gravel planting

The Systems Administrator gave some of the gravel back to me.  The return loop on the garden railway was deemed an engineering failure, the curve of the loop being too tight so that trains kept derailing and the total length of track being more than the SA could maintain.  Instead the little trains will go out and back up one side of the gravel behind the long bed, with some sidings, and the SA has been ripping up the extra track over the summer.  I get a bonus space, previously bisected by the turning loop, where I can find homes for some more sun and drainage loving plants.

First off the blocks was an agapanthus.  I think it is probably A. inapertus, but I am not quite sure. Originally it was in a pot, where it didn't do much, so I planted it in the gravel of the turning circle, optimistically shoehorning it into a gap where it was overshadowed by lavenders in the summer and still didn't do much.  While it was in its pot it lost its label, since when and until it does something more decisive I am not sure which sort of agapanthus it is.  It has slender leaves, more evergreen than some varieties, which fits the description of A. inapertus, and my records tell me I did have one in a pot, but I'd be more confident of the identification if it would flower.  I turfed all the agapanthus out of their pots into the ground a couple of years ago, apart from the fat leaved tender evergreen ones, after noticing how much better the ragtag and bobtail of mostly nameless seedlings were flowering in the gravel than their cossetted named cousins in pots.  Greenhouse space is always at a premium in the winter, so wasting it on plants that didn't even perform as well as the ones grown outside seemed silly.

The agapanthus lifted out of the ground much more easily than I was afraid it would, proof of how little it had done to establish itself since I planted it out.  I worked some mushroom compost into the planting hole and might have to go and water it occasionally in the summer, but I hope it will be happier in its new home.  The roots looked white and healthy enough, so with any luck it will get going next year.  A dark blue one and a white that were liberated at the same time flowered generously this year, after doing practically nothing in their pots.

Next in were five Rhodiola rosea, rooted from bits chiselled off a parent plant that is gradually disappearing under a conifer.  This used to be classed as a sedum, and has the same general vibe. From a central, fleshy, lumpy, pinkish-purple rootstock emerge radiating arms in spring, from which fleshy, grey, wavy edged leaves stick out at right angles.  At the end of each shoot is carried a tuft of small yellow flowers.  By this stage of the year the arms have shrivelled to thin wisps, and after I'd planted my first crown in the gravel I spent some time looking for it as it disappeared into the pinkish, brownish background of chippings.  I found it again after a fingertip search of the area, peering over the top of my gardening spectacles, eyes watering copiously in the cold wind.

I wanted to get them planted out now because I was worried about overwintering them in their small pots.  It's so easy to over water that sort of thing and find come spring that it has rotted, or else let it dry out completely in the attempt to not over water it and so kill it that way.  I was vaguely worried that they might be slightly tender and I might be pushing it planting them out in November but that is completely wrong according to Wikipedia.  In the wild they grow in the cold regions of the world including much of the Arctic, the Alps, the Carpathian Mountains, the Pyrenees and Iceland.  On that basis I am sure that north Essex will be absolutely fine.

I never realised until I Googled it just now that Rhodiola possesses all sorts of medicinal properties (or at least is credited with them).  For promoting physical and cognitive vitality, lightening your skin, promoting fat loss, combating hair loss, fighting depression, strengthening the nervous system, and balancing the body's stress response system, Rhodiola rosea is good for them all.  I am not sure it will cure housemaid's knee, but it seems it will treat everything else.

I was pushing my luck more with the latest batch of seed raised Belamcanda chinensis, now Iris domestica.  If we get a hard winter I may yet lose the lot, but I wanted to get them planted out for much the same reason.  I certainly couldn't leave them in their pots on the concrete, which meant finding them space in the greenhouse or one of the cold frames.  All are going to be stuffed to the gunnels as it is, and I risked the iris either rotting or dessicating.  The superb drainage provided by the gravel in the front garden has kept some potentially tricky characters like Morina longifolia going for years, and I thought the Iris domestica would be as safe there as anywhere.

a concert, a cold, more gardening

The concert was lovely.  I had not actually heard of either of the performers when I booked the tickets, but the prospect of cello sonatas by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms performed on nineteenth century instruments sounded delightful, a glimpse into the sound world of George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell and the Brontes with three composers I like.  And it was very good, and the friend I'd taken along enjoyed it wholeheartedly as well, which is always a plus.  I hadn't knowingly heard the Beethoven or the Mendelssohn before, though they may have been on Radio 3 and washed over me, but I have a recording of Mstislav Rostropovich playing the Brahms cello sonatas, which gave some insight into quite how different from the modern instrument the gut strings of the period cello sounded.  I like both, though at one level I enjoyed the unfamiliar works more last night because I wasn't comparing them to the version I was used to, an inversion of the usual rule that people like the familiar.

Boxford church was looking very lovely too, with light spilling out of its clerestory windows and its funny little spire illuminated.  I should have looked it up before going, as I now read that there are a number of good memorials, which we completely neglected to look at during the interval.  The heating worked on the principal that a man standing with one foot in a bucket of scalding water and the other in ice will on average be comfortably warm, so my seat was toasty but my friend was distinctly chilly, and the stage lights if you forgot yourself and looked up above the performers' heads were like something designed to elicit a confession, but the mood of the audience was amiable.  I've noticed that before at Suffolk Villages concerts.

The Systems Administrator has returned to the marital bedroom after a couple of nights coughing and spluttering in the spare room, and this morning admitted to no longer having a headache after several days of suffering.  Part of me feels rather mean that Mr Fidget at the first sign of illness was whisked off to the vet, while the SA was left to sweat it out with no more assistance than my buying some more Neurofen lemon meltlets when I was out.  I work on the basis that human beings have five temperatures, cold, normal, warm and clammy, really hot, and no longer making sense. If the patient hits five it's time to seek urgent medical help, but the SA never rose above the clammy stage this time round, and there is (as our GP practice manager points out monthly in the parish magazine at this time of year) nothing they can do for colds, not even nasty ones.

I finished digging out the surplus patches of Baptisia australis from the far rose bed, or at least I dug out as many roots as I could find and have my fingers tightly crossed that it will not regenerate from the bits that I missed.  Then I dug in some mushroom compost, bashed the biggest lumps of clay down into something more tilth-like, and planted some yellow aquilegia raised from seed, the three Geranium 'Rozanne' that have been sitting by the greenhouse for weeks, and a willow leaved gentian.  I have missed the Systems Administrator's garden input, as just before going down with the cold the SA offered to use some of the pile of thick and slightly rotten planks on the concrete to extend the row of compost bins.  I need an extra bin urgently as the others are full and we are at that time of the year when masses of compostable material comes off the garden.  Besides, I want to turn the contents of the existing bins and make sure they don't have rats living under them.  I am suspicious about signs of digging at one end.  Although I don't know what I should do if I actually found a live rat.  Scream and run or hit it with a spade?

winter iris

It has just begun to rain, driving me in from the garden.  I had better write my blog post now because I am going out later to a Suffolk Villages concert in Boxford and when I come in again then, like Caliban and The Sweeney, I shall want my dinner.  In truth there is not much to blog about.  I went to Waitrose, and then I did some gardening, and then it rained.  The End.

I have been tidying the Iris unguicularis under the south wall of the house.  This is the winter flowering iris, which you will find called Iris sylosa in some old books.  The first couple of flowers have already appeared, making me think I had better try and get it cleaned up ready for the main display and before I risk damaging the emerging buds poking about in it.  The flowers are a delight, of classic iris form, not too big, and carried over a period of months.  They are prone to attack by snails, but apart from that they are perfect.  The leaves, on the other hand, are a bit messy at best. They die so badly, and before they die completely they go yellow and brown at the tips and look rank.

It's the leaves that let down many monocotylenous plants (that's the ones with long strap shaped leaves).  Take the Watsonia that are living so happily in the gravel, at least until we get a cold winter.  Their ever-increasing clumps of dark green, sword shaped leaves would be quite handsome if only they would not fill up with dead brown ones needing to be cut out.  Questing Libertia peregrinans does the same thing.  I once saw my mother's eyes light up with speculative intent as they fell upon its charming, olive green and russet leaves, only to lose interest the moment she heard it required grooming.  Deciduous Agapanthus is more obliging, its leaves turning to mush no more substantial than the faded leaves of hyacinths in mid summer, but the iris hangs on to its old leaves for years, as they turn ever paler and wispier without ever actually shrivelling and disappearing.

