back from the brink

How many second chances should you give a plant?  On the one hand, plants can be expensive. They can take ages to grow to any size.  They can have sentimental value.  When a plant is slow to get going, or begins to ail and not look so beautiful as it once did, it is only human nature to try and revive it, rather than ripping it straight out and starting again with a new (costly, tiny) specimen of no emotional importance.  Sometimes this can work very well.  Better watering, or feeding, or hard renewal pruning to stimulate vigorous new growth from low down, or reducing the size of other plants that are now shading or crowding the thing you want to keep, can give it a new lease of life.

And sometimes nothing makes any difference, and what do you do then?  If you cast your mind over the most beautiful, peaceful, dramatic, romantic, and wonderful gardens you have visited you will find that whatever their size or style they all had at least one thing in common, which is that they were not run as hospitals for sick plants.  Few things drag a garden scene down and ruin the ambiance like having a collection of the living dead lurking in the borders.

Which brings me to my cycad, which I got as a good sized specimen some time ago from B&Q, heavily reduced because they were trying to get rid of the last few, but still in remarkably good nick.  I bore it home in triumph, installed it in a pot in the conservatory, and was very pleased with it for years.  Every now and then it would put out a new circle of leaves, which was always fascinating to watch.  They start as a small tufty ring on top of the swollen base, inside the circles of existing leaves, and for a few days you are not quite sure if the cycad is really making new leaves or if you are imagining it.  Then they begin to lengthen and you can see the individual leaflets, which are curled inwards towards the midrib.  As the new leaves lengthen the leaflets begin to unfurl, but they don't flatten completely until the new leaves have reached virtually their full length, which is at least as long as the old leaves.  It doesn't happen very often, and if the plant isn't happy it will stop making leaves at all.

Then I upset it.  I rearranged the conservatory so that the cycad ended up in a different corner, and I repotted it, and soon after the ends of the leaflets began to turn brown.  I tried watering it more, thinking it was getting hotter and drier in its new place.  That didn't help.  I moved it back to its old place but it looked no happier.  I trimmed off the dead brown ends of the leaflets to try and smarten it up, and then the entire outer ring of leaves died and I had to remove them.  When I investigated the roots I discovered most of them had rotted, and almost put it on the compost heap then before giving it a fresh chance with what roots it had left in a smaller pot.  It sent out a circle of new leaves, but before they were fully grown the tips of the leaflets had again gone brown.  I thought maybe it had been unlucky to have put out its fresh leaves in a particularly hot spell, then it tried again and the second lot of new leaves did the same thing, then the older leaves died.

Eventually it was down to one circle of ragged leaves, and I was ready to throw in the towel.  It hadn't done anything for ages except die by degrees, and the books said that once cycads had given up growing they could be very reluctant to start again.  I even got to the point of taking it out of its pot to throw it away when the sight of its roots, better than they were before, persuaded me to give it one last chance.  It went back in its pot that was so small it was barely bigger than the swollen base of the plant, and I was incredibly careful about watering it, checking each time that the compost was dry to the touch before giving more water.  I fed it too.  A few weeks ago it showed the first tantalising signs of new growth in a couple of years, and now the leaves have reached their full length and finished uncurling and they have not gone brown at the tips.

Should I have bothered?  For most of the past few years it has not been an attractive addition to the conservatory.  If it had been more visible I'd probably have junked it before now, and it was only because it was hidden away at the back that I was willing to overlook its hideousness while obstinately trying to nurse it back to health.  Now it is beginning to look decent again I am quite chuffed.  A new cycad with a base that big would cost at least fifty quid, and in any case I feel I have learned something about growing them.  Do not over-pot them or let them sit wet from over-watering.  The roots are thick, fleshy, and will rot.  Do feed them.  If they seem happy with the amount of light they are getting then try to leave them where they are.  But viewing the conservatory purely as a visitor experience the cycad should have gone years ago.

the mystery of the missing potters

The auricula project has ground to a halt, stymied by lack of pots.  After experimenting with vintage pots bought on the internet which turned out to be critically too small for plants that had to stand up to the general hugger mugger of the garden all summer long, I was delighted to discover a pottery in north Yorkshire still manufacturing classic long tom frost proof clay pots five inches in diameter.  I ordered a dozen last summer, which took ages to arrive because they had run out and were making another batch, and terracotta cannot be hurried, but when they came they were exactly what I wanted, and with a gentle irregularity that proved they were indubitably hand made.

The first set of auricula ended up being potted on later in the year than I would have liked because of the delay with the pots, and I fretted intermittently that they would get too wet standing outdoors and would rot, but tucked in under the rain shadow of a wall and the house they survived the winter, as did the pots.  In spring they burst forth into growth anew, now with several rosettes of leaves.  If I'd been growing them for show I'd have divided them, but since I was growing them for general garden display I was perfectly happy with larger plants, and with the five inch pots which were easier to keep watered than the tiny ones.  The auriculas flowered, the Systems Administrator built a shelf for them, I ordered some more plants in different varieties.

They went initially into round black plastic deep three inch pots.  I didn't want to overpot them at the start, and after last year I was fed up with trying to manage the tiny terracotta long toms out of doors.  By the end of July I was starting to think about moving them into their permanent pots in the autumn, so I logged on to the Yorkshire pottery website and ordered some more five inch long toms, plus one of a bigger pot that might be good for tulips as an experiment, so that I could see it in the flesh before buying a whole set of them.  The system is that you do not pay with the order, because the pottery has to work out what the delivery charge will be, which varies depending on the number and size of pots and whether they will nest inside each other for transport.  I waited to hear from them what the grand total would be, and when after a couple of days I hadn't heard anything I rang them, but got their answerphone.  The website warned that if they were digging clay there might be nobody there, so I left a message.

And heard nothing.  After a few days I rang again and got the answering machine, but there didn't seem any point in leaving another message.  And that is how it has gone on ever since.  Every week or so I remember the auricula pots and ring the pottery, and every time I get their answering machine.  Their website is still up and running.  I tried Googling their name, thinking that a craft pottery that had been in business on the same site since 1831 was not likely to go under without leaving a ripple, and found nothing, no story in the local paper about job losses or disappearing heritage, no mention in the News section of the village website (which did include a link to the pottery's website), no angry reviews by customers who had handed over their payment and not received their pots.  In the meantime the pottery's website and phone number float on like the Marie Celeste, undamaged, unoccupied, with no clue where the people have gone.

Maybe they are on holiday.  Perhaps they take a summer break.  They could be visiting family in Australia.  Perhaps they do not change the answering machine message because they don't want to advertise the fact they are not there to potential thieves.  Maybe they forgot to change the message before going away.  Perhaps they are ill.  Apart from keeping on ringing them and keeping an eye out for news on the internet there isn't a lot I can do, since I'm not planning to visit north Yorkshire in the near future.  I could contact the village website, but that seems rather odd.  If the pottery is still in business I should be able to get in touch with them by the normal channels, and if they aren't there's nothing the village website can do about it, and if they are ill the person who runs the website might not want to comment.  Only the auriculas need potting on now  so that they can start rooting into their new compost while it is still warm.  I have not managed to find anybody else selling five inch long toms, though since my last search I have been pursued by advertisements for pots which are too small or not the right shape.  I have found the name and phone number of one Essex potter who does not even have an email address, who will make to order and does some work in frost proof terracotta, but honestly it would be much easier if the Yorkshire firm would just crank back into action.

taking cuttings

In the greenhouse I have been taking cuttings, some experimental and some that have worked in the past, if we don't get a late hot spell that cooks them.  My last batch of perennial wallflower cuttings shrivelled to a crisp one sunny day.

