PHENOLOGICAL NIGHTMARES AFTER DINNER AT MY CLUB

Well hello!  It's been ages, hasn't it?

Somebody phoned me this week and asked if I was devastated about the demise of the Busy Lizzie which has succumbed to Downy Mildew.
I answered, 'No, I'm absolutely delighted.'
'But what will people put in their hanging baskets,' asked my questioner.
'Nothing, lets hope,' I replied, 'but since there are, let's say, 50,000 other dangly plant varieties available, they should be spoilt for choice.

The RHS has flogged the lease on the Lawrence hall and will have lots of lovely dosh to blow on big projects.  One is a massive prairie or meadow garden at Hyde Hall, to be developed under the guidance of the incomparable Nigel Dunnet.  But here's a piccy of relatively self-made, natural 'upper saltmarsh' at Cley, in Norfolk.  The flora, here, is rather nondescript, but in my view, sublimely pretty.
As often happens around here, the pictures on this post bear little or no relation to the text - hurrah for lack of an editor!  CLICK THE PIX FOR A BIGGER VIEW.


Now, where was I . . . Oh, yes -–
I was sitting in an extremely posh kitchen, not a million miles from London having admired a rather delightful garden.  I was supposed to be politely listening to my hosts, while sipping coffee of herculean strength and admiring one of the most beautiful and characterful cats I've ever seen.  This cat had a sharp sense of humour, as well as spotted fur and unnervingly frank, pale green eyes – a micro-leopard.

But instead of living the moment, I had to endure a sustained vibratory assault on my left nipple.  The iPhone 4S – to which, I'm told, you can speak but which I've always felt too embarrassed to – was leaping and jerking about in my breast pocket like a March frog.  It was receiving a severe twit-storm of tweets.

The whole drama was sparked off by a certain illustrious editor (tweet him at @SeeWhyGardens) who confessed to dreaming that he had co-hosted a posh dinner party with me, somewhere oak-pannelled and clubby where we ate scallops and behaved raucously while being funny and charming.  There was talk of decanted wine and various clubbable guests who, says the tweeter, 'loved us.'

(I believe 'clubbable' means suitable for belonging in a club. However, some of the 'clubbable' people I know would benefit from being bludgeoned into oblivion.)

I haven't yet asked my co-host who, specifically, was there but it seems to have been a rollicking good party and we must have thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

Soft Cranesbill, Geranium molle, such a tiny, insignificant weed that you wouldn't think twice before yanking it out of the ground. And yet John Clare would rave over such a plant.  Is it time we tolerated beautiful species like this in our gardens, perhaps even making more space for them, and for other species which benefit from their presence. 

Meanwhile, I've been a bit worried about Phenology.  

A yellow crocus popped out in my meadow, just after Christmas and now someone is tweeting about swallows and asking if we've seen any yet.  I put this down to misguided optimism in both cases. The crocus got eaten by a sparrow, by the way and the swallow tweeter is almost three months early.

The wonderful sightings of winter migrants continues on our local Fen, however.  The PG and I admired a superb male hen harrier, cruising along the dyke yesterday and since Christmas, 'ring tail' - ie, female or juvenile hen harriers and short eared owls have been spotted almost daily.

But back to phenology.  Weird climates - and ours has been abnormal for so long, now that we've forgotten what a normal year is like - should be blowing a howling gale of fear up all our skirts big time.  Climate change – or rather Global Warming – if you read the GM, hormone-treated, fungicided straws in the abnormally strong and capricious wind, is accelerating.  At some point, maybe soon, we reach a point of no return.  What happens after that isn't nice.

Personally I believe, as humans, we deserve all we're going to get.  The idiotic mantra 'Save the Planet' keeps being chanted, as people recycle tokenistically and eat imported organic bananas, but I'm pretty sure the planet is absolutely fine and is in no way under threat.

Earth, as we call it, will probably continue to be an insignificant fragment of a universe that blew itself apart, a while ago.  And to think that we, as humans, can have the remotest shred of influence on its ultimate outcome is a shining example, wouldn't you say, of the Sin Of Pride.

No, it's just us folk who are under threat, as we fully deserve to be.

Except that it isn't just us, is it?  It's a pretty huge hunk of terrestrial life that will perish, when, as Johnny Cash would say, The Man Comes Around.  It'll be good-bye to life as far as we and a good number of cohabitee taxa are concerned –- but by no means good-bye to life itself, I'd suggest.  The Earth will still be here, doing what planets tend to do, long after we've buggered it all up and gone.

I suppose I should be censured for such a dark attitude but I don't see this as bad news at all.  From primordial slime to Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Shakespeare and Newton is not a bad bit of progress.  But when you move on to, say, the Birdy Song, MacDonalds and Damien Hirst, it's perhaps time to say enough already – bring on the fire and brimstone!

Field scabious, Knautia arvensis, which I regard as an essential meadow plant.  I wonder whether it will feature in in the Hyde Hall prairies?  I also grow it in my gravel garden where it seems happy and has not, so far, become a nuisance.  It's far prettier than Knautia macedonica and doesn't get mildew.



