Thursday 28 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: Gnome Nation

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In a pleasant change of mood from the discussion of ever-falling house prices, The Independent today tackles the question of what makes Britain great.

Apparently quite a lot of what makes up our stout national character relates to gardening: the list includes Allotments (which "show that self-sufficiency might lead to the possibility of sleeping with Felicity Kendal"), Rude Vegetables and of course Gnomes, which "some say have mystical powers".

You what?

Sadly, most of the commenters on the main web page are taking it way too seriously.
Angry posts about traffic, litter and (best of all) "imagrants" and "Mosks". Mmm. Learn to spell, and then maybe I'll bother reading it.

On the other hand, fish and chips, jaffa cakes and "proper sandwiches", I like a bit better as explanations of our national appeal. But on my list (obviously from a fairly horticultural angle) would also be:


Pub window boxes: Come on now! Where else in the world have you ever been where establishments selling booze took so much care over the gardening? It's like making a gingerbread house to tempt in small children, it's saying "come in and drink, we mean you no harm, you will be safe with us. Cirrhosis? What's that? Mm, look at this busy lizzie and stop thinking such depressing thoughts."


Municipal bedding: Say what you like, no one does it like us. Okay, Jeff Koons made a dog out of flowers in Bilbao. But that's like post-modern and stuff. I'm talking about proper old-fashioned Britain in Bloom. The vicious competition, the night time strikes on the enemy, the lifetime rivalry: it's just so, well, British.


Sissinghurst: There's a reason this is the most visited garden in England. It has romanticism, history, great planting, and lesbians. Thousands of coachloads are not disappointed, because it's one of the most magical places on earth.


But there's still so many things to mention. Chelsea Flower Show! Lawns! the W.I.! What would you add? Remember now, no going-on about "Pollish" people.

Tuesday 26 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: Running wild

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I must be getting better at running, because this weekend I had energy while battering my body around the streets of Hounslow to note a promising looking skip full of pallets (raised beds ahoy), admire a pretty oleander, and earmark a bush covered in juicy fuchsia berries for guerrilla jam-making.

At least two people have inquired how the training is going for the Trees for Cities 5k Treeathlon I'm running in, eek, four weeks time. Well, I'm so scared of not being able to get through the whole distance that I'm upping my mileage dramatically every time I run. According to the Couch-to-5k online running trainer I'm using, the way to do it is to get up to running for 30 minutes by doing intervals with walking in between. Hurray! My trainer told me to walk some of the way! Dsc00243

My biggest fear currently is being seen by any of my neighbours who will tease me mercilessly, so 7.30am and 11pm runs are pretty much obligatory. One thing I am convinced about is the power of having entered for a run on a particular day: Trees for Cities Treeathlon is a gentle jog around Battersea Park compared to most of the sporting events that we've watched this summer, but the thought of messing it up entirely fills me with the requisite motivation to get out of bed and run. Ooh, that, and being more like Cheryl Cole.



PS. Don't forget that if you want to do the run and you're in Leeds or Manchester, the dates are later - Leeds is the 28th September, and Manchester doesn't race till the 5th October. Ages!

Friday 22 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: Chin chin!

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I feel ever-so-slightly excited about this bank holiday weekend. Firstly, we might get to check out new Gardeners' World presenter Toby Buckland (pictured) in action; but in addition, programme schedulers have also promised us a little bit of Matthew Wilson, widely regarded in blogging parts as the one that got away as far as the top GW job is concerned. 

Having watched Gardeners' World last week I can't help feeling they are beginning to get the formula better  than it has been for months. There was lots of detail about the sweet pea trials at Wisley, a nice thing about ethno-botanist James Wong's garden, and loads of serious propagation from Carol Klein, who's been standing in for Monty since he got ill and who I will greatly miss when she takes a bit of a step back. (I even enjoyed Joe's briefly choked-up moment about getting awarded a scout veg-growing badge).

As far as the rest of my gardening weekend goes, I'm looking forward to reading the papers - despite Garden Monkey's monkeyish dismissal of most weekend garden writing as "frippery" this week. I definitely don't want my column to go down as a gristly amuse-bouche, but then I
absolutely love reading those weekend garden pieces: I got into gardening partly by reading columns like Christopher Lloyd's (early on in Country Life, later in the Guardian).




