tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68491675648114935282024-03-13T07:37:31.721+00:00SILVERTREEDAZERamblings, rants, gardenish nonsense and cineastic idiocy with Nigel Colborn.Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.comBlogger184125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-88010194865155085962017-08-15T07:23:00.003+01:002017-08-15T07:24:22.489+01:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;">THIS BLOG IS NO LONGER ACTIVE. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">IT IS A DECEASED BLOG. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">IT IS NO MORE.</span></div>
Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-74828465354835120952013-11-29T17:39:00.000+00:002013-11-29T17:46:03.034+00:00POST-BELLUM POPPYCOCK<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Oh dearie me - another embarrassing gap between posts. Please forgive.</div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">Field Poppies <i>Papaver rhoeas, </i>on set-aside land in Thurlby, Lincolnshire <i>circa</i> 2003</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Click Pics for a larger view.)</span></span></div>
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I posted these pictures a couple of weeks ago because I had intended to rant about politicians, celebrities and public figures who began piously to wear Haig Fund charity poppies several weeks before Armistice Day or Remembrance Sunday.</div>
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I can't understand why I found such low key demonstrations of personal worthiness so offensive but the whole thing put me off wearing a poppy at all, this year.<br />
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It seemed as though there was a contest of some kind, to show who cared most about the millions of young lives thrown away because of awful policies, mostly devised by old men. And with people still dying in unnecessary wars or at the hands tyrants, the whole idea of remembrance seemed to me to have become cheapened by turning the poppy into some kind of uniform or a badge of virtue.<br />
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Then, after reading <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/poppycock--or-why-remembrance-rituals-make-me-see-red-8927751.html">Robert Fisk</a> in the Independent and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/08/poppy-last-time-remembrance-harry-leslie-smith">Harry Leslie Smith in the Guardian</a> I realised that there were far bigger minds than mine reacting to such behaviour.<br />
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And when, by mistake, I tuned to that puerile television dancing contest on the BBC, last month, I noticed that absolutely everyone wore poppies of one kind or another. Some even appeared to have small red enamel and gold ones. How distressing, to link <i>chic</i> items of costume jewelry with more than a million boys and young men who died hideously and agonisingly in Flanders where <i>Papaver rhoeas</i> happened to grow in the shell-ravaged battlefields. <br />
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That November badge – cheap plastic imitation of a field poppy – has become even cheaper and shoddier. In future, I'll still make an annual donation to the British Legion but won't be wearing a buttonhole.<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">Natural variation, spotted in a field of poppies.</span></div>
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The poppy itself could never be besmirched. Such peerless beauty is everlasting and one of the great delights of the summer is to see the poppies, individually at first – a scarlet roadside flash – and then in profusion.<br />
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It's difficult to analyse that beauty. Is it the pleated petals, pressure-packed like a tiny parachute in the gooseberry-haired bud? Is it the rapid expansion, like a butterfly from its pupa, from wrinkled blob to silken perfection? Or is it that the flowers don't really fade. They emerge, they're fresh and lovely, they fall.<br />
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<span style="color: #e06666;">A true Shirley Poppy, with yellow stamens.</span></div>
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Field poppies, both wild and garden forms, breed and mongrelise all over our garden. Some are semi-double, some plain scarlet, some pink, some cinder-grey with red undertones like the poet Hopkins's 'blue-bleak embers' which 'fall, gall themselves and gash gold vermilion.'<br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;">A semi-double field poppy in my garden</span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666;">Stamens. How many flowers have dark grey ones?</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">An unlikely blue tinge on <i>Papaver </i>'Beauty of Livermere' It's a perennial, probably just a good form of<i> Papaver bracteatum</i>.</span><br />
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Welsh Poppy, <i>Meconopsis cambrica</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Meconopsis are wonderful, too, but they lack the charm of the big, pepperpot central capsule. There's nothing better, for cool shade or semi-shade, though, than a stand of Welsh poppies. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;"><span style="font-size: small;"> And finally - a Himalayan blue job. I think it's 'Branklyn' but a meconopsis of one sort or another.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>I'm listening to Benjamin Britten's </b><i>Friday Afternoons</i>, song arrangements for children. It being the great man's centenary, I'm working through my collection. <i>Grimes</i> is being saved until last.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>This week's exciting event </b>was the Garden Media Guild Awards Lunch. Everyone was extremely jolly and the food was delicious. Awards were presented. We consumed six cockles each among other things as an appetizer and ate blue-grey potatoes with tender lamb, followed by a tiny tarte tatin. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">That's it for now. Bye bye. </span><br />
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-108152320301117332013-09-19T16:06:00.000+01:002013-09-19T16:08:59.931+01:00Diary Extract 1. THE LAND IRONCLADS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<u><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #990000;">A SILVERTREEDAZE EXTRA</span></b></span></u></div>
<span style="color: #990000; font-size: small;">From time to time, between more general posts, I'll be publishing selected extracts from my diary which may be of general interest. The text has been edited, to remove personal or private material and to avoid offence where it is not intended. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000; font-size: small;">Accompanying pictures, as always, may be relevant but are more likely to be included just for relief from the awful prose.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666;">A storm builds over the North Sea at Holkham Bay in early August 2013. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666;">Is a storm gathering over food supply versus sustainability in Britain?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;"><u>21st August 2013, at home.</u></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">After lunch, the PG and I walked the fields above the Fen. It was what Norfolk countrymen would call a 'fine, soft day' with pearly sky, gently filtered sunlight and exactly the right level of warmth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">Much of the wheat is newly harvested. Land is cleared within hours of the huge, high-tech combines feeding their way into the crop. Straw was processed into big bales – not for bedding or fodder, I suspect, but for bio-mass fuel to feed power stations. The baler follows the combine; fork-lifts and trailers follow the baler and within 24 hours a 50 acre field is cropped, cleared and part-way tilled with heavy disc harrows or a spring-tine drag.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">Where land is worked, gigantic half-track or double-wheel tractors pull tine-disc combinations, sometimes turning stubble to drillable tilth in a single pass. I'm reminded of H G Wells' 'Land Ironclads' – though those were military tanks. The land is bludgeoned into submission by these mechanical giants whose size makes their drivers look like little plastic toys .</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">The romance is gone from arable agriculture. No mammals – short tailed voles, harvest mice, field mice – will pick through stubbles which are left for less than a day. Few farmland birds will forage for grain fragments. Arable weeds – if they germinate at all – will be zapped with residual herbicides and a rushed treatment with slug pellets – probably methiocarb – deals with the molluscs. Thus, the rich fenland, east of the village, becomes more barren than a desert. Kestrels, buzzards and barn owls, though they survive here, have slim pickings and the only refuge from machines lies in the narrow field margins, occasional trees and the few dyke-sides or road verges which have not been mown. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">Considerably more than four tonnes of milling wheat can be harvested from each tilled acre, here – more than double the national average for when I farmed in the 1970s. In real terms, the price of the grain has not increased by much, so arable farmers need those big yields to stay profitable. But on such bountiful land, do they need generous taxpayer subsidies?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">The payments are for 'land stewardship' we're told – but little or nothing is done to protect the varied habitats surrounding the intensive cropping. Thus, by default, biodiversity is reduced. And even where there are extra stewardship schemes, also paid for by taxpayers, biodiversity can be almost as poor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">I don't think this damage is caused by wantonness or spite. As with so many cases of unnecessary damage, ignorance is the main cause. With learning, better understanding of how the natural world works and small, low-cost – or even cost-free – changes in many common farming practices, biodiversity could be sustained and enriched – and without yield loss. With that kind of care, the beauty of these flatlands would be spectacularly enhanced. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">There are outstanding exceptions. Even among the most efficient and industrialised farmers, some are fully in tune with sympathetic land use, with assisting natural diversity and thus, with creating greater concomitant beauty. (Beauty being far, far more than just what you see, when viewing the landscape.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">But in spite of everything, our Fen does not lose all its beauty. It remains a place to be cherished for its calming flatness, big skies, constantly changing light, moody water courses, low-level mists, rampaging thunder storms – even for its keening, penetrating winter winds. That is so even as, day by day, month by month, a little more life-richness is lost. Plink, plink, plink – one by one the lights of life go out, the bulbs fuse, the filament snaps, a fairy dies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">With land ownership – whatever the acreage – comes a deep and binding responsibility, not just for now but for coming generations. And that applies to those of us who garden, as well as to big arable farmers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">This is not about saving bitterns or re-introducing ospreys; it is not about grants for planting pointless hedges or digging isolated ponds. This is about teaching <i>everyone</i> in the countryside how to live and let live – that is, to let the <i>rest</i> of life on earth live.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">At a guess, I'd say that biodiversity is greater, now, in Peterborough than on the fenland which surrounds that sprawling city. And yet, 200 years ago, the lowlands of Eastern England had some of the richest and most diverse habitats in the British Isles. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;">How on earth did we allow that to happen?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjya59IRqOg_ALPF4ZlQNBIcIjuc6SA6n5Y_99kf4LH6R77SH5m6Zxn_We5LthHO_8BXLO7Fpqrw8ghfZkg7NQlxTREa6slv4WEh5Wd-nMtnVFZj4lp1Kw9KmqW07jOvIo6TLN6djpowV0/s1600/HacfenW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjya59IRqOg_ALPF4ZlQNBIcIjuc6SA6n5Y_99kf4LH6R77SH5m6Zxn_We5LthHO_8BXLO7Fpqrw8ghfZkg7NQlxTREa6slv4WEh5Wd-nMtnVFZj4lp1Kw9KmqW07jOvIo6TLN6djpowV0/s640/HacfenW.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #351c75;"> BIG SKIES: part of our fen, at the end of the settled weather period in early September.</span></span></div>
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-22334304654367586062013-09-16T18:03:00.000+01:002013-09-16T18:03:05.532+01:00LITTLE GREY MEN COULD WRECK OUR GARDENS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A disturbing and distressing story caught my eye in this fortnight’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Horticulture Week</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #741b47;"><i> Aster laevis</i> 'Calliope'</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Brussels Bureaucrats, apparently, are about to smack us about the head
with a particularly ill-judged and potentially damaging piece of looney-toons legislation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Believe me, this</span> one makes the outlawing of curved
bananas look sane and reasonable.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As part of proposed EU
legislation to regulate ‘plant reproductive material,’ Brussels wants <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all </i>plant varieties to be listed on an
official register.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To implement
that, they want <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>every variety to carry an officially
recognized description which could run to two pages.</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such descriptions would give details of
such life-threatening features as the length of the hairs on a plant’s stems.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This would be part of a plan to force nurseries and individuals to sell <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i> registered plants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Registration, because of the exhaustive information required, multiplied
up by all the red tape necessary to keep the maximum number of EU civil
servants employed, will cost a great deal of money to implement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> And presumably, each registration will have to be approved by the Eurocrats.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It could therefore become illegal for anyone to sell
non-registered plants. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This system
already applies to vegetable and agricultural crops, greatly reducing
diversity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We do NOT want this to
happen to ornamentals – preferably not anywhere but absolutely <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></b>in Britain.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjySk2NNJSPrLB_tPDrRd8zJEEv9BI_NzjyXjBFlNzjxrOenl4T_WDe9zAbsfAO-g3vPKUDPIAI4R48CIsun2q5LBM7ghEaxSJFxWdz9KeYKvDIwmkErDU1DcgiBQek49cLCi7c8N2SLio/s1600/Mxed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjySk2NNJSPrLB_tPDrRd8zJEEv9BI_NzjyXjBFlNzjxrOenl4T_WDe9zAbsfAO-g3vPKUDPIAI4R48CIsun2q5LBM7ghEaxSJFxWdz9KeYKvDIwmkErDU1DcgiBQek49cLCi7c8N2SLio/s640/Mxed.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> British gardens are among the world's most diversely planted. How many of these modest plants might be lost, if registration becomes necessary? Would registration condemn them?</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If this legislation is forced through, it will kill small, independent
nurseries – the lifeblood of British horticulture and the main reason for our
unique horticultural diversity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>How many other nations can boast more than 70,000 cultivars and species
commercially available?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Holland?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t think so!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dotty legislation like this could also clobber plant breeders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The big guys may be able to carry the
cost burden, not to mention the mind-numbing paperwork, but the little
chaps?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No chance!</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Professional and semi-professional breeders have given us so much in the
past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m talking about people who
tinker with specialist plant groups, often in back garden nurseries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have bequeathed British – and
therefore world – horticulture some wonderful varieties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may remember Woodfield Brothers’
spectacular lupin exhibits at Chelsea year after year, back in the, er, 1990s.