This week's film was ... but first, I have to tell you about THE SHELVES  

In our house, DVDs are stored haphazardly in all sorts of odd places.  But in one room, there are shelves reserved strictly for what we know as film classics. These may not be high art, as in, say Bergman's Seventh Seal or the perplexing Last Year in Marienbad - though both are there.  Instead, the shelves are reserved for titles which the PG and I regard as great, ie films that we can happily watch on a regular basis and seldom lose interest in.  Casablanca is there, of course, as is In the Heat of the Night, The Life of Brian, Brief Encounter, Fargo, Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai (next to The Magnificent Seven,) Withnail and I, Cabaret, Dirty Harry and many more.

Few films get transferred to this place of honour after a single viewing. It takes time.

BUT-  A Separation, written and directed by the Iranian Ashgar Farhadi is an exception.  It has gone straight onto THE SHELVES.

The story structure is, in my view, faultless.  A married couple in oppressive Iranian society, find themselves impaled on the opposite horns of a hideous dilemma.  One partner wants to emigrate, to make a better life for their child; the other feels duty-bound to stay behind to nurse a parent with advanced Alzheimer's.

The film opens at the point where the problems are sparking off a divorce.  Events occur, through the ensuing two hours which get you so caught up with the agony of the main protagonist – the husband – that you feel you are there.  There are Kafka-esque courtroom scenes showing a shambolic judicial system; moments almost of farce, when things go wrong; deep tragedy as mistakes and deceits bring unwelcome consequences and, above all, acting and directing which gives the characters and their situations amazing clarity.

Before seeing this film, I hadn't a clue what life might be like, for a middle class family living in urban Iran. It's 40 years since I last visited Tehran and the Shah was in charge then, but this immaculate portrait and riveting story has filled me with information as well as providing two hours of fascinated absorption.

Do watch it, if you haven't already.


Good Lord!  If you've read this far, you deserve a candlelit dinner in a romantic location with the date/partner/friend of your dreams.

Bye bye for now!

WHO NEEDS A RUCKED UP LANDSCAPE?

A sublimely happy, prosperous, productive, creative and exhilarating New Year to you!
May your boiled potatoes never degenerate to a mush; may your roses remain black-spot-free and let's  hope your carrots will run straight and true next summer.

Now then.  I'm afraid I have to deliver a raspberry to certain folk, out there, who have been extremely rude about Lincolnshire, the county in which I'm proud and delighted to live.

CLICK ON ANY PICTURE FOR A BIGGER VIEW.

Land near Thurlby, Lincolsnhire - An example of atrocious fenland landscape which offends so many sensitive eyes.  Note the rotting cabbages, abandoned car wrecks and chemical-mad farming practices.

It began with a Twitterstorm of rudenesses including such comments as 'Does the whole of Lincolnshire smell of rotting cabbage?'   There were unkind references to people getting depressed, as soon as they saw the landscape and even unkind comparisons made with Holland which, one twitterbug asserted, induced similar feelings of misery.

I've no intention of being rude about Holland – a country which I love to visit, whose horticulture is second to none and whose history is long and distinguished.  But I would like to correct those who, out of ignorance and a rather limited experience, are unkind about my particular corner of England.

May I begin with a little list?

Isaac Newton (maths)
Joseph Banks (botany)
Matthew Flinders (Australia)
Alfred Lord Tennyson (pomes)
John Harrison (chronometers)
John and Charles Wesley (Methodism/Hymns)
Henry the Fourth (King of England who nobbled Richard the Second)
Jennifer Saunders
Jim Broadbent
Dame Joan Plowright
Margaret Thatcher (politician)
Neville Marriner (conductor)
Malcolm Sargent aka 'Flash Harry' (conductor)
Nicholas Parsons (ancient broadcaster)
William Cecil - Lord Burghley (counsellor to Elizabeth 1)

These are just a few notable people who originated from Lincolnshire.  For a county with a reputation, according to some, for inbreeding, Lincolnshire seems to have produced a lively quiverful of notables.

And now, I'd like to smash two seriously wrong, but widely held beliefs:

The first is that Lincolnshire is flat.  This is nonsense.   A sizeable proportion – the southern third – of this huge county is undoubtedly flat.  But much of the remainder is gently rolling, with a high proportion of woodland, pasture and some fine rivers.  And if you travel northwards, into the Lincolnshire Wolds, the landscape becomes distinctly hilly.

The second fallacy is that flat landscapes are ugly, depressing, featureless, boring and undesirable.  This is a pernicious misconception and can lead to disastrous planning decisions.  Flat, fen landscapes can be more beautiful than the Alps, more pastoral than the Sussex Downs and are far more bio-diverse than, say, the Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District.

Fen landscapes are dynamic, with wonderfully dramatic skies, multiple reflections from lying water, subtly changing colours and intriguing lines.  The blend of manmade patterns - networks of dykes, patchworks of partly worked land, differing crops - makes a moving harmony with with the natural elements of sky, water and light.

