SILVERTREEDAZE

PHENOLOGICAL NIGHTMARES AFTER DINNER AT MY CLUB

2012-01-20T14:48:00.002Z

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?

2012-01-03T12:11:00.000Z

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.

2011-12-09T11:24:00.001Z

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!

2011-12-02T16:01:00.001Z

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

2011-11-25T17:29:00.001Z

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

2011-11-09T17:58:00.000Z

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

2011-10-18T15:37:00.001+01:00

'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 andhistoric botanic gardens. Until the Maggie era, it was government fundedand as such, I've no doubt that there were Civil Service-connectedinefficiencies and everyone had a lovely, cushy ride.

But you could getin 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 achild, to appreciate the wonders of the Plant Kingdom and to understand the purpose of science. Welived 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 blanketof 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 havingto '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' waspossibly a good idea. But I've never got over the feeling that the taxpayerdidn'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!

I EXPECTED A SüSSSPEISE BUT THE KAISERSCHMARRN WAS RATHER A SURPRISE

2011-09-30T17:07:00.001+01:00

Good Morrow, all! I write under intolerable pressure, since I should be tackling the usual Sisyphean task of trying to catch up with uncompleted tasks, having been to Germany and dealing with Mother.

The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

We have drought, still. No rain expected for another ten days; my autumn perennials drying; the lawn dead; the paperwhite bulbs which I promised to plant in gravel in a pot are still in their packets and the gravel is still under weeds, weeds in the drive. Why doesn't drought kill weeds?

And now it's hotter than Jeddah, here, and the sycamore leaves are burning up.

If I bump into any climate change deniers over the next couple of weeks, I shall probably hit them, if they're smaller than me and if their bigger, I'll slip vine weevil pupae into their pockets and pee into their petrol tanks when they aren't looking.

Part of the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin.

It's been eventful.

I have spent a week in Berlin, attending Der Ring Des Nibelungen at the Deutsche Oper. It was utterly bloody brilliant. The Rheingold kicked off to a rollicking start with the Rhinemaidens dressed in slinky, skin tight, shiny wetsuit type things that showed off everything to erotic perfection. They sang pretty well too and Alberich had a voice like Guinness - dark, full, creamy but with a bitter edge.

In Die Walküre both Siegmund and Sieglinde were achingly wonderful and Wotan acted with such conviction that we thought he really was having a heart attack on stage.

Siegfried began Siegfried as a thick, spoilt, twat of a child, bullying the odious Mime but puzzled about how to put two pieces of Lego together. He finally grew up.

The last act of Götterdämerung and its conclusion had the entire vast audience stunned to silence for a full minute before shocked applause began tentatively, swelled slowly and finally grew to tumultuous acclamation. The entire cast, stage crew and orchestra too curtain calls. I have seldom been so moved at any theatrical production anywhere.

The stagecraft was amazing, intricate, complex and it all worked to a tee. And the music, conducted by Donald Runnicles, was fine.

Looking into the Memorial to the Nazi Book Burning in the 1930s

Berlin was a city one instantly takes to. Since reunification, it has united with a vengeance and the best bits of architecture, by far, are all in what was East Berlin. We saw the various museums - Pergamon has to be seen to be believed and Nebuchadnezzar the Second's glazed bricks and sculpted, processing lions blew us clean away.

Other thoughts about Berlin:
1. Everything seems to function as it should. Unlike London, there were several streets where the road was not being dug up.

2. House sparrows, virtually gone from London were widely abundant, all over the city. Now why would that be?

3. The street trees, a mix of various species of oaks, limes and one or two other interesting specimens are allowed to grow much more freely in London, partly because streets like the Kurfurstendamm or Unter den Linden are so much wider, longer and therefore able to accommodate them without nuisance.

4. Berlin's parks really are rus in urbe. The Tiergarten is a restful, green forest with the river Spree snaking along one side and the city's superb Zoo on the other.

The PG has announced that we will be returning. So much more to see, to do and to achieve before then, though.

A modest lunch, German style - ham knuckle, spuds and sauerkraut.

Last Saturday, we were taking our seats for Götterdämerung. But this day last week, I tackled a monstrous Kaiserschmarrn and got a round of applause for finishing it. I also got indigestion. You can find a pretty good recipe here .

This week's film was Wild Strawberries. The first Ingmar Bergman Masterpiece I ever saw and having spent two days seeing to a sick, ageing mother, I felt it was appropriate. Anyone who approaches old age must watch this film - it's a vaccination against age-related misanthropy. Look and learn.

I'm reading the incomparable Roger Deakin - Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. That man is on a par with Richard Jefferies and produced some of the finest nature writing of the past half century. So sad that he died before giving us more.

This statue of Prometheus was found in Albert Speer's office, apparently. I've forgotten who the sculptor was, but clearly not an ornithologist. It's a vulture about to eat out his liver, rather than an eagle.

That's it for now. Bye bye.

PERFERVID LEMURS ROLLICKED AMONG THE PHEASANTBERRIES

2011-09-16T14:59:00.000+01:00

Autumn glory - Tim Miles' creative planting at the Cotswold Wildlife Park

Click any image to enlarge.

What ho! Top of the whatsits to y'all!

The drought continues. Our autumn perennials are dying before they flower, the lawns are brown and I think I'm suffering from tomato overdose. I never thought I'd say this, but frankly, I'm glad summer is over. Roll on porridge mornings, woolies and mud.

A juvenile cuckoo is still hanging round one of the few thickets, down on our fen. It looks out of place, and I fear for its ability to make it, down to Africa. Our swallows are also being terrorised by a hobby which is lurking about the village in a most ungentlemanly fashion. It's a tiercel, I think, ie a male – smaller than the female – and flies with frightening speed on sharp, curved wings. When the swallows move south, it will probably move with them nothing like having your lunch accompany you.

I believe some of you had a struggle with last time's film quiz, and got cross when you discovered that the film was not exactly mainstream. So this time, I thought we'd have two questions, one totally easy; the other perhaps a little more challenging, but still, I hope, elementary.

And remember - No Googling!

First, then for dyed in the wool cineastes, what film does this line come from?

What we have here, is failure to communicate.

Second, for an easier ride:

Who said this, in which film? And for brownie points, to whom was it said - and that, in a way, is a kind of a trick question, except that it'll make it easier for you.

That evening I had to run nearly all the way to the station. I'd been to the Palladium, as usual, but it was a terribly long film and I was afraid I'd be late.

Actually, on balance, I think they're both as easy as each other. Anyway, good luck, and the usual tray of home-baked eBrownies to the winner.

A ring-tailed lemur, Lemur catta in the Madagascar Enclosure, at Cotswold Wildlife Park.

I spent one of the most delightful days of the year, on Tuesday, at Cotswold Wildlife Park. We – that is, members of the Royal Horticultural Society's Tender Ornamental Plants Committee – were guests of the park, just outside Burford, of the A361.

We were greeted by Reggie Hayworth, MD, and then escorted by fellow committee member and Head Gardener Tim Miles, first on a train ride, round the estate, and then on a more detailed walk. Tim has a long experience of zoo gardening. He once showed me round London Zoo, when he was head gardener there, and we ended the day cuddling baby chimps and discussing the picky eating habits of dormice with the then Director, Joe Gipps.

In his 13 years at Cotswold W P, Tim has achieved a quiverful of miracles. The park retains much of its 'parky integrity' with mature trees and grassland unspoilt, despite having white rhino grazing behind the ha-ha, instead of cattle.

He has also managed to develop the most naturalistic planting possible in the animal enclosures. In the tropical rainforest hot house, for example, the lianas and shrubs and monocots all blend perfectly, despite being from disparate regions, and look perfectly at home. Bromeliads jostle with old world plants but it doesn't matter. The feel is the same and the animals and birds clearly thrive in the most home-like conditions possible.

Tim's planting prowess has resulted in spectacular borders, containers and the biggest, and most tastefully colour-coordinated hanging baskets I've ever seen. You can be rude as you like about hanging baskets – and the likes of Roy Strong usually are – but these are really special. Soft, bricky colours in one set, sky blue and white in others, all the picture of health, all vast, all set to last until November.

Mike Holmes, of Double Eight Nurseries gave us a talk on biological and integrated pest control on industrial scale glasshouse production and then, after our meeting, we all went home.

A collared brown lemur Eulemur collaris (I think!) Check out that tail!

I'm listening to Laura Marling singing Salinas from her latest album A Creature I Don't Know which is really interesting - a bit Joni Mitchell-ish.

This time next week, I'll be watching and enjoying Der Ring Des Nibelungen in Berlin.

This week's film was Monsoon Wedding. It's a delicious portrait of an extended Indian family wedding written by Sabrina Dhawan and directed by Mira Nair.

Toodle-oo!

SEASON OF MIFFED AND BELLOWED FRUITLESSNESS

2011-09-01T18:02:00.001+01:00

What ho, my lovelies!
Goodbye and good riddance to August, the month I usually hate. February is next from bottom but at least it's shorter and contains my birthday – though that's nothing to celebrate at my age. No one likes November and March can be a bit of a swine, especially if the wind turns east.

But August, groan, is horrible. It's like waking with a bad hangover on what should be a beautiful day but turns out to be a slutty, shabby and badly foxed day. One should be loving the late summer, but all August does is give one a head ache and makes one feel lethargic and unsuccessful.

But now comes my favourite 30 days. Heavenly September, when the lazy old sun can't be arsed to pull itself up out of the frowzy mist until it has enjoyed a restorative ciggy and a scotch. September days can be like late Billie Holiday recordings – voice is going, but the old glory is still there, gold-hazed, sleepy, seductive but strangely invigorating.

O Lor' what a load of utter tosh. Please pay no attention. Now then. To work, to work,

My autumn border begins to wake up. Four rudbeckias, front to back: R. fulgida (self sown) R. subtomentosa 'Henry Eilers' - barely visible on right, spiky flowers, R. laciniata 'Juligold' further back, hanging ray florets, and R. laciniata 'Herbstsonne,' tall, right at the back. Asters and chrysanthemums dominate later. Dahlias dead. [CLICK TO ENLARGE PICS]

And now, the FILM QUIZ
Some of you Tweeted your answers to the first quiz – one of you within minutes. Thank you. But if you want the gold star reward, you have to write the answer in the Comments section, on each post – though tweets are welcome as well.

Victoria got it first, on this blog, so the first golden ePrize goes to her.

It was Rod Steiger (Chief Gillespie) speaking to (Virgil Tibbs) Sydney Poitier in the Norman Jewison classic, In the Heat of the Night.

ANOTHER rule, I've just made up, by the way, is: No Googling. You're on your honour not to cheat.

So, here goes. A bit of a stinker, this time, since you were all so speedy with the last:

FILM QUIZ TWO.
Who said this, and to whom:

You're the type women fall in love with . . . I'm the type that interests them.

I'll give you a bit of help: The above is a translation. The original dialogue was in a European language.

COW WASH

I learn, today, that as part of the drive to reduce the use of veterinary antibiotics, £1.7million of tax payer's money is going to be spent on research into homeopathy for cows.

Well that's another £1.7million of our hard-earned down the tubes.

The British Veterinary Association refuses to endorse homeopathy which is hardly surprising. Veterinary medicine, after all, is based largely on applied science, rather than faith or magic.

I believe homeopathy to be about as logical and effective as bone pointing or sacrificing virgins. It works for humans who believe in it. However, it's going to be tricky explaining the concept of Similia similibus curentur (= likes may be cured by likes) to lactating Holstein-Friesians. And if they don't understand homeopathy, how will it work for them?

And now you'll tell me how wrong I am and give me a raspberry for scoffing at this branch of 'alternative' medicine.

A pelargonium - looks really sexy enlarged!

HORNY EVENING
On Friday, a riveting lecture was given in our village church, about rhino conservation in Kenya and, in particular, the black rhino Diceros bicornis. Having spent part of my childhood in that spectacularly beautiful country, I was smitten with nostalgia, especially when we were shown slides of the landscapes around Mount Kenya.

Wildlife conservation faces challenges enough in sophisticated regions but in parts of Africa, where so many people live on the edge, priorities are different and it's hard to see how threatened species, in these areas are going to survive. Eco-tourism is a great motivator though, and when governments see biodiversity as a valuable resource, they are more likely to support conservation.

But what impressed me most was the dedication of the conservation workers. These are people who have devoted so much of their lives to species preservation, despite the hardship, frequent danger and constant battle to keep nature at the top of everyone's agenda. We should salute such folk - they are doing so much to prevent damage to our world.

The wrong end of a white rhino, Ceratotherium simum which I photograped in Hluhluwe Game Reserve, Kwa Zulu Natal.

HERE'S TO THE BARLEY MOW!
Also last week, a delectable late afternoon and evening at the famous Peterborough Beer Festival. It's alway fun, but this was a vintage year. Tasting companions included my great friend Robin Thain – a frighteningly tall Viking of a man to whom a 12 mile walk is little more than a pre-breakfast stroll – and the legendary laughing archaeologist Francis Pryor. In his early career, Francis was a professional beer taster and knows a thing or two. He also has a delicious sense of humour, a sharp brain and grows all his own vegetables plus much of his own meat. An all round good egg – a double-yolked one, in fact.

The evening was fair and mild; the mild was dark and toasty; the bitters were wonderfully varied. There were too many 'modern' extra-super-hoppy blond ales but just enough deep amber, gentle, barley-hop old fashioned brews to keep us happy.

Top jaw-drop moment was when an innocent young man, looking neatly dressed and out of place, asked one of the burly barmen if he had any lager. The barman was dumbfounded; a startled silence fell on all within earshot – a classic Bateman moment, Francis and I agreed. But I felt sorry for the young man who was at first, confused and then crimson with embarrassment.

The beers were in pristine perfect condition and the company was all one could wish for. Three old men behaving like small boys let loose in a sweet shop. I tipped quite a few of my 'tastings' on the grass in the huge marquees, but still had a slight headache next morning.

And in case you're wondering, I travelled in on the bus and the PG came to take me home.

Hops in my garden. I would be without their heavenly, beery September smell.

I'm listening to Beethoven - an early quartet.

This day in 2006 the PG and I were in the Little Karoo, admiring the South African Spring flora with the mighty Swartberg Mountains in the background. We stayed at Oudtshoorn.

This week's not-film was David Hare's TV drama, Page Eight, starring Bill Nighy. What a perfect combination of two giant talents! I had looked forward to it all week but sorry, chaps, I thought it was lukewarm, off the boil and sleep-inducing.

All the stuff of wicked conspiracy was there: dishonest politicians manipulating the secret service for their own ends; PMs sucking up to the Americans; our Government conniving with them in Special Renditions – a vile and obscene euphemism – ; Blairish fibs and... oh, I'm getting exhausted trying to remember it all. I may have dozed a bit, anyway.

Compared with the slickness of the Le Carré stories, particularly Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, this TV drama limped, for me. The oblique dialogues didn't float my thingy – though, even in the Le Carré, one never got them first time round – and Ralph Fiennes struck me as being more like an East End thug made good, than a PM. And to cap it all, it the drama ends with a cliché - but I won't spoil it for you.

Perhaps real current drama, in Libya and Syria, made this all look cardboardy and contrived. But the more likely problem is that without a Cold War, spy stories just don't work.

(We're also re-watching Kenneth Branagh/Emma Thompson in the Olivia Manning Levant Trilogy, The Fortunes of War. Now that's good television and a pretty decent dramatisation of some fantastic novels to boot.

Bye all! Thanks a zillion for reading.

MIRO, MIRO, ON THE WALL

2011-08-19T17:59:00.001+01:00

FIRST, A NEW IDEA: A fun but completely pointless 'Who said that?' series.

On each post, there'll be a quote from a well-known film. The first person to say which film it's from will be rewarded by an electronic waft of floral delight. If you get the name of the speaker and the listener, you might even recieve one of Apple-Burberry's newest, sparkliest gadget, the iClapp and thereby store your moments of triumph on a sleek, envy-arousing gizmo. You can play them back to yourself whenever you reach a low point and need cheering up.

So here goes:

Quote quiz number one.

Who said:
'We have the motive, which is money, and the body, which is dead'
And a bonus point if you can name the person(s) to whom it was said.

My wild cornflowers, Centaurea cyanus. The plants in my garden originate from seed collected nearly thirty years ago – from the wild, in the Touraine, France – and have been propagated by me every year since. I brought seed to our new home when we moved. Truly wild cornflowers are deep, sapphire blue, single and are smaller, thinner stemmed and lighter than the galumphing things you get from packets of seeds. They fade to this paler blue when the season has advanced and the plants are growing old.

