THE LOCOG DEVELOPED A FLAT TYRE

What ho, my lovelies!  

First a little ironic symbolism... (CAUTION - the first paragraph contains rude bits.)

This dragon thing guards the entrance to the City of London – a small, but rather wealthy village which makes up part of our capital. Note the open claws, for grabbing money; the inefficient little wings – for flapping, rather than soaring; the slathering tongue, always wanting more; and those genitals, so out of proportion to the rest of the creature's body. No surprise then, that when you've been shafted by the City, it really, really hurts.  


The City of London's motto is Domine dirige nos - 'Oh Lord, guide us' – but that doesn't seem to have happened for a very, very long time.  Or if it has, they haven't listened.


FIRST OF THE MID-SPRING BEAUTIES.
Michael McCarthy, in yesterday's Independent Newspaper discussed the seasons and how they can be subdivided. 'The first Orange Tips are out now,' he writes.  And they are. Yesterday, I spotted our first  for 2012.  It was a male – the female lacks the tangerine wing tips -– and was cruising the ditch below the hedge which lines part of our fenland lane.  It was probably wondering where the vegetation had gone.  The flail mowers worked overtime last winter, not only thrashing the hedges into lifeless stumps, but also sweeping along the ditch banks, shaving away the carpet of sweet violets, meadowsweet, celandines, hedge garlic, cuckoo flowers and grasses which all had helped to hold the steep sides together and which supported a rich biodiversity.

No doubt, dozens of Orange Tip chrysalids were killed, in the cauterising triple chop, so I suppose we should rejoice that there are at least some survivors.  And it's likely that the resilient dyke-side flora will recover - but when?  Meanwhile, where will the female orange tips lay their eggs?

Such thoughtless actions encourage me to work even harder at providing more refuge within our own boundaries.  And as long as creatures are being extirpated, albeit inadvertently by well-meaning but ignorant landowners and local authorities, it behoves us gardeners to make our ground more life-rich.  Obsessive tidiness seems to be as damaging, almost, as intensive cultivation.

Erythronium californicum 'White Beauty'     (CLICK ANY PIX TO ENLARGE.

SYLVAN SEASON.  

The soil in our tiny woodland garden is improving year by year and like wild woods, in April, it's looking extremely pretty just now.  For the third winter, I've refrained from raking off fallen leaves, allowing them to rot ever so slowly into the loam, making it leafier and moister. Signs of success include thriving trilliums and Cyclamen repandum – always a swinish species to establish – and busy dunnocks, wrens, robins  and blackbirds, going for invertebrate life among the decaying vegetation.
Our wood anemones are loving it; gathered bluebell seed, scattered three and four years ago, is producing the first few flowers and the true oxlips, Primula elatior, have gone berserk, hybridising with anything primulaic.  But this year's star, so far, is Erythronium californicum 'White Beauty.'  Lilies in miniature, and all the more enchanting for the beautifully marked foliage.

4. Fritillaria montana - I think - which bloomed in our shingle bank.  This it was supplied to me as F. thessala which it isn't.  Indeed, I'm not sure that name is valid.  It's not in the latest RHS Plantfinder but I suspect the correct name, for that green and brown-flowered species would be  F. graeca subspecies thessala.


IT'S A FAIR COPPICE!
When bashing about in my mini-wood, clearing away unwanted elder seedlings and thinning a thicket, I discovered three  ash seedlings.  Each is about 6 ft high, single stemmed and I'm pondering the notion that these should be allowed to stay and, in the unlikely event that I live for long enough, would be regularly coppiced.

We burn an awful lot of fire wood and ash makes some of the best.  It staggers me, that while country folk all over Britain are installing wood burning stoves – heating oil being suitable only for the wealthy or the spectacularly insulated – farmers, or anyone who owns more than half an acre of land, are not planting ash for coppicing.  Perhaps the megalithic DEFRA should make compulsory coppicing, for fuel, part of a payback plan for the generous subsidies we taxpayers hand over to Britain's farmers.