The Dutch Landscape paintings of artists like Ruisdael, Avercamp and Cuyp capture these dynamics perfectly.

There's no question that a puckered or folded topography has its own, widely recognised beauty.  But rudeness about flatness comes from prejudice, rather than careful observation.

I think part of this prejudice stems from the dismal state of the land which borders some of Lincolnshire's main trunk roads.  The drive from Spalding to Kings Lynn, for example, can induce a suicidal impulse - especially on a drizzly day.

Ugly pack houses, light industry, filling stations and hideous ribbon development disfigure the area in all directions.  Yet even round there, within a short ride of such curiously named but unpretty places as Saracen's Head, Tongue End, Pode Hole, Whaplode and Cowbit, there are examples of bird-rich wetland, fascinating washes and, in the older communities, interesting architecture.

Stamford, at Lincolnshire's south western end, is one of Britain's finest limestone towns with much of its architecture still unspoilt.  Lincoln itself has a 12th century cathedral which compares favourably with York and is imposingly set, atop the steep hill round which the city is built.

Other Lincs places dear to my heart include the Grimsthorpe estate (Vanbrugh; Lancelot Brown) where Duke of Burgundy butterflies breed; the limestone region north of Stamford, where pyramidal orchids, rock roses and other jazzy wildflowers make the road verges brighter than gardens; the desolate salt marshes which border the Wash, east of Boston - the original Boston, that is, not the repro one in Massachusetts; and Grantham, where Richard the Third once slept, and which really does have a police-friendly road called Letsby Avenue.

 Two shots of Crocus imperati which flowered in our garden in late December 2011.

I'm listening to rain and wind lashing my window.

I have been watching the latest BBC adaptation of  Great Expectations.  Being a Dickens lover, I had looked forward to it with eager anticipation.  What a disappointment!  What had been a rattling good yarn, full of wry humour and warm relationships – as well as cruelty, betrayal and revenge – was transformed into a dreary, humourless drama.  Gillian Anderson was a good Miss Havisham, and I didn't have a problem with her being so young.  But the other characters were rinsed out and spun dried until they became little more than wallpaper.  And what on earth was the idea in making Pip look like a some sort of a gay pin-up?  As for Messrs Wemmick and Drummle – don't get me started!

Happy Epiphany!

'DARKNESS VISIBLE' – ABSOLUTELY THE WORST AND MOST SCARY KIND.

I'm dreaming up horrible destinations for the undeserving.  Here's one (described below in reddish type by my good friend J Milton) that I had previously planned for certain bankers.  

However, I feel, now, that perpetrators of mindless bureaucracy have the prior claim on this choice region of hell.  Details on the particular piece of catastrophically silly, pointless and – thankfully – unenforceable piece of pillocky legislation will follow in a mo. . . 

First the pome fragment . . .

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed

With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.

Yes, that would do nicely for faceless ones who stride past, staring through me with their dead eyes, some mornings, when I'm alone and palely loitering in the vicinity of Whitehall.

And then,  a pretty thing. It's cold, nasty winter but not yet Christmas – so we need tropical pictures to warm up our cockles – whatever they are.  (Hope it's not rude.)

Here's the first. . .

 A Common Birdwing butterfly, Troides helena photographed when we were last in Peninsular Malaysia
CLICK ON ALL PICTURES FOR A LARGER VIEW.

Oh, and answers to the last film quiz which was here, are these:  

The film was the Coen Brothers' Fargo and the man who did the stamps was Norm Gunderson, played by John Carroll Lynch whose wife, Police Person Marge, was played by Frances McDormand.  When Norm grumbles because his painting was chosen for a small denomination stamp, Marge cheers him up by saying that when the postage rate goes up, his will be the stamp everyone will use, to make up the difference.

And now here's this week's film quiz.  

First an easy one

Who said:

'That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.'  

Bonus points for the character name, and the star to whom he or she is speaking?

And now a nasty one for Victoria. . . 

Who said this:

You wanted a recording of my voice, well here it is.

And can you finish the quote?

Dahlia 'Fascination' - like a cheap, pink negligée.
Dahlias will be harder to overwinter, safely, for reasons you can read about below.

Now the rant.

If you want something to make you furious – I mean apart from the unbridled arrogance of the Merkozy cuddly snuggle-up which will NOT do much to stabilise the crumbling mess that was the Euro – look no further than the latest scriddick of asinine, anserine, indeed positive ovine legislation that directly concerns all good gardeners.  And I mean even organic ones.

From 1st January 2012 it will be illegal to dust gladiolus bulbs, dahlia tubers – or anything prone to the rots – with sulphur powder.  

That's right.  Sulphur may be one of earth's commonest elements.  It may, with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and nitrogen, be one of the building blocks of our bodies, not to mention everything we grow and eat.  It may be organically approved and as safe, nearly, as tap water.  But its use as a fungicide dust will, from next year, be verboten. 

And anyone who so much as dangles a leaky packet of sulphur over a crate of over-wintering dahlia roots could be committing an offence under the Food and Environmental Protection Act.  