The answer is patience and scissors.  If you work your way through the patch of iris, clump by clump, snipping and pulling the old leaves out and collecting up any other leaves that have blown in there plus the dead snail shells, and the live snails if you are so inclined, at the end of it the iris will look much better.  You will have lost a couple of hours of your life and may have backache and sore knees, but you may feel better too.  Nothing to do now except wait for the flowers.  Iris unguicularis does not like being moved.  It likes sun and to bake.  There are those who say you should cut the leaves to half their length in the summer to allow it to bake more thoroughly, but I have not found it likes that particularly, and it will not solve the cosmetic problem of the old leaves.  Baking, sharp drainage, maybe a little blood, fish and bone once in a blue moon, and to be left alone apart from a spot of annual grooming, that is what the winter flowering iris needs.

levelling the lawn

I had to come in from the garden at a quarter to four.  It was just too cold, with a brisk wind that went straight through my fleece and smock and cotton shirt and thermal polo neck, and through me.  Tomorrow is forecast to feel even colder, with showers.  Give it a week or so of colder weather and I suppose my metabolism will crank up to meet the challenge, but winter finally starting is a shock to the system.

I spent the morning trying to level the sunken paving slabs that cross the back lawn.  I laid them originally so that on frosty mornings I would be able to walk down to the bottom part of the garden to see the winter flowers without leaving black footprints on the frozen grass.  They make a visual connection between the two decks, and line up with the steps down from the front garden.  As a design feature I'm quite happy with them, in a low key, 1960s inspired, vaguely modernist sort of way that echoes the aesthetic of the 1960s, vaguely modernist but ramshackle house.

Unfortunately that sort of thing depends on precise geometry, and the slab path across the lawn has never been the same since the drain to the septic tank collapsed and the Systems Administrator had to hire a digger and excavate the back lawn.  The drain was buried a good six feet deep at the point where it fractured, and the mound of excavated spoil was enormous.  Of course it did not all fit back in the hole.  Excavated soil never does.  After we had filled the hole as best we could and relaid the turf the area of the erstwhile hole began to sink, and went on sinking.  I would top dress the depression with any leftover or discarded compost every now and then, but that didn't address the issue of the paving slabs, which had begun to tilt and sink as well.

So today I lifted half of them, added a fresh layer of sand to their holes, and relaid them.  Before lifting them I cut back the encroaching grass to neat straight lines with a half moon edger.  As I threw the offcuts of scrappy turf away I was disgusted to see that some of them were infested with root aphid.  If it is endemic in the lawn then what hope my pot plants?  Then I had to work out how to prise the slabs out of the lawn, since prudence told me that if I used the half moon edger as a lever then it would probably break.  In the end I hit upon the idea of using my old small hand fork, which is already broken since I snapped the central tine catching it on a root.

Fortunately I had a supply of builders' sand left over from a previous paving job, all bagged up in old compost bags outside the workshop.  It took a remarkable number of trips down to the back garden with buckets of sand to level all the slabs, as far as they would level.  The lawn is not entirely flat, but the path looked a great deal worse with a dip in the middle, and rather better once I'd adjusted the height and angle of the central slabs.  By then some of them stood proud of the surface of the lawn, which will be no good when lawn mowing recommences next year, and I top dressed between them and the sunken patch of lawn with old potting compost.  I have held off putting the compost from some of the pots of cosmos and zinnia on the compost heap especially for this purpose.

I rumpled the surface of the lawn vigorously, running my hand back and forth to get the blades of grass to stick up above the compost.  The middle of the lawn looked very brown when I'd finished, and I worried that my ministrations would kill the grass, before applying the reality check that's often useful in such situations, which is to ask myself whether if the plant concerned was a weed and I wanted to get rid of it, did I think that my proposed course of action would do the trick.  The answer is generally 'no' and was in this case.  The grass, which barely deserves the title of 'lawn', is definitely of the utility type with coarse leaved and some running grasses.  Fine turf it ain't, and while at the moment it looks very raw and unfinished, still I am sure that the grass will make its way up through the compost given time.  Ideally I'd have done the whole project six weeks ago when the grass would have had longer to recover before it got cold, but I didn't.  I must have been busy doing something else.

Smarter versions of the vaguely modernist look, made out of machine cut stone instead of Marshalls Heritage concrete stone-effect ready-made slabs, have been the default choice at Chelsea for about the past fifteen years, and are popular with garden designers doing private gardens, to judge from the ones featured in Gardens Illustrated.  Apart from the fact that it is going to date as surely as an avocado bathroom suite, it is an unforgiving style in terms of construction standard and finish, and we must hope that the customers shelling out well into five figures for their garden redesign do not have too many dodgy drains underneath, since the slightest dip or deviation shows up badly and looks dreadful.  From that point of view the cottage garden style is far more forgiving.

this season's roses

My order of roses from Trevor White arrived yesterday while I was out.  None of the roses in the garden look anywhere near dormant yet, but as commercial growers they clearly don't want to hang about.  I wonder if they use some sort of hormone spray to make them defoliate?  I'd had an email telling me the order had been dispatched so their arrival wasn't a surprise and I'd already bought an extra bag of compost and primed the Systems Administrator to keep an eye out for the delivery.

At one level it seems a great waste to buy healthy, freshly lifted rose bushes and pot them up instead of getting them back into the ground with the shortest possible interruption to their growth. But a couple of these are destined for the side of the wood where the Systems Administrator is still clearing out the brambles, or was before going down with The Cold, and the others are replacements for the ones that were supposed to be growing up into the hazels behind the deck in the back garden, only they died.  Whether or not doing the same thing over again and expecting different results is a definition of insanity, and whether or not Albert Einstein said it, I am not going to replant the replacements exactly as before and hope that they'll grow.  I think I have worked out why the first batch didn't take, which is that it is too dark immediately behind the deck.  Once they have grown a few feet they will be out of the shade and into the sun, and should do very nicely thereafter, just as 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' is rampaging up the wild cherry, but chicken and egg, until they have grown a bit they are in the dark and while they are in the dark they won't grow.  Plan B is to start them off in pots and plant them out once they have made some height up their canes.

It is a very good plan, provided they do grow.  A rooted cutting of 'Albertine' that was a present from a friend sat sulking in its pot and only sprang into life once planted out, when it trebled in size very quickly.  But at the plant centre we used to have to prune the pots of climbing roses as they became unmanageable on the beds otherwise.  I was hoping to see the manager at a Plant Heritage meeting to pick his brains about potting, since he once mentioned to me that they'd been potting Trevor White roses at the garden centre where he worked after leaving the plant centre, but he hasn't been along to the last few meetings.  I shall just have to water religiously, fertilise generously in the spring and hope for the best.

The roses came with good big chunky root systems.  The last plants I had from Trevor White were equally big, and I was very sorry about the two I managed to kill by degrees by planting them in the dark.  The roots were actually so generous that I was scraping around trying to find pots big enough for them, and a couple ended up in clay pots I was saving for the dahlias.  I don't see how my erstwhile manager could have fitted them into the standard two or three litre deep plastic pots that garden centres generally use for climbers, not unless they cut quite a lot of the roots off, which seems a waste.  If and when I next see him I must ask him about that as well.

In the afternoon it rained and that was the end of my gardening for the day.  I am afraid it says something about my enthusiasm for gardening versus housework that given a wet afternoon and the choice between washing my accumulated dirty plastic plant labels for re-use next season and cleaning the bathroom I opted for scrubbing labels.

a concert and an exhibition

I went to London today for a Radio 3 lunchtime concerts from LSO St Lukes.  This restored and converted formerly derelict church just north of the City is one of my favourite concert venues.  An hour's worth of chamber music is perfect.  I can concentrate for that long, and there's a full afternoon left afterwards to go and do something else.  The tickets are good value too, twelve quid for musicians of international standing, or just nine pounds if you book at least four concerts from the same series.  Presumably the cost is partly met by the BBC to provide programme material, though what you hear on the radio is no longer quite what you get on the ground.  Today's concert will be presented as the first of the current series with viola player Laurence Power when in fact it will be the second, and Radio 3's Fiona Talkington sometimes looks mildly embarrassed as she explains to the audience in the hall why the script she is about to read doesn't match their version of events.  I thought the BBC was supposed to have given up that sort of fudge, but I suppose it is a small deception.  I don't often get round to listening to the lunchtime concert on the radio since it seems unfair to impose it on the Systems Administrator who is not a chamber music fan, so I don't know if in the final edit they cut out the little interludes of tuning and coughing between movements.  At any rate, it is not a live broadcast.  A few years ago LSO the centre director of LSO St Lukes used to introduce the concert, but nowadays they wheel out a Radio 3 presenter and do interviews with the musicians.