I should like more Sarcococca confusa.  It is such a useful evergreen, shade tolerant, fairly drought tolerant, weed suppressing, graceful in habit for something so dense, and bearing little white flowers in late winter that are marvelously strongly scented, the sort of fragrance that catches you at a distance rather than demanding that you bury your nose in the bush.  Googling propagation sarcococca it seemed that my options were seed, or semi-ripe cuttings in July or August.  I duly made a note to myself to take cuttings, and yesterday finally got around to it.  Well, it was still August.  They were quite small cuttings, maybe three inches long, and as well as stripping the leaves from the section that would be buried in compost I had to nip out the beginnings of next winter's flowers, which were already forming.  I put some pots in the ordinary covered propagator and some with gentle bottom heat and we shall see what happens.  It will be a race against time, whether they manage to grow roots before drying out.  They still looked shiny as of this morning.

Still in the spirit of experiment I took a few cuttings from the trailing bedding verbena in the pot by the front door.  I don't need them to root, in that they are common enough plants, I don't need lots, and could easily buy new anew in one of the local garden centres next spring, but having read somewhere that you could take cuttings of bedding verbena I was curious to see if it worked. Besides, who knows, one of these years I might want a lot of plants, or to keep a less readily available strain going.  It was difficult poking about the plants to find any non-flowering shoots, and I had to content myself with nipping out the nascent flower clusters, thinking that if this didn't work then I'd wasted some flowers.  I could only find tiny little cuttings not much over an inch long.  I gave them heat.  They looked like something that would appreciate some heat.

Searching around the base of the plants I managed to find three potential cuttings on my three Arctotis 'Flame', obtained at such cost and aggravation after they got delayed in the post and had to be nursed back from death's door, arriving yellow and virtually leafless.  It might be nice to have more than three plants, and as I don't know how well they will overwinter in the greenhouse I should like to spread my bets.  An article by Sarah Raven in the Telegraph said that tip cuttings two and a half to three inches long should root within three weeks, and I read somewhere else that at Kirstenbosch they root Arctotis throughout the year, using sand.  Sarah Raven recommended adding one third grit to the potting medium, suggesting that good drainage was important, so I opened up some John Innes seed compost with added perlite.  I couldn't find anything looking like a tip cutting that didn't have an extremely well developed flower stem growing from it, and took young newly emerging shoots instead.  Even then I had to nip the flower buds out.  I haven't got around to doing the pink Arctotis yet, but was relieved that the cuttings from 'Flame' did not collapse overnight.  They look so fleshy and fragile it is difficult to imagine them lasting for a fortnight without roots in their pots.  I gave them heat as well.

The cottage pinks do not get bottom heat, but do get added perlite.  I've propagated a lot of pinks in the past couple of years and it generally works, unless they roast or rot.  With any luck at this time of the year they will not get too hot and dry out, and the perlite should prevent rotting. After sampling the advice on the internet I am satisfied that perlite and vermiculite are not interchangeable, despite some views to the contrary, because vermiculite absorbs water while perlite does not, so a potting mix made up with vermiculite will tend to sit wetter.  My aim with the cuttings is to prevent the buried stems from rotting, so wetter is bad.  The mnemonic I use to remember the difference is that perlite is drier (which rhymes, sort of) while vermiculite is wetter and the v at the start of vermiculite looks a bit like w for wetter.  When in doubt I Google it again.

I did not use a hormone rooting powder.  I used to, then I kept reading how the active ingredient only had a short shelf life and none of the products available to amateurs were very potent anyway.  Plus the woman in charge of propagating for Suffolk Plant Heritage did not bother and seemed to think it was a pointless exercise.  Given that the active ingredient does break down rapidly it is rather poor that manufacturers don't put a best before date on the pots.  Perhaps my view of garden centres is jaded, but if they had a dozen pots left over at the end of the growing season I would not trust them to chuck them out and restock with fresh product next spring.

another disease to worry about

Reading my September issue of the RHS Garden magazine I learned that yet another fatal plant disease is looming on the horizon.  Xyella fastidiosa, a bacterium that infects the water conducting vessels of plants, has been working its way across Europe since 2013.  Symptoms include leaf scorch, wilt, die-back, and death.  Of course, quite a lot of other things can lead to the same list of symptoms in plants, and not all plants infected with Xyella show any symptoms at all.

The first manifestation in Europe was in olive trees in Puglia.  I'd seen in the papers that something was infecting olive trees in Italy, and felt sorry about it, but Italy seemed comfortingly far away and olive trees seemed quite niche from a UK point of view.  Now it turns out that the thing that was attacking olive trees in Italy has also been found in oleander, Polygala, cherries, and almonds, in locations across France, Germany, Spain and the Balearic Islands, and that it is thought to be capable of infecting 359 species (so far and counting) across 75 different families, including hebe, lavender, rosemary, oak, and herbaceous plants as well as shrubs.  It has not been found in the UK yet, but what's the hope of it staying out, given our fondness for cheap Dutch plants and Italian specimens?

The rest of the article did not make comforting reading.  The UK has regulations in place to keep the disease out of Britain, namely that importers have a responsibility to ensure plants originate from a disease free source, one that has been inspected and confirmed to be disease free. Inspected for signs of a disease that can be symptomless, and whose presence can only be confirmed by specialised laboratory testing.  Run it past me how that works, exactly.

There is a Government plan on what to do if Xyella is found in the UK, but that didn't fill me with confidence either.  Control measures focus on removal of host plants and control of the insects that spread the disease.  Um, it is spread locally by sap sucking insects like common froghoppers. How are we going to control those, by spraying chunks of the Home Counties with DDT?  If the infection is thought to have become established the host plants within a 100m radius must be destroyed.  I took a bit of time to digest that.  A hundred metres could easily span the width of eight or ten suburban gardens and the depth of three roads.  Thirty gardens?  I tried to imagine DEFRA officials going through them removing every hebe, lavender, floribunda rose, sycamore, bird cherry, native oak, and ivy plant, plus whatever else Xyella can live on.  And what would they do with the debris?  Burn it in the road in great piles like cow carcasses during the foot and mouth outbreak?

Would the householders get compensation for their ruined gardens?  Who would pay for the removal?  Who would do it?  And who would report a suspected case of Xyella to DEFRA?  Most people would quietly dig out their ailing shrub or hire somebody with a chainsaw to come and chop down whatever tree looked poorly and cross their fingers that it was dying of something else, rather than risk bringing down a Government scorched earth policy down on their own garden and their entire street.

Of course post Brexit we could adopt biosecurity measures as strict as Australia's, if we wanted to, apart from the difficulty that unlike in Australia the rest of the European continent is within flying and drifting distance for spores and insects, and lots of people arrive in the UK with vehicles by ferry and train.  But we could, if by good luck we manage to evade Xyella until then.  I can't see plant health making it to the top of the list of Brexit issues to be addressed in any timescale that would be of any use, though.

a retrograde step

It is always a blow when something you liked, that worked perfectly well for you, ceases to be an option.  So it is that we are grappling with the imminent demise of Love Film, a disc rental service we've been using for years, that was acquired a few years ago by Amazon and set to close due to declining demand now that digital downloads are the thing.

LoveFilm was fantastic.  It had a huge catalogue including some really obscure titles.  I almost never read a review of any film, even when they were still at the film festival stage and before mainstream cinema release, that couldn't be rented from LoveFilm in due course.  I think one comedy native American road movie that I wanted to see after watching a Rich Hall documentary about film portrayals of American Indians might have eluded me, but in general you could get anything.  We had got into a routine of ordering something funny, something thrilling, something touching on a serious topic but in a heart-warming way, and one downright heavyweight that you had to be feeling strong to watch, so that we'd always have the genre in stock to fit the mood. Sometimes we'd get through two or three comedies and crime capers before steeling ourselves for an evening's gloomfest, but as a system it worked.

In order to use Amazon's streaming service the Systems Administrator has had to buy an Amazon firestick and an Amazon tablet.  They were offering a special deal to ex LoveFilm customers, but even so that is a firestick and tablet which we did not otherwise want or need.  We were not sure whether we would be allowed to download the film in advance so that the tablet could act as a buffer against our slow and slightly dodgy BT broadband connection, or if we would have to stream as we watched.  The answer, it turns out after much digging about by the SA, is the latter.  We will have to see whether our broadband can support a full length film without various judders and sticky patches when the connection drops out.  If not, there is often spare capacity at the end of the month on the SA's backup 3 mobile dongle, so we could use that, or switch to it mid film if BT is having a bad week.  And we will have ammunition to complain like mad to BT if we find we really can't watch streamed films without interruption.  We are on a plateau only sixty miles from the centre of London, for goodness sake; it's not as though we were living in darkest rural Herefordshire or hidden deep in some valley or on the wrong side of a mountain.