CLICK ON ANY PIC TO ENLARGE

Now then, where were we . . . . Oh, yes,

My good friend James Alexander Sinclair confesses to an attack of August lethargy in a recent post and how right he is. Three weeks ago, I was eating my heart out about the sow thistle seeds blowing across our autumn border and trying to pull up as many of the plants as I could reach; today, I've just been gazing at them in a dreamy trance. I blame the late J. A. Baker, whose exquisite nature book The Peregrine is an exquisitely minute study of the bird of prey. He takes gazing in dreamy trances to new levels and when you read his lilting, poetical prose, you are profoundly moved, even though reading it is extremely hard work because you need to take each sentence at a slow, ambling, pace without for one second, losing attention.

The air, in our garden, especially around the dead meadows, is full of wafting detritus. Insects by the million float about thinking that summer will last forever. Thistledown and willowherb seed drifts everywhere and the smells of ripened wheat have given way to that wonderfully hot, almost baked bread smell of newly turned land. Round here, disc harrows or cultivators rip up the stubbles within hours of harvest, and new crops are soon drilled.

The swifts are gone, totally gone; the black headed gulls have barely any of the chocolate breeding colours left on their crowns and the late hatch of holly blue butterflies are searching for enticing evergreens.

We have an embarrassment of hoverflies and a wasps' nest in our house wall. We've decided that if we don't disturb them, they'll not harm us so will take no action.

Autumn flowers are beginning to stir. We have an eruption of what used to be Leucojum autumnale in and is now Acis autumnalis in one of the gravel screes and very pretty they look. Each flower is frail and tiny, so you need lots to make an impact. Mine are now in their 7th year but I still dig up about three clumps, every September, and divide up the bulbs.

Acis autumnalis, formerly Leucojum autumnale.

Yesterday, the PG and I went to London to make arrangements for some future travel and to 'do' the Miró exhibition at Tate Modern.

The best bit of my day was nothing to do with Miró and was entirely unintentional as perhaps the best and most sincere art is. We were in the excellent Tate Modern café which, you may wish to know, stocks bottle-matured real ales. Huzzah huzzah!

At a large table close to ours, about half a dozen of the yummiest mummies I've ever seen were lunching together with their babies and toddlers. These were pretty obviously chattering class mums and it was fascinating to see how animated, alert and engaged all the little ones were. Watching their antics, while I ate a respectable tuna sandwich and the PG downed a very green green pea soup, was better than being entertained by a jazz combo. I felt quite sad to leave them all.

After that, the Miró seemed almost anticlimactic. I wrote this about my experience in yesterday's diary.

Joan Miró had a long, productive life, living part of it in exile, enduring the hateful Fascist regime under Franco which lasted from the late 1930s to his death in 1975. His work is riddled with pain, fear, agitation and hunger for better things. But the most accessible stuff was painted between about 1918 and 1925. His paintings on copper are staggeringly colourful, for their era, and look almost like modern acrylics. But the surreal weirdities, with dangling parts - both male and female bits dangle on stalks - barely recognisable features, inexplicable blobs, squiggles and shapes - some of which he labels ‘personages’ - are impossible for a Philistine like me to understand.

Miró has no feel for anatomy at all, right from his earliest work. His ‘suckling mare’ for instance, is a peculiar beast whose legs are anything but horsey and whose tail is not attached to its spine, but stuck up its arse. And his ‘calligraphy of the trees’ as he calls it, suggests that real palms and woody plants are merely a stepping off point for beautifully designed arboreal-ish shapes which bear little resemblance to the real thing. But, gosh, they are beautiful.

In one early painting, there’s a palm with hopelessly wrong morphology which makes it look as though one trunk has been stuck on top of another. And yet, the painting has far greater beauty than would have been seen in a more faithful depiction of the actual scene - his nondescript farm garden in Catalonia.

The works of his old age, dare I say, seem to me to be largely crap. He had clearly become part of THE ART ESTABLISHMENT and was then able to churn out inexplicable squiggles and splodges and have a damn good secret laugh. ‘Hope for a condemned Man’ for instance, is three big white blobs with a single, smaller blob of a different colour in each. The ‘Fireworks’ triptych was achieved by hurling tins of black paint at a white canvas - but only in the most ‘artistic’ way.

When an artist calls his painting 'Woman with a Blond Armpit Combing her Hair by the Light of the Stars' you cannot help but feel he's pulling your wire - isn't he? I came away scoffing, but have to admit, I've been thinking hard about Miró ever since I got home.

A sunbursting gazania - they only do this in sun and sulk at other times.

I'm listening to England making a convincing start, in the 4th Test Match agains India. A 4 - 0 win would be sweet indeed, but our team needs to beware of hubris, and of the weather forecast.

Around this day, in 1952, when I was eight, I was tooling around the bush in Kenya where, for a time, we lived. My family were staying on a farm close to Nyeri (whence cometh some of Africa's lightest, subtlest flavoured and most fragrant coffees) and I was out 'hunting' with my mate who was my age. We were on a quest to find the biggest preying mantis possible and also hoping to catch some chamaeleons. These make the most wonderful pets, when you're eight, and provided you keep them well fed with grass hoppers, will cosy up to you and amaze you with their independently swivelling, goggly eyes.

Despite fixing our elasticated, snake-buckled belts round our heads and sticking feathers in them, with grubby handkerchieves fixed over our necks, to ward off sunstroke, I don't think we quite cut the mustard, as true hunter gatherers. If you stood us up against, say, a Kalahari bushman, I think we'd probably have been found just a teeny bit wanting.

But we got our chameleons!

This weeks film was Everlasting Moments a nicely shot, faultlessly directed piece by Jan Troell about a woman who finds solace in photography despite living a harsh, working class life. She pops out children with scary fecundity, is alternately brutalised and, sort of, loved by her Finnish husband - played by Mikael Persbrandt who looks and acts like Sweden's answer to Oliver Reed. She also has an innocent liaison with professional photographer played by Danish Jesper Christensen - clearly the Scandinavia's answer to Donald Sutherland. I loved this film for its gorgeous sepia photography and faithful, non-romanticised portrait of life for the underclasses in the early 20th Century. And I can even forgive it for a slightly unconvincing conclusion.

I'd planned a short post, but this one has been endless. If you've read this far, I admire your doggedness and thank you profoundly for your kind perseverance.

As that weatherman used to say: bye bye for now!

'WE'VE COME ON HOLIDAY BY MISTAKE'

2011-08-05T10:52:00.000+01:00

Good morrow, my hearties! I discovered myself on holiday, this week, so only a token post.

Holiday makers enjoy sunning themselves near the creek's mouth at Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk. The pines on the horizon are growing on what are optimistically known as the 'East Hills.'

(CLICK ON PICS TO MAKE BIGGER.)

What a frabjiously histrionic bit of weather we've been having! Two days of Kuwaiti style humidity and oppressive heat followed by a Singapore Sling of thunder, typhoon-strength rain and served up with an ear-smacking, hair teasing, nipple-firming whack of hard-whipped wind.

I've never experienced such a strange swirl of cold and hot air, all in the same breath. This was not natural. A stiff breeze wound itself round my bare legs – at first hot and breathy, then deathly chilled and finally violent enough to knock the borrowed sun hat off my head and into a puddle. The sensation of that turbid wind was similar to swimming in Norway's Sognefjord - which I did one summer - where the surface water was warmer than a tropical pool, but a metre down, felt like ice.

Norfolk, where my daughter and family are holidaying, is lovely, especially in February. But the region where we stay is becoming rather badly Sloaned. Wells-next-the-Sea now boasts TWO delicatessens and one of the pubs has gone off its head with pretentiousness. Traffic is becoming impossible and when we arrived on Tuesday, the town was cluttered with SUVs and similarly unsuitable vehicles, milling round, desperately looking for somewhere to park so they could unload their Jeremies and Jocastas. No one was eating candy floss - a sure sign that the place is going depressingly upmarket - and I had to go miles away from where we stay and park near the disused jam factory.

We excursioned, on Wednesday, to Pensthorpe – a wildfowl menagerie made popular when it became a base for some of BBC 2's Springwatch programmes. The duck, as expected, were all in eclipse plumage, but what a super place it is! The Piet Oudolf gardens are all beautifully, well, Oudolfish and the 'Wave Garden' undulates its hedges, despite the dense shade. All the key parts of the attraction for our grandchildren, ie, the lavatories and cafés, are exemplary. Tasty food, special lunch packs for children – reasonably priced – and some of the best and most generously filled sandwiches I've ever eaten.

The birds are in superb order, despite being in eclipse, and the information boards were mostly well presented and informative.

But it was the wilder areas, within the vast grounds, that really won our hearts. A young but surprisingly deep and gin-clear River Wensum meanders through extensive wetlands which were full of baby toads and frogs, alive with dragonflies, noisy with bird noises and abuzz everywhere with insects. Showing my 4 year old granddaughter a devils coach horse was the fitting climax to an eventful nature ramble.

'Does it bite?' she asks.

'Of course it does,' I reply, 'look at the size of those jaws!'

'Does it hurt?'

'Only a bit,' I lie. 'Let's put him back in the grass now.'

A young European White Stork, Ciconia ciconia dancing for joy at Pensthorpe, Norfolk.

I'm listening to Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit.

This week in 2006 we had a gale which split the trunk of my Cercis canadensis right down its centre. I also wrote a piece for a bird magazine about the effect that year's drought was having on the berry crops which would be needed by birds and other wildlife during the coming autumn.

This week's film was West is West. The sequel to East is East about an emigré Pakistani, married to an English woman and living in Salford. This time, the ultra conservative Jahangir Khan (Om Puri) takes his younger son to Pakistan to 'sort him out' ie, to re-mould him as a model Pakistani. It's all a bit 'pat and feel-goody' at the end, but still immensely enjoyable.

STUNG BY DAD'S FLAMING NETTLES

2011-07-29T15:46:00.002+01:00

Well hullo!
I'd like to apologise, most humbly, to the following:

To Arabella Sock - because I was rude about her Heuchera which she grew in a miniature gabion.

To Plantagogo and Heucheraholics because they grow and market a huge range of the genus Heuchera Their plant quality, as seen at the best of Britain's flower shows, is tip top and their service is, I'm sure excellent.

And to heucheraphiles everywhere - apologies to you too.

Solenostemon, unnamed seedling. A bit too close for comfort, to a heuchera hue. But I still love it.

CLICK ON PICS TO SEE BIGGER.

Now please don't misunderstand me, I still hate heucheras. Although I'd defend to the death, the right of anyone to grow the things, if so minded. They make excellent vine weevil food, anyway, and I'm informed by my friends at Buglife that insects need all the help they can get just now.

My main gripe, with modern heucheras are the leaf colours – the caramel ones, the pallid yellow ones, the ones with foliage that looks like pewter, and the ones whose leaves are the hue of Christmas puddings and those ones with flat-hued, beetrooty lugubriosities for leaves. And it also bothers me that the flowers look, somehow, as though they belong to a completely different type of plant.

BUT . . .But, but – I've good reason, now, to repent of my bellicose remarks concerning heucheras and it all happened like this.

Aeons ago, when my father was still youthful, he used succumb to the most passionate crazes about particular plant groups. One year, he propagated enough Asiatic primulas to re-stock all the wetlands in Kashmir.

In another, he discovered the wholesale seedsmen and bought seed for enough bedding to furnish Harrogate, Bath and Aberdeen - all past finalists in Britain in Bloom, since you ask.

These crazes for bulk growing began when I was about 13. He couldn't make his mind up, one year, which variety of coleus to grow. In the end, he bought a packet seed of every variety from every seedsman he could find. And for a string of summers, every windowsill in the the house, every inch of bedding space outside and an entire greenhouse was devoted to amazing displays of what where then Coleus and are now Solenostemon.

My mother loathed them and said they were 'common' and I have to admit, their colours are a bit naff. But of course, that spurred him on to growing more. Luckily, he managed to kill most of them off, each winter, with botrytis.

Not so sure about this Solenostemon. It really is naff, isn't it?

But that spurred him to propagate more feverishly than ever each spring. When we went on holiday to France, one year, he noted with scorn, that the French allow their flame nettles to flower, whereas he meticulously disbudded his. And while, looking scornfully at the aforementioned flowering solenostemons, he would, with swift sleight of hand, swipe a bevy of cuttings. In one hotel where he knew the owner, a Monsieur who resembled Wilfred Hyde White, he even absent-mindedly de-flowered - if that's the right term - a couple of plants, much to the displeasure of the proprietor's daughter.

Solenostemons went right out of fashion for a while. I never realised how much I missed them, until I spotted a couple of nice varieties for sale at our local general nursery.

I added them to my basket, and a day or two later, spotted another batch going really cheap at Bourne Market. I've rooted cuttings from every one of them, of course, so now I have a pleasing, burgeoning collection of Coleus, Solenostemon or, if you prefer, flame nettles.

Solenostemon, an unnamed seedling. Fiery reds, fascinating leaf textures and so easy to grow.

Now here's the apology bit. I was admiring my latest acquisition - a Solenostemon variety called 'China Rose.' It was collected by Ray Waite, ex Curator of Glass at Wisley, and generously handed to me, in the form of three cuttings, by his successor, Nick Morgan.

I rooted all three in precisely 7 days and now have healthy young plants - though still too tatty to show you pictures. When they're photographable, you'll be well impressed!

Anyway, as I admired my growing collection a spine-chilling realisation dawned on me. 'Some of these,' I told myself, 'are exactly the same colour as those nasty heucheras you hate.'

Oh my goodness, what a ludicrous thing!

Taste, you see, is utterly subjective and completely illogical. It enables me to adore plants that my mother calls 'common' and permits certain exalted persons to sneer at jazzy polyanthus or Schizanthus at flower shows while raving over azaleas in identical colours on their ducal estates.

I don't like heucheras but I love Solenostemon. Where's the sense in that?

One of the cheapie flame nettles, from Bourne Market - I love the deep lobes and distorted leaves.

I'm listening to Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb - words by Christopher Smart who was mad as a hatter.

This day in 1983 I had just returned from a West Country visit. Three people came to our garden, that evening, according to my diary, and went away cross because we didn't sell house plants. They were not interested in any of our hardy nursery stock.

This week's viewing - well, and for some time past - has been the 1984 ITV adaptation of Paul Scott's wonderful Raj Quartet, Jewel in the Crown, in which a dastardly Tim Pigott-Smith, boozy Judy Parfitt, cowed Peggy Ashcroft, delectably sensible Geraldine James and dishy Charles Dance take us through the death throes of the British Raj and birth pangs of the new India.

Bye bye, and enjoy your heucheras.

HAEMORRHOIDAL TOMATOES, FREUD AND DEAD BADGERS

2011-07-22T14:35:00.003+01:00

Echinacea laevigata growing in the prairie planting at Wisley.

(This was originally posted as Rudbeckia laevigata - thanks to Arabellsa Sock for spotting my stupid mistake. Sorry!)

(Which, as JAS has kindly pointed out below, was also wrong. The plants are actually Echinacea pallida. And it's time I abandoned all pretences of being anything of a plantsman.)

As ever - click on pix for larger view.

What a sad, sad day, with news that the mighty Lucian Freud has died.

I love his work. And it's great that he generally gave contemporary artists, including Picasso, the metaphorical two finger salute. And that he didn't give monkey's about publicity or the drekkily precious and self-loving contemporary 'Arts' scene. No nasty, kitsch, cheap-looking, Woolworth-like diamond encrusted skulls for him!

When I was being treated to lunch, once, in a relatively posh Kensington restaurant, he sat at the next table. I longed to kidnap him for a couple of hour's chat on how he manages to make his paintings so terrifyingly real - you can almost smell the models - when his technique seems so brash and so un-laboured.

Stanley Spencer, Francis Bacon and now Freud. Gone, gone, gone - like the art of painting? Or is that unfair? We've still got Hockney, but he's decamped to the wrong side of the Atlantic. Lord, I'm rambling!
A nice piece on Lucian Freud here.

Reisetomate - not a pretty sight.

SOME of my early tomatoes are a disgrace and I blame Twitter. I had planned to grow only 'Sungold' which we love for its cheery sweetness and monster yields. Also 'Gardeners Delight' which was - note the 'was' - a beauty for taste and 'Striped Stuffer' purely for size.

Then a tweetie friend - @simiansuter - suggested I should try a couple more: 'Latah' - a bush type which I'm growing outdoors - and 'Reisetomate' which is remarkable for its strange shape. He kindly sent seeds and I duly sowed them and grew the plants on.

The first 'Latah' ripened a week or so ago, outside, and is quite tasty and pleasingly firm-fleshed. I like its habit - a comfortable sprawl, but not so prostrate as to dump the fruit on the ground - and would grow it again.

The less said about 'Reisetomate' the better. It looks like an uncomfortable medical condition which is a pity because the flavour is not at all bad. Sharp, I'd say, with a good initial bite, but I didn't detect enought of that sought-after tom-cat-tomato muskiness that makes home-grown fruits so much more desirable than those tarted up things that occupy supermarket shelves.

