Wordless Wednesday - Fresh

Cake and friendship

Not gardening-related, but I wanted to record for posterity the most gorgeous cake, and thank the person who made it, who has come to be a friend of mine.

A few years ago, I was head of the department in which I still work. I didn't like being head of department, but that is another story, thankfully another one with a happy ending. A lady came for an interview to come onto our Foundation Degree in Food Technology course, of which I was the course manager. She sat in my office, and explained that it was a long time since she had been at school, had brought up a family, and had a young daughter. She wanted to do something for herself, and that something was to do the foundation degree.

We went through the course and what it entailed. As I explained the modules (which have a heavy science and technology bias), Sam came out with: "I can't do science" and "I can't do maths". But she could. She could combine study for a foundation degree (equivalent to the first two years of an honours degree), with being a mum to a lovely daughter. OK, so quite a few "mature" students do that. But Sam's daughter has Spina Bifida and is confined to a wheelchair. Sam combined undergraduate study with being a mum, and regularly going with her daughter to Alder Hey hospital for complex operation after operation. To while away the time at the hospital, she would even take her assignments.

Sam completed the Foundation Degree, and took the brave move to top this up to a full Honours degree with us. Let's face it, by year 3 of a degree, even full-time students tend to have sobered up and to start working hard. Combining this with looking after a family and all of the time she and her husband spent with Beth, and working with Go Folic (see Sam and her daughter here) and the effort is Herculean.

This September I saw Sam graduate with a 2(i) Honours degree in Food Technology. I was so proud of the lady who sat and told me that she couldn't do maths or science.

What I forgot to say is that Sam has a host of other skills, and one of these is cake decorating. She runs Top Tier Designs. And she made Thomas' first birthday cake. It's perfect. Thank you, Sam x

Green(ish) wall

Bittersweet

Ten years today since the saddest day of my life.

One year today since the happiest day of my life.

Happy first birthday, Thomas x
Happy birthday, Dad x Something nice to celebrate on your birthday now x

Miss you always, Mum x

New Year Revolutions

Pah! to resolutions - made in haste and broken even faster.

No, this year, I thought I'd try something a little more fun. A little more of a challenge. I thought I'd try and kick a bit of bottom, horticulturally. OK, so it'll end up as a damp squib, but at least I will have got a few things off my chest. We want a Revolution!

So I shall start 2013 with an attempt to get a few New Year Revolutions going. Perhaps I can change a few things, to make the world a better place - for me, at least...

Revolution 1:
First against the wall will be all gardening journalists who refer to a few clashing flower colours as "outrageous" or "courageous". No, just a bit bright.

Revolution 2:
Start up a new gardening magazine. It will contain normal sized gardens. Too long have I had to put up with a single patronising "small gardens" issue per annum. Yes, I'm looking at you, Gardens Illustrated. Of course, it will flop as I expect I'm the only person who would like to see interesting smaller gardens. I suppose others prefer to see identikit rolling acres with huge herbaceous borders and natural swimming ponds the size of a small sea.

Revolution 3:
Singlehandedly make candytuft the "must have" plant for 2014 (I thought 2013 would be pushing it). It's so retro it's futuristic. Candytuft will be in all the Chelsea gardens in 2014, mark my words. By 2016, it will be everwhere, and the plant snobs will begin the backlash.

Revolution 4:
Develop a new form of parasitic nematode. It will parasitise smug proselytisers, such as rabid organic souls. Parasites can do some really weird things to their hosts. Good. I try to garden organically, but find it ironic that organic gardening allows a range of chemicals which I find hard to believe could be classified as "organic".  I've wondered about organic gardeners' use of Bordeaux mixture for some time, as it is harmful to wildlife, but at least is is being banned from Feb 2013. I have to say, I'd develop a similar parasite to attack those gardeners who have spraying regimes which would put the American army's use of Agent Orange to shame. Blackspot isn't the end of the world, you know. Sorry, that one was a bit of a rant. Still, it is *my* revolution - I can rant if I want.

Revolution 5:
Ban any more bl**dy heuchera cultivars. Especially those that are the colour of sick (i.e. most of them).

Revolution 6:
There is no revolution 6.

