I took a day off from our garden today to go garden visiting. We went to two gardens east of Norwich, and I will have to try and keep them distinct in my head, since both were in private family ownership, attached to large houses with some formal bits and some shrubby and landscapey bits, and it would be very easy to start swapping elements between them or merge them into a composite whole.
We began at Raveningham in Norfolk. It has been the home of the Bacon family since 1735, and I see on Wikipedia (though it is not mentioned on their own website) that the current incumbent Sir Nicholas Bacon is the Premier Baronet of England. He is also president of the Royal Horticultural Society and the Norfolk Beekeepers Association. You can tell that the present owners are interested in gardening. There is an air of active management, new planting and new features. Gardens that are merely being coped with develop a giveaway air of sadness.
There were only four cars in the car park when we arrived, and one of those was a pickup truck that might have belonged to the estate rather than a visitor. Nobody was spending their morning sitting in the little entry booth, and we paid by stuffing a fiver for the Systems Administrator in an honesty box and writing my RHS membership number on a sheet. We wandered through Victorian greenhouses with pots of pelargoniums and a heady scent of jasmine, contemplated the walled kitchen garden which was in the process of being comprehensively dug over and with the first tentative signs of this year's rows of vegetables coming through, and I examined how they train their wall grown figs. You have to chop an awful lot of growth off, is the answer, and need a taller wall than mine.
There was a big rolling lawn studded with daisies in front of the house, stopping at a proper ha-ha with a view over the park beyond, and up an avenue of trees incorporating a splendid ancient grown-out oak pollard that must have been there long before the rest of the avenue. The borders were large and informal, and in the process of being generously mulched with muck, and swathes of bluebells and cow parsley led to the village church. The church had that East Anglian speciality, a round tower, and recent gravestones showed the churchyard was in active use as recently as last year.
Behind the house was a lake, created by Sir Nicholas for the millennium, and surrounded by meadows with the greatest number of cowslips I think I have ever seen, anywhere. There were a lot of other wildflowers to come later, though in the long term I don't think the area was destined to remain as open grassland, because there were a lot of little trees planted, wrapped for now in defensive rings of wire netting and I see on the website that they had Roy Lancaster in to advise. My hunch is that Sir Nicholas is at heart more of a woody plants enthusiast than a herbaceous man. Gardeners tend to incline one way or the other.
Tucked into the edge of the shelter belt was a recently planted large stumpery with some already impressive tree ferns, which will be really good once it has settled down. It needed more smaller ferns between the stumps to get the full Victorian fernery effect, and I wondered about the strong young shoots of something I couldn't identify, but which might have been whatever was there before the stumpery in which case it wasn't properly dead yet. There were sprinklers playing on the tree ferns, which is what you have to do if you want to grow them in East Anglia after the driest winter for twenty years.
The cafe was nice and remarkably cheap. I think we saw one other couple walking about the garden, and when we left there were still only five other cars in the car park. A real grass tennis court had been incorporated rather neatly into one corner of the garden in front of the house. Altogether we liked Raveningham (pronounced Ran-ing'm) very much. My only criticism would be that they could think of a better way of storing the various bright yellow, commercial grade hoses than leaving them coiled in full view about the garden.
Ten miles down the road and just over the border in Suffolk is Somerleyton, where you can see a high Victorian house and garden on the site of a genuine Jacobean manor house and garden. We only viewed the house from the outside, though we could have been on a guided tour. The outside was quite extraordinary enough. It was built (encasing the original manor house) for the Victorian railway engineering and construction magnate Sir Samuel Morton Peto, who seems to have been aiming as near to Waddesdon Manor as he could get without having the full financial resources of the Rothschilds. Sadly he came to grief in his business dealings with the failure of the London and Chatham railway and Norfolk bankers Overend Gurney, and had to sell the house to the Crossleys of Halifax, who had grown rich in the manufacture of carpets. I liked the way that ownership of this extraordinary Italianate pile reflected the aspirations and shifting fortunes of the Victorian manufacturing class.
The gardens have been simplified since their Victorian heyday, so the former large covered winter garden is no more, but there is a pleasant white themed (for weddings) sunken garden occupying part of its former footprint, and a mad stretch of crumbling red brick Italianate wall from what was the Palm House. The parterres designed by eminent Victorian garden designer William Nesfield were simplified after the second World War, then revamped by contemporary East Anglian garden designer George Carter. I was impressed by how the suit had been cut to fit the cloth, with balls of Santolina filling the box edges (once a year clip) instead of bedding, and Sempervivum in the urns on the terrace (water them once or twice a week if you feel like it and they will live for years unless vine weevil get them). There were some nice young standard trees, and the whole formal area had a quiet, competent air of being cared for within a budget that was a lot less than is spent on the formal terrace at Waddesdon.
In the less formal parts of the garden were some really good, large conifers from the early days of tree collecting in North America, a splendid cedar of Lebanon, and some fine monkey puzzles. There were some interesting glasshouses by Paxton himself (or at least attribute to Paxton), with ridge and furrow roofs to maximise the amount of light getting in. Sadly they didn't seem to be in full productive use and the only one we were allowed into housed the cafe. There was a Lynn Chadwick sculpture, on loan from an aunt who I think must have been Lynn Chadwick's daughter, of two sturdy women with triangular heads, looking vaguely as if it had escaped from Harlow New Town, and a classical Atlanta, distracted by Aphrodite's apples in the middle of an expanse of lawn. We were a little early for the long iron pergola, planted with a cheerful mixture of things instead of making a design statement with seventy yards of all the same thing, but enjoyed the way several ancient wisteria had engulfed sections of it, bending the ironwork wildly out of true. It will be very jolly when it flowers. We were too early for the formal rose garden, and didn't go into the yew maze not being fans of mazes, but listened to the other people getting lost. We liked Sir Samuel's chutzpah in buying a clock that was made for a House of Commons competition, and building a tower to put it on.
All in all we liked Somerleyton. Victorian formal gardens are not my favourite sort, and it isn't such a plantsman's garden as Raveningham, but it is done well. The two make a good pairing for a day out, and we did them in the right order. At the end we even said we'd like to go back later in the year when there was more flowering.
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
Monday, 8 May 2017
a success
It's always nice when a planting idea starts to really work. That's part of the fun of bedding and annuals: you can dream up a scheme and a matter of weeks or a couple of months later see how it turns out. Woody plants and climbers can keep you guessing for rather longer before you see whether it was a good idea. The eighteenth century landscapers and their clients never saw many of their remodelled estates in their full glory, even if Capability Brown did move the odd mature oak.
The current success which pleases me each time I go into our bedroom and look out into the wood is a Clematis montana 'Broughton Star' which has been laboriously making its way up a holly tree in the end of the wood for the past five years. It is a pink semi-double, with a ruff of small petals inside an outer ring of larger, more open petals, and a prominent boss of pale greenish-yellow stamens. The individual flowers are not huge, but there are a lot of them, nicely spaced out over the stems so that the holly appears studded in individual pink stars, the name 'Broughton Star' being entirely apt.
I bought my plant as a teeny tiny thing in a little pot, because that was all the plant centre could get. I potted it on into a deep two litre pot, where it continued to look small and sad and made very little growth. It may have been the victim of a rogue bag of compost, as a couple of other things did inexplicably badly in their pots and picked up rapidly once in desperation planted out or repotted. The clematis went into the end of the wood, just under the outer canopy of the holly and well away from the trunk, where it would get some light. Then I waited to see if it would start growing, and if so whether it would have the energy to climb up until it got a proper amount of light. The land drops away sharply from the house at that end, so anything starting at ground level is in the first instance shaded by the bank as well as the house.
'Broughton Star' began to grow, not quickly but doggedly. It flowered so I knew I had the right thing, only it did not make much of an impact. I stared out at it in the depths of winter trying to work out how far it had got, and as it came into leaf this spring I saw the answer was, quite a long way, at last. That was a relief, since after planting it I read some descriptions that said it was not so vigorous as the other montanas, and I began to worry that it would not manage to get far enough up the tree to make a show. The young foliage had a bronze tint which looked good against the dark green of the holly. And then the flowers came out. It was all highly satisfactory.
The holly tree is not so beautiful as it was, though I hope and believe its scruffiness is down to middle age rather than the first signs of a terminal decline. Last spring I planted the rose 'Albertine' on its other side, a rooted cutting that was a present from a friend. 'Albertine' also detested life in a pot, but has leaped into life since being put in the soil. Give it another five years and the rose should be ready to take up flowering in the tree just as the clematis flowers are fading. I like growing things up trees, though it doesn't always work. Vitis coignetiae suddenly died just as it was making decent progress up a self seeded birch, and the Vitis amurensis I bought to replace it, planting it in nicer soil to grow up an alder, quietly died at some point during its first winter, while I killed two perfectly good rambling roses planting them downhill of the deck where they could not cope with the almost permanent shade. Their replacements are now romping along in very large pots outside the greenhouse, where I hope to get a good six feet of top growth this summer so that when I plant them out in the autumn they will already be peeping above the level of the deck.
The current success which pleases me each time I go into our bedroom and look out into the wood is a Clematis montana 'Broughton Star' which has been laboriously making its way up a holly tree in the end of the wood for the past five years. It is a pink semi-double, with a ruff of small petals inside an outer ring of larger, more open petals, and a prominent boss of pale greenish-yellow stamens. The individual flowers are not huge, but there are a lot of them, nicely spaced out over the stems so that the holly appears studded in individual pink stars, the name 'Broughton Star' being entirely apt.
I bought my plant as a teeny tiny thing in a little pot, because that was all the plant centre could get. I potted it on into a deep two litre pot, where it continued to look small and sad and made very little growth. It may have been the victim of a rogue bag of compost, as a couple of other things did inexplicably badly in their pots and picked up rapidly once in desperation planted out or repotted. The clematis went into the end of the wood, just under the outer canopy of the holly and well away from the trunk, where it would get some light. Then I waited to see if it would start growing, and if so whether it would have the energy to climb up until it got a proper amount of light. The land drops away sharply from the house at that end, so anything starting at ground level is in the first instance shaded by the bank as well as the house.
'Broughton Star' began to grow, not quickly but doggedly. It flowered so I knew I had the right thing, only it did not make much of an impact. I stared out at it in the depths of winter trying to work out how far it had got, and as it came into leaf this spring I saw the answer was, quite a long way, at last. That was a relief, since after planting it I read some descriptions that said it was not so vigorous as the other montanas, and I began to worry that it would not manage to get far enough up the tree to make a show. The young foliage had a bronze tint which looked good against the dark green of the holly. And then the flowers came out. It was all highly satisfactory.
The holly tree is not so beautiful as it was, though I hope and believe its scruffiness is down to middle age rather than the first signs of a terminal decline. Last spring I planted the rose 'Albertine' on its other side, a rooted cutting that was a present from a friend. 'Albertine' also detested life in a pot, but has leaped into life since being put in the soil. Give it another five years and the rose should be ready to take up flowering in the tree just as the clematis flowers are fading. I like growing things up trees, though it doesn't always work. Vitis coignetiae suddenly died just as it was making decent progress up a self seeded birch, and the Vitis amurensis I bought to replace it, planting it in nicer soil to grow up an alder, quietly died at some point during its first winter, while I killed two perfectly good rambling roses planting them downhill of the deck where they could not cope with the almost permanent shade. Their replacements are now romping along in very large pots outside the greenhouse, where I hope to get a good six feet of top growth this summer so that when I plant them out in the autumn they will already be peeping above the level of the deck.
Sunday, 7 May 2017
all in good time
We were woken up this morning by Our Ginger howling outside the bedroom door. As I surfaced I remembered that it was Sunday, and that I was going to spend the day chopping out more bramble root in the meadow and digging through the patch of bare ground where I planned to plant primroses once I'd divided them. Then I remembered that I'd promised that in the morning I'd check the proof of the music society's promotional bookmark.
Proof reading does not come come naturally to me. I don't know if it does to anybody, when the whole carefully evolved point of human perception is to form meaning out of less than perfect signals, not to nitpick about the data. If I've got to check any document or calculation then the best time to do it, or the least bad time, is first thing after breakfast. Analytic tasks first thing, creative juices flowing later in the day, is how it works for me.
All of the music society's events are due to be held on Sundays, so I checked that all the dates on the proof were Sundays, and that they matched the dates I'd written in my diary from the flier the Chairman gave out at the last concert. They did, except that for some reason I hadn't written the last concert down at all, nor the lecture because at that point it was tbc. I managed to find the email from the Chairman which confirmed the lecture. I looked at the spellings of the composers' names and thought they looked right, though I had to check on Wikipedia that Piazzolla really did have two each of z and l. I noticed that pian0 was spelt with a final zero instead of an o. Then I couldn't think of anything else to check, except to query whether we were really having four concerts in the church. The chairman was grateful I'd spotted the 0, and was unnerved enough to say she would refer once again to the actual contracts with the musicians before giving the printers the go ahead. A local business is kindly sponsoring the bookmarks, and it would be awfully embarrassing to get them wrong.
By then the Systems Administrator had announced his intention to do the vacuuming, and it seemed only decent to wash the kitchen floor and the hall, and then I thought I'd better water the conservatory and the Hamamelis pots, so by the time I got up to the meadow half the morning had already gone. I don't know where Sandy Denny's time went, though it's a fair bet it did not go on proof reading bookmarks and watering flowerpots, but I always forget how much of mine goes on routine stuff, cleaning and little admin jobs that you don't think will take any time at all, except that they do.
In the meadow I have nearly finished digging out the gardener's garters, Phalaris arundinacea, that I planted in an unwise moment some years back. I was going to tell you when, but failed to enter it on my spreadsheet for some reason. No matter. It was a bad thing to have planted, and I advise you to learn from my mistake and avoid the wretched thing. When I planted it I was eager to fill the great bare expanses of space in the meadow and grateful to the Phalaris for its ability to cope with poor soil. I am now grateful I put it somewhere as poor as I did, since it has spread quite enough as it is and would probably have gone much, much further given more moisture. It is green. That is about all you can say about it. It is green and it runs at the root. The flower spikes are less interesting than almost any other grass you can think of and it does not sway gracefully in the wind. I have been digging out its fat underground roots with the pick axe, and then targeting any pieces of regrowth. The most difficult bits to extract are where it has gone close to trees or the clumps of hellebores which I want to keep. The only consolation is that so far it does not seem to regenerate as readily from small sections of root as many other running grasses, but we shall see. Maybe when we finally get some rain it will horrify me by springing up all over the place.