Today was an all-Brahms programme from the last years of his career, his own adaptation for viola of his clarinet trio, and his reworking of an early trio for piano, violin and cello.  I liked them both very much, and since I liked the Brahms at the last Brightlingsea concert enough to have looked at what recordings were available I should probably invest in some more of his chamber music.  And I like the viola, and the cello.  There is something about the sound that penetrates to the core.  And Laurence Power is a very engaging stage presence, with a quick smile and lovely floppy dark hair.

Millionaire's Shortbread was on in the crypt cafe, and none of my neighbours fiddled with their programmes during the performance, so all in all it was a success.  From LSO St Lukes I went to the Royal Academy to see Abstract Expresionism, since my previous projected visit had morphed into a trip to an entirely different exhibition.  I was not sure beforehand if I liked Abstract Expressionism. I hadn't really seen very much in the flesh.  The Tate has Rothko's Seagram Murals, which I love, but according to the Art UK Discover Artworks website there are only seven publicly owned paintings by Jackson Pollock in the whole of the UK and only a single solitary one by Willem de Kooning.  By way of comparison, the site lists 114 for Rembrant van Rijn and 48 for Monet, so if the UK audience and I had not got our eye in for Abstract Expressionism that would be understandable.

Having seen them I am still not sure whether I like Abstract Expressionism, other than Mark Rothko, though I am happy to have seen the exhibition.  It is a big, important part of Western twentieth century art history and worth an hour and a half of anybody's time, though it is a big exhibition and an hour and a half is not really very long.  The trouble was, as I heard a young man mutter to his companion as they both stood contemplating a Jackson Pollock, it's exhausting to look at.  And it is, apart from the Rothkos which are as mysterious and calming as the ones in the Tate (and include some in a different palette).  Now there's no reason why art should not demand effort to look at it. One of Classic FM's irritating tics is their habit of presenting classical music as if its main role were to be calming.  Or relaxing, or smooth.  Art may be many things, but it is not necessarily relaxing, let alone easy.

But a dozen rooms of mostly very big paintings, largely bright or at least clashing except when they are black, and jagged or else restlessly wiggly, do tire you out after the first hour or so.  There is no repose for the eye (except for Rothko) and the RA have not provided any seats in most of the rooms.  I gave up and sat on the floor in front of the Rothkos, which seemed to start a bit of a thing as several other people sat down as well.  I thought they were paintings of their time and place, largely post-war New York, brash and big and noisy and masculine.  Being rural, quiet, small and female I didn't greatly relate to them.  That's not to do them down as art, they just weren't quite my kind of art, just as I am not keen on Alan Ginsberg and found On The Road one of the most annoying books I ever read.  They did make me think of the sort of works that get hung in the atriums of financial institutions, whose job is to signal the prestige of the organisation to an audience who are mostly passing through without stopping to look at them.  I read a comment once by a landscape designer that planting for the banks of dual carriageways had to be done in hundred yard blocks because nobody could take in anything more detailed than that while driving past, and that's what some of the biggest and brightest Abstract Expressionist canvases felt like, art for people who are going to pass it at speed.

Room ten was devoted to works on paper and photography.  One little pink tinged gouache in a gold frame caught my eye, whose delicate drawing had all the freaky fun and charm of Klee and which depicted what might have been a dancing chicken.  I read the label, and it was an early Rothko.

win some, lose some

There was a very light frost this morning, no more than a dusting on the grass by the chicken house and a layer of ice on the car windscreens.  It was not even enough to blacken the foliage of the dahlias, but I was glad I took the succulents into the conservatory a few days ago and had finished putting the pelargoniums in the greenhouse.  The nights are forecast to be chilly all this week, and I must remember to go and put the mouse guards over the entrances to the beehives before the bees can acquire any unwanted furry lodgers for the winter.

Mr Fidget went for his follow up appointment at the vet, and his temperature was back to normal. The top end of normal, at 39.1 degrees Celsius, but just within the normal range.  He presented a very different picture to the cat the vet saw on Monday, sprinting about the room when he wasn't being physically held down to have his temperature taken, and the vet thought that whatever he'd had, he was getting over it, though she reassured us that it was right to take him for the follow-up appointment even though he looked a picture of health.  We bought worm and flea treatment for the kittens while we were there so that she wouldn't feel she had totally wasted her first appointment of the day.

At lunchtime I discovered the wrapper of a packet of six wholemeal rolls I'd left on the kitchen worktop had been ripped apart and the tops of three of the rolls gnawed off.  We agreed that all bread would have to live in a cupboard in future, and I suddenly realised I'd had a lucky escape leaving the packet of emergency fruit cake by the coffee machine.  I don't think we are underfeeding the kittens.  Their backs feel exactly right, nicely covered, not bony but not fat, and the vet didn't express any anxiety about Mr Fidget's weight.  I'm afraid they are simply inveterate scroungers, especially Fluffy and Fidget.  Eating half a packet of wholemeal rolls does not even count as snapping up unconsidered trifles: those rolls were supposed to be our lunch.

The frost was not enough to end the autumn run of salvias.  Salvia involucrata 'Bethellii' is having a great year.  It makes a big plant, taller than I am, and is thick with bright sugar pink flowers at the end of every stem.  Down in the bog bed Salvia uliginosa is still blooming electric blue.  It is tall, not as tall as 'Bethellii' but inclined to flop, and likes to run gently at the root.  Unfortunately it has now hit the front of the bed and can run no further, while behind it is increasingly hemmed in by a vigorous Persicaria.  I see from my planting spreadsheet that I planted it a decade ago, so it has come through some pretty savage winters, two long and cold and at least one extremely wet.  I must see if I can chisel some little rooted bits from the front edge where they are going to waste, and pot them up with the view to starting another patch further back in the bed where it would have more space.  The Persicaria is going to need editing: it has over-run the Selinum wallichianum as well.

The Systems Administrator's cold has developed disastrously.  The SA had hoped to finish chopping down the brambles in the meadow this week after making such good progress last week, and admitted he now understood how I felt last winter, before deciding he didn't feel like any supper and retreating early to bed.

last meetings

This could be a short post, because it is late and Mr Cool is lying on my arm which makes typing difficult.  I fell over him earlier in the evening, or he cannoned off my legs, when I was trying to get ready to go out, and he ran out into the garden and would not believe that I had not tried to kick him deliberately, so now that he has forgiven me or forgotten all about it and come to sit next to me I don't have the heart to reject his advances.  It's getting tricky, though.  I am reduced to typing one handed and he keeps pressing enter and shifting me down a line, or he was until Mr Fluffy arrived and started boxing with him.

Mr Fidget seems better today.  He stood up and stretched on his pouffe this morning before eating some breakfast and disappearing into the eleagnus hedge.  I told him that he ought to be resting. He had better go back to the vet tomorrow and have his temperature taken again to check it is back to normal, but at tea time I found him and Mr Fluffy attempting to eat a piece of Battenberg cake the Systems Administrator had neglected to put away in its plastic box.

The SA has a cold and is much worse.  Swings and roundabout.

It has been a day for rounding off the year.  This afternoon I did my final woodland charity talk for 2016, or at least the last one I've got booked.  Last minute panic bookings are getting pretty unlikely now since many clubs have a Christmas party in December rather than a speaker, so that's probably it.  I can't remember exactly how many I ended up doing, and as Mr Cool is lying on my arm I can't get up to go and look in my diary, but it must have been about eight which from a standing start of having none booked at all as of the first of January was not bad going.  Today's talk was to a Christian ladies' fellowship group in Colchester.  They had warned me that while parking when I arrived would be easy, by the time their meeting finished the main hall would be awash with the babies and toddlers group and so it was.  One lively blond haired infant was crawling determinedly towards the main doors of the hall, and retrieved with a cry of 'Stanley, come here'.  The old names really are coming back into fashion.  I've seen a baby named Stanley.  