Many of us still grow the late Hector Harrison’s fascinating diascias.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what about Elizabeth Strangman’s pioneering
work on hellebores?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think of
amateur and semi-professional dahlia breeders, too, not to mention iris nuts,
saxifrage enthusiasts, fuchsia breeders – the list is long and diverse.</span> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #a64d79;"><i>Fuchsia </i>'Rose Fantasia' Fuchsia enthusiasts have raised thousands of cultivars. If each has to be registered, most could be lost to cultivation.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So what happens if those unelected Brussels Sprouts have their way? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What will that mean for the
diversity of planting in good gardens?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Do we really want our planting schemes limited to what is approved for
registration by those self-perpetuating grey scrubbers?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Currently, anyone can offer plants that they've bred - either to give away or to sell. Many are also happy to let their progeny go into cultivation without protecting their intellectual property, ie, without breeders' rights of any kind. I <i>love</i> that kind of freedom. It is part of our gardening heritage, just as it is also reasonable that professional breeders should have the right to protect or copyright their commercial progeny.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Let’s say, for example, that a perennial enthusiast has developed a gorgeous late
flowering aster, with bright, rosy-purple flowers and elegant, darkly marbled
foliage which is never disfigured with so much as a speck of mildew?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most British gardeners might give it
little more than a cursory glance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So if big horticultural marketeers fail to see any potential, that plant is overlooked, no one registers it, so good-bye! </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But if you happen to be an aster nut, and have a nicely planted autumn
border, that variety could become an object of intense, insatiable desire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So imagine how you – or that person – would feel, if all the breeder can say is, ‘Sorry, love, I’d give you a root or two,
but I’m forbidden. I'd be breaking the law.’</span></div>
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<span style="color: #bf9000;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Begonia 'Sherbet Bon Bon' – a highly commerical plant. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #bf9000;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Great, but I want esoteric, wispy things in my garden as well as big brassy jobs like this.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So what will British growers, breeders, gardeners and in particular, plantsmen
do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will we fight such insane
legislation, if it looks like becoming law?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will we march in the streets, waving placards?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will we distract our MPs from worrying about their emoluments and get them help us out of our miserable situation? </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And what will the Royal Horticultural Society do? Let's hope they're going to raise an almighty stink about this. If they don't, they dam' well should, and now and without ceasing until the nonsense is nipped in the bud. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>We know that
DEFRA will probably be supine and continue to snooze gently while the
legislation goes through. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And probably, as gardeners, we’ll just moan a bit more, and then carry
on muddling through, somehow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And in time, the less mainstream plants will quietly disappear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, they’ll be flogged, one at a time, at
garden fêtes or from Women’s Institute stalls, or exchanged among garden clubs until,
like Gardeners Delight tomatoes, they’ll become denatured, variable, of dubious provenance and no
longer so desirable.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In time, we could see our gardens – both public and private – lose their uniquely
rich diversity and become drearily uniform. And this won't happen just from Penzance to Inverness, but also from Britain to
Bulgaria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How bloody awful, to have
one of our richest treasuries – our wonderful plant heritage – watered down to
a few hundred crappy cultivars which look OK in garden centres but have limited
garden value and are exactly the same, anyway, as what grows in every garden in the street and in every park as well. What a terrible thought! I hope I'll be digging in God's little acre, by the time that happens!</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZOgvZVrHdksKotx1_9jmTrHqUZcHZfQAmqjnf11c287C6AEqVdojR_XvwaY5Qb_c6AQZmx475j6kWC1rcaKbUyV4DcekUOlgi5GEXZyB9a9U7buedmNSstIgAeiaC-qFRxLqu_aVbmA0/s1600/Woodanem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZOgvZVrHdksKotx1_9jmTrHqUZcHZfQAmqjnf11c287C6AEqVdojR_XvwaY5Qb_c6AQZmx475j6kWC1rcaKbUyV4DcekUOlgi5GEXZyB9a9U7buedmNSstIgAeiaC-qFRxLqu_aVbmA0/s640/Woodanem.jpg" width="550" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #8e7cc3;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><b> </b><i>Anemone nemorosa </i>'Parlez-Vous' - a cultivar of quiet beauty, probably only of interest to a few gardeners. But I wouldn't be without it, or without a dozen other wood anemone cultivars.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>I'm listening to </b>Benjamin B</span>ritten's extraordinarily bouncy-rhythmed festival cantata <i>Rejoice in the Lamb.</i> <br />
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<b>This week's film, </b>in honour of the recent date was <i>Battle of Britain. </i>When released in 1969, this film was unkindly received. But it has lasted well and is a reasonably accurate telling of Britain's invasion crisis, in September 1940, averted by our gaining air supremacy over the Luftwaffe. Olivier's portrayal of Dowding was, for once, under-played and utterly convincing.<br />
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Hang onto your fancy plants - the grey men are coming to get them!<br />
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-26370606578648924132013-09-06T17:40:00.002+01:002013-09-06T17:42:40.784+01:00A NIGHT AT THE LEPIDOPTERA<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Sorry but, yes – yet another butterfly picture. But but he who tires of such darling winged jewels must surely be flyered of tife. Get yourself outdoors, now, while there are still a few on the wing and admire their co-ordinated colour schemes and the gliding flight that some of them manage. And what about those intricate, watch-spring probosces which coil and uncoil and can be inserted into the tiny Buddleia flowers with such alarming accuracy?</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3cMB9-Mu8rNznVQ_StzFTS2A6aGVcZSAYSCa0TVanci3T5qtQBYWuYyNJq_hEVuN51ZQA221jlgYyViE3qN7wGBsnTrOBmW1nwyYL5Prs9lsJzdUZbtaXw3UUeQrgD9_Kb02kDbgL2Mc/s1600/Tort1W.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3cMB9-Mu8rNznVQ_StzFTS2A6aGVcZSAYSCa0TVanci3T5qtQBYWuYyNJq_hEVuN51ZQA221jlgYyViE3qN7wGBsnTrOBmW1nwyYL5Prs9lsJzdUZbtaXw3UUeQrgD9_Kb02kDbgL2Mc/s640/Tort1W.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Small Tortoiseshell <i>Aglais urticae</i> sips nectar from <i>Buddleja davidii</i> 'Nanho Blue'</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Winter will be here soon enough and then we'll dream of butterflies. Some of us will long to see buddelias bloom again, and to enjoy their slightly cheap, Fry's Chocolate Creme fragrance. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">(Sorry, but I really hate calling the Rev. Adam Buddle's plants 'buddlejas.' I've even heard people pronounce them 'bud-<i>lee</i>-jiahs' which really won't do. It's worse than calling 'scones' 'scones' or 'vahses' 'vorses' – or vice-versa. The correct genus name, arrived at by some pedant or other, may be <i>Buddleja</i> but everyone calls them buddleias, don't they? Besides, Latin lacks the letter 'J' doesn't it? Hence the schoolboy rhyme:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Caesar ad sum iam forte,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Pompey ad erat.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Caesar sic in omnibus,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Pompey sic in at.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> . . . th</span><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">ough it only works if you use the anglicised name for Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus)</span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">A-a-anyway . . .back to butterflies. Like so many people on the look-out for nature, this summer, the PG and I have been bowled over time and again by so many joyous butterfly sightings that it seems wrong not to mention them again. Stars for us, this year, were more White Admirals than I've seen in a lifetime; a Green Hairstreak, Clouded Yellows, Graylings and in our own mini-meadow – after missing them for a year – Common Blues of both sexes. We hope they've bred but have no idea whether there was any of the necessary hanky-panky.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Also 'on the pin' in his collection, my brother showed me a number of aberrant Camberwell Beauties. These would have been caught, killed, set and then mounted in an insect cabinet. But that was in an earlier era when collecting <i>Lepidoptera</i> was a noble pursuit. How I would love to see that gorgeously cream-edged, purple beauty, <i>Aglais antiopa, </i>on the wing. One day, perhaps.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">A not-too-brilliant shot of one of the white admirals, <i>Limenitis</i> <i>camilla,</i> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"> feeding on hemp agrimony in Holkham Pinewoods, Norfolk, in early August. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Butterflies punch above their weight, in the line of beauty. Few other insects cause the heart to sing so joyously – especially when one spots an unusual one. Some are herald insects, too. The year's first Orange Tip tells us that spring is truly come; Ringlets appear in the first week in July, usually when it's close and thundery; peacocks hang about my potting shed when autumn days lose their charm but fly out again, if the late sun coaxes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Most of us admire only the adult butterfly or <i>imago</i> but the pupa of a Peacock which hangs from its tail, is an object of intricate loveliness. And a Large White chrysalis, which props itself upright with a thin silk girdle attached to at vertical surface is also to be admired even though the caterpillar has probably ransacked your broccoli. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">A world without butterflies would be a hellish place. We should strive to preserve such vulnerable insects.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">The rose 'Compassion' and <i>Clematis viticella </i>'Betty Corning,' both of which are fragrant and both of which produce flowers for much of the summer. These adorn the arch which leads into our tiny woodland garden.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>I'm listening to </b>Neil Mackie singing Benjamin Britten's <i>Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings</i>. There are worse ways to enjoy Tennyson <i>et al</i> and the music is sublime – Barry Tuckwell is the fruity tooter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>This Day in 2006 </b>the PG and I were in South Africa and flew to from Port Elizabeth to Nelspruit for a few days in the Kruger. We stayed on the banks of the Crocodile River, looking into the National Park. Elephants were at the river edge, two species of bee eater were nesting in the banks, as well as goliath heron. Hippos serenaded us with their grunts each night and gave us a reveille every morning, often accompanied by the haunting calls of African Fish Eagles. What a wonderful place it was </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Here's a brief, unedited diary extract. </span><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">After our arrival and a rushed
lunch, we joined with two other people and boarded an open vehicle for our
first game drive to the Kruger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Our guide, David, who was born in Zimbabwe, turned out to be as good as
any we’d had and managed to find plenty of game. We began with the fairly
obvious antelope, wart hogs, elephants and rhino and soon found a large male
lion, bloated with a recent kill and fast asleep with all his legs in the
air.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We saw Lilac Breasted
Rollers, Tawny Eagles and a Pale Chanting Goshawk.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"> <b>This week's </b></span><b>film was</b> <i>Cloud Atlas </i>– a strange, multi-genre, multi-age tale of love crossing the the ages. Parts were trashy action movie, others were grisly, futuristic Scifi; much of it was spectacular. If I had to give an Oscar, it would be to the make-up and prothesis artists. I enjoyed it greatly, but can't quite understand why.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Oh, and our elder twins are 40 today. Happy birthday to them.</b> </span></span></div>
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Bye Bye - and thank you so much for reading this aimless ramble.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b> </b></span>Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-33376672230040246082013-08-21T12:37:00.000+01:002013-08-22T09:43:37.178+01:00NOT DEAD - MERELY ASLEEP<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Well goodness me! Hullo!<br />
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<span style="color: #bf9000;">Wheat, heavy in the ear and ready for harvest on Hacconby Fen.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #bf9000;">(<i>click on pix for a larger view</i>) </span></div>
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Now then. . .<br />
The more observant among you will have noticed that this blog has been inactive since April. No doubt, you'll have leafed through the back posts – for lack of anything else to see – and probably sighed with disappointment at the absence of any new material.<br />
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It has been an inexcusable neglect, caused by long-running industrial action leading to a lock-out by the SILVERTREEDAZE production team who complained that their pay of £0.00 per hour, coupled with a <b>zero hours contract</b> was NOT a basis on which to develop a happy working relationship.<br />
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But I'm delighted to announce that after lengthy negotiations, much beer and sandwiches and a re-shuffle, their Union Leaders have agreed to accept a 50% increase to the hourly rate with a minimum number of hours guaranteed.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #cc0000;">As a result, this blog is to be relaunched in EARLY SEPTEMBER.</span></span><br />
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Unlike the Norwegian Blue Parrot, it will not be dead. It will not have ceased to be. A phoenix-like fiery birth, from the ashes of neglect, will excite, inspire and enthuse you.<br />
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<span style="color: #134f5c;"><i> Eryngium giganteum</i> and <i>Digitalis lanata </i>looking pretty in our hot, dry zone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">We'll post<b> PRETTY PICTURES</b> – maintaining the tradition of the images being completely irrelevant, much of the time.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-size: large;">We will talk <b>gardens, fads and flarze. </b>And we'll keep covering nature, wherever we find anything interesting. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">This has been a bountiful summer for butterflies. Peacocks are flocking, in our garden and the common blues are back in the mini-meadow. But the peacocks above hatched in Norfolk and were feasting, early in August, on wild hemp agrimony, <i>Eupatorium cannabinum</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: large;">There'll be a brand new, occasional feature: </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Hot extracts from my personal diary will appear, from time to time, as separate posts</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-size: large;">There will be more <b>RANTS</b>, of course. There is, after all, plenty to be cross about! </span><br />
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For instance, it was recently announced that fresh <b>Eggs</b> will no longer be served in the Houses of Parliament. 'Elf and Safety' have banned them from Westminster Palace's eateries, unless they have previously been removed from the shells, in a factory, pasteurised, blended into a disturbing yellowish gloop and re-packaged for caterers. That, apparently, is safer and more wholesome than nature's exquisitely sculpted ovaloids, dropped fresh, pure and seamlessly packaged from the chicken's bottom.<br />
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Those of us who are neither peers – manufactured or born – nor elected MPs, may continue to eat fresh eggs, cooked in any way we want. <br />
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The ban raises a couple of amusing questions: If fresh eggs are unsafe, as Elf 'n' Doodah suggest, why is it fine for the rest of us to eat them? Is it because MPs all lead pure, uncorrupted and irreproachable lives within the sanctified environs of Westminster, whereas we peasants and plebs are accustomed to wallowing around the the cack?<br />
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Either way, the ban seems to be bloody silly. Besides, you'd think Parliament would avoid the subject of eggs altogether, after the 'Curried Egg Fiasco' of earlier, Tory years.<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;"> An amusing 'coleus shelf' on a wall at the magnificent Easton Walled Gardens, Lincolnshire.</span></div>
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Please, please, <i>please</i> be sweet enough to give us all at SILVERTREEDAZE another visit. And keep on coming back.<br />
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Posts will be announced on Twitter – @plantmadnige – and your comments, rude or otherwise, will be eagerly awaited.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The fun begins in EARLY SEPTEMBER</span>. Be there!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Please! <span style="font-size: x-small;">Please! <span style="font-size: xx-small;">Oh, go on, please!</span></span></span></div>
Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-83565358475721338392013-04-05T12:28:00.000+01:002013-04-05T12:28:40.266+01:00A BIRD IN THE BOSCH<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
So much for that brave 2013 resolution to write regular posts, perhaps even weekly. <br />
I'm told that if you don't feed a website or blog on an almost daily basis, no one comes. But if I've learned anything, in a relatively long life, it's that 'received wisdom' is not always wise. So I'll bash on regardless. But sorry, if you've missed these insane rants. Abnormal service will be resumed forthwith – possibly.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ice on our mini-pond at breakfast time this morning. Disgraceful weather for April</td></tr>
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First, the weather.<br />
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I blame government incompetence, for the current freezing conditions and demand a Parliamentary inquiry, now. I want to see weather forecasters – except the incomparable Liam Dutton – made to squirm in front of stern questions from indignant MP committee members who are desperate to make themselves look angry, superior, sorrowful, scandalised and televisual, all at the same time. (It was a dark day for democracy, when they decided to broadcast parliament on TV)<br />
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I append snowdrops, shot this morning - and about as appropriate in April and Christmas pudding is in July. Shocking and outrageous.<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;">Snowdrops - <i>Galanthus plicatus</i> on 5th April in my garden. Outrageous weather! </span></div>
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And now this. . . .<br />On a more serious note, a remark or two about the <b>Neonicotinoid</b> <b>Issue</b>. Almost everyone now knows that there is increasing scientific evidence that neonicotinoid-based insecticides adversely affect bee populations by altering their behaviour patterns. However, no one has demonstrated <i>how</i> this actually happens and although evidence is mounting, full, unequivocal proof is still wanting. (<span style="color: #cc0000;">Please don't get cross until you've read to the end of this section</span>.)<br />
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That bees are ailing is beyond all doubt. And it is highly likely that neonicotinoids are one of the causes of this disastrous problem.<br />
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But it's important not to make the assumption that if the chemicals are banned, all will be well with the bees. That is dangerous territory. There are so many other contributing causes of decline in pollinator populations, including the serious biggy, habitat loss. And there are still a great many unexplained population crashes in other species - a prime example being the urban house sparrow.<br />
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It seems blindingly obvious that in light of increasing evidence, neonicotinoids are far to risky to use, both in agriculture and in private gardens. It makes no sense at all not to suspend their use forthwith, until the picture become clearer. <br />
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To prohibit their use in gardens, while permitting them on farmland suggests either profound ignorance or, and more likely, a pot shot at a weaker target than the disproportionately strong farming lobby. Bees will be feeding extensively on oilseed rape flowers next month, for example, and will be greatly at risk to neonicotinoid exposure.<br />
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While a ban is in place, researchers can continue to search for provable links between the chemicals and the bee problems. And when there is <i>conclusive</i> <i>proof</i> one way or the other, the chemicals could be reinstated or permanently banned. <br />
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Organic growers and some environmentally minded people will, of course, disapprove of their use regardless of possible impact on bees. But it is important to bear in mind that most of Britain's farmers will continue to use pesticides. And if they do not use neonicotinoids, they will turn to other products which may be less harmful, but could also be worse.<br />
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The Ypres Salient – Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendaele. Monochrome seemed a better medium.</div>
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<b>I'm listening to </b>Delius - <i>A Walk in the Paradise Garden</i>, in the hopes of forgetting how absolutely poisonous the weather is outside.<br />
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<b>Just over a week ago, </b> I was with my younger son in Belgium. We stayed in Brugge and made a brief pilgrimage to Ypres to visit some of the battleground sites and the magnificently restored Cloth Hall, in the centre of the town. The hall is now home to the In <a href="http://www.inflandersfields.be/en">Flanders Fields Museum</a>. We wept, a little, particuarly at the Essex Farm Cemetery, over the grave of a boy killed in action. He was fifteen years old. And we wept more, after the deeply moving Last Post ceremony at Menin Gate. Mawkish? Probably, a bit, but . . . well, more on this, possibly one day later.<br />
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<span style="color: #783f04;">An iPhone picture of people gathering for the Last Post memorial ceremony under Menin Gate, Ypres. Several hundred people attend daily, as they have for almost a century since 11th November 1918</span><br />
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<b>Instead of the week's film - this: </b><br />
The collection of early Flemish paintings, in Brugge's <a href="http://www.brugge.be/internet/en/musea/Groeningemuseum-Arentshuis/Groeningemuseum/index.htm">Groenigemuseum</a> is utterly, mind-blowingly wonderful. If you ever go to Belgium, this is an absolute, utter must must must see. And I'm talking Bosch, here, but not absolutely not bosh! <br />
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Thanks for reading this. Sorry for such a long absence!<br />
Byee!<br />
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-37610905967236440632013-01-28T17:05:00.000+00:002013-01-29T06:34:05.537+00:00A SERENDIPITOUS ALBATROSS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
How lovely it was, to see a proper snow cover in such soft, pearly light earlier this month. The skies over our fen, on 21st January, were almost as featureless as the ground and certainly darker in colour. How often, even on a sea-scape, is the daylight sky darker than the ground? Part of the ethereal effect was caused by the lightest and most uniform of mists. Calming, dreamy, heavenly!<br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">Snow round our way 1. Hacconby Fen on 21st January. </span></div>
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<b>Glad tidings. . .</b><br />
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According to Michael McCarthy, Nature Correspondent for <i>The Independent </i>newspaper, the tiny policing unit which, until recently, had a keenly honed axe poised above its skinny neck, will not be part of the current round of token austerity cuts. (More detail<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/soaring-emotion-in-the-silent-music-that-is-falling-snow-8463822.html?origin=internalSearch"> here</a> as a tail piece to his delightful article on fieldfares.)<br />
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The budget for this little policing unit is minuscule when you consider what policing can cost. But its function is of incalculable value to wildlife conservation and therefore of great importance to everyone, including nature-haters and even economists.<br />
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The NWCU was set up to prevent, or to catch the perpetrators of such calumnies as shooting and poisoning rare raptors, nicking the eggs of threatened bird species, ransacking protected habitats and a lot more besides.<br />
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We should, no doubt, thank some deity or other for the Unit's current
salvation but according to Mr McCarthy, the decision came from Richard Benyon, Wildlife
Minister at DEFRA.<br />
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That's wonderful news but a little surprising. It was, after all, the keen field-sportsman Mr Benyon who, last October refused to outlaw the possession, in England, of carbofuran, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/fury-at-minister-richard-benyons-astounding-refusal-to-ban-deadly-bird-poison-8215803.html">a toxin popular among bird poisoners</a> and already outlawed in Scotland. It's good – though unusual – to see something worthwhile coming out of DEFRA, for a change<br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;"> </span><span style="color: #0b5394;"> <span style="color: #0b5394;">Snow round our way 2. T</span>rees' were painted in starkly contrasting tones by snow adhering to their limbs and branches.</span><br />
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<b>Paradise lost. . .</b><br />
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Speaking of aquatics, I recall, as a boy, looking for the rare wild Water Soldier, <i>Stratiotes aloides</i> which grew in a neglected stretch of the Great Ouse known as the Old West River. We never found it – though every time we tramped the riverside washes from Ely to where the Ouse parts company with the Cam, the wildlife we observed was constantly amazing.<br />
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I heard my first drumming snipe, on those wet meadows – I must have been about fourteen – and discovered meadow rue, water violets and once, green winged orchids. These grew on the drier, higher stretches, not far from where cowslips bloomed in the turf of a long-abandoned apple orchard. <br />
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How much of that wildlife remains? Not a lot. Many of the meadows over which we roamed have been built on. Some people describe such land as 'developed' but to me it's lost, wasted, gone. Little, ticky-tacky boxes with neat fronts, Sunday-valeted cars and Sky TV. And if a cowslip should dare to pop up, in the manicured verges, it will either be mown off or blotted out by well-meant but ugly splurges of big hybrid naff daffs.<br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;"> <span style="color: #0b5394;">Snow round our way3. The view from our kitchen window.</span></span></div>
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<b>Fudgetastic. . .</b><br />
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The PG and I visited north Norfolk for a couple of days, for a bit of punishing exposure to the north-east wind and in the hopes of spotting a few respectable birds. We were not disappointed. The very first I saw, for instance, at Titchwell RSPB reserve was a brambling and the most unusual, for midwinter, was a green sandpiper.<br />
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But the bird which gave a surge of Joy was neither – it was a fulmar.<br />
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The most wonderful coastal features, between Sheringham and Cromer, are the cliffs. These are not proper cliffs, towering majestically and holding the sea and bay with indestructible granite or steadfast slate. No no. These cliffs are tired, folded, collapsible and insubstantial – a bit like this garrulous blogger! Made of glacial till, they have the consistency of fudge – not the bendy fudge that is offered, for example, at Sheringham's sweet shop Fudgestastic – but the crumbly kind you make at home.<br />
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You can dig out the sandy material of these cliffs with a lollipop stick – or, if you're American, a popsicle stick. So it's not surprising that Sand martins colonise them every summer. You can see hundreds of the small, brownish birds gliding and soaring up and over the cliffs.<br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">The glacial cliffs at Beeston Regis, on the north Norfolk coast. Many a Sunday afternoon was spent on this beach, in one's tender years, often in a glacial east wind. (Beeston Hall School is a short walk inland.)</span><br />
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When we were young, fulmars also
nested in the cliffs. They're are related to albatrosses and glide on curiously
straight wings. They're grey above and white below – like so many sea
birds – but unmistakeable in flight. And if studied through binoculars, <a href="http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/f/fulmar/index.aspx">fulmars</a>
have the most exquisitely beautiful dark eyes. It's almost as if
they've dabbed a little eye-shadow on, just to look more alluring.<br />
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Every
year, after I'd grown up and moved away from that part of the world, I'd try
to get back from time to time, partly for nostalgia but also to see the
fulmars.<br />
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And then, one year, they vanished. Sand eel populations in the North Sea crashed and those lovely creatures stopped coming. Like little terns, guillemots, puffins and a number of vulnerable seabirds, their population suffered.<br />
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I gave up looking for them, after a while, but always felt a pang of sadness if we visited the Beeston or West Runton beaches in summer. One would glance at every passing gull, in the hopes of seeing straight wings – but always in vain.<br />
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But this year . . . well, here's what I wrote in my diary on 9th January: <br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">The fulmars are back! We saw two, cruising the cliffs above the grey, rising tide. All so beautiful along the crumbling cliff edges which seem as soft as ordinary soil. And the break-waters make a dark, hard, contrasting pattern along the waterside – strikingly beautiful because it echoes the line of the cliff but in geometric terms. And with the waves showing how the timber dissipates their strength, the picture becomes perfected. So lovely, so stark, so Norfolk. I’d love to live here again.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">Sea defences. The cliffs, composed of sandy glacial till, are weak and crumbly, hence the breakwaters, constructed soon after I had moved away. The cliffs' current outline bears no resemblence to the tucks and folds that I remember, back in the 1950s. The coastline has retreated several metres in nearly 60 years.</span><br />
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<b>I'm listening to </b>a concerto for Erhu and orchestra 'Gazing at the Moon' played by the Shanghai Chinese Folk Orchestra. It is calming, lyrical and lovely. The erhu seems to have the sweetness of a violin but the guts of a viola. If you haven't listened to one, other than as background in a Chinese restaurant, I cannot recommend it highly enough.<br />
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<b>This week's film was </b>a cleaned up, Blu-ray edition of <i>Gone With the Wind</i>: four hours of Southern saga. Recollections of the French and Saunders spoof made us giggle at inappropriate moments and I was struck by how much, at certain angles, <i>Vivien Leigh</i> resembles The Duchess of Cambridge. But it's a fantastically glorious film and on Blu-ray the picture quality was quite good. The sound was utter crap, though.<br />
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Bye bye, for now.</div>
Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-47114259917030199042013-01-18T16:58:00.000+00:002013-01-18T16:58:33.628+00:00WE HAD A FREEZE-UP KNEES-UP AND FELL FLAT ON OUR FACES.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: blue;">Greetings to all! This is an interim post - a mini-blog of spectacular worthlessness.</span><br />
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This afternoon, in a driving east wind with fine snow stinging our faces and a temperature of minus 2ºC nipping our fingers – despite Thinsulate gloves – the PG and I trudged for about a mile down to the fen, gave up and limped home. <br />
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One surprising experience, while walking through the village, was to hear the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nDLF2fxoWQ">'teacher-teacher-teacher'</a> song of a great tit. They don't usually start tuning up, round here, until days are noticeably lengthening. So to hear one in sub-zero weather an driving snow was hugely up-cheering. But I couldn't help wondering whether the bird was singing in desperation, trying to forget that he was cold and hungry – a sort of 'not waving but drowning' situation.<br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">The PG has made marmalade and we have a haggis penned up. That equals total contentment, for January, provided one can skulk in the house and flirt with the wood stove all day.</span><br />
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I'm extremely worried - as we all should be – about bees. <br />
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I listened to an item on BBC Radio 4's <i>Farming Today</i> recently about the government''s plans for addressing the crash in bee populations. It seems that the responsibility for honey bees, in Britain, has been handed over from DEFRA – the megaministry responsible for food, farming, fish, environment and what little is left of our wildlife – to, um, FERA, the Food and Environment Research Agency. <br />
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But FERA - is a part of DEFRA, so it's hard to see what the transfer means. If you want to be depressed, not just about the terrible situation bees and other pollinators are in, but about what DEFRA-FEERA seem to be doing about it, read the press release <a href="http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/2013/01/10/boost-for-bee-health/">here</a>.<br />
<br />FERRADEF's proposals are in the right direction, but pretty limited. They'll increase efforts to manage the parasitic Varroa mite; they'll renew watchfulness for nasty new alien bee-pests and of course, there'll be more bossiness and interference or in their words, 'developing a welfare code for bee keepers.'<br />
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At the same time, they're going to reward good bee keepers by REDUCING the number of official inspections of their premises.<br />
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Well done!<br />
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During the item, on <i>Farming Today</i>, not a single mention was made, of habitat loss. We didn't hear anyone from DRAFE-EARF regretting the mindless destruction of wild flora by verge clipping, of the demise of other pollinators or of how land owners, local authorities, village busybodies, the CPRE and other well-meaning bodies appear blind to the desperate shortage of plants which carry nectar and pollen.<br />