I'm sure even Garden Monkey would agree that CL is sacrosanct. Yet I would defend quite a lot of other frippery too. I constantly enjoy reading what other people have to say about gardening. I love Carol Klein's column in the Weekend Guardian, short and sweet. I absolutely worship at the feet of Dan Pearson, and could instantly reel off my top five columns of his that he did this
year (these two are amongst my best, epitomising his calm, elegant, passionate way of writing about plants). I love being made to feel deeply inadequate by Sarah Raven as she reveals herself to be totally proficient in growing yet another group of plants I have no idea about. Cleve makes me laugh (a client who banned yellow) and Anna Pavord can too, especially when she tries to cut back on her gardening budget. 

I also own the collected weekend columns of Elspeth Thompson and Ursula Buchan and I read them whenever I need a cheer up. And Val Bourne, who writes regularly for the Telegraph on the weekend, is one of my favourite writers for summing up the exact essence of a plant - she
wrote all those tempting descriptions on Crocus which often finally seal the deal as far as I'm concerned.  And no one can persuade to miss consulting Helen Yemm, who manages weekly to find solutions to Britain's most pressing gardening pests, diseases and mysterious failures, whilst also keeping us up to date about what's going on in her garden. And I haven't even
mentioned Robin Lane Fox, king of the witty piece taken from a totally new angle (his new year's resolutions in January were a delight, as were his veg in pots).

In fact I could probably spend the entire weekend reading the weekend's garden writing. And wouldn't mind at all. Although I am hoping for good weather on at least one day this weekend, I could never find it a chore to be left alone to ponder any of these entertaining, informative
writers. Which is why I for one will never agree with Garden Monkey that it's mere "frippery"; I find all these writers inspire me, provoke me, inform and surprise me. How I look at a garden has been fundamentally shaped by newspaper writers, and if that means I'm the kind of person who could exist on just canapés, all I can say is: pass the sausages on sticks. And cheers!

Thursday 21 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: The Mighty Budd

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We've been fairly short of butterflies this year, thanks to all the rain; Jane Perrone reassures us, though, that it's just that they don't want to get wet. Her test was that even her buddleia didn't seem to be doing the business, a shocking state of affairs.

We gardeners rely on buddleia as a catch-all token gesture to wildlife. It pretty much qualifies as wildlife itself, colonising railway embankments, rooftops and chimney-stacks with a pioneer spirit that sometimes verges on alarming.

If you have a buddleia in your garden, you will spend at least one
afternoon a year doing the annoyingBuddleja2 trimming that goes with such a
vigorous grower. So it's easy to see why people might not value it all
that highly - after all, rather than caring for it, you tend to feel
more like you're fighting it back. But does that mean the whole plant's
been dismissed unfairly? Is buddleia actually due for reconsideration?


On a recent visit to Denmans, John Brooke's base in Sussex, I began to think that buddleia doesn't have to be consigned to nature corner: look at this border of dahlias and evening primrose, backed by a vividly rosy-purple buddleia. I think the pale primrose zings against
the mauve, with the white cactus dahlias providing an accent that's just spot on, for me.
Budd





Elsewhere in the garden, other buddleias were working just as hard - far from shoving themselves in where they weren't wanted, these guys were there in official border plant capacity, providing colour, height and all the other stuff you want at the back of the bed. A particular nice white one served as a backdrop to some paler planting nearer the house. (A hard pruning had clearly got them to flower as much as possible, with blooms pointing in all different directions.)



Denmans has an extrovert quality that's not just restricted to the
unconventional use of Buddleia. Here'sTupa2_3 a huge patch of one of my
favourite plants, Lobelia tupa, growing in a lovely meadow area with
heleniums and other daisies providing accent colour in the background.



For me, Denmans made the perfect argument for the better use of buddleias. CBUB, I think I'll call it. I want to see them attracting butterflies to the poshest borders in Britain, not just tolerated in some wild self-seeding area near the compost heap. Just don't ask me to start spelling it with a "j", that's all I ask.

Thursday 14 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: Heartfelt green-fingered blues

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So the big announcement at Gardeners' World was finally issued by the BBC yesterday at noon, revealing that rank outsider Toby Buckland got the job of fronting Britain's most popular gardening TV show. (By rank, I don't mean that Toby smells, simply that his name wasn't even on original lists drawn up by the bookies in May.) 

