the battle of the bunnies

The bunnies are winning.  The new anti-rabbit gate was installed, and the gales had passed so we set the camera at the top of the back garden for a couple of nights to see if the gate had done the trick.  Obviously we were hoping that it had, but we were rapidly disabused of that notion.  Rabbits appeared soon after dark on both nights, appearing as blurry black and white images on the infra-red camera, their eyes standing out as glaring white spots.  They were still hopping around in glorious technicolour well after dawn.

It was not an entirely random display.  They consistently appeared from the direction of the hedge, and headed back that way as they disappeared out of shot.  We wriggled our way among the mature shrubs to the back of the border that runs the length of the garden and surveyed the hedge line.  The double run of wire netting enclosing the hedge, professionally installed by the man who planted the hedge over twenty years ago, all appeared to be solid and intact.  He did a good job, that contractor, and used good quality posts.  However, we did find a weak spot right at the top of the slope, where we'd left a gap in the hedge in case we ever needed to get heavy machinery into the back garden.  The single run of netting installed by us had slumped, and it would have been possible for rabbits to hop over it.

I found a spare piece of netting, and stapled it fast to the fence post, a handy stake and an elder that had sprung up in the hedge line.  I wouldn't normally staple netting to my shrubs, but regarded the elder as a weed, and couldn't face trying to knock a post in at that moment.  The soil there is phenomenally stony because an old track lies underneath (it was the access to the integral garage when the house was built.  We do not keep cars in the garage, only lawnmowers) and a large sea buckthorn would have got in the way of the hammer.

Unfortunately today's check of last night's proceedings on the camera showed that there were still rabbits in the border, appearing and disappearing from the direction of the hedge.  We both prowled up and down the hedge line looking for obvious holes, and agreed that there were none at the top of the garden.  This made the bottom of the garden the prime suspect, where the contractor's fence comes to an end before the ditch.  It might be that the rabbits were coming in at the bottom of the slope, and using the cover of the border to move uphill rather than travelling that far in the open.  The Systems Administrator reset the camera pointing down the hedge line, on the grounds that then we'd see if they were coming into shot from downhill, or appearing from behind the camera.  One night should be enough, given that they seem to be here every night, then we can station the camera at the bottom of the garden and try and discover their movements around the area of the bog bed.  I know they've been active down there, because there are scrapes as well as droppings.

Forget Peter Rabbit.  Forget Watership Down, Hazel and Bigwig and all that crew.  Put Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail from your mind.  Rabbits are not cute.  In a garden context they are vermin. They have grazed down the leaves of all the Crocus tommasinianus in the bottom lawn, when everybody knows they need to be left to die down naturally for the bulbs to build their strength up, and eaten most of the flower buds off the Pulmonaria 'Blue Ensign' (the bluest of blues, a superb form).  If you see the Easter Bunny, shoot it.

the art of pastry

I have just had a run-in with the most irritating dough I've encountered in any recipe for ages.  The source of my disappointment was the normally reliable Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (1978 edition) and the reason for my excursion into this retro territory was that I'd noticed a recipe for a mincemeat and apple round, and I had a lot of mincemeat.  I kept buying it at Christmas.  It doesn't have a regular place to live, not being a perennial store cupboard item like plain flour or syrup, and the shelves were quite full at the time, so I kept not being able to see any mincemeat or remember whether I definitely had bought some, and buying another jar.

The Systems Administrator was rather puzzled to discover we had so much, but I promised that mincemeat kept for years, and that it didn't all have to be eaten as mince pies that Christmas.  For weeks now I've been meaning to make the mincemeat and apple, but it's never been a good time. Once it morphed into bread and butter pudding, because we had bread that needed using up more urgently than the mincemeat, and the SA is reluctant to share space in the Aga when doing a roast, or anything involving more than one pot.  It wasn't really a good time this evening, as I let the chickens out because I felt sorry for them and they didn't go back in until half past seven, but I was determined to make the blessed pudding, after talking about it for so long.

The instructions said to rub the fat into the flour, stir in the sugar, mix in the egg and sufficient milk to give a fairly firm dough.  I quote.  Fairly firm dough.  The quantities were 3 oz butter, 6 oz self raising flour, 3 oz sugar, one egg, 3 to 4 tablespoons of milk.  To be on the safe side I only added three tablespoons of milk initially.  Never mind fairly firm, the dough was so sloppy it wouldn't hold together in the bowl.  I added some flour, consoling myself that I was only aiming at a leavened biscuity sort of thing and not cake, so the proportion of flour was probably not critical. The dough had to be rolled into two rounds, then you were supposed to put the mincemeat and grated apple on one and cover it with the other as a lid, sticking the edges together.

If only.  The dough was soft, fragile, and not keen on rolling into a round, or being picked up in one piece once rolled quite thinly (sic).  I managed to transfer a roughly circular sheet of pastry on to my greased tray, somewhat larger than a generous side plate but a lot smaller than a smallish dining plate which was as thin as I could get it.  The lid was even more reluctant to leave the pastry board in one piece.  I remembered I'd read somewhere that you could transfer fragile pastry by using the rolling pin as a support.  The lid consented to roll around the pin, unrolled in mid air, stuck to itself, and collapsed on the pile of mincemeat and apple about three inches off centre.  I discovered that you could not move it sideways at all, it simply tore, and was reduced to trimming the excess off the side that had overshot and blobbing it on to the opposite side where it was short. The second round of dough, which up to this point had stuck to the pastry board, the rolling pin and my fingers, resolutely refused to stick to the base of the tart.

I squidged the mess together as best I could, painted it with milk as instructed, and sprinkled it with much more than the given quantity of demerara sugar, hoping a sparkly shiny top of cooked sugar would hide a multitude of sins.  The book said to cut a small slit in the top but I wasn't touching that blasted pastry any more.  I put the tart in the oven, and set the timer for slightly less than the minimum cooking time given in the book, fully expecting to find the tray swimming in burnt liquid out of the mincemeat at the end of it, and the top marked by rivulets of brown ooze where the filling had erupted through the makeshift joins in the pastry.

The timer rang.  I opened the door and looked inside the oven, to find a roughly circular, evenly risen, pale gold, gently sparkling mound of pastry, unmarked by any leaking juices from within. You just never know with cooking how it is going to turn out.

spring cleaning

It was a damp and a drizzly day, and I set about tidying up the conservatory.  It wasn't too bad, but there were some fallen leaves to sweep up, my new Clivia had been sitting in its plastic bag on the hall table ever since the Plant Heritage meeting, and I had reluctantly to admit that the conservatory windows needed washing.  I had a colleague once, a fastidious man with very definite ideas about design, who was having his house done up, and I was quite interested in the progress of his conservatory until he mentioned that the carpet was due to arrive.  Our conservatory does not have a carpet.  It has a tiled floor with a central drain, glass on three sides, a polycarbonate roof that lets a certain amount of light through, and is full of plants.  Sometimes too full.  There used to be an Acacia by the door for several years that covered anyone using the door with yellow bobbles when it was in flower, followed by the grey remains of its dead flowers for months afterwards.  The Systems Administrator used to mutter hostile remarks about the Acacia.

It is currently slightly better organised than that.  One of the things I have begun to grasp over the years is the necessity of observing the principle Harold Nicolson  attributed to Vita, that of having the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful plants.  Today I evicted a plumbago.  The fact that ours was a miserable, skinny specimen was brought home to me months ago, on holiday, when we saw one doing really well (possibly in the conservatory at Hidcote?) and I was forced to contrast its lush, dense foliage and smothering cover of bright blue flowers with my thin, spindly plant and its miserable scattering of blooms.  I messed around repotting it, and made vague plans to move it off the back wall so that it would get more light.  All in vain and putting off the inevitable.  Today I chopped off its lank branches, disentangled them from the neighbouring jasmine, and lugged the truncated pot outside.  I felt better as soon as I'd done it.

