MUTHAH OF A MIDSUMMER - or - GIS MORE RAIN!

Greetings!.  

And sorry for such a disgraceful gap in posts. Can't believe it's since mid May,  but I've been having something of mid-blog crisis and am considering a change in emphasis.

29th June 2012

Oh dear! When I posted this yesterday, I didn't realise that folk were suffering hideously with flash floods or were being battered by golf-ball sized hailstones or threatened by tornadoes. And I didn't realise that railway lines were being wrecked, or that folk were getting stranded in vehicles - and worse that there were fatalities.

People who have suffered from such adverse conditions have total sympathy from me. Floods are horrible, even when they're not dangerous and my supercilious remarks (below) about folk who moan are in no way aimed at those unfortunate victims. They have every right to feel aggrieved and let's hope their plight is relieved, and soon.

What follows is aimed exclusively at those who complain about the effect of a strange summer on their gardens.

But first, this beautiful creature. . .

An Amur (or Manchurian) Leopard, Panthera pardus orientalis photographed at Edinburgh Zoo at the end of May.  Such feline beauty is deeply moving, especially when you realise that this species is almost extinct.  It comes from the easternmost limits of what was once the USSR.  In the wild, fewer than 40 recorded individuals remain.  

The eyes are a remarkable shade of aquamarine with subtle marks and suffusions that make them resemble precious jade.  And the spots, which are similar to those on a jaguar almost join to form rings on parts of its body.  Look at those massive paws, too.  All soft and 'pussytoes' now, but imagine being clouted, with claws extended.  OUCH!

I felt richer for gazing at this animal but profoundly sad and ashamed that we humans have wrecked its habitat and hounded it almost out of existence. 
(Click pics for bigger view)  More information here 

And now, this. ...

THERE HAS BEEN ALTOGETHER TOO MUCH MOANING!  
These days, wherever two or three are gathered together, in the name of Gardening, conversation turns almost immediately to how awful the summer is being, how the hosepipe ban ruined people's planting plans, how gales and rain have lashed soft summer growth to pieces, how the succulents have all got waterlogged, how there are frogs in water and the water's in the cellar, how ten billion slugs have simply shredded the hostas, my dere,  ... and on and on and on and on.

WELL ENOUGH ALREADY!  STOP IT!   NOW!  AT ONCE!

I realise that my usual function is to rant, but any railing done here, would be at the moaners, carpers, whingers, whiners, complainers and other mardy-bootses who can't stop banging on about the weather.

Yes, the weather has been crap.
Yes, the hosepipe ban was a ludicrous piece of nonsense, except where it's still enforced.
Yes, climate change is going to ruin us all and this is merely an overture.
Yes, this summer's mainly the Chancellor's fault and the sun would shine again, if only he'd stop all these silly U-turns.

But, NO, I'm not fed up with it.

And I don't think it has been a bad summer - just a different one.  Very, very different.  And in certain ways, wonderful for gardening.

For once, here in Britain's usually arid east, it's wonderful to experience what gardening must be like in Devon, or in Cumbria. I've never know such glorious lushness. Look at the pictures of my 'spring' borders, taken a month ago.  An embarrassment of columbines, some of them four feet tall.  And lupins big enough even to satisfy the Monty Python highwayman.  Instead of looking like a well planted border, it all began to resemble a lush, wild habitat.  And I love it.

Bad planting and indifferent design have become all but invisible.  It's just a wild party and any minute, someone's going to rip of her clothes and dance naked on the terrace table!

Our spring border on 29th May 2012. 

The woody plants are having a ball, too.  Young trees and shrubs, planted into droughty soil, last autumn have grown wonderfully well.  Even mature trees, stressed from nearly two years of below-average rainfall, have stretched their limbs and grown more rapidly than I'd have thought possible.  And the colours!  So many variations of green and such rapid changes in leaf colour and shape.  And so far, so little disease.  (Though we have a plague of honeysuckle aphids.)

We planted a length of yew hedge in 2010.  It has grown more, in the last two months than during the previous  two years!

Oh, and our  mini-meadow is nearly shoulder high, but doesn't look bad, despite the ox-eye daisies having over-reached themselves and partially collapsed; and despite the wildlings – painstakingly introduced last year – being overwhelmed by exuberant meadow grasses.  I'm sure the crushed lady's bedstraw, wild sorrel, field scabious and birds foot trefoil will survive.  And meanwhile, the volume of herbage, with grasses in full bloom, is almost architectural.

Looking over part of the spring border at the over-lush meadow.

I'm listening to Wagner's Lohengrin - the Solti recording with a very un-German sounding Placido Domingo in the hero's role and Jessye Norman as that horrible old bag Ortrud.

This time last week I was planting up troughs for my mother who had taken my brother and me out for a hefty pub lunch.