Not everything is available to rent at the moment, even quite recent and quite mainstream movies like the 2015 comedy with Meryl Streep, Ricki and the Flash.  There is also the option of buying second hand Blu Ray discs, though the market seems thinner than it is for used CDs, presumably because Blu Ray is a newer technology, so not everything is available on Blu Ray and if films have been issued on Blu Ray there aren't necessarily lots of used copies swashing around for sale. Buying may even work out as no more expensive, at £3.49 for Amazon video rental and £1.26 standard postage for a disc, and at least if you buy a film you've got it to lend to other people, or even watch again.  The way to do it would be to set up a long wish list and check it periodically to see what's available, and what's cheap.  There is also Sky, which does allow you to download films to watch when it suit you.

But altogether it is a nuisance and a disappointment.  Instead of being able to browse one very comprehensive catalogue, choose what we would really like, and have it arrive on the doormat in an envelope, we are looking at having to keep tabs on a variety of sources and settle for what we can actually get.  It doesn't feel like progress.

a sticky day

The shrubby ivy has been loud with the sound of bees foraging, and I was worried that they would put ivy honey in the supers that are still on the hives.  Ivy honey tastes vile, as I discovered when I once took a late super of honey off, thinking it was an end of season bonus, and found it tasted so nasty there was nothing to do with it but give it back to the bees.  Then I remembered that ivy honey is notorious for setting rock hard in the comb, so much so that some beekeepers advise against letting your bees overwinter on it for stores because they need to collect so much water just to make it liquid enough to eat.  That was fine, then, since if they did put ivy honey in the supers it wouldn't spin out the next time I was extracting honey.  I thought about going and getting the supers, but it was so hot and so sticky that I could not face the thought of immolating myself in a bee suit and trying to shake bees out of their boxes, and I was pretty sure they wouldn't be pleased to see me.

It was ridiculously humid.  The Systems Administrator, who wilts like yesterday's lettuce left out of the fridge in this sort of weather, has had a low grade but constant headache since the current sticky spell started and gave up, sitting in a deckchair under the 'Tai-haku'.  Yesterday Mr Fidget sat with him, too hot to fidget, but today he could not be bothered to walk that far.  Our Ginger lay on the drain cover by the front door, Mr Fluffy lurked in the turning circle, and Mr Cool vanished into the wood and was not seen until teatime when it started to rain.

I occupied myself until then cutting the edges of the top lawn, pulling out horsetail from the beds, and trimming some of the shrubs around the lawn.  The rambling roses had sent out more long tentacles since I last dealt with them a couple of months ago.  I used to try and twiddle some of these errant stems around so that they grew in the direction I wanted, but nowadays I am more ruthless about simply cutting them off.  They tend not to stay obediently twiddled, but bulge and sag outwards, so the roses might as well put their energies into developing all their other shoots that were going the right way to start with.

The older branches on some of the shrub and old fashioned roses tends to flop outwards, while this year's strong, new, as yet unbranched shoots grow upwards in the middle.  The tell tale sign is when the SA can no longer mow up to the lawn edge and an arc of unmown grass starts to appear that I have to cut by hand.  I trim back the flopping older growth from over the lawn, while trying to preserve a soft, graduated outline rather than facing them up severely like shrubs in a supermarket car park.

The golden yew by the conservatory is slowly but inexorably trying to advance beyond its allotted space.  It is rather a nice, spreading form, Taxus baccata 'Summergold', not the rarest thing but not the most common.  Nine UK nurseries currently list it according to the RHS Plant Finder.  It isn't prostrate in habit, but doesn't seem to have any central trunk.  Instead, branches amble out sideways then every so often decide to send a shoot upwards, from which new side branches emerge, drooping slightly and gracefully.  This gives it a rather lively habit, and my aim in trimming it is always to keep the open grace of it rather than chopping it back to a blocky outline. It shares its quarters with a semi-prostrate cotoneaster, which sends long, delicate shoots out through the yew, some of which I allow to remain.  I like plants to mingle.  After fifteen years the yew is up against the lawn on one side, a potted Acer on another, and the deck by the conservatory on a third, so regular trimming is called for.

I faced up the wild hollies at the end of the top lawn.  I am happy for them to present a sheer, shining dark green face as a backdrop for the potted Hamamelis and Acer.  A plain and rather elegant metal arch over the gateway into the wood had become obscured with hazel twigs, and I removed some of those, all the time trying to keep a natural outline for the hazel so that it would not look as though it had been pruned, but just as though it happened to be exactly framing that arch.

And then it began to rain, and I staggered indoors for a cup of tea, vest sticking to my clammy stomach.  We are due to get a good dose of rain over the next twenty-four hours, which will be very useful for watering all the new planting down by the gate, and after that it should be much fresher.  The seven day forecast shows the daytime temperature only recovering to 20 C by Sunday, which is fine by me.  19 or 20 degrees Celsius is a lovely temperature, warm enough for anybody.

a visit postponed

We were all set to go around and lay out the design for my friend's garden.  Two nice, smooth, silky ropes that looked as though they might lie in serpentine curves without kinking, a handful of bamboo canes to stand in for the position of trees and the larger shrubs, a tape measure to carry out reality checks on planting distances, two of the pieces of rose root I dug up from her old garden now growing away nicely in pots, and an aerosol of white grass marking paint for when she was sure she was happy with the layout, my housewarming present to her.  It is absolutely impossible to lift turf working from a line delineated by a rope (or hosepipe) laid on the lawn.  I guarantee that within five minutes it will have moved.  I was rather pleased by how well the roses had taken, given that late June is not the normal recommended season for digging up pieces of root from shrubs and expecting them to grow.

Half an hour before we were due to go out the phone rang and it was my friend, sounding dreadful.  She had a cold.  I said not to worry at all about postponing the garden session, and advised her to drink lots of tea, and she said that what she really wanted was to go to sleep, so I told her that in that case she should go back to sleep.  Then she began to worry that she had to be better by the weekend because the grandchildren were coming to stay, and I told her that if she was still ill then their parents would just have to make other arrangements.  It is much easier to take a ruthless view of children and grandchildren when you don't have any.

I was rather nonplussed by suddenly being left with most of a free morning.  Not quite all of it, as I'd been having a leisurely start to the day up to the point when I found I wasn't going out, and then I wasn't wearing my gardening clothes or even the right earrings and had to change into them (my gardening earrings are the pearl studs I used to wear to the office.  Not out of any desire to emulate Vita Sackville-West or any other aristocratic lady gardeners, but because the pearl studs have gold posts that haven't eroded over time and so are less likely to fall out while gardening, and if they do they are of no sentimental value whatsoever).

I decided to spend my unexpected free day working on the back garden, as a change from the front garden and because my back was politely indicating that it had worked hard yesterday with the pick axe and would like a day off.  That's the trouble with getting older, the spirit is willing but you discover that the flesh is no longer happy to go outside every day and hit things with a pick axe.  The jobs that needed doing in the back garden were very decorous, trimming off the great long rambling rose stems the wet end to the summer has sent scrambling yet again through the flower beds and across the lawn, trimming the edges of the lawn, and clearing away the sere and brown remains of the Camassia.  I could usefully have done the latter a couple of weeks ago, if I hadn't been doing other things.