Even with a new garden it is unwise to plant crude running things just because you are desperate to fill the space. I know that now. As the garden matures and your own tastes develop you will want that space to grow something interesting. Far better to fill the gaps with annuals, or cheerful, fast growing but short lived species that won't outstay their welcome.
I feel a little stiff. Probably it was just as well only to have spent three quarters of the day digging out roots.
Proof reading does not come come naturally to me. I don't know if it does to anybody, when the whole carefully evolved point of human perception is to form meaning out of less than perfect signals, not to nitpick about the data. If I've got to check any document or calculation then the best time to do it, or the least bad time, is first thing after breakfast. Analytic tasks first thing, creative juices flowing later in the day, is how it works for me.
All of the music society's events are due to be held on Sundays, so I checked that all the dates on the proof were Sundays, and that they matched the dates I'd written in my diary from the flier the Chairman gave out at the last concert. They did, except that for some reason I hadn't written the last concert down at all, nor the lecture because at that point it was tbc. I managed to find the email from the Chairman which confirmed the lecture. I looked at the spellings of the composers' names and thought they looked right, though I had to check on Wikipedia that Piazzolla really did have two each of z and l. I noticed that pian0 was spelt with a final zero instead of an o. Then I couldn't think of anything else to check, except to query whether we were really having four concerts in the church. The chairman was grateful I'd spotted the 0, and was unnerved enough to say she would refer once again to the actual contracts with the musicians before giving the printers the go ahead. A local business is kindly sponsoring the bookmarks, and it would be awfully embarrassing to get them wrong.
By then the Systems Administrator had announced his intention to do the vacuuming, and it seemed only decent to wash the kitchen floor and the hall, and then I thought I'd better water the conservatory and the Hamamelis pots, so by the time I got up to the meadow half the morning had already gone. I don't know where Sandy Denny's time went, though it's a fair bet it did not go on proof reading bookmarks and watering flowerpots, but I always forget how much of mine goes on routine stuff, cleaning and little admin jobs that you don't think will take any time at all, except that they do.
In the meadow I have nearly finished digging out the gardener's garters, Phalaris arundinacea, that I planted in an unwise moment some years back. I was going to tell you when, but failed to enter it on my spreadsheet for some reason. No matter. It was a bad thing to have planted, and I advise you to learn from my mistake and avoid the wretched thing. When I planted it I was eager to fill the great bare expanses of space in the meadow and grateful to the Phalaris for its ability to cope with poor soil. I am now grateful I put it somewhere as poor as I did, since it has spread quite enough as it is and would probably have gone much, much further given more moisture. It is green. That is about all you can say about it. It is green and it runs at the root. The flower spikes are less interesting than almost any other grass you can think of and it does not sway gracefully in the wind. I have been digging out its fat underground roots with the pick axe, and then targeting any pieces of regrowth. The most difficult bits to extract are where it has gone close to trees or the clumps of hellebores which I want to keep. The only consolation is that so far it does not seem to regenerate as readily from small sections of root as many other running grasses, but we shall see. Maybe when we finally get some rain it will horrify me by springing up all over the place.
Even with a new garden it is unwise to plant crude running things just because you are desperate to fill the space. I know that now. As the garden matures and your own tastes develop you will want that space to grow something interesting. Far better to fill the gaps with annuals, or cheerful, fast growing but short lived species that won't outstay their welcome.
I feel a little stiff. Probably it was just as well only to have spent three quarters of the day digging out roots.
Saturday, 6 May 2017
pots and bins
I planted up the pot outside the front door a couple of days ago with summer bedding, Calibrachoa and trailing Verbena in coordinating shades of pink. They are frost tender and it feels too early to be putting them outside, when frost is still entirely possible, but if I leave buying the plants until the end of the month the garden centres may not have much left, and since it is not frosty at the moment they might as well get on with sending roots down in their new quarters. If we are due a cold night I will have to put the pot in the back of the porch, or even in the hall. It is a vintage genuine 1960s piece inherited from the Systems Administrator's parents, a terracotta cone that sits in a simple iron stand, and the SA's brothers insisted we should have it since we had a 1960s house and they both had cottages. I am quite fond of it, and Mr Fidget is fascinated by the drips that come out of the holes in its sides towards the base when I water it.
It will be a relief when I can turf the pots of Pelargonium and Agapanthus and all the dahlias and other tender stuff out of the greenhouse, which is so crowded there is no room to put anything down. The Pelargonium are mostly responding to the longer days, warmer sun and perhaps their dose of Vitax Q4, and throwing out new leaves and whole new shoots. They were not so vigorous last year as they should have been, and I decided that giving them the odd dose of tomato feed when I watered them was not enough and I was going to have to be more organised. The Vitax Q4 is a start, though I had better look on the tub and see how long one dose is supposed to last. Though the sprinkling I gave the pots may not equate to the recommended dose per square metre. I am nervous of giving too much.
Meanwhile spring is marching on, and this morning I tidied the pots of tulips away and put them back outside the greenhouse, since almost every petal had fallen. The last to drop its petals was 'Ile de France', which was also one of the first to open. Most of them had finished flowering two or three days ago, and I had a session dead heading them. I gave the pots a liquid feed this morning, and will leave the bulbs undisturbed to finish growing and die down in their own time, in the hopes that most of them will remain large enough to flower next year, instead of degenerating into a dozen tiny offsets. I don't risk them in pots two years running, since the disappointment if they didn't produce a show would be too great, but any good sized bulbs will go into the dahlia bed.
One minor issue has been successfully resolved at the local level. The brown bin was not emptied a fortnight ago over the Easter weekend, and when I rang the council office on Tuesday the person I spoke to said that was because the road had been closed for resurfacing and so the bin lorry could not get in. It was true that the road had been given a whole new coat of tarmac on top of the recently mended potholes, and very grateful I was too, only I did not want to miss out on a collection which, after all, I was paying for. The woman in the council office said they would try to empty it, only it was difficult because they were not in the area any more. The rest of the week passed, and the following one, and nobody came for the brown bin. I thought of asking for my renewal date to be pushed out a week, then the much more simple and obvious solution occurred to me which was to put a couple of extra bags out for the bin men with a note.
It was a carefully worded note, saying they could not come a fortnight ago because of the road rather than than they did not come, to try and sound understanding rather than accusatory. I hoped the bin men would oblige, since they must remember the road being closed and always seem perfectly helpful when I speak to them, but the rules say that extra bags left by the brown bin will not be emptied. Excellent and sensible bin men, they emptied the bags as well as the brown bin and so I am all square with Veolia waste and perfectly happy. If a company wants its staff to deliver good customer service it needs to give them the discretion to make decisions on the ground. I was once stuck waiting at the till in Tesco for ages because somebody in front of me had got a bun from the bakery section and the till operative could not match it to any of the pictures of bakery products on her little card. The queue behind me lengthened and began to mutter ominously, but the till operative would not take a decision to resolve the problem by either charging the bun at the lowest possible price on her card, or better still giving the customer the bun with a smile and a comment that her price list obviously needed updating. Paralysed by the need to follow the system, she did neither. I think eventually a Supervisor had to come and sort it out.
It will be a relief when I can turf the pots of Pelargonium and Agapanthus and all the dahlias and other tender stuff out of the greenhouse, which is so crowded there is no room to put anything down. The Pelargonium are mostly responding to the longer days, warmer sun and perhaps their dose of Vitax Q4, and throwing out new leaves and whole new shoots. They were not so vigorous last year as they should have been, and I decided that giving them the odd dose of tomato feed when I watered them was not enough and I was going to have to be more organised. The Vitax Q4 is a start, though I had better look on the tub and see how long one dose is supposed to last. Though the sprinkling I gave the pots may not equate to the recommended dose per square metre. I am nervous of giving too much.
Meanwhile spring is marching on, and this morning I tidied the pots of tulips away and put them back outside the greenhouse, since almost every petal had fallen. The last to drop its petals was 'Ile de France', which was also one of the first to open. Most of them had finished flowering two or three days ago, and I had a session dead heading them. I gave the pots a liquid feed this morning, and will leave the bulbs undisturbed to finish growing and die down in their own time, in the hopes that most of them will remain large enough to flower next year, instead of degenerating into a dozen tiny offsets. I don't risk them in pots two years running, since the disappointment if they didn't produce a show would be too great, but any good sized bulbs will go into the dahlia bed.
One minor issue has been successfully resolved at the local level. The brown bin was not emptied a fortnight ago over the Easter weekend, and when I rang the council office on Tuesday the person I spoke to said that was because the road had been closed for resurfacing and so the bin lorry could not get in. It was true that the road had been given a whole new coat of tarmac on top of the recently mended potholes, and very grateful I was too, only I did not want to miss out on a collection which, after all, I was paying for. The woman in the council office said they would try to empty it, only it was difficult because they were not in the area any more. The rest of the week passed, and the following one, and nobody came for the brown bin. I thought of asking for my renewal date to be pushed out a week, then the much more simple and obvious solution occurred to me which was to put a couple of extra bags out for the bin men with a note.
It was a carefully worded note, saying they could not come a fortnight ago because of the road rather than than they did not come, to try and sound understanding rather than accusatory. I hoped the bin men would oblige, since they must remember the road being closed and always seem perfectly helpful when I speak to them, but the rules say that extra bags left by the brown bin will not be emptied. Excellent and sensible bin men, they emptied the bags as well as the brown bin and so I am all square with Veolia waste and perfectly happy. If a company wants its staff to deliver good customer service it needs to give them the discretion to make decisions on the ground. I was once stuck waiting at the till in Tesco for ages because somebody in front of me had got a bun from the bakery section and the till operative could not match it to any of the pictures of bakery products on her little card. The queue behind me lengthened and began to mutter ominously, but the till operative would not take a decision to resolve the problem by either charging the bun at the lowest possible price on her card, or better still giving the customer the bun with a smile and a comment that her price list obviously needed updating. Paralysed by the need to follow the system, she did neither. I think eventually a Supervisor had to come and sort it out.
Friday, 5 May 2017
mixed fortunes
The magnificent new door mat is scarcely functioning as a mat, because Our Ginger has taken to sleeping on it and refusing to get up when either of us wants to get in through the front door. The only answer is to open the door just enough to get one foot through it, and push the mat with Our Ginger on it out of the way. Consequently the mat has moved from its intended place just inside the threshold to a central position in the middle of the hall, a thick coir raft with a large ginger cat on it, which we have to walk around when going in or out. Ah well, it was a good idea having a new luxury doormat, even if it hasn't worked out in practice, and it could be worse. I knew somebody who had a wolfhound that used to sleep inside his front door and refuse to get up when he came home, and he couldn't open the door at all.
For my next act, to protect the deckchairs on the shady deck from the copious showers of bird crap that fall at night from whatever bird it is that roosts in the Meteasquoia glyptostroboides, I have purchased a PVC tablecloth to drape over them when folded up and not in use. I was thinking in terms of making an open bag to fit over them like a sail cover, and it was the Systems Administrator who pointed out that I could save myself the trouble of sewing anything and just hang something over them weighted with battens on the lower edges. Amazingly, the second time I searched on Amazon I found a cloth printed in a fake plank design that is an almost perfect colour match for the deck. I had been thinking in terms of taupe with as inoffensive a pattern as I could find, probably polka dots, but the idea that you could buy wood patterned tablecloths had not honestly occurred to me. The aim is that it will blend in with the backdrop so that it doesn't draw the eye as an unwanted focal point. But since the acquisition of a new doormat didn't go entirely to plan we'll see if the chair cover idea works any better.
I promised an update on my attempts to propagate Viola odorata by potting up little rooted pieces. The answer is that the method works. Every pot in all three trays, one of each colour, has got a bunch of healthy looking dark green leaves in it. I haven't tipped any of them out to see how fast the roots are developing, but they must have roots or they would be dead by now. A one hundred per cent success rate at propagating sweet violets is some compensation for the failure of the doormat project. I have just ordered a new (to me) pale pink variety called 'Lydia Groves' for a gap in the ditch bed and skinflint that I am only ordered the one, thinking that if it took I could bulk it up next year.
For my next act, to protect the deckchairs on the shady deck from the copious showers of bird crap that fall at night from whatever bird it is that roosts in the Meteasquoia glyptostroboides, I have purchased a PVC tablecloth to drape over them when folded up and not in use. I was thinking in terms of making an open bag to fit over them like a sail cover, and it was the Systems Administrator who pointed out that I could save myself the trouble of sewing anything and just hang something over them weighted with battens on the lower edges. Amazingly, the second time I searched on Amazon I found a cloth printed in a fake plank design that is an almost perfect colour match for the deck. I had been thinking in terms of taupe with as inoffensive a pattern as I could find, probably polka dots, but the idea that you could buy wood patterned tablecloths had not honestly occurred to me. The aim is that it will blend in with the backdrop so that it doesn't draw the eye as an unwanted focal point. But since the acquisition of a new doormat didn't go entirely to plan we'll see if the chair cover idea works any better.
I promised an update on my attempts to propagate Viola odorata by potting up little rooted pieces. The answer is that the method works. Every pot in all three trays, one of each colour, has got a bunch of healthy looking dark green leaves in it. I haven't tipped any of them out to see how fast the roots are developing, but they must have roots or they would be dead by now. A one hundred per cent success rate at propagating sweet violets is some compensation for the failure of the doormat project. I have just ordered a new (to me) pale pink variety called 'Lydia Groves' for a gap in the ditch bed and skinflint that I am only ordered the one, thinking that if it took I could bulk it up next year.