I'm not quite sure I would include amongst Toby's life achievements "making a garden for Andrew Motion" (as the Telegraph did), but there we go. That's showbiz.

It's that showbizziness that's giving me bad vibes about the way in which the decision itself was made. I don't know what was going on in the production team's heads and perhaps they are right and Toby will be fantastic in the job: I have definitely enjoyed his column in Amateur Gardening in the past, and his more recent spots on GW itself. But I have a feeling that the BBC have gone about picking someone for slightly odd reasons, that may be more to do with money and budgets and the future of the programme than we would like.

I am always intrigued the way individuals make major decisions, because it's often so idiosyncratic. I was talking to my dad recently who had made a decision about moving house: he said he'd made a list of all the things he missed about other houses he'd lived in, and looked for a house that had all of them. (This included, my friends, "lawn big enough to mow on a ride-on tractor mower". Says my dad, "I've been missing doing that since we sold the Temple in 1986". Who moves house so that they can have more lawn to mow? Yup, bonkers, as I said.)

But I wish that someone had made the Gardeners' World decision by doing what my dad did: making a list of what they missed from the past. I still miss Geoff Hamilton; we all do, it turns out. (He died very prematurely of a heart attack in 1996, aged 60, while doing a charity bike ride.) I miss someone who had an over-arching philosophy of what he was doing - a view of the world that combines caring about how it looks now, with caring about how it will be in future. I miss how completely he was himself on television - a talent in itself. I miss someone who would talk about each plant like it mattered, rather than chucking things into a planting scheme with the overall effect in mind. I miss how kind and generous Geoff Hamilton was.

I still remember all these things, and I mourn them. Geoff would have been 72 tomorrow, and I wish he was still alive: one properly good way to honour his memory is to look after your heart, as we've been told repeatedly over the last week, including in a fairly alarming ad. And, I guess, let's cross our fingers about Toby Buckland. I hope he turns out to be a great choice.


Photo from Barnsdale website. Barnsdale garden is open daily to
visitors, where you can the TV gardens that Geoff created as well as
newer areas designed by his son Nick, author of "Grow Organic". The nursery runs a mail-order side and won a silver at Chelsea for its display this year.

Wednesday 13 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: Happy bloomin' Christmas, already?

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Eek guys look what I found yesterday on Amazon. Yes, while most of us idiots are still struggling with the intricacies of the bulb order, Raven is off and running, Ironwoman triathlete-stylie, towards the long-term goal that is a Happy Christmas. 

I have to admit that Christmas cookery is practically my favourite subject for a book in the entire world, so she's onto a winner with me. But how do we feel about this turning up on Amazon on twelfth day of August? Okay, it's just pre-orders. But in my family, it's totally verboten to talk about Christmas until at least September the 1st, so Sarah R really is taking a risk there. (Although probably mostly with my aunty Jude, who has yet to tackle the subject of family christmasses in her oeuvre, that I am aware.)

It's really hard this time of year not to think about autumn and winter. It's pathetic, because in some sort of Zen way I should just be enjoying the moment. It's boiling hot sunny outside and the garden looks amazing because there's been so much rain - I can see twelve five-foot canna stems from where I sit typing. Yet there is winter, lurking at the back of it all. "After summer evermore succeeds / Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold", Gloucester says in Henry VI.

Given winter's obvious disadvantages, it's quite nice to be able to get excited about the Christmas book: I am really looking forward to getting my hands on it and seeing what's in it. But I'm also anticipating that slightly sinking feeling when I realise that Christmas à la Raven would be 300 times better than anything I can achieve. Hand-grown table centre arrangements, paperwhite narcissi everywhere, jam made of her own strawberries, ugh, I'm starting to feel nauseous already. I both want to be her, and don't want to be her. Help! How can I stop wanting to be Sarah Raven, and just be happy being me?





PS. One bit of consolation. Okay, I may not even have a husband, but SR's gave her a potato peeler for Christmas. Thank heaven for tiny mercies.

Friday 8 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: The horror, the horror

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About four weeks ago I foolishly signed up to run the Trees For Cities Tree-athlon. It's not even a real Triathlon: you just have to do a 5k run and then possibly a bit of treeplanting. However it's that "just" having to do a 5k run I'm currently in trouble with.

