Drink-along-a-Monty

Hmm. You know when you get something stuck in your teeth, and you have to keep niggling away at it with your tongue? Or when you've got a bite, and you know you mustn't scratch it even though it itches like crazy. You still have to scratch it.

At the moment, this is how I feel about Gardeners' World. Hence my return to the topic after Nigel the Dog's guest post.

To be honest, I think that one needs a little incentive to watch this programme nowadays. And so in a state of reckless abandon, I suggest the Gardeners' World Drinking Game*. It should make the programme more interesting, and if it doesn't, you'll be too blotto to care.

Drinking Game rules:

Have one gulp of your drink (or if you are really going for it, one shot) for each successfully met condition:

Monty sayings:

- "Here at Longmeadow"
- "Time to trim the hedges"
- any mention of blanket weed in the pond
- any mention of non-use of chemicals (NOTE: for die-hard drink-along-a-Monty gamers, this should be accompanied by downing a cocktail made up of the most virulent-coloured, additive enhanced cocktail you can make. Or a Kia-Ora)
- any mention of compost heaps (a double shot if accompanied by either his love of compost, or by mentioning that he lawn-mowers it)


Camera shots:

- Any appearance of Nigel Dog - should also be accompanied by a loud "Woof woof!"
- Close-up of flower with Monty working, out of focus, in the background
- Shot of pristine garden tools on the shed wall - you know the ones - the dozen different trowels)

If you're teetotal, and have access to a laptop, you might prefer to follow the programme on Twitter, with the hashtag #shoutyhalfhour (via @saralimback) - always entertaining.

Let me know if you have any other conditions you think are worth adding to the rules.

Cheers!

*Though, as a responsible mother, I will be gulping on orange juice rather than gin).

Wordless Wednesday: Peony + Typical British Summer = …

Shiny, happy beetle

I discovered this little chap (or chapess – not sure how you tell? Or how the beetles tell, come to that – presumably they can) on our lavender this week.

Isn’t he lovely? A beautiful metallic brown with green, bejewelled stripes. A blinged-up beetle.

 

The rosemary beetle has a taste, it seems, for all manner of aromatic plants. Much as I love to see the bees on the lavender, I think there’ll be enough flowers to go around, even with a few of these chewing the buds. I might resort to a bit of hand squishing if they start to get out of hand. After a chat on Twitter, I thought that they might make an interesting aromatic popcorn-style snack if cooked in a hot pan. Arabella Sock had the altogether more tasteful suggestion of turning them into earrings.

Any other ideas for such a pretty pest?

Young dragons

 

Never let it be said that I have a love of sophisticated, trendy plants. One of my favourite plants is candytuft, simply because it grew in our garden when I was a child – I may even have sown some myself back then. I’ve certainly grown it in the garden here, where it self-seeded for a few years, but has now petered out. I must remedy that.  I also rather like that common old white sweet alyssum. This dates back to spending a lot of time on my tummy in the front garden watching ants and other creep-crawlies. When your nose is but a few centimetres from the floor, the scent is overwhelming.

Even better than these two plants, though, were snapdragons. These were interactive flowers – pick a flower and squeeze, for growling, biting action. You could then dismantle the flower, to investigate its white throat, the golden lower lipstick, furry inner beard and pollen-coated anthers.

When you were finally bored of that, you could study the bees squeezing into the flowers and then reversing out, with their body dusted with pollen.

Proust might have had his fancy biscuits (mine’s a malted milk, if you’re offering), but to take me back to childhood, just give me a 1970s garden to explore (though it was thankfully heather-free).

I always used to think that snapdragons were annuals. That’s how they’re marketed, I suppose because they’re not reliably perennial in the UK. The dragon below, however, is now in its fourth summer, having endured two very bad winters and this year’s tolerable winter. It has also endured neglect, apart from the occasional dead-heading.

And now, this dragon has bred – the dragonlings are a mixed bunch, and I have to say that the pure yellow one is probably living on borrowed time as its colour is a slap in the face in that particular area, but I’m very fond of my unexpected dragonlings, so it may just be moved.

 

Hurrah for childish delights and unexpected perennials :-)

Wordless Wednesday - Greens

Wordless Wednesday - F.U.N.E.X?

(I know that this a wordless Weds, but in case you were wondering about the title...

)

She bangs the drum - a review of the Bad-Tempered Gardener by Anne Wareham

 

OK, so this book has been around for a while, but I happened to notice it in the library a couple of weeks ago (sorry, Anne – no sales income from me). Anne has made herself a niche in the gardening press as the self-styled bad-tempered gardener, and so I was expecting some rather bad-tempered rants in this book. Fortunately, perhaps, for my blood pressure, she comes across more as an irritated (and sometimes irritating) gardener. A self-made square peg in a round hole.

The structure of the book is in short chapters of a couple of pages or so; incidentally a very useful structure when I have to keep putting the book down to do baby-related things. For those who follow Anne on Twitter, some of the chapters, and the recurring themes, read rather like expanded versions of her tweets. Typically, these cover: the mediocrity of gardens opening for the NGS; gardens being featured in magazines in a highly selective fashion; uncritical views of gardens visited by media. I’m certainly not saying that these are not valid points. I don’t know how the garden media works, and it does seem odd that a garden can be awarded a ‘Garden of the year Award’ by viewing some selective photographs. One could argue that it is only the view of one magazine that this is the garden of the year so what is the big deal? But I suppose it has a substantial(ish) readership and such an award increases visitor numbers and so income for that garden.