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We are losing biodiversity all over the country, on roadsides, along railway tracks, in villages, in waste spaces – in all places where land is not specifically designated for a particular use. <br />
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We all need to learn to love grotty corners, unused bits of space, scruffy hedges, self-generated woody zones, boggy spots, unkempt ponds and so on.Those are the places where bees and other pollinators can feed. That's where cuckoos can find caterpillars. Grass snakes can lodge in such places, ragged robin can flower in the damp; herb Robert will bloom in the dry. When I was a boy, such places abounded and were teaming with life. Since then, most of those little paradise spots have been tidied away.<br />
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<b>I'm listening to </b>my son having a video conference.<br />
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<b>This day in 2006 </b>I was interviewing Julia Clements, the flower arranger whose career was launched during World War Two and who, when invited to lecture in the USA, made herself a dress from old curtains.<br />
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<b>This Week's Film was </b><i>Winter's Bone. </i>Directed by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0335138/" itemprop="director">Debra Granik</a> who co-wrote with
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1367893/">Anne Rosellini</a>. it's a bleak story, set in the wilds of Missouri, in the Ozarks. A brutal tale and yet among the violence, a theme of goodness, kindness and loyalty. The directing, photography, acting and screenplay were, I thought absolutely superb. <br />
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Not such a miniblog, after all, but still spectacularly worthless. More soon, meanwhile, thanks for reading!<br />
Bye bye, <br />
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-13442155684545537162013-01-04T17:05:00.000+00:002013-01-04T17:25:43.913+00:00MY QUOTIDIEN WAS HORRIBLY SCUFFED<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: #b45f06;">Bonne Année! – as they say over the Channel. May your 2013 be a regular beauty with a little less rain, a forward but gentle spring, a more gorgeously lounging summer than last year and hopefully, fewer political and administrative omnishambleses than we had to endure over the past twelvemonth.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;"> The recently thinned woods, near here, on a rosy afternoon during the festive break.</span></div>
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(Click on pictures for a larger view.)</div>
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I'd planned a spanky re-launch of this rather amateurish blog with a fresh, sexy design and so on, but after spending an afternoon fiddling with the wretched thing, found that I was quite unable to make the picture at the top stretch the whole way across the page.<br />
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So, thanks to the template being horribly inflexible, and to my hopeless inadequacy, we'll have to stay as we are. I don't like it, and I'm not that fond of Google any more, but there it is.<br />
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A SAD THING. . .<br />
After an association of one sort or another over thirty years, I've sort of retired from doing things for the RHS on a regular basis. I expect to be judging at some of their shows this year but days of pomp and self-dignification are gone at last.<br />
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I've loved almost every moment. The RHS is a wonderful society and much of what little I know about horticulture and gardening stems from it one way or another. We exhibited at RHS shows, when I ran a small nursery and later, writing up Chelsea for <i>The Garden, </i>in 1987 was one of my earlier journalistic tasks. Until then, the only national magazine I had written for was <i>Country Life </i>and even then, it was as more about agriculture and the countryside than gardening.<br />
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So I'm deeply grateful to the Society for all the fun I've had with them. And as a parting gift, from the lovely Tender Ornamental Plant Committee, and through the illustrious offices of the mighty <a href="http://mygarden.rhs.org.uk/members/Jim-Gardiner.aspx">Jim Gardiner,</a> I was given a bumper bundle of plants which included this clivia, a disturbingly tumid <i>Hippeastrum</i>, a flowering Christmas rose and, joy of joys, an absolutely gorgeous <i>Camellia sasanqua. </i>It was in flower, of course - they bloom from late autumn - and the fragrance, faintly reminiscent of gardenia, flirted with me all the way home from Wisley.<br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"><i>Clivia miniata</i> - a prezzie from the RHS, blooming its head off in our south-facing window.</span></div>
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A SILLY THING. . .<br />
Recently in London, the PG and I found ourselves in want of coffee and, after looking in vain for a non-chain, independent trader, fell into a <i>ersatz </i>olde worlde, clacky wooden, floorboardy establishment which calls itself, a bit pompously, <a href="http://www.lepainquotidien.co.uk/"><i>Le Pain Quotidien.</i></a> A jolly coincidence, that, because recently, I'd read somewhere that the English word 'quotidian' means daily and was thus able to swank that I knew the meaning.<br />
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A-a-anyway, having agreed mortgage terms for three coffees and two Danish pastries, the boy quickly returned with sizeable soup bowls, each full of an ocean of steaming, aromatic coffee but both <i>sans</i> handles. 'How much more would we have had to pay, for handles?'' I asked.<br />
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'But this is the way the French always drink coffee,' he retorted, looking, I thought, rather scornful.<br />
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Looking back, on countless French breakfasts, emergency stops at roadside bars for shots of espresso, asking for coffee mid afternoon<i> –</i> because the French are so hopeless at tea – nursing a 'demi-tasse' after dinner and so on, I have never seen coffee drunk from a vessel without a handle. I've even seen French persons dunking their croissants into huge cups at breakfast, but even those, I'm sure, had handles.<br />
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The bakery stuff, at Le Pain Quotidien, was delicious and the coffee superb, but if there is a next time, I must remember to take a soup spoon.<br />
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Two coffees to swim in, at <i>Le Pain Quotidien.</i></div>
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LOVELY THINGS...<br />
Joyous sights on our fen and in the garden. The first aconite, below, showed yellow on New Year's Eve.<br />
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Barn Owls have been hunting on the fen, ethereal and ghost-like, in the afternoon gloaming, but so cheering to see. Their triangular faces look so wise and their ability to hover in absolute silence is amazing.<br />
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And yesterday afternoon, the PG and I stopped our bikes to watch what at first we thought were greylag geese, flying quite low and heading for us from quite a distance. But as they got closer it was clear they were swans. Closer still, and it was also clear they were not galumphing great mute swans but migrants overwintering from the Tundra - but which? Bewick's or Whooper? Oddly, they were flying in complete silence but despite that, the extra long necks and light build suggested they must be <a href="http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/w/whooperswan/index.aspx">Whooper Swans</a>. Sevenbirds, in perfect, geometric formation, flying south-east of us and probably heading for the Ouse Washes. A lovely, lovely, heart-surging moment. And I didn't have a bloody camera!<br />
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The first winter aconite <i>Eranthis hyemalis, </i>in our garden, beneath a witch hazel.</div>
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<b>THIS WEEK'S FILM</b> was <i>The Help - </i>a story set in Jackson, Mississippi, about the brewing storm over Civil Rights in the southern states, in the late 1950s and early 60s. I was living in upstate New York, during the 60s and remember, vividly, the riots, the unrest and the fact that a close friend of mine was involved with the marches. It got pretty nasty with massive riots in Newark NJ, closer to home, in 1968.<br />
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Kathryn Stockett's novel was deftly transposed to a perfectly paced screenplay by Tate Taylor and made a powerful story, wonderfully shot. Small-town Mississippi looks so claustrophobic and yet, I'd love to see some of those places. Oh, and they played a Johnny Cash/June Carter duet, bless them!<br />
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I thought our recent extensive trip to less trodden parts of America would sate our curiosity, but it has had absolutely the opposite effect. I've even re-read that chap Sam Clemens's kiddie novel <i>Tom Sawyer -</i> first time since I was about ten.<br />
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<b>I'm listening to </b>Elgar's Piano Quintet.<br />
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<b>This day in 2004</b> the PG had 'flu and I was using a pickaxe to cut a trench into our yard so that I could plant a hornbeam hedge.<br />
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Happy New Year everyone. Bye bye!</div>
Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-16650368820163107242012-11-09T17:34:00.000+00:002012-11-09T17:39:23.851+00:00DOES MY CHALARA LOOK BIG IN THIS?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">Autumn trees by the River Hodder, in Lancashire not far from Clitheroe. Amazing what you stumble upon, when diverted from the soul-destroying M6. The angler looked cold but seemed to be enjoying himself. Shot on 31st. October, on a journey home from Blackpool where my brother and I had been on a mercy visit and to buy some Blackpool Rock - one of life's essentials. <b><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Click to make bigger.)</span></b></span><br />
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Good cheer to all who enter here! <br />
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Let's try to forget about Ash Dieback.<br />
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I said, forget it!<br />
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There, that wasn't difficult, was it?<br />
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CORE VALUES. <br />
Now. What's all this nonsense about Bramley Apples? Recently, those
grown in Armagh, Northern Ireland have been being granted an EU Special Protected Designation of Origin, putting them into a similar elite group to Champagne, Parma Ham, Stilton and – heaven help us! –
<a href="http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/2011/02/22/cornish-pasties-can%E2%80%99t-be-pirated-3/">Cornish pasties.</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.farminglife.com/news/armagh-bramley-apples-get-eu-protection-1-3609643">Armagh apples</a> are special, why? Because of the climate? Because of the soil they grow in? Sorry, but I don't buy a bar of all that. <br />
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If you lined up a tasting panel and served dishes of stewed Bramleys – or Bramley apple pie – made from fruit grown in Kent, Herefordshire, Lancashire and Armagh, would anyone have a clue which one comes from where? I suspect the whole thing is a lot of flim-flam.<br />
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Parma ham - from Parma – I grant you, has unique flavour, texture and quality
partly resulting from the area in which is is grown but mainly from the way the hams are
cured. If I were a Parma ham producer, in Italy, I'd resent someone from Spalding or Pamplona calling their product 'Parma' ham. But anyone with a tastebud would know the difference at the first bite, wouldn't they? And since the origin of the product has to be declared, the customers would know where the stuff comes from and base their choice on that. <br />
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Furthermore, this special designation lark doesn't create a level playing field. The French-based cheese company Président makes a holey cheese product which they are allowed to call 'Emmental' It's perfectly edible but just isn't like genuine Swiss cheese – its more rubbery and has a different, blander flavour. And it's not nearly so good in a fondue.<br />
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It's easy to see why local growers or producers would want their stuff to have a Specially Protected Designation but with most of the foods so designated, it makes not one jot of sense.<br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;">Fallen apples. One soon tires of cooked apple, I find – especially Bramleys. These ones fed the fielfares and attracted big slugs which the hedgehogs enjoyed. </span><br />
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And with Cornish pasties it's utterly bonkeroonies. I've eaten excellent pasties made hundreds of miles from Truo. They even produce them in my local town – but are tactful enough to call them 'Bournish Pasties. <br />
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I've also experienced terrible pasties made in the heart of the Duchy. Indeed, one that I particularly disliked, some years ago, was bought from Rick Stein's delicatessen in Padstow. It was excessively salty and had greasy, flaky pastry.<br />
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But I'd better balance that by saying that the finest and most beautifully made Cornish Pasties, a decade or two ago, were bought from Trevone Post Office. They were made by a small producer, I believe, and you had to order them in advance from two wonderful ladies who ran the post office in those days. They were called Pam-the-Post and Viv-the-Victuals and were as much operators of a valuable local social service, as they were businesswomen.<br />
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Getting back to those Bramleys - perhaps a gang of gardening journalists should get together and organise an adjudicated blind tasting of the cooked apples from the provenances mentioned above. If a significant number of tasters get the identities right, and find the Armagh apples distinctive, tastier and better for cooking than the other three counties, I'll eat my hat.<br />
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Meanwhile, on a personal note, may I say that I rather dislike Bramley's anyway. There are far better culinary varieties and for a lot of puddings – Tarte Tatin for instance – dessert varieties are much nicer, especially those which retain their integrity after cooking.<br />
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<b>I'm listening to </b>Vaughan Williams' opera <i>The Pilgrim's Progress. </i>We're off to see it at the London Coliseum next week, and I'm getting familiar with the music. Pretty good, so far. Quite a bit of 1940s Britten about parts of it.<br />
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<b>This day, in 1972, </b>was the day before our Wedding. Yes, that's right!<br />
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<b>This week's film was </b>Antonioni's 1950s <i>Il Grido</i>, a story of failed relationships after an unexpected betrayal by the protagonist's partner. It was shot in the depths of a miserable winter in the flatlands which flank the river Po. It's dark, despairing, depressing and I loved every scene.<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;"> <i>Aster</i> 'Little Carlow,' one of the best Michaelmas daisies currently available. Superb colour, extremely floriferous, mildew-resistant in my garden and satisfyingly longlasting.</span><br />
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Oh, by the way - how were your late perennials? We had a wonderful show – though not a decent piccy to post because we were abroad for the best bits. (I shot the above a couple of years ago.) Asters were never better, especally <i>Aster laevis </i>'Calliope' which grew 8 foot tall. I've also fallen for the low growing, long-flowering <i>A. asperula</i> which produces strange stems with branches held at big angles, separating the flowers but enabling you to enjoy each in detail. The broad foliage is pretty, too. Apart from that, and the equally short <i>A. thompsoniae</i> 'Nana' I prefer my Michaelmas daisies tall.<br />
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Golly, what a long ramble. If you read this far, I love you! Bye bye! <br />
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-64473786881736283452012-10-26T12:55:00.000+01:002012-10-26T12:55:03.911+01:00RETURNING BY POPULAR DEMAND<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Well thank you all <b>so much </b>for visiting, after my last, rather self-pitying post. By your hits, I'm inspired to continue.<br />
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Gardening soon - but first . . . a post mortem on our amazing American trip. And if any of it seems negative, that is absolutely NOT intended. I'd go back and carry on hoofing round that great country in a moment. And if I were invited to live in San Francisco, I think I'd go.<br />
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Now then, ahem, <br />
After a longish trip to any country, it takes time to distil memories of all the experiences and bundle them into a general impression. So when friends ask 'how was America' the answer is usually a lame retort such as 'fantastic' or 'wonderful' or 'fascinating.'<br />
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<span style="color: #783f04;">Cables holding up Brooklyn Bridge. You can walk over the bridge, but expect to be run down by bicycles. <b>Click on pix to enlarge.</b></span> <span style="color: red;"> (There may be a 'pictures only post,' later, when I've sorted the fancy ones.)</span><br />
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Surprising as it may seem, travel often reinforces prejudices, so you have to force yourself to keep re-opening your mind. Bumbling along in a series of trains, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, I found myself searching for people, places, attitudes and ambiences that would enable me to say, 'Aha – this is truly America.' That didn't happen.<br />
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At times, I could hardly believe this was the same country as the one I lived in for four years, back in the 1960s. I wanted to read the runes, take the pulse, measure progress and note significant changes. But getting a grip on such a vast and diverse nation is more challenging than knitting a sweater with spaghetti noodles and I came away as perplexed as I was enlightened. <br />