Thursday, 4 May 2017
a routine appointment
This morning we took the kittens, by now cats, for their annual vaccinations, prompted by a deluge of email reminders from the vet. The half a dozen emails made sense when I looked at them, two jabs each for three cats, feline enteritis and feline leukemia, presumably generated automatically. Thankfully when I rang the vet the receptionist made an appointment for all three under the name of Mr Fidget, so I only got one text yesterday confirming that they looked forward to seeing me today. Still, it means it has been a year since our visit to the rescue centre, and our realisation that we couldn't leave one solitary kitten from the litter behind and would have to take all three.
Things did not bode well when we first got up as the only black and white cat in evidence was Mr Fluffy. We debated last night how much to feed them: too much and they wouldn't feel like coming in for their breakfast, too little and they might be driven to go out rabbiting and again not be bothered about missing breakfast. Fortunately Mr Cool and then Mr Fidget came when called, although Mr Fidget was not really hungry and soon became suspicious that we were up to something, even though we were trying to behave entirely normally. As the time to set off to the vet got closer we shut them out of more and more rooms, until they were limited to the kitchen and the inner hall and it was time to stuff them into their cat baskets.
Mr Cool began to panic and crash round and round in his basket, and as soon as the car started to move Mr Fluffy and Mr Fidget began to yowl, but we got there without anybody having a heart attack or an accident on the seats. I'd booked a nine o'clock appointment so that there would be the shortest possible delay between shutting them in at breakfast and setting off for the vet, which had the advantage that things were still running to time and we were called in after only a short period of contemplating dogs in the waiting room.
The vet we saw had given them their first shots when they were little, and vaccinated and microchipped our previous generation of kittens. She has unnervingly sound instincts when it comes to cats. It was she who told us that she thought the grey tabby had a compromised immune system while she was still a kitten, then became embarrassed and told us to forget that she had said that, but she was right in spotting that the grey tabby was not a good doer. Always thin as a rake, her spirit blazed defiant to the end but her kidneys packed up when she was only eleven, and that was after years of problems with the pads of her feet. I felt quietly relieved once the vet had weighed all three of the artists formerly known as kittens and listened to their hearts and palpated their stomachs, and pronounced them fit. My aunt's vet diagnoses heart defects in her cats so regularly that my advice was that she should find another vet.
Mr Fidget is once again the heaviest, as he was when we first got them. Mr Cool after an adolescent growth spurt that put him in the lead by a considerable margin is now in the middle, and Mr Fluffy remains the smallest under all the fur. The vet was pleased to hear that they all got on with each other, and frankly amazed to hear that they got on with our old cat, and sent us on our way with the hope in the nicest possible way that she would not see us for another year. It must be a satisfying part of a vet's job when your customers come in with a basket of rescue kittens, and return a year later with them all grown into healthy and well adjusted cats.
When we got home Mr Fidget and Mr Cool thought that they wanted to rush into the garden and sulk, but changed their minds at the offer of cat treats, and in the end they all came to sit with us and Our Ginger while we drank coffee, so there were no hard feelings about having been taken to the vet. It is a relief to have got that out of the way, though.
Things did not bode well when we first got up as the only black and white cat in evidence was Mr Fluffy. We debated last night how much to feed them: too much and they wouldn't feel like coming in for their breakfast, too little and they might be driven to go out rabbiting and again not be bothered about missing breakfast. Fortunately Mr Cool and then Mr Fidget came when called, although Mr Fidget was not really hungry and soon became suspicious that we were up to something, even though we were trying to behave entirely normally. As the time to set off to the vet got closer we shut them out of more and more rooms, until they were limited to the kitchen and the inner hall and it was time to stuff them into their cat baskets.
Mr Cool began to panic and crash round and round in his basket, and as soon as the car started to move Mr Fluffy and Mr Fidget began to yowl, but we got there without anybody having a heart attack or an accident on the seats. I'd booked a nine o'clock appointment so that there would be the shortest possible delay between shutting them in at breakfast and setting off for the vet, which had the advantage that things were still running to time and we were called in after only a short period of contemplating dogs in the waiting room.
The vet we saw had given them their first shots when they were little, and vaccinated and microchipped our previous generation of kittens. She has unnervingly sound instincts when it comes to cats. It was she who told us that she thought the grey tabby had a compromised immune system while she was still a kitten, then became embarrassed and told us to forget that she had said that, but she was right in spotting that the grey tabby was not a good doer. Always thin as a rake, her spirit blazed defiant to the end but her kidneys packed up when she was only eleven, and that was after years of problems with the pads of her feet. I felt quietly relieved once the vet had weighed all three of the artists formerly known as kittens and listened to their hearts and palpated their stomachs, and pronounced them fit. My aunt's vet diagnoses heart defects in her cats so regularly that my advice was that she should find another vet.
Mr Fidget is once again the heaviest, as he was when we first got them. Mr Cool after an adolescent growth spurt that put him in the lead by a considerable margin is now in the middle, and Mr Fluffy remains the smallest under all the fur. The vet was pleased to hear that they all got on with each other, and frankly amazed to hear that they got on with our old cat, and sent us on our way with the hope in the nicest possible way that she would not see us for another year. It must be a satisfying part of a vet's job when your customers come in with a basket of rescue kittens, and return a year later with them all grown into healthy and well adjusted cats.
When we got home Mr Fidget and Mr Cool thought that they wanted to rush into the garden and sulk, but changed their minds at the offer of cat treats, and in the end they all came to sit with us and Our Ginger while we drank coffee, so there were no hard feelings about having been taken to the vet. It is a relief to have got that out of the way, though.
Wednesday, 3 May 2017
figs
It's no wonder I keep accumulating spare plants in pots. As I was tidying up outside the garage, and trimming the old, dead growth off the Erigeron karvinskianus which I should have done before the new growth started, I cut off some low growing branches from the 'Brown Turkey' fig planted against the wall and discovered that they had started to send out roots where they ran across the paving slabs. It went hopelessly against the grain to throw a shoot with roots on it of a named and fruitful fig on the bonfire heap so I went and potted them up. If I'd been trying to propagate the fig on purpose I'd have made sure they were well rooted into their pots before severing them from the parent plant, but it's worth a try for the sake of a few litres of compost, and suggests that figs would be extremely to propagate from layers if you wanted to. The snag, of course, is that I don't need another 'Brown Turkey'.
The parent fig started off life in a pot in the conservatory, where it grew but did not look as luxuriant as those I saw growing in the ground, so eventually I planted it at the base of the retaining wall under the terrace (or patio). I did not bother surrounding it with slabs, or planting it in an old washing machine drum, or any of the tricks recommended to get figs to fruit instead of growing madly. The soil under that wall is so poor that when I laid the slabs outside the garage I was digging flints out with a pick axe, and I didn't think any further restraints on growth were called for. The fig sat still for a couple of years in absolute shock, then began to throw strong new shoots from ground level, abandoning the sad, twisted framework of branches that was all it had been able to manage in its pot.
I now have to prune it regularly to prevent it from shadowing the terrace (or patio) and blocking the garage door. This requires a little thought, since I do not want to chop off the entire crop of figs. I have been studying how it fruits, and the figs are borne on the thinnish young shoots made in the previous year. Tiny nubs of potential figs sit on the branches through the winter, and by now they are swelling into recognisable fruit. I negotiated last summer with the Systems Administrator to let most of the fruiting shoots growing in front of the garage door remain until after I'd harvested the figs, then pruned them, and can see a similar discussion brewing this year. I took out the tallest growth too, where it was standing well above the level of the retaining wall, but remembering that I'd read somewhere that the figs were carried on the young growth I tried to leave as many of the small branches as possible. It is possible to train figs tightly in to a wall: I have seen it done in restored walled kitchen gardens, but how the gardeners manage to keep enough fruiting wood I do not know.
I swept all the paving outside the garage and the terrace (or patio) and scraped the emerging weeds from between the paving slabs and weeded the pots, which were pretty tidy, and wrote nice discreet labels for a couple that still had their huge glaring nursery labels. I have standardised on pale brown plastic ones, the colour of milky coffee, that blend in against the background of terracotta more unobtrusively than white ones. In fact, I must buy some more at Chelsea since the useful sundries supplier who comes to the Plant Heritage meetings sells plastic labels in every garish colour you could think of, but not pale brown. I potted up some Sempervivum that had been growing on in individual pots since their previous big pot was hit by vine weevil and I had to rescue them. I picked Eleagnus leaves out of the Iris unguicularis while reflecting yet again that yew or hornbeam would not have kept showering the front garden in a never-ending blizzard of leathery brown leaves.
And then I gave up. It was drizzling, it was cold, and my resolve deserted me. The new plant growth in May is always a delight, but the weather can be horrible.
The parent fig started off life in a pot in the conservatory, where it grew but did not look as luxuriant as those I saw growing in the ground, so eventually I planted it at the base of the retaining wall under the terrace (or patio). I did not bother surrounding it with slabs, or planting it in an old washing machine drum, or any of the tricks recommended to get figs to fruit instead of growing madly. The soil under that wall is so poor that when I laid the slabs outside the garage I was digging flints out with a pick axe, and I didn't think any further restraints on growth were called for. The fig sat still for a couple of years in absolute shock, then began to throw strong new shoots from ground level, abandoning the sad, twisted framework of branches that was all it had been able to manage in its pot.
I now have to prune it regularly to prevent it from shadowing the terrace (or patio) and blocking the garage door. This requires a little thought, since I do not want to chop off the entire crop of figs. I have been studying how it fruits, and the figs are borne on the thinnish young shoots made in the previous year. Tiny nubs of potential figs sit on the branches through the winter, and by now they are swelling into recognisable fruit. I negotiated last summer with the Systems Administrator to let most of the fruiting shoots growing in front of the garage door remain until after I'd harvested the figs, then pruned them, and can see a similar discussion brewing this year. I took out the tallest growth too, where it was standing well above the level of the retaining wall, but remembering that I'd read somewhere that the figs were carried on the young growth I tried to leave as many of the small branches as possible. It is possible to train figs tightly in to a wall: I have seen it done in restored walled kitchen gardens, but how the gardeners manage to keep enough fruiting wood I do not know.
I swept all the paving outside the garage and the terrace (or patio) and scraped the emerging weeds from between the paving slabs and weeded the pots, which were pretty tidy, and wrote nice discreet labels for a couple that still had their huge glaring nursery labels. I have standardised on pale brown plastic ones, the colour of milky coffee, that blend in against the background of terracotta more unobtrusively than white ones. In fact, I must buy some more at Chelsea since the useful sundries supplier who comes to the Plant Heritage meetings sells plastic labels in every garish colour you could think of, but not pale brown. I potted up some Sempervivum that had been growing on in individual pots since their previous big pot was hit by vine weevil and I had to rescue them. I picked Eleagnus leaves out of the Iris unguicularis while reflecting yet again that yew or hornbeam would not have kept showering the front garden in a never-ending blizzard of leathery brown leaves.
And then I gave up. It was drizzling, it was cold, and my resolve deserted me. The new plant growth in May is always a delight, but the weather can be horrible.
Tuesday, 2 May 2017
gardening society
This month's garden club lecture was about plants for pollinators, but the speaker's grasp of insect biology turned out to be patchy, so we will skate quickly over that. It was good to see my old gardening friend from Writtle, and I paid for a couple of garden visits, feeling very organised that I had written a cheque and put the names of the gardens on the back, only to find that I should also have put it in an envelope.
I am feeling even less optimistic about the potato competition than I was before, since one of the recent cold nights has been cold enough to nip the leaves of the potato. They look alright underneath, but the top ones are shrivelled and blackened. Ah well, it's the taking part that counts, and the lovely tea that people tell me we get at the potato day. If I'd realised it was going to get that cold overnight I'd have put the pot back in the greenhouse. The emerging dahlia leaves in the dahlia bed have been hit as well, and a couple of borderline hardy herbaceous salvias in the back garden. I am hoping that they are all sensible enough to keep some viable buds in reserve and will shoot again, rather than having sent up every potential stem they could make all in one go.
Next month's garden club topic is currently unknown, since the speaker who was booked to talk about pond life can't make it. I expect they will send an email round once they've found somebody. The chairman looked entirely poised and in command of the situation, as she always does, but it must be hard work. Before then there's the garden club plant sale, held every other year to raise funds for the club. The one held two years ago raised the best part of a thousand quid, which is necessary to pay for speakers and the annual supper, otherwise I suppose they'd have to increase the membership fee. I have offered to take some plants. It's generally the way with cuttings and seeds that they either fail completely or you end up with many more plants than you need. Maybe I'll find a taker for one of the collection of sheep eating Puya which are currently taking up rather a lot of space in the greenhouse. I should hate to throw them on the compost heap, but I don't honestly need fifteen of them.
I am feeling even less optimistic about the potato competition than I was before, since one of the recent cold nights has been cold enough to nip the leaves of the potato. They look alright underneath, but the top ones are shrivelled and blackened. Ah well, it's the taking part that counts, and the lovely tea that people tell me we get at the potato day. If I'd realised it was going to get that cold overnight I'd have put the pot back in the greenhouse. The emerging dahlia leaves in the dahlia bed have been hit as well, and a couple of borderline hardy herbaceous salvias in the back garden. I am hoping that they are all sensible enough to keep some viable buds in reserve and will shoot again, rather than having sent up every potential stem they could make all in one go.
Next month's garden club topic is currently unknown, since the speaker who was booked to talk about pond life can't make it. I expect they will send an email round once they've found somebody. The chairman looked entirely poised and in command of the situation, as she always does, but it must be hard work. Before then there's the garden club plant sale, held every other year to raise funds for the club. The one held two years ago raised the best part of a thousand quid, which is necessary to pay for speakers and the annual supper, otherwise I suppose they'd have to increase the membership fee. I have offered to take some plants. It's generally the way with cuttings and seeds that they either fail completely or you end up with many more plants than you need. Maybe I'll find a taker for one of the collection of sheep eating Puya which are currently taking up rather a lot of space in the greenhouse. I should hate to throw them on the compost heap, but I don't honestly need fifteen of them.