This week's film?  Too many to mention, but a piece of acting knocked me absolutely sideways.  It was in Boardwalk Empire, from the incomparable American HBO.  Steve Buscemi, as the vile and corrupt Nucky Thompson is in dialogue with one of his mistresses, played by Kelly Macdonald.  I won't spoil it for you, but this is an agonising scene with terse, near perfect dialogue.  So much depends on the actors wringing the gut-churning irony out of the situation, but while doing very little.  And this they achieved perfectly.  A television moment which stands up to almost anything I've seen in a theatre or on film.

Toodle-oo for now and thanks for reading this far!

FAIR DAFFODILS WE WEEP. . .

 Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus the true pheasant's eye in my mini-meadow.

Good morrow all, and a very happy Chelsea to you.

A month since my last post?  Disgraceful!

There's little excuse. Time vanished and ideas dried away  – 'Like to summer's rain; / Or as pearls of morning's dew, / Ne'er to be found again.'  (A minor prize for she - or he - who identifies the boring quote.  Victoria, consider yourself not allowed to answer first. )

There have been a few minor distractions in my life – Mother! Untimely frost!  A car crisis!  Don't Ask!

Also, a slew of unexpected tasks.  I'm appalled at the  mathematical pattern of gardening journalism over the past quarter century.  A bit - but not a lot - like those gases, in Boyle's Law,  the volume of work is inversely proportional to the rate of pay.  I've discovered that in real terms, my average rates, per thousand words are about 60% of what they were when I began this, my third career.

If it's the same for all garden journalists – and I have no reason to assume otherwise – it means we're all having to behave like the White Queen, in Alice who, if I remember rightly, has to run faster and faster to stay in the same spot.

I'm not moaning. It's good to get the work. But it is a little sobering.


Another vexing thing . . .
I've been answering gardening questions for much of my time in this weird life, on radio, television and  - since being given the 'bum's rush' from GQT - mainly in print. And I've come to the conclusion that we're all useless.

Why?  Because the same questions keep being asked every week of every year.  And if questions are constantly repeated, it means we're not giving the right answers.

Whenever I look over anyone's  fence, or peer into the serial cock-up that is my own garden, I see the same mistakes and the same misguided husbandry.  It's hopeless.  No one seems able to learn and as 'teachers' of a kind, that is fairly and squarely, our fault.  We should be ashamed.

In my own village – where there are at least six people far better at gardening than I – I saw daffodil leaves newly knotted.  The bulbs had been 'naturalised' ie, planted in a neat row in a close-mown lawn.  And when the flowers had 'hastened away,' the leaves were skilfully twisted into tight hangman's knots.

Bulb knotting was done routinely, half a century ago, but has long since been discredited because it can foster disease and doesn't help the bulbs.  But it also looks HIDEOUS, UNNATURAL, REVOLTING, PERVERTED AND BRUTAL.

And in the case of this particular garden, the whole effort was wasted because within a few days of  knotting the leaves were mown off and the lawn shaved.

 Why aren't we hitting the targets with our answers?  And why does so much of my query mail look like this. . .

Dear Neil Coletorn

   Can you identify the encl. ( flower/twig/leaf/rotted black mush/torn-off shred of kitchen roll/live hungry aggressive arthropod etc.)

Why, when people ask for a plant identification, do they also ask whether the plant is a weed?  When any fule kno that a weed is identified not by what it is but by where it is.

I also get,

Dear Mr Cobbin,
   How can I kill. . .daisies/pheasants/mice/shield bugs/ants/snakes/lichens/moss etc. 

I've had -  
'How can I keep slow worms out of my wall? And where can I get cyanide to deal with the moles and wasps?  And even 'How can I keep bees out of my garden?'

Also. . .

Dear Sir or Madam
   Now that Arsenic, Lead Arsenate, DDT and Nicotine shreds have been outllawed, how can I possibly grow crops? 

Some folk want to douse their allotments with Jeyes Fluid, others want to know why I don't recommend sowing by the moon and a few attack me for not being organic or permaculturist.

And one final thing.
Why, when sending emails, do some folk think that the shift key and punctuation buttons don't work?

Try this for size:

From - nickandshirl@talktalktalk.com

HiNigel
Wehopeyou'reokwehaveaproblemwithvineweevilstheyhavedestroyednicksauriculasandnow
theproblemseemstobespreadingtoourrhododendronbushesbecausetherearebitesoutoftheedgesofthe
leavesandweareafraidtheywillattacktherootsThankingyouforyoourhelp
Shirl
 
I'm listening to Abba - Lord help me!  (Money Money Money, since you ask.  It's the Euro crisis, stoopid!)

This weeks film was Winter Light Ingmar Bergman's excruciating analysis of faith, liturgy, religion and relationships.  It's profoundly depressing – and when first saw it, in 1965, I was suffering Sophomore blues at Cornell Univeristy.

This time next week Chelsea will be over, as far as I'm concerned, and a good job too.

Thank you for getting this far. Bye bye!


 

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!