Listening to flower pots...

There is something truly wonderful about the pile of old terracotta pots sitting patiently in the greenhouse, awaiting the chance to fulfil their potential. The very fact that they are made from the earth is testament to its essential productivity and they seem to hold within the promise of fruitfulness. Most of these are very old, perhaps some over 100 years, handed on from gardener to gardener, garden to garden; but for this year they are here and silently crying out to work with me in trying to bring a harvest from the earth.

And in gardening, as in life, we need that encouragement, that belief. In spring we need to see these pots, empty and have the thought that maybe with just a little bit of compost (old dead matter) and a seed and some measure of luck, something beautiful and wonderful will come from it – as unlikely as that may seem and even if experience tells us it doesn’t always work out. To pick one up and know, that to not fill it, to not sow something, to leave it unfulfilled is to have already written failure; but that to take that chance, to take that risk, might just result in a little miracle and something quite wonderful.

So I sit in the warmth of the small greenhouse with the wind and rain hammering to get in, next to this pile of pots, and try not to look out the windows, past the shed, at the beds unprepared, the grass growing too long, the weeds waking up from their long winter rest, keen to make up for time. Instead I fill each one and nestle some seed down into its dark duvet and try not to get too excited by the pictures on the packet or the descriptions of fantastical crops. Although in this I would almost certainly fail, where it not for last year’s fallen written across labels and gathered like tombstones in an old broken pot. I take one out, put a line though the squash that for some reason didn’t ripen or the celeriac that never got planted and then, with genuine belief that this year will be different, write on the new name.

I have been trying to think of a sentence which neatly uses the word that keeps coming to mind, but actually it’s so fundamental to all life that it deserves one of it’s own. Tenacity. Nature has it in abundance; the damn Marestail that you just cannot get to the end of; the Marguerite that shrivels and dies due to me failing to water it enough during the summer, but then revives each winter to take another onslaught and the rhubarb that no matter else fails can always be relied on to be there, allowing us at least one meal from the allotment in early spring.

Whilst it would be foolish to suggest that we take pride in not learning from our mistakes, it would be twice as foolish to be paralysed by the thought that we might make them again. The pots have no memory of past wrongs and take no umbrage at being emptied of dried compost and stalks too withered to be identified. So I’ll take my lead from them and sit in quiet, hopeful expectation, and fill and sow each one as though it were my first.

The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono

Just discovered an enchanting book  called The Man Who Planted Trees or L'homme qui plantait des arbres by Jean Giono in my local book shop, written in the ashes of the second world war. It is well worth a read or even a watch, as in 1987 Frédéric Back turned it into a wonderful animation. I'll link to both below:.

Click here for a .pdf version of the book

Click here to go to youtube and watch the animated version.

There is even a world touring puppet show; more details by clicking here.

Nest Egg Basket & Pasta Making

The Pekin Bantams that we hatched towards the end of last year have now been moved down to the allotment and are laying well. We have 3 lavender hens and a lavender cock, as well as a black frizzle hen and a black/white frizzle cock. Most lay most days and it is surprising how quickly the eggs build up. The little egg holder we had in the kitchen was nowhere near big enough and we realised that we needed something else to hold them safe in.

Maybe it was too much Springwatch or seeing the birds at Katie’s school on their nest camera, but it seemed to me that the very best thing for the eggs would be a nest. We had in the garage some heather cut last year, as well as a little willow and birch. All of it had dried out and so I soaked in a warm bath to make it pliable (which made one of the biggest messes inside the house that I have ever achieved...). My intention had been to photograph the stages and provide a step-by-step photo blog on how to make one, but I quickly realised that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing!

At first I started with two willow rings, made in the usual way by winding willow around in on itself, one smaller than the other. But these were green willow and I would never have been able to hide it within the darker material, plus how was I going to connect the two? So I abandoned the willow and went straight for the heather, again making a ring and then sort of building it up from there. I cannot provide any instructions – it was highly frustrating and fell apart more than once. In the end I used some fine brown cotton, which you can just about see looking at it, to bind it up a bit. It might well be that now it has dried you could cut this off and it would still stay whole, but I don’t intend to find out. I lined the inside with a mix of pillow feathers (much finer than I had imaged) and some craft feathers we had (look like pheasant to me).

What I took away from making it more than anything was a genuine deep respect for nest making birds. Here I was, with ten fingers and cotton thread, struggling to make something that they could construct, far more perfectly than I, with their beak and maybe some spider web or mud. It was only by actually trying to replicate nature’s craft that I understood just how hard it was and how skilled these birds are. It was an experience that has radically changed my perspective and I cannot recommend trying it highly enough – just be prepared to be very frustrated along the way... 

Making pasta

With 24 eggs needing to be used up we decided to have a pasta making session. 100g of organic Tipo ‘00’ flour per egg (or two bantam eggs), mixed and kneaded and then rolled out in the pasta machine. We made lasagne sheets, tagliatelle and spaghetti, drying the latter two on a long pine dowel we got from the ironmongery, suspended between two chairs. It dried over night and could then be wrapped up in brown paper for use over the coming days.