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There's so much paradox! On the one hand, the United States presents a model of democracy and governance, along with a robust judicial system, that sets a shining example to the world. On the other, health cover for a substantial portion of the population is hopelessly inadequate. Libraries, some of the universities – especially one's <i>alma mater </i>Cornell – and museums are among the finest on earth, and yet I was told that some 30 million Americans lack basic literacy skills. Can it be that many? <br />
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Then there's capital punishment – a barbarous and brutal practice, to most people in Europe. And what about those bizarre gun laws? And the suspiciously hefty influence on government from fundamentalist religions and from big business. That must be a worry.<br />
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<span style="color: #741b47;"> A poster in Sonoma, California. The obvious solution is to have oodles of both.</span></div>
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You won't want to be bored with too much detail and anyway, this blog is supposed to dwell on gardenish things. But before returning to rants about cooking apples, badger bashing and other blights, here's a goodie basket of 'impressions' whose flavours still linger on the palate. I'll give you ten, picked at random...<br />
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1. I love the way good American restaurants take breakfast as seriously as dinner. Well-made pancakes, maple syrup, thin, crisp streaky bacon, genuinely fresh orange juice and as much excellent coffee as you can take all help to make the day's first meal as pleasurable and sociable as posh wining and dining. British breakfasts, even when the food is good, tend to accompanied by brutish monosyllables and slurps of coffee..<br />
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2. The Presidential Election is neck and neck. And yet those who most desperately need a Democrat government, not to mention a healthy dose liberalism, seem the least likely to vote for Obama. Even the word 'liberal', to the uneducated, is synonymous with Marxist. Talk about turkeys giving a thumbs up for Christmas!<br />
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3. As in Europe, everything seems to be made in China.<br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;"> Retired bikers in Colorado.</span></div>
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4. Detroit is still churning out the most frightful vehicles – pick-up trucks the size of furniture lorries, SUV's of spectacular vulgarity and still quite a few big, smoochy things which look more suitable for sleeping in, rather than driving.<br />
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5. When your train trundles gently through the mid-West, from Chicago to Denver, you realise what a <i>huge</i> country this is. But it's surprising to see how few people actually live out of town. There isn't the dotting of villages that you'd see in, say, Hampshire or Champagne.<br />
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6. America has a staggering diversity of oaks, some evergreen, others deciduous; some less than a metre high, others huge; some with long, pointy acorns, others with snub-noses. Oaks are a significant landscape feature across the country.<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"> A tasteful restaurant sign in Silverton, Colorado.</span></div>
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7. Tipping – possibly America's worst vice. In the 1960s, one tipped waiters etc. roughly 10% of the bill. Today, you're expected to cough up 20%. In some restaurants, they helpfully add the gratuity to your bill without asking, as an item at the bottom, but when you pay, <b>your bill will not only list the gratuity but will also leave space for you to add another tip on top of the gratuity.</b> A TAXI DRIVER will sit in his cab without moving so much as an eyelash to help, while you struggle with your luggage, but he will still expect a tip. Tips, across the nation, blew our travel budget to pieces.<br />
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8. Americans fly an awful lot of flags. They're everywhere - a bit excessive, but perhaps we should wave ours a little more - and I mean the Union Flag, not that blue thing with a ring of stars.<br />
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9. The scenic regions of this continent - the Rockies, the High Plains, the woods in West Virginia and above all, the Californian Sierra Nevada are all movingly beautiful. See the Grand Canyon if you like – and it sure is impressive – but so much of America is infinitely more lovely and nearly as grand. And the Mississippi River, which I've now seen at both ends, so to speak, is awfully big.<br />
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10. I think I really <i>have</i> left my heart in San Francisco. Of all cities, it's the one in which I feel most relaxed, inspired and contented – <b>excluding Fishermans' Wharf</b>.<br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">A squirrel in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.</span></div>
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<b>I'm listening to </b>Rossini's <i>Stabat Mater</i><br />
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<b>On this day in 1985 </b>I swept a chimney which had begun to smoke badly, possibly because of jackdaw nests in the flue. An enormous pile of twigs, string and other 'jackdaw' treasures came tumbling down - enough to fill a large wheelbarrow. My diary says <span style="color: #b45f06;">'I lit an experimental fire after clearing up – it went beautifully with not a trace of smoke anywhere.' </span> And to think we'd paid to have a chimney sweep in. No wonder I bought my own rods and brushes and took over the task myself.<br />
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<b>This week's film was <i>La Haine</i> –</b> a masterpiece made in the 1990s by Mathieu Kassovitz about fear and loathing in the Paris suburbs. Brilliantly shot, slickly acted and immaculately edited, it's all the better for a second viewing and is one of the privileged DVDs to be stored, not in our general DVD heap but on THE SHELVES, in our telly room. (To have a place on THE SHELVES is quite something. Bergman's <i>Seventh Seal</i>, Welles's <i>Citizen Kane </i>and of course<i> Casablanca</i> are also on THE SHELVES.<br />
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Oh dear – another hideously long blog. Thanks so much, if you managed to get this far! </div>
Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-36130292173818800462012-10-11T02:12:00.002+01:002012-10-11T02:19:17.828+01:00CHASING A CALIFORNIA SISTER<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Well, folks, I think we're getting close to the end of the line in more than one sense. <br />
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The PG and I fly home tomorrow morning at some hideous hour so future blog posts – <b>if there are any more</b> – will be back to the usual rants about the exasperations of British gardening, the countryside and whatever else seems of import.<br />
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I say '<b>if there are any more</b>' because readership has slumped alarmingly, since we left the UK. A total of 43 of you have checked out the last post. That's a ten-fold drop on earlier, UK-based posts and is the first one that has failed to invite a single comment. So we'll see how things go, over the next few weeks. Perhaps I should do more reading, less writing and give everyone a break.</div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">Meadows bordering the Merced River at Yosemite, in the Sierra Nevada. The colours and background, apart from the mountain, looked exactly as they do in the film <i>Bambi. </i>The trees are mostly ponderosa pine, incense cedar and live (evergreen) oak. (Click on pics to enlarge.)</span></div>
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Meanwhile, I promised to mention our last big event which was to hike for three days in the Yosemite National Park. </div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;">The forest in Tuolumne County - part of the Yosemite National Park. The big sequoias grow in this area</span></div>
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The Sierra Nevada is a spectacularly beautiful mountain range and the Yosemite National Park has some of the stateliest peaks, grandest rock formations and the most interesting wildlife. We admired the big sequoias, though the trees are not as massive as I expected, and are certainly not looking in the best of health. But the forest in which they grow is magnificent. Sugar pines and Douglas firs grow huge, here and wherever there's a glade or a low-lying spot, lupins, rudbeckias, irises, <i>Veratrum</i>, <i>Smilacina</i> and lots of other familiar American herbaceous species flourish.</div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;">The view from near Columbia Rock, below Yosemite Falls. The sheer rock faces, lining the valleys give the scenery more grandeur than the Alps, in places. </span></div>
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We stayed at Yosemite Lodge, conveniently close to the fabled Yosemite Falls which, inconveniently, dried up shortly before our arrival. The whole earth, round here is dry and thirsty. We climbed the steep ascent to Columbia Rock, close to the top of the dry falls, exhausted but triumphant, at the top. We trailed to Mirror Lake which has dried up to a sandy beach and doesn't reflect at all, let alone act like a Mirror. <br />
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And we wandered along part of the Merced River, passing through meadows which are exactly like the animated drawings in the Walt Disney film <i>Bambi. </i>We even spotted a doe and her two part-grown fawns, grazing an hour or so before sunset.</div>
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<span style="color: #783f04;">A mule deer, near Yosemite Village. These animals are used to people but further away from human settlements, they're far more wary</span></div>
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Star wildlife species, for us, were the ravens, mule deer, California ground squirrels, acorn wood peckers, a canyon wren and a ravishingly beautiful butterfly like a European white admiral, but with extra colours, called a California Sister. I think we've also seen the closely related Arizona Sister, too. You can find these insects <a href="http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species/Adelpha-bredowii">here</a> .</div>
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Since traipsing about in Yosemite, we've been in San Francisco, eating, going to the California Academy of Sciences, and eating, going shopping for Ghirardelli's chocolate for favoured relatives, and eating, visiting the de Young Art Galleries, and eating, exploring the magnificent Golden Gate Park, and eating, travelling out to the Sonoma and Napa valleys to sample the wines, and eating. My belts have bust and I think I need to go shopping for a bra.</div>
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<span style="color: #bf9000;">While the sun sets, at Yosemite, the taller peaks light up like the rising moon, even though darkness has fallen below them. The effect is eerie but movingly beautiful.</span></div>
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<b>I'm listening to </b>Tony Bennett singing <i>I Left my Heart in San Francisco</i>. Cheezy, I know, but it sort of fits.</div>
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<b>Can't think of a film </b>this week - too depressed about terrible bloggins stats.</div>
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<b>This time next month</b>, Silvertreedaze will have had a re-vamp. It will either live or die. Meanwhile, I'm off to enjoy my last decent dry martini and to tuck into a farewell San Francisco dinner.</div>
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If you've read this far, I love you! Tell your friends that this blog is quite fun, at times. Oh, go on! Be a sport! You know you want to, really!</div>
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-58961657657475150812012-10-08T23:36:00.000+01:002012-10-09T15:01:31.034+01:00TARNISHED TINSEL <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Hullo from across the Atlantic!</div>
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In every trip – even one as exciting, fulfilling and pleasurable as this – there's a low point. Usually, that first discordant note jars at the point in one's travels when the thrill of arrival has worn off, but when the prospect of going home and sleeping in one's own familiar bed is still too far away to relish.</div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">Trains, in the US tend to be old, shabby and slow - the most comfortable way to see it all.</span></div>
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This trip has been different. The high points have towered so mightily that one has tended to view everything with starry-eyed wonder. We have immersed ourselves in American history, delved into the fascinating system of US governance, browsed a Founding Father's 18th century Library, gazed across millions of acres of maize and soya, growing in one of the world's biggest and most productive bread baskets - the plains of the mid-West.</div>
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We have crossed the mighty Mississippi, close to the Great Lakes; slummed for a night in Chicago where we visited the site of the Valentine's Day Massacre; and traversed some of America's most rugged, awe-inspiring and moving landscapes including the Rockies, the high sierras of Colorado, Utah and Arizona and the Grand Canyon. </div>
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And we have crossed the Mojave Desert to arrive at the low point. </div>
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Los Angeles itself is not a city, as such, but a disturbing dream. As our shabby Amtrak train crawled through well-watered, neat and appealing suburbs, we could see the yellow-brown pall of pollution marking where the conurbation lay. Hundreds of elegant, leggy, black-necked stilts and other wading birds were feeding in concreted water courses and along the arid tracks and there were fascinating desert plants clinging to life. But despite these natural attractions, it seemed clear that Los Angeles was to be 'got through' rather than enjoyed. </div>
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<span style="color: #783f04;">The incomparable Bogey, reduced to dabbling in wet cement. Why?</span></div>
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And as soon as we had disembarked, our guide seemed hell-bent in getting us away from Los Angeles itself and into Hollywood. There's a simple, catch-all word to sum up Hollywood – 'horrible.' Our guide droned on about films, film stars, property values, and great traditions. We were dragged out of our bus to see the disfigured concrete paving, outside the grotesque 'Chinese Theatre' where stars pushed hands, feet or other parts of their anatomies into the setting cement. And we were driven through Beverly Hills which seemed little more than a pretentious suburb with high hedges hiding nasty-looking houses. Apparently Marilyn Monroe bought one in secret, to escape to when the public were being too adoring. I wonder why no one suggested that to get away, she could have bought a cottage in Alaska for a fraction the price.</div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">The RMS Queen Mary, at Long Beach. Majestic from afar, but close-to, she's shabby, flaky and sad.</span><br />
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Thank goodness, our stay in Los Angeles lasted less than 24 hours, much of which was spent aboard the once glorious, now sadly delapidated and abused <i>RMS Queen Mary, </i>the liner (NOT cruise ship) in which I travelled to New York from Southampton in September 1964.<br />
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<b>But now we're in wonderful, glorious, delicious San Francisco and have also just had an AMAZINGLY delightful sojourn in the Sierra Nevada. More on that, soon.</b><br />
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<span style="color: #783f04;"> A San Francisco cable car like this, pulled by underground moving cables, is clanking by as I write this caption.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #274e13;">Dahlias grow this tall, in the San Francisco Botanic Garden. Note the correct plant-viewing gear, ie, shorts and stupid hat.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">The Golden Gate bridge, painted International Orange which makes it look as though they've done the primer but forgotten to add a top coat.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #073763;">Not seals – as stated in the some of the publicity blurb – but sea lions, slummocking at Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco is almost totally delightful. But Fisherman's Wharf is vile – a milling throng of slack-bellied gawping tourists, me included – bewildered by the astronomical prices and dismal quality of the food on offer there. It's such a shame because you can find superb restaurants to suit all pockets, in this city, often in delightful surroundings. But Fishermans' Wharf is somewhere to keep away from.</span></div>
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<b>I'm listening to </b>clanking cable cars, outside our hotel window near Union Square.</div>
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<b>This time next week</b> I'll be home, tweeting, writing newspaper copy and trying desperately to catch up in the poor, neglected garden</div>
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<b>This week's film mench </b>should be <i>Bullit</i>, since we've walked the road where part of the famous chase took place. But we're also two minutes walk from Union Square where Coppola's masterwork <i>The Conversation</i> was set.</div>
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More soon, from the Sierra Nevada where I flirted with an Arizona Lady and trod the meadow where Bambi lost his mother. Cue tears & happy childhood dreams!<br />
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Toodle-ooh, my lovelies. </div>
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-71345492214778352972012-10-03T18:27:00.002+01:002012-10-03T22:25:25.322+01:00IN LOVE WITH A DARK-EYED JUNCO<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
What ho, my hearties! And the usual, inevitable apology for being disgustingly late with postings about our perambulations across the big, wide USA.<br />
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We've hit the Pacific and thus, have completed our overland coast to coast journey. It's been bumpy, slow, varied and wonderful. The weather has been kind, Amtrak – one of America's more creaky institutions – has delivered us safely and we are now basking in California sun<br />
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There's no time for a detailed blog – the San Francisco cable car awaits – but I hope the picture captions will say enough, for now. I may write a detailed story and can assure you it will be a ripping yarn, but that will be for sale, possibly, as an iPad-friendly book.<br />
