taking a phlegmatic view

Nature gives, and nature takes away.  There was a brisk, drying wind today, after half a gale last night, and bright sunshine, so the effects of yesterday's little bit of rain won't last long.  I ran the hose on the parts of the long bed with the worst soil, and on recently planted areas, moving it every so often.  I was not delighted to discover when I came to plant out my new Watsonia that one of them had root aphid.  On the other hand, I was not so outraged as I might have been if I didn't manage a greenhouse myself, and know how it can sneak in, and if I hadn't worked in plant retail and so understand that to maintain a range as wide as they do at Beeches, plants are necessarily going to spend some time in their pots.

It makes me sigh mentally when I read articles aimed at new gardeners telling them how to buy plants, which solemnly warn them not to touch anything with weeds in the pots, or liverwort, as it will be old, geriatric and not worth planting after being in the pot for too long.  It may be, it may not.  Weeds and liverwort can grow extremely quickly, and many plants (probably most) can live happily in a pot for longer than it takes to sprout a crop of hairy bittercress, as long as they are properly watered.  If you go to a DIY store with a very fast stock turn, you will not see liverwort on the pots (though that is partly because the staff will probably have let the plants die from lack of water first), but you will not get the range and choice of plants either.  Nurseries which carry a choice of four or five different sorts of Watsonia are likely to take a while to sell them all.

I drenched the Watsonia with Provado, along with the Ozothamnus which was also affected, and will check the other pots as I go.  I sent a polite email to Beeches warning them that they had root aphid in their stock, and that while I was dealing with my plants myself, they might want to do something about theirs.  It wasn't a complaint as such, and I'm certainly not going to take the plants back.  I just thought they ought to know.  The Watsonia looked very fine and handsome in the gravel of the turning circle, once planted, and I began to have beautiful fantasies of what interesting hybrid offspring they might produce with the existing soft orange W. pillansii, the brick red and the pink. That is not so unlikely as some of my gardening fantasies, since the books say they do hybridise, and I know the seed is not hard to germinate or grow on, because that's now I got my stock of orange ones in the first place.

It proved quite difficult to find anything on the web about how to grow Ozothamnus selago tumidus, but the description on one US nursery website said that it was not drought tolerant.  That is a pity, and slightly surprising given its silvery leaves, attenuated like a whipcord hebe, look as though they were adapted to overcome water shortage.  On the other hand, I did not do well trying to grow O. rosmarinifolius in the island bed in the back garden, which gets pretty dry, as its lower branches kept going brown and bald.  This irritating habit was shared by the plant centre's stock of Ozothamnus, which tended to make horrible specimens in pots.  But if I put my new plant quite close to the blue summerhouse it should just be out of the arid zone and in the better, damper vein of soil, and it can always get the odd splash when I'm watering the pots outside the summerhouse.

a sprinkling of rain

It rained all morning.  When I went out to let the hens into their run it was the sort of light rain that is barely more than moisture condensing out of the air, but by the time I'd finished breakfast it had solidified into a steady, light drizzle.  That was OK.  The garden had been getting dry, and gentle, continuous rain arriving at a pace which gave it a chance to soak into the soil was useful.

It gave me the chance to catch up with my ironing.  That is not strictly true, since I could have done the ironing at any time I chose.  I could have spent yesterday ironing instead of gadding about the countryside buying obscure plants and looking at lithographs by half-forgotten artists and getting caught up in unpublicised carnivals.  Could have, but didn't.  Housework comes a very poor second to horticulture and art, unless guests are in the offing and the dread deed cannot be put off, or the weather is truly inimical to outside work.  There was a lot of ironing, really an embarrassing quantity, and it was just as well that the rain lasted as long as it did.

It has not soaked deep into the soil, and I'll still need to keep watering here and there, but it has usefully freshened up the top inch, and will give welcome relief to the asters in the back garden, which were starting to look stressed.  They are shallow rooted plants, and will feel the benefit.  I felt the benefit myself as I pulled a couple of buckets of weeds out of the gravel, a task made far easier when the ground has not set like cement.  I was able to dibble out the tufty roots of weed grasses in a very satisfying way, and the rambling roots of the creeping sorrel pulled up in strands, instead of breaking off after the first inch.

A yellow flowered, drought resistant evergreen shrub with fine, bright green foliage called Halimium calycinum is doing so well in the gravel that I began to think I should plant some more.  Life is too short to keep grooming gravel by hand: it needs ground cover.  The hebes I've tried have mostly shrivelled and died, faced with the bottomless, hungry sand and root competition from the hedge, but the Halimium apparently thinks that life is peachy.  I looked up propagation methods, but it doesn't appear to respond to summer cuttings.  Spring (February to March) or autumn (October and November) were recommended.  I tried and failed to imagine cuttings of a sun loving, drought tolerant evergreen rooting successfully in the late autumnal dankness of my greenhouse.  The plant has a graceful, spreading habit, so would layers take root, if I pressed a few stems down into pots of compost?  Lots of woody plants do root where they touch.

I planted my bun shaped conifer, Thuja occidentalis 'Teddy', and the conical Picea glauca 'Sander's Blue'.  I am now totally confused about the ultimate size of the Picea, since I've just clicked on a site which gives the mature height and spread as twenty and ten feet respectively (while still referring to it as Sander's blue dwarf spruce).  That nursery did describe it as slow growing, and another supplier puts it at four feet after ten years, with an ultimate height of twenty.  I definitely want it to stay at the lower end of that range, but the gravel will probably slow it down.  In fact, it may be too dry for it, but something that looks very similar, whose name I don't know because the Systems Administrator planted it, is doing rather well in that area.  But it all depends on the precise run of the vein of especially bad soil.  I planted a couple of evening primroses the other day, no more than five or six feet apart, and one went into soil that felt vaguely moist and workable despite the hot weather, while the other planting site was dust.

Dwarf conifers are still naff.  A passion for dwarf pines just about passes muster, and yews are positively smart, but a love for miniature conifer buns and cones is the garden love that dare not speak its name.  It's forty years since the 1970s dwarf conifers and heathers boom, and as yet neither have recovered.  I don't care.  I am as keen on obscure woodlanders that produce tiny sprays of green flowers lasting approximately three days as the next well brought up gardener, but that doesn't stop me liking dwarf conifers.

a trip to the other side of the county

I went to Beeches Nursery today, just outside Saffron Walden in the village of Ashdon.  I got lost on the way there, but that was nothing new.  I have never yet managed to find my way to Beeches without getting lost.  The Systems Administrator and I have even driven up and down the main drag at Ashdon, knowing that the nursery was there but unable to spot it.  The cause of my downfall this time was Finchingfield, which is very stingy with road signs next to its quaint village pond.  You navigate your way over the narrow bridge, peering over the hump for oncoming traffic and reassured by the last sign which pointed your way across the bridge, and then nothing.  Apart from a sign warning you to beware of ducks in the road.

I kept left, and fairly soon found myself in Great Bardfield, which meant that I should have kept right.  At that stage I wasn't lost as such, merely in the wrong place, but then I tried to cut across country instead of retracing my steps to Finchingfield and really did get lost.  I should have known better.  The last time I actually wanted to go to Great Bardfield I couldn't see which road to take out of Finchingfield, while Bardfield itself is a confusing village.

Part of my journey lay along Monday's Tour de Essex route, and so I did check on the Essex County Council website before setting out that there weren't due to be any road closures as early as today. I spotted a reasonable attempt at bunting in a couple of the villages, and two yellow painted bicycles tied to a fence, but the only sheep I passed (Essex is not great sheep country) were just plain vanilla sheep coloured.  There was one optimistic sign for a Tour de France campsite, but in general I didn't get the impression that north west Essex was fizzing with anticipation.