I wrote 'was' about 'Gardener's Delight' because I'm convinced that the variety has changed profoundly since I last grew it about 20 years ago. I remember the fruits being smaller, firmer, greenish in seed long after ripening and having an amazing tang, acidity and musk. The ones I'm harvesting now are nice, but really, you couldn't say anything stronger than that. But perhaps I'm being harsh, since the first few I picked were well down below the leaves, and therefore shaded. But seed strains drift, over time, unless they are rigorously maintained. Beware your seed source, therefore!

THE PICTURES. (All but the tomato shots taken by the PG - the talented half of N&R Colborn.)

Helenium 'Moerheim Beauty' brings the first autumn colour to our late border. Cardoons and globe thistles give background height. You can see the buds of things to come.

After the hideous drought, our garden weeds are all perking up nicely. The autumn border, of which I was so ashamed last year, promises to deliver beauty in spades, for the coming season. Heleniums already bloom but there are rudbeckias, asters, posh salvias, chrysanthemums and what not all waiting in the wings.

I love that deliciously melancholy season from about mid-September onwards, when soft sun and lacy mists lull us into a relaxed state of composure. I listen repeatedly to Richard Stauss's Four Last Songs, gorge on ripe plums, wallow in the moist warmth of the early autumn and try not to think of the coming winter fuel bills.

A gaggle of mini-rants.

Butterflies are more scarce than usual this year, in our neck of the woods. Could that be in any way linked to the local obsession with mowing all nettles down, with cutting verges right back to the hedge bottoms and with spraying of the remaining nettles that can't be reached with a mower? I wonder.

When will people learn that the countryside is NOT something that needs to be gardened. That its richness lies in the wild exuberance of growth wherever the landscape is not farmed. Even wildlife conservation experts need a lesson or ten in how to be less heavy handed with their management. And the rest of us should stop being so bloody prissy about it all. LET IT BE! Even the mouldering carcase of an abandoned car can become a life-rich refuge. Go figure, as the Americans are sometimes wont to say!

A peacock butterfly on Inula hookeri - we haven't had many this year, yet.

I heard on Farming Today, on BBC Radio 4, that the acreage of oilseed rape is so large, this year, that the surplus will be exported to Germany where it will be converted to bio-fuel. Well bully for us! And nice to have something to export, now that we don't manufacture very much and export far less of what we make than we should.

But bio-fuel? That is obscene! I realise that it will help to reduce burning fossil fuels but have you considered what the real carbon footprint is, of producing so intense a crop, of shipping the whole seed which contains about 40% oil overseas, and then of doctoring the stuff so it won't muck up diesel engines?

And have you considered the horrible contrast, between Europe turning such a precious, high energy food into something for feeding Audis, BMWs and Volkswagens while one of the century's largest famines is happening, right now, in East Africa?

The badger cull. Lord Krebs, the scientist who carried out the original experimental cull on badgers demonstrated that it doesn't work. Survivors of the cull, including infected animals, moved away and took TB to new areas.

I don't think the cull will work. TB will continue to spread among livestock until faster, more accurate, on the spot testing can be carried out on cattle and the necessary action taken at once.

And if it becomes necessary to step up farm biosecurity, to keep badgers away from cattle and vice-versa - so be it. Better to spend the money on grants for doing that, rather than carrying out a vain and ineffectual cull. Trained 'marksmen,' they say, smugly; shooting the badgers and night. Gawd help us!

Would allow your wife or your servants to grow this tomato?

(Name the origin of the misquote for an eBouquet.)

I'm listening to Berlioz - Symphonie Fantastique

This day in 1990 I was in Padstow and my diary reads thus: 'We walked to Tregirls Beach, equipped with Dickens, sandwiches and beach wear. Sounds dull but it was heaven. We rested, played 'catch,' paddled, swam, watched other people and scorched our skins.'

Later that evening I wrote: 'A cold salad evening with the children all wilting infuriatingly while we ate. Their stamina is pretty lacking' Of course, the poor loves were all adolescents.

This weeks film was Ingmar Bergman's The Passions of Anna. Swedish desperation on a claustrophobic island made worse by sheep killing, arson and a man driven to suicide by a vigilante mob. Nice. I'd go into a more analytical summary but I think you've had more than enough.

Bless you for reading this far,

Bye bye!

MARROWS ARE MY BIG GUNS: THE COURGETTES MERELY INFANTRY.

2011-07-13T11:03:00.001+01:00

My dears!

We've been buzzed by Spitfire fighters, Lancaster bombers and beautiful Hummingbird Hawk Moths.

I have fallen off my bike and damaged it but apart from bruises, a sprained wrist, dented helmet and embarrassment, am fine.

Our darling swallows have hatched off four young which are now flying slightly inexpertly about in a northeasterly wind. They are also turning the narrow passage between our yard and garden into a tunnel of ordure - but we're honoured, rather than offended. It can be hosed down when the birds have flown to Cape Town.

We have eaten the season's first home grown tomatoes and delicious they are! I've also scrumped wild cherries from a garden in the village because the owner says they're sour and nasty. They're deliciously bitter-sweet, tasting of maraschino, but tiny.

As so often happens, the pictures on this post bear no relation whatever to the text. The joy of not having a strict editor is a mixed one but I hope you get double value from this illogical way of doing things.

Cheap, speedy colour, in my autumn border, with Lychnis coronaria and assorted forms of Papaver rhoeas. This is almost as pretty as the autumn perennials show which will get going in about 6 weeks.

(CLICK ON PICTURES FOR A BIGGER VIEW.)

NOW, NOW! YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE!!

I was going to tell you about the RHS International Trials Conference which happened last week but I’ve just been listening to Tim Richardson – author of Avant Gardeners – on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He was theorising about the political battlefields that gardens were and still are. (If you don't know his work, you might want a glance at the nicely turned piece here.)

Anyway, Tim R was suggesting that mighty British gardens such as Stowe and Stourhead, were biting satires on political situations of the day. Lord Cobham, developer of Stowe in the early 1700s, was an old soldier and disenchanted Whig who had it in for the government of his day. His garden was a demonstration of his disgust - perhaps even an expression of treason. (You'll find an NT dumbed down history of Stowe here.)

He also suggested that public parks are designed as demonstrations of oppression. Being well ordered and stately, furnished with plants looted from the British Empire and presided over by big statues of such personages as Queen Victoria, they're there to keep the populace in order.

We've enjoyed huge numbers of bees, in the garden this summer. They love this purple toadflax almost as much as lavender.

Well pardon me, but I always thought that the inspiration to create public parks, in Britain, was the precise opposite of that. John Claudius Loudon, a great horticultural philanthropist who died in 1843, championed the creation of landscaped public spaces where ordinary people might take pleasure and relief from the sooty, smutty city environment.

It was Loudon who also developed ideal designs for model labourers' cottages, on large estates, and who insisted that such employees should have private gardens large enough to grow crops and keep livestock.

And it was Loudon who brought a breath of country air into London’s squares, by planting them with trees and shrubs. Anyone less bellicose or oppressive than Loudon, or his great friend Joseph Paxton, would be hard to find.

Hummingbird Hawk Moths Macroglossum stellatarum are constant visitors in our garden. We counted five at once yesterday.

There’s no doubt that rebels and independent-thinking folk will do things in their gardens that may express contempt, or that might be intended to deliver strong messages. After all, gardening is an art, and art is a means of expression - otherwise it’s pointless.

For example, I admit to being tardy with trimming my roadside hedge and verge as a demonstration that wildflowers look prettier and are more biodiverse than groomed grass. And I won’t pull the self-sown chicory up in my drive, partly because I know that it irritates persons in our village who are afflicted with excessive tidiness.

Imagine the aerodynamics involved here, and the accuracy needed to extend a probiscis into the tiny opening of a lavender flower, and while stationary, on the wing. Amazing!

Tim Richardson made a strong and convincing argument, on the radio, and I could visualise millions of Daily Telegraph-reading Radio 4 listeners nodding in hearty approval as they spread Tiptree Tawny marmalade onto their granary toast.

But I tire of the current trend to try to make gardens something they are not. Gardens are gardens are gardens. They're outdoor places where you grow things. And like any space, they can be substrates for design, and for artistic expression. But if they do not contain living plants, they are not gardens. A garden is a place where plants are grown. You can create an outdoor installation, if you feel so minded. But if it doesn't grow things, it isn't a garden.

And I'm also sick, by the way, of the erroneous notion that garden designers are at war with those of us who garden, but who may be a bit crap at artistic expression, even though we love art.

It's a stupid concept and arguing the toss about whether plant husbandry is more important or less, than artistic accomplishment in outdoor spaces, is about as fatuous and self-harming as trying to drink the Thames dry.

And before anyone calls me a Luddite stick-in-the-mud grumpy leek grower, I’d like to say that I believe the idea of Conceptual Gardens at Hampton Court was brilliant, even though, for years, they baffled horticulturally minded judges. And indeed, it was I who suggested that Conceptual Gardens should be judged, not by garden judges, but by persons from the Arts world. Though there needs to be a qualified horticulturist present to make sure the designers’ offerings would actually work as gardens in real life, rather than for merely looking fabulous for 5 days at a show. (I urge you to read Victoria Summerley's brilliant piece in the Independent, here.)

If you click on this, you can see the eye - it's a compound one, of course, but you can clearly see what excellent vision this insect must have.

I will be listening to Michel Thomas' German Course. An attempt to converse with a Berliner in his or her native tongue, when I go in September, will immensely satisfying, even it it's only to order a beer rather than to explain that our postillion managed to escape being struck by lightning.

This Day in 1984 The PG, our four twins and I were driving through France without reservations and the only the loosest of plans. We travelled to Evreux, Chartres, Blois and finally to Montrichard, in the Touraine which we liked. We stayed in the village of Thésée, near Saint Aignon, and the children and I swam daily in the river Cher. It was heavenly, and the auberge where we stayed served delicious Touraine cuisine including eels and pike cooked in various ways.

It was near there that I gathered seed of wild cornflowers. I still have that particular strain which I sow, or allow to self seed every year. It is flowering gloriously here, as I write, 27 years later.

This week's film was Driving Lessons with Rupert Grint, Laura Linney and directed by Jeremy Brock. I was persuaded by my brother to try it and despite some disappointing flaws in the screenplay, I greatly enjoyed it. I even wrote an extremely pompous review which you'll find here.

Unusual sight - a Hummingbird Hawk Moth resting on our wall.

Bye bye - and thank you SO much for reading this far. You deserve a decoration for endurance.

OUR TESCOPOLITAN HELL

2011-07-01T13:10:00.001+01:00

Good grief, can it be July already?
A Happy New Month to you all, and may the weather be less utterly bastardly to you, this month, than it was in June. What a perfectly putrid 30 days! Couldn't make up its mind, down our particular kink in the lane, whether to be a fridge, a blow drier or an oven. It was the wind that was most hateful and that's still blowing as I write.

Why doesn't my own pitiful vegetable garden look this pretty? Answer - this one is a mock-up for a flower show. [As always, CLICK ON ANY PICTURE TO MAKE IT BIGGER.]

Two rants today!

1. WHY are Britain's supermarkets so absolutely bloody awful?

Since the PG has been convalescing from her surgery, and forbidden to drive, I've been chauffeuring her to and from various Sainsco, Waitrissons and Marks Expensives and helping her with routine victualling exercises.

Although I frequently pop in and out of such soulless places, I haven't gone through the whole intricate process of pricing, selecting, carting and packing a week's worth of groceries for a very long time, other than in France - but more of that in mo.

The first and most obvious thing to hit me like a sledgehammer was the cost. I've always reckoned that with Government Statistics, the golden rule is to note the official figure and double it. Thus, if the official rate of inflation is about 4.5%, as it is at present, the real rate is at least 9%. But when I paid something like £1.49 for a tiny packet of skinny broccoli spears and £1.25 for a cauliflower, I realised that even my GSIF (Government Statistics Interpretation Formula) is faulty.

The last cauliflower I bought was in, I think, October, and was from a small trader in the neighbouring village. It cost 25p and had been grown less than 3 miles away. So cauliflower inflation, here in Lincolnshire is around 500%

But once I'd recovered from the cauterising prices - and one has to admit, those aren't entirely the fault of the egregious oligopoly that owns and runs Britain's supermarkets - it dawned on me that the place I was in was not where I wanted to be. Not at all. Standing in a street in a force 8 gale with driving rain, noxious exhaust fumes and a burst sewer main up-wind might have afforded more pleasure than being in that awful barn of a supermarket. They ought to call them infernomarkets. I had to resist the burning impulse to abandon my half full trolley and, well, just run.

Wheeling the thing down those aisles of sterile opulence, I began to realise how limited British supermarkets are. For example, out of the zillions of cheeses on display, I failed to find a single one made with unpasteurised milk. And although there were at least four kinds of melon, not one was fit to eat. Not only were they unripe but they had no hope of ripening. Ever. They'd been harvested too young and would stay rock hard and odourless for weeks, and then suddenly decay and stink.

My own 'Sungold' tomatoes, but last year's. Supermarket tomatoes, in Britain, are bland and unappetising, despite looking uniform and gorgeous.

We do we Brits tolerate such crap produce? Why can't we buy seeded grapes that have flavour? Or peaches in edible condition? Or plums that have juice? Or tomatoes that may not look beautiful but taste? Why do supermarket meat counters bring on a death wish and why is supermarket bread like fluffed up cardboard?

Nip through the Channel Tunnel to the Carrefour at Coquelles, or drive on to the nearest Auchan and you can buy beautifully ripe melons by the sackful. For next to nothing, you can buy a huge, old hen ready for casseroling or traditional Poule au Pot. You'll find any offals you might need, too, and the cheese department staff will discuss the merits of their wares, both pasteurised and untreated, in detail and with knowledge. The pâtés will taste good, rather than like high class cat food and there will be about fifty to choose from. And that's just a supermarket, in France.

An old lady in Carrefour once found me fondling the melons and looking perplexed. She took pity and showed me how to choose. 'C'est pour aujourd'hui ou demain?' she asked. I said I'd like one ready to eatl So she got stuck in and began to weighed the fruits in her hands, telling me one must pick the heaviest because weight means maturity and therefore sweetness. And one must then smell the blossom end. If it's alcoholic, it's too far gone. If aromatic, and if the melon gives a little, when gently pressed, it is ready.

The poor PG has another couple of weeks before she can drive. I hope my ranting doesn't drive her too nuts in that time. Anyway today, we're off to a farmer's market. Now we're talking!

Death of the strawberry. I haven't bought a strawberry with flavour, in Britain, for about 30 years.

Rant number two will be briefer, I promise.

Who, I'd like to know, is responsible for the death of the English Strawberry?

It simply isn't possible, now, to buy strawberries that taste really good. Oh, they look all right. Some of the supermarket ones look gorgous. But they taste of slightly acidulated water and have the texture of baby turnips.

As a soft fruit, strawberries never were outstanding, unless you could find them ripened to a red perfection. In that almost unheard of state, they should NEVER be washed, and must be eaten while still sun-warmed. If you ever felt the need to add sugar, the strawberries were substandard, and the very thought of polluting such gorgeous fruit with cream should would have been as unthinkable as farting at the Queen's Chelsea drinks reception.

I suppose infernomarkets are guilty here, too, just as they're guilty for buggering up grapes. If a strawberry picked in Wisbech has to be trucked to, say, Spalding, for packing, and then trundled down to Plymouth or up to Newcastle, to be thumped down on Sainsco's produce shelves, it needs to have more staying power than a Rugby forward.

When I was a boy, we would buy fresh strawberries, on Ely or Cambridge market and if you didn't eat them within about 6 hours, they would deteriorate.

Then came Elsanta, the most horrible variety ever bred. Even the word is worse than swearing. Elsanta! Elsinner would be more apt, or 'Elstinka.' A mockery of a strawberry. Shiny, red, conveniently sized and oh so tempting in the punnet. It even smells like a beautiful, ripe strawberry. But when you pop this travesty into your mouth, the disappointment is so keen that you're likely to become traumatised.

It's such a shame. I used to love strawberries. Now I never eat them because I can't grow them, and because no one sells decent ones any more. Pity.

I'm listening to Abba for some bizarre reason. Fernando.

This day in 2006 I was gathering yellow rattle seeds from a certain location not far from here. Our minimeadow benefited hugely from them and we now have a thriving colony of the semi-parasite.

This week's film was Nightwatch. Nattevagten. A nicely turned, grizzly nasty about necrophilia, student pranks and serial murder. I expected to be revolted, but it was handled with great skill by writer director Ole Bornedal and above all, it starred the peerlessly marvellous Sofie Grabol, who is so good in The Killing.

Byee! And thanks for listening.

DULL OPIATE TO THE BRAINS

2011-06-24T17:24:00.001+01:00

What ho, my hearties! Happy solstice!

Well, of course, the more literary among you will instantly notice not only the origin of the post title, but also that it is an outrageous misquote.

