'WE'VE COME ON HOLIDAY BY MISTAKE'

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

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

(CLICK ON PICS TO MAKE BIGGER.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Does it bite?' she asks. 

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

'Does it hurt?' 

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

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

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

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

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

STUNG BY DAD'S FLAMING NETTLES

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

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

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

And to heucheraphiles everywhere - apologies to you too.

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

CLICK ON PICS TO SEE BIGGER.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my goodness, what a ludicrous thing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bye bye, and enjoy your heucheras.

HAEMORRHOIDAL TOMATOES, FREUD AND DEAD BADGERS

Echinacea laevigata growing in the prairie planting at Wisley.

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


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

As ever - click on pix for larger view.

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

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

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

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

Reisetomate - not a pretty sight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A gaggle of mini-rants.

1.  

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

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

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

2. 

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

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

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

3.  

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

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

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

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

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

I'm listening to Berlioz - Symphonie Fantastique

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

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

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

Bless you for reading this far,

Bye bye!

MARROWS ARE MY BIG GUNS: THE COURGETTES MERELY INFANTRY.

My dears!


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


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


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


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


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

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

(CLICK ON PICTURES FOR A BIGGER VIEW.)

NOW, NOW!   YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUR TESCOPOLITAN HELL

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

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

Two rants today!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Rant number two will be briefer, I promise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Byee! And thanks for listening.

DULL OPIATE TO THE BRAINS

What ho, my hearties!   Happy solstice!

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

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

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

(CLICK ON ANY PICTURE TO MAKE IT LARGER.)

The Longest Day has passed and is past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A white picotee form of Papaver rhoeas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's enough poppies! [ed]


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

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

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


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

TRICKOLATIN' MY DODMAN TRAPS

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

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

CLICK ON ANY PICTURE TO MAKE IT BIGGER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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