Pretty much anyone who went to school with me will tell you I am a bit of a reluctant runner. Happy to do hurdles, back crawl, long jump, netball even; running, though, and I'd develop a severe case of hay fever that meant I had to stay safely in the athletics pavilion. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've never run further than a mile. Ever. And five kilometres is just over three.

So yesterday I got an email reminding I had just six weeks to go till the big, over three-mile, day. Six weeks! And I hadn't actually done any actual, well, training. And where exactly are my trainers, now I come to think about it? So this morning I dug them out, with something of the same sense of reluctance that once sent me fleeing for the athletics pavilion, and decided to try and run for seven minutes without stopping.

Well, I did it, running round the block at a slug's pace (literally, I was lapped by one of those yellow ones with the orange edges) and crossing the road to avoid any eye contact with Polish loft conversion specialists. All I can say is, I am now extremely pink.

But then I drove round the block in my car to measure the distance and it was a totally depressing mere 0.6 miles. Oh my god, what have I let myself in for? I am going to be overtaken by grandmas. Possibly even my own grandmas. 

I feel that the trees of London may have a long wait on their hands before my fitness actually has anything to offer them. But on the other hand, signing up for this race got me to go for a run, which has to be a good thing, right? For a start I've breathed out loads of extra carbon dioxide for them to metabolize. Oh, that's probably actually not necessary, is it? Possibly the most useful part of the experience is the chance to nose into lots and lots of people's windowboxes and front garden planting. If and when I make any significant improvement on that shocking 12-minute-mile time, I'll let you know.

A Nice Green Leaf: The horror, the horror

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About four weeks ago I foolishly signed up to run the Trees For Cities Tree-athlon. It's not even a real Triathlon: you just have to do a 5k run and then possibly a bit of treeplanting. However it's that "just" having to do a 5k run I'm currently in trouble with.

Pretty much anyone who went to school with me will tell you I am a bit of a reluctant runner. Happy to do hurdles, back crawl, long jump, netball even; running, though, and I'd develop a severe case of hay fever that meant I had to stay safely in the athletics pavilion. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've never run further than a mile. Ever. And five kilometres is just over three.

So yesterday I got an email reminding I had just six weeks to go till the big, over three-mile, day. Six weeks! And I hadn't actually done any actual, well, training. And where exactly are my trainers, now I come to think about it? So this morning I dug them out, with something of the same sense of reluctance that once sent me fleeing for the athletics pavilion, and decided to try and run for seven minutes without stopping.

Well, I did it, running round the block at a slug's pace (literally, I was lapped by one of those yellow ones with the orange edges) and crossing the road to avoid any eye contact with Polish loft conversion specialists. All I can say is, I am now extremely pink.

But then I drove round the block in my car to measure the distance and it was a totally depressing mere 0.6 miles. Oh my god, what have I let myself in for? I am going to be overtaken by grandmas. Possibly even my own grandmas. 

I feel that the trees of London may have a long wait on their hands before my fitness actually has anything to offer them. But on the other hand, signing up for this race got me to go for a run, which has to be a good thing, right? For a start I've breathed out loads of extra carbon dioxide for them to metabolize. Oh, that's probably actually not necessary, is it? Possibly the most useful part of the experience is the chance to nose into lots and lots of people's windowboxes and front garden planting. If and when I make any significant improvement on that shocking 12-minute-mile time, I'll let you know.

Thursday 7 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: A carrot above the rest

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Garden blogfriend Veg Plotting contacted me a while ago to say she was going to open her garden this summer for charity. No surprise there, because garden opening is a popular summer activity; our paper's own Victoria Summerley will be opening her subtropical plot in deepest Wandsworth for NGS this coming Sunday

But then VP explained what she meant: a virtual garden opening, with all you'd expect from the real thing - recipes, plant histories, the occasional crazy visitor - but without having to leave the comfort of your own home.

Given the kind of weather we've been having I imagine that online garden visiting has been one of the more successful ventures of the summer - VP has certainly managed to raise a colossal sum of money already for her chosen charity, WaterAid, though more is always welcome. And every donor is automatically entered for a draw to win prizes! Properly good, horticulturally special prizes like signed books by Jekka McVicar and Matthew Wilson and membership of the Cottage Garden Society (Awww!). 