A golden eSovereign to whoever spots the dilibrut misteak and can put the right quote in.

Poppies: by no means suppliers of dull opiate to the brains - mine provide a warm, cuddly sense of joy tinged with sadness that they're so ephemeral. And you can't do much better than that.

(CLICK ON ANY PICTURE TO MAKE IT LARGER.)

The Longest Day has passed and is past.

Each night falls a little earlier as we decline into the silly season. Won't be long, now, until pheasant shooting begins and the hedgerow blackberries are plumptious and tempting.

Some pundit or other from the Woodland Trust has made a sweeping statement about blackberries being more than a month early this year because of the drought, and predict a small crop. They claim that over 10 years, the average date for blackberries ripening is the first week in August. In what country, I wonder, were they compiling their records?

Papaver apulum - deep red with white haloes on the black central spots.

Where I live, the first blackberries are seldom ready before the end of August and the season doesn't get going until early September. As for the crop being small, I wonder how they can predict with such confidence. There is a massive set of buds, on our hedgerows - I went out today, to check - and given decent rainfall over the next few weeks, the crop round here, where drought has been severe, could be pretty good.

I get the impression that brambles are deep rooted and have access to water a long way down, especially on Lincolnshire's richer, moisture retentive soils.

Papaver rhoeas - a typical form from the Cedric Morris strain.

I also note that a crop of GM Wheat is to be sown in a field trial. This variety will be modified with genes from a mint species which causes the wheat to exude an aphid warning pheromone to repel the pests.

Using such a GM crop would thereby remove the need for chemical pesticides. Is that an organic move, then? Discuss!

This particular wheat also contains genetic material from animals, so it will be interesting to watch how the public react to that notion. You can hear the information on BBC Radio 4's Farming Today, here. And you're most welcome to start a debate here, on the comments section.

Black stamens disqualify this form from being a 'Shirley Poppy.'

Persons unknown - but bitterly resented - have sprayed or flailed every nettle in the village and its surroundings. If anyone in the 'Tidytidytidy Brigade' dare mention to me that there seem to be fewer small toroiseshell and peacock butteflies about these days, I'll hit 'em. Meanwhile, the year's first Meadow Browns and Ringlets have hatched, in my mini-meadow. Huzzah!

A true 'Shirley Poppy' with yellow stamens, as developed by the Rev. Wilkes of Shirley, Surrey in the 1880s

This year's swifts have also hatched, fledged and flown from our house eaves. The garden is full of shattered snail shells, thanks to some highly successful broods of song thrushes. And now, the three pairs of swallows that have nested in our outbuildings are sitting so tight that I'm sure there are more happy events on the way. What a heavenly season this is! Blessed June!

A white picotee form of Papaver rhoeas.

The main purpose of this ramble, though, was to share some of my poppies with you. I don't know quite why, but they're so exquisitely beautiful, to me, that I can never pass one by without pausing to gaze.

They have so much that caresses the aesthetic sense. The pleated petals, as they open; the flashes of colour – whether on field verges or in fancy borders; the bizarre pepperpot fruit capsules with their ribbed caps; the black stamens and sombre marks of death at some of their centres - all are totally delightful and absorbing.

But words don't really do them justice and even the best pictures give no more than a hint or a memory of their true delights. And my poor pictures, all shot early in the morning of 17th June, are even less adequate at portraying the true delight of poppiness.

Papaver somniferum - more likely to get dull opiates from this one!

This one is wearing a sepal like a cap - daft thing!

Something disturbingly phallic about the way opium poppy buds dangle. Not sure I like them.

That's enough poppies! [ed]

I'm listening to Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin with the magnificent Thomas Allen in the title role.

This day in 2006 The PG and I discovered, with our noses, genuine sweetbriar Rosa rubiginosa, growing on a fenside lane near here. The foliage is richly scented with apple.

This week's film was The Italian Job which I enjoyed more than I expected. It has worn well, since 1967, but is flawed by some self-indulgent irrelevencies: Benny Hill's obsession with fat bottoms brought nothing to the story and those three Minis begin to be rather boring, driving to completely pointless places in Turin. Noel Coward was priceless, but my dear, the over-acting! What a perfect luvvie he must have been.

Good bye, and may you spend the rest of the month in perfect poppiness!

TRICKOLATIN' MY DODMAN TRAPS

2011-06-17T16:33:00.001+01:00

NORFOLK, ah, lovely, bootiful Norfolk! Where even the glacial east wind is bone lazy, blowing straight through you because it can't be bothered to go round. We had nearly four days there this week, and adored every moment.

Grassland at the NNR Reserve at Cley Marshes. All rough grassland should look like this!

CLICK ON ANY PICTURE TO MAKE IT BIGGER.

This place is birding heaven, naturalist's heaven, boatman's or yachtsman's heaven and, perhaps above all, a wildflower lover's heaven.

Noel Coward rudely said, in Private Lives, that Norfolk was very flat. It isn't. It's no flatter than Essex, or Warwickshire, and if you've tried scrambling up and down the precipitous bumps of the terminal moraine just above Sheringham, you'll find it as steep as parts of the Lake District.

The PG and I enjoyed walking among bee orchids, marsh orchids, common spotted orchids, adders tongue ferns, horned poppies, vipers bugloss and scadillions of big, red, full-blown poppies.

We dined on freshly caught crab, Norfolk ham, superb cheeses from Mrs Temple's Walsingham creamery, fresh raspberries, bright but disappointingly flavoured local-grown strawberries. (I might have known they'd be 'El-bloody-santa' - the nastiest variety every foisted on the world.)

We watched godwits - both bar-tailed and black-tailed - spoonbills, redshanks, spotted redshanks (black in their summer plumage) sanderlings, dunlin, glimpsed bearded reedlings and sat, slack jawed in concentration, watching hundreds of little terns fishing for sand eels in the North Sea, and flying home to their colony to feed their young.

A black-headed gull, resplendent in breeding plumage, watches us eat our beach picnic.

We went slumming from our home-base of Wells-next-the-Sea, to fish and chippy Sheringham, to gaze at people gazing at the sea, and we lunched at the top of the aforementioned moraine, while sea breezes kept our drinks at fridge temperatures.

The People!
What can I say about folk who call boots boats and boats boots? Rum? Pecooliar? Maybe, but it's lovely - though increasingly rare to hear a genuine Norfolk accent. Proper Norfokkers speak in a lilting voice with poetic cadences. The 'raised inflection interrogative' was here long before teenagers picked it up from watching Neighbours and is much more musical because it drops on the last syllable. Try saying 'Dew yew want an ice cream.' Now say it again, but with 'ice' half an octave higher.

As for the dialect - that seems almost to have disappeared. I haven't, for many years, heard anyone talk of 'trickolating' (mending) or 'pingling' meaning to mess about with food, rather than to eati it. Snails, in my childhood were 'dodmans' or 'oddmedods' and ladybirds were 'bushy barneybees.' You didn't bump your head, but a low beam could cause you to 'thack your skull.'

We also called on another 'bor meaning 'neighbour' and greeted folk, not with 'wotcher,' but literally with words that sounded like 'What cheer!'

I feel able to be frank - well, let's face it, rude - about Norfolk for three reasons.

Firstly, I spent a goodly chunk of my childhood there. We lived, in the 50s, in a decrepit old rectory with neither electricity nor mains water, and later, in a house conveniently next door to the village pub, this time with power but still no mains water. My father installed an electric pump, so our supply could be sucked up from a well. But just outside the pub, there was a hand-cranked, village pump which cottagers without their own wells were obliged to use. Bathing, for some, was not so much weekly as annually, usually on the day before the Royal Norfolk Show. (Only joking!)

Secondly, with forebears just over the border into Lincolnshire, I feel almost native, so being rude is sort of self-mocking, if you see what I mean.

Einstein dined here - not! The spelling errors and misplaced apostrophes suggest that 'Ronaldo' can't possibly be foreign but was probably Norfolk born, bred and schooled.

And finally, though most of the natives are utterly delightful, Norfolk folk can, at times, refine rudeness into a highly developed art.

Take a local hostelry the PG and I dined at on a previous visit - The Crown, at Wells-next-the-Sea. Everything about the meal was good - excellent sea food, efficient service and pleasant enough surroundings.

But the ale was not in perfect condition and by its taste, either the pub's pipes was not quite as they should be, or, it was on the turn. Stale ale - though perfectly drinkable - develops a cardboard back-taste and the hoppiness swings from pleasantly bitter to unpleasantly rank.

When we paid our tab, and, since the receptionist asked if everything was all right, I mentioned the beer. She was clearly offended and informed me, brusquely, that they knew beer, that did I realise it was Real Ale, that it was tasted every day and was never served unless it was in perfect condition?

'Sorry to disagree,' I replied, 'And I do appreciate that Woodforde's Wherry is not half so good as it used to be, but yours tasted as though it was on the turn.'

'It's fine,' she snapped, 'our beer is excellent.' So we left with a flea in our ear.

Sad really, because we'd like to have gone back to the Crown one day. But somehow, I don't think we will.

Hells bells - that's more then enough moaning. Stop it Colborn, at once!!! Self-satisfied prat!

Speaking of horny - ahem, ahem! How about these. . .

Yellow horned poppy, Glaucium flavum on the shingle beaches at Cley. Wonderful curved, horny pods and blue-green, glaucous, pubescent foliage.

The texture and colour of the foliage is wonderful in contrast with hard pebbles.

Some people - especially PRs and the tourist trade - call my favourite part of North Norfolk 'Poppyland.' The name was coined by Victorian critic Clement Scott who shacked up with a miller's daughter at Overstrand, just down-coast from Cromer. Wild field poppies thrive in the sandy, flinty soils, not only on the coast, but all over the county. Every decent farm gateway, every road bank, many of the field margins and lots of front gardens are joyously picked out with big red blobs of poppies.

Because of the opiate connections, poppies are associated with sleep. Norfolk people believe smelling them causes headaches but to me, these are ebulliant, wide-awake plants, full of brash cheefulness. They come just after gentle pink dog roses, in the procession of landmark summer wildflowers. Lovely! Lovely!

It's more fun watching people watching the sea than watching the sea.

Next week - I think you deserve a pictorial tribute to poppies, especially if you've just read all this rambling nonsense!

I'm listening to Beethoven's Piano Sonata No 16 in G.

This week's film was Ordet, (Danish) Dreyer's exploration of religious fundamentalism, Lutheranism, faith and reason in a small agricultural community in the 1920s. The concluding events defy logic and reason but not faith - if you have it.

This day in 2006 it was sweltering hot and I wandered knee deep in drifts of Dactylorrhiza fuchsii or common spotted orchids, at Thurlby Fen Slipe, a local nature reserve in sunny Lincolnshire - another county which is a lot less flat than people think.

I SPOTTED ICARUS FLIRTING IN MY MEADOW

2011-06-07T15:44:00.001+01:00

Good morrow to you! And a happy June and all that. We're open to the public on Saturday and Sunday and the garden has never looked weedier.

And yet, and yet . . . I'm growing accustomed to the weedy, shaggy status quo. And accustomed to the puzzled faces, looking over our front gate at the ridiculous stand of chicory - now more than 2 metres high - which is masking the narrow border behind. The seeds germinated there and I didn't have the heart to remove the plants so our drive is soon to be lined in a haze of blue flowers. Unplanned, unwelcome by the PG who thinks they look horrible, and misunderstood by garden visitors whose puzzled expressions fill me with swirling mix of pride and shame.

A male Common Blue Polyomatus icarus turned up in my meadow this week. If you supply the right habitat, the wildlife will come to it, I've been told. Here's living proof.

But the big triumph, and one which again, I suspect most of our visitors won't understand, is the mini-meadow. You can see the edge of it in my previous blog post. I've been working on it now for nearly 7 years and in all that time, its development has been leisurely. Introducing meadow flora was difficult at first, because the grass was so lush on the rich soil, but yellow rattle, Rhinanthes, has reduced the vigour of the grasses - too much in some places - and by raking off each September, I've managed to lower the nutritional plane. We now have more wildflower species, though ox eye daisy predominates, and last summer a spotted orchid turned up. Lovely! But we need a lot more diversity.

Now, the big excitement last year was the arrival of common blues in early summer. And the bigger excitement was that they bred and produced another hatch late last year when we counted several females and enough males to establish further growth.

The underside of the Common Blue - easy to distinguish from a more common garden species, the Holly Blue whose underwings are pale blue with smaller dark markings. You can see one here.

My big anxiety was yet to come, though. Unlike agricultural land, the meadow is not only limited in size but is set in a relatively formal, managed garden. At some stage I have to cut the 'hay' and remove it, after allowing all seed heads to mature and shed.

The problem is that this species over-winters as a (tiny) caterpillar. When the weather grows cold, the larvae drop down into the lower vegetation where they stay in hibernation until spring.

My worry was whether raking off all the dead grasses and then, of necessity, mowing repeatedly with rotary machine until the sward is short enough to go through winter and then show off primroses, aconites and other winter tinies, would destroy the caterpillars. And worse, whether the final fine mower which sucks, would hoover up the caterpillars along with the remains of the severed grass.

But the latest sighting shows that all was well. The butterfly colony has survived and everyone is happy. All I need, now, is more birds foot trefoil. At present, these butterflies are breeding on white clover, but that is not first choice for them as food plant.

Marbled White Melanargia galathea a species of limestone and chalk regions but would it come this far from Rutland where there are colonies on the limestone brash? I shot this one in France btw.

So what's next? I want to establish sheep sorrel next, to encourage small copper butterflies. There are some in the area and we've had them in the garden. It would be great if they bred. Our other butterfly residents, ie, breeding in my garden include Speckled Wood, Orange Tip, Ringlet, Meadow Brown, Large Skipper, Gatekeeper and bloody cabbage whites - both small and large. Visitors include Comma, Red Admiral, Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell, Brimstone.

Plants of especial interest include this white form of Bastard Balm, Melittis melissophyllum lovely in shade, irresistible to bumble bees and not especially easy to establish. It grows close to the American Epipactis gigantea a striking helleborine with pelals in brown and tan. Possibly a pic soon when it's in flower.

I'm listening to The second Sri Lanka Test limping towards a draw, England having failed to whack up enough runs to be able to declare with a biggish lead before lunch.

This day in 2006 I watched Springwatch - with Bill Oddie and the nearly new Kate Humble, who I described as 'young and bouncy.'

This week's film was Le Père des mes Enfants (The Father of My Children) Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve. The story is based on a parallel event in real life. The protagonist, at first, is the 'Father' in the title but by the second half of the film, the narrative has shifted and all member of the family become protagonists, from time to time, in their on right.

I thought the idea was pretty good, but the structure and development seemed slipshod and the shooting restless. By the last 30 minutes, there were rambling threads and plotlets which seemed to be going nowhere. More work on the screenplay would have turned a modestly OK work of art into an outstanding one.

The problem with so many potentially great French films is that the culture still seems to be polluted by the awful era of Nouvelle Vague. If gushing cineastes could see New Wave cinema for what it really is - pretentious crap - there might be fewer traces of it around today. Hands up all those who think Nouvelle Vague cinema was great! And if you can say why it is, perhaps you'd be able to tell me what the hell Last Year in Marienbad was all about because I'm damned if I know.

Next Week. . . . The idiot economists who think they can price the countryside. Anyone or any panel of experts who think that pollinating insects, including bees, are only worth £380 million, have to be disastrously misinformed. Cereals are wind pollinated. OK. But almost everything else depends on natural pollination by agents other than man. Go figure.
I haven't seen the White Paper on the value of our ecosystems, yet, but whoever has devised it clearly wants to know the price of everything but understands the value of nothing.

But for now . . . .Good bye!

RAIN MADE MY CURLY KALE GO FRIZZY

2011-06-01T16:49:00.000+01:00

What bliss to wake on Sunday and see leaden skies. By 11am, light rain was falling and continued gently until early evening. Not a vast amount of water, but enough to revitalise, to freshen, to lay the dust and make us all feel better. And now it's deliciously warm and Junesque outside.

I even went out to photograph the mini-meadow in Sunday's rain and this is what it looked like.

Ox eye daises Leucanthemum vulgare dominating the sward of our minimeadow. Knapweeds, field scabious and meadow cranesbill should follow but I fear that the spotted orchid, Dactylorrhiza fuchsii may have failed in the dry. (CLICK ON PICS TO MAKE BIGGER.)

PEATIE-TWEETIE - Sorry this is a bit long.
I got myself into a slightly intense exchange of tweets about peat and peat-based composts the other day. As usual with such discussions, I suspect that I was the villain and decided to scarper before it got nasty. It's not easy even for normal people to have a serious exchange when limited to 140 characters but with me, it's next to impossible.

When I was informed that if I couldn't propagate without peat I had no right to call myself a gardener, I thought it time to quit.