The precise location of Beeches is as unclear as ever when approaching travelling towards Saffron Walden, because their sign is obscured by a telegraph pole and a truly enormous Scots thistle, but this time round a sixth sense told me that I had more or less arrived, and that I should park on the verge and continue the search on foot.  I found them almost opposite.  They have no customer car parking as such, and visitors have to shuffle on to the verge, or leave their cars by the kerb on the main road.  It's not ideal.

The plants, however, are sublime, and I amassed a couple of Watsonia, one pink and one brick red, a tiny whipcord Ozothamnus of a type I never saw before, a climbing Aconitum, a Sanguisorba with particularly striking leaves and an upright habit, an allegedly hardy silver leaved begonia with coral flowers though this one is going in the conservatory, and a Macleaya.  The Macleaya was the least rare thing on the list and not particularly worth driving to Saffron Walden for, but I wanted one.  I used to grow it, and it gradually died out, which may be a lesson to me that it will not do, but I have improved the soil in the bed where I intend to put it, and other things seem happy there.  I was so pleased with this haul that as I was about to pay I asked whether they had any willow leaved gentians about, or ever did them, since I hadn't seen any in the shade tunnels.  It turned out that they had, so I bought one of those, though the assistant warned me that I'd need to find it deep soil that was reliably damp.  He also told me that the secret with Watsonia was to water them generously in February and March, before the flowering season.  That would explain why my potted ones in the greenhouse were so sad and non-flowering, as I am very nervous about over watering things in pots in February.

From Ashdon to Saffron Walden, to visit the Fry Art Gallery.  I hadn't been for two or three years, and wanted to catch their temporary exhibition of the splendidly named Bernard Cheese before it closes next weekend.  Having seen it, I have to regretfully conclude that the gallery did hit on the most appealing picture by a wide margin for their promotional material.  It was quite a nice exhibition, and it's always good to see this year's offering from the Fry's permanent collection (they don't have room to hang it all at once), but if I'd driven that far and not wanted to go to Beeches, I'd scarcely have felt it was worth the effort.

It was an odd order of events, to go the plant nursery before the gallery, but I took the view that it wasn't going to be too hot, so I'd be able to leave the plants in the car for an hour or two, and that it would be easier finding Saffron Walden from Ashdon than vice versa.  Saffron Walden's one way system and signposts leave something to be desired.  Including the tourist ones, since the Fry Gallery does not feature on the map in the long stay car park or on the signposts when you follow the path from the car park to the town centre.  Getting to the long stay was something of a performance, since the road alongside the common was suddenly closed to traffic ahead of me, and a convoy of traffic including a bus was sent on a winding journey through the neighbouring residential streets.  They appeared to be setting up some sort of fair on the common, which I assumed was something to do with the Tour de Essex.

The real fun and games started on leaving the car park to go home.  There were no notices in the car park, or the town, warning of traffic delays this Saturday.  None.  Following the signs for Thaxted I began to wonder why the streets were lined with so many people, some clutching balloons. Was it a preliminary Tour warm-up event that the council hadn't put on their website?  Caught in a stationary queue of vehicles all trying to head for Thaxted, I wound down the window to a man in a Rotary Club t-shirt and a luminous vest who explained that I might be stuck there for a while as the roads were being closed for the Carnival.  Carnival?  What sodding carnival?  The approaches to Saffron Walden were lined with various banners welcoming the Tour on Monday 7th July, but nowhere was a Carnival on the afternoon of Saturday 5th mentioned.  I had seen some as-yet undeployed Road Closed signs earlier, but had assumed that they related to Monday.

The man in the vest suggested I go a different way, but that failed, as the road ahead was also closed, followed by the road behind.  The residential side streets of Saffron Walden began to fill up with traffic trying to dodge the carnival and escape.  Looking at the number of three point turns being executed by increasingly stressed drivers in narrow streets lined with the residents' cars, it was only a matter of time before somebody drove into someone.  Finally, the parade passed, we were allowed out of our side street, and followed the procession at a snail's pace towards Thaxted, until our ways diverged.

As tourist days out go, I'd say that Beeches fully lived up to expectations.  Interesting plants, helpful and knowledgeable staff, worth anybody's time visiting who is really interested in plants.  But for sheer unhelpfulness to non-locals, and lack of signs and information, Saffron Walden gets the wooden spoon, and my award for most rubbish tourist town of 2014.  If I go anywhere more annoying in the rest of this year, I'll let you know.

starting to flag

It is getting rather hot to garden comfortably.  Twenty-nine degrees somewhere in Essex today, according to Radio 4.  It's the same every year, when we don't have a washout summer.  I look at my diary, relatively blank since it's the off season for lunchtime concerts, and friends tend to be away, and imagine that all of those clear days will be spent productively getting lots done in the garden.  Outside under the sun, with my shirt sticking to my back, work progresses slowly, and I get to the end of the afternoon with a vague sense of surprise that I've accomplished so little.  July and August are simply not productive months.

This is why the gardening days of spring and autumn are so valuable.  Planned winter work can be washed out, or frozen out, and in any case the days are so short, but September and March still bring twelve hours of daylight, and the cooler air puts a bounce in the gardener's step.  The high days of summer see the gardener tottering around at a snail's pace in comparison.

Our pile of old stems and branches waiting to be burnt is turning into a mountain.  First of all the freshly cut green branches needed to dry out so that they'd burn without smoking unduly, and now the surrounding area is so dry, the Systems Administrator is afraid to start a bonfire in case the flames jump to the rest of the heap and start a major conflagration.  It's got to the point where even having the hosepipe to hand on standby, just in case, does not provide sufficient reassurance.

Rain is forecast for tomorrow.  I'm taking this with a pinch of salt, since recent forecasts have mysteriously petered out before reaching us.  Sometimes it has even rained in Colchester, but not a drop by the time you get half way to Clacton.  It sounds as though this time round we will get some rain drops, enough that if you were painting the outside of your house you wouldn't reckon on getting another coat on tomorrow, but whether it will be enough to do the soil any good is another matter.  I ran the hose today on some shrubs in the front garden that were struggling, not trusting the forecast.

The heat has killed the cats' appetites.  You can see this in the reduced pile of tins that goes out for recycling.  Even the chickens are eating less.  I went to fill up their food today, worried that I should have done it yesterday and they might be running out, and the hopper was still three quarters full.  I suppose that hens are not large animals, and they have to spend their lives outdoors or in an unheated hen house.  In the winter they must expend a huge proportion of the energy they consume on just keeping warm.

Tour de Essex

I'm impressed by the effort they're putting into the Tour de France in Yorkshire, all those multi-coloured dyed sheep, the yards and yards of bunting, and humorous yellow bicycles and upended pairs of legs inserted into hedges and manure heaps.  They're really taking it seriously, though the Systems Administrator, who likes the Tour de France as a sporting spectacle and read up on the Yorkshire leg, says that grafting the official Tour terminology (en Francais, naturelment) on to the northern English place names has led to some incongruous pairings, as the Cote de Buttertubs is followed by the Cote de Grinton Moor.

It's more than we seem to be doing in Essex, where the only publicity I've seen is a warning on the electronic traffic information signs around Colchester's inner ring road that the Tour de France visits Essex on Monday 7 July.  At least it makes a change from exhortations not to drink and drive, not to drive when tired, to watch mirrors for bikes, or (for the first half of 2012) to prepare for the Olympics.  I presume the original purpose of the signs was to give advance notice of major delays on the main roads in the region, to allow us to alter our plans if we wanted to instead of charging on to the A12 or M11 to join the ten mile line of stationary traffic, but they don't usually, even when the radio traffic updates are warning of trouble on the region's roads.  Probably there is no budget to pay anybody to put real time information in.

