THEY'RE PLANTING ME IN A RAISED BED

Well, hullo my hearties!

First, the tasteless and unnecessary information:

A big NHS van arrived today, bearing - for all the village to see - a showy, white, clinical-looking raised bog contraption, a pair of crutches and special elephant feet to increase the height of the Matrimonial Bed.  The raised bog is nothing to do with peat, but perches on top of our existing khazi so that I can perform without bending at the hip more than 90º. Don't ask me how one is supposed to do that! It's going to be a sharp learning curve next week.

Enough already!!

Now, as a foot note to my last post - a rather arresting comment on the radio this morning:

According to the John Innes Institute at Norwich,  More wheat will be eaten, worldwide, over the next fifty years, than has been harvested over the past ten thousand years.  

Something to think about?  Certainly a good reason for keeping an open mind about all forms of food production.

Helleborus purpurascens in my garden this week. I've come to the conclusion that I prefer simple wild species to fancy hybrid hellebores. They're certainly prettier than those awful doubles.  Click on pic to enlarge.

Well, well,
What do you do when the spirit is feverishly, yearningly, urgently willing but the flesh is weaker than a Methodist's whisky and soda?  You get frustrated and angry, then if you're not jolly careful, you can become resentful and moany.  But I'm hideously behind with all my garden routines.

As I type this, I'm looking out of the  window – yes, I can touch type – at the climbing rose, 'Scharlachtglut.  It has still not been pruned or trained.  It's the last one to do, but should have been finished weeks ago.  I love its  big, single, blood red flowers, with their yellow stamens, and the generous clusters of fruity orange hips which last all winter. But now they're hanging – some wrinkled, some rotten, none pretty – and the whole plant needs serious attention.  

I really am in a pickle. Half my perennials are still not cut back and I now see spring bulbs coming up among the dead stems.  There's a good day's work there, tidying, dividing plants that need it, and taking a few basal cuttings of treasures, for security.

Most of our 'lawns' are wild mini-meadow, but what little fine grass I have is, as yet, un-mown. It's tussocky here, muddy there, and where it runs up to the borders, has begun to merge with the little plants at their edges.

The 10 foot Corylus avellana 'Contorta' which I'd normally hate, and certainly didn't plant myself, has a forest of straight suckers round its grossly convoluted main stems. I have to remove these without disturbing the violets, wood anemones, epimediums, Omphalodes verna and Scilla bifolia at its feet. The suckers should have been removed in October.

Actually, that Harry Lauder's Walkingstick hazel won a reprieve when we moved here 7 years ago.  I had marked it for death, along with such other monstrosities as a big, half dead weeping willow, a 20ft Leyland 'hedge' and a mature-ish Cryptomeria, outside the back door that was so hideously pruned that it resembled a wrinkly old man with no trousers.  

But I realised that  if I pruned the hazel with guile, it could develop an open-framed, characterful plant for winter, at the entrance to our tiny woodland garden.  I'd planned a foreground of tall herbaceous stuff for summer, so that the nut's full-on ugliness, when in leaf, would be sufficiently disguised.  It looks elegantly Chinese, in winter, now, but still abominable in leaf.

A-a-a-anyway.  The reason for this horticultural tardiness is genuine and unavoidable.  My failing hip allows work for about 40 minutes, and then converts me to a staggering, limping wreck.  Getting up and down takes minutes, rather than seconds, and bending or flexing feels like feeding oneself through a very small hoop backwards, arse first.

I could have hired a gardener, but somehow, I didn't feel I could bear a stranger rummaging about in my borders.  Those beds are rather private and only I know where the really sensitive places are.  How could an outsider know where the small colony of Tulipa sprengeri lives, or why one cannot weed in the wood until one can see where submerged specials like Trilliums lie. 

And how could I bear a professional laughing at my childish habit of stuffing broken bits of plant – dianthus, helianthemum, penstemon & so on – back into the ground, hoping they'd root, even though they usually do?

The PG has repeatedly offered to help, but I forbid it. She has more than enough to deal with, without more labouring.

So I've decided that the garden – poor little mite – will just have to wait until I'm properly mobile again. It will recover, once I get my hands back on it.  And meanwhile, there'll be plenty of contemplation time while the new hip replacement beds in.  I'm told it will be 6 weeks no bending, 3 months near normal, 6 months to almost full recovery.

Next autumn, therefore, a gentle renovation will begin for parts of the garden.  But a great central re-design is on the cards.  I've had a major inspiration but may need help from a design expert.  I know pretty well what I want, but it's always worth getting others to cast their beadies over one's plans.  (I'm thinking that double barrelled geezer with the big hats.) Someone like he might spot obvious errors, idiocies and missed opportunities.  But of that, more later.

Life, I believe, needs a jolt from time to time, to buck one up and stimulate creativity. But with the pre-Christmas fire, my collapsible mother and this bloody hip, I think we've had quite enough, for now, in the jolt department.

Crocus chrysanthus 'Blue Pearl,' one of the best coloured chrysanthus types and a reliably tough little crocus.  This was shot by the PG a year or so ago.  Mine in the garden just budding.


I'm listening to Melvyn Tan playing Schubert's Moments Musicaux on a Broadwood Fortepiano - a recording, he's not here personally!

This day in 2006 I attended the Official Opening of Delamore Young Plants, in Wisbech Saint Mary's. Peter Seabrook was guest of honour and I lunched with a group of Israeli plant breeders.

This week's film was Social Network.  After keen anticipation, I have to say I was disappointed. Aaron Sorkin's screenplay was clever - perhaps too clever - and like his West Wing, the dialogue rattled along almost at the speed of light.  But with the modern film makers' maddening habit of boosting background noise to the max, and then picking actors with mediocre diction, I found parts of the dialogue inaudible or incomprehensible.  Even with subtitles turned on, it was a race to keep up.

But it wasn't all the film's fault. Part of the trouble was the subject. I found the characters, particularly the main protagonist and his closest associates to be such staggeringly repellent creatures, so amoral, dysfunctional, nerdicular and just plain revolting, that by the end of the film, I wanted them all to die, and their nasty gimlet-eyed lawyers with them.

I'm sure it will get scads of oscars on the forthcoming Sunday stitch up, but if it does, that might be more to do with chauvinism than merit.

No blog next week, unless I come out of hospital double quick.  So until March - toodle ooh!