There's a lead time of at least 10 years, from planting, and initial wood yields are low. But if you look further ahead, it makes perfect sense to set aside small parcels of land for coppicing.  Every ninth year, strong, clean ash limbs would make superb logs and the places where these trees grew would become interesting habitats.


CHELSEA TRACTORS, TWATTICLES AND SUVS.
It was abandoned, rather than parked, in the car park of a certain mainline station. The wheels overlapped the demarkation lines on both sides, so the driver had managed to take up three parking spaces with a single vehicle. At £13 per vehicle per day, I reckoned he or she owed the railway company the best part of £39.

Whenever I see a large four-wheel drive vehicle, I feel a surge of anger welling up. My reactions are excessive but there's something about the smug, planet-wrecking arrogance of these things that get my goat. And the bigger they are, the hotter my ire.

And this one was a monster.  I've no idea what make it was, but the cheap-looking badge on the front suggested, for some reason, Detroit.  Every line made it ugly and it was obvious that a heap like this would be awkward to manoeuvre, sluggish and probably uncomfortable or worse, so soft-sprung that you'd be rocked to sleep at the wheel after twenty miles or a couple of gallons of juice.

These things are sometimes called Chelsea Tractors. Secretly, I've always called them – and those awful cowboy pick-up trucks – 'Twatticles' ie, vehicles for twats.  But the rhythm and imagery in the word is all wrong.  The 'icles' suggests something small, or anatomical, so I'm trying to develop a more fitting term.  I need something that suggests excessive, budget-busting waste; something grossly over-priced, over-hyped, completely pointless and a huge nuisance to those who are not involved and do not want to be.  And I've come up with a winner:  THE LOCOG.

Chionodoxa forbesii 'Pink Giant' earlier this spring, in my gravel.

I'm listening to  The PG, cutting up fruit and carrots for lunch.  We are determined to become more sylph-like.

This time last year, 16 days after my hip replacement operation, I managed, with much help from the PG, to limp on crutches, round part of one of Lincolnshire's best patches of ancient woodland. The bluebells, says my diary, looked absolutely enchanting. We also watched longtailed tits gathering moss for nesting material.

This week's film was Fritz Lang's Der tiger von Eschnapur.  Made, or more accurately, re-made in 1959, this is an unremarkable story shot remarkably.  Lang disliked wide screen photography and one of the visual strengths of this film lies in its being 'full screen,' ie, nearly square, but with spectacular depth. This is especially telling in the many shots which are made from considerable height, looking down, or looking up.  But the story is pretty facile, Boys' Own stuff - potentate falls for beautiful dancer, but so does the handsome western architect. Potentate gets into a cold, jealous fury and commits wicked acts.  Doomed lovers run off into the desert.  The end.

But there's a sequel.   Bye Bye for nowI

CLOPRIDIC BEES AND TOOTHPASTE BREAD

Good morrow all! And apologies for the huge interval since the last post. I trust you have enjoyed the unnatural, unseasonal but intensely pleasant faux summer.

'I think I'd be more comfortable and pull a less lugubrious face if someone would kindly remove the old fashioned terry nappy.'  A Malayan tapir Tapirus indicus, at London Zoo.  The Zoological Society of London has ongoing conservation projects in more than 50 countries, worldwide.
As usual, the pictures have nothing to do with the text, on this post. We just visited London Zoo, recently, with our daughters and grandchildren.   Click on pix for a larger view.

Three thought-provoking things in the last couple of days.

1. I'm increasingly worried about rare breeds.  
Not long ago the PG purchased, from a farmers' market stall, what looked like an excellent piece of rump steak.  It was dark, correctly matured and begged to be lightly seared in our cast iron, ribbed griddle and eaten with salad and really thin, rattly chips.  But the meat turned out to have the consistency of shoe leather and lacked what I call a proper steak flavour.