The jasmine got a hard pruning a while back, and is being slow to respond, but I think I'll give it this summer and see how it does with regular feeding.  It is Jasminum mesnyi, a tender (you might get away with outside in a really warm and sheltered garden) scrambler whose large yellow flowers ought to start opening about now.  The foliage of mine tends to go rather pale and mottled, and I peer at it suspiciously for signs of red spider mite and try to work out what it is about a slightly shady garden room in north Essex that fails to make it believe it is in its native Vietnam.

Patience with cutting back can work.  I have an evergreen clematis, again one of those species on the cusp of tenderness, that has had a chequered conservatory career.  It started off at the front in the light, which it liked, but massively outgrew its aluminium tripod despite my efforts to persuade it to twiddle round and round the support, and began to block the view out of the window.  I moved it to the back wall to give it more height, but it shot up to the top of the wall and only flowered at the very ends, just under the roof.  I guessed the back wall was too dark for its liking.  By now I had a thirteen foot plant, bald for most of its height and with a flimsy aluminium tripod embedded in its lower limbs, so I chopped it off at the three foot mark, which left it with no leaves at all, and stuck it in the sunniest corner next to the standard Eriobotrya 'Coppertone', hoping that it might reshoot and twine through the shrub.  Nothing happened for months, and I wondered if it was dead, but the truncated stems still looked plump and were green under the bark when I scratched at them with my fingernail.  Trying to judge how much and how often to water it was tricky, in the absence of any feedback because there were no leaves.  Finally this spring it has begun to throw out new shoots, which I think will look better popping out of its host here and there than thinly spread out against a wall.

The Clivia gave me an anxious moment when I extracted it from its black plastic pot, cutting it free because some of the thick, fleshy roots had gone out through the drainage holes and I didn't want to chop them off.  Compost instantly began to fall off the rootball, revealing quite a few dead roots, and I wondered whether I had managed to overwater it during its fortnight's sojourn in the hall.  Then I worked out that there were plenty of healthy new roots, and decided that it must be one of those fat-rooted things, like my kitchen orchids and the ginger lilies, that do give up on their oldest roots, and that part of normal hygiene when repotting was to remove them and clean the plant up.

Washing the windows took longer than titivating the plants, but was not so interesting.  There are times when I'm gardening and could wish that I were taller or had more upper body strength, but wriggling in among the plants to get access to the windows is one of those tasks that leaves me relieved to be small and flexible.  I did make one interesting discovery as I was worming my way up the ladder wedged in between the glass and the Wollemi Pine, and some flattened brown discs fluttered to the ground.  I traced their source to one of the higher branches on the Wollemi, and I think they must be seeds.  They certainly look like conifer seeds, though larger than anything I've seen drop out of a fir cone before.  I collected them carefully and put them in a pot pending further investigation.  I have no idea if Wollemi are self-fertile, or the age at which they normally start setting seed, but it would be very gratifying if they were seeds and triply so if any germinated.

sowing seeds, planting bulbs

Finally the wind dropped, and I was able to go and sow some more vegetable seeds, and make a start with the flowers for cutting.  I realised as I began that I had no idea how long to make the rows or how large the patches of the cutting flowers.  Would a four foot row of Calendula, the width of the bed, give me about the right quantity of flowers, or so many I'd be pressing bunches of marigolds on my friends whenever I saw them, as well as eggs?  And how densely should I sow, to allow for losses in the uncontrolled open ground of the vegetable patch?

My ideas about how many vegetable plants to try and grow to meet the needs of two people are scarcely more accurate.  Vegetables seem so entirely in the lap of the gods anyway.  The last time I got a decent courgette crop I tempted fate by buying a little recipe book called What Shall I do with All These Courgettes.  Hubris followed, and I have never successfully grown courgettes since. Still, I sowed some leeks, turnips, beetroot and peas.  In the past I've started leeks in modules in the greenhouse, but I'm really tight for space in there, not to mention the root aphid problem, and the packet said you could sow them in a drill outdoors, so I thought I'd give it a try.  Note to self: the carrots, turnips and leeks will all need fleecing against their respective pests, if they ever come up.

I planted some Ranunculus corms for cutting, bought from Peter Nyssen, orange and pink ones. They came in a minimum quantity of 25, which seemed like an awful lot when I opened the packets, and I wondered whether to keep some to plant later to try and stagger the flowering period, but didn't know if they would keep or would simply dry out.  They are funny looking little things.  I was expecting a knobbly tuber like Anemone, but Ranunculus turn out to have lots of little fleshy roots, like a miniature cross between an Eremurus and a shuttlecock.

As I scraped planting drills in the beds and tried not to think about the crop of weeds that would shortly appear I realised that I not only didn't know how many plants to grow for flowers, I had no idea when any of them would be ready to pick.  I re-read Sarah Raven's book on the cutting garden before ordering my seeds, but whether any of my carefully chosen combinations will actually happen at the same time so that I can display them together in a vase is anybody's guess.

I have grave doubts about my cheap Cyclamen cilicium though, now that I've seen them.  This species is more or less hardy in southern England, though not so easy and cast iron guaranteed as C. coum and C. hederifolium, and it likes a little more sun than some cyclamen (so the books say).  I have one in the gravel in front of the house that is doing reasonably OK, and as I gazed in wrath one day at the scruffy mess of self seeded bladder campion that had taken up residence at the foot of that wall, it struck me that what I wanted was not a weedy and rampant wildflower, but a carpet of cyclamen.  Peter Nyssen were offering them for a very modest amount, far less than I had paid for my existing plant, and I ordered ten.

The parcel arrived yesterday, and as I opened the bags with the cyclamen in it I realised two things.  The flattened, knobbly disc that I fished out of its surrounding sawdust looked very dried out, and I remembered that cyclamen do not like drying out and wondered how many of the ten would ever come back to life.  The second thing I realised was that I did not have a clue which way up to plant them.  Google was little help.  Which way up to plant cyclamen was out there as a topic, but generally focused on the better known species.  I gathered that the side with old growth coming out of it should go on top, but some of these tubers had wispy growth and lumps on both sides.  The concave side was the top, the convex the underneath, but most of my newly acquired wizened discs didn't have detectable concavities.  The website of The Cylamen Society acknowledged that it could be very difficult to tell which the top was and warned that I might end up having to take pot luck, and so I did with some of them.

the illusion of free plants

If there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is almost no such thing as a free plant.  Volunteers that self-sow in situ come closest, but even then they require some care and thought in terms of weeding and maintenance.  If the parent plant is over-enthusiastic with its progeny you'll have to spend some time editing the results, while if you are too enthusiastic with the hoe or insist on smothering your garden with weed-suppressing landscape fabric you won't get much in the way of self-sown additions.

Sowing seeds can yield an astonishing quantity of plants relative to the outlay in materials, not to mention home saved seed and the packets that come enclosed with magazines, and taking cuttings can produce a similar bonanza.  The big cost is your time.  I love propagating.  Making more plants is all part of the fun of gardening, quite as much as buying new plants.  I was always surprised by how few of the customers at the plant centre seemed to have any notion of growing their own plants, to judge from their lack of enthusiasm if I told them how they could increase their purchases, and equally surprised at how many of the amateur run gardens opening under the Yellow Book scheme don't seem to have a greenhouse or any kind of facilities for propagation.  If you are keen enough to open your garden to the general public then surely you would enjoy working your way through some of the marvellous seed catalogues that are out there at the click of a mouse, not to mention having the facility to bulk up what you've already got.  Apparently not.