The experimental planting of Geranium 'Rozanne' seems to be coping in the far rose bed.  In the spring the ground is covered with the densely packed foliage of the Camassia, which have seeded themselves joyously over the years.  By high summer the Camassia leaves are starting to look tired, and by late summer they have withered entirely, leaving a gap.  I racked my brains for ages last year trying to think of something that would make a suitable underplanting for roses, coping with the partial shade cast by the roses, the evil clay soil, and average rainfall of only around 550 millimetres (or twenty-one inches if you are still metric), and the fact that up until mid June it would be more or less overwhelmed by Camassia leichtlinii.  It needed to fit in with a blue and yellow colour scheme, and flower in the second half of the year for as long a season as possible. After much head scratching I settled on hardy geraniums, and went for 'Rozanne' because it is sterile and has a long flowering season.  In 2013 it was voted the RHS Plant of the Century, and for some reason I didn't actually have it anywhere in the garden.

The three plants I put in last autumn vanished rather quickly, and I didn't really see any signs of life before the Camassia got going so was not utterly hopeful, but as the bulb foliage faded so the geraniums appeared, late but triumphant like a reinforcing cavalry force appearing on one's flank in the field of battle.  Now they are flowering blithely, and I'm eyeing up the bare spaces in the bed trying to work out where I could fit a few more, where they would not be completely smothered in early summer.

bramble bashing

Now that the bird nesting season is over I am tackling the brambles and nettles that have grown again around the wildlife pond in the meadow.  Last winter the Systems Administrator cut down a lot of their top growth all the way up the side of the wood, and I dug out quite a lot of roots, but then it got too late in the spring to risk removing any kind of undergrowth, and I was busy with all the tidier bits of the garden and the greenhouse.  The remaining bramble roots left to themselves began to regenerate, at first sedately and then as the season wore on and it turned into a wet summer with rampant abandon.  And so here we are again, chopping out unwanted growth less than a year after doing exactly the same thing.

The brambles aren't actually as bad as before, since there isn't a dense tangle of old, dead branches under the new stems like there was last time.  The nettles, on the other hand, are probably worse because they moved to colonize spaces previously dominated by brambles with great enthusiasm.  If we can remove them both including the roots before next spring then after that we must adopt a zero tolerance policy on brambles this side of the rabbit wire, since neither of us have the time or the energy for this level of scrub clearance to become an annual job.  And while the trees and large shrubs have survived their latest brambly inundation I should like to use the space to grow something more interesting under them.

I thought as I chopped away with my pick axe that the saga of the brambles could be used as a metaphor for all sorts of situations in a Thought for the Day sort of way.  Dig out the root as well as clearing away the branches, or your problem will be back before you know it.  Although if we were to push the vegetable metaphor a little further, most plants die eventually if you keep chopping off all their leaves.  And some plants die if you cut all their branches off even once.

The nettles are taller than I am, and so venomously stinging they have managed to get my right thigh through my gardening trousers.  A small but strategically placed hole has opened in the left thumb of my leather pruning gauntlets.  This is Combat Gardening.  By teatime, when I called it a day in the meadow because I wanted to pick blackberries and tomatoes and needed to check the watering, I felt pleasantly exercised.

sorting out the stash

I have finally finished sorting through the collection of pots outside the greenhouse.  Many gardeners will have their own collection of pots, and I like to think it is a sign of my increasing gardening maturity that nowadays most of mine are things I've raised myself from seeds or cuttings, rather than impulse purchases brought home with no clear idea of where to put them in any sensible timescale.

As I was weeding and sorting I tipped every plant out of its container to check the roots for vine weevil and root aphid.  I didn't find any vine weevil at all, which was a good result.  Anything with root aphid was put in the council brown bin, unless it was rare and precious enough to be worth dosing with an insecticidal drench.  There wasn't as much root aphid as a couple of years ago, so I hope I am getting on top of the problem.

The tough part of sorting out your stash of plants is psyching yourself up to be ruthless enough about throwing away the ones that are frankly past it.  Plants in pots have a limited shelf life, deteriorating with age faster than their compatriots in the open ground even with fairly diligent watering.  Plus, if you have propagated more than you need to start with it is only natural to plant out the biggest and best specimens first, so the ones still languishing in their pots by the following season were probably the runts of the litter to start with.

There are several trays of Solidago rigida in one litre pots waiting to go into the meadow.  They are from last year, and I was relieved to see how good their roots were looking.  If I manage to dig out some of the nettles and brambles this autumn they will still be worth planting.  Theoretically they should have gone in last autumn, but I wasn't ready for them.  Solidago rigida is a native of the north eastern United States.  It is a good insect plant, flowers usefully late in the summer, and is tough.  It should be just the thing for a wild place like the meadow, though I would not necessarily put it in a more formal area closer to the house.  And it is yellow, which some people would hold against it.

On the other hand last season's Teucrium hirsutum had really not liked spending an extra year in pots, and looking at the small, almost leafless, pathetic stubs of plants I hardened my heart and put them in the bucket destined for the compost bin.  As I recall, seed was not very expensive and they germinated easily, so I might as well start again next spring.  I managed to plant out a couple of trays of them earlier this year, which look as though they might be reviving now they are in the ground from what I could see in among the rash of annual weeds that have sprung up among them, but the ones I didn't have time to plant before did not look worth spending any time on to plant them now.  Not that I could plant them now, since I need to weed the meadow first.

Throwing out the surplus Dianthus carthusianorum was quite painless, as I have planted plenty already in the gravel, and have a couple of trays of the similar Dianthus cruentus coming along this year, which will need finding space in the gravel somewhere.

Some failed experiments in bedding went on the compost heap.  The pale yellow flowered Cosmos never grew at all well, and when I tipped them out of their pots I found few roots.  I don't know why they didn't take, when the pink ones are so easy, but they didn't.  The biggest swizz was the trio of climbing plants supposed to be Ipomoea 'Heavenly Blue', seeds of which came free with a magazine.  They did have very interesting, unusual triangular seed leaves when they germinated, and that was the only interesting thing they ever did.  Planted into a generous pot they grew up their bamboo tripod, but here we are towards the end of August and they have had no flowers, nor even the merest sniff of a flower bud.  The yellow and blue scheme they were supposed to be part of failed anyway, so they went to the compost heap too.

A Plectranthus argenteus that has not been at all happy all year since overwintering in the conservatory was stripped of its shoots to make cuttings.  I was surprised on investigating its roots to find that it was not suffering from root aphid, and I don't really have a strong theory as to why it has done so badly this year when it was fine last year.  Plectranthus generally seem straightforward from cuttings, otherwise a fresh packet of seed will not be very expensive if I decide I want more.  In the meantime I have a dark green and burgundy leaved form grown from cuttings of a lopsided plant that came as a freebie when buying plants at Beth Chatto last year.  I can see why they ended up with some odd shaped plants to give away, because the variety barely survives the winter in a frost free greenhouse, and several of mine died or lost several limbs to adopt odd shapes themselves.

Surplus Kalimeris incisa, nameless Kniphofia grown from self sown seedlings dug up while weeding that I could not bear to waste, Physalis, Sempervivum, cottage garden pinks, rather weedy little Aquilegia, this year's sowing of oriental poppies, a stray self sown Correa rescued from another pot in the conservatory, an odd leftover Geranium maderense that was too weedy to offer to the garden society plant stall, all have been scrutinized, weighed up, weeded or junked.  Tomorrow I might manage to do some actual gardening.

a day at the Tate

Today I went to Tate Modern, to get another fix of Giacometti before it closes on 10th September. One of the pleasures of revisiting an exhibition is being able to home in on the rooms or individual pieces you liked most the first time, without feeling the need to conscientiously work your way through every last display cabinet and faint pencil sketch.  I like the array of heads on plinths that greet you as you enter the first room, the smallish trio of walking men, the large gesturing man, and especially the dog.  If I could take just one piece home with me it would definitely be the dog. Though I rather like the Egyptian inspired woman standing between the gigantic wheels of her strange chariot.

