Wordless Wednesday - I like it now it's gone

Merry Christmas

I hope that you get where you want to go; I hope that you stay warm; I hope that you have a happy Christmas and a happy and healthy new year.

In 2011, may your seeds germinate, your compost gently steam and your slugs take a long holiday somewhere else.

Merry Christmas!

Let it be warm and sunny

Back to basics

I haven’t tweeted or blogged much recently – I find the very cold weather depressing and can’t rouse myself from apathy. Except to rant about Gardeners’ World, of course. The garden has been abandoned for the past few weeks, in a listlessness borne of shortening days. As nights grow longer, I withdraw deeper into my shell.

One thing that has been taking up my time as I hide in the house waiting for longer days is grappling with garden design principles. I’ve mentioned previously that I was starting a shortish garden design course, and I have been really enjoying it. So far, I have:

• bored SomeBeans and my father rigid with talk of unity and progressive realisation in various garden design periods;
• tried to distil this into a short (3000 word) assignment – writing the essay wasn’t difficult, but getting the word count down from 6000 to 3000 was excruciating;
• traipsed around some very forgiving people’s garden, with 10 or so classmates, tripping over each others’ survey lines;
• done battle with a scale rule to produce a pretty accurate base drawing.

The biggest challenge so far, however, was something I’d kept quiet in class about until this week.  At the start of term, we’d all splashed out on various bits of equipment, as keen students do. Because of the theory we had to initially cover, this equipment stayed on a shelf at home, until last week.

It’s a strange feeling to be worried about pens. I’ve been using pens for many, many years now. You learn how to use pens at school, and since then, I’ve probably used one every day. So it was rather embarrassing to be in possession of some pens which I was too frightened to use, even if I had known how to fill them up with ink. Oh, the ignominy.

But it turned out that nearly everyone else had had the same worry and the same sense of foolishness at not knowing how to fill them up. We had all bought them, looked at them, looked at the instructions, looked at the ink bottle, looked at the pens again and quietly put the lid back on.

However, after our lesson on Monday, and a patient tutor, I have discovered the joy of  ‘inking’. It makes feeble pencil drawings look almost good. It will take quite a lot of practice to become proficient, to produce graphics that look like they should, to make sure that I don’t smudge and to make sure that I keep the pen at the right angle, but I have conquered my fear of the Rotring pen. Hurrah!

Next week we’ll be learning ‘colouring in’ as SomeBeans calls it – another return to basics!

A poem

A poem by E.J. Thrip*,

So. Farewell then
Toby Buckland
The nation’s gardener.

The BBC have placed you
On TV’s compost heap

But you showed us all
How to tickle
The soil to hide your footsteps

It’s a shame that
The BBC see fit
To do the same to you.


*with a very large nod to E.J. Thribb.

The problem with the public...

...is that they are generally wrong. Well, they are if they disagree with me.

The BBC have been garnering intelligence on what people like and don't like about gardening on the BBC. In what appeared to be a hastily constructed forum called 'Over the Garden Fence' they encouraged us to tell them what we liked about the BBC's contributions to gardening.

I don't know if the two are related, but tonight I have found out (thank you, Twitter folks) that Toby Buckland will no longer be heading Gardeners' World. A shame. Also adieu to Alys Fowler.

Toby's reign had a slightly wobbly start (the Cool Wall, anyone?) but had improved and had some more interesting and occasional technical pieces in it, which made it worth watching. I had all but given up the previous incarnation, apart from to count how many times the Lord of Cord said "Here at Berryfields" each week. I found it condescending. And dull.

One positive remains - Carol Klein will still be on the show. Rachel de Thame returns - into each life a little rain must fall.

I hope the BBC didn't make these choices based on their half-baked intelligence-gathering forum. I'm sure they didn't. Because who would let the public decide such madness as this?

Roll on long Friday summer evenings, a glass of wine, a comfortable garden bench and the TV off switch.

Wordless Wednesday – Five weeks

Wordless Wednesday - garden companionship

A handy little piece of equipment

Whilst at the Malvern Autumn Show in September, we spent some time wandering around the steam enthusiasts’ ‘village’. It’s quite something to see the dedication these men (and yes, they are almost exclusively men) have ot their machines. I suppose it’s technology on a scale to which we can relate. The machines might be large, but of you twiddle a knob, you can see what effect it will have. Open up a car engine nowadays and all you’ll see are plastic-encased boxes.

I was admiring a display of oil cans, as you do, when the chap on the stall challenged my father and I to identify the piece of equipment in the photo below. He’s been given the piece by a lady who knew he collected odd bits and pieces of machinery.

We failed the identification test, but do you know what it is?

Change

From this…

to this

in only one week.