It does take time, I admit that.  Maybe it's one reason why Yellow Book owners don't always run their own mini plant factory on the side.  Perhaps they need all their available time to maintain their gardens to Yellow Book standards.  I, meanwhile, have my own Erythrina crista-galli germinating in the heated propagator.  It's a thrill to see the shoot emerge and the leaves unfold, and I'll save at least a tenner compared to buying a grown plant if I manage to bring one through to the planting-out stage, but I also have lawn edges that are untrimmed, and borders that are still only partially mulched as we get into April.

Today was definitely a day for hiding in the greenhouse rather than trying to spread mulch or cut the edges of the lawn to neat curves.  It blew, and it was cold.  I'm glad I moved the outdoor dining chairs away from the conservatory windows, given that the teak bench on the terrace (or patio) has blown backwards into the Eleagnus hedge.  The top of the hedge, meanwhile, has sagged out over the drive under the force of the wind, and once things calm down I am going to have to get the ladder, or probably the Henchman, and cut back the now overhanging portions.  We learn some lessons in life too late, and now I know that I should have planted yew.

There is no such thing as a free plant (only £5.95 for postage) in a magazine readers' offer either.  I belatedly noticed that Amateur Gardening magazine was offering two dozen each of the lavenders 'Hidcote' and 'Munstead' courtesy of Thompson and Morgan, the offer still valid until 7th April.  They would only be tiny little plugs, but plugs grow fast enough and £5.95 is a very good price for forty-eight lavenders.  I considered the space I wanted to cover by the blue shed, and the number of rooted cuttings and box plants I'd accumulated, and the fact that lavender does quite well on the light soil in the front garden, and would fit in nicely with my vague Nicole de Vesian rip-off plan (or if not Nicole de Vesian then about half the Chelsea show gardens you have seen over the past decade), and decided that it would be £5.95 well spent.

Thompson and Morgan's website was not working properly.  It was not obviously not working, and let me input everything up to and including my credit card details, then nothing happened when I pressed Submit Order.  I reflected that 7th April was quite close with Easter in the way, and decided I'd better ring them and see if the order had gone through.  I got a recorded message that said something about how they were aware that they had problems with their website, and that my call was progressing forward in the queue, in between scratchy fragments of Vaughan Williams. When eventually I got through the person I spoke to said she could not tell me whether my order had reached them, though it probably hadn't, and my best bet was to leave it and try again tomorrow.

Is the wrong answer.  A customer is trying to buy something from you.  They have spent fifteen minutes on the phone waiting to speak to a human being because your website is not working.  If when they get through to an actual person that person can't tell them anything about the website problem then put that in the recorded message and spare us the bad Vaughan Williams.  Something along the lines of We are aware that you may have experienced problems with our website.  We will not be able to help you further at this time so don't bother holding.  The readers' offer was limited to one per customer, so I thought that if my website order had gone through, which it probably hadn't, as the lavenders were not due to be sent out until the end of the month Thompson and Morgan would probably be able to sort it out in the next four weeks if I somehow managed to place two orders, and I was buggered if I was spending any more time in their queue.  So I placed another order.

The phone operator told me that I must quote the Offer Code.  There was nothing in the magazine labelled Offer Code, so I tried the code from the order form I'd have used if I'd got round to the question of cheap lavenders in time to order by post.  She told me that was not the Offer Code, without telling me what format an Offer Code would be in.  Eventually I worked out which part of the quite small print in the ad I was supposed to read out to her.  Once she'd told me everything had gone through and rung off I realised that she hadn't given me any kind of reference number in case of further problems.

I admit that only going for the cheap offer and not adding other items to it is not in the spirit of Readers' Offers from T&M's point of view.  They haven't even added a new customer to their mailing list because I've bought seeds from them in the past and they already know I exist.  But as customer experiences go that gets about two out of ten.

a musical discovery

I went last night to hear The Furrow Collective at the Colchester Arts Centre, on the strength of having heard one member of the quartet before as part of a different line-up at Ipswich, and liked her.  The friend I went with to that gig really liked Lucy Farrell's voice as well, and so we agreed to give another of her incarnations a go.  The members of the Furrow Collective are all young (by my standards), the next generation on from Martin Carthy and Martin Simpson, but well established.

One reviewer described them as a bleakly charming and intriguing curiosity, which I should think pleased them.  All four are good singers, giving strength in depth in the vocals, and they take it in turns to lead on songs, giving an interesting variety of styles and accents, since two members of the group are Scottish and one is a man.  Between them they muster a harp, a guitar, two fiddles, a banjo, a concertina, and a musical saw.  Their sound is pretty stripped down, and I liked it a lot. Their timing is subtle but very tight.

They have the knack of finding good versions of traditional songs, which is a distinct talent.  It's always a sad disappointment sitting through a set by somebody with a great voice or slick guitar technique, who has managed to come up with duff versions of everything (or bad songs. Unfortunately there are many more would-be singer-songwriters than there are good songs written in this world.  For further elaboration on the theme see last year's splendid film release Frank, a tale of mismatched musical talent and ambition, also featuring a brilliant performance by Michael Fassbender managing to convey a remarkable range of emotions while wearing a large papier-mache head that completely hides his face).

It was a dark and a windy night, and I wouldn't have chosen to go out in it if I hadn't already got my ticket and arranged to meet somebody.  That is one of the advantages of buying tickets in advance even for things which you are sure are not going to sell out, it makes you go and then you enjoy it when you get there.  The Arts Centre was nowhere near full for The Furrow Collective, which was a great waste given the quality of the music on offer.  There again, almost no folk musicians except Martin Carthy and Cara Dillon do completely fill the Colchester Arts Centre.  Last night they hadn't bothered to set out chairs in either of the side aisles, and had put chairs and tables cafe style in front of the stage, to help make the place look fuller.  They are trying to raise funds at the moment for new chairs, and I hope they succeed since the current ones were designed with no reference to the human form, and my back was aching long before we ever got through the support act.

This morning I wound up the bathroom blind to see that a green bucket of prunings and a Strulch bag stuffed with other empty bags, which I had left on the lawn the day before, had blown into the rose bed landing on the bulbs whose emerging leaves I'd been so careful not to crush when mulching the bed.  Our initial attempt to film the performance of the new anti-rabbit gate failed as well, since the camera blew over in the small hours.  I hate this wind.

the gardeners strike back

The Systems Administrator has finished the anti-rabbit gate, a piece of plant support netting held between battens, with a loose curtain overlapping the bottom batten so as to take up the unevenness of the drive.  It is ingeniously hinged at one end and hooks on to a bolt at the other. Constructing the wooden hinge required a fair amount of bodging, but having one saves me having to try and hook both ends of the batten up at once.  That would be a task designed to drive anybody mad, especially performed after dark or in the rain.  A half gale blew through the entire process, and the SA's residual cold had developed into a headache by the end of it.  It is a very fine rabbit gate, though.  I shall take great pleasure in shutting it behind me as I go out this evening, though opening it and shutting it again when I get back may be less fun as by then it is forecast to be raining heavily.

We've had the wildlife camera set on the gravel where my poor bulbs got eaten for the past forty-eight hours.  It revealed Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat passing at speed, having evidently clocked the infra-red camera and not liked it, and at around midnight Our Ginger who saw the camera and paused in front of it to beam.  He does go out at night, it seems, just not until after we've gone to bed and the non-stop feline party has ended for the day.

There was also a small rabbit, just the one, which first appeared not long after dusk.  The SA was surprised at how early in the night the camera picked it up, but I thought that rabbits were crepuscular animals.  Which said, I've seen them running round the neighbour's field and the grass by the lettuce farm reservoir quite late into the night, when I've been coming back from evenings out.  In the old days when our cats were fierce the rabbits always used to jinx left or right at our entrance, though, never going in.  Not any more, alas.