Now that, in itself, is totally bloody silly.  But it gets even more barmy when you realise that gardeners will still be allowed to buy and use sulphur to sprinkle on their gardens if they want to increase the acidity of their soil, or to use it as a plant nutrient. 

WHAAAAAAAAT?????  So it's not banned because it's considered dangerous.  They don't mind you having it but forbid you to use it in any way but the one they prescribe.  And that's sulphur.  Something  so abundant, in some areas of the world, that you could gather up a bucketful simply by dragging it along the ground.

So what panel of cretins dreamed up that one?  More to the point, how many pointless and tedious meetings, each squandering entire rain forests of paper, printed with impenetrable text, all in Civilservantese, had to be held, to come up with that particular piece of utterly pointless legislation?

And how will it be policed?  Will check-out staff, at garden centres, come over all officious, like Boots pharmacy counter assistants, and demand to know what the stuff you're buying will be used for?  

Perhaps the police – who, I'm told, are worryingly undermanned and overworked – will deploy burly constables to come and smash down our shed doors, hoping to catch us furtively sprinkling flowers of sulphur (posh name for sulphur powder) onto our begonia tubers while pretending that we were about to use the stuff as a rhododendron tonic.

I'm not sure where all this nonsense originates from.  It has a hideously strong whiff of Brussels about it, possibly coupled with Nannistate and New Labour and I DO NOT APPROVE OF IT.

The wise way forward is pretty obvious.  I can't tell you how to get round the problem, because even though the law, in this case, is an ass and should be strongly contested and objected to, the law as a whole has to be respected, don't you think?  

Or if not respected, obeyed until, by popular pressure, it can be changed.  So why don't those bodies with muscle - the RHS, the HTA, Garden Organic and others unite, get together and tell the legislators to stop being so bloody silly and repeal the stupid law this instant!

Here's another nice Asian plant, Amherstia nobilis, a superb member of the pea family which grows as quite a large tree and is native to Myanmar (Burma.)   The racemes were nearly 60cms long.  I fell in love with this while visiting the Kuala Lumpur botanic gardens.  There were Long Tailed Macaque monkeys,  Macaca silenus, playing in a stream nearby.

I'm listening to Erik Satie Gymnopedies 1 -3

This day in 2005  The PG and I visited Hanson's Chocolate Shop in Folkingham to buy expensive but delicious chocolate things for the Christmas crowd. The shop is still going strong. Even Lincolnshire, it seems, has a certain amount of Sloaniness, enabling a business like that to survive in such a small village.  Mostly, though, it's the three Ms, round here – Money, Muck and Misery.  That evening, we went to a cocktail party in Rutland.

This week's film was John Boorman's Hope and Glory, a little classic much loved by the PG and me.  We had a Boorman relative to stay, and since she had not seen the film, used that as an excuse to play it again and watch it with her.  It's an exquisite glimpse at middle class suburbia in wartime, through the eyes of a school boy who learns the rudest word in the English language and how to bowl a Googly, all in the space of a few days.  Ian Bannen plays his irascible grandfather to a tee. I've a feeling, had he really existed, that he'd have enjoyed this grandpa's awful blog.

(If you need to know what a Googly is, look at one being delivered here.   The knack is not to give the game away to the batsman - but then, a clever bat will usually spot a googly in time and play it accordingly.)

Bless you for your patience, and bye bye for now!

MORE CAKES AND ALE PLEASE, SIR TOBY!

And a very happy Advent to y'all!  It's a time of expectation, waiting and hoping, I'm told.  And also a time to contemplate death.  Hurrah!

And a huge THANK YOU to the scads of you who so kindly sent messages of congratulations on my AMAZING, SURPRISING and MOST GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED - though wickedly undeserved - gong, at this years Garden Media Guild.  Yer could 'ave knocked me dahn wiv a fevver, yer honour, 'onest!

London, despite the strike, was still a joy to visit, despite the police closing the West End for the strike, and despite my being stuck, in traffic, in a cab with the cabbie who could even out-talk me.  When the diatribe began with 'I'm not a racist, but. . .' I knew it would be a long, hard ride.  It took 76minutes to get from Oxford Circus to the Barbican.

But hey - how lovely is London? Where else are there so many theatres staging good productions? So many art galleries and museums absolutely free to enter?  Such a range of restaurants from absolutely terrible to sublimely good.

Click any picture for a larger view.  (Perhaps you'd prefer not, though,with the 'bottom' picture.)

As daffodillydallier and lake-lover Bill Wordsworth wrote:

'Earth has not anything to show more fair.

 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

 A sight so touching in its majesty:'

Well, OK, fair enough . . . you're right – this is not the view from Westminster Bridge and the piccy was not snapped by Wordsworth but by me.  But you can still see that. . .
 'Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
 Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.    Well, nearly, anyway!


I shot it on Hungerford Bridge on my new iPhone 4S camera which is not a bad gadget.