Trying to think how I could support her efforts, I kept returning to the village shows that my sister and I adored when we were kids. The idea caught in my mind of an online village show, with visitors and entries from all round the world. We'd even include people from the Southern Hemisphere, even if they do stubbornly insist on holding winter about now. 

So the Emsworth Village Show was born. We started with the normal categories you get at a fete - and then we added some others, like Best Paparazzi Shot of Garden Celebrity, Fattest Pig, and Men Only Victoria Sandwich. If you are anything like me, perusing other people's veg, chickens, pigs and misshapen carrots is a delicious task that will while away many happy hours.

Please do come and have a wander round the show. We're still accepting entries, too, so if you have a fairly hippyish non-competitive sense of wanting to show off your absolutely enormous onions, here's the place. And don't miss checking out VP's garden, - and make sure you're in with a chance for one of those excellent prizes.

A Nice Green Leaf: A carrot above the rest

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Garden blogfriend Veg Plotting contacted me a while ago to say she was going to open her garden this summer for charity. No surprise there, because garden opening is a popular summer activity; our paper's own Victoria Summerley will be opening her subtropical plot in deepest Wandsworth for NGS this coming Sunday

But then VP explained what she meant: a virtual garden opening, with all you'd expect from the real thing - recipes, plant histories, the occasional crazy visitor - but without having to leave the comfort of your own home.

Given the kind of weather we've been having I imagine that online garden visiting has been one of the more successful ventures of the summer - VP has certainly managed to raise a colossal sum of money already for her chosen charity, WaterAid, though more is always welcome. And every donor is automatically entered for a draw to win prizes! Properly good, horticulturally special prizes like signed books by Jekka McVicar and Matthew Wilson and membership of the Cottage Garden Society (Awww!). 

Trying to think how I could support her efforts, I kept returning to the village shows that my sister and I adored when we were kids. The idea caught in my mind of an online village show, with visitors and entries from all round the world. We'd even include people from the Southern Hemisphere, even if they do stubbornly insist on holding winter about now. 

So the Emsworth Village Show was born. We started with the normal categories you get at a fete - and then we added some others, like Best Paparazzi Shot of Garden Celebrity, Fattest Pig, and Men Only Victoria Sandwich. If you are anything like me, perusing other people's veg, chickens, pigs and misshapen carrots is a delicious task that will while away many happy hours.

Please do come and have a wander round the show. We're still accepting entries, too, so if you have a fairly hippyish non-competitive sense of wanting to show off your absolutely enormous onions, here's the place. And don't miss checking out VP's garden, - and make sure you're in with a chance for one of those excellent prizes.

Tuesday 5 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: Britain In Bloom

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If you've ever wondered how there can be quite so many murders in Midsomer, look no further than Britain in Bloom. It tells you all you need to know about how seriously people can take things when it comes to the very local.

And DCI Barnaby had better be on the lookout, because for the next two weeks the Royal Horticultural Society's Britain in Bloom judges are taking their highly prestigious clipboards around the entire British Isles to check out the finalists for this furiously
contested title.

If you're not familiar with Britain in Bloom, it's considerably more intriguing than simple floral showing-off.

As in the FA Cup, some of the most satisfying stuff goes on at the very lowest levels of the competition, as even the smallest scheme gets help to find funding and recognition for improvement made. (For example check out this scheme to improve a churchyard in Torbay which was a coat-hanger dumping ground for the town's regular shoplifters before the team got to work.)

But if you want one of those coveted signs for the whole town recognising its "Britain in Bloom" status, you will have to be in it for the long haul. The judging taking place this August is on towns that qualified last year, to ensure a certain consistency of achievement (no last minute running out to Homebase here, then).

And the judges are scary. Well, I think so anyway. Check out the rules on litter and graffiti. Eek. I'm going outside with a bin-bag right now. 