There is the nasty possibility that by now we have them living in the garden.  The camera is set on the gate for now, to see how it performs, but after that I want to move it to the back garden and discover the terrible truth.  Both the Cardamine quinquefolia I got from the Chatto gardens and planted in their obscure corner only a few days ago have been eaten to the ground, as has the existing plant which was flowering, and is why I noticed the damage in passing as my brain registered that the splash of pink in that corner was missing.

I'd actually gone to the bottom of the garden to prune the hydrangea 'Annabelle', which is one of those that you can take down to a short framework in March if you want to without losing a year's flowers.  It tends to be a floppy thing, and I thought that shorter might be better.  Once I was in the back garden I spent the rest of the day applying Strulch.  Originally I'd thought it would be too windy, or rather originally I'd expected it to be raining, which is what the forecast for Monday said yesterday, but by today the forecast had changed and the rose beds seemed reasonably sheltered. The leaves of the bulbs and perennials are enlarging day by day, and the sooner all the beds are Strulched the better. They are not  all going to be Strulched, though, unless I buy some more, as I can tell from looking at what I've done and what's left to do that I'm at least half a pallet short.

windier sunday

I happened to hear yesterday evening's shipping forecast of Force 9 for Thames, and as the wind got up late on I suddenly remembered that the garden dining chairs were still sitting on the deck by the conservatory.  It's for such moments that I bought the large Maglite torch (I love Maglites.  I have a tiny one that lives in my handbag, and fantasies of owning one of the really big multi battery models traditionally carried by gamekeepers, being so heavy that they function as blunt instruments while not counting as offensive weapons).  I padded down to the back garden and moved the chairs off the deck on to the lawn, so that they could not blow through the conservatory windows.

Morning brought a hiatus in the wind but it was raining, periods of light splutter alternating with vicious squalls, while the wind gradually got up again.  I don't think we saw the full Force 9 here, but the land generally slows things down compared to conditions at sea so that you can reckon on knocking one off the forecast strength.  A Nine is technically a Severe Gale.  It does not become a Storm until it hits Force 10.  Every so often some radio or newspaper piece refers to force nine storms, and I rage inwardly.

I didn't fancy the greenhouse in that much wind.  It is getting a bit old and rattly, and doesn't feel entirely secure in real gale of wind, though so far the lost panes have all slid outwards so you would have been fine inside, just not if you were standing next to it.  And I've been grumbling for weeks that my chest is still bunged up with phlegm so I thought it might be vaguely sensible to try and stay warm and dry, and had already earmarked the day for desk jobs.  I spent it going through old gardening magazines before filing them away in date order in boxes in the garage, which holds a pretty comprehensive archive of popular consumer taste and aspirations by now, going back to the 1980s and augmented by some earlier RHS magazines inherited from my late father-in-law.  Probably most of it will never be used, and will end up at the recyling centre as and when we shuffle off to somewhere smaller and easier to heat, with a more manageable garden, or else the mortal coil, whichever comes first.  In the meantime there is space for them in the garage.

I pondered on various garden issues as I read through them, and came to some decisions.  I should not waste my time trying to move a couple of Penstemon grandiflorus, that have never thrived in their current position (there used to be three, which tells you quite how little they have like it there).  Penstemon do not move well, and I'd do better to start again with healthy young plants if I want to try again somewhere else (though I'm not sure where).  A Cryptomeria japonica 'Elegans' which was a delight as a youngster but ceased to be beautiful at least a year ago has got to come out.  The Systems Administrator would chop it down for me with the chainsaw, though after that the thought of dealing with the rootball makes my heart sink, but it needs to go.  Helen Dillon recommends an alternative to the giant oat grass Stipa gigantea whose flowers last all through the winter, whereas those of the Stipa have gone tatty and bald by late autumn.  Some of the existing Stipa seem to have died out in great patches, after several years of loyal service, so maybe I should try and track down Chionocloa conspicua in their place.  I definitely need a sculptural focus for a spot by the conservatory.  Maybe I could use an amethyst geode outdoors in summer, and bring it in for the winter, or else start saving up for a Whichford elephant pot.  I have coveted both for years. It's funny, my normal standpoint that I don't want many things completely breaks down when it comes to the garden.

I'd have rather been outside, if the weather had been half decent, but a chunk of gardening is also done in your head, reading and thinking.

windy saturday

The clocks go forward tonight, but it still barely feels like spring.  I spent the day moving more of the great pile of compost on to the vegetable patch, chiselling weeds and roots out of the veg beds as I went  and collecting stones, round pebbles for the beach garden in one pot and irregular lumpy ones in another pot for the path by the dustbin.  The latter still has some bare patches of Mypex membrane showing, but it's getting there.  When it's completely covered I shall work out the area, and try and calculate how many dump bags worth of stone I must have moved, one potful at a time. I'll find it difficult to drop the habit of collecting stones once it's finished, though it will always need topping up as the stones tend to shift to the side over time leaving bare patches in the middle when we walk.  And I can syphon off especially knobbly and picturesque flinty stones for the dry garden by the entrance.

There was a stone covered path across one of the display gardens at Writtle, not laid on fabric, which according to one of the landscape tutors had been topped up over the years with fresh aggregate equivalent to a metre's depth, while still mysteriously remaining at the same level as the rest of the garden.

There was no sign of any of the broad beans coming up, or the parsnips, but I wasn't expecting to see anything of them yet since they are notoriously slow to germinate.  I didn't try to make any further sowings, since handling seed outside when it's too windy is simply frustrating.  Small seeds can blow clean out of the palm of your hand, and a sudden gust can too easily send the open seed packets bowling down the path, scattering their contents wastefully on the ground.

The poor old chickens didn't get a run.  They looked at me slightly hopefully at lunchtime, but their heart wasn't really in it, and mine certainly wasn't.  Hens don't like wind, presumably because the noise and bluster makes it more difficult for them to tell when there are predators about, and I was afraid that if I let them out they would disappear inside the hedge or deep into the back of the big bed in the back garden, and I would find it difficult to keep track of where they were.  And I don't like wind either, it makes me clumsy, and I didn't want to find myself trailing around the back garden after the chickens doing five minutes of this and ten minutes of that, while the wind blew my buckets over and sent my kneeling mat tumbling across the lawn each time I got up.

The Systems Administrator is building a panel to hang across the entrance, of plastic mesh hanging from a wooden frame, to prevent all but the most determined rabbits from coming in during the night.  I am reconciled to hoofing down the drive each morning to move it before the postman arrives.  That shouldn't be too much of a challenge on week days, since the post generally comes some time between mid morning and lunchtime, but for some reason it's earlier on Saturdays.  This morning he came at twenty past eight.  I was already up and had let the hens into their run, but not that long before.

beastly bunnies

Rabbits have eaten the leaves off more of the bulbs by the entrance to the garden, including some freshly planted Dichelostemma and a second tray that was sitting there waiting to go into the ground.  I managed to get them all the way through the winter without being attacked by the mice that have been plaguing the greenhouse, then a couple of days outside and they've been grazed off. The foxtail lilies are being steadily cropped to the ground, and most of the flower buds have gone from the fritillaries.  It is really quite discouraging.  As a stopgap the Systems Administrator has offered to make a temporary wire barrier to go across the entrance to the drive, which I can take down each morning when I go out to let the hens into their run, as that's normally before the postman comes.

And we are talking each other into believing that Our Ginger and the short indignant tabby could cope with the introduction of kittens.  That's what we need, a couple of fit young cats patrolling the garden and putting the fear of god into the local rabbit population, which stayed out for over a decade while the two Maine Coons and the black cat were in their prime.  Meanwhile, on the basis of know-thy-enemy, the wildlife camera is set up on the affected bulbs to try and discover how many rabbits are coming in, and at what time.  It was previously supposed to have been telling us what creature was making the mysterious burrows near the chicken house, but the SA found no images because the batteries had gone flat.  They were cheap own brand ones, and evidently a false economy.

