The best time to take a cutting, they say, is when somebody offers it to you. This morning I experimentally dug up some pieces of rose from a friend's garden at about as wrong a time of year as you can get. The sad thing is she offered me some bits of rose if I cared to dig them out last year, and I never got around to doing anything about it all winter. Now she is due to move house in the next fortnight, which concentrated the mind. Agreeing that the people who were buying her house would not miss a bit of the rose, I had nothing to lose but an hour of my time and several litres of compost.
It is a very pretty rose, with neat, smallish leaves, and small pink flowers. They are single, but larger and more frilled than a hedgerow wild dog rose. Its overall character put me in mind of the old Scotch roses when I saw it flowering last year. Apart from being charming, in an understated, half wild way, I was very impressed at how well it was doing in a difficult site. It was running all around the base of a smallish oak while some stems had climbed into the tree. Clearly it had the potential for height, given support. The soil in my friend's garden is probably not quite as light as the soil in our front garden, but still poor, sandy stuff, and any rose that could not just survive but spread in that earth under the crown of a tree had to be a very good doer.
My friend did not know its name, and I thought she meant that she had lost it or forgotten it, or been given the rose without a name attached. Today she clarified that she had not planted it: the birds had brought it. She took a little convincing that in that case it did not have a name. An expert might be able to hazard a guess as to its parentage, in broad terms, but her rose was unique.
The first piece came up very easily , and I did not need to resort to the pick axe I had brought just in case, as well as a sharp spade and a garden fork. I shoved it quickly into an old poultry food bag to keep the roots moist, though the soil was almost as dry as dust. My friend reappeared with a flower pot, asking if I could dig her a piece too. I asked if she had any compost, and when she said she had run out I asked if she would rather I try to root some for her, rather than leave her looking after the pot in the middle of moving. I dug up a third piece because her daughter wanted some, and a fourth for luck. I reduced the length of the shoots immediately, and cut them down further when I potted them.
I managed to get a lot of root. The smallest piece needed a five litre pot and the largest barely crammed into a ten. I watered them all generously, thinking that was probably more water than the roots had seen for weeks, and stood them outside the greenhouse where they would get some shade. Their leaves were still perky when I went to water the tomatoes after tea. We will see how we do. If even one pot survives I daresay I can make some more from it somehow. It seems to be a rose with a powerful will to live, so I am moderately hopeful.
Addendum Two of the three fig branches that I cut off the parent plant before noticing that they were beginning to form roots where they touched the paving have survived being potted up, and are sending out new leaves and bright green little shoots. On that basis if you had a fig and wanted to propagate it so that your friends and relations could have one too, I should say that layering would be very likely to work. I was talking to somebody at lunch at the weekend who had planted what their local garden centre sold them as a fig, only to discover when it produced a large pink flower that it was a magnolia. At least if a friend gives you a rooted branch of their own tree you know you are getting a fig. Ours is 'Brown Turkey', and fruits extremely well given the right weather. We do have it growing in what is virtually rubble, and I warned my new acquaintance that in rich Suffolk clay she might get a lot of splendid leaves but not necessarily any figs.
Wednesday, 5 July 2017
Tuesday, 4 July 2017
what beasts lurk within
The talk at the garden club this month was about the invertebrates that might live in our garden ponds. The speaker, who is the Suffolk County Recorder for freshwater invertebrates, opened with the depressing statistics about natural ponds, half of all those in the UK lost in the last century and four fifths of the remaining ones in a poor state, not quite as depressing as the statistics for meadows but not very good. He warned us to make sure that our garden ponds offered an escape route to any hedgehogs that might fall in. Painted Jaguar's rhyme, Curls up but can't swim, Stickly-Prickly that's him, is wrong: hedgehogs can swim very well, but they can't scale vertical pond sides to get out again. Then with a final warning not to release fish or invasive pond plants into the wild we moved on to the substance of the evening, the weird and marvellous mini-beasts that inhabit our ponds, or might do so.
Insects are truly weird and marvellous, and freshwater invertebrates are every bit as fabulous as bees in their own ways. Pond skaters do not merely rest on the surface of the water because they are small: they have feet covered in greasy hairs that actively repel water. The water cricket goes one better and propels itself along by excreting a surfactant which breaks down the surface tension at one end of its body, dragging it forwards across the water surface. Water boatmen skate on the underside of the surface, looking downwards into the pond for prey while drawing air from above the surface via their protruding bottoms.
Whirligig beetles find their prey using the same echo location principles as bats, but based on returning ripples of water rather than sound. They skitter around the surface of the pond, their four eyes looking up into the air and down into the water for predators that might eat them, and their skittering motion sending out tiny ripples. They can detect the returning waves and distinguish between plants, other beetles, and potential prey which they rush towards propelled by flattened hind legs that they are capable of feathering like an oar for the return stroke.
The lesser water boatman dives enfolding an air bubble with its body. It breathes using the air in the bubble, and as the oxygen concentration starts to drop and the carbon dioxide levels rise, the air in the bubble absorbs more oxygen from that dissolved in the pond, while carbon dioxide diffuses out into the surrounding water.
Most beetles can fly so can move between ponds. They detect water surfaces from the polarised light reflecting off them, sometimes leading to unfortunate accidents with car windscreeens which are also polarised. Water fleas cannot fly, but in times of environmental stress produce resting eggs which can remain viable for decades, if not centuries, waiting for conditions to improve. Water flea eggs have been found on the feet of frozen Siberian mammoths, and since water fleas predate the dinosaurs they probably hitched a lift with them too. Some species of leech spend the winter up the noses of wild ducks, feeding modestly on blood before emerging in the spring to breed in a different pond, or perhaps a different country.
Some leeches carry their young attached to the undersides of their bodies. If in a laboratory tank you deliberately disturb the water so that the babies are washed off, the parent leech will go around the tank until it has carefully retrieved all of them. Once the young are old enough to leave for real the parent leech creeps under a stone and dies. No UK wild leech is likely to attach itself to your legs if you go in a pond, since most species' mouth parts are not strong enough to pierce human skin. The medicinal leech, once widespread, was collected almost to extinction, and while still used in medicine nowadays they are hygienically bred in captivity.
One species of caddis fly larva makes a case for itself out of bitten off sections of plant roots, arranged in a stack of hexagons. How it knows how long to make each side of the hexagon to end up with a case that is neither too small nor too loose is a mystery, nor how it is able to arrange the pieces into hexagons.
None of this has anything directly to do with gardening, but it is all very wonderful and strange. The best time to go and look in your pond is after dark, with a powerful torch.
Insects are truly weird and marvellous, and freshwater invertebrates are every bit as fabulous as bees in their own ways. Pond skaters do not merely rest on the surface of the water because they are small: they have feet covered in greasy hairs that actively repel water. The water cricket goes one better and propels itself along by excreting a surfactant which breaks down the surface tension at one end of its body, dragging it forwards across the water surface. Water boatmen skate on the underside of the surface, looking downwards into the pond for prey while drawing air from above the surface via their protruding bottoms.
Whirligig beetles find their prey using the same echo location principles as bats, but based on returning ripples of water rather than sound. They skitter around the surface of the pond, their four eyes looking up into the air and down into the water for predators that might eat them, and their skittering motion sending out tiny ripples. They can detect the returning waves and distinguish between plants, other beetles, and potential prey which they rush towards propelled by flattened hind legs that they are capable of feathering like an oar for the return stroke.
The lesser water boatman dives enfolding an air bubble with its body. It breathes using the air in the bubble, and as the oxygen concentration starts to drop and the carbon dioxide levels rise, the air in the bubble absorbs more oxygen from that dissolved in the pond, while carbon dioxide diffuses out into the surrounding water.
Most beetles can fly so can move between ponds. They detect water surfaces from the polarised light reflecting off them, sometimes leading to unfortunate accidents with car windscreeens which are also polarised. Water fleas cannot fly, but in times of environmental stress produce resting eggs which can remain viable for decades, if not centuries, waiting for conditions to improve. Water flea eggs have been found on the feet of frozen Siberian mammoths, and since water fleas predate the dinosaurs they probably hitched a lift with them too. Some species of leech spend the winter up the noses of wild ducks, feeding modestly on blood before emerging in the spring to breed in a different pond, or perhaps a different country.
Some leeches carry their young attached to the undersides of their bodies. If in a laboratory tank you deliberately disturb the water so that the babies are washed off, the parent leech will go around the tank until it has carefully retrieved all of them. Once the young are old enough to leave for real the parent leech creeps under a stone and dies. No UK wild leech is likely to attach itself to your legs if you go in a pond, since most species' mouth parts are not strong enough to pierce human skin. The medicinal leech, once widespread, was collected almost to extinction, and while still used in medicine nowadays they are hygienically bred in captivity.
One species of caddis fly larva makes a case for itself out of bitten off sections of plant roots, arranged in a stack of hexagons. How it knows how long to make each side of the hexagon to end up with a case that is neither too small nor too loose is a mystery, nor how it is able to arrange the pieces into hexagons.
None of this has anything directly to do with gardening, but it is all very wonderful and strange. The best time to go and look in your pond is after dark, with a powerful torch.
Monday, 3 July 2017
ground cover for gravel
I have been weeding the low planting around the garden railway. Prostrate thyme, Thymus serpyllum, plays a large part. In autumn and winter after it has been cut back it can look a bit stark, but at this time of year it is covered in small purple flowers and is very attractive to bees. It is happy growing in the light soil, and seeds itself about moderately, which is useful for filling in the gaps.
Named varieties are available, but ours was grown from seed. If the seedlings are pricked out into modules, twenty-four to a standard seed tray, then once well rooted the plug can be planted successfully straight into the gravel, without further potting on. This is a great saver in time and greenhouse space. In fact, given thyme's preference for perfect drainage, the sooner it goes into the gravel and the less time it spends in a pot the better.
The plants are not awfully good at suppressing weeds, it has to be admitted. They are not dense enough, and seedlings of grass, wild vetch, field maple, and the little yellow flowered annual member of the pea family whose name I have still not discovered, will all germinate under the thin cover of thyme and pop up into view. Two or three years ago I was getting quite disheartened about the prospects of ever getting the weeds in the railway garden under control, but after a fairly concerted effort at weeding over several years there are not so many this year. Much less grass, certainly, though I am afraid I have let rather a lot of wild vetch go to seed and will be pulling their babies out like mad next season.
To thicken up the carpet, and provide some variety, I've been planting low sedum among the thymes. The best and toughest on our extremely light soil has proved Sedum album 'Coral Carpet' which forms gradually expanding mats of densely packed, tiny, fleshy, leaves in a pleasant shade of purplish pink. It is wonderfully easy to propagate, simply pull little pieces from the edges of your established clumps and dibble them into divided trays of well drained compost. A few months later you will have plugs ready to go out like the thyme plants, straight into the gravel. Short cuttings of the dwarf stemmed varieties like 'Vera Jameson' strike very easily too, though the plants don't cope with the sand as well as 'Coral Carpet'.
I have unfortunately lost the name of one splendid, red leaved, low growing, stem forming variety. Pots of it adorn the top of a low wall, along with pots of houseleeks, and I keep adding more plants to the gravel planting where it grows pretty well, but my original plants were used for the failed experiment in making a green roof for the pot shed, and while I salvaged the plants and propagated more from them after dismantling the roof, I failed to keep a note of the name. It has deep pink flowers to go with its red leaves, and is a really useful variety, and I wish I knew what it was. It is probably not especially rare, and if I were to ask somebody like the Plant Heritage national collection holder for sedum they would probably know what it was, but so far fortune has not brought a specialist in sedums my way.
Sedum rupestre 'Angelina' does well too. It has long, ochre yellow leaves and yellow flowers, and roots easily from cuttings. It is a brittle plant, and out in the garden I tend to poke any pieces that fall off straight back into the gravel. If you were a very restrained and tasteful gardener you might think it was too yellow, but I like it in small splashes. Little dabs of it give all that purple a lift. I wouldn't plant a large continuous sheet of it.
The grey, hairy leaved shrub Lotus hirsutus loves the gravel a lot. It was originally in the long flower bed, and still is, but its offspring have been eagerly colonising beyond the border since the gravel was put down. This afternoon I was hard-heartedly weeding tiny ones out of what is supposed to be the path running the length of the railway, otherwise the entire layout could disappear in a Hairy Canary Clover forest, given a few years.
Named varieties are available, but ours was grown from seed. If the seedlings are pricked out into modules, twenty-four to a standard seed tray, then once well rooted the plug can be planted successfully straight into the gravel, without further potting on. This is a great saver in time and greenhouse space. In fact, given thyme's preference for perfect drainage, the sooner it goes into the gravel and the less time it spends in a pot the better.
The plants are not awfully good at suppressing weeds, it has to be admitted. They are not dense enough, and seedlings of grass, wild vetch, field maple, and the little yellow flowered annual member of the pea family whose name I have still not discovered, will all germinate under the thin cover of thyme and pop up into view. Two or three years ago I was getting quite disheartened about the prospects of ever getting the weeds in the railway garden under control, but after a fairly concerted effort at weeding over several years there are not so many this year. Much less grass, certainly, though I am afraid I have let rather a lot of wild vetch go to seed and will be pulling their babies out like mad next season.
To thicken up the carpet, and provide some variety, I've been planting low sedum among the thymes. The best and toughest on our extremely light soil has proved Sedum album 'Coral Carpet' which forms gradually expanding mats of densely packed, tiny, fleshy, leaves in a pleasant shade of purplish pink. It is wonderfully easy to propagate, simply pull little pieces from the edges of your established clumps and dibble them into divided trays of well drained compost. A few months later you will have plugs ready to go out like the thyme plants, straight into the gravel. Short cuttings of the dwarf stemmed varieties like 'Vera Jameson' strike very easily too, though the plants don't cope with the sand as well as 'Coral Carpet'.