Working through the temporary exhibitions in reverse closing date took me next to Fahrelnissa Zeid in the new extension.  I can truthfully say that I had never heard of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but the posters looked lively, and half the point of paying up front to belong to a gallery is to reduce the marginal cost of entering exhibitions to zero, instead of having to decide if you want to pay £11.30 in order to discover whether you like Fahrelnissa Zeid.  It turned out I did, a lot.  She was an unlikely candidate to be an artist, born at the start of the twentieth century into a wealthy and aristocratic Ottoman family, and eventually married to a member of the Iraqi royal family who only escaped assassination by luck because he agreed to go on holiday with her that summer instead of making his usual visit home.  She never even cooked a meal for herself until the age of 57 when he was sacked from his ambassadorial post following the coup, and even then she soon took to painting on the leftover bones.  Most of her paintings were done on conventional canvases, and in the middle and to my eye the most appealing stage of her career they were large, colourful, very energetic abstracts.  I would say she was an Abstract Expressionist, except that she didn't work as part of that movement.  She trained in Europe, and I found echoes of Kandinsky and Klee, as well as Op art, plus influences from the Middle East, all pulled together into a vigorous and individual style.  I really liked it.  It is not a very large exhibition, and there were not very many people looking at it, and one of them sat on a bench scrolling through pictures on her phone all the time I was there.  It runs until 8th October.

Then, as my brain was not quite full, I went to see Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which runs until 22nd October.  It has reviewed very well and I felt a bit mean leaving it until last, but I was more likely to be able to visit that one again if I liked it.  It deals with weighty and often painful subjects, the treatment so often meted out to black Americans, how black artists responded, and how the white American art establishment responded to them, and it is a big exhibition.  There is something of practically everything, 60s pop art, photography, conventional painting, sculptural assemblages referencing African art and fetish objects, conceptual art.  Much of it is overtly political, some of the portraits could be taken at face value as portraits of people who just happen to be black.

There was nothing I coveted as much as I coveted Fahrenissa Zeid's small mixed media abstracts or her mysterious shimmering blue green square.  As a visual experience it is not the most decorative exhibition.  At the intellectual and historical level it packs a big and painful punch.  I really liked some of the portraits as paintings, while I am always going to be irritated by an inner tyre encased in a pair of tights and hung on the wall whether they were assembled by an oppressed black artist or Louise Bourgeois.  It did feel unfair to the artists to have tagged them on at the end of my day out when I might have been starting to flag, but juxtaposing the Soul of a Nation with my earlier viewing did leave me thinking about the point of art.  Does it matter whether it is visually ravishing or carries a serious message?  Is one better than the other?  What, in fact, is art for?  And is the message always the one the artist meant?  One of the totemic objects in Soul of a Nation is a large wooden sculpture, shaped like a fist on one side and with two negro faces on the other.  It is a very fine object, but reading the label and learning the identity of the shiny, dark brown timber the first thought that jumped into my mind was not anything to do with black power or identity but the slogan in defence of tropical rain forests, Mahogany is Murder.

a partial fix

I rang the garage first thing, and got through to the young assistant on the service desk.  I explained what had happened to the window, and she said that the earliest they could book the car in was next Thursday.  Four working days (since Monday is a Bank Holiday) wasn't too bad, and in any case if that was the first day they could manage then that was what I would get.  In the meantime I'd been promised the use when needed of the SA's car, which is cleaner than mine.  The weather forecast was dry and not too windy, and looking at the compost bags hanging over the car window I hoped it would stay that way.

Five minutes after putting the phone down to the young person at the garage it rang again, and it was the experienced service manager, who said she gathered that my retraction mechanism had broken, and that I would not want to have the car sitting outside with no window for an entire week.  If I could bring it down this morning they could wedge the glass shut for me, then at least the car would be secure.  She was absolutely right, I did not really want the car sitting outside the house until next Thursday with a large hole in the side of it, only I had not seen any alternative.  I agreed enthusiastically, and then remembered after ringing off that today was the first day of the Clacton Airshow, and began to worry how bad the traffic to Clacton was going to be.

In a world where garages are commonly viewed as rip-off artists, alongside banks and estate agents, I really like my garage (mind you, I like my bank too).  It is a skilled job being a good garage service desk manager.  I have heard Lesley coax descriptions of ailing motors from their non-mechanically minded owners with the patience of a doctor or a detective so that she can form an educated guess about what is actually wrong with the car and hence how much workshop time to allocate to it.  Let us hope the young person is listening and learning.

The traffic turned out to be no worse than normal, if not downright quiet for a sunny day in August.  You would not have guessed there was an airshow.  Once at the garage it took rather a long time to wedge the window shut, and I was running out of levels of the day's Sudoku on my phone when the assistant appeared with my car key.  As I left the showroom the service manager told me not to open the window, and I drove up the road worrying that I would absent mindedly press the button or else lean on it by accident.  Just as it is impossible not to think of a word you have been told not to think of, so it felt as though it might be almost equally hard not to press a button you had been told not to press.  I stopped on the way home to buy hand cream at the garden centre that sells it, thinking that at least I would get some incremental benefit from the journey given I was running out of hand cream, and as soon as I got out of the car I realized I had forgotten my hat, which must have dropped off my lap when I stood up in the garage, so I had to go back for it.

That was half the morning gone by the time I got home, just to achieve a temporary partial fix on my car which had been working perfectly well until the previous day, and buy some hand cream. No wonder the meadow is disappearing under a fresh crop of brambles and even the path to the dustbins is half blocked with over-ebullient shrubs.  Where does the time go, indeed?

I had been meaning to write up the minutes of yesterday's music society committee meeting first thing in the morning, so had to come in early from the garden to do them.  For a meeting where we weren't going to discuss much except formally approve the accounts it went on for a long time and generated a lot of notes.

came to pieces in my hand

This afternoon as I was driving my small and elderly car at a sedate thirty miles per hour I pressed the button to open the window.  It wound down with a strange and ominous grinding noise it had never made before, and I found that something in the door had broken and it refused to come up again.

A car with a window you can't shut is not at all user friendly.  I don't know how people who drive convertibles manage.  I was supposed to be meeting a friend, but did not like the thought of leaving the car in the town car park with the driver's window fully open, even though it is an old and shabby car and probably nobody would want to steal it, and I could still lock it and would have the key.  Objectively speaking the thought of anybody climbing in through the open window and hot wiring it in order to nick it was ludicrous, and if they wanted it that badly they could just break the window anyway.  It's not as though there was anything worth stealing in it, only three road atlases (one national, one Essex and one Suffolk), some grubby reusable shopping bags, a free Evening Standard collapsible umbrella, a squashed box of tissues, partly used, and two dirty towels to cover the back seat when carrying compost.

I couldn't help thinking of the episode of One Foot in the Grave in which Victor Meldrew empties the contents of an entire dustbin into the open topped sports car of somebody who has annoyed him, only of course it was not actually their sports car but another one of the same model.  Deeply engraved into my subconscious must be the fear that if you leave your car window open somebody will chuck rubbish in through it.  A more rational fear is the fear of rain.  Also, as I discovered driving home behind two buses, a car with no driver's side window is jolly noisy.

It is now parked by the house, driver's side to the wall, with a couple of large compost bags shut into the door so as to hang down over the void, tree stakes propped against them to try and stop them blowing around.  The towels are shoved up against the inside of the door to catch any drips. If I need to go anywhere between now and whenever I can get it booked into the garage I daresay I can borrow the SA's car.  It is a nuisance, though.  I've only just spent a morning driving to a garage, and going to the Skoda garage in Clacton there will not even be the consolation prize of a new frying pan and some oven gloves from John Lewis at Home.  Coming on top of the honey fiasco I am starting to think that the week is not going my way.

many a slip

I was all set to extract honey today.  I went up to the bees on Sunday when it was warm and calm and put excluders underneath a couple of supers, one full and one fairly full of capped comb that was ready to come off.  For the non-beekeeper who wishes to know more (otherwise I should skip the next couple of paragraphs if I were you) this translates as follows: a beehive consists of a stack of boxes.  The queen bee lives in the lowest box where she lays eggs that develop into new bees. The upper boxes are there for the worker bees to store nectar and honey.  You can tell they have finished converting nectar into honey when they cover the honeycomb with a wax capping.  At this point if you want to remove the upper box and the honey without too many bees you need to get them out of the upper box(es) of finished honey.  There are various ways of doing this, but one of the easiest for an amateur beekeeper with only a few hives is to put a board underneath the box(es) to be removed that has a couple of holes in it, in which you place little plastic devices the bees find it easy to go through one way but difficult to navigate in reverse.  A day or two later most of the bees should have left the box(es) above the board and been unable to get in again. You don't leave it too long or they will find their way back up.  There, now you know what was going on.