Monday, 1 May 2017
may day
May Day passed us by rather. We did not stand under Magdelen tower to watch the sun come up, or fling ourselves off the bridge into the river, or parade somebody encased in green branches through the streets of the town in a fertility rite possibly invented by Edwardian folklorists, or march with banners in support of Jeremy Corbyn. Instead I weeded and spread gravel and the Systems Administrator had a bonfire, while rain showers through the day sent us repeatedly ducking back into the house.
One of the enduring mysteries of the East coast is why windy, showery, generally rather shoddy days are so often followed by glorious evenings. We noticed it when we sailed, batting along all day in an uncomfortably stiff breeze with rain showers and spray finding its way down our necks, only to find the marina bathed in golden light and with scarcely a ripple of wind when we finally arrived somewhere. This evening it is still windy, but the light is beautiful, and I was able to spend the last couple of hours until half past six weeding in pure sunlight. When I nipped over to the Beth Chatto gardens after lunch in the drizzle to buy a birthday card they were doing a reasonable trade, but the atmosphere was scarcely festive.
I groomed all the old plantlets out of the clumps of tatty grass in the turning circle, which took some time but made them look much better. It has an extraordinary growth habit, this grass, sending up stalks on which grow little baby grass clumps, just like a spider plant, some of which in turn sent up another stalk and made another plantlet, with a flower stem capping the whole thing off. The stems with the plantlets droop with age, and some of the little clumps rooted where they touched the ground, which is partly how the grass spread to cover so much of the turning circle, although it seeds as well, which is how it leaped the breakwater that divides the turning circle to set up shop among the dwarf tulips, until it was unceremoniously evicted. If I see a grass specialist exhibiting at Chelsea I should ask if they can tell me what it is. There may not be one, for I detect that the great grass enthusiasm of the 1990s and early years of this century is gradually waning among domestic scale gardeners.
Mr Fidget thought that tidying the grasses was a great game, and occasionally jumped on my fingers as I combed and tugged, which was was moderately uncomfortable since my green gardening gloves are not claw proof.
I am almost at the end of the first bag of gravel, which is not bad going in four days. We debated how much the gravel I'd moved must have weighed. The SA asked how much the whole bag weighed, but I did not know because the supplier's website didn't say. It was a large builders' bag. We agreed that it contained a cubic metre of gravel, and the SA said that if it was water it would weigh a thousand kilos. I said in that case it must weigh more, since gravel sank in water, but the SA countered that while individual pieces of gravel sank, the bag had air in it between the stones. I said I thought that if the bag were waterproof and we put it in water it would still sink, and the SA said that if I were to weigh a litre of gravel I could calculate the weight of the whole bag. I began to think that we might be rather sad people, and have not yet scooped up a litre of gravel and put it on the kitchen scales,
One of the enduring mysteries of the East coast is why windy, showery, generally rather shoddy days are so often followed by glorious evenings. We noticed it when we sailed, batting along all day in an uncomfortably stiff breeze with rain showers and spray finding its way down our necks, only to find the marina bathed in golden light and with scarcely a ripple of wind when we finally arrived somewhere. This evening it is still windy, but the light is beautiful, and I was able to spend the last couple of hours until half past six weeding in pure sunlight. When I nipped over to the Beth Chatto gardens after lunch in the drizzle to buy a birthday card they were doing a reasonable trade, but the atmosphere was scarcely festive.
I groomed all the old plantlets out of the clumps of tatty grass in the turning circle, which took some time but made them look much better. It has an extraordinary growth habit, this grass, sending up stalks on which grow little baby grass clumps, just like a spider plant, some of which in turn sent up another stalk and made another plantlet, with a flower stem capping the whole thing off. The stems with the plantlets droop with age, and some of the little clumps rooted where they touched the ground, which is partly how the grass spread to cover so much of the turning circle, although it seeds as well, which is how it leaped the breakwater that divides the turning circle to set up shop among the dwarf tulips, until it was unceremoniously evicted. If I see a grass specialist exhibiting at Chelsea I should ask if they can tell me what it is. There may not be one, for I detect that the great grass enthusiasm of the 1990s and early years of this century is gradually waning among domestic scale gardeners.
Mr Fidget thought that tidying the grasses was a great game, and occasionally jumped on my fingers as I combed and tugged, which was was moderately uncomfortable since my green gardening gloves are not claw proof.
I am almost at the end of the first bag of gravel, which is not bad going in four days. We debated how much the gravel I'd moved must have weighed. The SA asked how much the whole bag weighed, but I did not know because the supplier's website didn't say. It was a large builders' bag. We agreed that it contained a cubic metre of gravel, and the SA said that if it was water it would weigh a thousand kilos. I said in that case it must weigh more, since gravel sank in water, but the SA countered that while individual pieces of gravel sank, the bag had air in it between the stones. I said I thought that if the bag were waterproof and we put it in water it would still sink, and the SA said that if I were to weigh a litre of gravel I could calculate the weight of the whole bag. I began to think that we might be rather sad people, and have not yet scooped up a litre of gravel and put it on the kitchen scales,
Sunday, 30 April 2017
hedge trimming
As a change from cutting the edges of the lawn, I trimmed the side of the Eleagnus hedge facing the drive. I gave it a very hard chop the autumn before last, because it had grown so far out over the drive that we were never going to be able to have another oil delivery. It looked dire after that, virtually bald on that side, and has gradually grown back fairly well. I now try to make sure I trim it regularly, to keep it off the drive and to encourage the regrowth to bush out. After the first flush of spring growth it seemed time to do it again, and to get rid of the odd, very long, straggly and unbranching new shoots flopping out of it. The postman and all other visitors have been willing to do as we do, and simply drive into them, but it's not a good look having lax two foot stems sticking at random out of your hedge. Besides, we need more oil inside the next month.
The problematic part was the stretch near the entrance where the gravel lorry shoved his wing mirror the other day, though he was only following in the path of the driver who delivered a sheet of foam a couple of months ago. I was rather exasperated about that. The Systems Administrator was using a kind of thin, stiff foam sheet to construct model buildings, and had discovered that it was much cheaper per square foot if you ordered a large sheet about four foot by six than buying it cut down into little A4 sized pieces. I was in the front garden one day and looked up to see a truly enormous lorry advancing up the drive, the driver oblivious to the fact that he was crashing his offside mirror through the hedge. I went and negotiated for him to stop and reverse up to the entrance, and he opened the back of the lorry, which contained nothing except the sheet of foam and a couple of pallets. I asked hopefully if I could have the pallets, but he said they were not spare, and was totally unapologetic about the state of the hedge. The fact that the SA will not use that supplier again is no consolation, since the enormous piece of foam will keep us in model buildings for about five years anyway.
Since then a couple of branches have died where they were bashed about, and others have flopped out over the drive, so that the only thing to do was cut them back until I'd got rid of the worst of the lump. They had probably sagged out over the drive a little to start with, which is why the lorry stuck at that point, but they were much worse afterwards. I am now left with a fresh bald patch, which with any luck will start to fill in with new growth over the summer. Luckily it is near the entrance, and doesn't form the backdrop to anything you'd spend time looking at.
I am nervous about the state of the hedge. It is a good age for Eleagnus x ebbingei, planted in 1994 though several plants had to be replaced as it went in just at the start of a prolonged dry spell and at a time when we had no mains water and were both still commuting to London, so they did not get the sort of loving care and regular watering you would like to give to a new pot grown hedge in a drought. I have had to trim odd dead twigs out of the length of the hedge this time, and am uneasily aware that entire plants could easily die, as Eleagnus x ebbingei is given to doing in its third decade. The thought of replacing the hedge appals me, the sheer quantity of top growth we would have to clear away and burn and then the labour of digging out the roots, and the idea of living without a windbreak along the side of the drive for several years while a new hedge grew is even worse.Our boundary hedge and the neighbour's trees offer more shelter than they did twenty years ago, but still I do not want the olive tree, the myrtles, the Watsonia and Gladiolus tristis and the little Persian silk tree exposed to the full blast of the south westerlies. Gardening on pure sand is difficult enough. One of the things that makes it worthwhile is using the sharp drainage to grow marginally hardy plants.
If I knew then what I know now I'd have planted hornbeam, or even yew. Oh well, that's gardening for you. Learning by doing.
The problematic part was the stretch near the entrance where the gravel lorry shoved his wing mirror the other day, though he was only following in the path of the driver who delivered a sheet of foam a couple of months ago. I was rather exasperated about that. The Systems Administrator was using a kind of thin, stiff foam sheet to construct model buildings, and had discovered that it was much cheaper per square foot if you ordered a large sheet about four foot by six than buying it cut down into little A4 sized pieces. I was in the front garden one day and looked up to see a truly enormous lorry advancing up the drive, the driver oblivious to the fact that he was crashing his offside mirror through the hedge. I went and negotiated for him to stop and reverse up to the entrance, and he opened the back of the lorry, which contained nothing except the sheet of foam and a couple of pallets. I asked hopefully if I could have the pallets, but he said they were not spare, and was totally unapologetic about the state of the hedge. The fact that the SA will not use that supplier again is no consolation, since the enormous piece of foam will keep us in model buildings for about five years anyway.
Since then a couple of branches have died where they were bashed about, and others have flopped out over the drive, so that the only thing to do was cut them back until I'd got rid of the worst of the lump. They had probably sagged out over the drive a little to start with, which is why the lorry stuck at that point, but they were much worse afterwards. I am now left with a fresh bald patch, which with any luck will start to fill in with new growth over the summer. Luckily it is near the entrance, and doesn't form the backdrop to anything you'd spend time looking at.
I am nervous about the state of the hedge. It is a good age for Eleagnus x ebbingei, planted in 1994 though several plants had to be replaced as it went in just at the start of a prolonged dry spell and at a time when we had no mains water and were both still commuting to London, so they did not get the sort of loving care and regular watering you would like to give to a new pot grown hedge in a drought. I have had to trim odd dead twigs out of the length of the hedge this time, and am uneasily aware that entire plants could easily die, as Eleagnus x ebbingei is given to doing in its third decade. The thought of replacing the hedge appals me, the sheer quantity of top growth we would have to clear away and burn and then the labour of digging out the roots, and the idea of living without a windbreak along the side of the drive for several years while a new hedge grew is even worse.Our boundary hedge and the neighbour's trees offer more shelter than they did twenty years ago, but still I do not want the olive tree, the myrtles, the Watsonia and Gladiolus tristis and the little Persian silk tree exposed to the full blast of the south westerlies. Gardening on pure sand is difficult enough. One of the things that makes it worthwhile is using the sharp drainage to grow marginally hardy plants.
If I knew then what I know now I'd have planted hornbeam, or even yew. Oh well, that's gardening for you. Learning by doing.
Saturday, 29 April 2017
cutting the edges
As a change from spreading gravel I have been cutting the edges of the grass in the back garden. I'd rather not do either two days on the trot, to vary the load on my middle aged body and so (I hope) lessen the chance of sprains, tears, and general seizing up. I cut the edges with hand shears, bent on one knee as if about to make a proposal of marriage to the roses, since keeping one foot flat on the ground when kneeling reduces the strain on the lower back. I have in the past experimented with long handled lawn shears, two pairs, one with vertical and one with horizontal blades, and a very long time ago I possessed a lightweight battery powered strimmer, but I've ended up back where I started, with hand shears. The edges are too varied, sometimes disappearing under overhanging shrubs, sometimes infested with clover that has started to run into the adjacent bed and needs prising up, or with tufts of coarse grass, or little points where the grass has begun to root and run into the bed, or places where the herbaceous occupants of the border have run right up to the front and need parting from the grass with both hands before you can cut the latter. The long handled shears couldn't cope and it was a fiddle swapping between them, and I hate strimmers, too noisy, and too hazardous to wildlife. Every other month there is a horrific account in the parish magazine of some animal that has sustained awful injuries being accidentally caught by a garden strimmer.
The cultural expectation in western gardens is that edges will be kept trimmed. On a Writtle college visit to Wakehurst Place in West Sussex the gardener showing us around told us, if you only have time to do one thing, mow the lawn, and if you don't have time to do that, do the edges. Flicking on the radio the other day I heard a voice opining that there was no point in cutting the grass if you didn't cut the edges. It is What One Does, a social marker that you are doing things properly, adhering to norms, taking it seriously. But I am sure that one of the tutors on the garden history modules mentioned that in Regency gardens the edges were allowed to stay whiskery.
The Arts and Crafts movement and Lutyens and Jekyll solved the problem with the use of mowing strips, broad lines of paving round the edges of the lawn, probably Cotswold stone to match the house and the rest of the garden architecture. Then plants flopping out of the borders, that bane of the tidy edge fetishist's life, can sprawl on the stone without damaging the hallowed lawn, and the mower can run over the other edge of the strip without damage. Given the tendency of turf to creep across slabs you'd need to go along cutting it back with a half moon edger every so often, but it would be much less work than having edges to maintain. And the edging strips would give you access to look at the borders when the grass was frozen or very wet and you'd rather not walk on it. I once suggested to the National Trust that they could do with some wide ones along the dahlia borders at Anglesey Abbey, to avoid having to shut them off to visitors every time we have a wet autumn, but they rejected the idea huffily saying that it was not in Lord Fairhaven's original design (it wasn't, but nor was having tens of thousands of visitors annually).
It is true that edging strips do alter the look of a garden considerably, and may not be what you had in mind. And they would be very expensive, with not just the cost of the paving but the installation with proper layers of hard core and so on, if you wanted them to remain firm and level and with good weed resistant joins between the slabs. I have covetously eyed up metal edging strips as used in Oxford quadrangles and the little modernist gardens outside City of London offices where money is no object because the hard landscaping is small change compared to the cost of the rest of the development. I imagine what smooth curves and reliable straight edges I could make with the metal strips, that would not creep or sag like my existing combination of wooden edges and no edging strip at all. I imagine the Systems Administrator being able to take the lawnmower right up to the neat, beautiful, tidy edge, so that there was virtually no trimming afterwards to be done with the shears. But the metal edging strips would cost an obscene amount of money which this garden could not justify even if I could afford it.