At least rabbits don't seem to eat daffodils.  Actually, nothing much does, apart from Narcissus root fly and particularly stupid supermarket shoppers.  Most creatures appreciate that they are toxic. They don't last overly long in our garden, though.  A gardening friend with equally dry, light soil said that they didn't do well in her garden either, so I blame the conditions and not my cultivation techniques.  Today I added some more of the variety 'Sun Disc' to one of the borders in the back garden, since my first planting made in 2009 has persisted pretty well.  The 'Beryl' planted at the same time in the same border have almost entirely disappeared.  'Sun Disc' is a fairly low growing daffodil, with neat little round flowers of lemon yellow, surrounding a dainty, darker yellow cup.

I've got some of the white flowered variety 'Thalia' to go into the daffodil lawn.  The grass is beginning to grow, as are the other daffodils so I can see where they are, and it will be a challenge planting 'Thalia' without making too much of a mess trampling everything else, and settling the earth around the newly planted leaves so that they stand upright and look natural immediately.  If they sit there all awry and looking awkward and trussed up it will spoil the look of the entire lawn for this season.  'Thalia' is a Victorian variety, and not always easy to track down, so I was pleased to find them in the Peter Nyssen catalogue.  I've already got some, which have lasted reasonably well, and they are said to tolerate partial shade which is useful as the hedge and oak tree have grown since I first planted daffodils in that lawn.

None of it will quite take my mind off the rabbits.

a busy day

It's been a long day.  I had a ticket for the R3 lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes, which meant I had to go to London, unless I wanted to waste my ticket.  The concert was one of four I booked last year spread over several months, the theory being that I'd enjoy them when I got there, while if I didn't book it was very easy to never get round to going.  It was raining too, so I wouldn't have been able to do anything in the garden, though the downside was that I had to get myself about London in the rain and my cold is still refusing to budge from my chest.  The Systems Administrator assured me that it was going to stop raining later, and when I got to St Lukes I discovered from a fellow concert goer that the fourth and final concert I'd booked for in June was already sold out.

Today was the Atos Trio, and while the eventual audience was respectable the hall was not full. The pulling power of chamber musicians seems to work on the same pyramidal basis as folk musicians.  A few, Nicola Benedetti or Martin Carthy, can be almost guaranteed to sell out and advance booking is essential.  For the great majority you'll probably get in OK just turning up on the day.  It was so long since I booked the Atos Trio I'd completely forgotten what the programme was, but the blackboard on the pavement outside told me that it was Haydn and Brahms.

I love LSO St Lukes.  I like the performance space, the programming of the lunchtime concerts, the informative programme notes that are thrust into your hand free and gratis as you go in, and the peaceful depths of the crypt cafe where you can get a piece of millionaire's shortbread and filter coffee with refills for £3.50.  If I worked around Silicon Roundabout I'd try and schedule my meetings so that I could go every week.  Today's music turned out to be interesting without making me fall in love with either piece.  The Haydn represented an early stage in the development of the string trio, according to the notes, when the violin and cello were still emerging from their subsidiary roles as supplementary bass line for the harpsichord on to an equal footing.  The Brahms was a mixture of his early and late output, Brahms writing the first version as a young man and then substantially reworking it thirty-five years later (I was mildly perturbed that the notes referred to the fifty-six year old Brahms as elderly).  The whole thing is being broadcast at lunchtime tomorrow, Friday 27 March, on Radio 3.

After the concert I made my way to Trafalgar Square to see if I could get into the National Gallery's current exhibition Inventing Impressionism.  If I'd had anybody with me I wouldn't have risked dragging them down there, since if there's one thing a British art audience likes more than another it's a nice dose of impressionism, but a friend got in without booking on a Saturday a couple of weeks back, and it seemed worth a try.  I had a fall back position just in case, to go round the corner to the National Portrait Gallery and learn about the Duke of Wellington instead, but the National Gallery was selling impressionism tickets for immediate admission.  The show has reviewed well, but it seems that to really tickle the public taste a job lot of impressionists isn't enough, the great British public want wall to wall Degas dancers, or else Van Gogh.

There was nothing of Vincent's at all in the current exhibition, because the uniting theme is the work of art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who put his reputation and all his capital on the line by taking up many of the impressionists (though not Van Gogh, and scarcely any Cezanne), acting not merely as agent but as a principal, buying their work from them and holding it as his own stock, sometimes for years.  I thought that made the show doubly interesting, as a document of social and economic history as well as a collection of paintings, although by now they are so highly regarded it's a hard stretch of the imagination to see them as the worthless alien daubs that the French art establishment treated them as at the time.  A Monet near the end of the exhibition was originally going to be offered as a gift to the National Gallery, except that the management let it be known that the offer would be declined.  It was not a very big Monet (and not red, which according to Grayson Perry puts up the price of pictures), but even so how much of their annual acquisitions budget would they have to part with to buy it now?

I liked some of the coastal and river scenes and landscapes very much indeed, and a Manet still-life of half a cooked salmon on a table (I've seen a knife balanced over the forward edge of a table to break the line of it somewhere else quite recently, and can't remember where.  I think it was a device used by Rubens, or Rembrandt, or both).  Some of Renoir's sweet, soft focus, characterless or at least extremely passive young women were less interesting.  Courbet's 1868 Venus arising from the waves complete with underarm hair was arresting given the date, and the amount of tizz that breastfeeding and female pubic hair can still provoke nearly a hundred and fifty years later.

After all that I'd have been happy to curl up for the evening with Our Ginger and a good book, but it was the beekeepers' monthly club night, and I'd already missed last month because I was ill, and I needed to drop off a cheque for the hall hire we owed for January and February as well as today.  I could have posted the cheque, which I made sure I got signed at the last committee meeting to be on the safe side, but that would still have left me with the task of finding a signatory for another cheque for something else.  So I took myself off to the meeting.  We had a good turnout, and a panel led discussion of practical beekeeping issues with contributions from the floor which was useful and entertaining, not least because the panellists didn't always agree with each other.

The Secretary introduced me to a new member who lives round the corner from us.  I promised to help him if I could, and lend him my extractor if he got a honey crop, while warning him that I wasn't a very good beekeeper and probably not a good teacher.  It's a mixed blessing having a new beekeeper set up just up the lane.  On the one hand he seems a nice chap and it's good to know the neighbours, but on the other hand our bees will be competing for the same forage.  It would be easier if the local farmers favoured field beans or borage, but lettuces and winter wheat are no use to bees.

learning from Mr Turner

I was going out this morning, so thought I'd set an alarm to be on the safe side.  I woke up a quarter of an hour before it was due to go off, but when I tried to cancel it so that it wouldn't disturb the Systems Administrator I couldn't find any such option on the menu.  With the minutes ticking away until it was due to start bleeping I dug the instruction booklet out of the bedside drawer, and searched for the section on cancelling the alarm, but there didn't seem to be one.  Several of the buttons would make the noise stop once it had started, turning the alarm off in the process, but the idea that you might no longer want an alarm at all didn't seem to have occurred to the designers. In exasperation I resorted to unplugging the clock radio at the wall.

Much later I got rid of the alarm during my Pilates practice by setting the time to ten minutes hence, and getting up and pressing one of the turn-off-the-alarm buttons when it duly bleeped, but I still have no idea how to kill the alarm before the event, even after consulting the booklet again at my leisure instead of operating under time pressure.  There might be somebody on the planet less temperamentally and intellectually suited to becoming a bomb disposal expert than I would be, but I wouldn't count on it.