I got ready for the extraction, tidying the kitchen, washing the floor, digging the extractor out of the cupboard under the eaves, and finding a couple of honey buckets.  Then, dressed in my bee suit, I set off up the meadow with my wheelbarrow, armed with a soft plastic brush to help clear any recalcitrant bees out of the boxes I planned to take.  (Sometimes there are still some bees above the excluder board, who either found their way back up again or never left in the first place.  Giving the super a sharp jolt can often shake a lot of them out, and I keep a couple of sturdy wooden boxes in the apiary that are useful in such cases, as well as providing a handy place if you need to put a stray super down for some reason.  If there are really a lot of bees still in the super there are ways and means, including lifting the frames out one at a time, giving them a hard shake and a brush, putting them in a spare super you have in a wheelbarrow a little way from the apiary, and then legging it with the barrow as fast as you can before the bees work out what you are doing.  This really doesn't work for more than about one super.  If you were a professional bee farmer you wouldn't even mess about with excluders, but would have a machine that delivered a puff of something the bees didn't like into the top of the hive and they would all go down towards the bottom).

As soon as I reached the apiary I could see that something was wrong.  There was a small but busy crowd of bees darting around the back of the top super on this year's strongest colony.  That was wrong.  Bees should only ever be flying about the entrance to the hive, which is at the bottom, opening into the brood box where the queen resides.  Access to the upper part of the hive should only be via the front door, which the bees guard against intruders, be they wasps or bees from other hives.  (When I started going to beekeeping classes I was taught that in the summer you should give the bees a wider entrance, perhaps even stretching the full width of the hive, to make sure they got enough ventilation.  Now that all my hives have floors made of metal mesh, to help with varroa control, I reckon that they will get enough air through the floor, and leave them with their one inch wide door all year, reasoning that it must be easier to defend.  In winter I put a metal cover over it with holes large enough for a bee but too small for a mouse to get in, but that is another story).

I needed my metal hive tool to prise the top super loose, as the bees had already done a good job of sticking it down again in less than forty-eight hours, and it was sickeningly light, whereas when I put it back on Sunday it needed real effort to lift it to chest height.  The top of the excluder board was powdered with crumbs of wax, and some dead bees.  Robbing.  I had somehow failed to make the top of the beehive entirely bee proof and bees had found their way in through the gap and stolen most of the honey from the super above the excluder.  Normally a good sized colony would defend their assets, but of course with the excluder in place they couldn't get up there to repel boarders.  The litter of wax was from the cappings, which the robbers had torn off the comb to get at the honey beneath.  The dead bees would have been killed in the fight between the robbers and the hive residents.  Poor bees.

I removed the excluder board and left the robbed super in place for the bees to finish clearing out what honey remained.  Later I worried that it would still have had some robbing bees in it and that if they made their way down through the hive and out of the entrance they could theoretically bring reinforcements back to rob via the front door, but the colony is probably strong enough to defend itself, even assuming that the robbers made it out alive.  As I said, poor bees.

I took the super I'd planned to collect from the other hive without incident, and extracted the honey, though there wasn't as much as there had been in the super I'd just lost.  By half past one I was all finished, floor washed again, extractor washed, honey harvest finished for another year. The next job will be to remove the supers now the colonies aren't growing, and feed the bees for the winter.  Objectively speaking I didn't really need the last bucket of honey, having harvested enough for our own consumption and to give some to friends, and not being geared up to sell it.  It is galling, though, having got the bees so far through the summer, past the hazards of swarming and wasp attack, to have lost half the crop from that hive at the eleventh hour through carelessness.  I think there must have been one frame sticking up slightly proud somewhere, so that surfaces that should have touched and made a perfect, bee-tight seal did not quite touch and there was a little gap, small but big enough for bees to get through.  I only hope they were my bees doing the robbing and not somebody else's, then at least the honey is still in the apiary somewhere and the bees or I will get the benefit of it eventually.

planting the gap

As they used to say on Ground Force, and now the planting.  I have finally planted up the space at the top of the sloping bed.  A bamboo cane marks the gap for a rugosa rose, probably 'Sarah van Fleet', and I expect a few other bits and bobs will find their way in to the mix in due course, given my penchant for complex matrix plantings, but it is essentially done.  The plants all look rather small and surprised at the moment, but I have high hopes of them.

I put Tamarix ramosissima 'Pink Cascade' in the middle, though further towards the back than the front.  It has feathery, light greyish green foliage and produces little airy tufts of pink flowers at this time of the year, which would be useful when the garden is starting to wind down in terms of what's flowering.  It should cope with the wind in what is a windy corner: think of all the tamarisks you have seen on beaches.  It is supposed to be fast growing.  Yes, I am very hopeful, notwithstanding that another tamarisk planted half way up the bank by the drive several years ago has scarcely done anything.  The new tamarisk has had lots of lovely compost dug into its dire, sandy soil, and is not half way up a steep slope so will be easier to water, and will not have a sea buckthorn collapsing on top of it.  Surely it will do well.

Caryopteris x clandonensis 'Heavenly Blue' has grey leaves and deep blue flowers, also out now, which are manna to bees.  It likes sun and good drainage, which it will get.  Boy, will it get good drainage.  But I have dug in so much compost, it might be happy there.  In spring it will get a severe pruning, to keep it bushy.

Buddleia davidii 'Wisteria Lane' is a bit of a punt.  It is quite a new variety, which is supposed to have very long and pendant racemes of mauve, honey scented flowers.  The flower clusters on my new plant are not in truth that long, on the other hand it is a very young plant.  They are certainly pleasantly scented.  I chose Buddleia davidii for that corner because, again, I wanted something that would flower late in the summer, buddlejas are good insect plants, and since you can see self sown seedlings of B. davidii growing out of the faces of buildings I thought it had a good chance of coping with the meagre soil.  I needed a variety that would not grow too big, which narrowed things down, and 'Wisteria Lane' was one of the smaller types that Crocus offered and I thought it was pretty.  But you never know.  I tried the newish hybrid 'Silver Anniversary' in the gravel in the turning circle and it was an abject failure.  I watered it and cared for it but it just wouldn't grow, finding the burning sand altogether too terryifying.

I am confident about Cistus 'Silver Pink'.  Cistus like the light soil in the top part of the back garden, and even seed themselves around.  They do not greatly like manure, but I don't think I've managed to add enough soil improver to this bed to upset it.

I have never grown Sphaeralcea munroana before, but it looks good on paper.  It is a native of the western side of the United States, where it grows happily in regions with ten to twenty inches of annual rainfall.  According to a US nursery whose website I turned to for guidance it is highly resistant to browsing by deer and rabbits, loves sun, and is cold hardy down to US zone 4, which is cold.  My plant came from the man in Lincolnshire, and I afraid it has not especially enjoyed spending the summer sitting in its plastic pot until I had a space to plant it, so I hope it takes. From what I've read they are not the longest lived plants, which is not necessarily a problem once you have it in the garden because it will seed itself, but mine has not set seed.  If I left it too long in the pot and it quietly fades away over the winter then I could always buy seed next spring, assuming I could find somebody selling seed, and that the articles that came up in my Google search for Sphaeralcea seed about overcoming dormancy don't mean that growing from seed is really difficult.  It has orange flowers, by the way.  That might put some people off, though not me.

The only other plant I bought for this project was a tiny pot of Malvastrum lateritium, the False Mallow, which is supposed to be happy creeping about in a very hot, sunny, well drained soil where it will produce mallow shaped green leaves and single, round, pinkish flowers.  Mine came from a plant sale months ago, since when it has done nothing, and when I came to tip it out of its tiny pot I discovered that its little root ball was suffering from a bad case of root aphid.  It is not utterly reliably winter hardy either.  I have dosed it with Provado vine weevil treatment, planted it anyway, and hoped for the best.  Otherwise a couple of nurseries in the eastern region sell it, or the person who provided the original plant might have some more.