On Tuesday night, I dined at Chimes in Pimlico, a decent eatery which specialises in English food and serves a range of draught, flagon and bottled ciders.  Yorkshire pudding, eaten as a starter with onion gravy, is one of our tastiest dishes, if properly done.  Chimes offered a variant - with grilled prawns in a sauce - which sounded so disgusting that I simply had to try it.  What a delicious surprise! The flavours blend and contrast beautifully and their Yorkshire pudding was exactly as it should be - a puff of red hot hot air, packed in thin, crisp, fragile, aromatic, flash-baked batter.

Liver, bacon, mash and gravy followed –  a favourite of mine and since the PG abhors liver, is something to go for when at a restaurant.  It was lovely, too, but I was sad about the mash.

People don't understand the subtleties of a good mashing potato and either adulterate it with flavour too strong for the potato, or cream it into a slick, slimy gruel or don't add anything to bring out the 'spuddiness.'  I like it mashed con brio but always by hand.  You have to knock air into it.  Butter is better than marge and you must add milk, too.  For seasoning, I use a small pinch of mustard powder per double serving and – this is really important – freshly ground nutmeg.  You don't necessarily taste the spice in the mash, but it tones up the gorgeous potato taste.

I drank Chimes own house cider, which was draft, semi-dry and had the necessary borderline taste between an abandoned apple box and old stilton rind.  (This is meant to be complimentary and not at all an adverse criticism.  To me, good cider tastes like that, whereas bad cider tastes like sick.)

I also drank a very dry, strong cider from Biddenden, in Kent, which was arresting, challenging and actually extremely pleasurable, despite the stilton rind.  By the end of the glass, I didn't really care about anything.

Not exactly the Thames but one of the fen drains, near us, romantically known as The Forty Foot.
Fenland drains, despite the intensive agriculture round here, are important wildlife corridors.  We have leaning telegraph poles, too, thanks to depth and quality of our easily worked soil.  Anyone can garden here!

Now a rant:

If you ask me, the whole thing is utterly and irrevocably a huge pile of humungously bad taste pants.  And I'm not talking slinky Sloggi jobs, here, nor Jermyn Street boxers and certainly not those disturbingly thigh-hugging, nearly knee-length Calvin Klein things.  Oh no! I'm talking slack-bellied, man-made fibre, Y-front style, unlaundered, luridly dayglo green or purple, bearing obscene double entendre slogans on their crotches type pants.

That's my informed analysis of the West's economy.  There's nothing more to say except that if we thought we were all utterly shafted before, when the credit crunch began, we were wrong.  That was just the starter.  

The main course is yet to come, apparently, and the only important question is this:  when everyone in Europe is having to carry their cash – be it NeueDeutschmarks, NouveauNouveau Francs or Thanatodrachmas – to the shops in wheel barrows, will £50 be enough, here in Britain, to buy a can of baked beans?  My suspicion is that it won't, and we'll end up well and truly in the cack.  

Perhaps we deserve it, but really, I do wish Merv could, well, you know - get a bit of life into his deliveries and cheer up a bit.  At least things wouldn't be quite so suicide-inducing, then.

Lia Leendertz, in her fantastically brilliant blog Midnight Brambling  describes quince and star anise ice cream.
What she hasn't said, though, is what voluptuous-looking, curvy, erotic fruit a quince, Cydonia oblonga is.  

I'm listening to Berlioz'  L'Enfance du Christ.

This time on Wednesday I was still reeling from having been given an award, my first ever, at the Garden Media Guild Awards Lunch.  I was guest of Thompson and Morgan - thank you thank you thank you T&M -  and was privileged to sit next to the frighteningly handsome, erudite,  jolly and award-winning James Wong, author of Grow Your Own Drugs.  We were treated to one of his pieces to Camera, about the biochemistry of the daffodil, which could have been awkward and ridiculously stagey, but which flowed like a ballet solo at Covent Garden.  To make such a contrived piece appear so natural and spontaneous is seriously good television.

This week's film was the first part of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander.  We often watch this in early December because the first act takes place at Christmas in the house of a large, wealthy family, in 1907.  The photography, the staging, acting and direction are faultless.  And there's more Scandinavian, self-destructive Angst per scene than you could throw a lorry load of sticks at.  What more do you want, in Advent, than Protestant gloom and a veneer of festive fun laid over a morass of despair, hate and sexual impropriety?

And that's more than enough from me.  But look at the picture below, and then tell me a quince isn't a suggestive thing!

You can stop looking now!  Bye bye!

THE BEST MAN WORE A BUNCH OF VIOLENCE

What cheer, my hearties!

No proper film quiz this week - but a double one next time.

However, here's an easy interim question:


Who whinged about his duck illustration ending up on the wrong US postage stamp??  And what did his wife say, to cheer him up?  (No need for the actual quote - a paraphrase will do nicely.)


It's been so long since I posted so today's nonsense is what you'd call an 'interim' or 'holding action' in a bid to cling onto the few friends I have left.