And as an excuse to duck the issue – in a disgracefully cowardly way – I promised to blog on the subject soon. So here is my contribution to the much exercised, frequently misinformed, often emotive and invariably intense peat debate.

First a few admissions:

1. Behind my garden fence I have several bales of Irish Moss Peat. They've been there for some years. Just thought you should know.

2. When I moved into my current garden, 7 and a half years ago, I dug a sizeable hole and back-filled it with Irish Moss Peat. I wanted a small, moist zone where I could grow calcifuges.

3. I use some peat free growing medium and some peat-based. I always prefer peat-based material because it is better in every respect. But I use peat-free where I feel I can, to reduce my over-all peat consumption - which, currently, is minimal.

4. I will continue to use peat - though sparingly and carefully - for as long as I can and I'm afraid I'm not ashamed of doing so. In fact I'm more ashamed of driving down to my relatives in Kent, instead of going by train, than I am of using peat as a growing medium.

5. I would NEVER use peat as a soil improver (2 above was a one-off event and the peat is still exactly where I left it, in the hole.)

So there. You probably hate me already but I wanted to make things plain.

Why do I continue to use peat?
Probably for the same reason that I drive a car, eat meat, burn oil and fail to grow all my own food: because it's difficult to find convenient alternatives. And because I know that with modest consumption, all gardeners could continue to use peat without causing extensive environmental damage, and without excessive carbon emissions.

I could survive, just, without doing anything unsustainable. But in real life, as long as I watch tv, enjoy lamb stew, go to a restaurant, buy grapes at Morrisons, take a hot bath or dine with friends, I'm leaving a footprint which, to an extent, is unsustainable - if you'll pardon the horribly mixed metaphors.

We all do things that are not helping to stem global warming. And we condone them, often by passive complicity, but we condone them just the same - often because we prefer not to face life without such things. We perhaps shouldn't. But we do.

And as a passionate and active supporter of wildlife conservation, I can assure you that if peat extraction could not take place without threatening important habitats, not only would I never use it, but I'd also be campaigning for a blanket ban. If peat from non-sensitive habitats is used, and used sparingly, biodiversity need not be harmed.

Peat is wonderful stuff for growers.
It is unique in its ability to absorb, hold and slowly release water. Without peat, the great revolution from open ground nurseries to modern garden centres may not have happened.

Growing media, right back to the first John Innes formulae, contained peat because they provided that unique habitat for the roots of plants kept and grown unnaturally, in containers.

When commercial horticulture changed, to feed the voracious demand for containerised stock, demand for peat grew massively. Extraction, as a result, was increased to the extent that local, ie, Mainland UK deposits began to be depleted. Worse, valuable raised bog habitats were destroyed, many of them before conservation bodies recognised the destruction. It is a tragedy, that so much was lost before blanket extraction was stopped.

Any extraction of peat, today, needs to be strictly policed and sensitive natural habitats need to be protected.

But peat is widely abundant. Many peat-rich areas are neither under threat, nor important as wildlife habitats. In general, they are species-poor and extraction, under strict control, need not cause such extensive damage.

Furthermore, in countries such as the Republic of Ireland, where peat is burnt in power stations, the surface material, previously marketed as high grade horticultural peat, has no other use. It is therefore wasted - a bye-product of great value to gardeners.

So, although I appreciate that peat use in horticulture contributes to carbon emissions - though not nearly so much as we're led to believe by the anti-peat lobby; and although there is strong political pressure not to use the stuff, I remain an unrepentant, though sparing peat user. And I'll continue to be one until either convinced otherwise, or until the law prevents me from acquiring what amounts to a valuable bye product.

Two final points:
1. In rescue work, botanic gardens and other institutions are conserving species threatened with extinction in the wild, or which are already extinct. Some of these plants could not be grown without peat. Carnivorous plants are examples, but there are others. It is essential, therefore, that if the government finally stamps out use of peat, those institutions receive the necessary dispensation, so that they can continue their vital work.

2. When you buy compost look at the bag. Many are labelled: 'With added John Innes.' That is a meaningless expression. Does it refer to John Innes knowhow? To the institute itself, based in Norwich, or that the compost contains John Innes compost within the mix - a compost in a compost. Which ever way you look at it, it's disingenuous because J.I. composts contain 30% Sphagnum Moss Peat.

My lovely Rosa 'Madame Gregoire Staechelin' got blown out of her birch tree during last week's gale. I need a ladder and a compliant PG to manoeuvre it back and fix it with wire that won't cut into the tree or the rose.

I'm listening to - or anticipating the angry comments about to come from the anti peat lobby.

This day in 2010 I arrived, with the PG, in Singapore to help with community gardening projects. My passport was stolen a few days later, in Melaka, Malaysia. Singapore stuff here

This week's film was a TV production of Voyage Around My Father, with Laurence Olivier, Jane Asher and Alan Bates and made during the 70s. It's a fine piece, and interesting to compare with the recent West End stage production which starred David Jacobi. Mortimer was a good writer of fast, witty dialogue but he also had an unerring gift for making a bully look vulnerable and, eventually, even appealing. I think it was one of Olivier's finer TV roles.

A new acquisition from Coton Manor - the fabulously coloured Rosa 'Mrs Oakley Fisher.' She's plonked in among deep purples and looks a proper madam!

Thanks, if you've read this far! A more jolly post next week, let's hope.

MRS SMACK'S SHORT SHARP VISIT TO BOTTYLAND

2011-05-20T12:26:00.003+01:00

What ho, my hearties! Still no rain, nasty cold winds, aphids building up and bloody Chelsea next week. Can it get any worse? Probably not. [CLICK ON PIX TO MAKE THEM BIGGER]

The garden at Coton Manor where the PG and I spent a delightful day last week.

If I walk into my greenhouse, I'm in danger of contracting a serious lung disorder from breathing in clouds of whitefly. The sticky yellow strips which I hang seem only to catch non-target insects like stray ichneumans and also stick to my face, whenever I give my disease-ridden plants too much attention.

The June display is done, weeks early, so there's nothing to see but dead grass, a few dusty succulents and the bare soil where some evil creature – possibly a capybara sized rodent or a vegetarian bird that would dwarf an emu – has ruined my lovely sweet peas.

But I'm getting bad tempered, and that won't do. Because the purpose of this post is to comment on Anne Wareham's new book The Bad Tempered Gardener - and two bad tempers on one blog post would be excessive.

Now, to Anne's Magnificent Octopus. . . but be warned. This is not a review - it's merely my personal reaction.

I see from the cover that several good and great ones have done dutiful plugs. James the Hat has place of honour on the front but Germaine Greer who seems able to opine about absolutely everything, includes a belter of a comment on the back of the dust jacket. It runs thus:

'[Anne Wareham] invites intellectual engagement. . .' Well dam' me, that's a bloody surprise! The only book that could possibly not invite intellectual engagement would be one with blank pages. And even then, one might ponder over the paper quality, grammes per square metre, whiteness, possible dot-gain and so on. And if that isn't intellectual engagement, I don't know what is.

Ms Greer goes on to say 'gardens should have ideas in them and the ideas should be perceptible.' May be, but perceptible to whom? I can imagine a bemused visitor, looking at one of my many garden cock-ups and saying 'what on earth are you trying to do here?'

'Ah,' I might reply, ponderously, 'that is the execution of an idea which is perceptible - but only perceptible to me.' And with luck, that would shut the bugger up. If it didn't, I'd go for less subtlety and say, 'none of your business. It's my bloody garden and I'll do what I like with it'

Digressing again - although not really. Hang in there.

I must begin by saying that I greatly enjoyed reading Anne's book. I like her articulacy and her acerbic style and although the structure is a bit random, I loved that and got the sense of reading a series of loosely connected, sometimes rather cross essays. And I hugely enjoyed Charles Hawes' pictures. They, and Anne's eloquent descriptions make me long to visit The Veddw.

The BOOK, along with tools needed to create an exemplary lawn edge, faultlessly trimmed and with essential bare soil separating plants from turf. (Shot by me, in my garden which is the one (and only) place in which I'm never bad tempered.)

The Bad Tempered Gardener gave me a series of sharp jolts. I felt like a small boy caught doing something he shouldn't and receiving a stern reprimand. I was slapped about quite a lot, as a child, and I felt some of my old scars stinging at times. It quickly became obvious that many of my loves and passions are Anne's pet hates.

Here are a few:
She loves garden centres; I abhor them.
She is not endlessly fascinated by plants; they are the core of my gardening existence.
She is scathing about gardening experts; I am one - of sorts, so can't hate them too much.
She detests neat, clipped lawn edges; I regard them as essential in certain places.
She hates roses; I love them

But we are both in concert with rose gardens and agree that they are horrible. And I'd go one further and say that they are also horticulturally suicidal - reservoirs for pests and diseases.

We both have big reservations about hellebores, too. But she appears unable to make cut hellebore stems take up water. Anne - here's how: take a jug of water out with you, cut the stems quickly and immerse them within two or three seconds to prevent air locks. While they're still under water, split the bottom inch of each stem on one side. (A simple tip but it works for me every time.)

Perhaps the biggest conflict we're likely to have is this:

Anne suggests that obsession with plants is the ruination of British gardens; I believe the one quality that lifts British gardens above most others in the world is our love of, respect for and deep knowledge of plants.

In good gardens, plants are allowed to speak, to proclaim their wonderful diversity. They are what drive a garden's dynamic, ensuring sweet change from season to season, providing surprises, changing emphasis, cheering miserable winters and enriching the mad extravagance of May and June.

The more plants you can have, the better a garden can be. Anorakish collecting can, in itself, become the main driver for creating gardens and THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. I've seen superb collections of single genera, made to look ugly because they're clustered in pots on a concrete pad. And I've seen similar collections, in beautiful and naturalistic settings which are as moving and intellectually engaging as anything designed by such talents as Tom Stuart Smith, Mr Hat, the Lutyens-Jekyll gang or Repton.

In an over-designed garden, plants are often imprisoned, hacked or beaten into submission. That can work, of course, but to plant lovers it can also be hateful to the eye and painful to the soul.

I believe that gardens are highly personal things. That's why I don't particularly enjoy other people seeing mine, unless they're close and understanding friends. And why I HATE show gardens at Chelsea and howl with boredom if forced to look at parterres or knot gardens.

I also think it wrong-headed to try to preserve gardens, after the owners have gone, and awful to develop a National Trust attitude of sanctity about them, forbidding change and thereby killing the dynamism. The core quality of some gardens is their ephemeral nature, their fluidity and the little quirks that make each unique. Such things usually die with their owners, and that's probably no bad thing.

I draw virtually all my inspiration from nature. I try to study landscapes with my own eyes, and not to be too influenced by authoritative voices which tell me what I should see, rather than allowing me to see for myself.

And to me, gardens are relatively artistic, but they are not Fine Arts. Great, soul-jerking, earth-moving art, for me, is Michelangelo, Wren, the Chrysler building, Wagner, Ely Cathedral, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Keats, Ingmar Bergman, Dürer, probably Antony Gormley and one day, maybe, Lucien Freud.

I do not consider gardens as forms of great art. They can be beautiful, though, and inspiring and challenging and glorious. But let's not - please, let's not - make them bigger and more important than they really are.

Anne's book is one I commend you to read. Whatever your beliefs, I can guarantee that not only will you become intellectually engaged, you'll also probably experience a strong reaction one way or another. What more could one ask, from a book.

This week's film was El Secreto de sus Ojos (The Secret of their Eyes.) From Argentina, directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a superbly told and well-filmed story about a retired legal counsellor writing a novel about an old, unsolved case and thereby solving it and also re-kindling a long but hitherto unrequited love.

I'm listening to Beethoven's early quartets again.

This time next week, I'll be thankful that Chelsea is done for another year.

Gawd - what a long, boring, rambling, railing post. If you've read all the way down to here, you deserve a really good drink and a decent meal. Now go and get those edges clipped, AT ONCE! I WON'T TELL YOU AGAIN!

THE RUIN OF VERGE

2011-05-16T07:56:00.001+01:00

Well Blogger is working at last. Huzzah!

Good day, happy Monday, and - well, you know. Lah-di-bloody-dah! I'm deeply depressed. On Saturday, I dug a new bed, along my neighbour's fence and planted sixty (yes, 60) beautifully reared and nurtured sweet pea plants. My plan? To grow exquisite blooms by cordoning the plants. Long stems, heavenly scent, delicious colours.

On Sunday morning, some animal - badger? squirrel? rat? - had dug up and eaten every single one. All that remains are a few wilted, severed leaves.

The one thing you need, in gardening, is a robust sense of humour and a belief in the certainty of failure for much of the time. If you can live with that, you'll be a gardener. Otherwise, forget it and play computer games.

Ferns, weeds and Corydalis elata (blue flowers) in my mini-mini woodland bed, by the back door.

CLICK ON PIX TO MAKE BIGGER

But that's by the way. THIS is what I wanted to say. . .

Artificial bumble been nests are a waste of time and money.

Of the zillions that have been bought and lovingly installed by wildlifely gardeners, only a tine percentage have actually been used by bees. Here's a typical press report.

And yet several British bumble species are still in dangerous decline. Why? Because of habitat loss, and because of a lack of decent flowers.

Given a choice between an old mouse hole, on a sunny bank, and a prettified edifice tied to a tree, it’s obvious that any self-respecting bee is going to take possession of the former and probably wouldn’t even notice the latter.

And do any of the gardeners who lovingly fix up bee nests also over-tidy? Do they have galleried old banks, where soil may tumble, exposing tree roots? Are there comfy holes in their masonry or under old stumps which might suit the bees? And might also suit hibernating toads? Or do conscientious and house-proud gardeners clear away such things in a frenzy of tidiness?

And what about those immaculately designed gardens, with paving, decking and hard surfaces? No doubt, these are pressure washed regularly to prevent moss and lichens – and decked about with trendy but useless plants such as tree ferns, bamboos, olives and, God forbid, hideous bloody cordylines? (The greatest favour our past winter did was to kill millions of cordylines.)

Wildlife needs and loves mess. And for true peace of mind, anyone with any feeling for nature will be happy and relaxed in a messy garden, and will enjoy the visitors which begin to arrive and share the ramshackle facilities. (Though perhaps less pleased whey they eat one's sweet pea plants!)

Besides ruined habitats, bees suffer from a lack of decent flowers. Year after year, in my area and in most places where I drive, verge-cutting is excessive. Legally, I believe, a metre-wide strip must be cropped regularly for road safety.

But if you mow entire verges, you kill flowering plants. Within a couple of seasons, cowslips, ox eye daises, meadow cranesbills, knapweeds, mayweed, poppies, speedwell – all the typical grassland species will be smothered by a sward of boring, green grass. To allow that to happen is vandalous. To encourage it is downright evil.

To maintain a flower-rich verge, all that is needed is a single annual, or a biennial cut. Just one pass, with a mower whose blades are set reasonably high. That serves to prevent woody plants from becoming established and smothering the verge, while allowing broad-leaved species to flourish.

The best way to ensure habitat protection on verges, I suggest, would be to make them ALL nature reserves, and to forbid mowing, other than as just described.

That would easy to implement. And as well as making Britain more beautiful and life-rich, would also save huge amounts of wasted energy. Unmown verges are not only precious as food sources for insects; they also serve as wildlife corridors, connecting larger habitats which, hitherto, might have been isolated and at risk of deterioration.

So don’t mess about with pointless bee boxes. Instead, campaign for neglected roadside verges. Let's put pressure on prissy local authorities and unhealthily tidy farmers, whether in suburbia or deep in the countryside, and let's press for punishing those obsessively tidy minded bastards who mow village verges that would be better left well alone. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE! Crippling fines would be too good.

And while we’re at it, please, please, let’s outlaw the planting of disgustingly large hybrid daffodils along country verges. They don’t help bees but they do smother valuable flowering wild plants.

Athyrium 'Ghost' my second favourite fern this year. The silvery fronds are made even prettier by the darkness of the stems. Piccies of my favourite next time.

I’m listening to the song Das Rosenband by Richard Strauss. It's extremely soothing.

This day in 1991 I was struggling with my first novel which I wanted to call Slurry but which Orion insisted was to be entitled The Kirkland Acres. I was concerned about pace and structure, at that stage, and wanted to get it right. I needn’t have bothered, though. Aside from an extremely handy £10,000 advance, it was not reviewed by anyone, on publication, and fell flat on its face. Orion’s promotion budget and programme were laughable; the re-titling was a mistake but I learnt a little more about what fiction publishers are really like.

This week’s film was The Pumpkin Eater – Harold Pinter’s brilliant 1964 screen adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s novel. Anne Bancroft manages to act everyone off the screen – and with Peter Finch, a youthful Maggie Smith and James Mason, that’s a formidable cast – but seems to have less dialogue than anyone else. Director Jack Clayton holds, time and again, lingering, painful, close-up shots of her suffering face. These are agony to watch and by the end of the film, I had to sit in the darkness for some minutes, to pull myself together.