The steak came from a Longhorn, I believe, and was sold at a substantial premium because of being a rare breed.

In my experience, the finest steaks on earth, to this day, come from grass-fed, preferably Scottish raised Aberdeen Angus - until recently, the Western World's most popular beef breed.

And this morning, on BBC Radio 4's  Farming Today  I listened to a posh Chef from somewhere or other, saying that Middle White pigs provided superior pork because there was so much fat, and it had so much flavour.  Now in this age of health-obsession, where doctors blench and reach for defibrillator if you so much as hint that you might eat meat more than once a month – and only then, if there's an 'R' in it – isn't an excess of animal fat in cooking a very bad thing?

And didn't rare breeds become rare because they were superseded by better ones, in which geneticists have invested almost a century of careful selection to come up with animals which gain the right sort of weight - ie, more muscle than fat - in the most efficient manner possible?

Modern, well farmed pork is spectacularly lean.  Back-fat, on modern bacon, is about a centimetre thick, these days, which is healthier than the old fashioned couple of inches – if you dare eat bacon at all, because the Health Police want it made illegal, owing to the toxic preservatives and the fact that eating cured or salted meat is as self-destructive as jumping off Tower Bridge and seeing how far you can fly, by flapping your bare arms, before hitting the Thames and being swept off to Southend in the tidal rip.

Is it possible that rare breed meat is just a tad over-hyped? It's great for fanciers and hobby farmers to preserve and sustain such breeds. Those treasured and cosseted gene pools could have great future value, and I'm enormously in favour of that kind of conservation. Indeed, if taxpayers money must be squandered on farming subsidies, I'd prefer rare breed conservers to get the dosh, than pampered arable grain barons.

But whenever I eat a piece of topside, rasher of properly cured bacon, or a rack of lamb, I'd rather take what my butcher currently offers – meat acquired from local commercial farmers who make wise use of the remarkable progress made in animal breeding.

Tulipa 'Hearts Delight,' a kaufmanniana or 'Waterlily' type of surpassing charm.  This one is flowering outside our back door.

2. The GM debate is opening again this year
 Rothamsted Agricultural Research Station is conducting a trial with wheat, genetically modified with material from the peppermint plant.  Pheromones from the modified wheat not only repel sap-sucking insects, but attract their predators.

If the trial is successful, it could lead the way to a new wave of cereal varieties which can match the yields of current high performers, but without the need for costly and potentially contaminating pesticides.

No doubt the arguments will polarise, with the anti-crowd campaigning to continue the ban on GM, and the 'science lobby' – whatever that may be – claiming that the only way to feed the world is with full-on, intensive, science-based agriculture.

But the world is closer to a crisis point than many of us care to believe.  Nations like China and India, with burgeoning economies – tomorrow's superpowers – seem to be adopting unsustainable 'Western' lifestyles.  Demands for cereals and meat continue to grow and, under current technology, it is not possible to continue the required growth in yields.

Modern, intensive agriculture is oil-based and there aren't the resources left, to achieve the growth targets as set out by UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.  (If you want to take this seriously, have a look at this PDF )

So we have to find other ways in which to increase yields.  Organic production cannot be dismissed. But it does not, in its current form, appear able to produce the yield growth needed.  Indeed, if the world were to go all organic tomorrow, yields would plummet and commodity shortages would be catastrophic.  (You might say that serves Mankind right, but it's a bit difficult to think that way, when you see footage of children dying of thirst or starvation.)

If modifying genes could result in crops which can deliver high yields, without needing unsustainable inputs, would that not be an extremely good thing?  Should we not, therefore, follow this trial's progress  with interest, or at least, with open minds?

There was a time when Westminster City Council produced some of the finest bedding displays on earth.  But this one, in the Embankment Gardens just below the National Liberal Club, shows how low they have sunk.  And whose idea was it, not just to use heucheras, but with those tulips?  I blame Maggie.  It was her government which dumped parks' in-house nurseries and enforced competitive tenders by contractors.  You get what you pay for.