I have unfortunately lost the name of one splendid, red leaved, low growing, stem forming variety. Pots of it adorn the top of a low wall, along with pots of houseleeks, and I keep adding more plants to the gravel planting where it grows pretty well, but my original plants were used for the failed experiment in making a green roof for the pot shed, and while I salvaged the plants and propagated more from them after dismantling the roof, I failed to keep a note of the name. It has deep pink flowers to go with its red leaves, and is a really useful variety, and I wish I knew what it was. It is probably not especially rare, and if I were to ask somebody like the Plant Heritage national collection holder for sedum they would probably know what it was, but so far fortune has not brought a specialist in sedums my way.
Sedum rupestre 'Angelina' does well too. It has long, ochre yellow leaves and yellow flowers, and roots easily from cuttings. It is a brittle plant, and out in the garden I tend to poke any pieces that fall off straight back into the gravel. If you were a very restrained and tasteful gardener you might think it was too yellow, but I like it in small splashes. Little dabs of it give all that purple a lift. I wouldn't plant a large continuous sheet of it.
The grey, hairy leaved shrub Lotus hirsutus loves the gravel a lot. It was originally in the long flower bed, and still is, but its offspring have been eagerly colonising beyond the border since the gravel was put down. This afternoon I was hard-heartedly weeding tiny ones out of what is supposed to be the path running the length of the railway, otherwise the entire layout could disappear in a Hairy Canary Clover forest, given a few years.
Sunday, 2 July 2017
be prepared
Things take longer than you think they're going to, as a rule. There is the odd exception, tasks you've been putting off for so long they assume an almost insurmountable psychological difficulty, until eventually circumstances force you to get on with them and you find they barely take ten minutes. But as a rule things take longer than you think.
Take the beehive supers. I had a spare super with no frames in it. I thought I would get some frames in case I needed to use the super, so ordered them, only to notice after they had arrived that the super was missing the metal frame spacers that are supposed to go along the top of each side, and that I didn't have a spare set of spacers in my box of beekeeping bits. I don't know why it didn't have any spacers. Maybe it used to have plastic ones and I removed them so that I could clean it. It didn't look as though it had ever felt the blowlamp's kiss, in fact it looked unused, so probably it was one of a set I bought a couple of years ago from a cheap and useful US beekeeping supplies firm which, alas, abandoned its attempt to break into the UK market even before Brexit sent sterling plummeting. In that case it may never have had spacers, since they wouldn't have come as part of the budget kit.
So I had to send off for spacers, which was a bore because if I'd noticed in time they could have shared the delivery charge with the frames. This morning I made up the frames, a job I should obviously have done in the winter ready for the season ahead if only I'd been better organised and had fewer colds. Then I found that the metal spacer would not fit properly along one side of the super because in assembling the box I had banged a nail in about three millimeters higher than it should have been, and the nail was now obstructing the narrow slit the metal spacer bar had to fit into.
I tried to pull the nail out with a pair of pliers, but without success, even after I'd squashed the grain of the surrounding wood to try and get a better grip. I had to appeal to the Systems Administrator for help, who tried doing what I'd been doing but with a different pair of pliers and then a small mole grip. The nail refused to budge. The SA eyed up the joints of the box and asked if they had just been glued and I said no, I'd assembled it about two years ago. The SA fetched a third tool, which was a small saw with a blade narrow enough to fit into the slit, and sawed through the nail, which had been on my list of techniques to try, only I didn't have a saw.
Finally about two hours after starting I had a box with frames in it in a fit state to be put on the bees if needed. And I'd thought that making up the frames would take no more than fifty minutes at five minutes a frame.
Take the beehive supers. I had a spare super with no frames in it. I thought I would get some frames in case I needed to use the super, so ordered them, only to notice after they had arrived that the super was missing the metal frame spacers that are supposed to go along the top of each side, and that I didn't have a spare set of spacers in my box of beekeeping bits. I don't know why it didn't have any spacers. Maybe it used to have plastic ones and I removed them so that I could clean it. It didn't look as though it had ever felt the blowlamp's kiss, in fact it looked unused, so probably it was one of a set I bought a couple of years ago from a cheap and useful US beekeeping supplies firm which, alas, abandoned its attempt to break into the UK market even before Brexit sent sterling plummeting. In that case it may never have had spacers, since they wouldn't have come as part of the budget kit.
So I had to send off for spacers, which was a bore because if I'd noticed in time they could have shared the delivery charge with the frames. This morning I made up the frames, a job I should obviously have done in the winter ready for the season ahead if only I'd been better organised and had fewer colds. Then I found that the metal spacer would not fit properly along one side of the super because in assembling the box I had banged a nail in about three millimeters higher than it should have been, and the nail was now obstructing the narrow slit the metal spacer bar had to fit into.
I tried to pull the nail out with a pair of pliers, but without success, even after I'd squashed the grain of the surrounding wood to try and get a better grip. I had to appeal to the Systems Administrator for help, who tried doing what I'd been doing but with a different pair of pliers and then a small mole grip. The nail refused to budge. The SA eyed up the joints of the box and asked if they had just been glued and I said no, I'd assembled it about two years ago. The SA fetched a third tool, which was a small saw with a blade narrow enough to fit into the slit, and sawed through the nail, which had been on my list of techniques to try, only I didn't have a saw.
Finally about two hours after starting I had a box with frames in it in a fit state to be put on the bees if needed. And I'd thought that making up the frames would take no more than fifty minutes at five minutes a frame.
Saturday, 1 July 2017
out to lunch
We went to a lunch party today. It came as a rare shock to the system, and I was able to catch up with most of my ironing first since I couldn't risk going and getting myself filthy in the garden for the three hours of the morning before we had to go out. I put on a skirt I have not worn for so many years I can't remember the time I last did wear it, and an ivory crepe blouse (only viscose, but still crepe) bought last year on the basis you should seize the moment when the shop has the thing that you want. I tried putting on a proper bra instead of my normal cotton camisole, before deciding that it was too ridiculously uncomfortable and I was supposed to be going out to enjoy myself, and switching back to a clean vest. I dug out a greenish blue cardigan bought about fifteen years after I bought the skirt but which fortunately went with it anyway, since I settled into a palette of colours I liked about twenty years ago. I put on a pair of black Majorcan sandals that did not hurt my feet, and emptied the contents of my usual satchel into a black leather handbag. I fastened a pendant of blue and green Roman glass around my neck and with rings on my fingers and Murano glass studs in my ears hovered warily until it was time to go out, in case a cat should come near me and get its claws tangled up in the crepe.
It is fun to dress up once in a while. It really is once in a while, which is why most of my dressing up clothes are anything up to a quarter of a century old. Shin length florals may even be in fashion at the moment, I'm not sure, but the great thing about giving up on fashion and buying things in a cut that suit you in a fabric that you like is that you can go on wearing them more or less for ever. I settled for a summer look that would let me hover in the background as an extra for more or less any costume drama set between the wars, and will stick with it.
It's just as well it was a longish skirt, because my legs have collected an amazing collection of scratches and scrapes, given that I always garden in long trousers tucked into short wellington boots. There is a three inch scratch down my right shin and a shorter, more mottled one on my left calf, though the enormous bruise on one knee has faded. I am fairly sure I caught the knee as I climbed over a wooden picket fence to weed by the oil tank, but goodness knows how I scratched myself though the trousers. There are a lot of brambles, I suppose, and as the Systems Administrator pointed out most people's normal gardening kit does not include a pick axe. Stuff happens. Somebody I was sitting next to at lunch showed me her permanently twisted and swollen finger, the result of an old injury sustained while trying to load a horse into a horse box.
It was a very fine lunch, and I should have liked to see the magnificent sausage meat and apricot pie before it was cut into lots of pieces, the handiwork of our hostess and not a catering company. Beyond the world of the Ocado delivery van a lot of skilled cooking still goes on among the middling classes of the Essex-Suffolk borders. It isn't even that people could not afford to buy pies if they wanted to, but a sort of pride and pleasure in knowing how to do that sort of thing and doing it well.
The only trouble with going out to lunch is that the rest of the day is wiped out. The SA was driving, while I had one glass of white wine, but after the pie and the cold salmon and the six different kinds of salad and the half of a hard boiled egg with its yolk scooped out and mixed with spiced mayonnaise and the miniature onion bhaji and the slice of crusty bread from a proper local baker, after the fruit salad with flavoured yogurt followed by the second helping of fruit salad, my theory that I would make up the rest of my new beehive frames when I got home seemed quite unrealistic and the SA wasn't heading out to the workshop.
The cats were sitting in the hall looking stern, because they had been left all day with biscuits but no lunch at lunchtime, and no human company, and now here we were pitching up at gone five, hands smelling very faintly of our hosts' black Labrador, who with impeccable manners had been forensically examining the grass under the tables all through lunch in search of crumbs.
It is fun to dress up once in a while. It really is once in a while, which is why most of my dressing up clothes are anything up to a quarter of a century old. Shin length florals may even be in fashion at the moment, I'm not sure, but the great thing about giving up on fashion and buying things in a cut that suit you in a fabric that you like is that you can go on wearing them more or less for ever. I settled for a summer look that would let me hover in the background as an extra for more or less any costume drama set between the wars, and will stick with it.
It's just as well it was a longish skirt, because my legs have collected an amazing collection of scratches and scrapes, given that I always garden in long trousers tucked into short wellington boots. There is a three inch scratch down my right shin and a shorter, more mottled one on my left calf, though the enormous bruise on one knee has faded. I am fairly sure I caught the knee as I climbed over a wooden picket fence to weed by the oil tank, but goodness knows how I scratched myself though the trousers. There are a lot of brambles, I suppose, and as the Systems Administrator pointed out most people's normal gardening kit does not include a pick axe. Stuff happens. Somebody I was sitting next to at lunch showed me her permanently twisted and swollen finger, the result of an old injury sustained while trying to load a horse into a horse box.
It was a very fine lunch, and I should have liked to see the magnificent sausage meat and apricot pie before it was cut into lots of pieces, the handiwork of our hostess and not a catering company. Beyond the world of the Ocado delivery van a lot of skilled cooking still goes on among the middling classes of the Essex-Suffolk borders. It isn't even that people could not afford to buy pies if they wanted to, but a sort of pride and pleasure in knowing how to do that sort of thing and doing it well.
The only trouble with going out to lunch is that the rest of the day is wiped out. The SA was driving, while I had one glass of white wine, but after the pie and the cold salmon and the six different kinds of salad and the half of a hard boiled egg with its yolk scooped out and mixed with spiced mayonnaise and the miniature onion bhaji and the slice of crusty bread from a proper local baker, after the fruit salad with flavoured yogurt followed by the second helping of fruit salad, my theory that I would make up the rest of my new beehive frames when I got home seemed quite unrealistic and the SA wasn't heading out to the workshop.
The cats were sitting in the hall looking stern, because they had been left all day with biscuits but no lunch at lunchtime, and no human company, and now here we were pitching up at gone five, hands smelling very faintly of our hosts' black Labrador, who with impeccable manners had been forensically examining the grass under the tables all through lunch in search of crumbs.
Friday, 30 June 2017
can she make a cherry pie
Tins of Waitrose Essential red kidney beans do look awfully like tins of Waitrose Essential cherries. This was pointed out to me by the Systems Administrator, who had been nearly fooled into thinking we had the ingredients for a chilli con carne when we hadn't (though some enterprising restaurant is probably about to dish up ground beef and black cherries laced with chilli powder). The SA was right, both have white labels with red blobs on them, the cherries being rounder and the beans longer. If you were in a hurry it would be quite easy to tug the ring pull and break the seal before you noticed your mistake, though luckily the SA hasn't so far.
I said that when we had a couple of wet days and I caught up with the domestic jobs I had been meaning, and the SA leaped in asking if I had been meaning to make one of my cherry puddings. I said that actually I had been meaning to tidy up the cupboard in the kitchen so that the tins weren't all muddled up. At some point of course I was meaning to make another pie, or I wouldn't have bought the tin of cherries, but I didn't have any timescale in mind. I like to keep a tin of essential pitted black cherries in light syrup in stock because tinned cherries are one of those things supermarkets don't always have when you want them, or you have to make do with the ones with stones in and spend ages destoning them, or buy Epicure cherries which cost approximately two and a half times as much as Waitrose Essential and taste absolutely the same by the time they have been cooked.
The recipe actually specifies fresh cherries. I tried using them once, and decided that by the time they had been boiled with cherry jam I couldn't tell the difference, and since they cost a lot more and taking stones out of fresh cherries is even slower than taking them out of tinned ones I wasn't going to bother again. It is Dan Lepard's cherry and polenta pudding from his baking book Short and Sweet, an excellent book which I recommend highly. You make a fairly moist sponge containing polenta and ground almonds, more of the latter than the former although he calls is cherry and polenta pudding, make furrows in the raw sponge with a teaspoon and fill them with a cherry compote.
I have deviated from his instructions on making the compote, apart from substituting the tinned cherries. He says to boil the cherries until the moisture is mostly gone. I found that the more you boil a cherry the more moisture comes out, and after about a quarter of an hour of waiting for my compote to show any signs of thickening I used a teaspoon of cornflour to hurry things along. I have used cornflower ever since. Cookery writers often sneer at it, apart from Ken Hom who has probably sold more books than most of them, but as long as you cook the compote for five minutes after adding the cornflower you don't taste it at all, and you end up with sponge containing discrete seams of cherry rather than pink sponge soaked in cherry juice.
If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a cooks' must be in part to request by name something out of their repertoire. Who could resist the plea, I like your cherry pudding? I made one this morning, after putting what I hope are the final details on the music society website.
Addendum When I wrote about my non-addictive not-iPhone I failed to mention its new and slightly creepy habit. Obviously it knows where I am, when it is allowed to come with me, but it has recently made it explicit that it isn't content to stop with a simple grid coordinate. Review your visit to Tesco, it demands. Is the White Hart in Boxford a romantic venue? Sometimes it just wants me to tick a box, yes, no, don't know. Sometimes it wants me to type a review. A review of Tesco or Tate Modern. On my phone. Is it serious? Most bafflingly, it wanted a review of the West Mersea Community Centre. I don't know what I was supposed to put. The microphone stand has to be jammed with a piece of paper to stay upright. I wonder if it has any sense of tact, or if the next time I go to a funeral it will ask me to review the crematorium.