So here are the shortlisted towns in full: 



Champion of Champions - Nottingham (large city), Heysham (small village), Alness
(small town), St. Ives & Carbis Bay (town), Darly (village)



Large City - London Borough of Croydon, Belfast, Sheffield



City – Solihull, Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, Tameside, Aberdeen



Small City – Stevenage, Mansfield, Gateshead, Taunton, Banbury



Large Town – Kendal, Buxton, Douglas, St. Hellier, Coleraine, Whickham, Perth, Bicester, Caerphilly



Town – Bridgnorth, Nantwich, Enniskillen, Morpeth, Forres, Rustington



Small Town - Frinton-on-Sea, Cricklade, Wareham, Dunnington



Large village - Kirkby Stephen, Market Bosworth, Upton upon Severn, Woolton, Falkland, Limpsfield Cayton



Village – Filby, Scarva, Earsdon, East Budleigh, Raglan



Small village – Scotlandwell, Ravenfield



Urban Regeneration - Chapelfield (Norwich), Leicester, Seedley and Langworthy



Urban Community – Moseley, Dyce, Clifton Village (Bristol), Wolverton and Greenleys, Starbeck



Small Coastal Resort – Herm, St. Brelade, Whitehead, North Berwick, Cemaes Bay



Large Coastal Resort – Felixstowe, Southport, South Shields, Exmouth, South Sea, Scarborough



(Picture from Douglas Borough Council, Isle of Man website)


Monday 4 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: Amateur Gardener. And proud of it

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I am going to come right out and admit that I like Amateur Gardening. I don't mean I enjoy bumbling around in the garden not really knowing what I'm doing (though I am partial to a bit of that). I mean I really like the magazine. Despite it's being apparently targeted at the over-90s and being "downmarket trash". 

There are many reasons I love Amateur Gardening. Firstly, you almost always get a free packet of seed. In fact, you only don't get a free packet of seed when some thieving over-90 has got to Co-op before you, and swiped it. Not rubbish seed, either. Mr Fothergills, no less.

Secondly, I could spend hours going on about how fascinated I am with Lucy and Emilie. (Not as fascinated as I was when they used to have Lucinda, but nonetheless.) Lucy and Emilie work for the mag and have to pose for all the practical demonstrations, doing their best to look like nice girls while gazing at clumps of aquilegia/dead euphorbias/automatic watering systems. Plus in winter they have the best assortment of colourful jumpers you will ever see in print.
Honestly, the £1.80 cover price is worth it just for them.

But finally, despite the magazine's downmarket, gnome-owning credentials, for me it is the best source for having up-to-date, fairly gossipy gardening news. Before there were gardening blogs, this kind of thing was essential. But even now, I think their news editor Marc Rosenberg does a really good job of rounding up intriguing stories, ranging from reporting the hoax Alan Titchmarsh skunk-growing video to giving the facts on cardboard eco-coffins.

Apart from these star features, there is also sound cultural advice in the form of Anne Swithinbank's kitchen garden column, which I find really handy, and Bob Flowerdew who as far as I'm concerned is top class great. Which prepares me nicely to try and chuckle at Peter Seabrook's signing-off column, which he appears to regard as unfinished unless he's having a little dig at the solar-panel-installing, mediterranean-plant-growing ninnies amongst us. Well, you can't please everybody.   

Friday 1 August 2008

A Nice Green Leaf: Holiday mysteries

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Currently on a week's secondment to Oxford where I'm teaching a course on the eighteenth century landscape garden (students all particularly raving about Tim Richardson's wonderful Arcadian Friends, just out in paperback). We had a hot trip to Stowe and an amazing time at Rousham, and we even managed to take a turn around Addison's Walk (of which more in a later post).


DaisyThe biggest problem of the week is managing to retain any kind of semblance of an air of horticultural authority in the face of all the weird stuff the class have managed to spot growing in flowerbeds. And of course I have no reference books.



The first problem was the pink flower in the first image. "Its name is on the tip of my tongue," I told the class, confidently, yet it never actually arrived. I looked like an idiot. Nevertheless, I scored some points recognising Salvia "Hot Lips" in a Magdalen college border, seen first at Hampton Court. But then I lost them again on this mysterious daisy. (Daisy-ish? Oh god, fine, make me beg. JUST PLEASE TELL ME THE NAME.)




Dsc00191And what in god's name is this fella (left)? I think I have some credit in the ID bank after I put a name to Garden Monkey's oddity -
so somebody, please help me get my reputation back with the Oxford
crowd. Don't lose all respect for me - can't you just think it's sort
of sweet that I don't know what they are? Missing you, xxx