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Meanwhile, click on piccies for a bigger view.<br />
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Washington DC. Seems so long ago, now, but early in our holiday we wandered from memorial to memorial, looking at monuments to America's greatest sons and daughters. This is part of the F. D. Roosevelt memorial, showing men in the Depression, waiting in dole queues.<br />
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<span style="color: #660000;">If you're a gardener, Thomas Jefferson has to be your favourite Founding Father. We browsed the books in his library - an eclectic collection from philosophy, politics and science to horticulture and agriculture. Here, the PG is dwarfed by the massive classic columns in the Jefferson Memorial.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">In the Rocky Mountains, scenery is never more beautiful than in early fall, when the aspens change hue from dull green to bright gold and in some spots, burning amber. Here in Colorado, they contrast superbly with blue Colorado spruce, <i>Picea pungens </i>near the spectacular Red Mountain Pass between Grand Junction and Silverton.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">The rattletrap steam train, ancient and creaky but still in working order, takes us from Silverton to Durango, a journey which takes three and a half hours through spectacular scenery. This ain't the fens!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO-gGNZ0Mm4jnwPrpt_ft_fNVH8l6Ept_sHTgOTekvtJhXJ6e998cQWTBN2q1t_BcaUxm3NWOsXbgm8A0F2aJJwQAieZLHSbGknSwkRGJE7bseaCy9UpXWYTdisZZ-gdsksdCN_D-RB5A/s1600/MeteocratW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO-gGNZ0Mm4jnwPrpt_ft_fNVH8l6Ept_sHTgOTekvtJhXJ6e998cQWTBN2q1t_BcaUxm3NWOsXbgm8A0F2aJJwQAieZLHSbGknSwkRGJE7bseaCy9UpXWYTdisZZ-gdsksdCN_D-RB5A/s400/MeteocratW.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">The Barringer Meteor Crater, near Winslow, Arizona. You can find details of this amazing geological event <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;">The impact of the meteor would have been equivalent to a 20 megaton nuclear bomb and hurled massive rocks and debris up over the sides of the impact crater. This is sandstone, at the rim which was originally below ground at the point of impact.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cc0000;">Growing close to the crater, one of my favourite American wildflowers, <i>Castilleja</i> or Indian Paintbrush. These plants, related to yellow rattle and foxgloves, are hemiparasites, sustaining themselves partly on host plants, so are impossible, virtually, to cultivate in gardens outside America.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;">Despite being apparently barren, the desert teams with life. This is, I think, a Collared Lizard. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #783f04;">Monument valley - setting for so many Western films and subject of so many travel posters. It is virtually impossible to portray even a hint of its majestic beauty. They all rave about the Grand Canyon, saying that it might move you to tears but for me, these rock formations were the most dramatic, beautiful and, for some reason, remarkably moving. If I were a primitive man, instead of a de-sensitised, hedonistic, over-pampered modern one, I'd probably feel that big, big deities made this place their home. There is a Valhalla of sorts wherever you look. A mighty and literally awe-full place and it's apt that it's situated within and Indian reserve.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">And finally, the PG's masterly shot of the Grand Canyon, taken through the window of a deHavilland Twin Otter aircraft at a rather uncomfortably low altitude.</span><br />
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More soon.<br />
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<b>I'm listening to </b>the PG, nagging me to catch a San Francisco cable car.<br />
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<b>This time last year </b>we were not in the USA.<br />
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<b>Today's film </b>has to be <i>Stagecoach</i><b>, </b>starring John Wayne. He couldn't act - and walked as if he'd recently had a small, personal accident, but the scenery in the film was as good in black and white as it is in the picture above, of Monument Valley.<br />
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Bye bye - more soon, posssibly! <br />
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<b>By the way - if you don't know what a Dark Eyed Junco is, look it up!</b></div>
Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-89199475973917510732012-09-17T13:52:00.000+01:002012-09-17T22:58:00.114+01:00YO DAT WORLD!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Good morrow, good friends! And welcome to the United States of America, and to Gotham City, known in some circles as New York.</div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">Thought you'd like a familiar piccy to begin with – shot by the PG on a Circle Line tour of the Hudson River, Staten Island and so on. She must suffer terribly from aching arms, poor dear! We admired her while being transported on a Circle Line Tour of the harbour, Hudson River and Staten Island. It's the best way to see the city skylines but when I was here in the 1960s, the piers all along Manhattan were full of large passenger liners. The Cunard Queens did a weekly shuttle. But now, it's largely a tourist area with some wharves left to rot and others occupied <i>USS</i> <i>Intrepid</i>, a WW2 aircraft carrier and on one quay, a Concorde is parked.</span><br />
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I promised to report on whether New Yorkers are as rude today as they were when I lived in this state in the 1960s. I didn't expect to provide a clear answer but can tell you now, after extensive study of shop workers, dog walkers, shoppers, restaurateurs and general passersby that they are not. Not rude at all. In fact I believe, now, that London is up there in the world's leading cities for rudeness and that NY has transformed over the past 44 years. (44!!)<br />
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We've had a wonderful three days, here and take the train to Washington today. A full day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a day touring the city with a group part of yesterday visiting the site of the appalling destruction of the World Trade Centre.<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;">Central Park, 850 acres of greenery, forged out of the schist rock which makes up the island of Manhattan. It's been hot and dry, here, but the greens are still restful and the park is popular.</span></div>
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We were staying in Upper West Side Manhattan, close to the park on Broadway and 75th. so were able to walk through the greenery to the Met. The collection is staggering, so here's an edited extract from my diary:</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #660000;">What an experience. So much to see and so many reactions. A few special memories stick. The perfection of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture, the fakeness and crapness of Andy Warhol’s shallow prints, the complexity of compelling weirdness of Jackson Pollack, the simple beauty of Miriam Schapiro’s huge Barcelona Fan and the cleverness - let’s not say gimmickry - of Anish Kapoor’s reflecting le</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We spent time in the</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Roman, modern art downstairs and then American section, before lunch, looking at the classic American style developing after Europe’s love affair with all things Greek or Roman.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And noted the contrast between simple Shaker style interiors and those of wealthy tycoons of the 19th and early 20th Century industrial booms.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And we looked at far too many disturbing creations by Tiffany - not my fave at all, though I like the dogwood stained glass. And as for irises - the famous ones by Van Gogh, glass ones by Tiffany and an uncomfortable close-up of an iris, by Gorgia O’ Keefe which resembles a lady's most intimate sanctuary.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then, the Moderns.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They’re all there, from pre-impressionists to nutty splodgers.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I loved the two Hockneys, the usual suspects Matisse, Gauguin, Monet, Cezanne and so on are there in spades, and with magnificent examples from each.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I hated the Warhols but was almost moved, surprisingly, by the Jackson Pollocks.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They look like abstracts but there’s so much to see in them.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Weeping figures, eyes, simple squiggles which describe something human. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"> Barcelona Fan by Miriam Schapiro</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">The PG studies Manship's bears. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">Barbara Hepworth at the Met. Oval Form with Strings and Colour.</span></div>
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Our last day was spent at the World trade centre. We took the subway to Brooklyn and walked over Brooklyn Bridge back to the bottom end of Manhattan. That, in itself, is a delightful experience, apart from the noise of the traffic. The distant views are cris-crossed with cables supporting the bridge, creating pleasing geometric patterns. But you cannot wander off the narrow pedestrian track because cyclists crossing the bridge take no prisoners.</div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">The PGs Shot of Brooklyn Bridge looking across at lower Manhattan</span></div>
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At the 9/11 Memorial Garden, we were frisked and subjected to Airport style security before being allowed into the open space where the massive buildings had stood before the attack. The area is planted with native White Swamp Oaks, a common endemic in the Easten USA with straight trunks, rough bark, handsome, lobed leaves and plump acorns.<br />
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Where the buildings stood are square pits. Each is now the site of a sort of inverted fountain - massive 30ft waterfalls, run down all four sides into a pool deep below. Along the rims of the fountain are wide sills, made of bronze and carved with the names of almost 3,000 victims of the Al Quaida attack.<br />
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The stark simplicity of this site is deeply moving but also strangely uplifting. There's a note of steady defiance about the lack of adornment and the absence of any trace of mawkish sentiment. And there's also a sense, with the young oaks, the cascading water and the open landscape, of rebirth and a new beginning.<br />
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Cascading water falls thirty feet, in the inverted fountains of the 9/11 Memorial Garden. Here is where the building stood and where so many people, about their business, were so wantonly struck down.<br />
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But we won't finish on a sad note. On a hoarding, near the Memorial Garden, some wag had written the words below. That, in a way, sums up the spirit among a good many people over here. You get up, you look out, you greet the world and you get on with it, regardless.<br />
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<b>I'm sitting on </b>Penn Station, listening, not to Musak but to a Mozart Piano Concerto. Lovely!<br />
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<b>This time last week</b> I was frantically trying to finish outstanding copy before flying over the Atlantic.<br />
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<b>No film</b> this week. So instead, on away blogs. Notes of my all time faves. Today <i>Casablanca</i> - the finest commercial film ever made with the greatest story structure, the best possible casting and -- well, let's not go on about it. It's just a great film and that's that. 'Here's looking at you, Kid' Oh, and yesterday, we drove past Laren Bacall's apartment! Not that she was in <i>Casablanca</i> but she was married to Bogey.<br />
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-66143765810775312492012-09-07T12:16:00.001+01:002012-09-07T12:16:08.255+01:00PERIPEREGRINATION JITTERS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: #783f04;">What a simply delicious September some of us are having. Golden, dewy morns, a touch of mist,</span><br />
<span style="color: #783f04;">new autumn flowers opening almost every day and warm, balmy afternoons. Enjoy them while you can.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #783f04;">Lovelies in my garden include <i>Aster asperula</i> which, unlike most autumn daisies, has beautiful, broad leaves as well as sparse but large, soft blue flowers. It's good to team with <i>Schizostylis coccinea </i>'Major.' </span><br />
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<span style="color: #783f04;">Pick of the bunch for us, though, has been <i>Rudbeckia fulgida </i>var. <i>sullivanii. </i>None of my plants is a named variety - they're all self-sown seedlings - but what performers! </span><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="color: #783f04;">These are proper 'black-eyed Susans' with chocolate centres, durable, egg-yolk ray florets and good standing power.</span> Few autumn perennials have benefited as much as they, from the wet summer. </span> <br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"><i> Rudbeckia fulgida</i> var. <i>sullivanii</i> on 6th September in our autumn border.</span></div>
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No time for gardening. <br />
The PG and I will cross the Atlantic, next week, to travel across the United States. It's a big trip and more to the point, the first we've taken, in decades, purely for pleasure. Work of one kind or another has influenced almost everything we've done overseas, for the last 30 years. But this trip is, essentially, a jolly.<br />
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I'm not telling you our itinerary – you'll have to watch that unfold –
but I can reveal that Washington, Chicago and San Francisco are on our
route though, alas, New Orleans, Charleston and Seattle are not.<br />
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The U.S. Presidential Election campaigns will add political spice. But they probably won't prevent me from being baffled about how American politics actually work. We'll see, first hand, the effects of the worst drought since the 1930s, in the Mid-West, and will try to understand its devastating effect on people who earn their living from agriculture. And in parts of California, there's a potentially deadly mouse-borne virus which may, or may not change our plans.<br />
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We will also be spending a night on <i>RMS Queen Mary, </i>at Long Beach, Ca.<i> </i>She is not a cruise ship but rather, an ocean liner. It won't be my first time aboard her. <b>As I write these words, on 7th September, I recall that on the same date in 1964, I was crossing the Atlantic on the <i>Queen Mary</i></b> and would return, four years later, on her sister Cunarder <i>RMS Queen Elizabeth.</i> More on her in a week or three. <br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">There'll be some strange, quirky and hopefully, entertaining dispatches, on the blog, so watch this space.</span><br />
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Just now, though, we're in a pother and a dither over what to take and what to leave. It will be hot in some places but cold in others. And in September it can freeze overnight but swelter at midday. What's more, we'll be tramping along mountain tracks one day, and poncing about in fancy city venues the next. And we've imposed a rule on ourselves that each must be able to carry all our own luggage, so cabin trunks are out and porters only employed<i> </i>when we're desperate<i>.</i> (Expect a rant, in forthcoming issues, about America and the Tipping Culture!)<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">One of our fences, expertly wired and beautifully furnished with burgeoning climbers – not! The shadows are pretty, though!</span></div>
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We'll travelling mainly by train – no internal flights. But every time I think of that, my mind fills, not with sensible clothing lists, but with images of Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag, in <i>Some Like it Hot. </i> Or of Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye singing <i>Snow!, </i>with George Clooney's Aunt Rosemary and owner of the world's most waspish waist, Vera Ellen. What a crime that Vera Ellen was not given equal star status with Crosby, Kaye and Clooney in that deliciously cloying festive extravaganza <i>White Christmas</i>!<br />
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And thank heavens for iPads!<br />
Usually, on long trips, we take enough books to fill a cabin trunk - a Dickens or three, some poetry, field guides on birds, flora and mammals, travel guides, real ale guides, restaurant guides and so on. But for this trip, just <i>The Birds of North America</i> in print and Audubon Field guide Apps for the rest.<br />
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I've never read a word of G. K. Chesterton – perhaps a bad omission, so for £1.99 I downloaded his complete works. And for good measure, added complete works of DH Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, both of whom are overdue for re-reading. And to think that as well as being weightless and fitting within the iPad, this huge volume of literature has cost me only £5.97!<br />
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<b>I'm Listening to </b>Schubert's <i>Der Winterreise</i> sung by the sadly missed and incomparable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He died earlier this year.<br />
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<b>This week's film was </b>Ralph Fiennes' adaptation of Shakespeare's <i>Coriolanus. </i>Not my favourite play, even on stage, but the first part of this film wasn't even Shakespeare. It began like a Hollywood-style action movie, geared for unhealthy adolescent minds and concentrating on killing as noisily and as graphically as possible. But after half an hour, and with amazing performances from Vanessa Redgrave and Fiennes himself, the remnants of the original play, and a glimmer of Shakespeare's genius showed through.<br />
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COMING SOON... Heathrow security, jetlag, a dip in the Hudson and a report on whether New Yorkers are as rude as Londoners, these days. <br />
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Bye bye.<br />