I don't post any reviews. Keeping a blog is quite enough writing, and I get to do that on a proper keyboard. I am a freeloader when it comes to other people's photos, though. Oh look, there's a church with a round tower somewhere around here. Another really cute church with good tombs. A Norfolk broad, since we are in Norfolk. Truly technology is wonderful.
I said that when we had a couple of wet days and I caught up with the domestic jobs I had been meaning, and the SA leaped in asking if I had been meaning to make one of my cherry puddings. I said that actually I had been meaning to tidy up the cupboard in the kitchen so that the tins weren't all muddled up. At some point of course I was meaning to make another pie, or I wouldn't have bought the tin of cherries, but I didn't have any timescale in mind. I like to keep a tin of essential pitted black cherries in light syrup in stock because tinned cherries are one of those things supermarkets don't always have when you want them, or you have to make do with the ones with stones in and spend ages destoning them, or buy Epicure cherries which cost approximately two and a half times as much as Waitrose Essential and taste absolutely the same by the time they have been cooked.
The recipe actually specifies fresh cherries. I tried using them once, and decided that by the time they had been boiled with cherry jam I couldn't tell the difference, and since they cost a lot more and taking stones out of fresh cherries is even slower than taking them out of tinned ones I wasn't going to bother again. It is Dan Lepard's cherry and polenta pudding from his baking book Short and Sweet, an excellent book which I recommend highly. You make a fairly moist sponge containing polenta and ground almonds, more of the latter than the former although he calls is cherry and polenta pudding, make furrows in the raw sponge with a teaspoon and fill them with a cherry compote.
I have deviated from his instructions on making the compote, apart from substituting the tinned cherries. He says to boil the cherries until the moisture is mostly gone. I found that the more you boil a cherry the more moisture comes out, and after about a quarter of an hour of waiting for my compote to show any signs of thickening I used a teaspoon of cornflour to hurry things along. I have used cornflower ever since. Cookery writers often sneer at it, apart from Ken Hom who has probably sold more books than most of them, but as long as you cook the compote for five minutes after adding the cornflower you don't taste it at all, and you end up with sponge containing discrete seams of cherry rather than pink sponge soaked in cherry juice.
If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a cooks' must be in part to request by name something out of their repertoire. Who could resist the plea, I like your cherry pudding? I made one this morning, after putting what I hope are the final details on the music society website.
Addendum When I wrote about my non-addictive not-iPhone I failed to mention its new and slightly creepy habit. Obviously it knows where I am, when it is allowed to come with me, but it has recently made it explicit that it isn't content to stop with a simple grid coordinate. Review your visit to Tesco, it demands. Is the White Hart in Boxford a romantic venue? Sometimes it just wants me to tick a box, yes, no, don't know. Sometimes it wants me to type a review. A review of Tesco or Tate Modern. On my phone. Is it serious? Most bafflingly, it wanted a review of the West Mersea Community Centre. I don't know what I was supposed to put. The microphone stand has to be jammed with a piece of paper to stay upright. I wonder if it has any sense of tact, or if the next time I go to a funeral it will ask me to review the crematorium.
I don't post any reviews. Keeping a blog is quite enough writing, and I get to do that on a proper keyboard. I am a freeloader when it comes to other people's photos, though. Oh look, there's a church with a round tower somewhere around here. Another really cute church with good tombs. A Norfolk broad, since we are in Norfolk. Truly technology is wonderful.
Thursday, 29 June 2017
modern manners
It is the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, and I still don't have one. Indeed, since my ancient iPod broke I don't possess any Apple product. No, I have a Samsung Galaxy phone at least two generations behind the latest model, which does all the things I need a phone to do, which is not very much. I can make phone calls, and even receive them if I notice that it is ringing, which is not very often since I keep it on silent. It organizes my texts, albeit very confusingly when more than one person is involved in a conversation. The maps work which is useful on a small scale for finding where a particular street is or on a large scale to check for traffic jams. I wouldn't try and plan a journey by it because the screen is so small that by the time I could see both ends of the journey all the road numbers would have disappeared. The internet works, albeit quite slowly, in case I desperately want to look something up while I'm out. I can play Sudoku or read the Guardian if I'm bored, and the Guardian send me news alerts in case I could not wait until I got home to learn that Rupert Murdoch's Sky takeover bid had been referred to the competition authorities. Oh, and I have the Wittr app so that I can see where other followers of the BBC's flagship film review programme are to an accuracy of anything up to several kilometers, while advertising my own presence to fellow devotees but not in a way that any of them could actually find me. And that's about it. The battery lasts all day with a margin to spare.
Other people do much, much more with their phones, though not the Systems Administrator who does even less. Every day brings fresh reports of how we are all glued to our smartphones, addicted, made stupid by them. The eleven year old daughter of somebody interviewed on the Today programme watched films on hers. Speaking as somebody who likes film, I can't fathom why if a film is worth two hours of my life to watch I would want to do so on a screen the size of a large matchbox, but what do I know? I am not eleven.
When I saw some of my former colleagues for lunch recently somebody posed the question, how late at night does it become rude to text somebody? I was flummoxed. Surely you could text at any time you wanted to, as long as you didn't expect an immediate reply? Apparently this is not how phones work. Somebody had rudely texted him at eleven at night and woken him up, and worse still woken his wife up, just as they were dropping off to sleep. I was mystified. Why had he taken his phone to bed with him if he didn't want to hear it? Mine lived in the kitchen between the toaster and the ice cream machine most of the time, where the cats couldn't knock it on the floor, and I checked it occasionally for messages when passing. But he used his phone as an alarm clock, he explained patiently. I was still mystified. Why not get an alarm clock? I have one in my digital bedside radio, though reception for Classic FM is not very good.
Another colleague chimed in that she thought it was OK to text up to ten at night, but always carried her phone in case her daughter needed her. I was still mystified. Her daughter is twenty, or possibly twenty-one, and in perfect health so far as I know. If she were waiting for exam results, or going through boyfriend troubles, or taking part in a trans Saharan motor race then a steadying maternal hand on the tiller might be required, but all the time?
When I met my coterie of beekeeping friends for coffee a little while back nobody got their mobile phone out at any point. Everybody except me had children and grandchildren, and one had a husband with a heart condition and runs her own business, while another is moving house, so I'm sure they could all have thought of reasons why they needed to check their phones constantly if they'd wanted to. Really, constant mobile use or not comes down to attitude of mind. If people keep their phones out on the table and check them every two minutes that isn't the fault of the phone, any more than poison pen letters are the fault of letter writing.
Other people do much, much more with their phones, though not the Systems Administrator who does even less. Every day brings fresh reports of how we are all glued to our smartphones, addicted, made stupid by them. The eleven year old daughter of somebody interviewed on the Today programme watched films on hers. Speaking as somebody who likes film, I can't fathom why if a film is worth two hours of my life to watch I would want to do so on a screen the size of a large matchbox, but what do I know? I am not eleven.
When I saw some of my former colleagues for lunch recently somebody posed the question, how late at night does it become rude to text somebody? I was flummoxed. Surely you could text at any time you wanted to, as long as you didn't expect an immediate reply? Apparently this is not how phones work. Somebody had rudely texted him at eleven at night and woken him up, and worse still woken his wife up, just as they were dropping off to sleep. I was mystified. Why had he taken his phone to bed with him if he didn't want to hear it? Mine lived in the kitchen between the toaster and the ice cream machine most of the time, where the cats couldn't knock it on the floor, and I checked it occasionally for messages when passing. But he used his phone as an alarm clock, he explained patiently. I was still mystified. Why not get an alarm clock? I have one in my digital bedside radio, though reception for Classic FM is not very good.
Another colleague chimed in that she thought it was OK to text up to ten at night, but always carried her phone in case her daughter needed her. I was still mystified. Her daughter is twenty, or possibly twenty-one, and in perfect health so far as I know. If she were waiting for exam results, or going through boyfriend troubles, or taking part in a trans Saharan motor race then a steadying maternal hand on the tiller might be required, but all the time?
When I met my coterie of beekeeping friends for coffee a little while back nobody got their mobile phone out at any point. Everybody except me had children and grandchildren, and one had a husband with a heart condition and runs her own business, while another is moving house, so I'm sure they could all have thought of reasons why they needed to check their phones constantly if they'd wanted to. Really, constant mobile use or not comes down to attitude of mind. If people keep their phones out on the table and check them every two minutes that isn't the fault of the phone, any more than poison pen letters are the fault of letter writing.
Wednesday, 28 June 2017
it rained
It turned out that the Systems Administrator had not been watching the cricket, because it rained all day yesterday in Chelmsford and so the SA and friends had to content themselves with a curry instead. The rain was very late to arrive here. As evening drew on it began to drizzle lightly, and I held off watering the pots outside because the Met Office forecast was adamant that heavy rain was expected for twelve solid hours and there didn't seem any point in watering them if they were going to be soaked anyway. Two hours after they said it was raining there was still nothing but drizzle, and the SA showed me on the rain radar how vast areas of downpour were engulfing London and the Home Counties, moving north but staying just the other side of Colchester.
Eventually in the night it began to rain, and by morning there was a good inch of water in the green garden tubs standing by the front door. The tubs have sloping sides, so there was not as much as an inch of actual rain, and while I could have measured the diameter of the top and bottom of the tub and calculated the ratio of their areas and so the depth of rain that had fallen on the garden, I didn't, but it must have been a useful amount.
The rain has been followed not by marvelously fresh, clean air and clear skies, but by cloud and gusty wind. Isn't that the way with British summers? It was one of the reasons why we gave up sailing, too many holidays spent scuttling from port to port in half a gale punctuated by two or three days spent sitting watching a full gale.
The Systems Administrator helped me sort out my remaining photos for the music society website. I was convinced I had Adobe Photoshop on my laptop, but that must have been on my old machine. I now have the free editing software paint.NET installed. I don't really understand why people want to give me free software, but if they do that's fine. The Polish accordionist's website defeated even the SA's attempts to download a photo in any format my machine could process, and so I learned to do screen grabs as well. I thought when volunteering to help with the music society's website that the main benefit to me would be forcing me to learn stuff I wouldn't otherwise. It means the SA is de facto volunteering as well, but I did check that would be OK before going ahead.
This evening I am due to talk about the woodland charity. I have checked through the slides (or technically speaking digital images, but I still think of them as slides), since I haven't done the talk for a while, and had a look at the charity's website to see what's new. If you put your location into a search box on the charity's website it will list the local woods open to the public, in ascending order of distance away from you. There is only one small snag, which is that it fails to take account of the coastline of Essex and so believes that Southminster is less than ten miles from West Mersea. It might be, if you are a seagull, but not when you have to drive off the island and all the way up to Maldon to cross the river Blackwater before heading back out into the Dengie Peninsula.
Eventually in the night it began to rain, and by morning there was a good inch of water in the green garden tubs standing by the front door. The tubs have sloping sides, so there was not as much as an inch of actual rain, and while I could have measured the diameter of the top and bottom of the tub and calculated the ratio of their areas and so the depth of rain that had fallen on the garden, I didn't, but it must have been a useful amount.
The rain has been followed not by marvelously fresh, clean air and clear skies, but by cloud and gusty wind. Isn't that the way with British summers? It was one of the reasons why we gave up sailing, too many holidays spent scuttling from port to port in half a gale punctuated by two or three days spent sitting watching a full gale.
The Systems Administrator helped me sort out my remaining photos for the music society website. I was convinced I had Adobe Photoshop on my laptop, but that must have been on my old machine. I now have the free editing software paint.NET installed. I don't really understand why people want to give me free software, but if they do that's fine. The Polish accordionist's website defeated even the SA's attempts to download a photo in any format my machine could process, and so I learned to do screen grabs as well. I thought when volunteering to help with the music society's website that the main benefit to me would be forcing me to learn stuff I wouldn't otherwise. It means the SA is de facto volunteering as well, but I did check that would be OK before going ahead.
This evening I am due to talk about the woodland charity. I have checked through the slides (or technically speaking digital images, but I still think of them as slides), since I haven't done the talk for a while, and had a look at the charity's website to see what's new. If you put your location into a search box on the charity's website it will list the local woods open to the public, in ascending order of distance away from you. There is only one small snag, which is that it fails to take account of the coastline of Essex and so believes that Southminster is less than ten miles from West Mersea. It might be, if you are a seagull, but not when you have to drive off the island and all the way up to Maldon to cross the river Blackwater before heading back out into the Dengie Peninsula.
Tuesday, 27 June 2017
my day as a webmaster
I spent much of the day putting details of the next season's concerts on to the music society's website. It had been on my list of things to do for over a month, but given that the outline list of concerts with dates and artists was already up there, and the printed brochure is still in proof stage and won't be posted to our loyal supporters until the second half of August, it didn't feel like the most urgent thing on the list. Then I got an email from the Chairman asking very gently if I were going to have time to do it, because otherwise she would, and thought I'd better get on with it.
There is nothing exciting about setting up new Events on a very simple website and copy typing details of the programmes and blurb about the artists, before copying longer blurb from the artists' own websites and including links to them. Artists who bother to specify tend to be rather sensitive about third parties editing their biographies, so it is safer to import the long versions lock, stock and barrel. It's no good copying straight over, since everybody uses a different font, so it all has to go via Word to be converted into the music society's chosen script and be tidied up into neat paragraphs where there are extraneous spaces.