Mr Cool keeps pressing Enter so we'll give up on the last paragraph.  This evening was my garden club's final meeting of the year, with the AGM followed by a supper and quiz.  My normal policy is to only go to the AGM of anything when I am actually on the committee, but as they are a friendly lot I thought maybe I should try going at least once.  My college friend who has been a member for 

several years without ever attending the AGM agreed that if I went she would go too.  The committee had been to a huge amount of trouble, a really huge amount, with table cloths and flowers on every table, and candles, and a hot main course dished from the hall kitchen with remarkable speed as we went up table by table to collect our food.

Everybody was asked to bring a pudding, which sounded confusing in that surely there was going to be a lot of pudding left over unless everybody took tiny ones.  The membership secretary explained as if to a slightly slow child that people liked to try more than one pudding and took the left-overs home with them, and part of the answer turned out to be that most people can eat an awful lot of pudding when they put their minds to it.  I took Dan Lepard's cherry and polenta pudding because I'd done one recently and felt reasonably confident about it, and also because I didn't want anything too runny or squishy given it would have to travel twenty miles in the car.  I nearly lost it at the first pedestrian crossing when a cyclist shot in front of me at speed and without dismounting, but fortunately didn't hear the crash of cherry and polenta hitting the back of the driver's seat.  I only had to bring home two slices so honour was satisfied, though I had collected the last piece of somebody else's apricot sponge in my tin.  My tinfoil had disappeared too, but luckily I'd guessed that might happen and shoved a box of clingfilm in the car.

There was a crossword competition, one answer sheet per table, and my table was one of only three to get all the answers correct.  It was all down to teamwork.  I am pretty good at botanical Latin and the rest of the team came up with solutions to some of the left-field clues that stumped the other tables.  Modern poison = sugar, maybe not a tactful clue when everybody was about to eat so much pudding.

The AGM was mercifully brief and the committee was reelected en masse.  Very sensible of the chairman to keep a tight grip if she has a happy team that works, and not allow an entry point for any vexatious volunteers.  Democracy is a wonderful thing but you can have too much of it in a club setting.  Next year's programme was announced and sounds pretty good.  The accounts were circulated at the thrify rate of one copy per table, but we passed them around and I was interested to see how the club keeps afloat financially, which I had never quite understood given that annual membership is only twelve pounds and they don't do a monthly raffle or charge for tea.  Even the AGM supper was free, apart from the cost of the pudding ingredients.  The plant sale held in alternate years turns out to be crucial.  There wasn't one this year, but come next May the village pub has kindly agreed to let the garden club use its garden, and then we need to sell a lot of plants, really a lot of plants, in order to be able to afford the speakers that we do.

Mr Fidget is unwell

Mr Fidget bounded into the bedroom first thing yesterday morning with Mr Fluffy, but looked slightly uncertain about his lunch, then spent all afternoon asleep, which is not like him.  He ate his share of supper, but later in the evening he was slightly sick, and he wouldn't eat any of their second, late supper at all, and showed no interest in licking out the ice cream tub.  This morning he met me at the top of the stairs as I got up, but after that he retreated to his favourite spot on the pouffe and didn't want any breakfast.  I offered him some water, but he didn't want that either, and when I stroked him he didn't purr.  It might have been my imagination, but he felt rather hot.

When it comes to human ailments we will both run with a temperature for several days before going to the doctor.  As long as somebody in previously normal health is still able to hold a lucid conversation then colds and flu count as self limiting illnesses.  But how do you tell if a cat is lucid? Mr Fidget will be eight months old tomorrow, still very young, and he has never been ill before.  We decided to book him in to the vet, telling each other that if we didn't we would only spend the day worrying about him.

As soon as the car began to move Mr Fidget began to wail in his basket and scrabbled at the wire, only stopping each time we reached stationary traffic.  He has done that on every car trip he has ever taken with us, coming home from the rescue centre and on previous trips to the vet.  If we ever find ourselves moving to the other end of the country with him he will have to be sedated.  Not a good passenger, Mr Fidget.  He was quite composed once we got to the vet, which was just as well because there were a lot of dogs in the waiting room.  Mr Fidget when well has an optimistically belligerent attitude to dogs.  He attempted to chase one of the Airedales when it came into the garden, arching his back and jumping sideways on all four legs, until it ruined the effect by chasing him.

A hard core of the other patients did not seem to be going anywhere.  There was an amiable Rottweiler whose owner said she had fleas and whose hair was coming out all over the floor, and a cat called Sophie accompanied by a little girl wearing a Halloween costume, and a pug who snuffled and barked.  The little girl stuck a finger into Mr Fidget's basket and complained when he didn't respond that he didn't like her.  I explained that he wasn't feeling well, and she wouldn't like it if she was ill and someone she didn't know came and stared at her, and she went away to play with the Rottweiler instead.  A large rabbit and a small black dog with a seriously tubby body atop four incongruously spindly legs joined the queue.  Quarter of an hour late turned to forty minutes, and the Rottweiler owner went to ask at the desk how much longer it was going to be because he had to get back to work.

Eventually a weeping girl appeared with a small empty pet carrier and two sombre grownups, and we concluded that things had gone badly wrong for someone's pet.  The queue began to move, until another girl appeared wearing a veterinary practice polo shirt and called Mr Fidget's name.  I realised this was our vet for the day.  Jenny Eclair last night was talking about her child GP, the one who diagnosed her tiredness as a bad case of lazycowitis and prescribed cardiac exercise three times a week.  Mr Fidget was due to see the child vet.  This is of course unfair to vets and to all qualified people under the age of thirty-five.  You need better A levels and a more impressive CV to train as a vet than a GP.  She was very nice, and asked about Mr Fidget's symptoms, and assured us that it was better to have him checked out than not, before feeling his abdomen, listening to his heart, and sticking a thermometer up his bottom.  Mr Fidget did not like that last procedure.

He had a temperature.  Quite a high temperature for a cat, and she gave him an injection containing a painkiller and an anti-inflammatory, and told us to bring him back in thirty-six to forty-eight hours so that she could see how he was doing once the drugs had worn off.  He might be better by then, or if not she would start doing blood tests and further investigations.  She thought it was a virus, which is what GPs always used to say when I was younger if you were off colour but not at death's door and with no other obvious symptoms, and which I always assumed meant they didn't know what it was yet.  She meant she didn't want to prescribe antibiotics at this stage.

Pumped up with the vet's drugs Mr Fidget wanted some lunch, which was a relief.  Even if he didn't want anything else later when the jab wore off then at least he'd have had something.  We reinstated the litter tray so that he wouldn't have to go outside, locked him in when he did look as though he wanted to go out, and he settled down to spend the afternoon on his pouffe.  Then he decided he wanted some supper, and now he has snuck out after all.  I'm not sure we should have left him, as I feel he should be resting, but it is very difficult to make a cat rest when it doesn't want to.

day in, evening out

I am thoroughly confused by the clocks changing.  I'm not sure whether we ate lunch at twelve or two by stomach time, and the cats are no guide because they will always tell you that they are hungry.  I'll get used to it in a few days, though it is a complete nuisance that it now gets dark so early.  I know that in theory I could just get up earlier to compensate, since as a politician arguing on the Today programme for the clocks not to change said (with withering and unnecessary scorn) the day won't get any shorter, you know.  But it's difficult keeping up a day that's out of synch with everybody else, not to mention the radio, and in the end you end up going with the flow.  If The World At One has just started then it must be one.

I have finally finished putting the pots of tender things under cover.  At last.  Bring on the cold nights, I'm ready for them.  Night time temperatures are forecast to drop by mid week, so I may be none too early.  I eyed up the remaining space and the pots of dahlias that are still standing outside the greenhouse waiting for the frost to blacken their leaves, and tried to decide whether they were going to fit.  It is going to be nip and tuck, but I think they will.  I had better look through the bedraggled collection of things propagated from seeds and cuttings and check what ought to go into a cold frame sooner rather than later.  Belamcanda chinensis, or Iris domestica as I am supposed to learn to call it, probably doesn't want to be frozen in its pots, and nor do the penstemons.  The iris (I still can't think of it as an iris but I must try to do so) has attractive amber flowers spotted with orange-red.  It is not difficult to raise from seed and this isn't the first time I've grown some, but I have never worked out a good place to put it.