The conversation during the morning's outing turned to the way that Turner and Constable and before them Rubens used a splash of red in the foreground of their paintings to give the composition some zing.  Red marker buoy, waistcoat, petticoat, whatever.  In our garden it was some red anemones that had turned up in a pot of what were supposed to be blue ones, the bulb merchant's error rather than mine since when dormant you can't tell them apart (or at least I certainly can't.  I have heard that real daffodil experts can identify any variety just from the bulbs).  These red flowers caught my eye whenever I looked at that part of the garden, only rather than giving the composition zing they disrupted it.  You couldn't help seeing them, and they were annoying.

My mother suggested pragmatically that I could simply pick them and stick them in water.  It seemed an easy solution. but when I got home I looked at the red anemones again and thought I couldn't be bothered to commit myself to always rushing over to pick them.  With my most pointed trowel I levered the group up, and traced the stems of the red flowers back down to their source. There was not one rogue plant, but two.  I teased them out, replanted the rest of the clump, and watered them in.  The disturbance may have cut short their flowering for this spring, but the effect on the garden scene was remarkable.  Suddenly the different shades of blue and pale pink flowed into each other, no focal point, no eye catcher.  I should have done it weeks ago, as soon as I discovered the mistake.

I found a home for the two rejected plants by the front door, where their red flowers could echo the smaller red flowers of the Chaenomeles under the kitchen window.  Red is a good colour, but you have to be careful where you put it.

in the greenhouse

The Met Office couldn't make their minds up about today's weather.  Yesterday they were forecasting rain on Tuesday morning for our area with ninety per cent probability, then by this morning it had dropped back to ten per cent chance.  I could see the radiating circles of light rain falling on the pond as I stood at the kitchen sink, and decided to spend the morning doing a stint in the greenhouse, then it could rain or not as it pleased without disturbing me.

I have plenty of Eccremocarpus scaber seedlings, more than I could possibly use.  This is a tender, rapid climber that produces little bell shaped flowers in vivid shades of red, orange, coral pink or white (not all on the same plant).  I plan to send some scrambling among the dahlias, but know from past attempts to raise it from seed that the young plants rapidly grow into each other and seize on to their neighbours for grim death, so I moved the seedlings straight into three inch pots, so that I'd have some scope to space them out as they grew.  I am going to run out of space in the greenhouse, I can see this now.  I was left with half a pot of seedlings undisturbed, and slipped their root ball back into a spare pot and filled the empty half with compost for now.  They'll soon be too enmeshed to prick out, but just for a day or two they can act as an insurance policy in case the ones I pricked out don't take.

I don't like the look of the current bag of B&Q compost.  Their multi-purpose is normally good, besides being cheaper than many of the branded composts, but this bag seems to contain too much insufficiently composted ground wood.  I could see a fine mesh of fungus growing through the contents of the bag.  If it is purely a decay fungus then it shouldn't hurt living plants, but I wasn't keen on entrusting my replacement packet of gazania seeds to it.  That's the trouble with buying compost.  A given make may review well, or you may have a good experience with it, then the next time you buy the same thing what you find in the bag may be quite different.

A heresy.  I am pretty ecologically minded.  I don't fly, and am pretty sure my carbon footprint is a lot lower than Prince Charles'.  But I do resent not being allowed to buy decent compost, containing an element of peat if that's what it takes to make a tolerable growing medium, for as long as the Irish go on shovelling peat into power stations.  When we stop burning peat in industrial quantities I'll feel more guilty about the relatively tiny amounts used by home gardeners.  Until then, not so much.

I sowed some sunflowers, two to a deep three inch pot as a compromise between not wasting growing space and not wasting seeds, though the seeds came as freebies with magazines.  I thought they were big and tough enough to cope with the fungus ridden compost.  If both germinate I'll carefully separate them out.  Large seeds like sunflowers don't make the best free gifts to package up with magazines sent through the post, as they tend to get crushed in transit, and one of my packets of 18 FREE seeds worth £2.89 or whatever it was only actually contained twelve usable ones.  And one packet that said 'Red Sun' on the printed outer packet was labelled 'Velvet Queen' on the inner foil.  It doesn't really matter, as long as I get some dark red and some yellow.  Last year I never got round to sowing any, but a few self-sown volunteers meant it wasn't a total sunflower wipe-out.

After lunch I let the chickens out for a run, because they were grizzling so loudly, but by teatime it began to rain.  Quite hard, and by then I'd mislaid two hens.  Three were with me in the long bed, one was last seen standing shrieking outside the hen house, and the fifth I'd totally lost track of.  I sat in the porch with a cup of tea, hoping they'd go in soon, and to my relief they did.  It stopped raining, but by then I'd decided to call it a day on the gardening front.   Everything was wet, and the air was cold.

stones

I have finally and grudgingly changed the blog background to green, since it was the first day of spring a couple of days ago (unless you are the Met Office) and I did briefly remove my fleece today.  I kept my beanie on, though, and was wearing two long sleeved t-shirts and a Musto thermal polo neck under a heavy cotton shirt.  That's how warm it was.

The bowl on the hall table where I keep any stones with holes in that I find was beginning to overflow, so I made up another couple of strings of them to hang from the posts by the blue shed. No witches are going to get into that shed, no Sir.  Incidentally, if you want to stop them running along the tops of your hedges the secret is to leave any holly trees uncut, as the witches won't be able to jump over them.

A friend who lives no more than three miles away as the crow flies, on the sandy soil of the Tendring plateau, said plaintively that she didn't have stones with holes in her garden.  Nor did we for many years, until I learned how to see them, so my guess is that she probably has but hasn't looked closely enough.  The holes are almost always blocked with earth when you find the stone, and the knack is to spot the depressions filled with earth that remain when you rub the rest of it off, that might go all the way through because there is a potential exit hole as well.  You will find out when you wash the stone under the kitchen tap, probing at the possible hole with the point of a skewer to scrape the packed soil out.  Sometimes you find you've picked up a dud, and sometimes a small pebble has wedged in the hole and takes a great deal of winkling out.  It is not a good idea to rest the stone in the palm of your hand while probing, just in case resistance suddenly ceases and the skewer shoots forward.

Of course there must be a preliminary stage of recognition, before you start narrowing in on likely spots of earth, to work out which stones are worth looking at more closely, but I don't know how that works.  Like posting messages on Snapchat*, you just recognise them.  Alas, while I have believed since my student days that Wittgenstein posed the question If you wanted to know whether a stone had a mouth, how would you know where to look? I have never been able to track it down since to source.  Or at least, Google has been no help.  I haven't yet resorted to reading the collected works of Wittgenstein.

I didn't find any new stones with holes today, but did discover one that was almost half a geode, a broken flint with a shallow depression on the broken face lined with faintly sparkling crystals of quartz.  Not as smart as the amethyst geodes you see in mineral and gemstone shops, but still good.

*If you are a devotee of the Kermode and Mayo Film Review Programme you will get the reference immediately.  If not, don't worry about it, though you could start listening.  It is easily the best source for keeping tabs on new film releases, and the odd vintage classic.

grow your own

I have finally sown some vegetables, parsnips and some broad beans.  It's not much, but it's a start. And I finished weeding the asparagus bed, trying to tease out the two different sorts of running weed grass that have infiltrated, one with thin, wiggly roots and the other with fat straight ones. There are absolutely no signs of any asparagus coming up, and it was neglected last year, but maybe it's still too early.  It seeds itself around the garden, where I tend to leave it through a combination of aesthetics and idleness, the foliage being quite ornamental and the roots difficult to extract.  I have read of asparagus coming back after ploughing, so with any luck having to compete with weeds for one summer won't have killed ours.  I weeded it beautifully the year before, and Strulched the bed, and filled in the gaps with new young plants, but then came a savage dry spell and I'm not sure how many of the replacement plants survived.