There is still no universal agreed standard among musicians about how to abbreviate the standard terms of the classical repertoire. Should it be Op or op, with or without a full stop? Comma or colon between the composer's name and the title of the piece of music, as in Brahms: Clarinet Quintet versus Brahms, Clarinet Quintet? Is there a hyphen in E-flat? Major or major, and Minor or minor? The music society in theory has decided how to treat all of these questions, but in practice there turned out to be some variation between concerts in the draft brochure, because the entries had been copied and pasted from communications sent by the artists themselves, or their agents. I felt bad I hadn't pitched in and proof read the brochure earlier, but several other people had and said it was OK, and I don't count myself a particularly good proof reader. It goes to show how much more attention you pay to the minutiae of text when you have to copy it.
Inserting the pictures is the worst bit, and a couple of our artists' websites defeated me and I had to put the task aside until I could ask the Systems Administrator for help. I only offered to maintain the music society's website after checking that the SA would be willing to provide me with technical support when needed. The most organised artists understand that little local music societies and local papers might want to download a picture to use in publicity, and make available a series of photos of themselves on their sites that are downloadable in JPEG format and aren't too big, along with the name to use in the photo credit. Bliss, it takes two minutes. Other artists photos came in file formats I'd never heard of and couldn't work out how to change, or were bigger than the data limit allowed by the music society's modest website and I couldn't find any way of reducing them. I longed for the SA, who was watching Essex v Middlesex in Chelmsford.
We have been following the Sky series Master of Photography, which manages to include enough technical details about apertures and shutter speeds to make the SA happy without there being so much that I switch off, along with a chunk of artistic commentary about the photos and some human interest as each week another contestant is eliminated. I am afraid that some of the less successful, trying too hard aspects of the Masters of Photography approach have crept on to some musicians' websites. Why, really, would you photograph a string quartet, the female members in long dresses, perched against chimney pots on a roof top or pretending to climb up a pile of logs? I am very dull and provincial. I would like pictures of them looking friendly and enthusiastic, and with their instruments, to reinforce what it is that they do.
There is nothing exciting about setting up new Events on a very simple website and copy typing details of the programmes and blurb about the artists, before copying longer blurb from the artists' own websites and including links to them. Artists who bother to specify tend to be rather sensitive about third parties editing their biographies, so it is safer to import the long versions lock, stock and barrel. It's no good copying straight over, since everybody uses a different font, so it all has to go via Word to be converted into the music society's chosen script and be tidied up into neat paragraphs where there are extraneous spaces.
There is still no universal agreed standard among musicians about how to abbreviate the standard terms of the classical repertoire. Should it be Op or op, with or without a full stop? Comma or colon between the composer's name and the title of the piece of music, as in Brahms: Clarinet Quintet versus Brahms, Clarinet Quintet? Is there a hyphen in E-flat? Major or major, and Minor or minor? The music society in theory has decided how to treat all of these questions, but in practice there turned out to be some variation between concerts in the draft brochure, because the entries had been copied and pasted from communications sent by the artists themselves, or their agents. I felt bad I hadn't pitched in and proof read the brochure earlier, but several other people had and said it was OK, and I don't count myself a particularly good proof reader. It goes to show how much more attention you pay to the minutiae of text when you have to copy it.
Inserting the pictures is the worst bit, and a couple of our artists' websites defeated me and I had to put the task aside until I could ask the Systems Administrator for help. I only offered to maintain the music society's website after checking that the SA would be willing to provide me with technical support when needed. The most organised artists understand that little local music societies and local papers might want to download a picture to use in publicity, and make available a series of photos of themselves on their sites that are downloadable in JPEG format and aren't too big, along with the name to use in the photo credit. Bliss, it takes two minutes. Other artists photos came in file formats I'd never heard of and couldn't work out how to change, or were bigger than the data limit allowed by the music society's modest website and I couldn't find any way of reducing them. I longed for the SA, who was watching Essex v Middlesex in Chelmsford.
We have been following the Sky series Master of Photography, which manages to include enough technical details about apertures and shutter speeds to make the SA happy without there being so much that I switch off, along with a chunk of artistic commentary about the photos and some human interest as each week another contestant is eliminated. I am afraid that some of the less successful, trying too hard aspects of the Masters of Photography approach have crept on to some musicians' websites. Why, really, would you photograph a string quartet, the female members in long dresses, perched against chimney pots on a roof top or pretending to climb up a pile of logs? I am very dull and provincial. I would like pictures of them looking friendly and enthusiastic, and with their instruments, to reinforce what it is that they do.
Monday, 26 June 2017
what's out in the back garden in late June
I went on weeding and edging in the back garden, while musing on what was looking good and what wasn't, and whether there was enough in flower at the moment. At lunchtime I wrote down my first conclusions on a garden ideas page of a spreadsheet, having lost enough pieces of paper with scribbles of gardening ideas on them to prefer a more permanent record. It is a good idea to write good ideas down, since what seemed blindingly obvious in late June may be a total blank by October when the borders are clearer, the ground damper, and you are ready to plant things.
The dying leaves of the Camassia leichtlinii in the far rose bed are a problem. The Camassia flowers, first blue and then the white, are delightful in the spring, The leaves are fine before they flower and for a while afterwards, but they are now dying down disgustingly. Last year I experimentally planted some Geranium 'Rozanne' in the same bed, to see if it would sprawl across the collapsed and yellowing remains of the Camassia, but the foliage of the latter was so dense that the geraniums struggled to get through, and they are still not romping away. There again, it has been very dry for chunks of the year and it may be that they will be more vigorous when they are more fully established. I racked my brains to come up with the idea of using 'Rozanne', and nothing has sprung to mind so far that would wait to emerge until late June then accept some shade, cope with the horrible clay, be content with twenty-one inches of annual rainfall, fit into a blue and yellow colour scheme, and be the right size to work as ground cover around roses.
The failure of potentially repeat flowering roses to produce further flushes given the meagre rainfall is also an issue. Many of the hybrid teas and the David Austin roses have ground to a halt. There are buds on some, but not nearly all of them. From that point of view the once flowering old roses are less of a disappointment. At least you know what you are going to get. I have been to visits to RHS Hyde Hall in the summer when they have been irrigating their flower borders outside the dry garden, which gives a clue to what might be necessary if you really expect a garden in East Anglia to keep going at full floral tilt into July and August.
On the plus side, some of the clematis are very good. I have fed them all religiously for the past couple of years, and I think they appreciate it. A couple of years ago I took to covering their roots in cobbles and sliding old plastic water bottles over the base of their stems, partly to protect the new growth from the rabbits that were living in the garden and partly to keep tabs on where the roots were. When the borders are fully grown in summer it can be impossible to tell where a clematis stem is coming from. I have a purple viticella type clambering through a white flowered single rose and another on a pink and white double old rose, a pale blue draped over the ochre leaved shrubby honeysuckle 'Baggeson's Gold', two dark reds entwined on a tripod and a third brighter red that has managed to make itself visible this year from its position a little too far back in the border partly because old rose 'Madame Hardy' has fallen over and I haven't got around to staking her. The non-climbing but leggy herbaceous clematis 'Alionushka' has taken enthusiastically to her new tripod, after years of wandering off to bloom unseen in the undergrowth, and the shorter herbaceous blue 'Petit Faucon' is equally happy on its new shorter support. There is a white one just waiting to get going in the far rose bed, that has opened one flower so far, and while I haven't seen any flowers yet on the dark mauve double 'Mary Rose' there was lots of growth last time I looked.
Sadly these represent only a fraction of all the clematis I have planted in the past twenty years. They are not the easiest things to get going in dry north Essex, among dense planting, or in the veins of heavy clay. Some quietly disappeared in the winter, probably rotted away, and others died of drought in the summer when I failed to get in among the other shrubs to water them sufficiently. Some were planted in too much shade too far back in the beds and lacked the strength to grow up to the light, even though if only they had been established they'd have easily reached to the tops of the roses they were meant to adorn. But when you can get them to go they are a great way of adding a second season to shrubs that flowered earlier in the year, or making delightful combinations with those roses that are still flowering.
The hydrangeas are just starting. First to open are the Hydangea macrophylla types, of which I have 'Ayesha', which has amazingly fleshy pink petals unlike anything else, and a nameless pink that was sold to me by mistake for 'Ayesha' and which I was all set to dig out, until it broke my spade and won itself a reprieve.
The alstroemerias are going well, those that took. Again, they are not the most reliable things when first planted, having fleshy and slightly tender roots vulnerable to freezing and rotting. I have a good orangey red, a cheerful pink and yellow, an amber and yellow, a soft orange, and one that is rather slow to get going and I can't remember what colour it is. A nice red planted a couple of years ago never came to anything, and a freebie yellow that had to be rescued and repotted when it was overshadowed by the surrounding asters seemed to recover, but failed to take when planted out again at the front of the bed. One of the difficulties of filling in what look like potential planting gaps in established borders is that in the first year the old plants shoot up so much faster than the newbies that the latter perish from lack of light, if you don't forget to water them because you can't see where they are. Alstroemerias don't seem much in fashion at the moment, I suppose because they look so highly bred and although we saw some in the cottage garden at Sissinghurst, they don't fit in with the New Perennial, prairie planting aesthetic. I like them anyway. Some are very pretty and they go on flowering for ages. Philip Tivey is the place to go.
Leaves are important too, in summer as well as autumn. The Japanese maples in their big pots are looking great, and so far I have managed to keep them properly watered so that the leaf margins have not gone brown and crispy. They will live happily in pots for decades if treated properly. The oldest of ours was a moving-in present when we came to the present house, so we have had it for nearly twenty-four years. They now get sun for about half the day and are well sheltered from the wind, which suits them fine. The first plant lived in the porch for several years but was a slightly sad and wind-blown thing until relocated to the back garden.
The dying leaves of the Camassia leichtlinii in the far rose bed are a problem. The Camassia flowers, first blue and then the white, are delightful in the spring, The leaves are fine before they flower and for a while afterwards, but they are now dying down disgustingly. Last year I experimentally planted some Geranium 'Rozanne' in the same bed, to see if it would sprawl across the collapsed and yellowing remains of the Camassia, but the foliage of the latter was so dense that the geraniums struggled to get through, and they are still not romping away. There again, it has been very dry for chunks of the year and it may be that they will be more vigorous when they are more fully established. I racked my brains to come up with the idea of using 'Rozanne', and nothing has sprung to mind so far that would wait to emerge until late June then accept some shade, cope with the horrible clay, be content with twenty-one inches of annual rainfall, fit into a blue and yellow colour scheme, and be the right size to work as ground cover around roses.
The failure of potentially repeat flowering roses to produce further flushes given the meagre rainfall is also an issue. Many of the hybrid teas and the David Austin roses have ground to a halt. There are buds on some, but not nearly all of them. From that point of view the once flowering old roses are less of a disappointment. At least you know what you are going to get. I have been to visits to RHS Hyde Hall in the summer when they have been irrigating their flower borders outside the dry garden, which gives a clue to what might be necessary if you really expect a garden in East Anglia to keep going at full floral tilt into July and August.
On the plus side, some of the clematis are very good. I have fed them all religiously for the past couple of years, and I think they appreciate it. A couple of years ago I took to covering their roots in cobbles and sliding old plastic water bottles over the base of their stems, partly to protect the new growth from the rabbits that were living in the garden and partly to keep tabs on where the roots were. When the borders are fully grown in summer it can be impossible to tell where a clematis stem is coming from. I have a purple viticella type clambering through a white flowered single rose and another on a pink and white double old rose, a pale blue draped over the ochre leaved shrubby honeysuckle 'Baggeson's Gold', two dark reds entwined on a tripod and a third brighter red that has managed to make itself visible this year from its position a little too far back in the border partly because old rose 'Madame Hardy' has fallen over and I haven't got around to staking her. The non-climbing but leggy herbaceous clematis 'Alionushka' has taken enthusiastically to her new tripod, after years of wandering off to bloom unseen in the undergrowth, and the shorter herbaceous blue 'Petit Faucon' is equally happy on its new shorter support. There is a white one just waiting to get going in the far rose bed, that has opened one flower so far, and while I haven't seen any flowers yet on the dark mauve double 'Mary Rose' there was lots of growth last time I looked.
Sadly these represent only a fraction of all the clematis I have planted in the past twenty years. They are not the easiest things to get going in dry north Essex, among dense planting, or in the veins of heavy clay. Some quietly disappeared in the winter, probably rotted away, and others died of drought in the summer when I failed to get in among the other shrubs to water them sufficiently. Some were planted in too much shade too far back in the beds and lacked the strength to grow up to the light, even though if only they had been established they'd have easily reached to the tops of the roses they were meant to adorn. But when you can get them to go they are a great way of adding a second season to shrubs that flowered earlier in the year, or making delightful combinations with those roses that are still flowering.
The hydrangeas are just starting. First to open are the Hydangea macrophylla types, of which I have 'Ayesha', which has amazingly fleshy pink petals unlike anything else, and a nameless pink that was sold to me by mistake for 'Ayesha' and which I was all set to dig out, until it broke my spade and won itself a reprieve.
The alstroemerias are going well, those that took. Again, they are not the most reliable things when first planted, having fleshy and slightly tender roots vulnerable to freezing and rotting. I have a good orangey red, a cheerful pink and yellow, an amber and yellow, a soft orange, and one that is rather slow to get going and I can't remember what colour it is. A nice red planted a couple of years ago never came to anything, and a freebie yellow that had to be rescued and repotted when it was overshadowed by the surrounding asters seemed to recover, but failed to take when planted out again at the front of the bed. One of the difficulties of filling in what look like potential planting gaps in established borders is that in the first year the old plants shoot up so much faster than the newbies that the latter perish from lack of light, if you don't forget to water them because you can't see where they are. Alstroemerias don't seem much in fashion at the moment, I suppose because they look so highly bred and although we saw some in the cottage garden at Sissinghurst, they don't fit in with the New Perennial, prairie planting aesthetic. I like them anyway. Some are very pretty and they go on flowering for ages. Philip Tivey is the place to go.
