ACTS OF VIOLETS

Viola odorata 'Amiral Avellan'

What an absolutely frabjuicilious spell of weather we're having!  My dear editor at the Daily Mail has forbidden me to use any more exclamation marks, ever, so I hope you'll forgive me for feeding my secret punctuation habits here on the blog.  No editors, you see!  Utter blissikins with choccy biccies thrown in!!!!!

You'll be hugely relieved to know that this post will be mercifully short.  Family arrangements for my father's funeral have tied me to the phone and a sudden spurt of work to my desk for longer than I like.  But during stolen moments outside, in the gentle sun with the occasional Brimstone butterfly fluttering by, I swear I could actually see the spring flowers opening.  Our first wood anemone is open, the snowdrops have shot their bolts, pretty well and a song thrush is nesting in the hedge.  Oh, and joy!  Two tree sparrows in my hedge - another bird first for our garden.

Viola odorata in my garden.

But among all this spring exuberance, I'd like to say a word for the  humble violet.  This is, surely, the most modest and secretive of all our spring wildlings.  We have only white ones growing in the hedge bottoms in our village lane but in the garden I grow several named varieties and am blessed annually with numerous seedlings which have amazing hybrid vigour.

The top one for picking is Viola 'Amiral Avellan' which has quite a sharp scent, and ruthless spreading qualities.  But for me, the wild white violet is tops.  A bunch of those, with some big purple ones mixed in – just to prove they really are violets – will win the heart of even the most unromantically minded lady.  The Victorians - and what romantic old sausages they were – were big on violets and in decent gardens, extra sweet-smelling, double-flowered Parma violets were grown strictly for cutting.

White violets in our fen lane.

When I had a tiny plant nursery, we used to sell sweet violets.  Few people do, nowadays, but Groves,  the old Bridport based nursery sells an interesting range.   

My top spring flar of the week is a superb cyclamineus hybrid daffodil known as 'Rapture.'  It stands 25 cms tall, with delectably swept back petals.

Narcissus 'Rapture'

That hedge again:  I'm all dug and dusted for the new yew hedge, even to the point of having spread the compost and tidied the site.  All I need now are the yew plants, due next week, DV.

I'm listening to Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor Horn and Springs, the old recording with yer actual Peter Pears.

Happy spring to everyone.  May the frosts be gentle and the days continue in this vein until I've got the veg bed dug.   Toodle-ooh!

YEWLOGISING MY HEDGE FUND

Primroses in the garden, photographed at twilight today with my swanky new camera which shoots well, even at ferocious film speeds.  (Today's subject ain't exactly photogenic, hence some totally  irrelevant pictures.)

First a question:

What is the difference between my 6 year old granddaughter and the Governor of the Bank of England?

Answer:  My granddaughter understood, finally, why I couldn't just draw a postage stamp, instead using of a real one, because it didn't really count as a true stamp.   

The other bod doesn't seem to understand that you can't just print lots of paper money when it isn't backed up by reality and expect it to have any true value, even if you give the activity a ridiculously euphemistic name like Quantitative Easing. 

I mean really!!  Honestly!  For cripesakes - this is just a step away from wheelbarrows full of Reichmarks.   Zimbabwe here we come - huzzah!!   A pint of bitter - that's ale, for those of you on the opposite shore -  might cost more than a Volkswagen in a couple of years time.  To hell with the bloody banks, I suggest.  Let's all have a bit of deflation.  It's Lent, after all, and we're all supposed to be tightening our belts.

Now then, enough of all that hooey.   To the serious stuff:  Concentrate!  Think!  Focus!

I'm minded to plant an - not 'a' but 'an' - hedge.  Our back garden, you see, is really our front garden, and vice versa.  It's all a bit complicated, and you really don't want the details but the main bit of our plot is reached through a rather low, head-banging tunnel squished between crook-back outbuildings and our house.  Once you've got through that obstacle, you find yourself rubbing the bump on your bonce in a private, secluded garden.

My Yew Hedge!  The string and sticks are real.  The rest has to be imagined.

But the aforementioned psg is bordered by the  village road and protected from it by a thick shelter-belt or screen of evergreens and deciduous trees.  Without that living screen, people could peep in to see what an absolute horlicks I'm making of the garden.  And one wouldn't want that.  I mean, think what would happen to the tatters of my reputation.  (He who steals my purse steals trash etc.  - by the way, refer back to the top of this post to be reminded that the contents of all our purses will be trash within a year or two.  But I digress and mustn't.)