3.  Bees, synthetic nicotinoids and motivation.

Finally – and heaven bless you, if you've come this far – Channel Four News interviewed a British research team, recently, who have identified a stronger link between use of neo-nicotinoids, such as found in Provado, and bee behaviour.  

Species of bumblebee appear to lose their sense of direction and are unable to forage effectively when subjected to low levels of imidacloprid.  The research continues.

French work on honeybees and another neo-nicotinoiod, thiamethoxam, also points to a possible link with Colony Collapse Disorder, where worker bees lose the ability to navigate and, put crudely, just slope off, thereby cutting of the food supply.

Neither team have proven, conclusively, that the pesticides are responsible for the decline in bee populations but it's a pretty strong indicator.  

There are plenty of other causes of bumble bee decline, such as habitat loss and climate change.  BUT, after seeing a summary of Dr. Whitehorn's findings so far, I'm restricting Provado to my greenhouse from now on.  Shame about the beetles which will devour my lily plants, but I'd rather have the bees.

Narcissus 'Rapture' - one of the best of the Cyclamineus hybrids and loving life in my garden.

I'm listening to Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, obviously!

This week's film was Francois Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups.  This is 'Nouvelle Vague' when it was still nouvelle and exciting.  A film with a strong story element, following the tribulations of a boy whose parents dislike him.

This day next week, I'll be at a concert performance of Wagner's Parsifal, in Birmingham.  Can't wait.  The tunes are so catchy, the story so amazingly fast-moving and the leading lady such a peach!  (Not) Do you think Wagnerians are closet masochists?  Now, where's that self-operated bastinado?

And I think that's more than enough for you to cope with.

DOUBLE BUMROSES

And the top of the world to you and yours!  Saint Pat's is past and spring is almost here.  Calloo callay!!

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

Why do plant breeders try so hard to turn natural beauty into abomination?  

 Primula vulgaris – a naturally occurring, pale form of our wild primrose, but not truly albino.  It seeds true and, though an aberration, is cherished in my micro-woodland garden.  (Click on pix for bigger view)

I have great respect for plant breeders – one or two of them are even good friends – and what they have achieved, over the last couple of centuries is, mighty impressive. We have a staggering excess of garden plant varieties. Too many?  Well, if 90% of all rose and hosta cultivars were eradicated tomorrow, there'd still be a gross surplus of both. But the surfeit of varieties results from competition coupled with a long breeding history. And anyway, it's better, don't you think, to have too many to choose from, rather than too few?

So, breeders have given – sorry, sold – us a huge and valuable legacy of superb garden plants. Frequently, a garden cultivar is more beautiful, more dependable, less variable and better behaved than its wild forebear. We have breeders to thank for that.

But breeders have also perpetrated genetic atrocities: petunias which look like black holes, in clammy sub-fusc foliage; evergreens such as Photinia davidiana 'Palette' whose young leaves resemble haemorrhagic vomit; or antirrhinums whose child-delighting, dragon-snapping flowers have been morphed into gaping, malformed foxgloves.

And primroses.
I believe these to be some of our loveliest wild spring flowers and although I collect interesting forms, there is nothing so beautiful as the original. In Britain, they are pale yellow; travel east and south, in Europe and western Asia, and lilac or pink forms are more frequent.

Perhaps that's why the name 'prima rosa' - first rose - was coined, presumably by the Romans. Whatever the origin, it is the earliness of this plant that helps with its charm, not to mention the pristine quality of the petals, subtle fragrance and the way the blooms sit so beautifully among the rugose foliage.

And then, at the February RHS Show, I was reminded of the abominations wished upon us by plant breeders.  Like the next picture. . .

BUMROSES.  I cannot bring myself to call these things 'primroses.'  There is nothing to commend them.  They are barely hardy, the flowers are grossly outsized, the colours of the pollen guides don't harmonise with the main petal colours, the growth is coarse, the flowers are badly presented and they die badly.  These are market stall horrors, unsuitable for gardens and unpleasant anywhere.