Continued:  And that's all there is, because after typing the last paragraph I had to go out because I was meeting a friend in Colchester to go to Jenny Eclair's show, How To Be a Middle Aged Woman (without going insane).  She was very, very funny.  The Arts Centre was sold out, and about ninety-eight per cent of the audience were women.  And now, although the clock says it is only eight minutes to eleven, it is really eight minutes to midnight and time to go to bed.

in the conservatory

Today was extraordinarily warm and lovely for the time of year.  I was totally overdressed for disentangling brambles from roses, and had to peel off layers as I worked.  I even checked with the Systems Administrator that it really was that warm, in case I was having a hot flush, but the SA confirmed that no, it wasn't just me, it was a warm day.  Dead still, too.  The blades of the wind generator on the farm across the ditch never turned.  The eleagnus hedge was a humming mass of foraging bees, and I was glad I'd only given it the lightest possible trim this autumn to keep as many of the flowers as possible.  It can have another haircut in the spring.

I moved the pots of succulents from the deck back into the conservatory for the winter.  The Aeonium have enjoyed their summer out of doors, and their rosettes have grown much bigger.  I consolidated the dark purple ones into one big pot.  It was a rather fine Whichford pot, a present from some years back, that turned out taller than I was expecting when I saw it in the flesh, and I didn't feel I'd found a really good use for it.  It had pinks in it for years, but the balance of shapes never looked quite right.  When Whichford's Christmas catalogue arrived today I noticed a photograph of Aeonium in a tall pot and had a light bulb moment.  The purple Aeonium had got extremely leggy so that they blew over in their individual small pots in any kind of wind.  Planted in one tall pot the heights of the two would complement each other and the weight of all that terracotta and compost would keep their centre of gravity suitably low.  I mixed a lot of grit into the compost, which seems to be the way to persuade Aeonium to make good root systems.

To my disgust I had over-watered the Echeveria and most of them had rotted.  They have had the same treatment as the Aeonium, from which I conclude that they need less water.  Some of the individual rosettes were showing a few wispy roots, and I sat them all on pots of compost mixed with grit sand, then mixed with grit when I ran out of sand.  Stood on the high greenhouse shelf with no extra water at all they have two choices, root or die.

Salvia confertiflora squeezed in somehow, cuddled up to the Tibouchina.  The salvia will need a bigger pot next spring.  It is growing, but a bare and skinny specimen compared to the ones I've seen at Kiftsgate and East Ruston Old Vicarage.  They are both at the front of the conservatory and near the door, to get as much air and light as possible.  Both are fuzzy plants with a terrifying capacity to attract botrytis.  The Clianthus squeezed in by the other door, next to the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone', and it was a puzzle to know where to put the seed raised Geranium maderense I had to move from the window to make room for the succulents.  I have to admit it to myself: the conservatory is full.  I must not buy any more conservatory plants until something dies, not even a little one.

It's a shame since I had tracked down a houseplant specialist that stocks Araucaria heterophylla, the Norfolk Island pine, and I'd love another one of those.  We had one before that started life on the telephone table before being evicted from the conservatory when it hit the roof.  They will get enormous given the chance.  Kew have or had one that they'd taken the top out of to make it fit in their big glasshouse, though they don't look nearly as nice once you do that.  The red Mandevilla hybrid is still living on the telephone table where I put it temporarily so that we could admire its flowers, and has been joined by a piece of purple and grey striped Tradescantia that I rooted after it fell off the parent plant in the conservatory.  I really ought to rescue the latter, since none of its predecessors have made it through the winter.  Conditions in the conservatory must get too cold, too damp or both.

I have already stashed the pink flowered Begonia fuchsioides in my bathroom, since the woman from Fibrex Nurseries was so discouraging about its prospects over winter in a frost free conservatory that she practically refused to sell it to me.  It is not very convenient having it next to the sink, but I can't think of anywhere else for it to live.  It can't go on the window sill in the study because it would be in the way of the blind, and I have a hunch that if I try to use the sitting room as an overflow overwintering area for tender plants I will find the Systems Administrator's normal indulgence towards my hobbies will reach its limits.

Addendum  It is a great shame about the Royal Clarence in Exeter burning down.  When I first saw the picture in yesterday's Guardian I thought it looked awfully familiar, and surely that was the hotel in Exeter's cathedral yard, and so it was.  I have been to a wedding reception there, a school friend who got married in the cathedral, so that's a little piece of personal history gone.  The historian on this evening's PM programme was over-egging the pudding when he said it was Exeter's most iconic building, though, since that must be the cathedral itself, and Exeter's remaining Elizabethan heritage isn't as extensive or exciting as he made it sound.  The Baedeker raids were bad, but I have seen photos of the city centre after the blitz, and the worst of the damage was caused by Exeter's demented post war planners.  A lot of it could have been rebuilt as was, or at least the facades retained, but they swept away great swathes of the medieval, Tudor, Georgian and Victorian town and replaced them with the most godawful brick boxes on a rectilinear street plan.  I thought as a thirteen year old that the High Street managed to be simultaneously bland and hideous, and revisiting twenty-five years later for a school reunion I saw that my teenage judgement had been spot on.

pruning and potting

At the start of today I thought I would have finished putting the pots in the greenhouse by dusk. Hope springs eternal.  Endless over-optimism is something of a gardener's trait, otherwise you wouldn't bother.  One of the ladies from Tynings Climbers told us that when they bought one of their tunnels she said it would take a couple of days to put up: it took six weeks.

I have re-potted two of the agapanthus.  They came out of their pots much more easily than I feared they would, with only a little help from the bread knife.  The trick (or at least the way I get things out if they won't lift out of their pots) is to upend the pot and tap the rim sharply on the edge of the greenhouse bench, directly over a leg otherwise all that happens is that the staging vibrates. You need to have your hands positioned so that you can feel the moment the root ball starts to come loose, at which point you swing the pot back to the horizontal while finding a spare finger to break the fall of whatever is in the pot, otherwise your precious plant will land on its head and snap bits off itself.  The agapanthus pots were about at the limit of what I could manage using this method, one being thirty-eight centimetres in diameter and the other slightly larger.  I had held back on watering recently because I knew I was going to need to lift them, but even so.

Agapanthus grown in containers will need periodic re-potting, since they will grow inexorably until the pot is absolutely stuffed with their thick white roots, gradually raising themselves up during the process until there is no gap left at the top for watering.  The books say they flower better if pot bound, but I've found that once they are too crowded in their pot, and perpetually slightly short of water because you can't get it to soak in, they give up on flowering.  These two, which were huge healthy looking specimens that would have sold for north of thirty pounds each in a garden centre, managed the grand total of four flower stems between them this year.  Having learnt from previous experience both were growing in machine made, smooth sided, large versions of the traditional flower pot, to make sliding them out when the time came as easy as it could be.  If you are planning to grow agapanthus in a container I would steer clear of anything rustic and hand made with a rough internal finish or the roots will stick to it, and don't for goodness sake choose a pot that's smaller across the top than it is further down.

I thought that if I sliced the bottom two inches off the root ball of the first plant it might fit back in its original pot with a gap at the top for watering, but it wouldn't, and after messing around trying to reduce the root ball enough to go in I gave up on that idea.  It needed a bigger pot, but searching through the pot shed I didn't have to, and I decided I was going to have to bite the bullet and divide it.  The bread knife went through the outer white roots almost as easily as cutting bread, but when it got to the core of the plant it was another story, and I had to resort to a pruning saw. One of the joys of having a new pruning saw for pruning is that I can use the old one for jobs like dividing root balls.

Unfortunately nasty grating noises and a feeling of resistance as I sawed warned me that there was something solid embedded in the compost.  I wondered if I had left an old crock inside when re-potting previously.  I once spent an unbelievable amount of time diligently sawing away with a very blunt saw at a bamboo I'd been told to divide at the plant centre, only to find out when the root mass finally fell into two halves that the reason why it had taken so long and been such hard work was that I'd sawed right through a piece of terracotta.  I went to fetch my spade, to bring some leverage to bear on the agpanthus problem, and remembered to angle the whole operation so that if the root ball suddenly gave I wouldn't crash the handle of the spade through the side of the greenhouse.  When eventually the agapanthus yielded, by now rather battered, three irregular lumpy stones fell out of the middle of the compost.  I have no idea how or when they got there, but the moral of the story is to try to keep container grown plants free of such rubbish, in case you ever need to divide them.

Neither of the two halves of the original root ball wanted to fit back into their old pot without further surgery, and by now I was getting fed up with chopping more and more roots off a perfectly healthy plant.  I managed to find a couple of old black plastic pots that will do for the winter, and can decide whether to buy more large terracotta pots in the spring.  Given how much large clay pots weigh and that black is a recessive colour I might be able to get away with using the plastic pots at the back of a display.  Or perhaps I am in danger of ending up with more agapanthus than I need and should give one of them to the garden club plant stall next year.