For some time, now, we've been increasingly concerned that some of the ugly conifers in the shelter belt are ailing.  There seems to a national conifer malaise, and I'm profoundly in favour of that, since they were horribly over-planted in past decades.  But that isn't the point. 

These lugubrious evergreens, if dead and gone, would leave horrid gaps.  Hence my decision, over the week-end when yet more brown dead areas manifested themselves in yet another sad cypress, to take affirmative action.   And another thing.  My garden design is intrinsically mediocre as it is, but the whole thing is made a zillion times worse by having too much visible all at once.  

 

Scilla bifolia tiny, short-lived, but first spotted by me on Mount Parnassos, coming up through the melting snow.  

It's a little sweetie and seeds prolifically.    Shot at a ridiculously high film speed - 4,000 iso, hence the unreal blue.

So, I've ordered up my yews – the only possible choice, in this case – and over the next couple of weeks, just in time for the beginning of the growing season, I'll be lifting turf to pile up and make into super humus rich stuff for soil improvement else

where.  

And if we live long enough, and the Phytophthera keeps away, there will be a symmetrically sculpted, cuboidal, neat, lovely, formal hedge.  A backdrop for the herbaceous pretties to the west; a shelter from east winds and a sight screen for the more intimate parts of the garden.  That will enable us to partake of tea on the Tea Lawn, in peace and privacy.

The true wild daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, still 

my favourite, bless its little heart and blooming in my garden.

I'm listening to Beethoven's 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet, Op74, 3rd movement which keeps saying 'tickety-boo.'

I'm Still Reading Martin Chuzzlewit. 

This time last year I was in Malaysia, trekking with my wife and younger daughter in the Taman Negara.  Hot, steamy, leech-ridden and absolute heaven on legs my dears!

Bye Bye!!

IT GLOWED IN THE DARK AND VIBRATED

I think turtle soup is a really bad idea.

Oh for the utter joy of gardening! And oh! - Oh! - OH! - how I long, crave and yearn to get back into my own, neglected and mistake-ridden patch. I've never felt such need for some therapeutic weeding and digging! Meanwhile, though, if you don't mind, I think it's time for a little mild colborning. By the way, don't bother to read on, if this post bores you! There'll be more horticophany soon enough.

Staying down in Kent with my mother, for reasons made clear in my last post, I've been obliged to break with my usual habits and watch more network television with her than has been good for either of us. She spared me the banalities of East Benders and Coronation Street but we have managed to burn away hours watching all sorts of crap.

Beyond Channel 4 News, and the occasional wildlife or science programme, I seldom watch the broadcast telly, preferring DVD films. Don't assume any virtue here - I'm as addicted to screen gawping as my mother is to soaps and cook programmes. And don't assume that my film selection is limited to introverted Swedish explorations of despair or Fellini's cinematic tiramisu. I get just as much fun out of a roister-doistering Western or a soppy Hollywood romantic comedy and my wife and co-film buff adores a taught thriller, as long as it's peppered with plenty of violence and shocks.

But back to my telly nightmare with the Mater. We

watched a quiz called The Weakest Link, chaired by an acerbic and rather spiteful red-headed woman. The standard of questioning is illustrated by this example: 'If you add 9 and 8 what it the total?' The quiz contestant, a trolly dolly from BA, dithered for some seconds before doubtfully proffering the answer.

Later, with a plate of smoked mackera

l and a lettuce leaf on my knee, we both enjoyed an episode of Coast which visited parts of the Northern Isles. This was well researched, jauntily presented by a bloke with very long, lank hair, and was absolutely riveting. Gloriously lovely filming of the natural beauty; an item on new technology for depth sounding and historical footage of the herring industry – all super stuff. I'll be watching at future programmes, if they sustain the standard. At the climax, a couple of rock climbers scaled the Old Man of Hoy! I mean is that dangerous or what??!!

And then, I was instructed to switch to Channel 4 to see the most extrao

rdinarily pointless, profligate and yet spookily fascinating show on food ever to be screened. Channel Four, judging by the trailers, loves a freak show. The world's fattest/thinnest child, pregnant men, persons who wish to marry animals etc. etc. But this particular 'cookery' programme was curiouser than anything I've seen!

A friendly-looking, stubble-headed and manically enthusiastic chef who, my mother tells me, is immensely famous - securing a table at his restaurant is less easy than getting to meet the Pope - told us he was going to create a Victorian Meal.