They seem to have gone as far as they can, with ugly paintbox colours, so now breeders appear to be taking a darker path. Polyanthus have turned up with flowers resembling dirty denim jeans. Theres a brutally ugly green-flowered thing called Primula 'Francesca' which, like Dante's Francesca da Rimini, should be blown away to hell in a whirlwind of souls.

And there are now mud coloured objects like the one below. (I couldn't be arsed to note down its varietal name.)

A dirty blue bumrose. If an admiral in full dress uniform had fallen overboard, drowned, and was then fished out of the sea three months later, his uniform would have looked more attractive than this plant.

ON A DIFFERENT TACK  . . .

At that same show, I was wryly amused by a trade stand, set up by a firm called Implementations, offering a range of expensive-looking tools which appeared to be made of copper. I learn that these are actually bronze and Implementations' website lists selling points as follows:

They're rust-free, hard wearing, soil doesn't stick to them.
Much like stainless steel, then – but here's their clincher: copper is known to deter slugs and snails.

That's true. Snails which crawl onto copper are said to be disturbed by an electrochemical reaction between the metal and their mucus.

So if you happen to discover that snails and slugs are eating your tool blades, switch immediately to copper. But remember, that scrap thieves are especially interested in copper and might nick your posh bronze fork and trowel set before you've had time to try it out. And it's a safe bet that the metal thieves will move significantly faster than the molluscs. 

Suitable for that bijou gardenette in Kensington - bronze tools, marketed by Implementations.

I'm not listening to anything.  
On a mad impulse, I decided to subscribe to Apple's iTunes Match and am in the middle of uploading my entire music library onto iCloud. It has taken about 48 hours of constant computer running, to upload nearly 8,000 'songs.'  Only 660 to go!

This day in 1986, 
when we ran a small nursery, I potted up 65 successfully rooted cuttings of Daphne blagayana, prepared our garden for opening and berated my then 12 year-old son for breaking a rake which, my diary wails, 'I've had for years and years!'  What was I, an octogenarian?  Can't remember the rake at all but can vaguely recall the son. (Only joking,)

This week's film was 
We Need to Talk About Kevin, about a nasty kid who does nasty things. It was compelling stuff, but when I viewed the interview extras, on the DVD, I realised that I had entirely the wrong take on the whole thing.

My interpretation was that the kid, if not born nasty, was pretty much a sociopath in the making, possibly because of the sterile lifestyle of wealthy western (must be careful not to say American) society, or maybe because some folk are simply born nasty.

But according to the star – the incomparable Tilda Swinton – and according to what I could hear, of director Lynne Ramsay's almost incoherent babble, Kevin was the way he was because of a bad mother who didn't bond with her baby.  I have to say, too, that the father is an absolute prat of the first order and the locals show up in pretty poor light, too.

I was so disturbed by my hopeless misinterpretation that I determined to break my current rule ( to avoid literature written post mid-Seventies, because most of it is so crappy) and have just started to read Lionel Shriver's original novel.  So far nothing to report, but I can see why she won the Orange.

'That's it from me,' as the weatherman used to say, 'bye bye for now!'

GALANTHOBUBBLES AND PAPER ROSES

'What news?  What news in this our tottering State?' asked the First Baron Hastings, and with good reason.  England was as broke, in 1483, as Greece is now and although Lord H was a vital link between the bankrupt monarchy and London's rich city bankers, Richard of Gloucester chopped off his head.  Ungrateful bastard!  


A kangaroo court convicted poor old Hastings on a series of ludicrously trumped up charges, including witchcraft and adultery with mediaeval totty, Jane Shore.  (It should be said that Jane, one helluva party animal, was also enjoying bedroom romps at the time, with King Edward IV, the Marquess of Dorset and plenty more of the then rich and famous. 