Oh, and I've just finished reading Anne Wareham's The Bad Tempered Gardener. More on that, soon, when the bruises have healed.

Bless you for reading this far. Bye bye! May your sweet peas never be ruined.

CALM DOWN, DEER, IT'S NOT THE HUNTING SEASON

2011-04-28T17:47:00.002+01:00

Papaver orientale 'Saffron' Our first big poppy this year. (Click on pix to see bigger.)

Well, hullo! What a delightfully festive time we're living in!

Gardens in a minute - but first, this:

1.These pernicious gagging injunctions must stop at once. What has got into the minds of the Cocklecarrot judges who are dishing out dodgy protection to anyone who can afford it, regardless of scurrilous peccadilloes or worse? Do they not understand the crucial importance of the Fourth Estate in a democratic system - especially when we don't have a written constitution?

The press may be populated with reptiles, but if you want freedom of speech and exposure of villainy or governmental malpractice, you have to take the vileness and gossip along with the genuine exposures which serve the public interest. If you protect against one, you'll be giving undeserved refuge to the other. And if you go on like that, Britain will end up like the rest of Europe - craven about bumping the pedestals of the great, regardless of their behaviour. If we want to preserve our precious freedoms, we must have a fearless and unfettered press, however distasteful that may seem, at times.

2. About the Prime Minister's borrowing of Michael Winner's odious and infuriating catch phrase. It probably made a lot of spondies for Mr Winner, but it backfired into poor old Cameron's gut like a rotten oyster lurking among a dozen Whitstable Specials, at PM Queston Time. He must have forgotten that there's a terrifying and semi-rational 'Rad-Fem' element woven through Old Labour and, having little else to attack him on, they saw their opportunity and pounced.

So who was the gender chauvinist in that spat? Who were over-reacting like a batch of bolshy schoolboys? And amid the hypocritical railing, where did parliamentary debate go?

Rosa banksiae 'Lutea' on our house.

Now then, Ahem Ahem!!

I'm inordinately proud of my Banksian rose. People have stopped me in the village, to

congratulate me on its sublime beauty. The fact that it's pushing tiles off the roof and threatening to obliterate the windows, doesn't seem to bother anyone but me. (I'm the poor sod who has to teeter atop the wobbly ladder, extricating rose from roof.) It's a climber I would never be without, and one of the first I planted when we moved in here, seven and a half years ago

This is the thuggiest of thug roses, but has the saving grace of being thornless and easy to handle. I have to prune mine twice, hacking much of it away in June, after flowering, and than having to have another go, to pull it out the roof, again, each autumn. You have to remember, though, that when you prune a spring-bloomer that late, you're removing future flowers with every snip.

The first Rosa banksiae was introduced into England in the early 1800s, I believe, by William Kerr – a Joseph Banks protégé. This was the white form which he named 'White Lady Banks'. It had been cultivated in Western China for centuries. I planted this double-flowered white variety last autumn, on an outbuilding. It has yet to flower, but I'm told the blossoms smell strongly of violets.

The double yellow, R banksiae 'Lutea' which is the easiest and most popular form, was brought to Britain by rosarian J. D. Parks in the 1820s. I first knew this rose when our family moved into a late 17th century house, in Kent, in 1968. A huge specimen grew on the south-facing wall, and I was determined, thereafter, to have one wherever I lived.

The flowers are supposed to smell of violets, but the white form has better scent than this more widely grown yellow. All the flowers come in spring and there's never a repeat.

Our first oriental poppy came out this week - picture at the top of the post. I tweeted about it earlier. The variety is 'Saffron' and I purchased it from one Nori Pope, when he had the nursery at Hadspen House. Every plant the Popes sold was a treasure.

'Saffron' is usually my first Oriental, but this year is almost month early. However, recent bitter north-east winds, and lack of rain, have stopped everything mid-stride. Now we can only wait, while the chill breezes bruise all tender vegetation. The picture gives it a strong hue, because it's newly emerged. But the charm of this variety is that it quickly matures to the colour of a Buddhist monk's saffron robe.

Angelica archangelica

After two years of sulky, vegetative growth, our angelica - we knicknamed it 'Houston' - has produced a rampantly shameless and unapologetic flower spike. The plant grows on the threshold of our tiny vegetable enclosure and is the most self-important thing I've ever grown. It's wrong where it is, not very graceful and I'm sure I'll never harvest the stems to make that delicious sweet green stuff that decorates cakes.

But I wouldn't have missed this outrageous inflorescence for anything. It's as if it's ramped itself up to present an outrageous, suggestive and decidedly rude gesture at judges, politicians, Andrew Marr and Royal Weddings. Good on it. I'll invite the village children to dance round it today, while chanting pagan things, à la Wicker Man.

I'm listening to An ancient recording of Victoria Spivey singing What's this Thing They're Talking about?

This Day in 1986 I traded in a combine harvester and, since the PG was in Norfolk collecting pots to sell in our nursery, I cooked supper for myself and the kids. Apparently, we all had pork chops and stir-fried leeks with, as a treat, pancakes to follow. What an indulgent Daddy I must have been.

This week's film was Monty Python's Life of Brian. It's still as fresh and delicious as the first viewing. The corpsing scene with a stammering Pilate who couldn't say 'r' is a cracker but the dissident being made to parse the Latin for Romans, Go Home, is one of the best comedic moments of all time. Imagine being married to someone called Incontinentia Buttock! The perfect antidote to over-saccharined religious films. Grossly irreverent, but blasphemous? Surely not!

Toodle ooh. Enjoy the long week end and a happy princely wedding to all.

WE'VE RUN OUT OF BLUSHFUL HIPPOCRENE

2011-04-21T15:08:00.001+01:00

Good morrow, good day, hullo and good luck! And whatever your Paschal or other vernal/aestival proclivities might be, good luck with those, too! It being Maundy Thursday, as I write this, I now have a mere 34 hours to wait, before I can gorge gluttonously on the chocolate and sweeties that I've foregone since Ash Wednesday.

This tulip was sold to me as 'Shirley' which is white, with a subtle and delicate lilac-mauve edge to the tepals. There's nothing subtle or delicate about this one, but I love its brash cheerfulness. (Close-up portraits by the PG. Wides by me.) CLICK ON PICS TO SEE BIGGER.

What can I say? Is this really spring? Or is it a precocious summer, to be nipped in the bud by cruel May frosts and a flooded Chelsea? We shouldn't care, I suppose, but should enjoy each glorious golden day as it comes. But I can't help thinking that there'll be a vicious sting in the tail of this heatwave.

Some triumphs:

A wide view of my mini-woodland garden

I have to say that my micro-woodland garden has been an unfettered joy this spring. At last, the treasures that I've been secreting into the leaf-mouldy soil are beginning to look as though they turned up there naturally, rather than having been planted in self-conscious, allotted spaces.

Left to right, Anemone nemorosa 'Viridiflora,' A. n. 'Royal Blue,' fading, with 'Parlez-Vous' behind. Dying oxlips to the right, budding Trillium flexipes on left.

The wood anemones which surprisingly, the wood pigeons ignored this spring, were spectacular, creating a lovely patchwork carpet with the lilac mauve of Anemone nemorosa 'Robinsoniana,' Ash Wednesday blue-grey of the curiously named 'Parlez-Vous' - I keep thinking of German officers crossing the Rhine - the startling azure of 'Royal blue' and all the oddities like 'Viridiflora' which has no flowers at all and the gigantic 'Leeds Variety.'

Anemones are on the wane but we have other sylvan delights including Trilliums, Uvularia, Cyclamen repandum, Omphalodes verna 'Alba' foam flars, some spidery epimediums, a plague of oxlips, both true and false, plus dottings of this and that.

Trillium flexipes just coming into flower.

The place works as it should. When I walk from the 'Tea Lawn' through the archway, into the wood, the atmosphere changes, the temperature drops a little and it smells different. People whom I've ushered through invariably say 'Ah!' Or, if they're really appreciative, 'Aaaah!' without actually being able to put their finger on why.

The mini meadow isn't bad either. The snakeheads are getting established, despite unwelcome attentions from lily beetles, and our wild cowslip colony has multiplied superbly. More to the point, the grasses and flowers are already full of insect life.

Do we have a downside? Well of course, who doesnt? I'm still on one crutch, after my hip operation on 25th March, but can walk for a little while without any aids at all. I can walk behind a mower, therefore, can water things in the greenhouse and do the odd light job but it's still a bit of a bugger getting down onto the ground, and up again. And in a garden like ours, there's only one possible kind of weeding - down on your knees and by hand, or with a little hand fork.

It's going to take a long time, to get total control back. Or, will I ever get control. Do I want to have full control?

Nature is giving us exquisite pleasure this spring.
The swallows are zooming in and out of our garage, so we're hoping they'll nest in there again this year. If only there were more swallows. I sense that numbers are falling, year on year. As for cuckoos, I only heard two last year, from the garden. Another distressing population crash.

We've enjoyed a big hatch of Holly Blue butterflies, not to mention Orange Tips. I've seen the year's first Speckled Wood, too - female in exquisite condition and with perfect markings.

Also - my auriculas - all outdoor tough-guy varieties, are looking delicious and smelling extremely attractive! You've got to slog through a bit more text to see a piccy of one.

Erythronium 'White Beauty'

AND NOW, two rather pointless observations.

1. I'm only going to Chelsea on the Monday, purely as a guest. And even then, I'm going mainly for the lunch. No journalistic work, no RHS work that I know of, and no responsibilities. Lovely!

2. When discussing proposals for a new farm housing 2,500 breeding sows in Derbyshire, Lord Melchett informed me, via Radio 4, that I don't want large animal farms in Britain, but preferred smaller, traditional farms. He didn't name me personally, of course, but rather sweepingly said something along the lines of 'People in Britain' or 'The British people' don't want this kind of thing.

I HATE it when leaders of pressure groups make sweeping statements on behalf of 'the people' or the 'silent majority,' as if they had inside knowledge of what genuine, analysed public opinion on the subject may be.

They do it to buy credibility, of course, but it doesn't bloody work with me, and I'm part of 'the British people.'

May I point out that I welcome large, efficient farms, provided the animal welfare is of a standard high enough to guarantee happiness, security and comfort for all the livestock, and that working conditions for the staff are also comfortable, safe and bring fair rewards for the work. And provided the carbon footprint of such farms is smaller, per unit of production, than on more traditional ones.

I welcome the efficiency of such farms if they will help to produce good food at competitive prices. And since Britain is only about 65% self-sufficient in food, it makes sense to increase our productivity.

I also suspect that if a detailed analysis was made, of the 'British People,' the majority would be found to buy food largely on price, given minimal quality standards, provided the animal welfare is up to scratch. I'm not saying that is good or bad. I'm simply questioning sweeping statements about what the man on the Clapham omnibus really wants.

As a footnote, it's interesting that as living standards have fallen, a tad, sales of organic produce have slumped. That speaks volumes.

Primula auricula 'Eden Greenfinch.' The name doesn't seem apt, but this shot was taken several days ago. The flowers have now turned much greener.

I'm listening to The 'Good Friday' music, from Wagner's Parsifal. The incomparable Peter Hoffman, who sadly died last November, is singing.

This day in 1991, my diary says, the night temperature dropped close to 0ºC and damaged our fruit crop. I was reading Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.

This week's film was Christopher Nolan's Inception. I was told it would a riveting film with a complex and absorbing plot, superb effects and a brilliant story. What I dozed through - and I admit, I was only half awake for much of its inordinate length - was a pointless ramble through a 'Matrix-like' world with a McGuffin which, as far as I could be bothered to tell, turned out to be valueless. The acting was uninspired, as you'd expect with such awful material and the soundtrack, with relentlessly repeated, juddering musical bangs and phrases, was agony to endure. To some, perhaps, a great action film. To me, it was puerile crap. I was staggered to see that it won some Oscars. But then, so did Titanic!

Bye bye, and happy holidays!

OH FOR A BEAKER FULL OF THE WARM SOUTH!

2011-04-15T10:47:00.001+01:00

The minipond in our mini-woodland garden.

Well hullo my hearties, my beauties! I must kick off with the most profound apology.
Well, a double apology.

First, it's been three disgraceful weeks since I set so much as a tiny toe into the delectably warm, oozy, cuddly ocean of the blogosphere. It would be shamelessly egocentric to imagine that any of you were waiting with eager anticipation for my next offering of pointless drivel but self-deception can be comforting.

Secondly, I've been terrible at keeping up to date with everyone else's blogs. I've even been a recalcitrant and inconsistent twitterpater, so tweetie friends and fellow bloggees, please know that I still care and - well, you know . . .

The excuse, as some will know, is a recent hip replacement. I won't bore you with disgusting clinical details but want, briefly, to put a word in for our poor old, much maligned National Health Service.

About 30 years ago in palmy days, I had a hernia operation in a private hospital near here. The service was good, the food disgusting, the medical treatment and its after effects fine and everyone was happy.

Exactly 3 weeks ago, I became an inpatient at the NHS Peterborough City Hospital for four nights.

The hospital is new and sparkly. The polyglot ancillary staff were busy, competent and managed to keep the great machine running reasonably well. I quickly made friends with the people who took food orders, and then delivered plates of matter which bore not one jot of resemblance to the descriptions in the Hospital Trust's five star menu booklet. The servers were utterly charming and efficient; the food was institutional – Colditz-cum-Somme trench fare.

The medical staff, including His Nibs, my Royal Navy surgeon, his devastatingly attractive anaesthetist –who had the most artistically chaotic hair in the style of a young, sexy Eleanor Bron, if you can remember back that far - the duty physicians, nursing staff, physiotherapists and medical porters were, without exception, wonderful. They were kind, attentive, helpful, encouraging, comforting and at all times remarkably positive. I was better looked after than in that posh private hospital of thirty years ago, and much more solicitously looked after than when staying at the Doha Four Seasons.

I've travelled a very great deal, in my 67 years. I've lived in Kenya, as a child, in New South Wales, Upstate New York and even Norfolk. And visited, extensively, much of South East Asia, South Africa, Europe, Central America and the Caribbean, and a number of other spots. (I've even seen Komodo dragons on Komodo and the piled skulls of the Toraj people in Sulawesi.) And I can tell you that we are pretty damned lucky, here in Britain, to have what we have in the NHS.

I may have paid dearly through my taxes, for this service, but I'm glad to have it. Deeply, profoundly glad, and no less happy for my dosh to flow into government funds for health, than to some grubbing giant of an insurance company that squanders squillions on ritzy head offices.

Hobbling about with 1.5 legs and two crutches has a mass of disadvantages but several HUGE plus points. Being lame has reminded me to stop, stay still and contemplate.

The PG, who has been an absolute pillar of wonderfulness, blending kind support and help with stern reprimands every time I disobey the 'hip precaution' rules, drove me to a bluebell wood, on Wednesday and yesterday, to one of my favourite birding woods. In the former, because I can only walk short distance, I learnt to stand, stock still, and simply gawp at the ocean of violet-blue, the contrasting brown oak and grey ash trunks, the curious angles of fallen branches, the exquisite beauty of a sudden patch of primroses, or a twig with back-lit, green-gold baby leaves.

Yesterday, at Callans Lane wood, Lincolnshire, where one can see both willow tits and marsh tits, together, thereby solving their exasperating i/d differences on the spot, I had a sensory feast:
I'd remembered to put on my hearing aids and while standing stock still for about ten minutes, heard the distinctive songs of black caps, willow warblers, white throats, chiffchaffs, song thrush, blackbird, robin, dunnock and wren. A heavenly symphony, I thought, and although I longed for a nightingale - they do come to that wood - was more than happy with with such a rich, aural feast.

Back home, our tiny woodland garden has been sublime this spring and the mini-meadow is also limbering up for a great season. Oxlips in the wood have been shamelessly promiscuous with wild cowslips in the meadow, so we have some outrageous mongrels popping up all over. Do I exterminate these, to keep stocks pure? Have I the heart to? Probably not!

I beg you to forgive the paucity of piccies, in this post. I promise a feast of them next time.

Meanwhile, I beg you to imagine the bluebells, the wood anemones, our newly returned swallows and the bizarre sight of me, putting on my underpants with a long-handled litter picker. I have to be extremely careful that I grab cloth, with the thing, rather than flesh!

The title is a line from Keat's Ode to a Nightingale. You can read the rest here

I'm listening to El Bodeguero from a CD I bought directly from the band 'Maguey' when in Havana, Cuba. They performed in a bar called Las Minas and a man made cigars in the front, where one sat and drank mojitos.

This time 3 weeks ago, I was pretending not to be terrified, while being wheeled off to the operating theatre.

This month's films have been The Stieg Larsson Trilogy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc. A violent but compulsive trio with immaculate plotting, competent acting and a constant, wearing sense of menace. I think they're terrific.