Leaves are important too, in summer as well as autumn. The Japanese maples in their big pots are looking great, and so far I have managed to keep them properly watered so that the leaf margins have not gone brown and crispy. They will live happily in pots for decades if treated properly. The oldest of ours was a moving-in present when we came to the present house, so we have had it for nearly twenty-four years. They now get sun for about half the day and are well sheltered from the wind, which suits them fine. The first plant lived in the porch for several years but was a slightly sad and wind-blown thing until relocated to the back garden.
Sunday, 25 June 2017
care and maintenance
I made a flan for lunch today, and apart from that I spent the day tidying around the top lawns, and watering. To deal with the flan first, it contained leek, goat cheese, and pulled ham, more trouble than heating up a supermarket one but nicer, and besides we have plenty of eggs.
In the back garden the edges need cutting. In fact, they have needed cutting for weeks and to my chagrin have shot up to produce flowering heads of grass, which I thought I really had better cut down before they seeded into the borders. In the borders I needed to chop down the spent flowering stems of the Camassia and the last few Aquilegia. I'd had a couple of goes at those already but plenty of flower stems still remained. The top spikes of many of the Aconitum had gone over leaving smaller side stems of flowers further down, so I took out the spent main spikes to improve the look of the remaining ones. I removed the finished flowers of Cephalaria gigantea on the same basis. I deadheaded the David Austin roses, though some show no signs currently of sending up fresh flowering growth and may not unless we get some proper rain or I give them a good soaking with the hose.
I pulled up horsetail, which again I started doing a month ago but did not have time to get right round the beds. The regrowth in the areas I did before is much lower and less dense. Horsetail appears impossible to eradicate though weeding or poison, but if you keep pulling it when you see it the plants get weaker, and will be hidden by ground cover if you go for something reasonably tall and bushy. The big leaves of Brunnera macrophylla do a pretty good job. Horsetail is not a strongly competitive weed and does not crowd out other occupants of the border, or at least not if they are chosen on the scale of Brunnera and the like, but it improves the look of the thing to pull it out.
There are patches of creeping thistle in both rose beds. Where the surrounding planting is too dense to risk using glyphosate at this time of year I pulled the stems up, for the look of the thing and to try and weaken it. Where I can safely get at the stems to spray them I'll do that next week. I sprayed the emerging growth in the spring, but creeping thistle is a tough beast that doesn't give up that easily.
The Strulch is doing a good job of keeping down most seed borne weeds. I pulled out numerous tiny hollies, ivies, dogwoods and field maples, and noted the position of a useful yew seedling to be moved in the autumn. There were a few strands of goose grass but not too much.
I cut off the long arms of the rambling roses that were yet again making a bid for freedom from the rose bank, leaving them in a trail along the middle of the lawn to be picked up later, along with any dead wood I noticed which was trimmed out as I went along. The rose 'Mrs Oakley Fisher' is making a strong new stem from low down, and may yet win a reprieve if she will just keep doing that.
It is all very satisfying, seeing the borders emerge from the fuzz of rank edges and dead heads. If I were not trying to do so many other things as well I would go round them more often than I do. This kind of routine maintenance is a major, and unsung, part of gardening, and essential to having a good garden. Magazine articles tend to play up the planting associations, while advertisements for the DIY sheds would have you believe that the thing you need to do to rejuvenate your garden and ready it for summer is go and buy bedding, hanging baskets and barbecues. In fact, far more than adding new plants at this time of year, making the most of what you already have by trimming and tweaking is key.
In the back garden the edges need cutting. In fact, they have needed cutting for weeks and to my chagrin have shot up to produce flowering heads of grass, which I thought I really had better cut down before they seeded into the borders. In the borders I needed to chop down the spent flowering stems of the Camassia and the last few Aquilegia. I'd had a couple of goes at those already but plenty of flower stems still remained. The top spikes of many of the Aconitum had gone over leaving smaller side stems of flowers further down, so I took out the spent main spikes to improve the look of the remaining ones. I removed the finished flowers of Cephalaria gigantea on the same basis. I deadheaded the David Austin roses, though some show no signs currently of sending up fresh flowering growth and may not unless we get some proper rain or I give them a good soaking with the hose.
I pulled up horsetail, which again I started doing a month ago but did not have time to get right round the beds. The regrowth in the areas I did before is much lower and less dense. Horsetail appears impossible to eradicate though weeding or poison, but if you keep pulling it when you see it the plants get weaker, and will be hidden by ground cover if you go for something reasonably tall and bushy. The big leaves of Brunnera macrophylla do a pretty good job. Horsetail is not a strongly competitive weed and does not crowd out other occupants of the border, or at least not if they are chosen on the scale of Brunnera and the like, but it improves the look of the thing to pull it out.
There are patches of creeping thistle in both rose beds. Where the surrounding planting is too dense to risk using glyphosate at this time of year I pulled the stems up, for the look of the thing and to try and weaken it. Where I can safely get at the stems to spray them I'll do that next week. I sprayed the emerging growth in the spring, but creeping thistle is a tough beast that doesn't give up that easily.
The Strulch is doing a good job of keeping down most seed borne weeds. I pulled out numerous tiny hollies, ivies, dogwoods and field maples, and noted the position of a useful yew seedling to be moved in the autumn. There were a few strands of goose grass but not too much.
I cut off the long arms of the rambling roses that were yet again making a bid for freedom from the rose bank, leaving them in a trail along the middle of the lawn to be picked up later, along with any dead wood I noticed which was trimmed out as I went along. The rose 'Mrs Oakley Fisher' is making a strong new stem from low down, and may yet win a reprieve if she will just keep doing that.
It is all very satisfying, seeing the borders emerge from the fuzz of rank edges and dead heads. If I were not trying to do so many other things as well I would go round them more often than I do. This kind of routine maintenance is a major, and unsung, part of gardening, and essential to having a good garden. Magazine articles tend to play up the planting associations, while advertisements for the DIY sheds would have you believe that the thing you need to do to rejuvenate your garden and ready it for summer is go and buy bedding, hanging baskets and barbecues. In fact, far more than adding new plants at this time of year, making the most of what you already have by trimming and tweaking is key.
Saturday, 24 June 2017
is it a weed?
As I was going out to the greenhouse my eye fell upon a bindweed that was twining its way up the base of one of the tripods in the herb bed, that more properly belonged to a still reluctant Clematis alpina. The bindweed flowers had a pinkish tinge to them, and were objectively speaking pretty, and I thought how culturally determined our ideas are of what constitutes a weed. I greatly coveted the bindweed's relative that I saw growing at the foot of Sissinghurst's tower. Its flowers were a deeper shade of pink than the bindweed in my herb bed, and its leaves were considerably more interesting, but many garden plants with frankly dull leaves are still counted as plants and not weeds.
I am with Richard Mabey and Michael Pollan when they identify the rankly weedy nature of weeds. Their speed of growth, love of disturbed earth and ability to spread themselves mark them out as weeds. There is a pat saying that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place, but that is not so. As I argued to the last person who quoted it to me, supposing you had a huge and majestic oriental plane tree that somebody had planted in an inappropriately small front garden. That would not make it a weed; it would still be a splendid tree but one that someone had planted in a very silly place.
Others see it differently. The local Chinese were apparently baffled by the interest shown in their wild flora by nineteenth and early twentieth century plant hunters. There were very settled ideas in Chinese culture about what constituted a garden plant. Chrysanthemums, Yulan magnolia, plum blossom, bamboo, and other garden plants all had their symbolic meanings and featured in Chinese painting and poetry as well as their gardens. Wild plants had no meaning and no place in the garden, and the locals did not see why the foreigners should be interested in them. Modern day east coast Americans have been baffled by the presence of the ephemeral spring flowering Mertensia virginica in English garden borders. Used to seeing it in huge quantities in the wild, they can't see why anybody would bother to grow it.
I am sometimes asked to identify mystery plants in the gardens of my friends and acquaintances, and I have come to realise that often when they ask Is it a weed they are asking in the Chinese sense, not the Richard Mabey and Michael Pollan sense of inherent weediness. They do not just mean, Is it a thug, will it smother everything else and seed everywhere or send mad, running roots through the entire border, rather they mean Will I be laughed at for growing it? Is it a socially acceptable thing to have or will its presence mark me out as ignorant and my garden as unkempt?
I allow quite a lot of cow parsley in the garden, and some hogweed. I am aware that they both have the potential to seed alarmingly, but I like cow parsley and the hogweed is quite attractive in a coarser and stouter way, and reliably perennial, unlike some of the more refined umbellifers. Some tidier minded gardeners would not approve of them, or the flourishing clump of red campion that has taken up permanent residence at the edge of the island bed. I keep meaning to try and get parsnips going in the rose beds, since I observed early in my spasmodic vegetable growing career that parsnip flowers were rather pretty. Cleve West then went and used them in a Chelsea garden so I'd have looked as though I were copying him, but that was several years ago now. Surely you can have anything in a flower bed that you like and that will grow there and is in rough balance with the other occupants of the bed, vigorous enough to survive but not so rampant it takes over.
I will pull up the bindweed in the herb bed when I get round to it, though. Digging the roots out completely is almost impossible, but if you keep pulling the tops off that keeps them in check. Bindweed really is too inherently weedy.
I am with Richard Mabey and Michael Pollan when they identify the rankly weedy nature of weeds. Their speed of growth, love of disturbed earth and ability to spread themselves mark them out as weeds. There is a pat saying that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place, but that is not so. As I argued to the last person who quoted it to me, supposing you had a huge and majestic oriental plane tree that somebody had planted in an inappropriately small front garden. That would not make it a weed; it would still be a splendid tree but one that someone had planted in a very silly place.
Others see it differently. The local Chinese were apparently baffled by the interest shown in their wild flora by nineteenth and early twentieth century plant hunters. There were very settled ideas in Chinese culture about what constituted a garden plant. Chrysanthemums, Yulan magnolia, plum blossom, bamboo, and other garden plants all had their symbolic meanings and featured in Chinese painting and poetry as well as their gardens. Wild plants had no meaning and no place in the garden, and the locals did not see why the foreigners should be interested in them. Modern day east coast Americans have been baffled by the presence of the ephemeral spring flowering Mertensia virginica in English garden borders. Used to seeing it in huge quantities in the wild, they can't see why anybody would bother to grow it.
I am sometimes asked to identify mystery plants in the gardens of my friends and acquaintances, and I have come to realise that often when they ask Is it a weed they are asking in the Chinese sense, not the Richard Mabey and Michael Pollan sense of inherent weediness. They do not just mean, Is it a thug, will it smother everything else and seed everywhere or send mad, running roots through the entire border, rather they mean Will I be laughed at for growing it? Is it a socially acceptable thing to have or will its presence mark me out as ignorant and my garden as unkempt?
I allow quite a lot of cow parsley in the garden, and some hogweed. I am aware that they both have the potential to seed alarmingly, but I like cow parsley and the hogweed is quite attractive in a coarser and stouter way, and reliably perennial, unlike some of the more refined umbellifers. Some tidier minded gardeners would not approve of them, or the flourishing clump of red campion that has taken up permanent residence at the edge of the island bed. I keep meaning to try and get parsnips going in the rose beds, since I observed early in my spasmodic vegetable growing career that parsnip flowers were rather pretty. Cleve West then went and used them in a Chelsea garden so I'd have looked as though I were copying him, but that was several years ago now. Surely you can have anything in a flower bed that you like and that will grow there and is in rough balance with the other occupants of the bed, vigorous enough to survive but not so rampant it takes over.
I will pull up the bindweed in the herb bed when I get round to it, though. Digging the roots out completely is almost impossible, but if you keep pulling the tops off that keeps them in check. Bindweed really is too inherently weedy.
Friday, 23 June 2017
casting light into a dark corner
Our neighbours have cleared away a lot of trees and scrub from the ditch along the bottom of their field. This lets more light into our shady bottom corner, which is a good thing from my point of view since the corner is still quite shady enough. I don't think any of the ferns or the Geranium phaeum will be curling up in horror at the sight of that blistering orb in the sky. On the downside where previously the shady planting had a backdrop of densely planted young trees, against which you could see the rabbit fence if you looked closely but it wasn't offensively obvious, the fence is now starkly visible against a background of the ivy which has run all over the formerly shaded ground of the field.
I have been harvesting yew seedlings found around the garden to make a hedge inside the field hedge by the shady corner. The plan is to keep it densely clipped so that it forms a backdrop for the ferns and the museum shop copy of the head of Thalia, the Roman muse of comedy, and to top it off at about five feet. It is a slightly risky plan in that if we get another freakishly wet year and the water table rises again then the yews will drown, like they did the previous time I tried making an evergreen hedge with some bought yews left over from another project. But we have only had one such impossibly wet period once in twenty-four years, so the yews might see out our tenure. It is true that the largest yew in the projected hedge is still less than a foot high and so it will be several years before it actually hides the fence, but there you go.
It was the Systems Administrator who called me down to the bottom of the garden to see how much lighter it was, and in return I invited the SA to admire my stumpery of one stump. The SA said that if I wanted more stumps there might be some suitable ones in the wood where some small alders had come down, and promised to investigate in the autumn. I am all in favour of home grown stumps where possible. I got the existing stump from a firm exhibiting at the Hampton Court Flower Show, but they ceased trading years ago. Quick searches online have not thrown up any obvious successor, though I am intrigued by the offer from a vendor in Hampshire of a large box of collected driftwood, scarcely used. Free stumps with no stump miles attached would be better, though.
I have been harvesting yew seedlings found around the garden to make a hedge inside the field hedge by the shady corner. The plan is to keep it densely clipped so that it forms a backdrop for the ferns and the museum shop copy of the head of Thalia, the Roman muse of comedy, and to top it off at about five feet. It is a slightly risky plan in that if we get another freakishly wet year and the water table rises again then the yews will drown, like they did the previous time I tried making an evergreen hedge with some bought yews left over from another project. But we have only had one such impossibly wet period once in twenty-four years, so the yews might see out our tenure. It is true that the largest yew in the projected hedge is still less than a foot high and so it will be several years before it actually hides the fence, but there you go.