Jane Shore lived to be at least 80, which for the fifteenth century was pretty good, so there is some sort of divine justice after all.  (The other nobles mostly killed each other while still in their prime and nasty Richard caught it in 1485 when he was 33 and that mardy-boots, sour-faced misery-guts Henry Tudor took the crown.)


WHAT ON EARTH AM I GOING ON ABOUT?  RIDICULOUS!!  I suppose it's because the economic cock-ups in Europe, and in particular, the Hellenic 'balls out' that's going on, with big central banks trying vainly to bolster up the poor old Greeks, and keep them tucked safely into the  Eurobed, is about as illogical, pointless and scandalous as were the Wars of the Roses in England, back in the fifteenth century.


OH PLEASE!!  COME ON, NIGE – GET BACK TO GARDENING AND STOP DRONING ON AND ON AND ON  WITH THINGS YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT.




So.  Gardenish stuff, then.

Crocus ancyrencis, the golden bunch crocus in out my garden this week.  Small but exceptionally good natured and, like Smarties – or M&Ms if you're American – inadequate when enjoyed singly but fabulously good in big handfuls. Cheerful is what they are - a bunch of February sunshine.  (Click pics to enlarge.)


There is absolutely nothing so cheerful as a crocus. Forget snowdrops, never mind aconites, lovely though they are.  Both are strictly winter flowers, effective for lifting one from the despair induced by post-Christmas dieting, income tax bills, and treacherous weather but not nearly enough to make one sing or dance.  


A crocus, on the other hand, elicits a verbal greeting.  The first appearance, of a proper spring crocus - rather than the precocious, skinny midwinter species - causes one to rush back into the house, grab the PG by her protesting arm and drag her outside to coo over those glowing egg-yolk petals as they open to the sun.

Crocus x luteus 'Golden Yellow' aka 'Dutch Yellow Crocus.' – much larger than C. ancyrencis, and frowned upon by gardeners who prefer the soft mauves, purples, whites and stripes of C. vernus varieties.  But to me, this is easily the finest and most dependable of all, coping with all weathers and most soil types and looking sublimely happy, after enduring a night at -13.5ºC last week. More of these should be grown.

SNOWDROPPING AUDACITY
I heard certain world-weary journos, at last weeks RHS London Show, suggesting that snowrops have become rather old hat.  'Everyone's done them,' she sighed. 'One's is so weary of hearing about them.  To compound her ennui, I dragged her off to see, first hand, the horribleness of the variety Galanthus 'Blewbury Tart.'  In fact I dragged several folk whom I knew not, to see the same abominable things on one of the bulb exhibits.

But despite yawns of the gardening fashionistas, snowdrop mania is still decidedly with us. And the freakiest varieties have excited not only your run of the mill galanthobores but also, the mail order giant, Thompson and Morgan.  


T&M have just paid £725 for one bulb of a variety called 'Elizabeth Harrison.'  I believe it's a chance-discovered form of Galanthus woronoii - the species I think we once called G. ikariae - which has dark foliage, more the bottle green of bluebell leaves, than the familiar, glaucous narcissussy tint.

But this one has an amazing added virtue.  It's ovaries and the little vee marks on its tepals are, wait for it, not green, but YELLOW!  Like 'Wendy's Gold,' in fact, and a handful of other galanthonasties, but with dark leaves!  

Yellow!  Well lah-di-bloody dah!  A snowdrop with icterine bits instead of green. Hmmm.  Why is my pulse not quickening at the thought of a snowdrop with yellow bits?  Could it possibly be that the beauty of this frail species is the exquisite contrast between the white and the green on the petals, tepals or whatever botanists call the prettier bits of a monocot flower?