The SA, who is better informed than I am about the Essex leg as well, says that it is going through Finchingfield.  That's a sensible place to send it.  Finchingfield is a quite ridiculously pretty village, and will give a far more benign impression of Essex to any potential tourists watching on the telly than if the Tour had gone through (with no disrespect to the inhabitants) Harlow or Thundersley.  As far as I can remember there isn't room in Finchingfield for more than a few dozen spectators to park, but never mind.

I did read on the BBC website back in April that an artist had been commissioned to come up with ideas for artworks to enliven Essex's roads during the Tour.  She suggested the three seaxes which are the county symbol done in the colours of the Tour jerseys, yellow, green, and white with red spots.  The council said that they loved the idea but it was too colourful and the seaxes would have to be in red.  The artist's reaction was that she was not really interested in painting the county logo on the roads.  A quick Google search has revealed that someone is also mowing some bicycle shapes into the North Weald Airfield with the help of some Writtle students, which will be visible from the air, but I had to look that up.  It wasn't in the Essex County Standard, when I browsed through it in the normal way, or the East Anglian Daily Times (though that should more accurately be named the Suffolk Daily Times.  It's a good paper, but very Suffolk oriented).

So maybe they're getting more excited about the Essex leg of the Tour down in Chelmsford and Epping, but it hasn't made it on to Sky News like Yorkshire has.  In north east Essex I'm afraid it is largely passing us by.

talk two

Another day, another talk.  I have mixed feelings about doing talks on summer afternoons.  On the one hand, it seems like a waste of good gardening time, but on the other hand it is nicer than flogging up and down the A12 in the dark in driving rain or fog.  Today's audience were a garden club, fairly close to home so no A12 required anyway.  They were a nice bunch, though I was disappointed not to find more of a plant stall.  I spoke to them before, years ago, and bought a rather jolly bromeliad which produces dangling green and red flowers on stalks.  I keep forgetting its name, although it is about the most common variety going, but still have it in the conservatory. The individual rosettes die after flowering, but it always makes more.

I came home via the Clacton Garden Centre, so that I could stock up on Thomas Treats and horticultural grit.  The fat indignant tabby has developed a passion for Thomas Treats, and while she never used to get any kind of titbit or special food because she was such a good doer that she didn't need coaxing to eat, it began to seem rather harsh to penalise her robust health with a Spartan regime.  So now she gets three biscuits, and three only, after breakfast.  She shouts for more, but as I tell her, they are meant as treats, not as meal replacements.  The clue's in the name.

While I was there I had a quick look at the plants, and discovered they had an unexpectedly good conifer section, with some quite unusual varieties priced rather modestly, so found myself buying another dwarf pine, a triangular Picea and a marvellously bun-shaped Thuja.  Standing in their pots outside the front door, waiting to be planted tomorrow, the Picea and the Thuja look like an introduction to cubism in conifer form, plant life reduced to the sphere and triangle.  The only thing that diminished my pleasure in my new conifers was the discovery that I could have bought Pinus sylvestris 'Chantry Blue' which I got from a local semi-retired conifer grower, now by appointment only, for about four pounds less than I paid for it.

To console myself I added a canna to the basket.  It didn't come with a name, but I liked the purplish tinge of the foliage, and the fact that it had four separate shoots.  I expect the flowers will be bright red or orange, either of which would be good.  Cannas seem to like life in the conservatory, out of the wind and frost free with a bit of extra warmth.  My existing plant has cherry red flowers, a good shade, and rather narrow (for a canna) mid green foliage.  Unfortunately, when I checked my spreadsheet of things planted to remind myself what it was called, I discovered I hadn't recorded it.

Another evening, another committee meeting.  It is the turn of the beekeepers, so I had better have a look at our online bank account and find out how much money we have got, so that I can share the good news.  And try and work out what is owed for raffle prizes to the person who organises the raffle.  She gives me her supermarket receipts, and I stick them in a file, but it is still difficult to keep track of all the little bags of change that people thrust into my hands at meetings for raffle proceeds, tea money, sales of leaflets at country fairs and everything else that they get up to.  Still, I don't have any more talks booked for six weeks, so once the blizzard of beekeeping financial activity engendered by the Tendring Show is out of the way, I can forget about charity volunteering and the Big Society can get on without me for a month.

late post

This will be a brief blog post, because I have just got in from doing a woodland charity talk, and there wasn't time before.  Or at least, to be strictly accurate, there was exactly as much time as there is in any other day, but I didn't use any of it to post.

Traffic around here is so unpredictable.  I left so as to give a generous margin for delays, as is prudent with any journey involving the A12 (there were hold-ups this morning due to a breakdown at Chelmsford, and everything ran incredibly smoothly.  Thirty four minutes by the Skoda's trip computer and I had reached the signposts for the Witham exit.  It can take longer than that to get to the top of Clingoe Hill, this side of Colchester, on a bad day.

So I would have had time to write the post while waiting in the car, if I had taken my laptop, now it has a battery which actually holds a charge, and a dongle, which I could have borrowed from the Systems Administrator.  But I didn't, and read a book instead.

I was talking to a WI group.  They were nice friendly people, but keen on doing everything properly, though they did not sing Jerusalem, which I was rather sorry about.  There was some formal business to get through before I did my piece, which I was expecting, but afterwards I spent too long chatting over tea and home made Madeira cake, and so had not packed up my equipment and made a graceful exit before the meeting resumed.  After that I was trapped for the duration, since I was seated diagonally opposite to the door, and could not very well stomp about collapsing my projector table and tramping to and fro in front of the table where the chairman and secretary were sitting, and while people were addressing the meeting.

The report on a national forum of some sort by the group's delegate did have a sort of surreal quality, as an address by Andrew Motion on his career as a poet was followed by the presentation of a trophy for a winning fruit cake.  Maybe one of these years I'll join a WI, though I'd better see how I get on with Plant Heritage first.

Somebody wanted my contact details for a couple of other groups she belongs to, which is always an encouraging sign.  I'm doing the same talk again tomorrow afternoon, so I'll be nicely rehearsed for that one, and won't even need to unpack the car in the meantime, apart from collecting some fresh twigs, since tonight's specimens will have wilted by then.

in the gravel garden

One year's seeding, seven years' weeding.  Unfortunately this year I have not got to the fine leaved annual weed grass in the gravel in time.  I'm clearing it away now, but most of the seeds have already fallen, so there'll be more next year, and in the years after that.  It is frustrating how the wretched stuff manages to come up even through the mats of thyme, which are barely acting as a weed suppressant.  How does Prince Charles cope with his great carpets of thyme at Highgrove? Does he have brigades of gardeners to hand weed and manicure them?  I suppose he probably does.

At least the thyme is seeding itself as well, so maybe if I feed it with fish, blood and bone it will thicken up and do a better job of smothering out the grass.  I've largely eliminated that particular specie of weed grass (there are lots of others) from the long bed through the generous use of compost and Strulch, but that isn't an option with the gravel.

We went the other evening to the Green Island Gardens in Ardleigh, as part of the horticultural society tour.  I am not actually a member of the society, but some friends are.  I had visited before, but a good decade ago, and things had come on considerably since then.  The gardens include some areas of gravel, and I looked at them with keen interest to see what was growing, while noting the owner's comments that the site was badly drained and water tended to lie on the surface.  Not like our areas of gravel planting, then, which sit on pure sand to a depth of goodness knows how many feet.  Water will lie in the compacted tyre tracks of the lettuce fields, but left to its own devices carrying nothing heavier than foot traffic, it is impossible to get water to lie in the front garden.