I think Anne is rather harsh on plantsmen (plantsperson?)/plantaholics. Not everyone gardens for design effect, and many people garden (and I would imagine go to visit gardens) to see a wide variety of plants. This may give a garden an unsettled overall look/feel but perhaps it is what many people want. I can understand their point of view as I was, until quite recently, very like that. Now, my feelings towards my garden have changed. I look at it now and see it as too ‘bitty’ – too many plants, not enough statement. It’s something I’m gradually trying to change, and so Anne’s comments upon buying/propagating many plants of one type for mass planting for effect ring very true to me. But, although I now realise the unifying power of mass planting in a garden, it doesn’t mean that I can’t still enjoy a plantaholic’s garden. I just get something different out of each.

Anne exhorts us, and the garden media, to be more critical of the gardens we visit. She was instrumental in setting up and running ThinkinGardens, an organisation encouraging us to explore the role of gardens. I suppose how you feel about analysing gardens depends on what you think a garden is for, and why you go garden visiting. Since coming across ThinkinGardens and Anne, I have tried to look a little deeper at gardens I visit. Not entirely successfully – I haven’t expunged the “oh look – pretty flower” habit from my view of gardens (and nor would I want to, completely!), and I’m not sure that I have the mental toolbox to look at gardens from a critical point of view as Anne wants us to. I can look and see whether the garden is well tended, I can, to a certain extent, admire planting combinations, colour and form – what works well and not so well from my own point of view. I’m not so well equipped to critically analyse from an artistic point of view as a critic would in an art gallery or at a theatre. Anne seems to want us to approach a garden open to the public as we would a gallery. Most people approach a garden, especially one open under the NGS as an opportunity for a nosey around and for some homemade cake. Perhaps Anne is right to some extent, but how many people wander round an art gallery to really analyse the paintings, to try to understand the symbolism of the items in the painting? I think a lot of people will go to the National Gallery and be as keen on visiting the cafe as they are on seeing the Turner exhibition. Cake is not available at Veddw.

Talking of the Veddw, it is here where the real passion in the book shines through. Anne talks in detail about the development of her and Charles’ garden over the years, and the sheer hard work that went into it. I wouldn’t like to judge a garden solely from the photographs I’ve seen if it ;-) but Veddw certainly looks very good. Anne talks about her struggle to understand the alien landscape of the area, and how she could reflect this in the garden. The garden therefore reflects its environment (is this what they call the genius loci?), and the history of that environment. Her views on certain plants are interesting, and often entertaining; rampant plants are welcomed, as a means of covering ground – great if you have a large garden, but I’m not sure I’d welcome ground elder into my domain. The reflecting pool and hedge garden look gorgeous (in the photos…), but please, Anne – I didn’t need to know the gory details of what you have done there!!! Pass the mind bleach…

Bad-tempered? Occasionally. Entertaining? Mostly. Thought-provoking? Certainly.

(Title of the post inspired by the Stone Roses. Incidentally, Anne is not keen on roses. Not at all).

Wordless Wednesday - Bee on Chive

Morphic resonance

No, nothing to do with plasticine figures. Morphic resonance was a phrase invented by scientist and author Rupert Sheldrake. He described it as “…the basis of memory in nature....the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species."  A bit wacky, really.

I think Sheldrake was more concerned with this in animals, but I think I’ve found evidence of it in plants. I must have bought an aquilegia at some point, as the garden just contained lollipopped shrubs when we first moved here. Since then, the aquilegia (notoriously promiscuous) has seeded itself around the garden. I think the original may have been a dark-coloured double – frilly knicker style.

Now, this original has spawned a range of plants which have seeded themselves around the back, and now front, garden. Strangely, though, the plants have come up in sympathy to the surrounding flowers – not due to any weeding out by me.

So, we have…

 

Blue next to a blue geranium

Red next to a red Astrantia and in front of the purple of Lysimachia ciliata ‘Firecracker’

Lilac and Allium christophii

Frilly pink in front of the pink-branched Acer palmatum ‘Sango-kaku’

 

Frilly purple in front of a purple-leaved Acer (and a self-seeded Allium christophii – but more on those in a later post).

Spooky!

Guest Post: Nigel the Gardeners' World dog

I don't normally do guest posts on this blog, not least because you don't really need yet another advert for garden tat. However, when I was approached by a TV personality, I went all starry-eyed and agreed that he could write a post. Well, I say write, but he had to dictate as he's not very good at typing.


For reasons best known to himself, he prefers to communicate in limericks. I asked him first to tell me a little about Monty, his veg growing and his taste in clothes...

"Now Monty grows many a gherkin
In his cords and his old leather jerkin
This rhyme is to teach you
That if you stand still, he'll pleach you
And that his hair resembles a merkin. Woof woof!"

He agreed to spill the beans on Monty Don's recent press kerfuffle, when Monty stated that the only way to kill lily beetles was by hand...

"Now my Monty's not academical
But he can sometimes get quite polemical.
He'll exhort you to splat
Those lily beetles flat,
And not mention the use of a chemical! Growl."

Finally, I asked about the new pond that Monty dug by hand in his garden, Longmeadow. There has been some criticism that the pond is the size of many people's gardens and that Monty's gardening plans are on a scale that many people just can't adapt in their own small gardens. Nigel spilt the beans on Monty's true plans for the pond...

"Now the pond was a big, big mistake.
In fact, it's more the size of a lake.
Monty's plan of action
Is to build a boating attraction,
And have Joe sell teas, coffees and cake. Woof"

 I'd like to thank Nigel for taking a brief break from rolling in compost heaps, to chat to me today. I hope he'll be a regular guest contributor to the blog. You can follow Nigel's occasional revelations on Twitter at @Nigel_Dog