There are people who will not tolerate any plant spilling out of their borders on to The Lawn. It might kill or injure some of the grass, or at least mean they cannot mow in neat lines. I am in the opposing camp, and like the relaxed air that it gives a garden when the odd plant sprawls as it wants to. I like the edges to have clean lines under the vegetation, be they curves or straight lines, but I don't mind the line being crossed here and there. The Systems Administrator, who does most of the mowing, obligingly cuts around any wandering plants, only complaining slightly if they are prickly or at the wrong height to duck under. Worse still are the folk who make great terrifying gullies between lawn and border. There was a garden down in south Essex, lovely in many other respects with some very tasteful plant combinations and nice use of colour, whose sterile, gaping voids between planting and lawn were terribly jarring on the eye. Actually, the whole thing was a bit too tidy for my taste. You could not imagine that you were going to bump into the great god Pan around the next corner in that garden.
Edges do take ages, which is one reason why our back garden has a few large borders and not loads of twiddly little ones, and why edges, like so many other aspects of gardening, can be used as statements of wealth and prestige. The next time you visit a garden with lines of pleached or trimmed hornbeam or holm oak, have a look at how they are set in the ground. The easy version is to plant them in the path, surrounded by gravel or hoggin, with the lawn or border running straight alongside. But there is a more elaborate variant in which the adjacent lawn has a keyhole or crenellated edge, so that each trunk sits in a square of hoggin with a rectangle of turf between it and the next trunk. Imagine how fiddly that is to cut and the extra work created. It looks great as long as it's kept neatly trimmed but be warned, if you don't have the staff and it gets whiskery it will look awfully tatty.
The cultural expectation in western gardens is that edges will be kept trimmed. On a Writtle college visit to Wakehurst Place in West Sussex the gardener showing us around told us, if you only have time to do one thing, mow the lawn, and if you don't have time to do that, do the edges. Flicking on the radio the other day I heard a voice opining that there was no point in cutting the grass if you didn't cut the edges. It is What One Does, a social marker that you are doing things properly, adhering to norms, taking it seriously. But I am sure that one of the tutors on the garden history modules mentioned that in Regency gardens the edges were allowed to stay whiskery.
The Arts and Crafts movement and Lutyens and Jekyll solved the problem with the use of mowing strips, broad lines of paving round the edges of the lawn, probably Cotswold stone to match the house and the rest of the garden architecture. Then plants flopping out of the borders, that bane of the tidy edge fetishist's life, can sprawl on the stone without damaging the hallowed lawn, and the mower can run over the other edge of the strip without damage. Given the tendency of turf to creep across slabs you'd need to go along cutting it back with a half moon edger every so often, but it would be much less work than having edges to maintain. And the edging strips would give you access to look at the borders when the grass was frozen or very wet and you'd rather not walk on it. I once suggested to the National Trust that they could do with some wide ones along the dahlia borders at Anglesey Abbey, to avoid having to shut them off to visitors every time we have a wet autumn, but they rejected the idea huffily saying that it was not in Lord Fairhaven's original design (it wasn't, but nor was having tens of thousands of visitors annually).
It is true that edging strips do alter the look of a garden considerably, and may not be what you had in mind. And they would be very expensive, with not just the cost of the paving but the installation with proper layers of hard core and so on, if you wanted them to remain firm and level and with good weed resistant joins between the slabs. I have covetously eyed up metal edging strips as used in Oxford quadrangles and the little modernist gardens outside City of London offices where money is no object because the hard landscaping is small change compared to the cost of the rest of the development. I imagine what smooth curves and reliable straight edges I could make with the metal strips, that would not creep or sag like my existing combination of wooden edges and no edging strip at all. I imagine the Systems Administrator being able to take the lawnmower right up to the neat, beautiful, tidy edge, so that there was virtually no trimming afterwards to be done with the shears. But the metal edging strips would cost an obscene amount of money which this garden could not justify even if I could afford it.
There are people who will not tolerate any plant spilling out of their borders on to The Lawn. It might kill or injure some of the grass, or at least mean they cannot mow in neat lines. I am in the opposing camp, and like the relaxed air that it gives a garden when the odd plant sprawls as it wants to. I like the edges to have clean lines under the vegetation, be they curves or straight lines, but I don't mind the line being crossed here and there. The Systems Administrator, who does most of the mowing, obligingly cuts around any wandering plants, only complaining slightly if they are prickly or at the wrong height to duck under. Worse still are the folk who make great terrifying gullies between lawn and border. There was a garden down in south Essex, lovely in many other respects with some very tasteful plant combinations and nice use of colour, whose sterile, gaping voids between planting and lawn were terribly jarring on the eye. Actually, the whole thing was a bit too tidy for my taste. You could not imagine that you were going to bump into the great god Pan around the next corner in that garden.
Edges do take ages, which is one reason why our back garden has a few large borders and not loads of twiddly little ones, and why edges, like so many other aspects of gardening, can be used as statements of wealth and prestige. The next time you visit a garden with lines of pleached or trimmed hornbeam or holm oak, have a look at how they are set in the ground. The easy version is to plant them in the path, surrounded by gravel or hoggin, with the lawn or border running straight alongside. But there is a more elaborate variant in which the adjacent lawn has a keyhole or crenellated edge, so that each trunk sits in a square of hoggin with a rectangle of turf between it and the next trunk. Imagine how fiddly that is to cut and the extra work created. It looks great as long as it's kept neatly trimmed but be warned, if you don't have the staff and it gets whiskery it will look awfully tatty.
Friday, 28 April 2017
the gravel arrives
It's just as well I was up and about early this morning, because just after eight as I was checking the watering in the greenhouse I heard the sound of the lorry arriving with my two large bags of gravel. I rushed towards the entrance, palms outwards to signal to the driver to stop as he advanced inexorably, dragging his nearside mirror through the unfortunate Eleagnus hedge, and panic stricken cats scattered in all directions. Eventually the lorry stopped and I persuaded the driver to come down from his cab so that we could talk to each other over the noise of the engine, and I was able to explain that I'd like him to offload the two bags next to the drive just inside the entrance and that he needn't come into the garden at all. I don't know what it is about men and lorries. Put a man in a lorry and send him to deliver something to a private house and he seems to have an irresistible urge to drive right up to the front door, instead of stopping when the going gets narrow and advancing on foot to see what the plan is like a sensible person.
Part of the gravel is destined for the middle of the turning circle, where I have been digging out some of the clumps of ornamental grass. It had seeded itself madly until there was far more of it than I wanted, and was no longer ornamental because a lot of the clumps had become thoroughly congested before dying in patches and collapsing. I am not at all sure what it is, since one of the difficulties of growing self seeding plants is that they aren't labelled. It might be Eragrostis curvula, which I did plant in that part of the garden in May 1998, but I'm not going to go through all 3.409 lines of my planting spreadsheet looking for the names of any other grasses planted in the turning circle. I am not at all good on the names of grasses.
This one has an odd growth habit, making little tufts of growth on long stems as well as flowering, and if I were to note down an exact description (maybe even take a photo) and ask an expert I could probably work out what it was. The young plants are very pretty when the wind ripples through them, and since it seeds so freely I am being ruthlessly taking out a lot of the old ones. I expect to get replacements, though if I do I shall edit them severely because I'd like to use the newly liberated space for something other than grass. And if no more come up then that's fine, given I have other plans.
I thought I would scatter seeds of prickly poppy, Argemone grandiflora, and a lovely burnt orange double poppy, Papaver ruprifragum. I tried starting them both in pots last year and they hated it. The true poppy didn't survive pricking out, and the Argemone made sad little plants that barely did anything when planted out, when they should grow over two feet high and carry white, poppy like flowers over glaucous, prickly, poppy-like leaves. I ordered fresh packets of seed from Derry Watkins' Special Plants nursery and shall try simply chucking them about where I want them to grow.
I spread quite a lot of the first bag of gravel before it was time to come in. I feel rather guilty about the young man who leaped up to give me his seat the last time I used the London underground, especially as his ankle was in a cast. I don't suppose he imagined that I spend my spare time spreading barrow loads of gravel with a large shovel, as a change from digging up roots with a pick axe. It is important not to overdo these things, though. I was talking to somebody who turned out to have injured her shoulder so badly it needed surgery spreading a load of gravel on her drive after none of the rest of her family would help her. I am far more circumspect. Ten shovel loads make a barrowful. Spread them, then switch to weeding and picking up dead leaves until I have a bucket's worth before the next barrow of gravel.
Mr Cool thought that playing with gravel was a great game and that his part in in was to lie in the wheelbarrow. And I can't get rid of all the old clumps of grass because they are Mr Fidget's den. I could see a white nose and two bright green eyes peering out at me as I weeded.
Part of the gravel is destined for the middle of the turning circle, where I have been digging out some of the clumps of ornamental grass. It had seeded itself madly until there was far more of it than I wanted, and was no longer ornamental because a lot of the clumps had become thoroughly congested before dying in patches and collapsing. I am not at all sure what it is, since one of the difficulties of growing self seeding plants is that they aren't labelled. It might be Eragrostis curvula, which I did plant in that part of the garden in May 1998, but I'm not going to go through all 3.409 lines of my planting spreadsheet looking for the names of any other grasses planted in the turning circle. I am not at all good on the names of grasses.
This one has an odd growth habit, making little tufts of growth on long stems as well as flowering, and if I were to note down an exact description (maybe even take a photo) and ask an expert I could probably work out what it was. The young plants are very pretty when the wind ripples through them, and since it seeds so freely I am being ruthlessly taking out a lot of the old ones. I expect to get replacements, though if I do I shall edit them severely because I'd like to use the newly liberated space for something other than grass. And if no more come up then that's fine, given I have other plans.
I thought I would scatter seeds of prickly poppy, Argemone grandiflora, and a lovely burnt orange double poppy, Papaver ruprifragum. I tried starting them both in pots last year and they hated it. The true poppy didn't survive pricking out, and the Argemone made sad little plants that barely did anything when planted out, when they should grow over two feet high and carry white, poppy like flowers over glaucous, prickly, poppy-like leaves. I ordered fresh packets of seed from Derry Watkins' Special Plants nursery and shall try simply chucking them about where I want them to grow.
I spread quite a lot of the first bag of gravel before it was time to come in. I feel rather guilty about the young man who leaped up to give me his seat the last time I used the London underground, especially as his ankle was in a cast. I don't suppose he imagined that I spend my spare time spreading barrow loads of gravel with a large shovel, as a change from digging up roots with a pick axe. It is important not to overdo these things, though. I was talking to somebody who turned out to have injured her shoulder so badly it needed surgery spreading a load of gravel on her drive after none of the rest of her family would help her. I am far more circumspect. Ten shovel loads make a barrowful. Spread them, then switch to weeding and picking up dead leaves until I have a bucket's worth before the next barrow of gravel.
Mr Cool thought that playing with gravel was a great game and that his part in in was to lie in the wheelbarrow. And I can't get rid of all the old clumps of grass because they are Mr Fidget's den. I could see a white nose and two bright green eyes peering out at me as I weeded.
Thursday, 27 April 2017
home cooking
It's been a cold, disgusting day, with just enough rain to make things wet but, as the Systems Administrator said, not enough to water the ground. It didn't actually start raining until the afternoon, but I never managed to do any gardening in the morning because I was cooking, having promised in a moment of enthusiasm to make a flan for lunch. After all, what's the point of having your own eggs if you don't cook with them?
My breakthrough flan moment came not long ago, when following Jane Grigson's instructions for Betty Bolgar's leek and mushroom tart to the letter. It is a very good recipe, which I've used over the years for entertaining, filled with leeks, onions and mushrooms lightly cooked and mixed with a mixture of single cream, milk, and egg, and because Jane Grigson said to mix the cooked vegetables with the beaten egg and milk and stir into the pastry case that's what I did. It dawned on me that this made an immensely better tart than my normal quick lunchtime flan method of putting the fried onion, grated cheese and whatever else I was using into the pastry case and pouring the custard part of the filling over them, and that is what I have done ever since.
Today's flan contained onion, gently fried until soft and a little caramelised, grated cheshire cheese because we have managed to end up with three packets of it, all of which need eating, and slices of tomato on top because just cheese and onion might have been a bit basic. We didn't have any cream, but semi skimmed milk was fine, with all the cheese. I blind baked the case first, using my fairly recently acquired baking beans, which are a vast improvement on my former method of pricking holes in the base, since dribbles of egg filling used to leak through the fork holes. The tart with filling was cooked for just under the hour in the top part of the lower oven of a four door Aga. I have never found any reliable one-to-one translation between Aga cooking positions and oven temperatures in degrees Celsius, and it so so long since I've baked on mains gas that I have to look up gas mark settings before I can follow recipes using them, so you will have to work it out for yourself based on your own oven. But I should say longer and cooler is better than hotter and faster when it comes to egg based tart fillings. The bottom of the Aga is too cool. You still have liquid custard swilling around in your pastry case after the hour.
Leeks or mushrooms, or leeks and mushrooms, are good. Ham is good, or a couple of rashers of bacon snipped up and fried. Almost any variation on the onion theme works, red onions or spring onions. The SA and I debated over lunch how we would do one with goat's cheese, and decided that red pepper would work, and onion, and that it would need to be a crumbly cheese. I like making flans. Granted, shortcrust pastry and a wodge of cheese and fried onion may not constitute healthy eating, but it is very cheering on a day like today.
In the same spirit I made a honey loaf, using my own honey, but the SA did not have room for any at teatime because he was still full of flan.
My breakthrough flan moment came not long ago, when following Jane Grigson's instructions for Betty Bolgar's leek and mushroom tart to the letter. It is a very good recipe, which I've used over the years for entertaining, filled with leeks, onions and mushrooms lightly cooked and mixed with a mixture of single cream, milk, and egg, and because Jane Grigson said to mix the cooked vegetables with the beaten egg and milk and stir into the pastry case that's what I did. It dawned on me that this made an immensely better tart than my normal quick lunchtime flan method of putting the fried onion, grated cheese and whatever else I was using into the pastry case and pouring the custard part of the filling over them, and that is what I have done ever since.