I turn my back on the garden for a matter of days and what happens?  It breathes a huge sigh of relief, to have me out of the way for a spell and flourishes.  The tuberose which has been sulkily  in unmoving bud for about two months suddenly blooms - well, nearly - my Daphne bholua 'Darejeeling' has bursting flower buds and the first if the winter bulbs, Iris reticulate are already pushing their sharp-pointed little shoots through.  The lawn has grown at least an inch, in less than a week and the meadow grasses are nearly 6 inches high.  It'll need another light topping with the non-rolling Hayter.

The 'tache,  grown for 'Movember,' is lopsided but the violence are genuine Viola odorata 'Governor Herrick.'
The tie is by someone called Duchamp or Dechamp - but not to be confused with that famous urinal.  Or maybe.. .

It has been eventful.
Last Thursday I witnessed, along with the PG, my brother-in-law's wedding.  The Registrar, who was younger than any of us, gave the couple - both coming in to bat for a second innings, and both grandparents  - a stern lecture on the solemnity of the marriage vows, before making them man and wife.

I wore a bunch of sweet violets in my button hole, as did the PG.  You'd probably call hers a 'corsage'  but mine was, distinctly a coarse-arge.

Afterwards we went to a pub in Barnes to nibble whitebait and later to the Groom's flat for a small party before moving on to a superb Italian restaurant not far from the Thames for a big, posh dinner.

A three-year old Ukrainian boy smeared red caviar over my suit trousers and then ate an entire plate of the stuff, spread on discs of toast.

On Friday we went to Eugene Onegin at the London Coliseum which has a better roof than the one in Rome.  Onegin was a complete sh1t but I have to say, Tatiana was a bit of a pillock and Olga should have been thoroughly spanked for her wantonness.

On Saturday, after a day with our grandchildren, we sat in the Old Vic to see Synge's Playboy of the Western World.


Since then, and since my mother moved to a retirement home, we've been sorting out the contents of her house.  How can you concentrate on packing up stuff when confronted by a trunkful of old family photographs?  We spent a morning gawping at the past.  My brother's shorts, at 4 years old, were much worse than mine when I was 7.

I'm listening to Eugene Onegin.  The music is pure Tchike but none the worse for that.

This day last week We were sampling a pre-opera pint of Youngs bitter.  Not what it was, now it's no longer brewed in Wandsworth, and now that Youngs is no longer independent.  Good pubs, in London's West End are rarer than hens' teeth.

This week's film was Rebecca another Hitchcock gem, though not particularly 'Hitchcockian.'  A magnificent Mrs Danvers.

Bye for now!

A FLY PINCHED THE SPOTS FROM MY AGARIC

A supremely happy November to you all.
And deep apologies for being so tardy in producing a new post.  The delay is inexcusable and I'm thinking of sacking this blog's editor for indolence, sloth, lethargy, procrastination, work-dodging, goofing off, slacking and general idleness.

Now the film quiz.
Who said, in which film? :  
You're a good-looking boy: you've big, broad shoulders. But he's a man. And it takes more than big, broad shoulders to make a man.
You must promise not to cheat, by Googling the quote. 

Bourne Woods on 5th November.  This year's colours have been slow to develop but are lasting wonderfully.
CLICK ANY PICS FOR A LARGER VIEW.

I do have a micro-excuse in that we've a new baby in the family.  It's neither girl nor boy but a MacBook Air.  I've pampered and spoilt it hideously already and have also begun, after teething troubles, to grow accustomed to the latest Macintosh operating system which is known as 'Lion'.

Now it's clear that the good marketing folk at Apple are none to familiar with zoology, and don't really get it about cats and their relative status.

A lion, I'd say, is probably the least desirable of the big cats, especially a male one – despite the majestic mane and swishy tail.  King of the Jungle he ain't!  The males are bone idle and spend most of their time sleeping, copulating or trying to kill other male's offspring so they can give their own genes preference.

Apple's last OS was called 'Snow Leopard' - quite the rarest and most attractive of the cats, being lithe, lissome and graceful in every way and able to survive in the most hostile mountain environment.  When they launched Snow Leopard I said - as in that annoying song from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma - 'They've gone about as far as they can go.'

The Fly Agarics have popped up at last.  The ones I found seemed a little short of the familiar white spots, though.  They were growing under birches, as usual, and always pop up in the same place each year, from huge mycelia.

The fungi have begun at last - hurrah!  After months of drought, recent rains have not been nearly enough to re-constitute our desiccated land.  But they have dampened things enough to kick the  fungi into action.  Several times, we walked in the extensive and biodiverse Bourne Woods, hoping to find interesting toadstools, including fly agaric Amanita muscaria, but have been disappointed until this week end.

Since last writing, we've had visitations, on the our Fen, of a Merlin, a Peregrine and two Short Eared Owls.  Each one a joy and privilege to watch and to admire.  Wonderful birds.


And ...  I've been angered by a couple of minor things recently. . .