Spiders can be surprisingly nutritious, I'm told.

I had in mind a Dickensian feast, with roast beef, oysters, plum duff - that sort of thing, but oh no! This gastronomic event began with a piece of laboratory glass, rather like a bent pipette, which contained a pink gunk resembling Symington's Strawberry Blancmange. It turned out to be a viscous liquid tasting, at different stages of consumption, of turkey, butterscotch, toast or some such. The panel of media wannabee dinner guests went into raptures while the chef spied on them through CCTV.

Mock Turtle Soup followed, but not in a plain old soup bowl. Oh dear me no! This had to be a consomme of cow's head, boiled down until it could be set in a pocket watch-shaped mould which was then gold plated and . . . . oh, I can't go on with this.

The main course was a miniature version of a garden, but with edible soil, edible gravel, deep fried insects - oh yes! - and not only deep fried, but stuffed with some kind of tomato paste to resemble insect guts. The Z list celebs went into a symphony of sycophantic rapture over this but it all looked a bit daft, to me. And we weren't shown them eating much, other than just the tiniest taste of crisp cricket - or was it a maggot? From the culinary point of view, I can't judge, but as a garden, it would have struggled to pick up a Bronze Medal.

The pud was the last straw! A huge, pointy jelly - sort of phallic and breastlike all in one go - which glowed in the dark, and into which the chef had plunged a number of vibrating dildoes so that the whole thing lurched and wobbled in the most giggle-inducing way.

Victorian? No!! An enjoyable meal for six? Not on your life! But for sheer, fascinating horror, delight, revulsion and wonderment - top marks.

Anyone fancy a deep fried brittle star?

I'm listening to nothing - but I'm about to watch Francois Truffaut's film Jules et Jim.

I'm still reading Martin Chuzzlewit.

This day in 2007 I heard that the book I was developing for Mitchell Beasley on naturalistic gardening had been turned down on the grounds that it was 'too British.' Americans, I was told, weren't into that kind of thing.

LESLIE COLBORN, 1916 - 2009

I hope you will all forgive the brevity of this post but few words are needed.  On Saturday morning my father died, nine days short of his 93rd Birthday.  I am grateful for his long, happy and successful life but that does not ease the pain of his parting.  He was a keen and capable gardener who taught me a great deal.

The picture is of Scilla greilhuberi, currently blooming in my garden.  Its flowers are almost exactly the colour of my father's eyes.

ALPINA TARDISSIMA

Crocus tommasinianus  - a selected form, unnamed but lovely.

Oh the shame of it all!  The horror!  The appalling neglect!!  I thought I was only a week late but discover that there has been not an entry on this blog, not a single one, since 10th February. How can I live with it?   How can I make amends?

Excuses?  Well, I've got a couple.   First, family illness struck, when my father, who'll be 93 next month, was suddenly hospitalised.  That means much mileage, since I live a fair distance away, and of course my mother, who is also frail and unwell - though mentally, she's a veritable Titan - needs extra support.   Many a happy hour, therefore, spent on the M25, A1, M11, M2 and all the other bastard Motorways.

I've also had a rush of work - I mean actual paid work - since I'm taking up the regular pen for a certain National Daily as of this coming Saturday.  And there was extra copy to write there, too, so that one could be ahead of the game.

But enough of all that.  Let's move to something gardenish at once.  Brrrrrhhhhhh - mmmm! Pull yourself together, AT ONCE!    Now then, off we jolly well go!

Part of the Alpine Display House at Wisley.

I had to go down to the the RHS Garden at Wisley a week or so ago and since we wanted to do a little photography in the Alpine department, I was permitted to wander about behind the scenes. 

What a magnificent collection it is, and what a perfect time of year to see the plants.  While remnants of snow still lay outside, there we were,  looking at all the exquisite little treasures nestling in their sandy plunge beds and flowering con brio.  Cyclamen were there, amazing South African rarities such as Massonia, intense blue Tecophilaea, saxifrages, hoop petticoat narcissus and, firm favourites of mine, the crocuses.  

Crocus sieberi, a form which grows on Mount Vardousia, in the Pelopponese.

First to strike me was a magnificent form of Crocus tommasinianus. (top picture)  Like nothing I've so far spotted, and infinitely superior to the widely grown C. t. 'Whitewell Purple,' this one positively glowed with the sunlight shining through the translucent tepals making them light up like neon. 