Today's flan contained onion, gently fried until soft and a little caramelised, grated cheshire cheese because we have managed to end up with three packets of it, all of which need eating, and slices of tomato on top because just cheese and onion might have been a bit basic. We didn't have any cream, but semi skimmed milk was fine, with all the cheese. I blind baked the case first, using my fairly recently acquired baking beans, which are a vast improvement on my former method of pricking holes in the base, since dribbles of egg filling used to leak through the fork holes. The tart with filling was cooked for just under the hour in the top part of the lower oven of a four door Aga. I have never found any reliable one-to-one translation between Aga cooking positions and oven temperatures in degrees Celsius, and it so so long since I've baked on mains gas that I have to look up gas mark settings before I can follow recipes using them, so you will have to work it out for yourself based on your own oven. But I should say longer and cooler is better than hotter and faster when it comes to egg based tart fillings. The bottom of the Aga is too cool. You still have liquid custard swilling around in your pastry case after the hour.
Leeks or mushrooms, or leeks and mushrooms, are good. Ham is good, or a couple of rashers of bacon snipped up and fried. Almost any variation on the onion theme works, red onions or spring onions. The SA and I debated over lunch how we would do one with goat's cheese, and decided that red pepper would work, and onion, and that it would need to be a crumbly cheese. I like making flans. Granted, shortcrust pastry and a wodge of cheese and fried onion may not constitute healthy eating, but it is very cheering on a day like today.
In the same spirit I made a honey loaf, using my own honey, but the SA did not have room for any at teatime because he was still full of flan.
Wednesday, 26 April 2017
visit to an exhibition
I went today to Tate Modern's David Hockney exhibition. It is one of the year's Must Sees, because the great British public loves David Hockney, and the exhibition and the cafe and the members' room were all more crowded than usual. It was worth it, though, because it's a good exhibition, and although the rooms were very full there was a good community spirit with people mostly trying not to stand in each other's way, and being gracious about sharing their cafe tables. And luckily many of the works were large so a lot of people could look at them at once, not like having half a dozen faces clustered around a small Vermeer while everybody else had time to study the backs of their heads.
The show canters through his career from the early 1960s to the past eighteen months, and so some of the earlier works were comfortingly familiar from previous retrospectives, or because they form part of the Tate's permanent collection. It was fun, though to see Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy hung along other large portraits made at around the same time.(though the cat in the painting was not actually Percy, but Blanche. According to Wikipedia her presence on Ossie Clark's lap symbolises infidelity and envy, while the white lilies on the table by Celia symbolise purity and refer back to pictures of the Annunciation. She was pregnant at the time). I liked the cheerfully unsubtle symbolism of the corn cob and banana in his otherwise decorous double portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Dan Bachardy. I liked too the energy in art collector (I deduce they were collectors) Marcia Weisman's face, but why is her husband's face painted with less care and detail than the terrazzo floor tiles? The big portraits are great fun, and Hockney was an absolute wizard at shadows and textures.
A Bigger Splash is in the exhibition, of course. Who does not love A Bigger Splash, and all the swimming pool paintings?
The next thing I really, really liked were the early multi-viewpoint Polaroid collages. The ones dated from the early 1980s are laid out in a strict grid pattern, while the later ones use overlapping and angled photos, and there is something charming about the grid. I love the way that the Polaroids capture the way that when we see things we pay more attention to the aspects of the scene that interest us, so in a picture of Christopher Isherwood (again) and (I presume) Dan Bachardy, Hockney's camera has lingered on Dan Bachardy's head and shows it from about five different angles, while his feet are tiny, tucked away at the bottom of the collage. They are playful pictures. Billy Wilder appears to be photographing Hockney photographing him.
There are some of the huge landscape paintings of Yorkshire, as exhibited at the Royal Academy a few years back, and then an installation I hadn't seen before. The same rural lane is shown in a four minute video over banks of screens on all four walls of the room, recorded in spring, summer, autumn and winter. As in the photo collages made three decades previously, the piece of the scene on each screen does not exactly match up with its neighbours. The camera moves up the lane very slowly, from the same spot and at the same pace on all four walls, so you pass the black gate on the right at exactly the same moment in every season, in winter standing out against the snow and in spring barely noticeable among the lush growth. In spring a car drives up the lane towards the camera and pulls over and you realise, it is pulling over for us. In summer a white van is parked among the trees on the left, but you don't know why or who it belongs to or how long it has been there. The idea that the same place looks different through the seasons is scarcely revolutionary, but Hockney presents it with great panache.
The last room is devoted to his drawings made on iPhone and iPad, shown on screens rather than printed out as I've seen them before. The image on each screen periodically changes, as if it were an advertising hoarding, and some are animated so you see the drawing appear, stroke by stroke. One even has rubbing out, presumably as a joke and a teaching aid. They are fun, an assured draughtsman and lively colourist at play. I enjoyed them, while being reminded of the early and brilliant Pink Panther cartoon of the panther painting everything pink while the furious little workman paints everything blue.
It is fun. It is worth seeing, and it is very impressive the way he has developed a whole new body of work in electronic media in his seventies. His portraits do not move me as Rembrandt does, and his landscapes do not thrill me like late Turner or Van Gogh, but David Hockney deserves his National Treasure status. On until 29 May.
The show canters through his career from the early 1960s to the past eighteen months, and so some of the earlier works were comfortingly familiar from previous retrospectives, or because they form part of the Tate's permanent collection. It was fun, though to see Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy hung along other large portraits made at around the same time.(though the cat in the painting was not actually Percy, but Blanche. According to Wikipedia her presence on Ossie Clark's lap symbolises infidelity and envy, while the white lilies on the table by Celia symbolise purity and refer back to pictures of the Annunciation. She was pregnant at the time). I liked the cheerfully unsubtle symbolism of the corn cob and banana in his otherwise decorous double portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Dan Bachardy. I liked too the energy in art collector (I deduce they were collectors) Marcia Weisman's face, but why is her husband's face painted with less care and detail than the terrazzo floor tiles? The big portraits are great fun, and Hockney was an absolute wizard at shadows and textures.
A Bigger Splash is in the exhibition, of course. Who does not love A Bigger Splash, and all the swimming pool paintings?
The next thing I really, really liked were the early multi-viewpoint Polaroid collages. The ones dated from the early 1980s are laid out in a strict grid pattern, while the later ones use overlapping and angled photos, and there is something charming about the grid. I love the way that the Polaroids capture the way that when we see things we pay more attention to the aspects of the scene that interest us, so in a picture of Christopher Isherwood (again) and (I presume) Dan Bachardy, Hockney's camera has lingered on Dan Bachardy's head and shows it from about five different angles, while his feet are tiny, tucked away at the bottom of the collage. They are playful pictures. Billy Wilder appears to be photographing Hockney photographing him.
There are some of the huge landscape paintings of Yorkshire, as exhibited at the Royal Academy a few years back, and then an installation I hadn't seen before. The same rural lane is shown in a four minute video over banks of screens on all four walls of the room, recorded in spring, summer, autumn and winter. As in the photo collages made three decades previously, the piece of the scene on each screen does not exactly match up with its neighbours. The camera moves up the lane very slowly, from the same spot and at the same pace on all four walls, so you pass the black gate on the right at exactly the same moment in every season, in winter standing out against the snow and in spring barely noticeable among the lush growth. In spring a car drives up the lane towards the camera and pulls over and you realise, it is pulling over for us. In summer a white van is parked among the trees on the left, but you don't know why or who it belongs to or how long it has been there. The idea that the same place looks different through the seasons is scarcely revolutionary, but Hockney presents it with great panache.
The last room is devoted to his drawings made on iPhone and iPad, shown on screens rather than printed out as I've seen them before. The image on each screen periodically changes, as if it were an advertising hoarding, and some are animated so you see the drawing appear, stroke by stroke. One even has rubbing out, presumably as a joke and a teaching aid. They are fun, an assured draughtsman and lively colourist at play. I enjoyed them, while being reminded of the early and brilliant Pink Panther cartoon of the panther painting everything pink while the furious little workman paints everything blue.
It is fun. It is worth seeing, and it is very impressive the way he has developed a whole new body of work in electronic media in his seventies. His portraits do not move me as Rembrandt does, and his landscapes do not thrill me like late Turner or Van Gogh, but David Hockney deserves his National Treasure status. On until 29 May.
Tuesday, 25 April 2017
domestic touches
It's hard sometimes visualising how things are going to turn out. I ordered a set of new food dishes for the cats, because I was fed up with the way they kept pushing their food off an existing set of melamine plates and on to the hall floor. I thought I might be able to get a set of plastic dishes sold for picnic and barbecue use, but when I looked in Tesco and The Range all the bowls were too deep, and I thought the cats would get cricks in their necks trying to eat out of them regularly. I ended up on Amazon buying some stainless steel bowls with non-slip bases meant for cats and shallow faced dogs, not because I was interested in the non-slip base but because they were only 3.5 cm high. And they sounded hygienic and easy to wash. Another vendor was offering biodegradable dishes made out of bamboo that would decompose after three to five years in landfill, but I had visions of them starting to biodegrade after being left to soak in the kitchen sink. The cats are perfectly happy with their new dishes, but when they eat biscuits out of them there is a strange tinkling sound. And Mr Cool dealt with the problem of not being allowed to push his food off his plate by seizing up a large spoonful of tinned food in his jaws and dropping it on the floor.
At much the same time I ordered two new doormats, because when I beat the old mats together to shake the dirt out, little pieces of doormat kept breaking off the edges as the PVC backing disintegrated, and I was bored of picking small tufts of plastic backed coir out of the gravel and tired of living with doormats that had the outline of Kansas, straight edges for the most part but with irregular pieces nibbled out of the corners. I chose a pair of magnificent one hundred per cent coir mats from John Lewis, thinking that with no PVC back to give way they would withstand any amount of beating, and only realised when I unpacked them that they were so thick that one wouldn't fit under the door it was intended to sit by. Luckily the actual front door allowed just enough clearance, and I swapped the other over with an existing mat, and all ended happily as the cats adored both of the new mats instantly, and practically queue up to take turns sleeping on them. I don't suppose they'd have taken half as much notice if I'd got them a set of luxury cat beds from OKA. As it was I had to move the one under the letterbox to one side so that the postman would not accidentally drop the post on Mr Fluffy.
So that is my piece of practical advice for today. If you are buying a doormat and the door is supposed to open over it, measure the gap under the door and check the thickness of the mat.
For my next act I was intending to make some new bedroom curtains, but I had probably better spend a bit longer thinking that project through in detail than I did on choosing the doormats.
At much the same time I ordered two new doormats, because when I beat the old mats together to shake the dirt out, little pieces of doormat kept breaking off the edges as the PVC backing disintegrated, and I was bored of picking small tufts of plastic backed coir out of the gravel and tired of living with doormats that had the outline of Kansas, straight edges for the most part but with irregular pieces nibbled out of the corners. I chose a pair of magnificent one hundred per cent coir mats from John Lewis, thinking that with no PVC back to give way they would withstand any amount of beating, and only realised when I unpacked them that they were so thick that one wouldn't fit under the door it was intended to sit by. Luckily the actual front door allowed just enough clearance, and I swapped the other over with an existing mat, and all ended happily as the cats adored both of the new mats instantly, and practically queue up to take turns sleeping on them. I don't suppose they'd have taken half as much notice if I'd got them a set of luxury cat beds from OKA. As it was I had to move the one under the letterbox to one side so that the postman would not accidentally drop the post on Mr Fluffy.
So that is my piece of practical advice for today. If you are buying a doormat and the door is supposed to open over it, measure the gap under the door and check the thickness of the mat.
For my next act I was intending to make some new bedroom curtains, but I had probably better spend a bit longer thinking that project through in detail than I did on choosing the doormats.
Monday, 24 April 2017
repairs, maintenance, and a small triumph
The promised afternoon of heavy rain did not materialise. Instead we got a heavy shower at teatime just as I was settled on the sofa with Our Ginger on my lap and Mr Cool nestled alongside, having left my tools and garden radio out in the garden. At least it meant that the Systems Administrator had time to put new felt on the pot shed roof where a large piece blew off in the last gale. It was the lower strip along the side facing the herb bed, and the SA managed to slide the replacement length in under the bottom edge of the upper strip by dint of lifting the latter with the blade of a hoe while we both pushed the new piece into place, very gently so that it would not buckle or rip. The whole roof has been reinforced with eight lengths of batten, which I painted with wood preservative last week, and with any luck it will last for a while.
I am pretty fed up with roofing felt, as however carefully you try to fasten it down the gales always seem to find their way in underneath at some point and rip it, and then you have to lay out on new felt and battens and spend half a day messing around with ladders repairing it. The roof is only made out of rough planks, patched with offcuts of composite board following some previous mishap, and is full of gaps and not at all airtight, so perhaps part of the problem is pressure building up inside the shed when there's a full gale blowing. That is not as daft as it sounds. I was chatting to a gardening friend a couple of Plant Heritage meetings ago, and she told me about somewhere she used to work where they had learnt to open the doors at both ends of the glasshouses when it was very windy. Counterintuitive, you would think, not to seek to protect their plants from the blast of the wind, but if the doors were left shut the gale forced air in through the cracks until the pressure burst the panes outwards.
I weeded the dahlia bed, where the remaining Strulch was doing a pretty good job against soft annual weeds, but quite a few tree seedlings had popped up. Then I fed it with fish, blood and bone, and began to water it as we have had so little rain, to encourage the dahlias into growth and wash their food down into the soil. Tomorrow I might add some 6X just to get the dahlias off to a good start, since my dawning realisation last year that the foliage really is supposed to be the shade of dark green shown in Monet's painting of his garden, and that I was not feeding mine nearly enough. The tulips that live among the dahlias are more than half over, and a dose of feed might help them keep up their strength so that they flower again next year.
I disturbed the Strulch in order to sow seeds of Calendula and Nasturtium. In the past I've tried starting them off in modules and planting them out, but it was all too much of a fiddle. I don't have time, and they didn't do well. Since I had lots of seeds, thanks partly to the packets that keep arriving with garden magazines, I thought I'd try direct sowing them instead, but as the Strulch is designed to stop germination this may not work any better. It needs topping up, though, so maybe I'll get some plants come up from the direct sowings, and I'll wait until things have grown before topping up the Strulch.