It was the Systems Administrator who called me down to the bottom of the garden to see how much lighter it was, and in return I invited the SA to admire my stumpery of one stump. The SA said that if I wanted more stumps there might be some suitable ones in the wood where some small alders had come down, and promised to investigate in the autumn. I am all in favour of home grown stumps where possible. I got the existing stump from a firm exhibiting at the Hampton Court Flower Show, but they ceased trading years ago. Quick searches online have not thrown up any obvious successor, though I am intrigued by the offer from a vendor in Hampshire of a large box of collected driftwood, scarcely used. Free stumps with no stump miles attached would be better, though.
Thursday, 22 June 2017
a visit to the UK's one hundred and thirty fourth most popular visitor attraction (2016)
My mother and I went to Sissinghurst, and made it back from Sissinghurst, with the only thundery shower happening just after we had gone inside the vast garden centre just off the M25 where the coach stopped for an early lunch and comfort break, and we were extremely lucky with the traffic, so the logistics of the visit worked much better than I was afraid they might.
Sissinghurst looked just like it does in all the books and magazine articles and TV articles that have been devoted to it, except that there were other people in it, which there never are when Monty Don features it as one of his eighty gardens of the world, or Marcus Harpur gets up at four in the morning to photograph it. But there were not nearly as many people as I thought there would be.
What can anybody say about Sissinghurst that hasn't been said already? It is one of the most famous gardens in England, which probably makes it one of the most famous in the world, gardens being one of the things the English are renowned for being peculiarly good at. The planting is still lavish, the yew hedges enclosing the internal paths are slightly too close together. It is not quite as it was in Harold and Vita's day, partly because it has to accommodate so many more visitors, 198,255 in 2016 according to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, and partly because gardens refuse to stand still. The soil along the nut walk became primrose sick and primulas could not be grown there any more, and that was that.
If you want to know about the famous (and much copied) white garden or the hot coloured cottage garden, the internet is already awash with descriptions and photographs of them. I did not take any pictures, preferring to pay attention to the experience of actually being there, but my mother and I were in the minority not walking about with our phones held out in front of us. Nowadays I refuse to shuffle out of the way when a stranger wielding a phone steps into my personal space. In the old days if somebody had bothered to bring a camera, especially one with a big lens on the front, I used to feel obliged not to interfere with their shot when they had gone to so much trouble and were taking it so seriously, but mere possession of a phone does not entitle you to barge other people out of the way.
There are lots of roses, and lots of clematis, and I was reminded again how much I like each of them and how well they go together. Apart from that I noted a few plants in my little black garden visiting notebook. The first was Ammi majus, which I have read about but not knowingly seen growing. It is an umbellifer, an annual which has to be sown from fresh seed, and is better sown where it is to flower (although I see Crocus do offer plugs). Thanks to these requirements I have never managed to get round to trying to grow it. Derry Watkins of Special Plants sells fresh seed in autumn of Ammi and other species, many umbelliferous, that need to be sown at once, so in principle I could buy the seed, but with the crowded nature of the garden and the Strulch I'm not sure where to sow it. Having seen Ammi in the flesh I am more convinced that it would be worth the effort to try and find the space and organise the soil to its liking. To call it a refined cow parsley is to understate its charms, and I say that as somebody who likes cow parsley. Ammi positively shines in all its parts, leaves, stems and luminously white flowers.
Another name I wrote down was Asphodeline liburnica. It did have a label buried deep beneath the clump, which was pointed out to me by the kind gardener who also told me the name of the Ammi. I had guessed the Asphodeline part of the name, but it was useful to have the whole confirmed. It was growing in the cottage garden, and had airy spikes of individually dainty flowers in a good but bright shade of yellow, on top of stems with slender, whorled, greyish leaves. I liked the poise of the plant, and thought it looked as though it would be drought tolerant, and the fact that it was flowering now when the Asphodeline lutea that I already grow has finished would be handy. Looking online I see that Beth Chatto would sell me some, though I was discouraged to see that it required rich soil, but all the other mentions I looked at before supper made it sound tougher than that. Apparently the flowers only open in the afternoons, which was when we saw it. I would not order any without further research, but it could be a good one for the garden at home.
The kindly gardener, who was very polite about being interrupted just as she was trying to spray a lupin, did not know the full name of the little pink climbing thing I had noticed at the foot of the tower, beyond confirming that it looked like some sort of convolvulus because it was. My initial Google search for pink flowered convolvulus produced lots of entries for Convolvulus cneorum, which does not even have pink flowers but lots of people want to sell them, and common bindweed. Once I changed my search terms to pink convolvulus sissinghurst tower it was up there near the top of the first page in somebody else's blog entry, nestling by the base of the tower, Convolvulus altheoides ssp tenuissimus. It had the most delightful grey divided leaves, and I liked it very much, though at this moment I still have three unanswered questions. Is is hardy? Is it as invasive as common bindweed? And is it available in commerce if the answers to the first two questions should be Yes and No?
So Sissinghurst was far less crowded than I expected, and I am very glad to have finally seen it given it is so historic, and I liked it, but with the caveat that rather like Hidcote it has lost its original essence. Once gardens have to carry that many visitors, and the original creating minds are no longer present, they change. Kiftsgate just down the lane from Hidcote is still in the same family, and is still alive. The brilliant little town garden we visited in Richmond was bursting with its own essence, and the private garden near Haverhill I saw with the garden club. Great Dixter retains its vitality under Fergus Garrett's direction, but he worked with Christopher Lloyd for many years. Sissinghurst is very pretty, but in some way I can't quite put my finger on it feels like a pastiche of itself. Maybe if I could wander around it alone in the early morning it would come fully to life.
Sissinghurst looked just like it does in all the books and magazine articles and TV articles that have been devoted to it, except that there were other people in it, which there never are when Monty Don features it as one of his eighty gardens of the world, or Marcus Harpur gets up at four in the morning to photograph it. But there were not nearly as many people as I thought there would be.
What can anybody say about Sissinghurst that hasn't been said already? It is one of the most famous gardens in England, which probably makes it one of the most famous in the world, gardens being one of the things the English are renowned for being peculiarly good at. The planting is still lavish, the yew hedges enclosing the internal paths are slightly too close together. It is not quite as it was in Harold and Vita's day, partly because it has to accommodate so many more visitors, 198,255 in 2016 according to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, and partly because gardens refuse to stand still. The soil along the nut walk became primrose sick and primulas could not be grown there any more, and that was that.
If you want to know about the famous (and much copied) white garden or the hot coloured cottage garden, the internet is already awash with descriptions and photographs of them. I did not take any pictures, preferring to pay attention to the experience of actually being there, but my mother and I were in the minority not walking about with our phones held out in front of us. Nowadays I refuse to shuffle out of the way when a stranger wielding a phone steps into my personal space. In the old days if somebody had bothered to bring a camera, especially one with a big lens on the front, I used to feel obliged not to interfere with their shot when they had gone to so much trouble and were taking it so seriously, but mere possession of a phone does not entitle you to barge other people out of the way.
There are lots of roses, and lots of clematis, and I was reminded again how much I like each of them and how well they go together. Apart from that I noted a few plants in my little black garden visiting notebook. The first was Ammi majus, which I have read about but not knowingly seen growing. It is an umbellifer, an annual which has to be sown from fresh seed, and is better sown where it is to flower (although I see Crocus do offer plugs). Thanks to these requirements I have never managed to get round to trying to grow it. Derry Watkins of Special Plants sells fresh seed in autumn of Ammi and other species, many umbelliferous, that need to be sown at once, so in principle I could buy the seed, but with the crowded nature of the garden and the Strulch I'm not sure where to sow it. Having seen Ammi in the flesh I am more convinced that it would be worth the effort to try and find the space and organise the soil to its liking. To call it a refined cow parsley is to understate its charms, and I say that as somebody who likes cow parsley. Ammi positively shines in all its parts, leaves, stems and luminously white flowers.
Another name I wrote down was Asphodeline liburnica. It did have a label buried deep beneath the clump, which was pointed out to me by the kind gardener who also told me the name of the Ammi. I had guessed the Asphodeline part of the name, but it was useful to have the whole confirmed. It was growing in the cottage garden, and had airy spikes of individually dainty flowers in a good but bright shade of yellow, on top of stems with slender, whorled, greyish leaves. I liked the poise of the plant, and thought it looked as though it would be drought tolerant, and the fact that it was flowering now when the Asphodeline lutea that I already grow has finished would be handy. Looking online I see that Beth Chatto would sell me some, though I was discouraged to see that it required rich soil, but all the other mentions I looked at before supper made it sound tougher than that. Apparently the flowers only open in the afternoons, which was when we saw it. I would not order any without further research, but it could be a good one for the garden at home.
The kindly gardener, who was very polite about being interrupted just as she was trying to spray a lupin, did not know the full name of the little pink climbing thing I had noticed at the foot of the tower, beyond confirming that it looked like some sort of convolvulus because it was. My initial Google search for pink flowered convolvulus produced lots of entries for Convolvulus cneorum, which does not even have pink flowers but lots of people want to sell them, and common bindweed. Once I changed my search terms to pink convolvulus sissinghurst tower it was up there near the top of the first page in somebody else's blog entry, nestling by the base of the tower, Convolvulus altheoides ssp tenuissimus. It had the most delightful grey divided leaves, and I liked it very much, though at this moment I still have three unanswered questions. Is is hardy? Is it as invasive as common bindweed? And is it available in commerce if the answers to the first two questions should be Yes and No?
So Sissinghurst was far less crowded than I expected, and I am very glad to have finally seen it given it is so historic, and I liked it, but with the caveat that rather like Hidcote it has lost its original essence. Once gardens have to carry that many visitors, and the original creating minds are no longer present, they change. Kiftsgate just down the lane from Hidcote is still in the same family, and is still alive. The brilliant little town garden we visited in Richmond was bursting with its own essence, and the private garden near Haverhill I saw with the garden club. Great Dixter retains its vitality under Fergus Garrett's direction, but he worked with Christopher Lloyd for many years. Sissinghurst is very pretty, but in some way I can't quite put my finger on it feels like a pastiche of itself. Maybe if I could wander around it alone in the early morning it would come fully to life.
Wednesday, 21 June 2017
the hottest day
I made it to London and back without any train delays. On the hottest day of the year this came as a major relief. Mind you, I did abandon any plans of going to a gallery or museum in the afternoon, which I would normally do to extract maximum value from my day return. Instead, catching the 3.18 out of Liverpool Street and escaping from London before the rush hour seemed the sensible course of action. One of my former colleagues was heading straight back to Lewisham on the same principle.
There are many ways of telling that you really are well and truly middle aged, but one is finding yourself, when you are in Oxford Street with three quarters of an hour to spare before lunch, down in the basement of John Lewis looking at frying pans. I did not buy one, because I did not want to turn up to my work reunion lunch carrying a frying pan, and supposing I had decided to risk the rush hour trains and go to the Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum they would probably not have let me in with a frying pan.
When I got home I read the online review of the pan I'd liked the look of, though if there is anything more middle aged than hanging around the John Lewis kitchenware department it has to be looking up online reviews of frying pans. Some people said the pan was brilliant and some said it chipped and ceased to be non-stick very quickly, and I became totally undecided and gave up. We will just have to go on eating fragments of Teflon coating each time we cook using the old one for a bit longer. I am fed up with pans coated with non-stick finishes that scratch however careful you are, but I would like a pan that I could make omelettes and pancakes in without them sticking to the base. The Systems Administrator wants a metal handle so that the pan can go in the oven. It would be easier in so many ways to be less middle aged and never cook and to spend any odd three quarters of an hour that I had in Oxford Street looking at shoes. Though John Lewis' basement has very nice air conditioning, and they do not call it a basement, with its connotations of spiders and boilers and psychotic caretakers; it is the Lower Ground Floor.
When I got home the SA had done most of the watering, and I would have had time to assemble ten new frames so that I could add a super to one of the beehives that needs it, only the parcel containing the parts for the frames that was sent yesterday for next working day delivery, and that was out for delivery by 07.54 this morning, never arrived and is still travelling around Essex in a van somewhere. Actually, by now it is probably back in the depot in Chelmsford. I thought I had enough frames, but when I went to get the supers on Monday the wax moth had got into one of them. I feel rather mean leaving the SA on FedEx watch two days running, but I suppose I have spent quite a few days myself keeping an eye out for delivery vans bearing discounted military history books and bits for the model railway.
Tomorrow we are due to have a thundery breakdown while I am in a coach travelling to Kent with my mother. This is unfortunate.
There are many ways of telling that you really are well and truly middle aged, but one is finding yourself, when you are in Oxford Street with three quarters of an hour to spare before lunch, down in the basement of John Lewis looking at frying pans. I did not buy one, because I did not want to turn up to my work reunion lunch carrying a frying pan, and supposing I had decided to risk the rush hour trains and go to the Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum they would probably not have let me in with a frying pan.
When I got home I read the online review of the pan I'd liked the look of, though if there is anything more middle aged than hanging around the John Lewis kitchenware department it has to be looking up online reviews of frying pans. Some people said the pan was brilliant and some said it chipped and ceased to be non-stick very quickly, and I became totally undecided and gave up. We will just have to go on eating fragments of Teflon coating each time we cook using the old one for a bit longer. I am fed up with pans coated with non-stick finishes that scratch however careful you are, but I would like a pan that I could make omelettes and pancakes in without them sticking to the base. The Systems Administrator wants a metal handle so that the pan can go in the oven. It would be easier in so many ways to be less middle aged and never cook and to spend any odd three quarters of an hour that I had in Oxford Street looking at shoes. Though John Lewis' basement has very nice air conditioning, and they do not call it a basement, with its connotations of spiders and boilers and psychotic caretakers; it is the Lower Ground Floor.