1. The Health Police have been issuing edicts about booze again.  As I'm over 60, I've been told that I shouldn't drink more alcohol than comes in HALF A GLASS OF WINE at any one time.  Any more increases the risk of my falling down.  Well, I wonder how many of the puritans who pontificate on such things have been down in our local town of a week-end evening.  Because I think I can safely say, based on the most casual of observations, that the vast majority of people falling down after about 10.30pm, are definitely under 60.  In fact, I'd say they were all well under 30.  And pardon me, if this seems sexist, but I'd say that a majority of the fallers down were female.  And those females not falling down are usually suffering from hypothermia, since they seem to be dressed for a Caribbean beach, rather than a draughty Lincolnshire town.

2.  The honey industry - though it hardly seems right to call such a delightful and beneficial activity an 'industry' - is about to be further handicapped by the EUrocrats.  They are hysterical about the risk that a genetically modified cell, even one that is dead as mutton, might sully the purity of Europe's honey. So they're going to insist that honey is analysed for the presence of GM, before it can be considered fit to sell.

The government officials - if they've got time before they retire in early middle age on pensions that we self-employed folk can only dream about - might be better employed spending the money on desperately needed research into bee health.

Beleaguered by mystery disorders which have nothing to do with GM; threatened worldwide by habitat loss, misuse of agrochemicals and attacked by widespread parasites, pollinating insects are having a very bad time indeed.  And if we don't soon find out how to stop the decline in their populations, we might well all starve.

The army of Brussels sprouts is advancing for Christmas. These grow within a short bike ride of our house.

People often ask me why I don't grow more vegetables at home.  Well, one answer is in the picture above.  When I can buy superbly fresh, top quality produce so cheaply, why would I want to waste valuable plant space by growing it at home?

And finally - may I please remind you that the disgusting growth on my face, as shown below, is causing me deep discomfort and not a little pain.  So if you want to make my agony and embarrassment all worthwhile, kindly bung a fiver or more to The Bristling Gardeners over at Movember.  The money goes towards research into prostate and testicular cancer - two areas of mens' health which are shamefully under funded.  THANK YOU SO MUCH.

I'm hoping to grow a Ned Flanders but think it could take a year or more.

I'm listening to  Number 1 of 14 Bagatelles by Béla Bartok - it sounds a bit like a piano being tuned. No really, it does.  Ah, that's better  - a sort of mad scherzo-ish bit.  It's making my feet twitch.

This day in 2005 I was packing for a trip to London, to celebrate 33 years of marriage and was writing a biggish book for Harper Collins.  I also recorded birds on a tetrad, for the BTO and purchased lamb chops for dinner.  We watched the BBC drama series Rome and according to my diary, I was pretty unimpressed.

This week's film was a French 'Comic Strip' style derring-do thingy called Wasabi which stars Jean Reno, was written by Luc Besson and directed by a geezer called Gérard Krawczyk.  It's spectacular nonsense, but slickly done and wonderfully funny as well as exciting.  I loved it, but any analysis or thought-out critique would be a complete waste of time.

EXCEPT that being French, there had to be A POINTLESS VOICE-OVER NARRATION at the beginning.  What is it about the French, that they have to do that.  I HATE it and they should STOP DOING IT.  AT ONCE.  (Remember Last Year in Marienbad? I've still know idea what that film was all about.  But I digress, as per. . . .)


That's all!  Byezeebye!

KEW UP TO NASH YOUR TEETH

 'Especially when the October wind with frosty fingers punishes my hair' 
Good afterdoodah!
What a lovely series of gales we've been having.

First, the movie quiz.   Remember - you have to answer it here, in the comments, not merely as a tweet.  And if you want to follow this blog, now you'v found it - please, please do!

This first dialogue is from memory, so I may not have it right, but you'll get the gist.  It's easy peasy:
Actor 1. . . FBI, CIA, ONI - we're all in the same alphabet soup.
Actor 2. . . well you can stick this in your alphabet soup. I had nothing to do with that United Nations murder.

And a tougher one:
Actor 1 - You're funny.
Actor 2 - I've been called a lot of things - but never funny.

Nerine bowdenii and Aster lateriflorus on our kitchen table.  

The walnuts came from an Ely back garden.

I'm going to get cross, in a minute.  But first –  a quiver full of happy recent events and something sumptuously artistic to look forward to.

1. The fieldfares are here.

2. A delightful visit to York, to speak to the Askham Bryan Gardening Club on Autumn Gardening.  The conference centre was pretty full and the Club members turned out to be a wonderfully jolly lot. I hope they all enjoyed their evening as much as I did.

3.  I've fallen so deeply in love with Salvia leucantha that I want to share its bed. 


4.  I had a crash with my electric razor which I absent-mindedly drove through part of my nasty little new moustache - see Movember link elsewhere on this blog.  Who says asymmetrical 'taches are unfeasible?

5.  The PG has had a birthday.  I presented her with hand made rose and violent cream chocolates. We have champagne in the fridge but I haven't manage to catch a sturgeon, yet, so no caviar.

6.  I spoke at my old school reunion at Ely. Haven't experienced such cold feet for years and was nauseous with stage fright. It wasn't helped when my introducer said:  'And now our guest speaker, Nigel Colborn, will give us a brief address.'  The outgoing President of the association had already sidled up me and said 'You're not going to speak for too long, are you?  You will be, er, brief, won't you?'