Green Island Gardens gravel area had a rather nice pink flowered Watsonia.  The owner explained that this was only possible due to the benign microclimate.  My orange flowered one has come through one winter, and is sending up flower spikes, but last winter was very mild, so it remains to be seen whether it will be viable long term.  In the short term the clump which was planted out last year is looking much, much happier than the ones overwintered in pots and planted out this year, which show no signs of flowering.

Apart from that her gravel plantings were made up of plants which I too use, though her Parahebe perfoliata was bigger than mine.  I first realised that a good place to grow this was in gravel when I saw one doing very well at a Wrabness Open Gardens several years ago, and since then I've seen it used that way at Fullers Mill.  In a pot it will blacken and die as soon as look at you, if over watered, which may account for it being out of fashion in commerce.  I got my plant in a little nine centimetre pot at an RHS show in Vincent Square, and the nurseryman who sold it to me lamented that it was so out of favour.  It is a curious looking plant, whose grey leaves held in opposite pairs clasp the stem so as to create the impression that the stem grows right through them.  The blue flowers carried on droopy tipped spikes are pleasant, but it's the foliage that's the real draw.

getting to the root of it

It might be coincidence, but the collection of tender plants by the formal pond seems to be growing and flowering better since I went around the pots and dosed them all with a systemic insecticidal drench.  I worked out a method of keeping track of which I'd done, after a false start where I rapidly lost count, which was to put a small pebble on the surface of the compost as I treated each pot.  So many had root aphid when I investigated that I decided I'd better assume that everything that had overwintered in the greenhouse might be infected.  Pelargoniums, Geranium maderense, the dwarf pomegranates, some pale yellow marguerites I took as cuttings from last year's plant, a dwarf leafed grey helichrysum also from cuttings, Tulbaghia, Agapanthus, the lot.  Since the dose they seem to making more leaves, throwing out more flowers, and generally looking healthier.  It could be the weather, but I think it is the liberating effect of not having their root systems preyed on by sap sucking insects.

I spent today mostly in the greenhouse, continuing the process of working my way from one end to the other and treating or throwing away everything.  Again, it seems to me that pots of seedlings I treated, not without misgivings since the drench was strong stuff to give to tiny plants, have turned a better colour and are growing more vigorously, as are the larger seed raised plants I pricked out into modules a while ago.

Root aphid, it seems, will go for almost anything.  I first saw it when I was working at the plant centre, on conifers and bamboo, though it certainly wasn't widespread.  As I now know, the only way to prevent it from becoming widespread if growing in containers under glass is to take prompt action at the first signs of trouble.  I've found it on herbaceous plants, shrubs and succulents.  The visible signs above ground are that the plant lacks vigour, and the foliage can turn dull or unhealthily bronzed or yellow.

Looking to the future, and hoping the root aphid will be relegated to history, a learning experience, before they have time to grow any roots, I've also been taking cuttings.  Sedum 'Abbeydore' and a prostrate form whose name I've lost but which makes great generous red leaved potfuls on the terrace (or patio), a small leaved form of myrtle, Santolina, Fuchsia 'Lottie Hobby' (a sweetie with tiny, vivid pink flowers), Eucomis (putting into practice what I was taught at the Plant Heritage propagation morning), Teucrium fruticans 'Azureum' (needs bottom heat according to consensus of opinion on the internet), Salvia lavandulifolia (worked last year) and a variegated leaf geranium with enormously cheerful cherry red flowers (salvaging the last shoots before consigning the very shabby parent plant to the compost heap).  I already have some cuttings from the geranium coming along, so if this lot strike I'll have more than I need.  Gardening friends, be warned.

Addendum  I gave the swarm another two pounds of sugar made into syrup this morning, and as of this evening they were still in residence.  We were left with rather a lot of bees buzzing around outside the garage where the swarm had been, so I put a nucleus hive there for them, and they mostly went in, especially once it started raining.  Come early evening I took it up to the apiary and put it down by the big hive with the swarm, hoping that the stragglers would recognise the smell of their own colony and return to the fold.  Then I put the rest of the equipment away in the garage, so that come tomorrow if any bees are still hanging around it will be a case of move along now, nothing to see here.

further confessions of an inept swarm collector

I set the alarm for five o'clock this morning, to go and see to the swarm before they were out and about, and woke at two minutes to.  Old habits die hard.  My plan was to carry the small nuc box up to the apiary, with a hankie stuffed in the door so that the bees couldn't escape, transfer a small colony that was not doing well since my failed attempt at swarm control to my other nuc box, then transfer the swarm to the liberated full size box.  On seeing the swarm Plan A ran into an immediate snag, since there was still a small beard of bees on the front of the hive, so I wasn't going to be able to carry it anywhere.  Squashing bees is wrong, not just because it is a waste and needlessly cruel to the bees, but because all the other bees can smell what you've done, and it makes them cross.

Changing the running order of events, I took the spare nuc box to the apiary to do the swap, giving myself a shock when I forgot which of two hives was the non-doing one, and lifted the lid of the neighbouring hive which was the other half of the swarm control to be greeted by a sea of bees which were doing very nicely, thank you.  There was a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing as I forgot my hive tool and the roof of the nuc box, and had to walk up and down the meadow several times while reflecting that early morning was very beautiful, and that I ought to get up this early more often, if only I were not so infernally sleepy.  Eventually I'd got the little existing colony safely housed, and all the parts of their old box back down to the house.  I am sure that people who keep their bees away from home instead of at the far end of their garden learn to be far more organised when it comes to remembering all the bits of kit they are going to need.

On opening the nuc box with the swarm in it, I saw why they had been so slow to go inside last night, and why a few had camped out overnight.  It was absolutely full of bees.  I lifted the frames into the full size box, wishing that more of the bees would hang on to them instead of falling on to the floor of the nuc or clinging to the walls, then tipped and shook as many bees as I could out of the nuc box into the full sized one, added enough frames to fill it, and put the lid on.  Rather a lot of bees had fallen on to the ground, and I hoped that the queen was not among them.  As long as she was inside the latest box, the rest would probably join her.

Then I made a pint of sugar syrup and put it on the hive over the hole in the crown board so that the bees could reach it, with the roof supported by an eke, hoping that if I bribed them with food they would look kindly on their new quarters, after being rudely transferred from pillar to post.  The swarm was conveniently sited immediately under the sitting room window, which meant that while the bees could under no circumstances live there long term, I had a ringside view of what they were up to.  After a quarter of an hour or so I became suspicious that the bees outside the box were gathering around the base of the eke, with no activity around the entrance hole, went to check and found that in the confusion I had put the entrance block in sideways, so that there was no hole.  I had to disturb them yet again while I prised the box up far enough to turn the block by ninety degrees.

As of half past five they are still in their box.  I was afraid I'd messed them around so much that they would simply abscond.  It drizzled for most of the afternoon, which may have helped keep them put.  The final step, once it is almost dark and they have stopped flying for the day, will be to stuff something in the door, strap the box up and take it in the wheelbarrow up to the apiary.  That account of the task ahead glosses over one or two unknowns, like that I have to get the eke off before strapping them up, because it is heavy and I can't have the bucket feeder rolling around. Which means I have to lift off the roof, take away the feeder and the eke, and get the roof on again without lots of bees spilling out everywhere.

I hope I manage to keep them, since apart from being a large swarm they are fabulously good natured bees to put up with being shaken around so many times, and in thundery weather.  I suppose the moral of the story is that when I saw that one of the colonies from the split brood was going backwards, I should have switched them back into a small hive at once, to leave myself with a spare large one, just in case.  But the idea of hiving a swarm so large that it wouldn't fit into a nuc box didn't feature in my plans.