After that the plant from the thirty-eight centimetre pot was able to go into the bigger agapanthus pot, once I'd sliced a disc off the bottom of the root ball.  Two down, two to go, although one will be easy to get out of its present container because the pot has split.

I brought in two of the large fuchsias as well, and cut them back fairly hard as the specialist fuchsia websites advise, and then went over them painstakingly cutting the leaves off, since the experts recommend storing them leaf free.  I didn't insist on taking off all the smallest, newest leaves, but the larger ones went into the compost bucket, together with the soft shoot tips.  It feels brutal and counter-intuitive to attack a plant in such a way that ten minutes previously was looking perfectly healthy and happy, but the aim is to avoid botrytis and other fungal rots.  I did the same thing last year and it worked.  The plant centre manager used to delay putting the stock of fuchsias under cover for the winter until they had dropped their leaves naturally, to avoid having the fallen leaves mouldering in the polytunnel, but some of my fuchsias are not hardy and I need to get on with filling the greenhouse and can't start leaving gaps for things to come in later.

The Plectranthus argenteus I'm overwintering had a drastic haircut as well.  It seemed a terrible waste to throw away the material for so many potential cuttings, but I don't need any more plants. My plants came from seed and I haven't tried taking cuttings of this species, but it has the vibe of something that would root really easily.  Some of the stems seemed half way to throwing out roots in mid air.

packing the greenhouse

It seems to take an age putting the pots of tender things in the greenhouse for the winter.  I suppose it is not just a question of moving the pots.  There are dead leaves to be picked off, root balls to be checked for root aphid, growth to be cut back, dry pots to be given one good soak before being stacked away as close as they'll fit.

I have made some welcome discoveries.  Some of the softwood cuttings I took from a pink Gaura have struck, not all of them, but probably enough to give as many extra plants as I want, if they make it through the winter.  It had never occurred to me that you could propagate Gaura by chopping a stem into bits and putting them in compost, but it was one of the species brought along to my garden club's propagation evening.  I have a rather nice pink flowered form, not too short and dumpy, which has made it through a couple of winters in the open ground, and I wanted some more.  I am not entirely one hundred per cent sure which variety it is, since I bought it originally to go in a pot by the front door and it seemed such a waste to throw it away when I dismantled the pot that I planted it in the gravel to take its chances, but by then I'd lost the label.  It might be 'Siskyou Pink' but it might not be.  I don't think I'll risk separating my cuttings until spring, but so far, so good.  Of course there is many a slip between cup and lip, and they may yet fall prey to botrytis or simply mysteriously die before then.

I heard back from the RHS about root aphid and the good news, if you are not an organic gardener, is that there are still vine weevil drenches approved that should work on them, one being Scott's Bug Clear Ultra Vine Weevil Killer.  I could also, the RHS entomologist suggested, scrape off the infected compost.  Indeed I could, and I have, also thrown away some infected Pelargonium where I had more than one plant of that variety, but as I am not a fully organic gardener I am glad there is still something available to treat my dwarf pomegranates when required.  Better still, it is available from Tesco Direct, so I won't need to trawl around the local garden centres looking for somewhere that sells it.

The dahlias have pretty much finished, and I have started carting the pots back up the steps by the conservatory to the front garden.  The Systems Administrator offered the use of the new garden trolley, but the steps are so much more direct than going right round the house, and save dragging the trolley up the steep slope to the drive.  I will borrow it for the last bit to trundle the pots across the gravel to the concrete by the greenhouse.  Then I suppose I had better wait for frost to blacken the foliage before cutting them down, now I know the reason for this is to give the tubers time to seal themselves naturally at the end of the growing season and avoid introducing rot and disease through the cut stems.  It's a nuisance in some ways, since I'd love to be able to put them in the greenhouse and have done with it, plus then I'd see how much space was left for other things, if any.  Frost is not forecast in the next week.

The big excitement is going to come when I tackle the pot bound Agapanthus.  I could wimp out and leave it until spring, but a couple have risen so far in their pots it has become impossible to water them properly.  That is going to be an issue come the spring, even if I want to keep them dryish over the winter.  I have a feeling I ought to do something about them now.  The last time I had to get a mature Agapanthus out of its pot it took absolutely ages, and the bread knife was never the same again.

talking and not talking

I did a talk this evening, about gardening for wildlife.  I hadn't been planning to and was rather looking forward to a quiet week with no more demanding social interaction than a haircut, feeling slightly socialled out after the Friday concert and Saturday lecture.  But on Saturday evening I got an email from a beekeeping contact who runs one of the local garden clubs.  Her planned speaker for the coming Wednesday was unable to make the meeting, and was I by any chance free?  Since I was free that evening the strong urge to sit in a chair in front of the stove with the cats and the Systems Administrator, with no obligation to be entertaining or even to speak, did not seem a sufficient reason to turn her down.

It's a mostly thankless task, running a club, as you grapple with finding speakers that will appeal to at least the majority of your members and that your club can afford, and then they go and get ill or stuck in traffic.  Add in the key holder who doesn't show up on time leaving your club members standing in the car park for twenty minutes, projection and sound systems that break down, the noise of loud music and/or shouting and/or whistles coming from whatever club has booked the other room in the hall, and a sprinkling of people who have somehow got themselves elected to the committee despite having the social attributes of Donald Trump, and the lot of a Chairman is not always a happy one.  We should be grateful to them at a time when newspapers are trumpeting about the epidemic of loneliness.

I'd already spoken to this same club earlier this year about the woodland charity, which was a good reason not to go again so soon.  The Chairman promised that she had been planning to ask me again next year as they had liked me last time, but in an ideal world you wouldn't have the same speaker twice in nine months.  But I was available at four days notice and lived just up the road, and beggars can't be choosers.

In the event I didn't even see my beekeeping contact, because she had a family emergency and couldn't go.  The organisers were rather apologetic about the low turnout, blaming illness and the fact that the meeting clashed with the final of The Great British Bakeoff.  I decided not to take it personally.  The talk itself was fine.  I'd done it quite recently so I was up to speed with the script, and they are a friendly group of people.  Almost too friendly, in that I'd rather not chat in the minutes before the meeting starts.  It makes it hard to get into the zone when you have to make polite conversation about irises and moles in the garden, and I'd really rather sit quietly in a corner and concentrate on what I'm about to talk about.

clearing and planting

I am trying to plant out as many of my seed and cutting raised hardy plants as possible while the soil is still warm.  There's nothing to be done about the ones destined for the meadow, not until I have had another go at the brambles and nettles.  That's a pity, since there are some nice young North American golden rod that are just ready to go out, and plants only deteriorate sitting in pots. Help, however, is in sight at least for the moment in the form of the Systems Administrator, who showed a sudden, unbidden and unexpected interest in the problem and after voluntarily clearing the whole of an enormous lump of ivy clad dead ash tree that fell out of the wood earlier this year, is planning to have a go at the brambles.

The gigantic lump, more ivy than ash, was one of those things that makes you feel discouraged. Just as I'd got rid of a lot of the brambles near the wildlife pond, including some of the evil white stemmed Rubus cockburnianus which I should never have planted, the lump fell and I was more or less back where I started in terms of stuff needing clearing.  Alas, the bare, brown and very dead remains of what was once a small holly bush were uncovered as the SA cleared the site.  The SA worked out it must once have been something because it had a rabbit guard on it, and kept it to show me.  Something about its lines and the way it held its dead twigs told me it had been a holly. I'm afraid it was the yellow berried one that used to live somewhere up there.

The SA had carefully worked around another young tree, still living, but I'm not sure if we want to keep it or not as it was a seedling evergreen oak, and unless topiarised it will grow huge and cast a lot of shade.  The nearest holm oaks are across two fields from us but they keep coming up in the garden courtesy of the jays (or at least I assume they are responsible.  At least one study has shown that jays that think another bird is looking at them will not merely refrain from going to their food caches but try to spoof the onlooker by deliberately looking in the wrong place.  A bird with a theory of mind?).

I pointed out another small tree which I was pretty sure was a hop hornbeam and not a self sown hazel, though it was difficult to get close enough to make sure, and a Styrax japonica, both of which were to be saved, and checked the SA was happy with the difference between brambles and species roses.  I have never badgered the SA to help with the meadow, since it purely an object of amusement and adornment.  Unseen from the house and not affecting access for any kind of service vehicle or delivery, it isn't something that has to be done unless somebody wants to do it.  But if the SA has developed a new found enthusiasm for bramble bashing that is great by me.