Too many words again - please forgive,
Toodle ooh!

DOGSLIPS, RINGTAILS AND BELLS OF SODOM

2011-03-22T18:00:00.000Z

Just seen yesterday afternoon, flying over the fen. A beautiful, sleek, female Hen Harrier - well, a ring-tail bird, anyway. What a stirring sight. She must be heading north to breed. A first for us on this particular fen. We've had several Marsh Harriers. All we need now is a Montague's.

The PG's shot, today, of Tulipa fosteriana 'Madame LeFebre' aka 'Red Emperor' out in our garden.

Winter is done and for once, the weather has played the game and given us a delicious taster of spring. 'Simpsons' type clouds are scudding playfully across the azure firmament and with days now longer than nights, we can feel the sap rising and our little hearts going pit-a-pat with the crazy excitement of it all.

Sparrows are making a racket in our roof; there's a song thrush nesting in our shelter belt and we've seen several male brimstone butterflies desperately looking for love. The greenish white females are so fat and lazy, sitting around, barely bothering to fly, waiting for their hyperactive, sulphur-clad Lotharios. It's a wonder that species breeds at all.

The garden's full of joyous rapture - no wild thyme, but 'oxlips and the nodding violet' by the million. Some of my rare and special daffodils are emerging and in the mini-meadow, yellow rattle is germinating like cress.

All should be a transport of delight but I'm a bit cross and I'll tell you why.

On Sunday, the PG and I decided to celebrate the first day of spring with a walk in one of our favourite local nature reserves known as Thurlby Fen Slipe. (A slipe is the strip of land which borders the raised banks of a river.)

This little reserve, only about a kilometre long is extremely narrow and follows the course of the River Glen. Some interesting flora grow there but the slipe's most endearing feature are the tiny grass meadows which skirt the river and which are thickly carpeted with cowslips in spring and common spotted orchids in summer.

We heard the first chiffchaff of the year calling in one of the small spinneys, watched a single corn bunting trying to distance itself from a couple of closely related yellow hammers. Two stock doves were canoodling - a bird species for which I have a totally irrational soft spot. I think it's the exquisitely blended shades of slaty grey and the fact that you almost always see them in twos.

The cowslips at Thurlby Fen Slipe Nature Reserve shot by me a couple of years ago.

We didn't expect to find any cowslips in bloom - though there was a single precocious stem that had bucked the trend and opened early, a little taster of the glories to come. But we could see the rosettes of cowslip leaves, wrinkled and dead flat, keeping their toe-hold in the short turf.

Wanting to have a closer look at this part of the sward, and to see how many plant species i could spot, along with the cowslips, I dropped to my hands and knees and that's when it happened:

Suddenly, I was nose to turd. A massive coiled dogshite insultingly and damagingly dumped in the middle of the exquisite meadow flora. And once I was down on the ground - and with my hip being so useless, that in itself is something of a major operation - I realised that the whole place was a minefield. There was barely a couple metres between craps. I stood up in disgust and we moved on.

And the further we travelled, the more dog crap we saw. So instead of watching for marsh tits, or looking to see whether the willows were busy with hungry bumble bees, we found ourselves on a sort of turdicular treasure hunt. 'Look, two more by that tree, and another - watch out, it's right in the path.' etc. etc.

I love dogs. They're adorably filthy-minded animals with absolutely not one shred of pride, constantly ready to shag, if they're males, and eager to swear undying loyalty and friendship, until a rival offers them a titbit. A bit like blokes, really. But I hate irresponsible dog owners. The should be frog-marched back to the scene of crime and forced to clean up the mess.

I wonder if the owners of these dogs realise what damage this constant shelling of the natural ground with nitrogen-rich excrement actually does. In a vast land area, I don't suppose it matters that much. But in a little nature reserve like this, the harm is more significant. Enrichment feeds grasses at the expense of most broadleaved plant species, so every time a dog evacuates - and some, particularly Labradors seem to have more coming out than there is food going in! – the balance is skewed further in favour of grasses and nettles.

Cowslips smell a little like freesias, but its a fainter, gentler scent. If you analyse their beauty, it doesn't add up to much, but because they are the very essence of spring, you can't help but adore them.

On our way back we passed one of the perpetrators. He had no fewer than six dogs with him, not one on a lead - despite the notice on the Slipe entrance which states that dogs are to be on leads. In a moment, the mutts had spotted the PG and me and, despite his commands that they stay, they were all over us, jumping up, licking our hands and being generally rather sweet and soppy.

Coward that I am, I couldn't make myself remonstrate with this man. He had a slightly scary glint, and worrisomely cropped hair and stubble, like something out of a Dickensian prison. Part of me didn't want to spoil his and our afternoon with distinctly un springlike acrimony. But most of me was just plain chicken about causing a row and possible punch up, or being licked to death by his soppy dogs.

So we went home.

I'm listening to Benjamin Britten's Canticle 'Abraham and Isaac.'

This week's film was Jane Campion's Bright Star. I had looked forward to this story of Keats' relationship with his neighbour, Fanny Brawne, with feverish anticipation. Certainly a film worth seeing, if only for hearing fragments of Keats poetry so beautifully read, but I was disappointed and it's hard to nail down exactly why. The costumes - all 1820s 'Empire Line' stuff and big hats - were super and I loved the setting. I think the two main problems were the screenplay, which really didn't work, for me, and the casting. Keats (Ben Whishaw) just didn't do the poet for me. He seemed utterly wet, and I've always imagined Keats as being more gutsy, despite the tuberculosis. The story limped and I had to keep reminding myself that this was one of the greatest stories of thwarted love and tragic early demise in history. Oh Lord, how I do ramble, Sorry, sorry.

This time next week with luck, I'll have had my hip replaced and as a result, will be less grouchy. But don't bank on it!

Toodle ooh and happy Springtide!

ELEGY IN BLUE.

2011-03-11T17:27:00.004Z

You'll be deeply relieved, I suspect, when you discover that this post is to be light on words. I was going to rant a bit about various things but when this morning's news broke about the Japan earthquake, even the most pressing problems at home suddenly seemed so trivial as to be barely worth a second thought.

I can't imagine how awful it must be, when your little world - the solid ground at your feet - suddenly starts jiving and rocking like a 12ft dinghy in a swell. What do you hang onto when concrete is behaving like jelly and your personal space is suddenly filled with falling masonry.

I'm trying to imagine, too, what our local town's shopping street might be like, suddenly converted into a raging torrent of debris-filled water with ocean going vessels capsizing at the point where one normally catches the bus or nips into the pub for a pint of real ale.

We've had too many earthquakes, recently. Let's hope there won't be any more for a while.

Scilla bifolia with weeds in my woodland garden.

About 15 years ago, I was wandering up Mount Parnassos, in Greece, with Kew orchid expert and botanist Philip Cribb and a party of fellow enthusiasts. Phil was searching for wild orchids, but I was being bowled over by anything in flower. As we neared the summit, where the snow was receding, I gasped with excitement and awe at the sight of spring flowers popping up in the damp turf. They weren't even waiting for the snow to melt but were thrusting through the pristine, crystalline slush at the margin of the snow field. Crocus sieberi were the most obvious but the plants that won me over completely were Fritillaria graeca and Scilla bifolia.

The blue is as intense as that of Gentiana acaulis - not reproduced too well here.

The intense blue of scilla bifolia has to be seen to be beileved. They're shortlived and, frankly, not very gardenworthy, but for the few days that they are in bloom, they're an absolute joy. Back home, I quickly got hold of some bulbs and now have a thriving little colony.

Among my seedlings, this pale pink form showed up. I hope it multiplies.

Enjoy them - their beauty cannot be denied- but while you take in the blue, in my rather inadequate and rushed shots, please think of people who have suffered in recent natural disasters.

BY NO MEANS LIVERISH, NOR EVEN ICTERINE.

You may recall I mentioned hepaticas recently here. Well, I'm glad to report that the rather tatty pink job originally bought at an RHS London show, has spawned some pretty babies. Enjoy those too. Sorry the photos are substandard, but I did them just now, on the run, in wind and lousy light.

Hepatica triloba - tatty but still going strong after weeks in flower.

The colours all look similar, online, but I can assure you they are all quite different.

A clean, dark blue.

Soft cerise with darker veins

Best of the seedlings a mid blue suffused with white.

I'm listening to a Tchaikovsky Piano Sonata and not enjoying it very much.

This week's film was Tirez sur le Pianiste - translated as Shoot the Piano Player. Francois Truffaut getting dangerously close to awful 'New Wave,' but still a fine little film of just over 70 minutes. Charles Aznavour is so perfectly cast as Saroyan/Kohler, the timid little musician who screws up his life because of excruciating shyness, and who is also caught up in some dark, weirdly plotted gangsterish thuggery which is never really explained. Thankfully he doesn't sing much. Oh, sorry to offend Azanvour fans. Wonderful to see the magnificently nosed Albert Rémy who most people remember from The Train.

This day in 1992 I was writing my first novel, The Kirkland Acres and complaining about the bitter cold wind and sparrows ruining my pulmonarias, wisteria and clematis.

Hepatica transsylvanica. More petals, you will note.

Thanks for reading - byeee!

POISSON-FRITES EN PAPILLOTE,

2011-03-04T08:10:00.003Z

- I said I wouldn't be writing a post this week, because of an impending hip replacement, but that was before BLACK MONDAY.

This Monday - BLACK MONDAY - the seven of us who turned up, starved and apprehensive, at 6.45am at the Orthopaedic Ward of Peterborough City Hospital - shiny, new and extremely friendly - were invited to sit and wait while the staff clacked about on the new, immaculately clean floors trying to look efficient and cheerful, rather than the usual disillusioned and mildly confused NHS manner.

The day wore on a little. More staff came in and greeted each other, and us, smiled sweetly and went about their business. Then, a more authoritative staff member turned up and regretfully informed us that due to an excess of week-end admissions, they had no beds for any of us. Our operations were therefore cancelled and they'd contact us within 28 days. I guessed that we'd be dumped back at the bottom of the waiting list.

Narcissus bulbocodium: nothing to do with the text - just a spring piccy to cheer you up.

That was a kick in the goolies all right. If you've ever had surgery and if, like me, you're of a timorous disposition, the prospect of being hacked about and your bones sawn up by muttering, masked medics in strange green clothes, is just a little daunting.

In fact it's ever so slightly bloody terrifying. And if you've seen many episodes of ER or worse, House, you can't help but imagine the aforementioned medics chatting about their sex lives, or slagging off absent colleagues in a distracted way, seeming to have forgotten they're delving into someone's living brain or kidneys while they natter.

So it had been a somewhat sleepless, edgy night. Plus, I'd been forbidden ibuprofen for a week before, so it was also pretty dam' painful.

But enough moaning already! I was pleasantly surprised on BRIGHT WEDNESDAY by a courteous call from the Orthopaedic Big Cheese's secretary who mentioned a cancellation. I now have a date for surgery on 25th March. It's a Friday afternoon. I'm trying not to think about 'Friday Afternoon Cars!'

'Marconi' peppers. Sweet, aromatic, delicious but rather un-British. My Grandmother would not have approved.

NOW THEN! Ahem ahem!
I glanced at a page in Saturday's The Times Magazine which quoted Michelin star chef Daniel Clifford as having said:

'The days of crunchy vegetables are over. You want them cooked through so they can be cut with a fork.'

'Well EXCUSE ME!' I yelled, hurling down the magazine and profoundly startling both cats and the PG, 'but I'll cook my vegetables any way I damn well want. I do NOT need some lah-di-dah Cheffy-pants telling me how to live! SO THERE!

Overcooked vegetables are criminal, abominable, obscene, disgusting and dangerous. HOME GROWN vegetables overcooked are like murdered children.

This chef, I decided, must be too young to remember the terrible old British method with vegetables which went like this:
- Harvest when really old.
- Peel - regardless of whether peel tastes OK or is nutritious.
- Put in saucepan half full of salty water.
- Boil for two days before serving from a cold tureen to ensure that they are luke-warm as well as mushed.

My prep school Brussels sprouts, done like this, had the consistency of used tea bags and smelt like farts, as well as being flatulence-inducing. School cabbage was worse, and whiffs of mustard gas pervaded the chilly corridors for days on end after a cabbagey lunch. Turnips, which Mr Clifford appears to champion, were worst of the lot. They had the consistency of cricket balls as well as that repellent brassica pong.

And on top of all that culinary stench, there was what we nutritionists call the Gaseous Product of Digestion (GPD.) This issued loudly from the pupils and more discreetly, but just as devastatingly from the teachers.

In fact, if Kaiser Wilhelm had thought of deploying ranks of small prep school boys on all-brassica diets, instead of heavy artillery, the Great War might really have been over by Christmas 1914.

Truly British vegetables! But I wish my onions turned out like these beauties!

But I do Mr Clifford an injustice, and must ask his pardon.

I took his comment out of context. I assumed he was trying to suggest that the fashion for crunchy vegetables was over. But what he actually said, when I bothered to read the whole article, was that late winter vegetables need thorough cooking, when compared to baby spring and early summer ones. And anyone but a mug would agree with that. He cooks his in chicken stock and other goodies including butter. Mmmmm!

He also included a delicious-looking recipe for Root Vegetables en Papillote. But I noticed they were all baby ones - hard to come by in March, especially if you rely on home grown - and involved 300 grammes (about 11 ounces) of diced, smoked belly bacon. Is that supposed to be a healthy option?

We had something even healthier last night: fish and chips, or, as they might say over the Channel, Poisson et frites en papillote. Well, chips are vegetables, aren't they? And there can't be that much difference between cooking lah-di-dah root veg in a paper thingy and wrapping up a chippy supper in EU & 'Elf and Safety-approved non-newspaper paper.

Luckily, our local chippy is quite the best I've ever frequented. Their fish is the freshest, their chips are lovely and the staff are utterly charming as well. Plus Thursday nights have a 'Pensioners' Special' price. I think a little Chablis was justified, to help the banquet down, don't you?

I'm listening to Schubert's Quartet Number 14 'Death and the Maiden.'

This day in 2008 I was in Malaysia, in the Taman Negara, nature-watching.

This week's film was Shutter Island directed by Scorsese and starring Leonardo di Caprio. Not a great film, and with a predictable outcome, though a nice little denouement. Di Caprio can certainly act, as can co-star Ben Kingsley. Though the latter has been more glitterily scary in other things. Sexy Beast, for example.

Bye bye, and don't forget to eat more home grown vegetables!

THEY'RE PLANTING ME IN A RAISED BED

2011-02-23T17:52:00.002Z

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!

TO EVERYONE'S SURPRISE, THE EWE GAVE BIRTH TO A HUMAN BABY.

2011-02-15T12:20:00.002Z

Sorry - there's virtually no gardening in this post. More, I promise, next time. Meanwhile, the Muscari azureum seeds that I scattered two years ago are coming into flower. Huzzah! But now, down to business. . .

Oilseed rape growing on the fens near my village. Heavy inputs of nitrogen fertiliser and pesticides are needed to produce good crops, but it is highly productive. A well grown rape crop can produce nearly 1.5 tonnes of vegetable oil per hectare.

Back to that ewe. . .

It was a little girl.

I know! I could hardly believe it either but I was listening to BBC Radio 4's Farming Today when, to my astonishment, a woman shepherd (she sounded too bossy to be a shepherdess) announced, amid much grunting and other agricultural sound effects, that the ewe – I believe it was a Norfolk Horn – had just 'had a little girl.'

Now I know Norfolk has a reputation for, shall we say, eccentric couplings but even the simplest grasp of biology will tell you that when sexual liaisons between genera occasionally happen, however satisfactory the consummation might be to the participants, no progeny can result. The DNAs wouldn't mesh.

And then it dawned on me that this was not a fleshly abomination at all. It was worse! This was an example of anthropomorphism – a fashionable tendency which I find extremely worrying.

If you call a lamb a lamb, nasty minds like mine turn quickly from cuddly little woolies, gambolling in daffodil-strewn paddocks, to thoughts of Barnsley chops, Lancashire hotpot, Kleftiko or mutton Shashlik. And if I were a livestock farmer – which I once was – I'd be totting up potential profits on the carcasses and wondering how I could maximise them.

But if you call a lamb a 'little girl,' that gives a skewed picture. It gets you closer to cuddly toys or to characters like Larry the Lamb – bet none of you remembers him! – or to LambChop. Nice, comforting imagery? Certainly! But it's removed from the reality of livestock farming. And the more removed consumers are, from the truth about origins of their food, the more unrealistic the whole thing becomes. Or is that balderdash?

Anyway, if you could just keep the foregoing rubbish at the back of your mind, while I bombard you with a couple more thoughts, I'd be deeply grateful.

Some thoughts:

1. According to the United Nations, world food production needs to double by 2050, if everyone is to be fed. It's here.

Achieving high yields already consumes profligate levels of resources, many of them irreplaceable. Doubling production will have to be achieved, therefore, not with the same resources, but with fewer. Have a look at this New York Times piece which outlines the need to change production methods.