When I got home the SA had done most of the watering, and I would have had time to assemble ten new frames so that I could add a super to one of the beehives that needs it, only the parcel containing the parts for the frames that was sent yesterday for next working day delivery, and that was out for delivery by 07.54 this morning, never arrived and is still travelling around Essex in a van somewhere. Actually, by now it is probably back in the depot in Chelmsford. I thought I had enough frames, but when I went to get the supers on Monday the wax moth had got into one of them. I feel rather mean leaving the SA on FedEx watch two days running, but I suppose I have spent quite a few days myself keeping an eye out for delivery vans bearing discounted military history books and bits for the model railway.
Tomorrow we are due to have a thundery breakdown while I am in a coach travelling to Kent with my mother. This is unfortunate.
Tuesday, 20 June 2017
hot weather gardening
My aunt gave a cello recital today, and I did not go. I felt rather mean about that, because it was a while since I'd been to one and she told me about it weeks ago, but I am already due to go to London tomorrow and on another trip on Thursday, and could not cope with making it three days in a row when I'd have to prevail upon the Systems Administrator to water in the greenhouse and cold frames and all the smaller pots on the terrace, because in this heat they cannot make it through the day without a lunchtime top up. And in truth I dreaded the idea of the train to London. The SA went to the cricket yesterday and the journey home took two and a half hours, with Abellio Greater Anglia first of all cancelling the connection from Colchester to Wivenhoe because there were no drivers, and then relenting and stumping up for taxis for the twenty or so people who needed to get there. When I asked if the SA had had a nice day the answer was yes, up until the train journey back. The temperature in London is forecast to hit 32 C tomorrow, and never mind travelling with a bottle of water, I feel I should be taking an entire carboy.
Today I watered the recent plantings up by the wood, which did not look too bad. They are in shade for part of the day and sheltered from the wind, so hadn't dried out as much as I feared. I still had a hose draped along the line of the fence and around the pond from the last time I needed to water up there, when the primroses were collapsing with drought, so didn't have to sort that out again, but getting it to work was as aggravating as running long, seldom used stretches of hose usually is. Nothing came out of the spray head when I squeezed the trigger, after an initial trickle, and when I went to investigate I found the initial run of hose from the house had come loose at the point where it joined the metal tube attached to the remote outdoor tap. I had to go and borrow a screwdriver from the workshop so that I could reattach the jubilee clip, and that was so stiff that I couldn't shift it at first and thought I was going to go and have to ask the SA to fix the hose for me. By the time I'd managed to work the clip loose enough to slide it back over the end of the metal pipe and then do it up again I'd forgotten whether I'd turned the remote tap off or not, and confused myself thoroughly turning it both ways trying to remember which way was on, in the absence of any feedback because I was fifty yards from the business end of the hose. By the time I'd finally got things up and running I'd walked from halfway up the meadow to the remote tap and back to the main tap on the house a lot of times.
The pink rambling rose 'Ethel' has finally got into its stride in the meadow and is sprawling delightfully through a fallen but still live oak. Some of the rose stems saw no need to exert themselves climbing, and instead have made a bolt towards the middle of the meadow, weaving their way through a nearby shrub rose in the process. The combination of pale pink 'Ethel' and the darker pink shrub rose flowers is very pretty, and I need to get the mess of bracken, goose grass, and other weeds out of the way so that I can assess the situation and see if they can stay like that, or if 'Ethel' is going to have to be either bodily shoved into the oak tree or else pruned. In the back garden the rambler 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' is going over, and it's worth knowing that 'Ethel' flowers significantly later, since if you wanted to prolong the season of small pink pompoms cascading from large trees you could use both.
There are an awful lot of weeds, and where I ran out of time to dig the bramble roots out they are busily sending up new shoots. Now I have finished assembling pots and the pricking out is mostly done for this year I had better devote more of my gardening time to the area up the side of the wood, otherwise most of last winter's effort chopping back the brambles will be wasted.
Today I watered the recent plantings up by the wood, which did not look too bad. They are in shade for part of the day and sheltered from the wind, so hadn't dried out as much as I feared. I still had a hose draped along the line of the fence and around the pond from the last time I needed to water up there, when the primroses were collapsing with drought, so didn't have to sort that out again, but getting it to work was as aggravating as running long, seldom used stretches of hose usually is. Nothing came out of the spray head when I squeezed the trigger, after an initial trickle, and when I went to investigate I found the initial run of hose from the house had come loose at the point where it joined the metal tube attached to the remote outdoor tap. I had to go and borrow a screwdriver from the workshop so that I could reattach the jubilee clip, and that was so stiff that I couldn't shift it at first and thought I was going to go and have to ask the SA to fix the hose for me. By the time I'd managed to work the clip loose enough to slide it back over the end of the metal pipe and then do it up again I'd forgotten whether I'd turned the remote tap off or not, and confused myself thoroughly turning it both ways trying to remember which way was on, in the absence of any feedback because I was fifty yards from the business end of the hose. By the time I'd finally got things up and running I'd walked from halfway up the meadow to the remote tap and back to the main tap on the house a lot of times.
The pink rambling rose 'Ethel' has finally got into its stride in the meadow and is sprawling delightfully through a fallen but still live oak. Some of the rose stems saw no need to exert themselves climbing, and instead have made a bolt towards the middle of the meadow, weaving their way through a nearby shrub rose in the process. The combination of pale pink 'Ethel' and the darker pink shrub rose flowers is very pretty, and I need to get the mess of bracken, goose grass, and other weeds out of the way so that I can assess the situation and see if they can stay like that, or if 'Ethel' is going to have to be either bodily shoved into the oak tree or else pruned. In the back garden the rambler 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' is going over, and it's worth knowing that 'Ethel' flowers significantly later, since if you wanted to prolong the season of small pink pompoms cascading from large trees you could use both.
There are an awful lot of weeds, and where I ran out of time to dig the bramble roots out they are busily sending up new shoots. Now I have finished assembling pots and the pricking out is mostly done for this year I had better devote more of my gardening time to the area up the side of the wood, otherwise most of last winter's effort chopping back the brambles will be wasted.
Monday, 19 June 2017
watering
Suddenly with the hot weather I'm having to water anything I recently planted. This means I have to remember where it was, which is harder when you are filling in odd gaps in a mature garden than when you are planting an entire border and just need to water everything. I dragged the hose down the steps by the conservatory, across the top lawn and down to the very far corner at the bottom of the back garden where there are the new shade loving plants. Then I had a moment of panic that I could not find my hairy leaved saxifrage. Surely something could not have eaten it in its entirety already? The panic ended when I found it not where I thought I had planted it, but somewhere objectively more sensible.
One of the hydrangeas were starting to wilt in the heat so I watered that as well, and the early flowering red pulmonaria that had collapsed. Since the hydrangea is about to flower and the pulmonaria has finished flowering for this year, the hydrangea's need is greater, so long as the pulmonaria does not actually die, but it seemed churlish to leave it wilting when I had a hose there.
Seeing the purple flowering primula that should have been orange reminded me that I had better dig them up while I could still tell which they were. The flowers were fading, and if I'd left it to the end of the week I don't think I'd have been able to identify which were which. The leaves are identical to the apricot ones, which was how the confusion arose on the nursery in the first place. I wasn't really very sure what to do with them once I'd dug them out, but potted them into two litre containers in a mixture of John Innes and multipurpose compost. I am not awfully optimistic about their prospects long term in pots, since vine weevils are very partial to primula, but I don't have another damp and lightly shady area to put them in the ground. For now they are having to make do with the shade cast by the potted Nordmann fir outside the greenhouse. I don't really want them in the display of shade loving plants outside the conservatory, since now they have finished flowering all they are going to do for the rest of the year is grow increasingly tatty leaves until they die down entirely.
The leaves of the dahlias in the dahlia bed are still not the right shade of dark green as seen on my visit to the field of commercially grown dahlias for cutting, or as painted by the French Impressionists. I gave them a sprinkling of 6X poultry manure, having bought some the last time I called at the Clacton garden centre, and began to water that in. I gave some 6X to the climbing rose 'Meg' that is still not throwing up any new stems despite previous doses of fish, blood and bone and bouts of watering, and watered around the rose, and watered the clematis on tripods that it is slightly unreasonable to expect to live at all in such light soil. I watered all the pots. Tomorrow I must get the hose in the meadow working and water the hellebores and Teucrium I planted from pots and the primroses I split, and in the back garden I need to water the extra Verbena bonariensis and Linaria purpurea 'Canon Went' I added to the island bed, which basically means watering the bed, since I'll never spot all of them otherwise. The asters and the clematis that only went in last year will be grateful anyway.
I am not honestly a fan of heatwaves. I know it is ungrateful of me, when people go on holiday to get weather like this, but if the thermometer could just hit the low twenties and stay there that would suit me fine.
One of the hydrangeas were starting to wilt in the heat so I watered that as well, and the early flowering red pulmonaria that had collapsed. Since the hydrangea is about to flower and the pulmonaria has finished flowering for this year, the hydrangea's need is greater, so long as the pulmonaria does not actually die, but it seemed churlish to leave it wilting when I had a hose there.
Seeing the purple flowering primula that should have been orange reminded me that I had better dig them up while I could still tell which they were. The flowers were fading, and if I'd left it to the end of the week I don't think I'd have been able to identify which were which. The leaves are identical to the apricot ones, which was how the confusion arose on the nursery in the first place. I wasn't really very sure what to do with them once I'd dug them out, but potted them into two litre containers in a mixture of John Innes and multipurpose compost. I am not awfully optimistic about their prospects long term in pots, since vine weevils are very partial to primula, but I don't have another damp and lightly shady area to put them in the ground. For now they are having to make do with the shade cast by the potted Nordmann fir outside the greenhouse. I don't really want them in the display of shade loving plants outside the conservatory, since now they have finished flowering all they are going to do for the rest of the year is grow increasingly tatty leaves until they die down entirely.
The leaves of the dahlias in the dahlia bed are still not the right shade of dark green as seen on my visit to the field of commercially grown dahlias for cutting, or as painted by the French Impressionists. I gave them a sprinkling of 6X poultry manure, having bought some the last time I called at the Clacton garden centre, and began to water that in. I gave some 6X to the climbing rose 'Meg' that is still not throwing up any new stems despite previous doses of fish, blood and bone and bouts of watering, and watered around the rose, and watered the clematis on tripods that it is slightly unreasonable to expect to live at all in such light soil. I watered all the pots. Tomorrow I must get the hose in the meadow working and water the hellebores and Teucrium I planted from pots and the primroses I split, and in the back garden I need to water the extra Verbena bonariensis and Linaria purpurea 'Canon Went' I added to the island bed, which basically means watering the bed, since I'll never spot all of them otherwise. The asters and the clematis that only went in last year will be grateful anyway.
I am not honestly a fan of heatwaves. I know it is ungrateful of me, when people go on holiday to get weather like this, but if the thermometer could just hit the low twenties and stay there that would suit me fine.
Sunday, 18 June 2017
a hot day
I could hear a skylark singing early this morning, and when I looked out across the fields I could see it, dipping along in typical skylark fashion with madly fluttering winds and singing all the while. Then our neighbour fired up a chainsaw and I could no longer hear the lark. I thought that twenty to nine on a Sunday morning was rather early to be using a chainsaw, but the Systems Administrator said that it didn't happen very often and that they were probably clearing their boundary to put up more wire to keep the Airedales in. They have fenced most of the way along the lane, though there are no signs yet of a gate of any kind, but perhaps the Airedales would strike out for open country across the ditch. I am relieved they have finally decided to fence their garden, since I had got thoroughly fed up with the dogs coming into ours. They did not tell us they were going to do it, and the first section of fence they put up blocked the access to the pile of grass cuttings we had been dumping on our land but reached down a yard of their track. Clearing new access to the grass dump through a bank of brambles has been keeping the SA busy, but fortunately no birds were nesting in there.
I ended up spending most of the day weeding around the bonfire heap and compost bins, where great trails of goose grass had sprung up and reached almost triffid like proportions. Never mind one year's seeding, seven years' weeding, it would have been more like seven centuries if they had been allowed to ripen their seed, and I certainly didn't want it in the compost or the leaf bins. It was a great waste to allow so many weeds to shoot up at the same time as I had bags of shredded hedge trimmings waiting to go down as mulch, but I simply never found the time to finish tidying that area back in the spring. There were nettles hiding in among the goose grass, and even though I was sweltering in long trousers and a long sleeved shirt, my shins and right forearm are still tingling.
Really it was too hot to do anything. The cats lay around in various states of collapse, especially Mr Fluffy who looked quite doleful under all his fur, when he is normally such a cheerful cat. The SA declined to do anything this morning in the workshop, saying that it was too hot for resin to go off properly and no fun doing any kind of woodworking when the sawdust just stuck to your sweat. Later in the day when the sun had gone off the workshop and a breeze had got up, the SA made a frame to go round the begonia pots on the shelf in the porch to stop them toppling off in a gust of wind. After last year when the Coleus reached a critical height and then blew off, and the previous year when I had begonias again and three of them smashed themselves one windy afternoon in late summer, I was anxious for a pot frame so that it should not be third time unlucky, but I did not like to keep reminding (AKA nagging) the SA about it, and I was delighted when the frame appeared. I think it might be made out of a little bit more recycled pew.
I ended up spending most of the day weeding around the bonfire heap and compost bins, where great trails of goose grass had sprung up and reached almost triffid like proportions. Never mind one year's seeding, seven years' weeding, it would have been more like seven centuries if they had been allowed to ripen their seed, and I certainly didn't want it in the compost or the leaf bins. It was a great waste to allow so many weeds to shoot up at the same time as I had bags of shredded hedge trimmings waiting to go down as mulch, but I simply never found the time to finish tidying that area back in the spring. There were nettles hiding in among the goose grass, and even though I was sweltering in long trousers and a long sleeved shirt, my shins and right forearm are still tingling.