I have a plan of what is supposed to go in which bed, worked out on a piece of paper.  Classic rotations as set out in the books ignore the possibility that one side of your vegetable patch might be shadier than the other, and my plan was based mainly on going through Dr Hessayon's Vegetable Book and seeing what demanded a sunny site, and what only had to be reasonably sunny.  One of the beds nearest the hedge was already earmarked for salad leaves, since I knew they liked a little shade in summer, and the sweetcorn was destined for the sunniest bed, but that left some juggling in the middle.  Dr Hessayon is amazingly gung-ho about chemicals, telling the reader to dust the soil against various pests with this and that product, most of which are probably no longer on sale. Our vegetables will have to take their chances with wire worms, but I am planning to fleece against leek moth, carrot root fly, and whatever it was that riddled my turnips with black holes the last time I grew any.  And I will need to net the purple sprouting broccoli against pigeons, if I ever get that far.

The surface of the freshly weeded beds is of course a snare and a delusion, since it is chock full of weed seeds.  It has largely been the weeding that's overwhelmed me in previous years.  That, and the watering.  We'll see.

The Systems Administrator had a bonfire, since the wind was blowing from the east to take the smoke into the wood and not out over the lettuce field or down to the neighbouring cottages, so the utility area is looking a little tidier than it was.  There is plenty more stuff to come down from the meadow to burn, though, largely bramble stems, both the wild ones and the terrifying Rubus cockburnianus.  It would be helpful if the weather could warm up enough for the SA to feel like mending the garden tractor, so that we could use it to cart the debris down in the trailer.  It currently has major carburettor problems and a knackered tyre, but there's no point in getting a new tyre for it until we see if it's possible to fix the fuel system.  But it would be more pleasant crawling around on the concrete working on the engine if temperatures would at least nudge into double figures.

It felt chilly today, and still not as though there was any great rush to sow things outside.  I'll try and do a bit more over the course of next week, though.  It must warm up soon, and before I know where I am it will suddenly be late April.

a game of two halves

The morning was a bit of a shambles.  I was all set to get on with the gardening, fetchingly clad in black thermal leggings and three layers of t-shirts, only to discover when I went to let the chickens into their run that it was raining.  The forecast was for rain early and sun later, so I thought I'd use the time making a cake and then get out into the garden.  Cake in the oven, timer set to five minutes less than the recipe said, I thought I'd ring a friend I've been swapping voice mail messages with since midweek.  The friend was at home and answered her telephone, and we had a good chat and agreed to go and see Sargent at the National Portrait Gallery, and to a morning concert at the Aldeburgh festival if we could get tickets.  Result.

Six minutes before the timer was due to go off the kitchen began to smell over-much of cake. Telephone in one hand and oven glove in the other I retrieved the cake, and found the top had caught.  My friend said kindly that she would leave me to it.  I thought I could scrape the carbonised layer off once the cake had cooled down a little, and fired up the laptop to book our tickets for Sargent.  The booking form took me all the way through to entering my credit card details and then stalled, the little circular icon going round and round while a message said that they were processing my transaction and I should not refresh the screen.  For five minutes.

I thought I'd better ring the ticket office to find out whether I'd bought tickets or not, and if not book some.  The NPG has an explicit policy that tickets cannot be exchanged or refunded, and I didn't want to end up with two lots.  I fired up my tablet, since the laptop was still processing my transaction, and rang the number for tickets on their website, which turned out not to be the ticket office but general reception.  They gave me a different number, which put me through to a recorded message that their ticket office was busy at the moment, but I could book on line.  No, I couldn't, that's why I'm trying to ring you up.  After ten minutes of the recorded message I spoke to a human being and sorted out the tickets.

It was still raining.  I scraped the burnt top off the cake and drizzled some water icing over it, pepped up with honey.  Crumbs began to surface in the icing, which started to run down the sides of the cake.  I put the weeping cake in a cupboard for the icing to set, and when I took it out at lunchtime what was left of the icing on top of the cake had become more or less transparent.  I spent the rest of the morning moving compost on to the vegetable beds, and listening to a programme about Pierre Boulez, which confirmed my suspicion that on the whole I much preferred Schubert.  Or Haydn, Brahms, Vaughan Williams, Bach, or Sibelius.  Or practically anybody.

The afternoon was much better.  I went to a Plant Heritage lecture about witch hazels, by Chris Lane whose now out of print book I bought a while back remaindered from King County libraries. The A12 and A14 ran smoothly, I found a parking space in the rather tight village hall car park without catastrophe, and it was a jolly good lecture.  It was packed, too.  I saw a couple of my former colleagues from the plant centre and got the hot gossip that the owners had put it up for rent, and met people I know from two different gardening clubs, and bought a very fine Clivia on the plant stall for the conservatory for the princely sum of five pounds in aid of Plant Heritage funds, complete with flower bud, so at least I'll see it in flower once even if I can never persuade it to do it again.  The afternoon felt much more productive than the morning.

what eclipse?

I kept half an eye on the window as I sat at the kitchen table writing up the minutes of yesterday afternoon's music society committee meeting and sorting out various bits of beekeepers' admin, in case I could see any signs of the eclipse.  It was a very grey and murky morning, and as twenty past eight approached I couldn't detect any difference in the light at all.  By nine I had to conclude that I'd missed it.  The Systems Administrator had heard an explanation from Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain (who read mathematics and theoretical physics at University College Dublin, making him one of the go-to comedians of choice when the media is trying to make science palatable) on R2 explaining that the loss of light would be about twenty per cent during the eclipse, but happen so gradually that our eyes and brains would compensate and we wouldn't notice the difference on a dull day. They were right, I didn't.

Having missed the once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, I nipped around the corner to Beth Chatto's to see if they had any Anemone pavonina, and was in luck.  There on a bench immediately opposite the entrance to the nursery were two trays of them.  Some were red, some pink, some yellow, and quite a few weren't quite open yet, but I managed to pick out four in my chosen colour range.  A stray Cardamine quinquefolia found its way into the basket as well, and then I went to pay before I could look at any more plants.  The Cardamine is for a very shady corner at the bottom of the back garden, where the existing one is doing well but not covering the entire space as quickly as I'd like.  It has ferny leaves and pink flowers in early spring, and disappears for much of the rest of the year, so is a good thing for quiet corners where you can enjoy it while it's out, and not worry about its absence the rest of the time.

There was another customer already hovering to pay, while the person nominally on the till was stuck on the telephone.  He looked into my basket and remarked that we both had the same idea, and I saw that his too contained pink and pale yellow Anemone pavonina.  I asked if he didn't like the red so much, and he replied that had them and did like them but wanted some other colours. He had succeeded in growing them from seed and said that you could get a flowering size plant in two years, so I must not allow myself to be put off by the mould episode.

There were not very many customers there.  I am afraid that the British are becoming a nation of fair weather gardeners.  Mind you, it was awfully cold, with a sort of raw dampness in the air.

one thing leads to another

Now that the Systems Administrator has finished clearing the posts from by the blue shed I thought I could get on with planting the small boxes, but before I could do that I had to fill the holes left by the postcrete and level the ground.  I also had a collection of Agapanthus and a large pot of Amaryllis belladonna to plant out that weren't flowering well enough in their pots to justify their space over the winter in the greenhouse, and had thought that the surplus soil from digging the holes for them would usefully fill the post holes.  And it seemed sensible to finish cutting the hedge in that corner before planting the boxes, since they are so tiny it would be easy to crush them while hedge cutting with one misplaced foot.