There is one success in the front garden, Gladiolus tristis, which is in flower for the first time. It is a lovely thing, the individual pale yellow flowers recognisably gladiolus shaped, but smaller and daintier than the modern hybrids, and well spaced along the stalks. I counted the stems and there were ten of them. Ten! Checking my records I see I bought one bulb from Avon Bulbs in 2014, which cost me five pounds. That felt like a great deal of money for one small bulb, which I potted up and kept in the greenhouse where I remember it sent up about one spindly leaf. G. tristis comes from South Africa and is only borderline hardy in the UK, and just to make things more difficult for itself and the gardener is a winter growing species, dormant in summer. At home it is adapted to winter rainfall. In my damp greenhouse in Essex I was terrified of it rotting. In July 2015 I planted it out in the gravel of the turning circle, where at least it would have guaranteed perfect drainage. It grew through the winter of 2015-16 and sent up three or four flower spikes, which failed to develop to maturity. Maybe there was a cold night at exactly the wrong stage of development. Finally I have a proper patch of it, and my five pounds seems well spent. The Pacific Bulb Society warns it can spread by bulblets and seed, but frankly if it chooses to spread more than it already has I shall be delighted.
I am pretty fed up with roofing felt, as however carefully you try to fasten it down the gales always seem to find their way in underneath at some point and rip it, and then you have to lay out on new felt and battens and spend half a day messing around with ladders repairing it. The roof is only made out of rough planks, patched with offcuts of composite board following some previous mishap, and is full of gaps and not at all airtight, so perhaps part of the problem is pressure building up inside the shed when there's a full gale blowing. That is not as daft as it sounds. I was chatting to a gardening friend a couple of Plant Heritage meetings ago, and she told me about somewhere she used to work where they had learnt to open the doors at both ends of the glasshouses when it was very windy. Counterintuitive, you would think, not to seek to protect their plants from the blast of the wind, but if the doors were left shut the gale forced air in through the cracks until the pressure burst the panes outwards.
I weeded the dahlia bed, where the remaining Strulch was doing a pretty good job against soft annual weeds, but quite a few tree seedlings had popped up. Then I fed it with fish, blood and bone, and began to water it as we have had so little rain, to encourage the dahlias into growth and wash their food down into the soil. Tomorrow I might add some 6X just to get the dahlias off to a good start, since my dawning realisation last year that the foliage really is supposed to be the shade of dark green shown in Monet's painting of his garden, and that I was not feeding mine nearly enough. The tulips that live among the dahlias are more than half over, and a dose of feed might help them keep up their strength so that they flower again next year.
I disturbed the Strulch in order to sow seeds of Calendula and Nasturtium. In the past I've tried starting them off in modules and planting them out, but it was all too much of a fiddle. I don't have time, and they didn't do well. Since I had lots of seeds, thanks partly to the packets that keep arriving with garden magazines, I thought I'd try direct sowing them instead, but as the Strulch is designed to stop germination this may not work any better. It needs topping up, though, so maybe I'll get some plants come up from the direct sowings, and I'll wait until things have grown before topping up the Strulch.
There is one success in the front garden, Gladiolus tristis, which is in flower for the first time. It is a lovely thing, the individual pale yellow flowers recognisably gladiolus shaped, but smaller and daintier than the modern hybrids, and well spaced along the stalks. I counted the stems and there were ten of them. Ten! Checking my records I see I bought one bulb from Avon Bulbs in 2014, which cost me five pounds. That felt like a great deal of money for one small bulb, which I potted up and kept in the greenhouse where I remember it sent up about one spindly leaf. G. tristis comes from South Africa and is only borderline hardy in the UK, and just to make things more difficult for itself and the gardener is a winter growing species, dormant in summer. At home it is adapted to winter rainfall. In my damp greenhouse in Essex I was terrified of it rotting. In July 2015 I planted it out in the gravel of the turning circle, where at least it would have guaranteed perfect drainage. It grew through the winter of 2015-16 and sent up three or four flower spikes, which failed to develop to maturity. Maybe there was a cold night at exactly the wrong stage of development. Finally I have a proper patch of it, and my five pounds seems well spent. The Pacific Bulb Society warns it can spread by bulblets and seed, but frankly if it chooses to spread more than it already has I shall be delighted.
Sunday, 23 April 2017
the drought worsens
I returned today to digging nettles out of the meadow, in the great blank area where the Systems Administrator spent ages chopping down the brambles and I dug out most of their roots. I'd been thinking I'd better return to the project of reclaiming that piece of garden to keep the momentum going, and then yesterday evening the SA asked me slightly plaintively what I meant to do about the nettles which were shooting up by the day. The SA really did work very hard on the brambles, and it would be too discouraging to see all that effort go to nought, so as soon as I'd finished the morning's round watering the pots I set off with pick axe and border fork plus small hand tools and a film review programme podcast to keep me going.
When I got there I found I was going to have to water in the meadow as well, because the big patch of primroses that had been doing so well I was planning to divide them and have more had suddenly collapsed. I was talking about them at yesterday's Plant Heritage meeting with somebody who grows primula far more seriously than I do, and she confirmed my observation that rabbits don't bother with them, so they seemed good ground cover for the meadow, along with the hellebores. Except that now they were shrivelling before my eyes, leaves as limp and wrinkled as a lettuce that had spent a week in the fridge.
We have a hose permanently run up the side of the wood as far as the compost heaps, where it connects to a tap so that we can attach a further hose to take up into the meadow or water the vegetables, when we're growing any vegetables. A long length of hose was looped multiple times over a fence post for that purpose, but I hadn't used it for months, and it took some fiddling around in the undergrowth to uncoil it. Rather to my surprise the system then ran without major leaks or mystery blockages, and the spray gun I found sitting on top of an old water butt still worked, so I was able to leave it to sprinkle the primroses while I weeded. The existing hellebores were starting to flag, though not as spectacularly as the primroses, so I gave them a drink as well.
The wildlife pond is another worry. Being merely a hole that we dug and lined with a butyl sheet it depends on rainwater to fill it up, or in the absence of rain the hose. I'd rather leave it to its own devices, since rainwater is probably better for the wildlife than tap, and besides it's an awfully big hole and we are on a water meter. But by now some of the marginal plants that should be in the shallows are entirely exposed, and a planting basket is sticking up like the remains of a drowned village emerging above the waters of a reservoir during a drought year. And it is only April. It is going to have to be given a couple of inches of tap water and I set the hose to start topping it up, but I don't really want to fill it to the brim from the mains. It's no good, we need rain.
The rest of the day was spent digging out nettles, miscellaneous weeds and the odd bramble, and collecting up the stems from the great clearance that didn't make it to the bonfire in the last round. Foxgloves have sprung up in places, and I worked round the bigger patches since I can't do all of it at once so we might as well enjoy them flowering before I disturb their roots. They will probably die after they've bloomed anyway, since Digitalis purpurea is normally pretty convincingly biennial. Remember that when you are tempted to pay four pounds for one plant in a garden centre. I found a few wild arums and tried to avoid digging them up, likewise the seedlings of some kind of sedge which I'm hoping might be the relatively dainty Luzula nivea, which is producing its fluffy white flowers now. If they turn out to be something bigger and coarser out of the wood I'll remove them.
I had to stop at six because I was knackered. Forget joining a gym, just spend your Sunday digging up nettles and bramble roots with a pick axe to work those biceps. I hope I have done enough to reassure the SA that I'm on the case.
When I got there I found I was going to have to water in the meadow as well, because the big patch of primroses that had been doing so well I was planning to divide them and have more had suddenly collapsed. I was talking about them at yesterday's Plant Heritage meeting with somebody who grows primula far more seriously than I do, and she confirmed my observation that rabbits don't bother with them, so they seemed good ground cover for the meadow, along with the hellebores. Except that now they were shrivelling before my eyes, leaves as limp and wrinkled as a lettuce that had spent a week in the fridge.
We have a hose permanently run up the side of the wood as far as the compost heaps, where it connects to a tap so that we can attach a further hose to take up into the meadow or water the vegetables, when we're growing any vegetables. A long length of hose was looped multiple times over a fence post for that purpose, but I hadn't used it for months, and it took some fiddling around in the undergrowth to uncoil it. Rather to my surprise the system then ran without major leaks or mystery blockages, and the spray gun I found sitting on top of an old water butt still worked, so I was able to leave it to sprinkle the primroses while I weeded. The existing hellebores were starting to flag, though not as spectacularly as the primroses, so I gave them a drink as well.
The wildlife pond is another worry. Being merely a hole that we dug and lined with a butyl sheet it depends on rainwater to fill it up, or in the absence of rain the hose. I'd rather leave it to its own devices, since rainwater is probably better for the wildlife than tap, and besides it's an awfully big hole and we are on a water meter. But by now some of the marginal plants that should be in the shallows are entirely exposed, and a planting basket is sticking up like the remains of a drowned village emerging above the waters of a reservoir during a drought year. And it is only April. It is going to have to be given a couple of inches of tap water and I set the hose to start topping it up, but I don't really want to fill it to the brim from the mains. It's no good, we need rain.
The rest of the day was spent digging out nettles, miscellaneous weeds and the odd bramble, and collecting up the stems from the great clearance that didn't make it to the bonfire in the last round. Foxgloves have sprung up in places, and I worked round the bigger patches since I can't do all of it at once so we might as well enjoy them flowering before I disturb their roots. They will probably die after they've bloomed anyway, since Digitalis purpurea is normally pretty convincingly biennial. Remember that when you are tempted to pay four pounds for one plant in a garden centre. I found a few wild arums and tried to avoid digging them up, likewise the seedlings of some kind of sedge which I'm hoping might be the relatively dainty Luzula nivea, which is producing its fluffy white flowers now. If they turn out to be something bigger and coarser out of the wood I'll remove them.
I had to stop at six because I was knackered. Forget joining a gym, just spend your Sunday digging up nettles and bramble roots with a pick axe to work those biceps. I hope I have done enough to reassure the SA that I'm on the case.
Saturday, 22 April 2017
a plant talk
This afternoon I went to the last Suffolk Plant Heritage Lecture before the summer break. The speaker was Bob Brown, owner of the nursery Cotswold Garden Flowers, whose website I sometimes refer to when considering trying a new plant, because he posts critical appraisals not just of the things he currently lists for sale, but many other species and varieties he has experience of growing, or trying to grow. That is a useful habit I wish other growers would follow, especially if they have previously sold the plant and so have the information already to hand in the right format. Though I suppose it could be embarrassing if you changed your mind about a plant to list its deficiencies when you had sold to people it in the past.
Bob Brown was talking about new and garden worthy plants, and began with the caveat that many new plant releases had not been trialled for long enough to find out whether they were garden worthy, and that many weren't. Certainly I remember how disappointingly short lived the new, exciting, rusty pink Verbascum 'Helen Johnson' turned out to be, when I managed to lay my hands on some plants after a wait (such was the demand) a couple of decades ago when it was new on the market. I try to be more cautious now, and had already sidestepped the charming but not reliably perennial foxglove cross 'Illumination Pink' that was the big new thing a few seasons back, after trawling round several garden forums and coming to the conclusion that it couldn't be trusted to live, and that was Bob Brown's first target.
I'd hoped to be introduced to some new plants I didn't know and that would be good for our garden. Looking at my notes I've scribbled down the names and brief descriptions of a few things I might like to be better acquainted with. Eryngium 'Pen Blue' looked promising, because its flowers were so very blue, and Eryngium generally do well on our light soil. Epimedium 'Spine Tingler' was worth bearing in mind for some future scheme, having large, long, thick and substantial, shiny leaves with splendid spines around the edges, the sort of leaves that remind you that Epimedium is in the same family as Berberis. And I liked the sound of mophead Hydrangea 'Zebra' with its white flowers on black stems, and the trick of flowering over a long season because it can bloom on the current year's growth as well as last year's wood like a traditional mophead. And Ribes valdiviana was pretty, looking from the slide rather like the hybrid Ribes x gordonianum which is a cross between the traditional cottage garden R. sanguineum and the scented yellow buffalo currant R. odoratum. I am partial to flowering currants, though I would want to know more about Ribes valdiviana before ordering one.
But I also realised as the lecture went on how individual tastes in plants are, and how difficult it is to predict what will be reliable in a garden setting. Primula 'Wanda' was declared unkillable, along with a jibe that the colour scheme was unappealing. Now I am fond of 'Wanda', which has little purple flowers with a yellow eye and was the first cultivar name of any plant that I remember learning, but I have not found it at all indestructible in north Essex, and from some muttering across the aisle I gathered that other East Anglian gardeners had lost it as well. Likewise the old variety Primula 'Garryard Guinevere' was said to be reliable, although we would not have heard of it. I had heard of it and am pretty sure that Margery Fish mentions it, and I have tried to grow it, but it didn't last. Conclusions based on growing in Worcestershire on heavy clay soil and with cold winters aren't necessarily a good guide to what will prosper on the Essex coastal strip.
And some of Bob Brown's plant choices were just horrid. Horrid to my eyes, that is. I am sure he was sincere in liking them and I expect that some of the other people in the room like them as well, but written next to my note "Heuchera 'Pink Pearl' lots of pink fl April-Oct" I have put my own comment in square brackets [dumpy plant]. Honestly, they were nasty lumpy little things. I get the same feeling looking at most Astilbe. And I thought the variegated Trachelospermum with orange and yellow leaves truly nasty even before Bob Brown told us that ladies often recoiled from it (note to all garden lecturers: do not try to get laughs by digs at ladies. Look around the room. About three quarters of your audience are ladies. Do you think we are amused by banter about our timid tastes or inability to water things properly?).
I did not buy any plants from Bob Brown or the Plant Heritage stall, being fixed firmly on weeding and mulching following which I will put in a couple of carefully researched internet orders for plants to do very particular jobs in selected places. It has taken three decades of gardening to get to that level of discipline. I did have a nice piece of coffee and walnut cake, though.