Addendum  I looked out of the bathroom window, after the bees were fed and settled and I could resume my normal getting up routine and take a shower, and saw a small rabbit hopping nonchalantly around in the rose bed.  I rushed downstairs, fortunately still fully clothed, seized Our Ginger from his basket where he was having an after-breakfast snooze, carried him down to the back garden and stood him in the edge of the rose bed.  I hoped he would be able to smell the fresh scent of rabbit, but if he could he chose to ignore it, since he just stared vaguely at the mass of rose stems and dying Camassia leaves without metamorphosing into a fierce hunter.  I went and collected the big tabby as well, as he was around.  He did at least stay on the lawn looking at the border for a long time, but I think he was simply trying to work out what he'd gone downstairs for. No rabbit carcases appeared for the rest of the day, but to show that they have a sense of humour one of the cats left a small dead shrew in the hall.

a swarm of bees in June

Yesterday it was a passing dog, and today it was a swarm of bees.  I don't think they were out of any of my hives, since they didn't look ready to release swarms, but you never quite know with bees.  I was suspicious yesterday that there were rather too many bees interested in the stack of spare hive parts in the corner of the garage.  Was it simply that they could smell the remnants of honey in the supers, or were they scouts looking for a new home?  When bees are swarming, the main swarm sends out advance parties to research likely sites for a fresh colony, and the swarm then votes on where to go by some method not yet fully understood by science.  Bees will come to investigate the smell of wax and honey, which is why the beekeepers always hold candle making days before April or after September, when there won't be too many bees out and about.  But I always keep my spare equipment in the garage, and the bees aren't normally that interested.  I was suspicious.

All was quiet in the garage first thing this morning, but when I opened the door to get my gardening tools, I was met by a cloud of bees waiting to come in.  Hmn.  I donned my bee suit, went through the pile of boxes to check that they didn't already have bees living in them, and stacked them neatly on the paving outside the garage, ready to put away later.  They needed sorting out anyway, since they were not in a sensible order, with things I only need in the autumn like ekes for feeding having ended up on top of the heap.

Mid morning, as I weeded and planted in the back garden, over the sound of Radio 3 I began to hear the unmistakable sound of a swarm in flight.  At close quarters it is loud, resonant, and unlike anything else.  A cloud of insects appeared by the end of the house, swirling in all directions, and circled around the pile of equipment.  Looked like I had trapped myself a swarm, mine or somebody else's.  After a while the Systems Administrator appeared looking agitated, and wanting to know whether I had seen the bees.  I explained that I had, but that I couldn't do anything about them until they had stopped flying.  I was pretty sure they were going into the boxes, so once they had decided which box to live in and formed a cluster, I would dismantle the stack and shake them into a nuc box, and take the box up to the apiary.  The Systems Administrator went and lit a small fire in the grate, in case this plan did not work and they went down the chimney.

And that is as far as I got with my plan to deal with the bees when it was time to go on a local horticultural society garden visit.  I wanted the bees to settle down in their stack and stop flying before I tried to transfer them anyway, so there was no point in not going to see the garden.  I will let you know how it went in due course.

our temporary dog

I was weeding by the compost bins when a flash of movement caught my eye.  I looked up in time to see a brownish streak, of which my mind registered nothing more than that it was brown, followed in hot pursuit by a small terrier.  My mind instantly categorised the brown streak as a cat, and I began to worry about the safety of Our Ginger, given that he does sometimes go up the side of the wood, while thinking that given the direction the two had appeared from, it was probably the neighbours' cat.  Our Ginger does not go very far up the meadow, so the terrier would have been well into our property before they met.  The dog having flushed out the neighbours' cat in the lane and followed it all the way down seemed more likely.

I got up from my knees, and set off in search of the terrier, the quarry, and any reassuring sight of our cats as not being involved.  I caught a brief glimpse of the dog, as it grinned at me amiably and disappeared under the workshop, but no cats at all, neither ours nor anybody else's.  I went to tell the Systems Administrator, who was mowing the lawn, that we had a strange and predatory dog on the premises, and not to let the chickens out until it was rounded up.

After a while the terrier came out from under the workshop, and flopped down at my feet, looking friendly.  It was mostly wire haired Jack Russell, elderly and slightly overweight, though as I had seen with an impressive turn of speed when aroused.  It had a red collar, but no tag, telephone number, or name of either the dog or (more pertinently) the owner.  I hung on to the collar while the SA found a piece of rope, and we took it to the front door and gave it a drink of water.  The terrier seemed entirely happy to be kidnapped, and so it seemed that until we could find whoever had lost it, we were in temporary custody of a dog on a piece of rope.

The SA took the terrier down to the public footpath by the farmyard, to see if any dog walkers were missing a dog, while I walked up the meadow to the apiary to see if I could hear anybody calling. They were ploughing in the field next to us, which made it difficult to tell whether anyone was shouting or whistling or not.  The SA returned, still with the dog, saying that there was no-one about on the footpath at all.  The SA recognises many of the local dogs from their walks, but didn't recall meeting this one before.

After that we were not sure who to call.  The RSPCA?  But nowadays they seem mainly concerned with prosecutions for animal cruelty.  The police?  I rang the non-urgent police number, but was told that the police no longer had any responsibility for reports of lost dogs, and that I needed to call the Dog Warden.  It took several goes with the council to track down the dog warden, at which point the SA appeared to say that somebody was calling at the far end of the wood.  The end of the wood is so congested with fallen trees, brambles and blackthorn that their chances of making their way through to pursue or reclaim their dog were pretty much nil, and after much shouting we agreed to take the dog to the entrance of the next farm up the road beyond the lettuce farm, so the SA got to go for a walk to the end of the lane and round the corner leading a dog on a piece of rope.

Presently the SA returned, saying that the dog lived in one of the cottages on the corner, and was being walked by somebody who wasn't her owner when she broke her lead and set off in hot pursuit of next door's cat.  She was a rescue dog, who could never be let off the lead because she would instantly disappear, with the added quality of being happy to make friends and move in with anybody.  The next door's cat reappeared while this was being explained, looking none the worse for its experience.  I'd have thought, though, that if you had a dog you knew was liable to bolt off at the sight of a cat or a rabbit, it would be sensible to put your name and phone number on its collar. At least we'll know where to take her if she calls round again.

my turn to cook

I have been unleashing my inner domestic goddess, and cooking.  This evening I blind baked a shortcrust pastry case that will form the basis of a flan for tomorrow's lunch.  I meant to make it last night for today's lunch, but ran out of time and energy, and since I was out all of this morning I couldn't have made a quiche for lunch anyway.  While the pastry was cooking I dissolved a can of caramelised condensed milk plus additional brown sugar in some ordinary milk, a task so mundane I'm not sure it counts as cooking.  This will form the basis of Dulche du Leche ice cream, once it is chilled, and frozen down with even more cream.  And I made a bread and butter pudding for breakfast.  Mine, not the Systems Administrator's, who does not share my enthusiasm for bread puddings.  It has all the right ingredients of breakfast (bread + butter = toast), eggs, milk and raisins (components of muesli), but not necessarily in the right order.

Last night's supper was a one-pot exercise in Mitteleuropean nostalgia from Gretel Beer, erdaepfelgulash, or potato goulash.  You peel and slice your potatoes, she suggests to about the thickness of a pencil, chop an onion, snip up a slice of bacon, fry the bacon lightly, add the onions and fry the mixture some more, then add the potatoes, salt and pepper, paprika, a pinch of marjoram, and caraway seeds.  I didn't bother with the salt, because I don't, except for bread, and substituted a little smoked paprika for the caraway seeds because the SA doesn't like them.  Stir it around, add enough water to cover, and some frankfurters chopped up.