Then there was the soft, lilac blue, rather floppity and creased up Crocus sieberi, gathered from the Pelopponese.  I've seen its close relatives on Mount Parnassos, before, piercing the snow to flower as soon as the white has crept a little further up the mountainside.  Nearby, beneath the firs, we found Fritillaria graeca and Scilla bifolia - but that was all a few years ago.

Romulea tortuosa subspecies tortuosa - a South African native.

Romulea is another genus of surpassing beauty which, like gladiolus, occurs both in the Mediterranean and South Africa.  The black and yellow flowers of R. tortuosa ssp tortuosa of seemed almost like shellac or enamel, especially when one looked closely at the individual petals.  These are plants of the sandy flatlands in the Cape, flowering in September, over there.

Detail of Romulea described above.

Most startling of all was the colour of another somewhat floppy crocus whose tepals were a pure, pale Cambridge blue - never a trace of mauve or purple there, absolutely in the precise blue spectrum but pale, like a gentian that has been mixed with whitewash.

Crocus baytoporium - a pure shade of blue not seen in other crocus species

The beauty of such things helps one to forget sick fathers, angst-ridden mothers, the vagaries of newspaper editors and the absolutely mind-boggling, exasperating, staggering, gobsmacking level of nincompoopery that seems to have affected everyone in the government, banking or industry.  We're all doooooomed, I tell you!  But why worry, when there's  Crocus baytoporium to wonder at?  And when the smell of Daphne laureola is calling from the woods round here?

This day last year  I was poring over my presentations for Green With Envy - the show I did with James le Chapeau.  We had some good laughs on that job!  The apotheosis of our theatre career was at Barrow in Furness where the nuclear subs nuked James's computer.

I'm reading Martin Chuzzlewit - yes, still!  About 40% through and it's brilliant!!

I'm listening to Wagner's last music drama Parsifal.  Well, I'm in that sort of mood.

Sorry to have taken so long to post.

Toodle ooh!  Stay well everyone!!!

JUGGLED BETULICIOUSNESS - was A Betulicious Excursion.

THIS post is now in the right order.  Huge thanks to Victoria and Joanna for showing me how to juggle posts.  If' you've already read the original, sorry to clutter you with a repeat!  But at least the blogsite is now tidy - sort of!

I can't tell you how good and virtuous I feel! Gardening was out of the question, this week end, everything being covered by snow or frozen slush, so I set about cutting up the remnants of our three, recently felled whitebeam trees.

With a simple bow saw, that was blooming hard work, but Oh the sense of virtue and satisfaction at the sight of a beautiful heap of logs, all split, stacked and stored! They'll be ready for burning in 2011 and I tell you, I've derived more joy from that than from putting down a case or two of Bordeaux!

Open woodland at Holme Fen Nature Reserve, Cambridgeshire.

BUT. . .

now for something more profound. No more jokes, please. No rants, no wisecracks about effete southerners or dysfunctional transport - just a note or two, with piccies, of a rather wonderful recent experience.

My good friend and critically acclaimed blogger recently asked why we seldom visit spectacular places if they are on our doorstep. We keep on saying, ' must go there one day,' but for some reason that day never comes. Well, over the recent Christmas break, along with the few members of the family who could be unglued from the festive decanter and dragged from the log-crackling stove, we bucked the trend and explored an absolutely mega local spot. OK, so it was a walk in the woods - but these are not just any old woods

Holme Fen, which contains England's largest natural birchwood, is a place I've had the best intentions of visiting these past 33 years! If you ever travel on the Edinburgh-London railway, look out of the port side windows (left hand side facing the direction of travel) about five minutes after leaving Peterborough. The billiard-table flat, industrially farmed fenland gives way, all of a sudden, to an impressive forest of our native birch, Betula pendula which runs along the railway track for a mile or so.

I know those woods from the outside because I frequently travel down that line. Every time I pass them, they look different.

Green and silver - the pattern of trunks rearing up from a carpet of mosses and ferns.

In winter, the silvery trunks catch the low sun and shine vividly above the tawny bracken; in early summer, bright, fresh young leaves shade a diverse and special range of fenland plants as well as foxgloves and more familiar woodland flowers. Come the autumn, and toadstool nutters would freak out at the diversity of the fungi – some edible, others deadly and many of ambiguous identity, just to keep them on their toes!

Birches, drawn quickly skyward, in a race to the light.