Friday, 21 April 2017
from the hideous to the sublime
Today I abandoned the garden and took myself off to London. I wanted to see the exhibition of Sussex Modernists at Two Temple Place before it closed, which it does this Sunday, following which the building itself will be closed to casual visitors until the 2018 exhibition. I've heard odd snippets about the place over the years, and been curious to see it, but never got organised. I had even arranged to go with a friend last week, but that fell through because she was ill.
I am still recovering from my visit, in a sort of low-key but mind-boggled way. The exhibition was amazingly full with people all well over the age of fifty, as if the contents of three coaches had been deposited simultaneously. Perhaps they had. I was surprised that a small exhibition of Modernism was so popular, even though it does finish this weekend, but perhaps like me they were largely there for the building. Which was staggering, in that Two Temple Place is one of the most hideous buildings I've been in for ages. Not just casually ugly, but monumentally contrived to be that way at quite vast expense. It's no good, I'm still boggled.
It was built, or rebuilt, for William Waldorf Astor at the end of the nineteenth century, and following the death of his father William Waldorf Astor was the richest man in America. Two Temple Place was constructed as his office, though it had a flat above, handily situated just south of The Strand and Covent Garden, mid way between the City and the West End and convenient for the law courts. The future Lord Astor favoured the Tudor aesthetic, and Two Temple Place was just the warm-up act before he bought Hever Castle and built an entire Tudor village. And it is stupendously ugly. There's nothing wrong with lots of brown wood and carving per se, but Two Temple Place unfortunately fails to capture the bluff Tudor energy of a Levens Hall, and its carvings lack the vivacity of Grinling Gibbons or the masters who adorned our Medieval churches.
It provides a most incongruous background to an exhibition of Modernism of any kind. Some of the works had to fend for themselves against the mock Tudor panelling, while others were mounted on white screens that partly blocked the view of the room, but Two Temple Place's brief is to display objects from regional museums. That is a good objective per se, only in this case it did not lead to a marriage made in heaven. There were some good things. I liked the photographs by Lee Miller, and the scale model of the pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea which I have still not managed to visit. I was mystified by the black and white documentary about the life cycle of the lobster playing on a continuous loop. And there were some pretty terrible things. I'm sorry, but I don't think Duncan Grant was a good painter, and if it weren't for his role within the Bloomsbury set I doubt we'd take any notice of him.
Admission was free, and I left satisfied that I had gratified my curiosity to see the building while having absolutely no desire ever to see it again. From there to Tate Modern and their display of photographs from Elton John's collection, The Radical Eye. This was displayed in the new Switch House in the sort of big, white rooms where the Sussex Modernists would have looked much more at home, and was not crowded at all. They were almost entirely silver gelatin prints, dating for the most part from the mid 1920s through to 1950, and were an interesting selection, though I believe that Sir Elton has lots more at home, having been collecting for many years since photographs were less collectible than they are now. Not that he is short of a bob or two. Anyway, he has a good eye. My personal favourites were the portraits and the architectural shots.
There is a fabulous run of Irving Penn portraits, and a series of famous artists hung side by side. One of Irving Penn's things was to pose his subjects in a narrow corner in his studio built from a couple of flats, and it is certainly interesting how they responded to the space. Noel Coward stands with his arms close to his body, looking wary, while Duke Ellington sprawls genially in a chair. On the other hand if you did not already recognise the artists you would scarcely guess them to be artists. You might suspect French Surrealist Tanguy whose comical, fluffy, sticky-up hair suggested he might inhabit some sort of creative milieu, but Derain's sturdy face and level gaze could just as well have belonged to a successful small builder or your child's geography teacher, and Satie's neatly trimmed beard would not look out of place at a Rotary meeting.
The Switch House is a splendid building, and I like the way that its broad landings have been designed as a public space for people to hang out in between moments of looking at art, with big, brown wipe clean cushions on the window sills. The floors are staining very badly, though, and the new members' room was closed for improvements less than a year after it opened. Maybe they are trying to damp the noise down, as it was very echoey and much too loud when I went. I don't really have any sympathy for the people who are complaining that their new luxury flats are directly overlooked by the new Tate viewing platform, since they should have known the extension was planned when they bought the flats. Tate Modern was the third most visited attraction in the UK in 2016 with 5.8 million visitors. If you are going to buy a flat with external walls almost entirely made of glass right opposite the third most popular visitor attraction in the country what can you expect?
I am still recovering from my visit, in a sort of low-key but mind-boggled way. The exhibition was amazingly full with people all well over the age of fifty, as if the contents of three coaches had been deposited simultaneously. Perhaps they had. I was surprised that a small exhibition of Modernism was so popular, even though it does finish this weekend, but perhaps like me they were largely there for the building. Which was staggering, in that Two Temple Place is one of the most hideous buildings I've been in for ages. Not just casually ugly, but monumentally contrived to be that way at quite vast expense. It's no good, I'm still boggled.
It was built, or rebuilt, for William Waldorf Astor at the end of the nineteenth century, and following the death of his father William Waldorf Astor was the richest man in America. Two Temple Place was constructed as his office, though it had a flat above, handily situated just south of The Strand and Covent Garden, mid way between the City and the West End and convenient for the law courts. The future Lord Astor favoured the Tudor aesthetic, and Two Temple Place was just the warm-up act before he bought Hever Castle and built an entire Tudor village. And it is stupendously ugly. There's nothing wrong with lots of brown wood and carving per se, but Two Temple Place unfortunately fails to capture the bluff Tudor energy of a Levens Hall, and its carvings lack the vivacity of Grinling Gibbons or the masters who adorned our Medieval churches.
It provides a most incongruous background to an exhibition of Modernism of any kind. Some of the works had to fend for themselves against the mock Tudor panelling, while others were mounted on white screens that partly blocked the view of the room, but Two Temple Place's brief is to display objects from regional museums. That is a good objective per se, only in this case it did not lead to a marriage made in heaven. There were some good things. I liked the photographs by Lee Miller, and the scale model of the pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea which I have still not managed to visit. I was mystified by the black and white documentary about the life cycle of the lobster playing on a continuous loop. And there were some pretty terrible things. I'm sorry, but I don't think Duncan Grant was a good painter, and if it weren't for his role within the Bloomsbury set I doubt we'd take any notice of him.
Admission was free, and I left satisfied that I had gratified my curiosity to see the building while having absolutely no desire ever to see it again. From there to Tate Modern and their display of photographs from Elton John's collection, The Radical Eye. This was displayed in the new Switch House in the sort of big, white rooms where the Sussex Modernists would have looked much more at home, and was not crowded at all. They were almost entirely silver gelatin prints, dating for the most part from the mid 1920s through to 1950, and were an interesting selection, though I believe that Sir Elton has lots more at home, having been collecting for many years since photographs were less collectible than they are now. Not that he is short of a bob or two. Anyway, he has a good eye. My personal favourites were the portraits and the architectural shots.
There is a fabulous run of Irving Penn portraits, and a series of famous artists hung side by side. One of Irving Penn's things was to pose his subjects in a narrow corner in his studio built from a couple of flats, and it is certainly interesting how they responded to the space. Noel Coward stands with his arms close to his body, looking wary, while Duke Ellington sprawls genially in a chair. On the other hand if you did not already recognise the artists you would scarcely guess them to be artists. You might suspect French Surrealist Tanguy whose comical, fluffy, sticky-up hair suggested he might inhabit some sort of creative milieu, but Derain's sturdy face and level gaze could just as well have belonged to a successful small builder or your child's geography teacher, and Satie's neatly trimmed beard would not look out of place at a Rotary meeting.
The Switch House is a splendid building, and I like the way that its broad landings have been designed as a public space for people to hang out in between moments of looking at art, with big, brown wipe clean cushions on the window sills. The floors are staining very badly, though, and the new members' room was closed for improvements less than a year after it opened. Maybe they are trying to damp the noise down, as it was very echoey and much too loud when I went. I don't really have any sympathy for the people who are complaining that their new luxury flats are directly overlooked by the new Tate viewing platform, since they should have known the extension was planned when they bought the flats. Tate Modern was the third most visited attraction in the UK in 2016 with 5.8 million visitors. If you are going to buy a flat with external walls almost entirely made of glass right opposite the third most popular visitor attraction in the country what can you expect?
Thursday, 20 April 2017
back in the garden
Enough of housework and personal grooming. Both are necessary for modern civilisation, but terribly dull. Since being taken for the day to a fairly posh spa some years ago I have considered pampering one of the greatest wastes of time imaginable, when one could be doing something so much more interesting than lying on a slab having a stranger prod at one's pores. Today with a feeling of joy and liberation I headed back into the garden, ancient red hat crammed down over the new curls because it was rather chilly first thing. I am relieved there has not actually been a frost, since while I remembered to shut the doors of the greenhouse and conservatory for the past couple of nights I completely forgot to put my garden club competition potato under cover. You will hear more of the potato in July when it is the great tuber unearthing and weigh-in at the competition organiser's house, but I am not at all confident. Really I have no idea what I am doing with this potato, only the anxious impression garnered from barely remembered gardening articles that if I feed it with the wrong thing it will make lots of impressive top growth but no more potatoes.
I decide to deal with the nettles behind the oil tank. It was not the obvious choice when there were lots of more front-line, visible tasks to be addressed, but I'd got some climbers planted in there and didn't want the nettles taking a firm hold, and I thought that if I rooted them out now I could use the last bags of Strulch on the area and keep it clean for the rest of the year. And I'd got some nice little Sarcococca confusa waiting to go in the space. Again, it might seem odd to stuff them away behind the tank where they will barely be visible, but I chose them for that spot for the scent. They will be quite close to the house, the chicken run and the path to the workshop, and I thought that drifts of their sweet, spicy smell on a winter's day would be welcome. And S. confusa makes a very, very dense canopy once it gets going, which should be a long term solution to the weeds.
The nettles were not yet flowering, so I chopped off their hairy stems to go on the compost heap, where they can add some useful greenery to what tends to be a rather brown heap, while saving space in the bags of roots destined for the tip. When I made it through to reveal the climbers their fortunes were mixed. Rambling rose 'Albertine' was really going for it, throwing up vigorous, thick new shoots. This is on its own roots and was given to me as a rooted cutting by a friend. It spent some time in its pot because I did not know where to put it, and barely existed, then I moved it into a bigger pot but it was still not happy, until I worked out that it could climb up a substantial and slightly tatty holly and planted it in the ground, where suddenly it perked up no end.
Around the corner from it rambling rose 'Blushing Lucy', bought from Trevor White, was also making growth although none of its new stems were as impressive as those of 'Albertine'. Lucy is intended to climb up a hawthorn and arch attractively out over the path to the bonfire, accompanied by Clematis x triternata 'Rubromarginata'. Taylors describe this as being the most scented clematis there is, growing in conditions that other clematis would not tolerate such as a spot at the base of a conifer that is very dry and does not see much sunlight, and I know from having seen them in bloom that the little, starry, four petalled pink and white flowers are very pretty, and they come at a useful time of year in late summer through to autumn. All in all it would have been an ideal choice except that mine was entirely brown and might be dead. I watered it anyway, in case the roots were still clinging on to life and it had the energy to reshoot. Clematis can be very good at reappearing from underground, but I am not overly optimistic. It didn't romp away last year as well as some of the others I planted at the same time, and I don't think it has got its roots down.
I fed everything with fish, blood and bone when I'd got the weeds out, and spread Strulch, and watered them all, and went on spreading Strulch in the corners I hadn't done yet in front of the oil tank, until I ran out of Strulch. I wish it would rain, otherwise the clematis is not going to be the last casualty by a long chalk. It is practically impossible to remember where everything is that's been planted in the past two years, and to get water to all of them.
I decide to deal with the nettles behind the oil tank. It was not the obvious choice when there were lots of more front-line, visible tasks to be addressed, but I'd got some climbers planted in there and didn't want the nettles taking a firm hold, and I thought that if I rooted them out now I could use the last bags of Strulch on the area and keep it clean for the rest of the year. And I'd got some nice little Sarcococca confusa waiting to go in the space. Again, it might seem odd to stuff them away behind the tank where they will barely be visible, but I chose them for that spot for the scent. They will be quite close to the house, the chicken run and the path to the workshop, and I thought that drifts of their sweet, spicy smell on a winter's day would be welcome. And S. confusa makes a very, very dense canopy once it gets going, which should be a long term solution to the weeds.
The nettles were not yet flowering, so I chopped off their hairy stems to go on the compost heap, where they can add some useful greenery to what tends to be a rather brown heap, while saving space in the bags of roots destined for the tip. When I made it through to reveal the climbers their fortunes were mixed. Rambling rose 'Albertine' was really going for it, throwing up vigorous, thick new shoots. This is on its own roots and was given to me as a rooted cutting by a friend. It spent some time in its pot because I did not know where to put it, and barely existed, then I moved it into a bigger pot but it was still not happy, until I worked out that it could climb up a substantial and slightly tatty holly and planted it in the ground, where suddenly it perked up no end.
Around the corner from it rambling rose 'Blushing Lucy', bought from Trevor White, was also making growth although none of its new stems were as impressive as those of 'Albertine'. Lucy is intended to climb up a hawthorn and arch attractively out over the path to the bonfire, accompanied by Clematis x triternata 'Rubromarginata'. Taylors describe this as being the most scented clematis there is, growing in conditions that other clematis would not tolerate such as a spot at the base of a conifer that is very dry and does not see much sunlight, and I know from having seen them in bloom that the little, starry, four petalled pink and white flowers are very pretty, and they come at a useful time of year in late summer through to autumn. All in all it would have been an ideal choice except that mine was entirely brown and might be dead. I watered it anyway, in case the roots were still clinging on to life and it had the energy to reshoot. Clematis can be very good at reappearing from underground, but I am not overly optimistic. It didn't romp away last year as well as some of the others I planted at the same time, and I don't think it has got its roots down.
I fed everything with fish, blood and bone when I'd got the weeds out, and spread Strulch, and watered them all, and went on spreading Strulch in the corners I hadn't done yet in front of the oil tank, until I ran out of Strulch. I wish it would rain, otherwise the clematis is not going to be the last casualty by a long chalk. It is practically impossible to remember where everything is that's been planted in the past two years, and to get water to all of them.
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