The Agapanthus were all hardy varieties.  There was A. mooreanus, A. inapertus, a 'Loch Inch', one I picked out from a mixed batch because it was a particularly good shade of dark blue, and one pot simply labelled White.  As a general rule of thumb, Agapanthus with narrow leaves that die down completely in the winter are relatively hardy, while those with broad evergreen leaves are more tender, or at any rate, the leaves will not withstand frost and the loss of its leaves weakens the plant.  The A. inapertus threw me in that its narrow grassy leaves were semi-evergreen.  I resorted to checking on the internet to see if I could expect it to survive UK winters planted outdoors and decided to go with Avon Bulbs' verdict that I probably could.

Note the use of the word 'planted'.  Asking a plant to overwinter outside when its roots are safely tucked away underground, and you can heap some extra mulch on top if necessary, is quite different to leaving it outside in a pot, where the entire root system is liable to freeze solid in a sharp frost.  I realised this after I'd evicted the collection of pots from the greenhouse when something (probably another bout of the cold) put a temporary stop to planting, and the Agapanthus spent several weeks living in the porch.  It's lucky that the postman is good natured about picking his way round flowerpots and deckchairs to get to the letterbox.

Planting the Agapanthus brought it home to me how there were patches of weeds in the Italian garden in the turning circle, including around some Anemone pavonina which are flowering now and deserve to be given the space to show off, so I spent some time weeding the gravel.  I got the anemones from the Chatto nursery after admiring them in her gravel garden, though that planting had a preponderance of bright red, and the colours I really like are the pinks and creams.  For this reason I only want to buy them in person and when they are in bloom and I can see what I'm getting.  I only remember buying three, but now have four so either I bought an extra odd one and forgot about it or they have succeeded in seeding themselves very mildly.  I have tried saving my own seed and growing more, but nothing happened, or rather all that happened was that the seeds went spectacularly mouldy.  My few plants have been growing happily for several years now, and I am very tempted to invest in some more, if there are any pink or cream ones to be had (note the use of the word 'invest'.  Money spent on long-lived plants does not count as consumption, it is an investment).

So by the end of the day I'd done some weeding, dug several holes, moved some earth and some concrete lumps and wooden posts, cut bits out of the hedge (rather too late in the season), moved the bits, scooped up some fallen leaves, got decoyed into weeding the beach garden in front of the blue shed because it looked so weedy and I was there with a kneeling mat, a hand fork and a bucket, and planted out some Agapanthus and Amaryllis.  But not actually planted any of the small boxes.

more mulching and weeding

The day dawned on two gleaming bags of Strulch on the top lawn, and two green buckets, and I resolved to use the Strulch that morning and move the buckets then keep the lawn free of mess, so that I'd have a clear view from the bathroom window.  The plan failed, in that I used the two bags, but then fetched some more, and picked up the rose prunings I'd left on the grass, but then did some more pruning and left new bits on the lawn, and distracted myself into starting the tackle the large lump of shrubby ivy that's fallen out from the wood over the deck on the far side of the lawn where the potted witch hazels live.  So by lunchtime I had more mess than when I'd started, although I'd got quite a lot of gardening done.  The day is definitely drawing nearer when I'll have finished mulching the rose bed behind the house, and it will be all set up for another couple of years.  But that day may not be tomorrow.  I managed to kid myself first thing that today could be the day, but by mid-morning had to admit that I was being hopelessly optimistic.

I was going to be hard hearted and press on in the afternoon, but the chickens sounded so disconsolate that I realised I had to let them out.  They were not keen to wander, and stuck close by me as I weeded the herb bed.  I don't understand how they decide when they are going to split into two groups, or go charging off down the garden, or whether to stay in a tidy flock close to the hen house.  I sometimes think they travel further on nice days, and today was pretty grey, but I'm not sure that's the whole answer.  Has something (a fox?) passed by their house on the off-chance and scared them recently?  It certainly makes for a more productive afternoon's gardening if they stay firmly in one place.

The herb bed has a path running diagonally across it, made by me, a diamond pattern of paving slabs set firmly in concrete with triangles of cobbles filling in the gaps.  I'm quite pleased with it. Borders of chives run down each side of the path, and around the two edges of the bed that aren't backed by the pot shed and the chicken run.  They have become rather gappy, and I have my eye on various clumps of chives that have put themselves in places where I don't want them, for lifting and splitting to fill in some of the gaps.  Chives seed incontinently, and when I think of the tiny pots that garden centres sell for between one and two pounds I can't begin to guess how much our chives would be worth on that basis.  I used to feel the same sense of dislocation seeing the plant centre charging the best part of four quid for little pots of Asphodeline lutea or Lychnis coronaria. I have to pull them out like weeds, indeed, while I give the Asphodeline its head in the gravel, within limits, the Lychnis is now functionally a weed and I pull out every plant I see.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator suggested keeping the lumps of postcrete instead of taking them to the dump, since they break up quite readily, to use as filler next time we're mending the potholes in the lane.  Waste not, want not.

brute force and cunning

The Systems Administrator came upon me as I was preparing to dig out a third post, and asked why I did not knock them out.  I replied truthfully that it had not occurred to me.  It didn't sound a very likely procedure even when the SA suggested it, redolent of jarred fingers and jolted shoulders. The SA went and fetched a pick axe, and gave one of the posts several brisk thumps, then lifted it out of the ground, leaving the postcrete behind.  He inserted the sharp side of the pick axe into the hole left by the post, leaned on the handle, and the concrete lump broke into several pieces.

So it turned out to be that easy. no digging necessary.  I went to find a bucket to put the rubble into, then had to go out.  It was late afternoon by the time I got back, and a column of smoke from beyond the house told me that the SA was having a bonfire, something that had been promised once the wind went round to the east.  When the SA came in from the bonfire he said that he had extracted the rest of the posts for me, since I was keen to start planting in that area.

I was grateful.  Admittedly, since the SA had put the posts there in the first place maybe it was his job to get rid of them once they were surplus to requirements, but I was the one who wanted to use the space, and I don't have a residual frozen shoulder or a permanently dodgy knee.  So all I have to do now is scavenge around to find some soil to level the depressions left by the postcrete, and I can plant my young boxes.  If I find I don't have enough then with any luck the Clacton Garden Centre might still have some left.

When I was clearing the dead leaves off the gravel in that corner prior to tackling the posts I found a cache of useful young holly seedlings, small ones just a couple of inches tall with only four or so leaves.  There are always plenty of blackbirds flitting in and out of the hedge by the blue shed, so I may have them to thank for the hollies.  I might lift some of the seedlings tomorrow and slot them in hard against the hedge in the back garden behind the statue of the head of a muse.  I should like her to have a plain evergreen backdrop, instead of a view of the rabbit fence, deciduous hedge, and beyond it the neighbour's young trees compete with tree tubes, and rubbish heap.  I tried planting some yews that were left over from another project, but the water table rose and they drowned, but since the hedge has not drowned it might just be dry enough close to it.

Holly has a reputation for being a slow grower, but I don't think that's the case, or at least not for plain wild green holly.  Some variegated forms possibly are slow, but holly that's germinated in situ grows pretty quickly in my experience.  It pops up here all over the place, taking cover under other shrubs before suddenly emerging, sometimes at a height of several feet.  One such volunteer is now in the process of being trained into a standard lollipop, though another is for the chop because I don't want a holly there.  So I believe the problem gardeners have with holly is that it transplants badly and is slow to get going after being planted out from a pot.

The muse's head is mounted on an upturned black cylindrical flowerpot and the top of her head stands about a yard above ground level, so obviously it's going to take a while to grow any sort of backdrop for her starting with plants that are two inches high.  But the seedlings are free, and I'm hoping that they will move better than larger plants would.