Really it was too hot to do anything. The cats lay around in various states of collapse, especially Mr Fluffy who looked quite doleful under all his fur, when he is normally such a cheerful cat. The SA declined to do anything this morning in the workshop, saying that it was too hot for resin to go off properly and no fun doing any kind of woodworking when the sawdust just stuck to your sweat. Later in the day when the sun had gone off the workshop and a breeze had got up, the SA made a frame to go round the begonia pots on the shelf in the porch to stop them toppling off in a gust of wind. After last year when the Coleus reached a critical height and then blew off, and the previous year when I had begonias again and three of them smashed themselves one windy afternoon in late summer, I was anxious for a pot frame so that it should not be third time unlucky, but I did not like to keep reminding (AKA nagging) the SA about it, and I was delighted when the frame appeared. I think it might be made out of a little bit more recycled pew.
Saturday, 17 June 2017
wild flowers in the mini meadow
The ox eye daisies in the daffodil lawn are putting on a great show. I'm pleased about that. They have a reputation for being fickle things, abundant one year then practically absent a couple of years later, perhaps mysteriously reappearing a few more years down the line. Ours have been a steady feature of the lawn in mid summer for several years now, so fingers crossed they continue.
There are a few plants flowering of the common knapweed, Centaurea nigra. They were raised from seed and planted out from nine centimetre pots, and since I planted a lot more than two I am peering hopefully at the long grass to try and spot if there are more tucked away in there, or if only a few established. The wild plant conservation charity Plantlife describes common knapweed, or hardheads or black knapweed as it is also known, as one of the toughest meadow plants. Its flowering season is supposed to run from June to September, so there's time yet for more plants to show themselves.
So far there are only a couple of field scabious visible. This is Knautia arvensis, a lilac flowered cousin of the red Knautia macedonica sold in some garden centres and grown in some gardens, including mine. Googling Knautia arvensis I see that it too is marketed as a garden flower, albeit for wilder parts of the garden. It flowers well on into the autumn and is a pretty thing in a wild and slightly weedy way. Both hardheads and field scabious are highly attractive to pollinating insects.
The final flowering species I've tried to introduce is musk mallow, Malva moschata. I've seen it growing in long grass in other people's gardens and feel that it ought to grow in ours. A perennial of slightly neglected open grassland on well drained soils, according to wild flower seed specialists Emorsgate, that sounds like a description of our daffodil lawn. Musk mallow has dainty, finely cut leaves and I think I've spotted some growing up through the grass, but there hasn't been a single pink flower so far. Musk mallow is another UK native that you may see offered in garden centres, although designers, and Val Bourne writing for the Telegraph, seem to prefer the white form. That might be easier said than done, since in my experience seed raised plants that are supposed to be the white form of things have an infuriating habit of coming out in the original colour. The plant centre once sold an entire tray of white Malva moschata to one of the nicer and politer designers that shopped there, and her niceness and politeness were tested as they all flowered pink in the white flowering scheme she had installed for a client, and the nursery the plant centre had got them from in the first place was very slow about producing any genuinely white replacements.
In the gardening snob stakes you do not get any points for growing ox eye daisies. The designer Tom Stuart-Smith in his book about the creation of his own garden recounts how he was very proud of the ox eye daisies in his newly sown meadow, only to have a cousin drawl on seeing them 'ah yes...motorway daisies'. His ox eyes took the criticism to heart, or merely lived up to their inherent fickleness, and five years later had all but disappeared.
The garden near Haverhill I visited last week had orchids growing in their meadow. The owner did not plant them, they arrived by themselves. Orchids have never shown any signs of arriving here and I have always assumed that conditions were not suitable, but perhaps there is nowhere local for them to arrive from. The owner claimed that the area was very dry, the driest in the country, which I privately disbelieved since I thought that crown belonged to St Osyth, but a quick look online suggests Haverhill is indeed dry, maybe only ten millimetres more annual rainfall than we get here. She told us her soil was light and almost neutral, but I would guess on the alkaline side of neutral, while ours is slightly acid and in the top part of the garden takes the concept of lightness to a whole new level. Maybe I should experiment buying a few orchids and seeing if they spread. I am put off because plants are so expensive and I have little faith that the experiment would work. Experimenting with plants you have raised yourself from seed is easier.
There are a few plants flowering of the common knapweed, Centaurea nigra. They were raised from seed and planted out from nine centimetre pots, and since I planted a lot more than two I am peering hopefully at the long grass to try and spot if there are more tucked away in there, or if only a few established. The wild plant conservation charity Plantlife describes common knapweed, or hardheads or black knapweed as it is also known, as one of the toughest meadow plants. Its flowering season is supposed to run from June to September, so there's time yet for more plants to show themselves.
So far there are only a couple of field scabious visible. This is Knautia arvensis, a lilac flowered cousin of the red Knautia macedonica sold in some garden centres and grown in some gardens, including mine. Googling Knautia arvensis I see that it too is marketed as a garden flower, albeit for wilder parts of the garden. It flowers well on into the autumn and is a pretty thing in a wild and slightly weedy way. Both hardheads and field scabious are highly attractive to pollinating insects.
The final flowering species I've tried to introduce is musk mallow, Malva moschata. I've seen it growing in long grass in other people's gardens and feel that it ought to grow in ours. A perennial of slightly neglected open grassland on well drained soils, according to wild flower seed specialists Emorsgate, that sounds like a description of our daffodil lawn. Musk mallow has dainty, finely cut leaves and I think I've spotted some growing up through the grass, but there hasn't been a single pink flower so far. Musk mallow is another UK native that you may see offered in garden centres, although designers, and Val Bourne writing for the Telegraph, seem to prefer the white form. That might be easier said than done, since in my experience seed raised plants that are supposed to be the white form of things have an infuriating habit of coming out in the original colour. The plant centre once sold an entire tray of white Malva moschata to one of the nicer and politer designers that shopped there, and her niceness and politeness were tested as they all flowered pink in the white flowering scheme she had installed for a client, and the nursery the plant centre had got them from in the first place was very slow about producing any genuinely white replacements.
In the gardening snob stakes you do not get any points for growing ox eye daisies. The designer Tom Stuart-Smith in his book about the creation of his own garden recounts how he was very proud of the ox eye daisies in his newly sown meadow, only to have a cousin drawl on seeing them 'ah yes...motorway daisies'. His ox eyes took the criticism to heart, or merely lived up to their inherent fickleness, and five years later had all but disappeared.
The garden near Haverhill I visited last week had orchids growing in their meadow. The owner did not plant them, they arrived by themselves. Orchids have never shown any signs of arriving here and I have always assumed that conditions were not suitable, but perhaps there is nowhere local for them to arrive from. The owner claimed that the area was very dry, the driest in the country, which I privately disbelieved since I thought that crown belonged to St Osyth, but a quick look online suggests Haverhill is indeed dry, maybe only ten millimetres more annual rainfall than we get here. She told us her soil was light and almost neutral, but I would guess on the alkaline side of neutral, while ours is slightly acid and in the top part of the garden takes the concept of lightness to a whole new level. Maybe I should experiment buying a few orchids and seeing if they spread. I am put off because plants are so expensive and I have little faith that the experiment would work. Experimenting with plants you have raised yourself from seed is easier.
Friday, 16 June 2017
a day in the garden
I planted out the purple leaved Primula 'Garryade Guinevere' from Lincolnshire at the bottom of the garden, and remembered why there was still such a large gap at the front of the bed, which was because I had meant to move something else forwards from its current position too far back in the border where it was being overshadowed. That meant I needed to move a small geranium I only planted the other day, to keep the gap clear and available until the autumn. I was sorely tempted to go ahead with moving the hidden plants when I first thought of it in April, but since by then we were well into a drought it did not seem sensible to be uprooting things about as far from the tap as you could get.
After that it was a day for general garden maintenance. I dead headed roses that had the potential to flower again if not allowed to set seed the first time, and those that don't form good hips. It is one of the attractive features of David Austen's breeding programme to produce new varieties of repeat flowering roses in the old fashioned style that they tend to have attractive hips, so it's worth holding back with your secateurs at the end of the season and not being too greedy for a final flush of flowers.
The curved beds running either side of the top lawn in the back garden are notionally rose beds, though there are a lot of other plants in them besides roses. The roses have all been in for some time, and are increasingly dividing themselves into two camps, those that are doing jolly well and those that are struggling miserably. Some have grown far taller than I ever imagined or the books and catalogues said they would, and despite my pruning them quite hard last winter several have flopped over. I am going to have to wriggle in among them with stakes and the lump hammer and try and get them back roughly upright for the rest of the summer, until the herbaceous lower storey of the planting has died down and the leaves are off the roses and I can see what I'm doing. At that point I might start talking nicely to the Systems Administrator about wooden tripods.
As for the roses that are struggling, I took half a dozen red flowered hybrid teas out last winter, and am starting to eye up 'Mrs Oakley Fisher' sourly. Bred in the 1920s, it carries apricot single flowers and is one of relatively few roses allowed to remain in the gardens at Great Dixter, and if mine were growing well they would be lovely indeed, but they are not growing well and have never grown well. Life on the yellow clay subsoil that was left at the surface after the previous owners contoured the back garden is too tough for poor 'Mrs Oakley Fisher'. When I planted up the further rose bed I was working on the principle that the gardening books said that roses liked clay. Having grown up in a garden on sandstone and never having gardened on clay before until discovering veins of it in the back garden of the present house, I did not at first grasp the difference between a good clay soil, well worked with plenty of humus, and the awful yellow stuff that emerged in bands in our garden.
I cut down the spent stems of the Camassia in the rose bed, and the early flowering Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus, and the columbines. I pulled up horsetail, an ancient and infuriating weed that signals the presence of the evil clay below, for in over thirty years I have only ever found it in the back garden and not a single stem growing in the sandy soil at the top of the hill. I pruned off long, hopeful shoots from the rambling roses in the bank, that were setting off across the rose bed, and pulled dead leaves out of the monstrous clump of Eryngium pandanifolium. That's a Great Dixter plant, and I do sometimes wonder if it's worth the space. It is supposed to provide a spiky, dramatic, architectural punctuation point, then in late summer it produces very tall stems of prickly flowers, but it seems to fill up with dead leaves making it look very tatty at awfully frequent intervals.
It is fun watching the garden sharpen up as the spent flowers, old flowering stems, dead leaves and unwanted growth are stripped away, and deaheading gives time to look at the rose flowers up close and personal. Meanwhile the SA cut down the dead sea buckthorn by the entrance, opening up a surprisingly large space. My past planting efforts in that corner have been tempered by the knowledge that if the drains collapsed again or there was any other reason why we needed to get a digger into the back garden then that would be its entry point. The sea buckthorn was chosen to be disposable if needs be, but it has disposed of itself by dying. Once we had eyed up the theoretical digger route there was still room for a decent sized smallish tree. Happy thought. I shall be browsing the Bluebell Nursery website between now and October.
After that it was a day for general garden maintenance. I dead headed roses that had the potential to flower again if not allowed to set seed the first time, and those that don't form good hips. It is one of the attractive features of David Austen's breeding programme to produce new varieties of repeat flowering roses in the old fashioned style that they tend to have attractive hips, so it's worth holding back with your secateurs at the end of the season and not being too greedy for a final flush of flowers.
The curved beds running either side of the top lawn in the back garden are notionally rose beds, though there are a lot of other plants in them besides roses. The roses have all been in for some time, and are increasingly dividing themselves into two camps, those that are doing jolly well and those that are struggling miserably. Some have grown far taller than I ever imagined or the books and catalogues said they would, and despite my pruning them quite hard last winter several have flopped over. I am going to have to wriggle in among them with stakes and the lump hammer and try and get them back roughly upright for the rest of the summer, until the herbaceous lower storey of the planting has died down and the leaves are off the roses and I can see what I'm doing. At that point I might start talking nicely to the Systems Administrator about wooden tripods.
As for the roses that are struggling, I took half a dozen red flowered hybrid teas out last winter, and am starting to eye up 'Mrs Oakley Fisher' sourly. Bred in the 1920s, it carries apricot single flowers and is one of relatively few roses allowed to remain in the gardens at Great Dixter, and if mine were growing well they would be lovely indeed, but they are not growing well and have never grown well. Life on the yellow clay subsoil that was left at the surface after the previous owners contoured the back garden is too tough for poor 'Mrs Oakley Fisher'. When I planted up the further rose bed I was working on the principle that the gardening books said that roses liked clay. Having grown up in a garden on sandstone and never having gardened on clay before until discovering veins of it in the back garden of the present house, I did not at first grasp the difference between a good clay soil, well worked with plenty of humus, and the awful yellow stuff that emerged in bands in our garden.
I cut down the spent stems of the Camassia in the rose bed, and the early flowering Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus, and the columbines. I pulled up horsetail, an ancient and infuriating weed that signals the presence of the evil clay below, for in over thirty years I have only ever found it in the back garden and not a single stem growing in the sandy soil at the top of the hill. I pruned off long, hopeful shoots from the rambling roses in the bank, that were setting off across the rose bed, and pulled dead leaves out of the monstrous clump of Eryngium pandanifolium. That's a Great Dixter plant, and I do sometimes wonder if it's worth the space. It is supposed to provide a spiky, dramatic, architectural punctuation point, then in late summer it produces very tall stems of prickly flowers, but it seems to fill up with dead leaves making it look very tatty at awfully frequent intervals.
It is fun watching the garden sharpen up as the spent flowers, old flowering stems, dead leaves and unwanted growth are stripped away, and deaheading gives time to look at the rose flowers up close and personal. Meanwhile the SA cut down the dead sea buckthorn by the entrance, opening up a surprisingly large space. My past planting efforts in that corner have been tempered by the knowledge that if the drains collapsed again or there was any other reason why we needed to get a digger into the back garden then that would be its entry point. The sea buckthorn was chosen to be disposable if needs be, but it has disposed of itself by dying. Once we had eyed up the theoretical digger route there was still room for a decent sized smallish tree. Happy thought. I shall be browsing the Bluebell Nursery website between now and October.
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