And during the dinner, someone from a nearby table crept over and whispered, 'Can you tell me, roughly, how long you'll be speaking for?'  I said 'you've got a sweepstake, haven't you?'  At which he went rather red and sidled away.

But it went well enough – well, they laughed and clapped a lot – and ended a delightful day, most of it spent with my brother or reminiscing with old friends.

7 Wonderful news that an exhibition by David Nash will come to Kew next year.
Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Nash does things with wood; Nash really understands wood; Nash carved a huge wooden ball and let it trundle on an oft interrupted journey along Welsh streams and rivers to the sea. Wooden Boulder.  

When I think of the runes burnt into Wotan's spear, cut grom the World Ash, I also think of Nash. He does amazing things with fire and wood.  And what are we all, if not fire and wood in a different form?  More Nash stuff here.

Crocus speciosus. I love the way the stigma peeps out - as if the flower is being indecent.

Having said all that, I'm bothered about Kew. 

It is, after all, one of the world's most important and historic botanic gardens.  Until the Maggie era, it was government funded and as such, I've no doubt that there were Civil Service-connected inefficiencies and everyone had a lovely, cushy ride.  

But you could get in for a penny and spend the entire day immersed in history, botany, horticulture and applied science. Not bad value, that.  

Kew was where I began, as a child, to appreciate the wonders of the Plant Kingdom and to understand the purpose of science.  We lived within easy reach, until I was eight, and my parents frequently took me and my little brother.  One of my earliest memories was seeing black swans with red bills, huge carp rising to gulp air and living loofahs.

On each visit, my father would see that we focused on a specific part of the gardens.  The world's oldest pot plant, collected by Francis Masson in the 1770s, became an old but rather inscrutable friend.  And has remained so.  Kew bumbled along, after our depature to live in Africa but was there, waiting, when I grew older and became even more besotted with plants and nature.  It was busy at weekends but otherwise, was a place which absorbed you; a place of quiet learning; a living museum of plants and botanical history; the world's flora crammed into a few acres by the Thames.

During the Reforming Eighties, the comfy blanket of government finance was pulled off.  Pardon the mixed metaphors but the teat which had sustained poor old Lady Kew for so long was suddenly snatched away, leaving her to starve or take desperate action.  

So instead of continuing her dreamy existence, at the tax payer's expense, she found herself having to 'go on the game.'  The only way she could continue was by prostituting herself.  Entrance money jumped from a penny to prohibitive prices – compare the free entry to the British Museum and National Gallery – and the publicity machine was rolled out.  Big events took place.  Massive exhibitions occurred; a ridiculously impractical but prestigious Alpine house was built; herds of school kids were, and are, dragged round the glasshouses; tropical rainforest style tree walks were constructed and in time the Royal Botanic Garden became an expensive and rather exclusive pleasure park.

Salvia leucantha  the petals and calyces are so furry one wants to use them as cuddly toys.

Perhaps you have no problem with all that.  And I have to admit, I'm not quite sure why I have found it all so offensive.  Financially, and to improve efficiency, 'going pop' was possibly a good idea. But I've never got over the feeling that the taxpayer didn't get a good deal on this.  

Just compare: 

each year, £107 is taken from each and every adult citizen in Britain and handed to farmers, regardless of the size of their businesses or the level of their needs.  (Needs?  Needs?  What bloody needs?) The total cost to the nation, of that subsidy, is around £3.5 billion.  Would it starve agriculture if a wafer thin slice were diverted to the RBG Kew?  So that research into medicinal plants, into molecular biology, into taxonomy, into ground-breaking analytical methods could continue without the distraction of Kew's having to flaunt the tarting kit all the time?

Kew's globally important scientific work continues, of course. And long may it do so.  And these comments are absolutely in no way critical of those who work so hard in the place.

I boycotted the much vaunted Chihuly at Kew exhibition, a decade ago, because of these feelings so clumsily expressed above.

But I'm going to the Nash.  At least he is working with a natural substance, much of which actually lives and has its being in the RBG.

And perhaps I should stop moaning and grow up.

I'm listening to Brünnhilde, heilige Braut from Götterdämerung.  Windgassen singing; Solti conducting.  I'm trying not to weep.

This day in 2006 I was writing a difficult conversation piece for The Garden and half dead with bronchitis and conjunctivitis. Disgusting to be with, my diary says.

This week's film was Soy Cuba  (I am Cuba.)  The Kalatazov/Yevtushenko agitprop job on Cuba's transition from oppressed and thug-ridden, offshore knocking shop for Americans to Castro's long-lasting regime.  I loved the edgy, unnerving camera work and felt great sympathy with the stories but hated the soundtrack.  I have such fond memories of Cuba's superb street, bar and club music that the din on screen jarred badly.  The heroic Russian style conclusion was such cheezy totalitarian propaganda that I burst out laughing.

Oh gawd  - another endless rant and ramble.  A rantle?  Whatever!

Bye bye!