieth century Italian art was to be taken to lunch at Gem, our Kurdish restaurant of choice.  I had a delicious aubergine thing, while the SA is still trying to work out how they stop their lamb kebabs from falling to bits.  They serve a sort of fascinating stuffed bread, which I think I could try at home, and if we go there again I might try asking the owner what sort of rice they serve.  It has much fatter grains than the usual long grain rice, but is not as sticky as risotto rice or pudding rice, and I liked it very much.

We had thought to go to the Cabinet War Rooms, but after looking at the queue decided to save those for a quiet winter's day when we might share them with fewer visitors and get more of the atmosphere.  Instead, we went and looked at Westminster Abbey.  Confession: it was the first time I had ever been inside.  If a building with comparable historic associations were to be found somewhere that we were on holiday for a week, I would have visited like a shot, but because it's in London, it's always there, and it costs eighteen pounds to go in, I never did.  It is incredibly tall inside, and the gothic tracery of the ceiling is fine, but honestly the best bit is the tombs.

They are squeezed into side chapels like a series of mad, overcrowded junk shops.  The Howards and the Percys have their own chapels, while others contain unlikely bedfellows.  It's a nice touch putting Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I together, united in death as they never were in life.  Brave General Wolfe gets a gigantic and lavish monument, but space is so tight that a heroic young man who died in a sea battle off Bengal is squatting on the back, partially obscured by a set of reposing figures in doublets.  Those who died more recently mostly have to make do with slabs on the floor, and I was touched to see Clem Attlee commemorated near his personal friend and political ally Ernie Bevin.  According to Wikipedia, since the early twentieth century remains have had to be cremated before being interred, because space is getting tight, the only exceptions being the Percys (of course), on account of them having their own vault.

Westminster Abbey is an Old Peculiar, answering to no diocesan bishop, and the Church of England, not being allowed to call the tune, does not pay the piper and contributes nothing towards the running costs, according to the leaflet I picked up.  On that basis I can see why the entrance fee is as high as it is.  In the economics of the arts, one Westminster Abbey entry equates to half a Christy Moore concert, who is in turn worth less than the RFH's most expensive classical pianists this April.