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Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-83250387683132695782012-08-23T08:02:00.000+01:002012-08-23T08:02:11.438+01:00A SUPRANORMAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED SOON.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #e06666;">An elephant hawk moth, </span><i style="color: #e06666;">Deilephila elpenor,<span style="color: #e06666;"> </span></i><span style="color: #e06666;"> outside my back door in July. It's resting on <i>Lonicera japonica </i>'Halliana'</span></td></tr>
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Good morrow, good people, good cheer! <br />
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Sorry, sorry, sorry! I'm SO sorry!!!!<br />
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The more observant among you will have spotted an appalling lack in postings, lately and I'm told that the worst thing anybody can do, with a blog, is to let it go dormant. So the unforgivable sin has now been committed and I suspect it will need hard work, lots of excoriating rants and scads of jolly piccies to win back your favour.<br />
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There are three good reasons, for the gap and I'll list them without boring you;<br />
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1. Mother.<br />
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2. Indolence, spinelessness, lack of virtuous industry and general weakness of character on my part.<br />
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3. A serious frontlog with my work, exacerbated by a bevvy of surprise commissions.<br />
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'What the heck,' you'll be asking, 'is a 'frontlog?' Well, if you write two weekly columns totalling, roughly 3,600 words as well as regular monthly pieces it's pretty important to keep up with the deadlines. Editors sulk, so, if you're late with your copy.<br />
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But if you decide that it would be a great idea to celebrate 40 years of marriage by spending 32 days abroad, you suddenly have two months worth of copy to file in a month. 'So?' I hear you say, 'what's the harm in a little extra work?'<br />
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'No harm at all,' I reply, in this enjoyable but hypothetical conversation we're having, 'except that Sod's Law has come into play and there has been a mini-maelstrom of extra assignments. And a self-employed hack whose boss is a complete and utter bastard – always has been –never dares refuse a thing.<br />
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So bizarrely, I've been writing November copy, juggling deadlines and unlike <a href="http://www.blackpitts.co.uk/blog/">James Alexander Sinclair</a>, who juggles with staggering dexterity, I've been close to dropping my little leather balls all over the floor.<br />
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As for the other reasons: indolence or, that musically descriptive word 'sloth' – we say it with a long 'O' in Britain, sounding even lazier and more slobbish – is still the deadly sin of which, I'm perhaps most guilty. (At my age, lust is largely just a fond memory.) And Mother is, well, Mother.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So please accept my apologies, for not providing regular, sparkly postings. And please be ready for a grand relaunch very, very soon.</span></div>
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<b>I'm listening to</b> Brahms Sextet in G Major Op. 36.<br />
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<b>The most recent film was </b><i>Once Upon a Time in Anatolia</i>. Sorry, but after all the wild elation and excitement of the reviewers I had high expectations but was rather disappointed. It's a bleak piece, quite well acted - if you can call it acting - and all shot in the most depressing manner possible, mostly at night, in one of Anatolia's less appealing districts. There was rather a stink of the Nouvelle Vague about it – a style that brought to cinema what Hirst and Emin have brought to 'fine art.' Discuss! <br />
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<b>This time last year</b> I was writing regular posts. I promise to return to form. Please be patient. </div>
Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-47627386135584840222012-07-04T17:28:00.002+01:002012-07-04T17:31:52.354+01:00THE THING WAS VILE WITH GREEN AND LIVID SPOT<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Good day to all and a very happy Barclay to all our fans!<br />
The title is the only line I can remember from Keats' <i>Isabella </i>or <i>The Pot of Basil.</i><br />
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That excellent, though no longer independent newspaper, <i>The Independent</i>, as part of its bid to lure a few youngsters of moderate brain – and to cherish the little darlings among its, ahem, more mature readership – has recently re-vamped its editorial pages and now includes a daily spread which, irritatingly, is called 'Trending.' Not being a youngster, and having a brain that is dysfunctional, at best and never did fire on many cylinders, I have difficulty understanding what the hell 'Trending' is all about. Celebrities get sploshed over the page, a bit and there are mentions of popular music groups I've never heard of and food item's I'd rather not try. I believe the idea is to give folk a little help in recognising things that are to do with the, well, <i>Zeitgeist</i>, I suppose you would say.<br />
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But whatever .. . . Lord, how I ramble! . . . I mention Trendings because I'd like you to regard occasional posts, like this, as being important comments on things of today that <i>really matter. </i>I will endeavour, almost certainly without success, to avoid the usual bilious rantings of the bigger posts, in these, my sort of answer to Trending. I shall call them <b>Bendings.</b><br />
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Bending Number 1.<br />
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Rose breeders have a lot to answer for. They may have brought us such immortal lovelies as the salmon climber 'Compassion,' the exquisitely fragrant 'Madame Isaac Pereire,' achingly gorgeous apricot old Tea Rose, 'Lady Hillingdon' and the sublime, crimson, quartered 'Charles de Mills.'<br />
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But they have also perpetrated some atrocities. I cite the hideous blood-and-custard 'Masquerade,' m'lud, and the eyeball-shrivelling, dayglo orange two-tone, egg and gore 'Tequila Sunrise.' Then there's the liverish mauve, always diseased 'Blue Moon' and what, until recently, I considered the world's nastiest rose ever, 'Superstar''<br />
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'Superstar,' introduced in 1960, was a new colour break which not only broke all records for egregious gaucheness but worse, practised deceit. At a glance, the buds were promising. Nicely pointed, on bushes that didn't grow too badly, it was quickly adored by all and became Britain's top of the pops rose. Every garden known to man boasted 'Superstar', from ducal palaces (possibly – not that one, you know, <i>hangs </i>with that many dukes) to what in those days we snobbishly called 'Council House Fronts.' <br />
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The flower colour is difficult to describe but was so impossibly artificial for a rose that it shrieked out from wherever the bush was planted – a sort of chemical plastic orange-scarlet-bricky hue. As a coarse fishing float, that tawdry hue would work beautifully. As a rose colour, it made me feel physically ill, especially when my mother – we had a bed of the damned things in my teens – once put a large vase of them on the breakfast table. In June, that rose was extremely nasty; by August, the stems and what few leaves didn't fall because of black spot, were so covered with powdery mildew as to be a rather elegant pale dove grey - making the Kia-Ora-cum-tomato-juice orange of the flowers look even worse.<br />
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Beales' wonderful Classic Roses catalogue says everything you need to know about 'Superstar.' I quote: 'Not very resistant to diseases. Not very attractive to bees and wildlife. Nuff sed.<br />
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But yesterday, ah, yesterday, at the excellent and comprehensive-ish Waterside Garden Centre, Kate's Bridge, Lincolnshire, I suffered a Heart of Darkness moment; an uncomfortably close glimpse into the Abyss; an encounter with the ravening craw of ugliness; a foetid miasma of tangible, palpable, bristling unpleasantness – a rose of such surpassing ugliness that it was necessary to find a seat, to sit, to screw one's eyes tight shut and try to neutralise the unbridled horror by imagining skipping lambs, primroses, Easter bunnies, Delia Smith, Liberace, Obamacare, Spaghetti alla Carbonara – anything to get my mind off that dreadful <i>cauchemar </i>vision.<br />
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Luckily, the PG was with me. 'Have you got your phone?' she muttered.<br />
'No need for that,' I replied, 'I think I'll be able to walk again, just give me a moment. No need to call an ambulance.'<br />
'To take a picture, <i>idiot</i>,' she replied. 'People should know about this. They'll want to see it.'<br />
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So here you have it, fresh from my iPhone 4 – whose camera, unlike previous iPhones, is not at all pants – the apotheosis of rose breeding. <i>Rosa</i> 'Crazy for You,' as seen in a garden centre. It's a floribunda, bred, I think, by the Frenchman, Michel Adam and introduced in 1998.<br />
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<b> I'm listening to</b> the PG who is pretending to be running her Dyson around the office, but is actually spying on me to see if I'm working. Which I'm not, though she thinks I am! Ha ha!<br />
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<b>This Day in 2006</b> I was visiting my parents in Kent. I record in my diary that they 'are frail, old, weak and afraid.' My mother was - and is crippled with arthritis. And yet she prepared quails, that day, cooked gently in a rich <i>jus,</i> each resting on a large field mushroom and followed with a lightly poached peach in a spiced sauce. It takes guts to cook that well, when every joint is painful to move and your hands are like claws.<br />
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<b>And this week's film was </b>Masahiro Shinoda's <i>Chinmoku</i> (Silence) made in 1971 about illegal Jesuit missionaries in 17th Century Japan. It's dark, brooding and relentless in its portrayal of religious persecution, human weakness, cruelty and in a way, expediency. A superb film, even though the acting is often wooden and the pacing a little too slow at times.<br />
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Another chance for you to enjoy the rose.<br />
Bye bye!</div>Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-80775620272591508612012-06-28T17:10:00.002+01:002012-06-29T07:10:05.757+01:00MUTHAH OF A MIDSUMMER - or - GIS MORE RAIN!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Greetings!. </div>
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And sorry for such a disgraceful gap in posts. Can't believe it's since mid May, but I've been having something of <b>mid-blog crisis</b> and am considering a change in emphasis.</div>
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<span style="color: red;">29th June 2012</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">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.</span></div>
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<br style="color: red;" /><span style="color: red;">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.</span><br style="color: red;" /><br style="color: red;" /><span style="color: red;">What follows is aimed exclusively at those who complain about the effect of a strange summer on their gardens. </span></div>
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But first, this beautiful creature. . .</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLE_XdGNjNA_PkPH_P3IyzUMkeBXOqSQ2f2cVzEa7xFCyAl_vvtBysIeyrzyccYVOmIrC8avf5OVRK8IzLLB1WJSgZn_evg5ztzb4ivfRXwvlmT8tK_fC6e6L3MiyaKTZmN6A49WcE16E/s1600/Amurleopard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLE_XdGNjNA_PkPH_P3IyzUMkeBXOqSQ2f2cVzEa7xFCyAl_vvtBysIeyrzyccYVOmIrC8avf5OVRK8IzLLB1WJSgZn_evg5ztzb4ivfRXwvlmT8tK_fC6e6L3MiyaKTZmN6A49WcE16E/s400/Amurleopard.jpg" width="398" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">An Amur (or Manchurian) Leopard, <i>Panthera pardus orientalis </i>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. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">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!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">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. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">(Click pics for bigger view) More information <a href="http://www.amur-leopard.org/index.php?pg=wild">here </a></span><br />
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And now, this. ...<br />
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THERE HAS BEEN ALTOGETHER TOO MUCH MOANING! <br />
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 <i>shredded </i>the hostas, my dere, ... and on and on and on and on.<br />
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WELL ENOUGH ALREADY! STOP IT! NOW! AT ONCE!<br />
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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.<br />
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Yes, the weather has been crap. <br />
Yes, the hosepipe ban was a ludicrous piece of nonsense, except where it's still enforced.<br />
Yes, climate change is going to ruin us all and this is merely an overture.<br />
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.<br />
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But, <span style="font-size: large;"><b>NO</b></span>, I'm <i><span style="font-size: large;">not</span></i> fed up with it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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 <i>love</i> it.<br />
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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!<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;">Our spring border on 29th May 2012. </span></div>
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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.)<br />
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We planted a length of yew hedge in 2010. It has grown more, in the last two months than during the previous two years!<br />
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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.<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;">Looking over part of the spring border at the over-lush meadow.</span></div>
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<b>I'm listening to</b> Wagner's <i>Lohengrin - </i>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.<br />
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<b>This time last week </b>I was planting up troughs for my mother who had taken my brother and me out for a hefty pub lunch.<br />
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<b>This week's film? </b>Too many to mention, but a piece of acting knocked me absolutely sideways. It was in<i> Boardwalk Empire, </i> 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.<br />
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Toodle-oo for now and thanks for reading this far!</div>Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-13942539308902537872012-05-17T14:41:00.003+01:002012-05-17T14:49:28.426+01:00FAIR DAFFODILS WE WEEP. . .<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #38761d;"> </span><i style="color: #38761d;">Narcissus poeticus </i><span style="color: #38761d;">var. </span><i style="color: #38761d;">recurvus </i><span style="color: #38761d;">the true pheasant's eye in my mini-meadow.</span></div>
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Good morrow all, and a very happy Chelsea to you. <br />
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A month since my last post? Disgraceful!<br />
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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. ) <br />
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There have been a few minor distractions in my life – Mother! Untimely frost! A car crisis! Don't Ask!<br />
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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, <i>the volume of work is inversely proportional to the rate of pay</i>. 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. <br />
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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 <i>Alice</i> who, if I remember rightly, has to run faster and faster to stay in the same spot.<br />
<br />
I'm not moaning. It's good to get the work. But it is a little sobering.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Another vexing thing . . .</b><br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Why aren't we hitting the targets with our answers? And why does so much of my query mail look like this. . .<br />
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<div style="color: #783f04;">
Dear Neil Coletorn</div>
<span style="color: #783f04;"> Can you identify the encl. ( flower/twig/leaf/rotted black mush/torn-off shred of kitchen roll/live hungry </span><i style="color: #783f04;">aggressive</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> arthropod etc.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="color: black;">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<i> </i>it is but</span> </span>by <i>where</i> it is.<br />
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I also get,<br />
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<span style="color: #783f04;">Dear Mr Cobbin,</span><br />
<span style="color: #783f04;"> How can I kill. . .daisies/pheasants/mice/shield bugs/ants/snakes/lichens/moss etc. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="color: black;">I've had - </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="color: black;">'<span style="color: #783f04;">How can I keep slow worms out of my wall?</span> And <span style="color: #783f04;">where can I get cyanide to deal with the moles and wasps?</span> And even '<span style="color: #783f04;">How can I keep bees out of my garden?'</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">Also. . .</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #783f04;">Dear Sir or Madam</span><br />
<span style="color: #783f04;"> Now that Arsenic, Lead Arsenate, DDT and Nicotine shreds have been outllawed, how can I possibly grow crops?</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;">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</span>.<br />
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<b>And one final thing.</b><br />
Why, when sending emails, do some folk think that the shift key and punctuation buttons don't work?<br />