I beg you sir, madam, chum, cobber -  to pick a snowdrop: an ordinary, single-flowered G. nivalis snowdrop – as soon as you've read this.  Look at those outer petals.  Do you note the subtle shading, in soft lines, running through the plant's tissue like a watermark?  Do you see the boat-like shape of those three outer petals?  Now lift one, gently, and study the inner parts of the flower. Do you see how that green has a slight iridescence, making the colour stand out from the stem and leaves?  And do you note the slightly less subtle grey-green striping above the deep green? Oh, and can you detect that slightly naughty muskiness of the perfume, and the twin lobed, toothy base of those inner petals?  Study the flower, I beg you, for some minutes.  Such beauty cannot be improved upon.

A fairly ordinary snowdrop.

So,  would yellow look better than green on those inner parts?  NO!  
Is a yellow ovary, rather than a green one attractive? NO!  
Would you pay £725 for a single bulb of this variety?  If you were wealthy enough for it not to matter?  Well, would you???


Should anyone be prepared to pay £725 for a single snowdrop bulb?  
Well, apparently, yes. T&M are a huge and successful business. Clearly, they know what they're doing and no doubt, there will be lots of gardeners positively itching to have a G. woronoii with yellow where the green should be.


I wish them well.  And if you can't wait to have this thing, I wish you well, too.  But before you sign up for it, have another five minute gaze at the ordinary one.  It really cannot be improved upon.


I'm listening to Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B Minor Op 115.


This week's film was The Prince and the Showgirl, in which Laurence Olivier is acted off the screen, for the first hour at least, by Marilyn Monroe.  Ham versus film star - tangible proof that acing to a camera is a little different from declaiming to the man at the back of the Dress Circle or Balcony.


This time yesterday, I was sipping a glass of champagne to celebrate my 68th birthday.  Old, creaky, crabby but still loving work and still revelling in the mess that calls itself my garden.


Bless you for reading this far - and enjoy your snowdrop gazing.

THE RUBBER KETTLE WAS MORE EFFECTIVE THAN THE STYROFOAM RAPIERS

The cocktail party was getting out of hand.  At one point, the Archbishop of Canterbury said to me, in a shocked voice, "Oh no, no!  It isn't what you think! We always wear something like this!''  I had cheekily suggested that it must have taken a lot of bottle, to turn up at a posh bash, like this, in the loose-fitting Hattie Jacques-style frock he was wearing.  And in such a zany purple, too.

At the time I had on, if I remember correctly, bright yellow corduroy flares, a spectacularly flowery, huge-collared shirt beneath a ridiculously affected, greenish jacket that buttoned up, Nehru-like, almost to the aforementioned, oversized shirt collar.  (You were absolutely nobody, in the mid-sixties, unless you dressed like a technicolor prat.)

It was a gauche comment but I'd been terribly distracted by His Grace's enormous, bushy eyebrows which resembled amateurishly layered hawthorn hedges.  The bristles sort of curled round one-another, making  frosted thickets under which two intelligent eyes twinkled and glowed like hot coals. The Archbish in question, Michael Ramsey, was our 100th and bumping into him at that party was one hell of a surprise.  The girlfriend I was with was struck dumb and I don't think spoke much more all evening.  Or to me, ever again.

Winter afternoon on our Fen.  

The pictures all get bigger if you click on them.

I mention this pointless recollection because I was similarly distracted at this week's Garden Press Event.

I'd planned to take everything extremely seriously.  To greet old friends in a brisk and business-like manner but rather than just gossip, to get on with compiling facts and gathering information.

But I never really got beyond the 'greeting old friends' bit.

Early on, I bumped into the Queen of Garden Bloggers with whom I discussed, briefly, science. Together, we examined a strange green object which lay on the long tables where new products had been laid out. It resembled a discus, as used by athletes, but when manipulated in a certain way, popped up in an unnerving manner and revealed itself to be a rubber kettle.  'Not something to leave on the gas,' I suggested, but ingeniously, it had a metal base.