Everything else that went in I grew myself from seed or cuttings.  That might be a story for tomorrow.

and even more compost

I bought more compost.  After thinking about it I decided I could put ten bags in the car, since although the weight makes the Skoda sink visibly on its suspension, I would be perfectly happy carrying three people and an adult passenger must weigh as much as three and a bit bags of compost, if not more.

In the half hour or so it took me to fill the bags only three other customers arrived, two of whom were together, and yesterday there were none at all while I was there.  August is a quiet month for gardening, but even so I began to wonder how long that kind of low key garden centre could survive.  It will be a pity when they all go, and there is nowhere left selling things like spent mushroom compost.  I would have to buy packaged, commercially produced soil conditioner each time I ran out of home made compost.  Then I calculated that at current prices B&Q large bales of multi-purpose compost actually worked out fractionally cheaper per litre than the mushroom compost, at £6.93 for 125 litres versus £7.00 for 120 litres.

That would explain why I saw bags of it laid out along the verge recently by a garden where contractors were planting a new laurel hedge.  And buying bales of compost would save me the time and effort of filling my own bags, and would make less of a mess and a smell in the car.  It would be a pity to have to buy new plastic packaging each time instead of reusing it to collect something that exists as a by-product of food production.  But I reckon I'd save time overall, even allowing for having to drive down to Colchester Hythe instead of just going round the corner.  If and when the Colchester branch of B&Q finally closes and the site turns into a Sainsbury then I'd have to go to Clacton, and that would take longer.  But if the little garden centre around the corner closed I'd have no choice.

I did cheer up when I realized that since potting compost cost the same as mulch, I need not feel bad I had wasted compost potting up too many Nicotiana mutabilis.  Those I didn't use myself or manage to give away are destined for the compost heap, but since I always need more home made compost it turns out the only thing I have wasted is my time in potting them on, and some water keeping them growing.  Likewise if I decide to grow more pots of tulips (I haven't) or repot all the dahlias (I might next spring) I shouldn't worry about the incremental expense of multi-purpose. Every litre of discarded potting medium on the compost heap is a litre of mushroom compost saved.

By late afternoon I was finally ready to start planting.  Mr Cool came and curled up on the drive nearby while I worked, then uncoiled himself, stretched elaborately, and strolled into the house with me for his supper.  Sometimes I think my adoration of Mr Cool might be mutual, although now I've fed him he has disappeared again.

more compost needed

My plants from Crocus came.  I had only just followed the link on their email informing me that the order was with the courier to arrive today and seen that there were no deliveries ahead of mine when there was the scrunch of white van wheels on gravel and they arrived.  The driver did not even want a signature, so if I wanted to order anything else I could risk doing it in a week when I couldn't guarantee to be around.  The box was encouragingly tall, and was handed over to me the right way up and uncrushed.

It had a little lid which I removed, and looked down lovingly at the plants while wondering how I was going to lift them out, before discovering I did not need to lift them out of the box, instead I could lift the box off them.  You pulled a tab near the base, like the ones on detergent powder boxes, and the whole of the top of the box ripped off, leaving the plants sitting nestled into a shallow inner tray inside the base of the big box.  Each pot was wrapped in polythene and taped securely to the tray, so even if the main box had been tipped over in transit the pots would probably have stayed put.  I love it when mail order plant companies invest in proper packaging and don't just try to wedge everything in with balls of newspaper.

The cats now have the lid, the base of the box, the inner tray, and a tunnel formed by the body of the big box which I've put by my desk for them to play with because they like tunnels.  Mr Fluffy spent part of the morning sleeping in it.  I have the plants, and they all look very healthy, while the tamarisk is taller and bushier than I thought it might be, and the buddleia that was described as being in a 9 centimetre pot and which I thought might have to be potted on for planting out next spring looks substantial enough to go out now.

All I have to do is get the border ready for them.  I went and bought another eight bags of bag-your-own spent mushroom compost, and dug that in, and used all the home made compost that was ready the last time I turned the compost heaps earlier in the summer.  That means the new bit of border has had sixteen bags of bought compost and ten bags of home made.  The mushroom compost bags held thirty litres because that's the size of the bucket the garden centre sells it by, while I didn't measure out the home made compost but on average there must have been more than thirty litres in each bag, so the new stretch of border has had over 780 litres of organic matter added to it but needs more.  I haven't even covered all of it yet, and some of it is still so sandy and meagre when dug over that it looks quite unfit to plant anything in.

I shall have to go and get another load mushroom compost in the morning.  I wish they would give me a loyalty card like coffee shops do, buy ten bags of bag-your-own mushroom compost, get an extra one free.

at the museum of east anglian life

Today is our thirty-third wedding anniversary.  When I initially suggested to the Systems Administrator a few days ago that we could go out on Friday the SA, who was suffering from a cold and getting increasingly stressed about the car, stared at me rather wild eyed and asked Where do you want to go?  I said I didn't know, somewhere local like last year when we went to the Munnings Museum, but that we didn't have to go out.  By the next day the cold and the car panic were abating, and the SA suggested that we could go to the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, adding as a clincher and proof that this was not just a casual idea that he had checked it was open.

That's the difference between being at home and on holiday.  If we were just visiting west Suffolk for the week we would certainly make the effort to go to a museum of East Anglian life.  Living on the fringes of East Anglia we have not bothered to visit once in over thirty years.  So we set off. The SA checked the traffic on Google maps before we went out and reported that everything was flowing freely.  When we got to the fringes of Ipswich the dot matrix signs on the A12 said that the A14 was closed between J50 and J49.  Where, enquired the SA, wa J50?  I looked at the road atlas and discovered that J50 to J49 was the stretch of the A14 that is effectively the Stowmarket bypass.  Ah.  We came off two junctions early and took the back route through the lanes, along with quite a lot of other people who could read road signs, and then sat in traffic in Stowmarket with all the other people who had been turfed off the A14 whether they had been reading the roadside warnings or not, but we got there.

The museum turned out to be bigger than I expected, though tiny compared to Beamish or Blists Hill.  They have got some old buildings rescued and reconstructed from various bits of Suffolk, which mostly house exhibitions.  There is a lot about agriculture from the late Victorian era through to the mid twentieth century, a lot about the many engineering firms that developed out of Suffolk's need to service the agricultural sector, and a little bit of domestic history with a few room sets and a Victorian school room.  There is a tiny bit about the fishing industry, which is fair enough since Stowmarket is well inland and there are museums on the coast that major in fishing (which we have not been to either).  I would have liked something about the silk weaving industry, though I suppose the Warner archive in Braintree covers that.  There are traditional East Anglian breeds of farm animals in modern wire enclosed paddocks, with signs around the museum appealing for funds to build them a Victorian farm.  There is a watermill, and a windmill originally used to power a drainage pump rather than thresh corn.  A Victorian octagonal shelter looking as though it had escaped from the seaside, except that it is too enclosed, came from the cattle market in Bury St Edmunds where it was used to settle livestock trading accounts.  There are charcoal burning and hurdle making equipment, neither in use today.  There is a restored walled garden in full productive clatter with vegetables, fruit and flowers for cutting.  If we had stayed on until tonight we could have seen the outdoor cinema showing Mary Poppins.

It is a slightly confusing site to navigate your way around.  The signs are not awfully clear as to what things are and which buildings you are supposed to go into, and more than once we found we'd started an exhibition somewhere in the middle and only got to the welcoming orientation panel that would have told us what it was all about at the end.  The key to the map they give you with your entrance sticker does not list the numbered attractions in any order that would make any sense to somebody who didn't know the site, so it took ages to decipher, and I was simply baffled by the little banner flapping in the wind on a patch of grass that said First Aid Point.  We never saw anybody there and there was no first aid equipment so I don't suppose what you were supposed to do if you needed first aid.  Lie down on the grass until somebody noticed.