Revolution 7:
OK, a garden can be critiqued like a piece of art, but some people really do visit just because of the coffee and cake. They have busy lives, and think about lots of other stuff in a deep way. Perhaps they just want to take a deep breath and admire the achilleas. Chill out about it, please!

Revolution 8:
Require that all references to bumblebees are superceded by the term "foggie toddler". Any non-compliances will be dealt with severely (i.e. forced to give garden room to spray-painted heathers).

New Years Eve addition:
Revolution 9:
Er, helloooo! Gardening magazines (or those contributors asked to write the "25 must visit gardens" reviews). Please note: once you get north of Oxfordshire, there aren't just barren glacial wastes. There are a few gardens up here. Well, I say up here, but I only live in Cheshire, and there's quite a lot of the UK above me. I realise that in these straitened times travel expenses might be reduced, but not every garden up north has been dug up by whippets wearing flat caps and drinking stout. I think Scotland and Wales might want a word, too.

Happy new year. And remember, if you want to be ahead of the fashion for 2014, get growing candytuft!

Nothing says 'Christmas' more than a...

...banded mongoose, I think you'll find.

My dear, meerkats are just so 2008.

Merry Christmas to you all, and a happy and healthy 2013 xxx

Oh, the shame...

A knock on the door yesterday afternoon. SomeBeans answered it.
"Hello. Would you like your front garden tidied?"

 Oh dear.

If only the chap had come by in February, when the dwarf irises pierced through the soil and early crocuses offered their throats to the sunny skies.

Or April, when tulips and forget-me-nots waltzed together in the borders. Or May, when the Centaurea exploded like blue fireworks.

Or June and July, when the peonies managed to dodge the rains and flowered like the most plumptious of scented pompoms.

Where was he in August? Aster 'Monch' was the star of the show.

 In September and October, other asters took over, to the delight of bees, hoverflies and butterflies. In November, Japanese anemones were still flowering.

Even a couple of weeks ago, the garden was shining. Frost scintillating on spent flowerheads and on evergreen foliage.

And then it rained. For a couple of weeks. Sparkling flowerheads offering their seeds up to goldfinches have turned to brown mush. Cardoon and Japanese anemone foliage has slumped and blackened. Fuchsia leaves have dropped.

And someone offers to tidy my garden.

Oh dear. For now, I'll continue to watch the goldfinches, blackbirds and wrens foraging through the sodden udergrowth for food. And then I'll get round to a bit of tidying. Probably.

11 years...

Wordless Wednesday - Metasequoia glyptostroboides

One of our less creative volunteers...

I can't watch those make-your-own-tat shows like Kirsty Allsopp's. Firstly, she's rather annoying. Secondly, I'd instantly think that I could make just a good a fist of it as the experts in her show. I would then become very, very annoyed and disappointed when my decoupage* umbrella stand sagged like a wet weekend in Warrington. This blog is suitably named, believe me.

Nevertheless, I decided to make our garden a little more interesting for Thomas as he grows up. So, I thought I'd have a go at making a living willow structure. There aren't many places in the garden which aren't stuffed full of plants, so a rather unpromising site was chosen - well, willow will grow anywhere, pretty much, and we're not short of water in the North-West of England. We did have a raspberry cane patch in one place, but dug it up a couple of years ago as we had so many raspberries at the allotment (which we have now given up, so no more raspberries for us!). Since then, this space has been used for plonking pots of gone-over bulbs and plants.

Weeds, self-seeded Hellebore, gone-over pots and a Fatsia which always struggled.

 

 I bought a willow wigwam kit from English Willow Baskets. It arrived, well wrapped, a week later, with a brief but easy to follow instruction leaflet.

A curious delivery

So, I hacked a few overhanging branches down, and prepared the site. To add insult to injury for the Fatsia, which was cut down to make space, I used its leaves to mark out the spacings for the uprights. They looked like they were waving at me, in a friendly sort of way. Rather more likely they were howling with despair.

 If you look very carefully, you can see the robin investigating the new landscape

 The kit was well packed and it was clear, even to a total beginner like me, what was what. The long ones were the 10' uprights, the not-so-long ones were the 8' diagonals, and the short ones were the weaving whatsits. Ah yes, weaving. More on that, later.