Traditional vegetable gardening can be incredibly efficient as a means of raising food. As gardeners, we can care for our environment, enhance biodiversity and can be highly productive. Food gardens, to me, have greater beauty than the over-topiarised pretentiousness of some 'great' gardens.

2. If we are to feed the 9 billion – expected population in 2050 – we need to box clever. A lot cleverer, I suggest, than we've done so far. There isn't the luxury available, of fostering bat-brained ideas based on emotion or worse, inaccurate pseudo-science. We've got to learn how to have two birds in the hand while leaving another two constantly in the bush.

3. Environmental damage, as witnessed in the past half century cannot be repeated. It is obscene and intolerable. Such reckless destruction is also dangerous to the whole of humanity and is therefore stupid. Yet we persist. Can't stop. Have to carry on wrecking.

Answers to our most desperate needs could be out there, in the wild. But if the loss of biodiversity continues at its current rate, there'll be nothing left. Then what? Will we live in a degraded earth, continually hammered by destructive climates, cowed by political instability and enduring constant, nagging wars over resources.

4. The power fulcrum is shifting eastwards. The world's second largest economy, China – and with it, the rest of Asia – will be calling the big shots pretty soon. And if the populations of India and China want the levels of self-indulgence we enjoy in Europe and the United States, where will the resources come from?

Virgin rainforest was removed to plant tea, in the Cameron Highlands region of Malaysia. Can production of such commodities be increased without further destruction of rich, natural resources?

Meanwhile, here in Britain we are about 65% self-sufficient in food. But with predicted population growth, that will drop to about 50%. We should be aiming higher.

Livestock production, butchery and our Western diets have become difficult and emotive subjects. In the face of dwindling resources and changing values, many of us are increasingly troubled about what we eat, and how much. But it is also becoming clear, that we must be ready to embrace technological advances that will benefit productivity, provided safeguards such as animal welfare are firmly in place.

After the traumatising experience of BSE, and subsequent food scares, consumers have become suspicious of anything new. That has to change: not the suspicion - that's healthy - but the willingness to keep an open and curious mind, rather than following the mob.

Genetically modified crops were roundly - and in my view, unwisely - condemned. The chorus of disapproval, led by Prince Charles and orchestrated by the Soil Association has been deeply destructive, closing people's minds to reasoned argument and shutting doors not only to efficient food production, but to a vast range of potential benefits including better wildlife conservation, reduced dependency on fertilisers and chemical-free plant health.

In a challenging future, I think we must be ready to look judiciously at all new technologies. And we should embrace any that will help to fill bellies without causing collateral damage.

Tapioca, manioc, cassava, Manihot esculenta - call it what you will, the roots are a source of dietary starch and the plants can grow in cereal-hostile conditions, even rainforest. Therefore a valuable world feeder with huge potential, even though we Brits remember it mainly for the gloopy 'frogspawn' milk puddings. It'll be better still if the toxins can be bred out of the sap. (This is a curious red-stemmed variety I photographed on the island of Sulawesi.)

I'm listening to Haydn's The Creation or rather Die Schöpfung. Neville Marriner is conducting.

This week's film was Bunny Lake is Missing. A British thriller, directed by Otto Preminger, screenplay by John and Penelope Mortimer, starring Larry Olivier, for once rather under-playing his role as an educated policeman. (You could tell he was educated 'cos he wore a Cambridge University tie all the time.) For all those big names, it's a bit of a disappointment for two reasons: first, the long suspense scene at the climax is milked so dry that one is beginning to yawn before the denouement arrives. But the big reason is that it's one of the few British films of its day without an appearance by Sam Kydd. We felt bereaved, having scoured every frame for him.

This day, roughly, in 1956 I was in the worlds coldest and most inhospitable spot – the corridor between classrooms at my Norfolk prep school. Icicles developed on the insides of the windows. The Suez Crisis and Budapest Uprising were to follow that year.

Bye bye

THE CAT CRAPPED ON MY SCHWEFELGLANZ

2011-02-07T15:05:00.003Z

Hullooo! Huzzah!!! And how lovely to be alive, in this force 9 gale, watching all my late winter pretties being lashed to pieces. Lovely!

Crocus imperati 'de Jaeger' - first bulb to bloom this year, beating even the first snowdrops.

I promised to deliver a serious rant, this week, about - well, you'll remember this 'teaser' from my last post.
'. . . here's a vision of 2050:-
Nine billion people, a crashing climate, new top dog superpowers replacing the old top dog superpowers and a looming resources crisis. Food for thought? And probably not for eating.'

But I'm afraid you'll have to wait another week. Playing on Twitter has neutralised too much of my bile, for some strange reason, and I've come over all benign. And it's sunny, even though the gale is howling, and things at last are beginning to look really pretty, in the garden, so I'll save the food controversy for next time

So for or now, let's begin with some really, really bad things.
1. Mubarak's hair dye.
2. England's post-ashes cricket.
3. The return of Just a Minute on Radio 4. In its early days, around the time that Oliver Cromwell died, this was an amusing programme with some jolly contributors. But now, like a number of shows I could mention, it has had it's day and should be kindly but quickly euthanised. In fact I wish it would, like Fred Chopin's awful 'Minute Waltz,' fade away - but for good.

This is an important issue because Radio 4 is a precious remnant of the once wonderful BBC. Since virtually all network television is unwatchable, Radio 4 is almost all that remains for anyone who likes to think, judge, consider and generally to cogitate about things. Radio 4 also has some of the best comedy and drama - Saturday's dramatisation ofChandler's The Big Sleep was done deliciously and I had my tranny radio tied to my waist while I gardened. (OK, so it's sad, but I couldn't stop listening.)

Cyclamen coum - toughest little brutes in the garden

When I take over, as Commissar of Radio Four, there'll be quite a few sacred cattle for the chop. Woman's Hour will only be allowed to remain if equal time is given for Man's Hour. And on Man's Hour it will be perfectly acceptable to discuss intimate 'man' things like cars, football, real ale and husband bashing, not to mention cringy stuff like circumcision and bicycle saddle design. (If they can do cringy on Woman's Hour - and boy do they ever! – we blokes should be allowed it, too.)

You and Yours will be cut to five minutes and broadcast at 5.40am. Intense, boring documentaries on current affairs will be banned between Saturday midday and 6am on Mondays. The Material World, Costing the Earth, Home Planet, Farming Today, From Our Own Correspondent and 'In Our Time' will be protected by a PPO - Programme Preservation Order' - just like hallowed trees, so that no future, power-mad, ratings-chasing, celeb-crazed Controller could kill them off.

All programmes that have 'phone in' sections will be banned forthwith.

Oh, and Gardeners Question Time will also go. It was fine in its day, just after the war, but not now. For incurable addicts, they could re-run programmes from 1960 to 1965, since the same questions are asked every year. Either that, or let there be proper gloves-off punch-ups on the best way to zap vine weevils and prune wisterias, and no more of this pussy-footing mutual politeness.

In place of GQT there'll be 30 minutes a week of Gardening Actualité - that is to say, a mic dangled near or attached to someone actually gardening. NO CELEBRITY GARDENERS - corduroyed or otherwise - would be allowed near the programme, neither would those who dye their hair, Mr T (see Bad Thing Number 1.) Indeed, gardeners selected for microphone attachment will be just ordinary blokes down our allotments. And the programme will go out live, so swearing, farting, grunting and tool breaking would be part of the show.

4. Some berk has paid several hundred quid for a blasted snowdrop. But it was a poculiform one, so that's ok then. Read about it here and here.

5. The woman who lives virtually next door to me has had a dense and beautifully screening shelter belt hacked into a number of hideous, naked trunks. I can now see into our neighbour's (not the tree hacker's) conservatory - can even see what magazines they're reading. And as I realised, while standing naked at the window, scratching those parts of me that in polite society are best left unmolested, the neighours can see straight into our bedroom. The shelter belt was of Prunus cerasifera with some laurel, sycamore and other odd shrubs and trees. It was never profoundly pretty, except when in full blossom, but folk would pick the cherry plums, in summer and the whole lot gave of its greenness. Any living vegetation is better to look at than no vegetation. A flock of long-tailed tits foraged in it every day. Now it's ugly, barren and bare and the tits are gone. I don't know why she had it cut down. Perhaps she resented others eating the cherry plums; perhaps she has an obsession with tidiness and the innate hatred of trees that seems to be common in Lincolnshire.

5. Er, that's it for bad things. We'll pass on Cameron and multiculturalism, fire and flood in Australia, the disgusting parade of obscene peep shows on Channel 4 and the fact that the blasted cats have shat on my most precious winter aconite, Eranthis hyemale '

And now for the good things:
1. Our darling little Cyclamen coum are rushing into flower. The one on the picture isn't mine. Mine are more wind-mangled and sparse, but it's the same thing. This is the toughest little cyclamen in cultivation and seems to put up with a wide range of conditions from partial shade to baking sun. It is happy in our rough grass, as well as in the chilly, east facing border in our front garden - made more chilly still by the tree feller.

Hepatica nobilis in flower - this one exhibited by Ashwood Nurseries.

2. The hepaticas are coming. Someone tweeted me, this morning, asking what they were, so here's a piccy. These weren't photographed in my garden. Ours are being blown in the hurricane, at present, so I've pulled this pic from our libray. It was shot, like the Cyclamen, by the PG. (I did the crocus at the top.)

3. We've confirmed our booking for Berlin, in September. We're going to the entire Das Ring Des Nibelungen and it's booked. Huzzah - or should I say Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!

4. Our Grimsby Fish Van can supply un-dyed kippers on the bone. Mmmmm! If you soak the kipper in very hot water for ten minutes, and then cook it sealed, in a microwave, the saltiness is reduced and the flavour is as good as I've ever tasted. Plus, the house doesn't stink of smoked herring for a week afterwards.

This week's film was Lagaan - starring Aamir Khan and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker – a Bollywood classic, set in the 1850s, about British colonialism in India. To avoid paying an unjust tithe or 'Lagaan,' the locals are given the option of a three day cricket match. If the Indian side wins, the tax will be waived but if it loses, the tax will be trebled. A gripping tale beautifully told.

I'm listening to the builders hammering. Work has begun on repairs to our house after the fire before Christmas. We have no wall on part of the house and the door to the guest room is nailed up. The only way into that room is by climbing the scaffolding.

This day in 2007 I went to Stamford for a haircut and walked on the Thurlby Slipe Nature reserve at dusk, watching barn owls hunting.

If you're read this far, you're an absolute saint and I love you - unless you delight in wanton tree felling. Oh, that' reminds me. I've just read Roger Deakin's superb book Wildwood. Anyone who loves nature and has a slightly pervy lust for wood should read this book What an irony that I was reading it when the trees opposite were being mutilated. Ah me!!!

WHAT WOOD YOU DO?

2011-01-25T14:26:00.000Z

Good Morrow, good folk! 'What news, what news in this our tottering state?'

I was going to post something anodyne about the signs of spring, and the starlings which are doing imitations of swifts, on our chimney. One even mimics the 'beep-beep' of the reversing garbage truck - quite a repertoire.

But there's too much momentous stuff going on in the real world and I need to do a double rant. And it's a couple of big ones, too. But I think we can only stand one per week, don't you? So here's the first:

Anemone nemorosa growing in ancient woodland near where I live.
(I've made the pictures bigger than the template allows but they look nice big
I must, must, must re-design this blasted blog. It's horrible like this.)

Newspapers, blogs, Twittings and TV are full of sound and fury about the Coalition’s plan to sell off our publicly owned woodland. I don't know how you feel about that, but it strikes me as pretty pointless because no one stands to gain much. The Exchequer gets a tuppeny-ha'penny payment, barely glint in the bottom of the dark, empty coffer. Purchasers will end up with assets of dubious financial value, unless they are changed, exploited and possibly wrecked. And above all we, the voters, the punters, the poor sods who have to put up with flaky governance and who have to finance the bank-buggered deficit with our hard-earned, risk losing a substantial and cherished chunk of our natural heritage.

Whichever way you look at it, it's likely to be a lousy deal with all sorts of nasty little trade-offs.

UNLESS – and it's a big UNLESS – there are safeguards of such cast-iron strength, that the woodlands' new owners make a better fist of managing them than the Forestry Commission has. Indeed, it's an opportunity to change priorities on much of our woodland, and put biodiversity, conservation and accessibility at the top of the priority list.

I have no particular affection for the Forestry Commission. Bad planting between the wars, and up to the 1980s has compromised diversity in much of our woodland and, when you compare ours with those of France, it becomes clear that we get a raw deal in terms of accessibility.

The Bluebells, Hyacinthoides nonscripta, in Bourne Woods. My father, my grandparents and great grandparents all gathered the flowers here each May, cycling over from Spalding on Sundays. It was acceptable, in past generations, to gather wildflowers, just as it was to go birds nesting, and to collect Lepidoptera.

We're remarkably lucky, in my area. We have large patches of ancient woodland, some Forestry Commission, some private. Accessibility should be greater in the private woodlands than it is, but the Forestry land is well pathed - if there is such a verb - and greatly enjoyed by the local community. Naturalists, cyclists, dog walkers - wish they'd keep their beasts on leads during nesting time - and others enjoy the woods greatly, particularly in spring.

I would think that the wildlife and amenity value of much of our woodland outweighs the commercial value of the timber, so the Forestry Commission could be more sympathetic in the way it harvests its crops. But they have got a lot better in recent years.

And what would new owners do? Developers would love to get their hands on the fringes of Bourne Woods, and I know the council has beady eyes on its eastern edge for building a byepass. Bye Bye bluebells; hello doggers and cruisers? White admiral butterflies and nightingales? Gone, and who cares? Few knew they were there and anyway, there's room for an ASDA, now, on that wasteland. Hurrah!

If you want to sign a petition, to prevent selling the woods off, here's a link. And here's another.

Otherwise, I'd just like to say why I love our local woods - and woods in general - so much.

Bluebells and Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea. You couldn't plant better.

I love the woods because. . .
Nature seems instantly accessible in them. When you walk into a wood – especially if you do so alone – the change in habitat is arresting, at first, but after a moment of adjustment, becomes welcoming and soothing. Sounds of the outside world are softened, and a normal spoken voice within the wood might jar, unless you hush up a little and begin to listen.

Wind sighs, in the branches but at ground level, the calm airs are rich with a cocktail of smells that might contain leafmould, fox, primrose flowers, oak tannin, bluebells, sweet violets, oxlips, sweet woodruff Galium odoratum, or honeysuckle. In damp woods, there’s the balsam whiff of emerging willow leaves; in dry ones, the rankness of herb Robert, Geranium robertianum. Garlic woods smell like a French kitchen in May and in October, fungal decay makes the air musty.

Primroses, celandines, anemones, bluebells, moss and birdsong.

A woodland picnic, a deux, is a joyous event. If you sit still, in the same spot for half an hour, the less obvious things begin to appear. Coal tits, marsh tits, willow tits and with luck, a goldcrest or two might entertain you with their acrobatics while they forage for tiny invertebrates. In spring, the cuckoo repeats too much but the falling cadences of willow warblers, and sweetest songs of blackcaps make up for that. If you're lucky, a nightingale might pipe up, drowning everything else.

A bank of wild garlic in Elsea Wood, Lincolnshire

You can gather free food in some woods. Bear garlic, Allium ursinum has fine flavour but you use the fresh leaves, rather than the bulb. Our woodland edges are hung with blackberries ever autumn, there are hazel nuts if you can beat the squirrels to them and for the brave - or foolhardy - there are plenty of toadstools, both edible and extremely poisonous.

In wildest days of October or March, you can find sheltered walking, among the trees. The wind howls and hisses over the top but your hair is hardly ruffled, as you stroll. The dried, dead grass stems, in winter, look as lovely as the bare trees and lighten up the scenery with pale buff and dun. And if it snows, you can walk through a photographic negative, with dazzling ground, looking lighter than the leaden winter sky.

Woods are full of suprises, too. I discovered small teasel Dipsacus pilosus locally - a rare plant I'd never seen in these parts. I know too, where deadly nightshade grows, though busybody idiots try to uproot all the plants because they're so poisonous. Would they plough in the foxgloves, too?

So those are a few reasons why I care so much about our lovely woods.

A foxglove explosion, in pinewoods in North Norfolk. Digitalis purpurea does this sometimes.

Next week, we'll do food.
Meanwhile, here's a vision of 2050:-
Nine billion people, a crashing climate, new top dog superpowers replacing the old top dog superpowers and a looming resources crisis. Food for thought? And probably not for eating.

I'm listening to the prelude to Wagner's music drama Lohengrin.

And I think I've said more than enough!

If you've read this far, you should be sainted and granted three huge wishes.
Byeeee!