Its existence prompted a pretty obvious question: why would anyone want a collapsible rubber kettle?  When fully erected - sorry, but there's no other way to put that - the object took up little more space than when squashed.  And it held only enough water to supply a small tea pot.  (Mind you, the Kelly Kettle, which I gave the PG for Christmas, is equally miserly with capacity.  A thing the size of a small central heating boiler, it will speedily heat three quarters of a cup of soup.  It's fun, though, because the liquid boils from the heat of six burning fir cones or a copy of page three of The Sun.

There were other things of little apparent purpose, too:

Ground up volcanic rocks to sprinkle on gardens. Presumably, they'd make plants erupt into growth.

Compost impregnated with charcoal and therefore, it was claimed, better for growing things in.

Bundles that resembled broken shoe laces.  Useful, I gathered, for tying up plants if you happened to run out of string.

Big strips of paper, marked with big numerals.  You lay these flat on the ground, apparently, and then plant into the numbers.  No doubt, you'd end up with a planting scheme that has as much charm and originality as a painting done by numbers.

One of the delights of the recent snow was that the village was suddenly full of children who, for once, were allowed to play out by themselves.  They sat on sledges - optimistic, for the Fens - threw snowballs and built some great snowpeople.  I loved this sculpture, made by three of them without, as far as we could tell, any adult supervision at all.


Most exciting discovery, at the Garden Media Event, was a female member British Olympic Fencing Team.  (Some stuff here)

When I was told about this I assumed, since every human endeavour seems to be represented at the Olympics, that the person in question would be an expert at building or perhaps painting fences.

I conjured up visions of flying larch-laps or a frenzied clapping together of feathered boarding.  Perhaps there'd be formation trellis construction, set to music while the posts are knocked in and the panels gracefully assembled into arches and pergolas.  I was sure the Torvil and Dean of fence-building were out there, simply awaiting discovery.

But this was a genuine Olympian sportyperson - indeed a goddess who, to mix mythologies, would have given Freija herself some competition.  She fences with sword things - rapiers or foils or whatever, and I'm embarrassed that I cannot remember her name.  But then, I know the names of absolutely no one, on any of the teams.

Hilliers, in her honour, were handing out styrofoam rapiers.  I declined the one offered to me - I'd have preferred a Star Wars thingy that lit up -  but eagerly accepted the glass of sparkling pink stuff that Hilliers were also graciously dishing out.

The annual Press Event, I finally decided, is a perfect excuse for seeing colleagues, friends, competitors and those who make their living from horticulture.  So, ground-up volcanoes and rubber tea pots notwithstanding, it's an event that absolutely everyone, in our walk of life, should attend.  I'll be there next year, if there is one, and hope to see you too.

We all need warming up, so here's Tulipa purissima 'Madame Lefebre' often called 'Red Emperor.'  In My garden, this variety usually flowers in March.  Can't wait!

I'm listening to Debussy's String Quartet.  He only wrote one, and it's a belter, though his contemporary, Ravel, I think has the edge, especially with the pizzicato movement.

This day in 2007 A newspaper photographer came to photograph me doing things in the garden and seemed surprised not to find burgeoning borders, full of colourful flowers.  I think we ended up lurking in a shed.

This week's film was Victim - One of Dirk Bogarde's best roles, in this 1961 mould-breaker by Basil Dearden.  Supporting performance from Sylvia Syms was also superb.  It's about blackmail and is set in the days when homosexual contact of any kind, between males, was criminal.  The police were pretty heavy handed, too, so blackmailers treated it as a licence for printing money.  Watching the film today, I find it almost incredible that 'Society' has moved so far and so fast into more liberal, tolerant times.  Still a long way to go, though.

Gosh, what an outrageously long post, again.   If you've read this far, I love you - regardless of who or what you are! Almost.
Bye!

PHENOLOGICAL NIGHTMARES AFTER DINNER AT MY CLUB

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do watch it, if you haven't already.


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

Bye bye for now!

WHO NEEDS A RUCKED UP LANDSCAPE?

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

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

CLICK ON ANY PICTURE FOR A BIGGER VIEW.

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

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

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

May I begin with a little list?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Epiphany!