At the other end of the gardening spectrum I dibbled little nine centimetre and one litre rootballs into the borders in the back garden, Verbena bonariensis, pink Linaria 'Canon Went' and a white hybrid of Verbascum phoeniceum, all the while running the hose on the bog bed which is still very dry in places.  I'm hoping they'll make some root growth before it gets too chilly, and planting them now means I can see how tall and how densely their neighbours grow.  It can be tempting in the spring to slip a new plant into what looks like a gap, only for it to be totally overshadowed as the established occupants of the border get off to a quicker start than it is able to do and shade it out. Yesterday I replanted a pale yellow alstroemeria that almost suffered such a fate last spring, before I rescued and re-potted it.

There are still some seed raised aquilegia to go in, and more verbena, and some bright red Lychnis chalcedonica, plus the geums and Selinum I bought.  It will still leave me with quite a stash of pots waiting their chance to go out into the soil, just as soon as we can clear the room for them.  I am looking forward to a bit of bramble bashing myself.

too much technology

I can't keep up.  I really can't.  I am so much not a digital native I feel I know how Pocahontas felt when she was transplanted to London.  And I am not even stupid.  Just very, very baffled.  The only consolation is that the Systems Administrator is baffled as well, and the SA is normally good at digital devices.

The new tablet arrived.  It is the cheapest Amazon Fire I thought I could get away with while being able to see the screen, which meant an HD8.  More than half of the icons on the Home page are for Amazon features, but I'm OK with that: I do not regard Amazon as the Great Satan.  The SA assured me that the Amazon branding was the price I paid for something with the functionality of the Amazon Fire being as cheap as it was.

It arrived with my Kindle library already downloaded, because I told Amazon when I ordered it that it was for me and not a gift.  I was perfectly happy with that, not that I normally read books on my tablet because I like reading on the Kindle.  Something about the quality of the screen and the fact that there are so few buttons is very soothing.  I managed to link to my email account in no time at all, it was just a question of putting my address and password into a box that popped up the first time I touched the email icon.  This was digital technology for non technology minded people, so far so good.  The Amazon branded App store let me download my favourite Sudoku programme as the SA had promised that it would: we checked on the SA's device that Amazon offered that app before I decided on the Fire.

I wasn't utterly convinced by the concept of the Silk browser, because I am a creature of habit and I use Chrome, but the SA said we could download Chrome later.  I really didn't understand why Silk took me to a BT page, twice, after I'd clicked on a link to the film review programme, and gave the device to the SA to look at.  It did the same to him as well, and the SA began to sound irritated, then it stopped doing it without the SA knowing why, or why it had been doing it in the first place. Never mind, it then let the SA access the BBC website and download the most recent film review podcast, which took a few minutes.

And then I couldn't find where it had put it.  Could not find a folder for podcasts anywhere.  Could not find a section in the help page that would tell me how to start looking.  If you wanted to know if a stone had a mouth, how would you know where to look?  Wittgenstein (if it was Wittgenstein who said it), where are you when we need you?  The Amazon Fire comes with a series of pages after the Home page, books, video, games, shop, apps, music, library.  Books was self explanatory and had my books in it.  Video was empty because I hadn't bought any, and probably won't.  I don't think it does justice to any film worth watching at all to try and watch it on a screen that size. Games contained my solitary Sudoku, which is the only game I ever play.  But where the hell were podcasts?  The old tablet had a down arrow icon on the front page that brought up a list of all of them, arranged in date of download.

I gave the tablet back to the SA who began to fiddle with it while emanating bad vibes.  Not as bad as when reinstalling the operating system on an errant PC, but not happy positive vibes.  Eventually the SA announced that podcasts were filed in music, not on the front page which is all adverts for albums I might want to buy (but don't) but in the library of the music section.  Of course they are.

The next time I fired up the tablet it came up with a page for Ceebeebies, followed by a link to a shop to sell me accessories for the tablet, while the button for the home page had vanished. Swiping sideways didn't get me home, while swiping down from the top brought up a menu including Airplane Mode, Blue Shade (what is that?) and Camera.  In despair I chose Settings.  I didn't want any of the Settings options, but it did have the little round Home button at the bottom of the page.  The SA reminded me that I'd taken the cheaper option with adverts at the start of every session.  Which turns out to mean often, as the tablet powers down jolly quickly (though maybe I can alter that using Settings).  I did notice before ordering that it is possible to upgrade retrospectively for another twenty-five quid or so so as to not have adverts.  At the current rate of progress I may be doing so.  Why any advertiser thinks it helps their cause to ram adverts in people's faces that slow them down when they are trying to do something else, and with no prior reason to believe they want to shop for that sort of thing at that moment, is a total mystery to me.

Meanwhile my phone had come up with a message saying it needed to do a software update and I would have to delete some data or unused apps to create sufficient memory space.  I was baffled again.  I don't have any data.  I don't even use the phone as a camera.  All it has on it is half a dozen text threads.  The SA explained that it was not that sort of data but the mess that was left over from having previously used maps and so on, and that anyway the memory of my phone was not very big.  The SA cleared the digital mess out and ran the update, following which the home page looks entirely different.  I am sure I will find my way round it eventually, and the SA has promised to show me how to de-gunk the phone for next time.  Tomorrow, when I have not already overdosed on new technology.

I really can't keep up.  I am going to read a book.  A printed one made out of paper.

planting and tidying

I finally finished planting the knapweeds and mallows in the daffodil lawn, intermittently inspected by kittens who came bounding across the grass to greet me before tearing up the oak tree.  I ended up locking them in the house after lunch, so that I could cut the last bits of straggly grass under the tree and along the line of the hedge without fear that I'd accidentally lop Mr Fluffy's feet off.  They were all lounging about digesting and looking relaxed and not as if they were about to go anywhere, but through the glass door I could see Mr Cool beginning to panic as he realised that he was locked in.  It took less than an hour to finish the grass, once I didn't have to mind what I was doing so carefully, and as soon as Mr Cool was allowed to go back outside he no longer wanted to.

The Systems Administrator managed to get the mowers over the top and bottom lawns.  We haven't had much rain in the past couple of days, but the dew overnight is pretty heavy by now, and the grass wasn't drying during the day.  It's still all surface moisture.  I planted some old polyanthus left over from last winter's pots by the front door, that have been sitting in individual plastic pots all summer, and digging down four or five inches the soil is still dry.  The daffodil lawn is bone dry too along the strip closest to the hedge, and unless we get some proper rain fairly soon I can see the hose coming out again.

I was very pleased with myself for tidying up the mess of old compost bags and assorted dump-bound rubbish that had accumulated behind the woodshed, so that there was space to put the hose away in a series of big loops on the ground.  It wasn't doing anything for the appearance of the garden, having got into the habit of leaving the hose snaked around the edge of the drive to whichever area I was last using it, and I needed somewhere where it could be coiled and uncoiled reasonably quickly and easily.  I hadn't reckoned with my efforts giving the Systems Administrator a nasty fright with the boiler, as I stacked bags of waste waiting to go to the dump too densely around the flue, and the boiler cut out.  It had done the same a few days previously, and the SA seemed to have fixed it by removing the Parthenocissus shoots that had started twining around the metal cage protecting the flue and vacuuming dust out of the exhaust.  Not knowing that I'd moved things around near the flue, the SA was spooked when the boiler did it again.

I planted my bag of a hundred Crocus tommasinianus in the bottom lawn, to bulk up the existing display.  A hundred bulbs didn't seem to go very far given the size of the lawn, and I wondered if I should have ordered more.  Five hundred, or stop pussy footing around and order a thousand.  Five thousand!  I add some more bulbs every year or two and the display is building up, though I still don't feel it's achieved critical mass.  I only ordered a hundred this time partly on grounds of cost, but largely because I thought planting five hundred bulbs might just get too soul destroying, not to mention hard on the wrist.  I note with envy those interviews in magazines with owners who claim to have planted a few dozen crocus bulbs some years ago, and now have sheets thanks to naturalising.  My crocus are still nowhere near being a sheet.  Maybe mice find them and eat them, even in the lawn.  Or the grass is too vigorous for them to self seed.

out and about

I went last night to my second Studio Music concert at Brightlingsea.  I knew how the furniture was arranged this time, and by dint of arriving early managed to nab myself a chair on the ground floor giving a view of the musicians without having to peer through the banisters.  They were a cello and piano duo, James Lisney and Joy Lisney, who had had a nightmare journey to north Essex after leaving London at three and arriving at twenty past seven.  True professionals, they did not let this outwardly ruffle them and appeared to be genuinely delighted to be playing on a Friday night to a tiny audience in what was basically somebody's front room, but I hope that they managed to get something to eat at some stage.