<br />
Try this for size:<br />
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From - nickandshirl@talktalktalk.com <br />
<br />
<i>HiNigel</i><br />
<i>Wehopeyou'reokwehaveaproblemwithvineweevilstheyhavedestroyednicksauriculasandnow</i><br />
<i>theproblemseemstobespreadingtoourrhododendronbushesbecausetherearebitesoutoftheedgesofthe</i><br />
<i>leavesandweareafraidtheywillattacktherootsThankingyouforyoourhelp</i><br />
<i>Shirl</i><br />
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<b>I'm listening to </b>Abba - Lord help me! (Money Money Money, since you ask. It's the Euro crisis, stoopid!)<br />
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<b>This weeks film was </b><i>Winter Light</i> 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.<br />
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<b>This time next week</b> Chelsea will be over, as far as I'm concerned, and a good job too.<br />
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Thank you for getting this far. Bye bye! <br />
<br />
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<br /></div>Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-85192491152925079282012-04-13T14:32:00.000+01:002012-04-13T14:33:41.002+01:00THE LOCOG DEVELOPED A FLAT TYRE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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What ho, my lovelies! </div>
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First a little ironic symbolism... (CAUTION - the first paragraph contains rude bits.)</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">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. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">The City of London's motto is <i>Domine dirige nos -</i> '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.</span><br />
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<br />
FIRST OF THE MID-SPRING BEAUTIES. <br />
Michael McCarthy, in yesterday's <i><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/nature_studies/nature-studies-by-michael-mccarthy-prepare-to-be-amazed--spring-is-nearly-sprung-7637296.html?origin=internalSearch">Independent</a></i> 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. <br />
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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?<br />
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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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="padding-top: 4px; text-align: center;"><i style="color: #38761d; font-size: 13px;">Erythronium californicum </i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d; font-size: 13px;">'White Beauty' (CLICK ANY PIX TO ENLARGE.</span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d; font-size: small;">SYLVAN SEASON. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d;">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 <i>Cyclamen repandum</i> – always a swinish species to establish – and busy dunnocks, wrens, robins and blackbirds, going for invertebrate life among the decaying vegetation.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d;">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, <i>Primula elatior,</i> have gone berserk, hybridising with anything primulaic. But this year's star, so far, is <i>Erythronium californicum </i>'White Beauty.' Lilies in miniature, and all the more enchanting for the beautifully marked foliage.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #783f04;">4.<i> Fritillaria montana</i> - I think - which bloomed in our shingle bank. This it was supplied to me as <i>F. thessala</i> 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 <i>F. graeca </i>subspecies <i>thessala.</i></span><br />
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IT'S A FAIR COPPICE! <br />
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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CHELSEA TRACTORS, TWATTICLES AND SUVS.<br />
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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These things are sometimes called Chelsea Tractors. Secretly, I've always called them – and those <i>awful </i>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.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #a64d79;"><i>Chionodoxa forbesii '</i>Pink Giant' earlier this spring, in my gravel.</span></div>
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<b>I'm listening to</b> The PG, cutting up fruit and carrots for lunch. We are determined to become more sylph-like.<br />
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<b>This time last year, </b>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. <br />
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<b>This week's film was </b>Fritz Lang's <i>Der tiger von Eschnapur</i>. 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. <br />
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But there's a sequel. Bye Bye for nowI<br />
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<br /></div>Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-47808409956651512752012-03-30T13:05:00.001+01:002012-03-30T13:07:59.553+01:00CLOPRIDIC BEES AND TOOTHPASTE BREAD<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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. <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><i>'I think I'd be more comfortable and pull a less lugubrious face if someone would kindly remove the old fashioned terry nappy.'</i> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">A Malayan tapir <i>Tapirus indicus, </i>at London Zoo. The <a href="http://www.zsl.org/">Zoological Society of London</a> has ongoing conservation projects in more than 50 countries, worldwide.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">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.</span><br />
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Three thought-provoking things in the last couple of days.<br />
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1<u>. I'm increasingly worried about rare breeds. </u><br />
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.<br />
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The steak came from a Longhorn, I believe, and was sold at a substantial premium because of being a rare breed. <br />
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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.<br />
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And this morning, on BBC Radio 4's <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj8q" style="font-style: italic;">Farming Today </a> I<i> </i>listened to a posh Chef from somewhere or other, saying that Middle White pigs provided superior pork <b>because there was so much fat, </b>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 <i>hint</i> 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 <b>animal fat</b> in cooking a very <b>bad </b>thing?<br />
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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? <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"><i>Tulipa 'Hearts Delight,' </i>a <i>kaufmanniana </i>or 'Waterlily' type of surpassing charm. This one is flowering outside our back door.</span></div>
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<u>2. The GM debate is opening again this year</u><br />
<a href="http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/">Rothamsted Agricultural Research Station</a> 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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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 <a href="http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/expert_paper/How_to_Feed_the_World_in_2050.pdf">look at this PDF</a> )<br />
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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.)<br />
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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?<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">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 <i>those</i> 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.</span><br />
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<u>3. Bees, synthetic nicotinoids and motivation.</u></div>
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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. </div>
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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.</div>
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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.</div>
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Neither team have proven, conclusively, that the pesticides are responsible for the decline in bee populations but it's a pretty strong indicator. </div>
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There are plenty of other causes of bumble bee decline, such as habitat loss and climate change. BUT, after seeing a summary of <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/search?author1=Penelope+R.+Whitehorn&sortspec=date&submit=Submit">Dr. Whitehorn's</a> 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.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d;"><i>Narcissus</i> 'Rapture' - one of the best of the Cyclamineus hybrids and loving life in my garden.</span><br />
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<b>I'm listening to </b>Bach's <i>Saint Matthew Passion</i>, obviously! <br />
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<b>This week's film was </b>Francois Truffaut's <i>Les Quatre Cent Coups. </i>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.<br />
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<b>This day next week</b>, 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?<br />
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And I think that's more than enough for you to cope with. <br />
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<br /></div>Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-14374847378956149262012-03-08T10:54:00.004+00:002012-03-08T11:12:21.720+00:00DOUBLE BUMROSES<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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And the top of the world to you and yours! Saint Pat's is past and spring is almost here. Calloo callay!!<br />
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Now, then. . .where were we? Oh <i>yes! </i></div>
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<b>Why do plant breeders try so hard to turn natural beauty into abomination? </b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d;"><i> Primula vulgaris</i> – 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)</span><br />
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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?<br />
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So, breeders have given – sorry, <i>sold – </i>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.<br />
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But breeders have also perpetrated genetic atrocities: petunias which look like black holes, in clammy sub-fusc foliage; evergreens such as <i>Photinia davidiana </i>'Palette' whose young leaves resemble haemorrhagic vomit; or antirrhinums whose child-delighting, dragon-snapping flowers have been morphed into gaping, malformed foxgloves.<br />
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And primroses.<br />
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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And then, at the February RHS Show, I was reminded of the abominations wished upon us by plant breeders. Like the next picture. . .<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d;">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.</span><br />
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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 <i>Primula </i>'Francesca' which, like Dante's Francesca da Rimini, should be blown away to hell in a whirlwind of souls.<br />
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And there are now mud coloured objects like the one below. (I couldn't be arsed to note down its varietal name.)<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">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.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">ON A DIFFERENT TACK . . .</span></div>
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At that same show, I was wryly amused by a trade stand, set up by a firm called <a href="http://www.implementations.co.uk/site/home">Implementations</a>, 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:</div>
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They're rust-free, hard wearing, soil doesn't stick to them.<br />
Much like stainless steel, then – but here's their clincher: <b>copper is known to deter slugs and snails.</b></div>
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That's true. Snails which crawl onto copper are said to be disturbed by an electrochemical reaction between the metal and their mucus.</div>
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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. </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #b45f06;">Suitable for that bijou gardenette in Kensington - bronze tools, marketed by Implementations.</span><br />
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<b>I'm not listening to anything. </b><br />
On a mad impulse, I decided to subscribe to <a href="http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/itunes-match/?cid=mc-features-uk-g-icd-imc-itunesmatch">Apple's iTunes Match</a> 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!<br />
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<b>This day in 1986, </b><br />
when we ran a small nursery, I potted up 65 successfully rooted cuttings of <i>Daphne blagayana, </i>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,)<br />
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<b>This week's film was </b><br />
<i>We Need to Talk About Kevin, </i>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. <br />
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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 <i>American</i>) society, or maybe because some folk are simply born nasty.<br />
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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 <i>bad mother</i> who <i>didn't bond with her baby. </i>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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'That's it from me,' as the weatherman used to say, 'bye bye for now!'</div>Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6849167564811493528.post-2443482728231450062012-02-21T17:53:00.002+00:002012-02-21T18:00:37.420+00:00GALANTHOBUBBLES AND PAPER ROSES<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">'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! </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">WHAT ON <i>EARTH</i> 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 <i>scandalous</i> as were the Wars of the Roses in England, back in the fifteenth century.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">OH PLEASE!! COME ON, NIGE – GET BACK TO GARDENING AND STOP DRONING ON AND ON AND ON WITH THINGS YOU KNOW <i>NOTHING</i> ABOUT.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So. Gardenish stuff, then.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #bf9000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Crocus ancyrencis, </i>the<i> </i>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 </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #bf9000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">fabulously good in big handfuls. Cheerful is what they are - a bunch of February sunshine. (Click pics to enlarge.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #bf9000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Crocus </i>x <i>luteus </i>'Golden Yellow'<i> </i>aka 'Dutch Yellow Crocus<i>.' –</i> much larger than <i>C. ancyrencis</i>, and frowned upon by gardeners who prefer the soft mauves, purples, whites and stripes of <i>C. vernus </i>varieties. <i> </i>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.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">SNOWDROPPING AUDACITY</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I heard certain world-weary journos, at last weeks RHS London Show, suggesting that snowrops have become rather old hat.<i> </i>'<i>Everyone's</i> done them,' she sighed. <i>'</i>One's is so <i>weary</i> of hearing about them. To compound her ennui, I dragged her off to see, first hand, the horribleness of the variety <i>Galanthus </i>'Blewbury Tart.' In fact I dragged several folk whom I knew not, to see the same abominable things on one of the bulb exhibits.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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, <a href="http://www.thompson-morgan.com/">Thompson and Morgan</a>. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">T&M have just paid £725 for one bulb of a variety called 'Elizabeth Harrison.' I believe it's a chance-discovered form of <i>Galanthus woronoii</i> - the species I think we once called <i>G. ikariae</i> - which has dark foliage, more the bottle green of bluebell leaves, than the familiar, glaucous narcissussy tint.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But this one has an <i>amazing</i> 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! </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I beg you sir, madam, chum, cobber - to pick a snowdrop: an ordinary, single-flowered <i>G. nivalis </i>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.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A fairly ordinary snowdrop.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So, would yellow look better than green on those inner parts? NO! </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Is a yellow ovary, rather than a green one attractive? NO! </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Would you pay £725 for a single bulb of this variety? If you were wealthy enough for it not to matter? Well, would you???</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Should <i>anyone</i> be prepared to pay £725 for a single snowdrop bulb? </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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 <i>G. woronoii</i> with yellow where the green should be.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>I'm listening to </b>Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B Minor Op 115.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>This week's film was </b><i>The Prince and the Showgirl</i>, 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.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>This time yesterday, </b>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.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bless you for reading this far - and enjoy your snowdrop gazing.</span></div>
</div>Plant Mad Nigehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01051715161395516677noreply@blogger.com8