The quality of light, even where the trees are densely packed, is extraordinary. In typical British woodland, grey-barked ashes and craggy oaks tend to have a darkening effect, bringing twilight forward by an hour. But birches are different. Their pale, reflective trunks bump up the ambient light and the branches and twigs in the woodland canopy, are so thin and wiry, that daylight penetrates far more easily than with other trees.

In wide view, a ghostly quality results; when viewed close-to, each trunk is marked with fascinating patterns. On old trees, dark fissures and cracks contrast with the silvery skin, often dusted with algae or crusted with lichens and mosses.

The bark, on aged trees, becomes fissured and cragged;

colonies of lichens and mosses make harmonious colour schemes.

These woods are more dynamic, than any I've seen. Fallen branches lie everywhere and it is soon obvious that the life cycle of the birch is shorter and more intense than for more mighty forest species. Growth is fast, seed production copious and each tree seems to be on borrowed time. Even the fenland ground feels unstable, here. Peat, on a high water table quakes as you walk, almost as if the earth was a giant waterbed but more subtle and slight in its movements. This is not a little unnerving! Carpets of mosses reinforce the sense of unreality - a soft quilt, tempting to lie on, though not in January!

Birch Bracket Fungus, Piptoporus betulinus on silver birch trunk.

Holme Fen is managed by Natural England and you can find more detail about it here. As well as birchwood, there is acid heathland - a rarity in these parts - and fragments of sedge fen.

Interesting wild plants include climbing corydalis Ceratocapnos claviculata, an annual which we found as moribund winter dregs, but which, in summer, is pretty enough to encourage in any garden. You can find pictures and details here.

Natural England has worked hard, but with a light touch, to preserve and manage these remarkable habitats. It's hard to believe that they are bordered by Britain's most intensely farmed agricultural land and could so easily have been lost, a sacrifice to food production.

A felled ash - too alien to be allowed in a birchwood?

Tree and scrub management is carried out by Natural England.

This nature reserve is part of a magnificent plan to restore 3,000 hectares – almost 7,500 acres – of a unique landscape to its original, pre-drained state. Known as the Great Fen Project , it will connect Holme Fen with a second great reserve, Woodtwalton Fen.

Common reed, Phragmites australis,

crucial for the survival of so many fenland species.

At almost 3 metres below sea level, this is also Britain's lowest point. A place of reeds, dykes - the local word for ditches - unstable, blow-away peat soils, complex drainage systems and staggeringly rich wildlife. When the Great Fen Project is completed and the area known as Whittlesea Mere is 'un-drained,' we can expect breeding bitterns to be commonplace, in the vast reed beds. Ospreys will hunt over the open water and a substantial part of the pre-17th century fen character will return.

It's good to feel that although I won't be here when the project is completed, wildlife will benefit for future generations.

And what on earth, you ask, has all this to do with gardening? Well an awful lot, actually. The colours, shapes, textures, smells, natural harmony and downright eeriness of this place would inspire even the most lumpen horticulturist. Birches are widely grown, as garden trees, though many gardeners go for the more spectacular Asian or American species. Whatever your tastes, it is inspiring to see this splendid genus in a natural habitat, and to derive inspiration from that.

So if you ever pass that way, pay Holme Fed a visit. You will find yourself in a strange but exhilarating and exciting world.

But enough! Enough! Desist! Stop, now!! As ever, far too long a post and I thank you deeply if you have read this far down.

I'm listening to . . . my wife playing a clip from the film Doubt with Meryl Streep - apparently about naughty things in a convent. (I always thought it was a given that naughty things happened in convents.) Her computer is drowning Beethoven's Trio in C minor Opus 9 on mine.

I'm reading . . . Martin Chuzzlewit. Still!

This day last year I was . . . In the garden with my 5 year-old granddaughter who staggered me by recognising and naming witch hazel. She shows all the signs of becoming a keen gardener, poor love.

HOMO NIVEUS

Just the briefest of footnotes on the snow postings.  Have a look at these snowpeople, shot with my swanky new iPhone camera.  Well, the iPhone is swanky but the camera, frankly, is a pile of pants.  (The rest of the iPhone really is phenomenally wonderful.)

First, meet Lugs!  Something of the cowboy about him.  Note the ears, legs, necktie and belt.

Now say 'Hi!' to Mr Carrotconk.    He has his own igloo (below) on our neighbouring village green.   Eat your heart out, London!  This is where the real snowguys hang.