I enjoyed their recital very much.  You get something of what the sensation of a nineteenth century salon must have been like, sitting so close to the musicians with the front row practically within touching distance.  We got Bach's sixth and most difficult cello suite, two early pieces of Chopin, some Schubert, some Ligeti, and some Brahms.  My initial uncharitable reaction when I saw on the programme that the first piece after the interval was by Ligeti was to hope it would be short, and it was, but I surprised myself by enjoying it.  It was the first time I ever heard slide cello and it is a fabulous sound.  I must confess I had not heard of either musician before this concert series, which signifies little since I haven't heard of all sorts of people, but I see from Joy Lisney's blurb that she is a champion of new music and is currently studying for a PhD in composition as well as performing.  I shall keep half an eye out in future.

I liked Brahms' violin sonata transcribed for cello so much that I might even buy a copy (Presto Classical's top choice comes bundled with all the rest of Brahms' entire output for the cello for a correspondingly weighty price, but it's also available on Naxos).  I was not convinced by James Lisney's claim that Brahms had played it at Clara Schuman's funeral, though, because I was sure I remembered from a Radio 3 programme that he was late to her funeral, only arriving in time for the actual burial, and I don't see they'd have had a piano standing next to the grave.  But perhaps he did.

Despite their hideous journey and late arrival at the venue they even played us an encore, some more Chopin.  My neighbours in the audience on both sides were friendly, and altogether I am beginning to warm to Studio Music.  It is only a quarter of an hour's drive from home, so the main issue is the need to arrive so ridiculously early to get a decent seat (and avoid getting caught by the level crossing at Thorrington).

This afternoon was the last of this year's lectures at the Suffolk Group of Plant Heritage, which was mainly about orchids growing in the wild, interspersed with other wild plants, lemurs, and assorted South African and Madagascan mountains and forests.  Somebody else's holiday photos, in fact, but the lecturer was an authority on orchids and possessed of a dry sense of humour.  And I bought a tender salvia with white flowers in dark purple calyces, to be a companion for 'Amistad' next year if I can nurse it through the winter in the greenhouse without it getting botrytis.  And I stayed for tea and cake, and chatted to various strange people, which is so much easier at a club meeting when you have a common interest to talk about.  Sit two keen gardeners down together with a cup of tea and pose the question 'What sort of soil do you have' and we're off.

another day, another electronics failure

My tablet died overnight.  It was perfectly fine yesterday.  I played Sudoku in the evening, and left the tablet on charge overnight so that I could listen to the film programme podcast today while planting mallows in the daffodil lawn.  This morning I was all set up to go, trowel, trays of plants in their nine centimetre pots, packet of mycorrhizal fungus, kneeling mat, shears to tidy up the whiskery bits of lawn as I went (keeping an eye out for approaching kittens), big green bucket for the rubbish, radio, jack plug lead, tablet.  Lights, camera, action.  Only when I swiped my finger across the touch screen nothing happened, and after I'd dried my finger (which was not even wet) and wiped the screen with kitchen roll and spectacle cleaner still nothing happened.  The little padlock remained firmly in place in the middle of the screen and that was that.

The Systems Administrator tried every technique in his armoury, from switching it off and switching it on again to attempting to reinstall the entire operating system.  Nothing.  The tablet is dead, defunct, no more.  It had done us pretty well, since I'd had a couple of years' use out of it and before that it was the SA's for about three years, but even so.  How dare it break?  It had all my film programme podcasts on it.

I am not having a good six months for electronic kit.  First of all it was my phone, going into a mad spasm and eating its entire battery in a few hours.  Then my iPod went into a fugue so that the only thing it would do was play Philip Glass.  And the battery in my garden radio got to the point where it wouldn't last a morning before it flattened.  The radio problem was easily solved by installing a new battery, its fourth.  I was relieved the SA could refettle it yet again, since it is a good chunky radio.  After I bought it the SA was so impressed that he bought an identical one for his bathroom. The model has been long discontinued by the manufacturer, but I think its modern equivalent would set me back pretty close to three figures, so a new battery at twelve pounds something was a bargain.

It didn't seem worth buying a new iPod, when I thought about it.  I hate wearing headphones, which is eccentric in this day and age but there it is, I can't help it.  And I don't want to listen to music on the move.  When I'm out and about I'd like to hear what's going on around me.  Eccentric again, but that's how it is.  So I listen to the iPod when I'm indoors and stationary, either cooking or ironing. On that basis buying a small CD player was easier and cheaper than getting a replacement iPod.  I am slightly sad to see it go on purely artistic and cultural grounds, since an iPod and docking station were featured in Grayson Perry's tapestry The Vanity of Small Differences as middle class signifiers, but I can't see him bothering to include a mini CD player any time soon.

In total I probably don't spend any more on electronic equipment than I do on gardening gloves, but it still riles me when it breaks.  Gloves are disposables.  Electronics are capital equipment, they are supposed to last.

going under cover

I was going to start planting the small pots of seed raised knapweed and mallow in the lawn, now there's been some rain to soften the ground.  Unfortunately it kept on raining, not a proper steady downpour that would soak into the soil, which I'm sure is still dry a few inches under the surface, just a series of annoying showers each time I'd got my tools out, enough to make everything damp including my kneeling mat, my knees and my gloves.  I gave up on that plan and decided to start moving the pots of tender things into the greenhouse instead.

Frost isn't forecast within the next week, but when it does turn cold night temperatures could drop suddenly, and it takes a while to stow everything away neatly, while in the meantime the bursts of rain are making the pots randomly wet.  I need to try and make sure when I fill the greenhouse that anything prone to botrytis has as much air moving around it as possible, that plants with fragile branches don't end up next to the narrow path that's all that will be left for access by the time I've finished, and that I can reach all pots needing regular checking and watering while pots that have to be kept dry are put where they won't get accidentally watered.  I've never yet got it entirely right.

So this year the pelargoniums are going up on the staging as last year they got a bit damp and mouldy down on the floor, while the fuchsias are going in the corner furthest from the entrance instead of right by the door where they were last year.  Fuchsia branches have a heart rending habit of ripping off, taking a long strip of bark with them, if you so much as brush into them.  There is not going to be room for everything, I feel this in my bones before I even start, looking at the space and the quantity of pots scattered around the front and back garden.

In order to fit as much in as possible I have been clearing the jumble of oddments from the little shelf above the main staging.  In summer it gets too hot for practically everything, apart from a prickly pear I grew from seed years ago and which lives up on the shelf so that it can't spike me or the cats.  This year I remembered to water and feed it and it made some new growth, sprouting a couple of fresh green new segments.  The old pads are brown and gnarly with age and the attempts of some daredevil snails to graze on them, and I would not say it was a thing of beauty, but I am fond of it.  Once I have chucked out the rubbish from the shelf and condensed the useful things down into one little section above the potting tray I should be able to fit some of the vast collection of Puya up there.  My garden club is holding a plant stall next May, and I hope somebody would like to buy an industrial quantity of Puya plants, because I hate the idea of throwing them away but overwintering them becomes more of a struggle each time they need repotting.

Every geranium root ball is being checked for root aphid as I stack them away, and as a radical step I have thrown away some infected mature plants if I've got clean rooted cuttings of the same variety.  This is partly to save my pitiful last supplies of Provado drench for serious cases, like the dwarf pomegranates which are years old and can't be renewed from cuttings in one season, and partly because I know I'm going to be short of space as it is.  I wish the RHS would hurry up and reply to my email, since I'd have liked to have a root aphid strategy planned out before starting to load the greenhouse.

I borrowed the Systems Administrator's dinky new little four wheel garden truck to move the pots since the SA was out.  It was bought specifically for hauling wood, and the SA was very clear that it should not be left full of other stuff if I used it for anything else.  In fact, the suggestion that if I found it useful I might like to buy one of my own has been made a couple of times.  It did still have some geraniums in it by the time the SA got home, but the SA was magnanimous about them, saying they could stay there until the morning.  It gets dark so early now.