Still, the food in the cafe was quite nice, and I got to scratch a Large Black Pig called Tim behind the ears, and after much painful thought understood how the mechanism of a church clock built in 1607 worked to transmit gravitational force from the weight to the pendulum so that it kept swinging.  The key according to the SA was the escapement at the top, and it all became much clearer once I worked out I needed to think about the mechanism from the top downwards, instead of fixating on the largest cogwheel and then working upwards.

The museum is taking its time expanding, since it was first opened in 1967.  There is plenty of space for some more buildings, as and when suitable buildings and more critically the finance become available.  Still, we spent three and half hours walking around looking at stuff, and left feeling our brains were full, just as it began to spit with rain.

site preparation

The top of the sloping bed is tantalisingly close to being weeded and cleared for planting, bramble stumps grubbed out and the majority of the sea buckthorn roots extracted.  It is remarkable how it has managed to look as though it is almost clear for several days, while taking hours more work to finish clearing it.  Thinking I must be nearly there, I went to measure the space before ordering shrubs to go in it.  It is a very odd shaped hexagon, and I am still trying to work out how the back can consist of two not quite in-line stretches of 3.3 metres each, when the front is only 3.3 metres in total.  I am fairly sure each individual measurement is right, and the answer must be that it's due to the uphill end of the border being deeper than the downhill one, and the downhill edge not meeting the back and front edges at anything like a right angle.

This morning I stood in the very light drizzle with a handful of bamboo canes, poking them into the ground and trying to check whether there was really room for a Tamarix, a small Buddleja, a Caryopteris and a pale pink Cistus, plus rose 'Sarah van Fleet', or if that would be too many shrubs, or not enough and I would actually need more than one cistus.  I wasn't buying more than one Caryopteris, since they are easy from cuttings.  I was accompanied by Mr Cool who alternated between trying to climb up my leg so as not to have to stand on the wet grass, and chewing the ends off the bamboo canes.  I decided that one each of the shrubs would be enough, and stomped back indoors to order them, unhooking Mr Cool from my knee.  The rose will come from the excellent Trevor White roses once it is the bare root rose season, and I ordered the others from Crocus.  I have used Crocus before and found them utterly professional, as befits a firm that supplies plants to several Chelsea show gardens every year.

By the afternoon the rain had passed and I set off to buy mushroom compost to dig into the soil at the top of the bed, which consists of incredibly thin soil made worse by the addition of left-over builders' sand, on top of an old track.  The mushroom compost had gone up by twenty-five pence per bag since the last time I bought any.  The woman on the till told me briskly that it was still very good value compared to other, bagged composts and she was right, but I would have preferred her to feel my pain.  After all, it isn't bagged.  I had to shovel every last one of the two hundred and forty litres I bought today myself.  At least I know to take my own stainless steel spade.  Life is too short to dig spent mushroom compost with a plastic shovel.

I spread it across the end of the bed, and was dismayed at how far it went, or rather didn't go.  I was evidently going to need another car load, and more probably two.  And I was aghast as I began to fork it into the soil at how quickly it vanished.  I'd spread a good generous layer, but the sand simply ate it.  In fact, I couldn't understand how there was quite so much builders' sand.  How much had our builder had left over?  Based on my recent gravel spreading experience there seemed to be a couple of bulk bags of the stuff, coming up in discouraging off-white seams with every turn of the fork.

I arranged for the Crocus shrubs to be delivered on Saturday, and in my mind's eye by Saturday afternoon, or Sunday morning at the latest, I was going to be arranging them in the freshly cleared and compost laden space, along with quite a few of the plants that have been languishing in pots outside the greenhouse all summer.  By Monday morning it was all going to be done, barring the composted straw mulch that will have to wait until I psych myself up to order another pallet load. I now see that was a complete delusion.  By Sunday afternoon I might just about have managed to bag, cart and incorporate in the border enough organic material to give the new planting at least a vague chance of survival.

at last we collect the car

I switched on my computer this morning and it was fine, uploading emails entirely normally and letting me scoot round the Times website while I ate my muesli.  I have discovered what it was doing last night, which was uploading the new Microsoft Office.  There were new and unasked for buttons on the toolbar, including Outlook, which I don't use, and some kind of search engine called Bing, which I'd never heard of.  I opened Bing to see what it was, and couldn't find any way of closing it again, and had to call on the Systems Administrator for help, who couldn't initially close it either and kept harrumphing from the aggravation of the car still being at the garage and the government website being down so it was impossible to see if it had passed its second MoT or not. I really wish Microsoft wouldn't do that.  Supposing I had badly needed to use my laptop last night, if I'd been up against a deadline to finish a report or something, I'd have been stuck.

Finally the government site worked, and a little tick appeared against the car's MoT status, and the garage rang to say it was ready to collect.  It goes to a Jaguar dealership for servicing because of the electronics.  There are so many of them it is basically a computer on wheels, and it is of an age where they have started to play up, so although it passed the MoT first time round in July except for the cracked windscreen, the Systems Administrator was not entirely confident that it would necessarily pass again.  The Jaguar dealership is in a retail park to the east of Ipswich, and there are two ways of getting there from here.  You could walk a mile to a railway station and get a train to Colchester where you could change trains for Ipswich, then get a bus from the centre of Ipswich.  Or you could drive there in another car.  The SA quite understandably preferred the latter option.  The garage is in the same retail park as the Ipswich John Lewis at Home store, and so it was a reasonably productive journey because after collecting the car we were able to go and buy a couple of oven gloves and some frying pans.

Having a car stuck at the garage for over a fortnight while Autoglass fails to replace the windscreen on a weekly basis is not the worst of problems to have, in the grand scheme of things. It's not as if it was our only car.  I have a friend who needs to sell her house, who is on permanent standby in case of viewers, having to keep the house unnaturally clean and tidy, all social plans subject to revision and cancellation in case a potential buyer should materialize, and afraid to book any kind of holiday.  The Colchester housing market has gone soft and she is getting quite demoralised being tied to home all through the summer.  Compared to that being on standby to go and collect the car is a minor inconvenience.  Even so it is a nuisance.  Arrangements to see people and go to places have kept getting bumped forward to try and keep my diary clear.  I was hoping to revisit the Tate's Giacometti exhibition with one friend before they go into hospital for an operation that will leave them immobile for a bit, but I fear we've run out of time.

The garage somehow swung it so that the SA was not charged for the second MoT.  It would have been deeply unfair to have to pay twice, when the only reason for the first failure was the windscreen and it would have been the work of two minutes to see that the windscreen had been changed and the paperwork showed it had been done by a qualified installer, and the car had been parked at the garage all the meantime.  Still, technically it was outside the ten working day period to qualify for a retest, and the SA was more or less resigned to paying twice and then deciding whether the hassle of trying to reclaim the cost of the second test from the insurers and the windscreen firm was worth it.

The oven gloves were plain black ones from John Lewis' Essentials range.  We already have some, and they give much better insulation than many branded ones at four times the price.  In the end we split the difference on whether to go for upmarket frying pans or get cheap ones and just replace them as often as the non-stick coating scratched, buying a fairly expensive saute pan that fits our existing lids and has a metal handle so can go in the oven, and two budget frying pans, one of which was marked with a piece of kitchen string through the handle as soon as we got home so that it can be kept for pancakes and omelets.  John Lewis at Home is really rather a terrifying temple to consumerism.  I read in one of the Sunday papers that inflatable flamingos were A Thing, but I didn't entirely believe it until I saw they have them in Ipswich.

computer says no

This could be a short post.  I think my computer is doing something.  I didn't ask it to do anything, because I wanted to use it, but I think it has gone ahead and is running its scan or update or whatever it wanted to do anyway.  The cursor sticks and becomes unresponsive for seconds at a time, if not minutes, and it is a test of my touch typing when whole clauses, whole sentences, don't appear on the screen for a minute or more after I've typed them.  I gave it half an hour to see if it would finish but it is still doing it.  Corrections are practically impossible as I end up overcorrecting.

In fact, that is me done for the day.  Typing the first paragraph took over ten minutes.  Try again tomorrow.