I used Waitrose's best Bavarian ones, which were not as alarmingly pink as some.  Years ago, I tried her recipe for beef stuck through with frankfurters, and the pink dye from the sausages spread out through the meat like an O level chemistry chromograph.  It was vaguely off-putting.  On the basis that the Germans are very strict about what goes into their beer, I hoped that the best Bavarian frankfurters would be similarly pure.  It was a good stew, for very little effort, and I recommend it.

Tonight's stuffed green peppers, except that they are red because that was what needed using up in the fridge, created altogether more washing up, since they are cooked in a home made tomato sauce which involves rubbing a cooked tomato and fried onion mixture through a sieve.  I always feel that anything that requires ingredients to be pushed through a sieve really calls for the services of a thirteen year old scullery maid, but we don't have one of those.  The minced pork is mixed with more fried onion, and par-boiled rice, but not cooked before being stuffed into the peppers, and I am now nervous (a) that the resulting dish will be fatty and (b) that it won't be cooked through, and I'll give us food poisoning.  You can see why people resort to ready meals.

Addendum  There is an entertaining online English vocabulary quiz, which I came to via a link from an article in the Telegraph.  The Telegraph presents it as research into gender differences in vocabulary, but whatever it is investigating I'm pretty sure it's not that.  You have to identify a series of genuine and made-up words as genuine or made-up, with heavy but unspecified penalties for false positives.  The spellings are American, and some of the words are tricky not because you can't recognise their component parts and hazard a guess at what they might mean, but because you aren't sure whether the root word declines or conjugates or whatever the term is like that.  My score jumped from 73 per cent at the first go to 87 per cent on the second.  I don't know how one amalgamates scores from multiple tests when giving subjects just one practice run can change their performance so much.  When second time around I went for feedback on the true words I hadn't known (no false positive either time) I discovered that they were measuring response times.  Which still doesn't let me work out what the experimenters are actually testing for.

sombre times in Colchester

The verges on either side of the road leading into Colchester are still sealed off by the police. There are police cars parked at each end, on both sides of the dual carriageway, and the verges are closed to pedestrians by swathes of blue and white police tape.  Essex Police have brought in reinforcements from outside: yesterday the Systems Administrator saw a Met Police dog team van. It was on yesterday's news that they had drained a nearby lake in the search for the weapon, or any other clue, and this afternoon it was announced a resident had found a knife in the road in the nearby Greenstead estate.  All of this is of course because of the fatal stabbing of Saudi graduate student Nahid Almanea, in broad daylight.

And on Sunday morning as we walked through Colchester Castle Park from the car park in Cowdray Avenue to a friend's house in the Dutch Quarter for her birthday lunch, we passed the posters appealing for witnesses or information about the killing of James Attfield, who was stabbed more than a hundred times.  That attack took place less than three months ago, at the end of March.

The headlines in the local paper today screamed that we have a maniac at loose among us.  The police are being more guarded in their public statements as to whether the two murders are linked. They might be, they might not.  The death of the poor Saudi student has been getting regular cover on the national news bulletins.  The killing of James Attfield didn't get so much national attention (though there is an appeal on the Crimewatch website), which makes me rather uncomfortable.  Is it that murders which happen late at night seem less threatening to the rest of us than those which happen in the middle of the morning, when anybody might be out and about?  Does the gender of the two victims have anything to do with it?  Did the fact that James Attfield had previously suffered a brain injury in a car accident make his a less compelling death?  That's a nasty thought.

I rather wish the police had been more careful and nuanced in how they expressed the idea that Nahid Almanea might have been singled out for attack because of her Islamic dress.  That is a possibility, but so far as we know there is not yet any evidence for it.  If it should emerge later on that she was killed for some other reason, by somebody known to her, or a serial killer who would have killed anybody who happened to be there at the time, it will be too late by then to undo the effects of the headlines like the one in yesterday's Independent, thousands attend the funeral of woman killed for being a Muslim.  Tens of thousands of Muslims are going to believe that now, whatever the eventual truth turns out to be.

It is not a nice thought at all, that two people have been stabbed to death in the locality in the past three months, and that whoever did it is still at large in the community, and managed to return home without anybody else noticing or reporting that they were heavily stained with blood.  Not nice at all.

old habits

It's good having a laptop that can hold a charge for an hour or two.  Even better for the Systems Administrator than me, since when I was sitting at the kitchen table reading The Telegraph on line with my breakfast, it was the SA who had to step over the power cable to get to the sink.  It didn't make much of a difference to me whether the machine was plugged in or not, apart from the times when I needed to print, or the jack plug came loose without my noticing.

In fact it's proving hard to shake off the habit of taking the power cable with me each time I transfer operations from the sofa to the table or back again.  I am so used to pulling the plug out at the sitting room end, looping up the cable and plugging in again in the kitchen, I forget that I don't need to do that, now the battery is fully conditioned and I can leave the laptop plugged in on the hearthrug to top up when I'm not using it.  When I studied biology at school, rather a long time ago, one of the things we learned about was a little, forest dwelling mouse.  It had its regular tracks around the forest floor, and when it came to a twig across its tiny path it would jump over it.  If you removed the twig, when the mouse came to the place where the twig used to be, it would still jump. I laughed at that mouse, aged fifteen, but I don't now.  I know how it felt.

In the front garden this afternoon a baby bird appeared, looking like a large duckling on stilts.  The SA asked me what on earth that was, I don't know why since the SA normally is a far better ornithologist than I was.  Looking at the baby's large, long toed but not webbed feet, I opined that it was a young moorhen.  How it got to the front garden is a mystery.  They live down on the farm reservoir, but not normally in our garden.  Perhaps it wandered along the ditch, and up through the wood.  That seems more likely than that it marched up the lane from the farmyard.  Shortly before it appeared, the SA had put up the temporary netting barriers we use to discourage the chickens from disappearing along the side of the wood when they are let out for chicken exercise time, so maybe the moorhen found itself on the wrong side of the gate.

The black cat suddenly noticed it, and began to advance towards it with a determined expression and slightly unsteady gait.  He used to be a competent hunter in his younger days, before he broke his leg, but has mostly given up in the last couple of years.  The sight of a giant baby bird running around in broad daylight right in front of his eyes must have brought back old memories and desires.  I scooped him up, took him inside, and distracted him with the second half of a pouch of Sheba left over from lunchtime, and the moorhen swiftly took cover in a jungle of euphorbias and lavender and disappeared.  The cats are all inside now, lying down, so it will have to sort itself out. Let us hope it does not meet Black and White Alsatian Killer, otherwise I'm afraid it's toast.

the cost of culture

I was talking today to one of the organisers of Dedham Films.  They are one of the many film clubs that have sprung up around the UK in recent years, and they are doing it in some style, in the elegant setting of Dedham's Assembly Rooms and with some very expensive, state of the art equipment.  They have recently signed up with the National Theatre to screen live performances of the NT's own productions, and from various other top class venues.  I have not yet been to a cinema projection of a stage play, but my Pilates teacher who saw Sir Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth on screen said that it was gripping, and less muddy and damp than being in the live audience.  The downside to gaining National Theatre Screen rights is that clubs have to take the whole season as a package, and she was afraid that the audience for Medea on 4th September was going to consist of six people, tops.  Would I like to go, she enquired hopefully.  Perhaps I might.  The last time I went to a Greek tragedy was well over twenty-five years ago, when a friend was left with a spare ticket for the Almeida, and I recall it being gory, but satisfying.  On the other hand, I could go and see Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in David Hare's Skylight.  A premium ticket to see that in the theatre would set me back nearly a hundred pounds, as the Telegraph highlighted a couple of days ago (West End premium ticket prices treble in ten years) and anyway it is virtually sold out.  On screen at Dedham it would cost one tenth as much, while a cinema ticket would be four pounds.