Even I could tell what was what.

Armed with lump hammer and stake, I made 30cm deep holes at 25cm intervals. Well, I did where I could. Our garden has an extensive amount of archaeology in the garden. Despite being in Chester, I doubt it's Roman. Instead, the estate was built on the grounds of an old house. They didn't bother demolishing the structure below ground level, so parts of the back garden are riddled with brick walls. I've tried digging them up. I gave up. We do have a good brick pile, though. Or spider-breeding centre, as it currently seems to be. Anyway, the uprights went in.

Uprights, well watered, despite the very wet ground.

It started to look quite good when I made the doorway - I almost thought I'd get it looking half-decent... I started to get cocky - a piece of cake, this.

Ha - the doorway is a bit too tall - I was thinking adult, not child.

The instruction to weave a horizontal band about 3' up from the ground floored me. I looked and looked for a secret page on the instruction leaflet which would show me how to weave. The diagram made it look simple. Well, not so much a diagram as a hopeful line drawing. It was like making something from Blue Peter all over again. The mothers and fathers might have left the room, but I was entangled in something much more complicated than a toilet roll desk tidy, and I had no double-sided sticky tape to hand.** By the third attempt, I was reasonably adept. I believe the word that is used by art critics when something isn't very good but has critical acclaim is 'naive'. Well, if you exclude the critical acclaim, I achieved naive weaving.

The diagonals went in, again in 30cm deep holes - one arm was now beginning to resemble Popeye's thanks to the lump hammer wielding. Actually, I'm not sure what a lump hammer is. I think I was actually using a mallet, but to be honest, the closest I'd previously come to mallet-wielding was in a particularly vicious game of croquet in Cambridge.

All went well, until I came to the final instruction. "Draw in the rods at the top. Tie in with biodegradable twine." Well, I thought I had it sorted. How difficult could it be? Very, it turned out, unless you were a twine, scissor and serenity-wielding octopus. If I wasn't such an incredibly placid and patient person, I'm sure the air may have turned blue, as uprights whipped out of my hands, out of the biodegradable twine, and out of control.

This was too much for one person. But it was cold and late.

The following week, with Grandma keeping Thomas entertained, I enrolled the help of SomeBeans. Despite being very detail-minded in most parts of his life, he declared, after he had tied a few uprights together willy-nilly, that it was outside, and so he wasn't bothered about the structure being orderly. Well, I did mind, so we undid the uprights, and decided to turn the wigwam into a dome (very similar to the instructions for a wigwam, but easier to do if you don't have a small team of willing helpers and unlimited patience).

We did it. There was a gap at the front, though. This was because I'd made the door too tall. This will have its advantages, however, as Thomas' aged parents won't have to get down on our hands and knees to get in.

To fill the gap, I channelled Kirsty's creative juices, and made a 'T' (for Thomas - geddit?) in a woven willow circle. There's no stopping me on the weaving front, now. I think I'll weave an iPad for SomeBeans' Christmas present. Or perhaps willow socks.

 One of our less-creative volunteers

And so, we had our willow dome. Hopefully living. We'll have to wait til Spring to find out. I'll update on our endeavours then. I'll put down some weed suppression membrane and bark chippings inside, and then as it grows and matures, so will Thomas. By the time he's old enough to (hopefully) appreciate it, the living parts will have grown and thickened and can be woven in to make the structure thicker.

In case you're wondering about the title of the blog post, it is inspired by our visits to Ness Gardens. In a couple of areas, they have woven structures and sculptures. These are usually labelled with a sign along the lines of "made by some of our more creative volunteers." We often wonder what the less creative volunteers (the lumpen proletariat?) think of this implication of their own creativity.

*SomeBeans (possibly deliberately) mixes up decoupage and decolletage. That may well sag, too.

**Maybe I've had a very sheltered life, but I have never come across double-sided sticky tape. And without that wondrous ingredient, you couldn't make anything from Blue Peter. Am I the only one never to have made anything? I'm sure my parents knew they never had to bother leaving the room if a craft project came onto the programme.