Today's Telegraph has a complaint from cash-strapped millennial Radhika Sanghani that she and her friends can't afford culture.  West End theatre prices are too high, let alone opera or ballet, while a ticket to the Arctic Monkeys set someone back half a week's wages.  Er, yes, but the Arctic Monkey's debut album was the fastest selling album in British history, they have won seven Brit Awards, and the Mercury prize, and headlined at Glastonbury twice.  To say that because you can't afford to go and see the Arctic Monkeys live, you can't afford culture is like me saying that because I can't go for dinner at le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, I can't afford to eat.

It seems disingenuous to equate Culture with the various types of live stage performance.  I get a lot of my Culture fix from the visual arts, and a great deal of it is free.  If you are happy to look at permanent collections then there are great tracts of world class fine art free to view, all over the UK.  Tickets for temporary exhibitions will set you back between about six and around sixteen pounds, not negligible for anyone on a low income, but a lot less than The Book of Mormon.  Or live classical music, as soon as you get outside the ambit of the really big name stars and full symphony orchestras.  If Radhika Sanghani can arrange her day so that she can take a slightly long lunch hour once in a while, she will find world class chamber musicians performing at venues all over London for between ten pounds and twelve pounds fifty a ticket.  Not negligible, but less than you would easily spend on a bottle of wine in a London wine bar.  Or there are less famous but still good musicians performing for nothing but a retiring collection, or free as part of summer arts festivals, if you keep your eyes peeled.  Even Colchester runs to free lunchtime recitals, while all around the country music societies putting on evening recitals would welcome a new twenty-something cohort of audience members with tears of gratitude.

Or if chamber music really doesn't appeal, folk and jazz come pretty affordable.  I tend to give jazz a wide berth myself, unless duty or sociability takes me with people I know, and then I always remember how much I don't like jazz.  But I do like folk, and it is really quite difficult to spend more than twenty pounds on a ticket for a folk gig.  Somewhere between eight and sixteen pounds normally does it comfortably.

If she and her friends must have live stage performance, they could look outside the West End.  The excellent Park Theatre in north London prices tickets for its 200 seat auditorium at nineteen pounds fifty, less for previews, with concessions for local residents.  Pricing at Colchester's Mercury is similar, although I was shocked just now when I looked and saw how much the Almeida is nowadays. But as the spokesperson for Wyndham's theatre said helpfully, in case the Telegraph journalist had never known or had forgotten the basic principles of supply and demand, when you have a strictly limited supply of something, in this case Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy live on stage with a relatively small number of seats, for a relatively short number of weeks, and lots of people who would like to sit in those seats, the price tends to be high.

So sorry, Radhika, tickets for the Book of Mormon are expensive, and likely to stay that way.  So are couture clothing, first class long haul air travel, or Premier league football club season tickets. It doesn't mean that you and your friends can't enjoy culture, any more than it means you can't wear clothes, fly, ever go on holiday, or watch sport.  You just need to look more broadly at what sort of culture is out there.  Honestly, there's lots.

summer solstice

Today is the summer solstice.  It was celebrated at Stonehenge by 37,000 people who gathered around the stones overnight to watch the sunrise, according to the Independent.  I found myself wondering how English Heritage had accommodated their visit.  Did they all book tickets in advance, as you are now required to do, paying £13.90 a head (unless they were members of the National Trust or English Heritage), and get the shuttle to travel the one and a half miles from the swanky new £27 million visitor centre to the stones?  That doesn't sound very pagan.  Or did they file in a great procession?  After all, they had plenty of time to fill, since the sun doesn't come up until around five, even on the longest day in southern Britain.  The photograph in the Independent doesn't look at all mystical, ne'er a druidical robe in sight, just a lot of people in sweatshirts and anoraks.  It gets parky at night on Salisbury plain, even in late June.  They are standing about patiently, not unlike commuters waiting for news of their delayed train at Liverpool street, except that several have mobile phones or cameras lifted above their heads to take pictures of the sunrise.  You couldn't honestly call them 'revellers', although Independent does.

They've all gone home now, and English Heritage have closed the site for the rest of the day, while they clear up.  That is almost as sweet as the story about the Japanese football fans at the World Cup, who took black bin bags to their first game (which Japan lost) and stayed after the match to pick up the rubbish in the stadium.

If I were going to make the tremendous effort of staying up all night, or even getting up early enough to see the sun rise, I'm not sure I'd bother to do it for the summer solstice.  I'd probably rather save myself for the dawn chorus, and get up earlier in the year, when the birds would be in full song.  Sunrise would be a bit later, too, so getting up would be less of a shock to the system.  I certainly wouldn't go and stand with 36,999 other people if I wanted to experience mystical union with nature.  Nobody else would be better, or at most the Systems Administrator or one or two close friends.  The English tradition of celebrating the summer solstice sounds pretty muted anyway, according to Wikipedia.  The key date is not the solstice, but Midsummer Eve, 23rd June, and since the church tried to ban gluttony, lechery and mystery plays through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, about the only genuine extant tradition seems to have been lighting bonfires.  Which I'm sure you aren't allowed to do at Stonehenge, among a crowd of 37,000.  As for doing as the druids did, I don't believe that was recorded for posterity, so whatever modern druids do is entirely made up.  No harm in that, but it doesn't have any more mystical significance than the Charleston, or Gangnam style.

If you want to get an idea of what Stonehenge might have been about, I would just stay in your armchair and read John Masefield, and let your imagination wander:

Up on the downs the red eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down's shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribes did thus on the downs, on these downs burning
Men in the frame.
Called to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes.
On the chalk downland bare.

And yes, I know it is about downland and not the plain, and there are no stones, and we don't know what Stonehenge was used for or whether sacrifice had anything to do with it.  But doesn't in conjure the spirit of what the monument might have been about or been like, when it had a current meaning and resonance, and no fences or shuttles or £27 million visitor centre, and there weren't 37,000 photo-taking non-revelling revellers standing politely in their anoraks, as if at a railway station?

Meanwhile in the garden all sorts of plants will know that the season has turned, and the nights are getting longer.  Long-night species like chrysanthemums, that have held off flowering so far, will detect as the days get short enough and the nights long enough to trigger flowering, and some trees will know that it is autumn, and that they must make buds safe for next year.  Nature is still truly in touch with the solstice, even if we aren't nowadays.

technical upgrade

The Systems Administrator ordered and fitted a new battery for my laptop.  This is revelationary, or revolutionary, or both.  The old battery had got to the point where it would not really hold a charge at all, and even taking the laptop through to the study and trying to print a simple document was apt to end in failure because the computer shut down before it had finished downloading the instructions to print unless I took the power cable too and plugged the laptop in for the whole three minutes or so it took me to hook it up to the printer and fiddle around with print menus.  (Obviously this would not have been an issue if we had got wireless printing to work, but we didn't, and it would be easier to print if the printer did not live on a low Ikea coffee table while the laptop has to go on the floor, but we'll sort that out at some point when we tidy up the study.)

I am typing this with the laptop, which was 99 per cent fully charged when I started, unplugged so that the new battery can start deep cycling a few times to condition it.  It has made me realise how deeply ingrained had become the unconscious habit of reaching forward periodically to check that that the power cable was still securely plumbed in to the back left hand corner of the machine.  If it is not pushed absolutely all the way home, the laptop doesn't charge, and the first I know of it is when the screen goes blank, followed by the message in that alarming primitive white font on a black ground that the system had shut down because the battery had reached a critical level, saving my data to disc, and that I needed to attach to a power supply and the system would automatically reboot in 13...12...11...10 seconds.

Now that the laptop has got a working battery, it is trying to calibrate itself versus my power consumption.  My battery charge has already gone down from 99 to 85 per cent, on the other hand my estimated time remaining has gone up.  Typing (rather slowly) in Blogger can't use very much power.

I retract that last sentence.  My available time has dropped, in the space of two minutes, from two hours twenty-seven minutes to one hour forty-two minutes.  And now it is back up to two hours twenty-one.  The computer is clearly confused.

As long as it isn't one of those batteries which explodes while charging I'm sure we'll be fine.

Addendum  I am rather sorry to have discovered that Labour are not going to give everybody an owl if they win the election.  As I have already placed on record, I should like a pet owl.  Almost as much as I'd like to be a fly on the wall at any future negotiation between Labour and the Lib Dems in which the owl question was thrashed out as part of the coalition agreement.

plants by post

I was watering the pots in the back garden when I heard the crunch of wheels on the gravel at the front.  I assumed it was the postman, but when I'd finished watering discovered a cardboard box labelled Plants: Fragile on the front doorstep.  It was the right way up, and not squashed or buckled, which was a good start.

Now I do not have the convenience of shopping at my place of work, not to mention the staff discount, I am branching out to explore new suppliers' lists.  Not that I need many plants nowadays, quite large parts of the garden are stuffed to bursting.  But I wanted some verbascums to add a vertical accent to one bed, and found that the Lincolnshire nursery who offered the variety I was after did some other interesting things as well.  And it seemed stupid to pay the standard postage and packing charge on just three verbascums.

I am a fan of mail order plants, as I am of mail order most things.  True, you do not see the plant before it arrives, and there is a risk that rather than lose the business the nursery will shove some stunted, pot-bound, diseased or otherwise unsatisfactory plant into the box and hope for the best. But a sensible nursery won't do that, and if you aren't happy with what they send out, you need never deal with them again.  Choosing plants from the comfort of your own sofa, with your reference books and the full resources of the internet to hand, has a lot to be said for it.  You can seek multiple opinions on whether the plant that has caught your eye is likely to thrive in your conditions, and it is easier to maintain a level head and reject a picture and a description, however enticing, than it is to leave the actual, growing plant where it is on the garden centre bench.  And nowadays organised suppliers run real time stock updates on their websites, so you can place the order and be fairly sure that the plants you have chosen will be arriving, rather than extracting a vague promise from a shop that they will put you down for a plant and let you know when they have it.

Besides the verbascum I was originally looking for, I discovered that the man in Lincolnshire could do me some interesting plants for the conservatory, and so I am now the owner of two new begonias and a Dicliptera sericea.   One of the begonias is a fancy, named form of Begonia evansiana, which I had before and managed to lose, goodness knows how because it produced multiple plantlets in its leaf axils and so once you have one you can have twenty.  I think that was the problem, and I think I over watered the corms in their dormant state in the winter.  B. evansiana grows around a foot tall, and has luscious leaves with red undersides, and pink typical begonia flowers, quite dainty.  It is almost hardy in a sheltered spot, and after ordering my 'Claret Jug' I discovered a couple coming up outside, where I tried them at the foot of a Tetrapanax a year or two back, aiming for the exotic look.  That's OK.

Begonia luxurians will be even more exciting, if it survives the winter in the conservatory.  It produces big, architectural leaves, and is capable of growing several feet tall.  Exactly how big depends on who you read, and how long it keeps going before being cut to the ground.  Some sources say it needs a minimum winter temperature of ten degrees, to which I say, dream on, but others say that frost free will do it.  For under a fiver it's worth giving it a go, since it would look very handsome against the back wall of the conservatory.

I'm also trying Dicliptera sericea, a tender, grey leaved sun lover, which should produce orange tubular flowers, and I read somewhere would be happy in a pot.  Indeed, Will Giles (he of the wonderful Exotic Garden in Norwich) says that mature clumps are easily splittable.  If mine survives to make a mature clump, and will split, I could even try a piece outside in the gravel.  The drainage is so very free, I might get away with it in a mild winter.  Experiments like that are more fun with an extra plant you have made yourself than with your only plant, which you have paid good money for.  You don't often see Dicliptera offered for sale, but that is just as likely to be because it is unknown and unfashionable as to indicate that it is difficult.

Plants by post do tend to look rather dishevelled when you unwrap them, so you need a little confidence that once they have been allowed to breathe and see the light, they will be fine.  The Dibleys order of Streptocarpus, plus one odd Begonia and a Tradescantia, which arrived a week or so ago are looking much happier now.  Dibleys send most of their plants out as young rooted plugs, and when first prised from their plastic boxes they are slightly sad little things, but potted into tiny clay pots (I had a panic finding enough that were small enough) and stood in semi shade for a week, allowed to dry out slightly between each watering, they look quite perky now.  I transferred them down to the conservatory this morning, together with the Lincolnshire begonias and the Dicliptera, and briefly exercised my imagination as to how floral and jungly they would look when they were all full pots smothered with flowers, like on the Dibleys website, instead of three leaves and at most one flower per extremely small pot.

multi tasking

I am going to try an experiment in a couple of minutes, and type today's blog post while listening to the Radio 2 Folk Show.  Normally I never have the radio on when I'm writing anything, even a shopping list, and I'm amazed by all the people who put in requests on Classic FM 'to help them with their revision', or who are slaving over their final year Dissertation, or working on a marketing report.  How anyone could revise for an exam with music on is a puzzle, let alone the excitement of waiting to hear whether your name is going to be read out.  Driving from Newcastle to Plymouth, fair enough, or tiling the bathroom, or weeding, but not revising for exams.  I even have to put the radio off if I'm setting out pots in new areas of planting.

I'm banking on the fact that I probably won't really like everything in the show.  If and when Mark Radcliffe plays something I think is wonderful, I can stop typing and listen.  The tracks I don't like so much I can filter out.  It's just as well that I don't love everything he chooses, otherwise I would be left yearning for more CDs than I could afford to buy, or have time to listen to.

Hmn.  He's started with Cara Dillon.  I haven't actually stopped writing, but I have half an ear cocked.  She is back on the folk scene after a slight hiatus while her children were small, with a new album.  I confidently predict now that it will be a hot contender for the 2015 BBC Folk Awards album of the year.  The method by which the short list for the awards is drawn up is slightly opaque, but the folk powers that be like Cara Dillon.  So do I, and she is quite astonishingly pretty.  I saw her at the Colchester Arts Centre with my dad, who was equally of the opinion that she was the most beautiful guest he'd seen for years, but he still prefers the gutsier singing style of Julie Murphy.

Now we're on to a track from a Manchester group whose name I didn't catch, because I was talking. The effect is rather funky, as if the Talking Heads had been crossed with a banjo.  That's the great thing about the interweb (that the young people use), you can always look up what something was after you've discovered whether you like it.  As long as you remember roughly when you heard it. This week's folk programme is straightforward, but tracking down a piece of harpsichord music I know I heard at some point on Radio 3, except that I can't remember if it was yesterday, the day before, or if in fact it was one of the guest's choices on Private Passions as long ago as last Sunday can be harder.

OK, waiting for the next track.  So I can type a paragraph in the time taken by a folk track.  On the other hand typing the first draft of anything is the fast part.  It's the proof reading that takes the time.  Not so much spelling, in the days of spell checker, but trying to make sure you haven't used the same word four times in two sentences.  Lexical facilitation, they used to call it when I did my psychology degree a long time ago, the idea being that once you've used a word, it is activated, live and hopping in your brain, ready to go again.  The third track turned out to be an A Capella American civil rights song, quite good, but not enough to send me scuttling to bookmark it on Amazon.

OK, that's enough of that.  It is possible to write, while listening with half an ear if not whole hearted attention, but how anyone could revise meaningfully for exams, let alone finish their Dissertation, is beyond me.