Photos: Flowers & Plants in the Balcony Garden

Californian poppies (Eschscholzia californica) are just lovely and these self sown seedlings are flowering earlier on the warm balcony compared to those in the ground, giving a much needed splash of colour after a long wet spring. There is a wonderful genetic variability in the seed giving rise to a range of tones, from these deep oranges to a light lemon, as well as many differences in the forms. My favourite photo of the day.

The bright green new growth on the Box (Buxus sempervirens) contrasts with last year’s darker, more mature growth. We have two Box balls that we usually place either end of the sofa we take out onto the balcony in summer. Sitting right by the arm rests it encourages you to run your fingers through, releasing that wonderful scent. Slow growing, Box is expensive, especially when clipped, but these came from a chain DIY store during a hot June and couple of years ago, when the idea of using water on the plants didn’t seem to occur to them. Wilted and rather unhappy looking we bought them for £5 each. If you are willing to give a little TLC it’s amazing what bargains can be found, as well as a warm glow that comes from rescuing a plant from uncaring hands.

We've no idea how this clump of forget-me-not (Myosotis) got up onto the balcony, but this is the first year we remember it - perhaps we sowed them or we had one or two plants that set seed last year. It's going over now, but has given a much needed lift to this corner. However it arrived when weeds are this pretty they are more than welcome.

This Hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla 'Altona') must be as tough as old boots. It's the second variety we have had up here, as the first withered and died at the first breath of sea air that blew across its leaves. Last year family matters meant that all our plants were abandoned without water and at the start of spring this year this new Hydrangea was pronounced dead too. Then on a closer inspection we noticed just one tiny shoot from the base, then another and another. So we pampered it a bit, some water, a warm spot and it has rewarded our attention with the fresh new growth. I wonder if it will flower this year?

It doesn't show up quite so well in the picture as it did on the plant, but this bright yellow streak of pollen looked quite shocking set against the vivid orange of the Californian Poppy (Eschscholzia californica).

I am always amazed that for a Middle Eastern plant, with such an exotic appearance, the fig (Ficus carica) is one of the earliest plants on the balcony to awaken from its winter slumber. At first you don’t actually believe that the figs are swelling, to soon surely?, and its only when the leaf buds start to break that you realise that it is gearing up for the coming seasons. What could be more hopeful during a wet and damp March than the sight of the juicy summer figs starting to grow? A couple of nights ago I heard Bob Flowerdew suggest a fig as the ultimate balcony plant for absent minded gardeners looking for something edible and unusual, that is virtually indestructible. The key thing is to keep them in a pot to restrict the roots, so that they produce fruit as well as foliage. Ours is only the usual ‘Brown Turkey’, but Reades Nursery hold the national collection of figs and can supply a wide range of plants.

It’s the first year we have grown Dahlias (‘Coltness Mix’) from seed for cut flowers at the allotment and in doing so have we also learnt an important lesson in bringing on plants. The seeds were sown in a covered seed tray back in March and once the first true leaves appeared we pricked out a few into pots. For some reason (we might have run out of compost) we didn’t prick them all out. Those that had been potted on went into a bay window in the house. After a few weeks most were transferred to the greenhouse at the allotment, leaving a few in the window and at the same time the remaining ones in the seed tray were potted on. Well what a difference at planting time. Those that were left in the seed tray and potted on late were considerably behind, with poor root growth – good enough to go out, but behind. Those in the bay window, that I had always considered to be bright & light, were rather lanky and delicate looking and it is these that we have potted on to mollycoddle on the balcony, as in the photo on the left. Finally, the ones that were potted on in a timely fashion and then transferred to the greenhouse are wonderfully stout, sturdy plants that look great planted out in a row. Of course it’s nothing that you don’t read regularly in the gardening books, but often it’s only this firsthand experience of seeing the difference that makes it sink in. 

The photo on the right shows some Box cuttings I took a couple of years ago, but never got around to potting on. They had stalled, but I repotted them this winter and they have now started to put on new growth. The cuttings took easily in the usual way and I intend to take lots more this year, when I prune the Box balls, for use as edging at the allotment.

This is a hardy Osteospermum with lovely flowers, although I have no idea of the cultivar. We had ‘Silver Sparkler’ a few years ago, which was a nice plant with whiter flowers and variegated foliage, but it was tender and we lost it very quickly one unexpectedly cold night. This hardy plant survived some reasonably cold nights, including snow, although the balcony is spared the worse of the frosts. One thing I could never do was get ‘Silver Sparkler’ to take from cuttings, but I’ll have a go with this one as I would like a second plant for the allotment for use as cut flowers.

This Copper Birch is possibly the most unsuitable tree that we could have bought for the balcony! Seeing it (Betula nigra ‘Summer Cascade’) discounted at the local nursery, I imagined that as Silver Birch is almost endemic on the sandy commons here in the Sanderlings it would cope with our salt laden winds and tolerate dry soil, as it was to live in a pot on the sun baked balcony. Once we had got it home, carried it through the house and upstairs (sadly breaking one or two smaller branches) and got it planted into its specially made pot, I looked up the particular cultivar and found it was an American bred river birch...!

However, we have fallen in love with its form and after a rough start (it had to be laid on its side for four weeks because the painter was in), it is responding to daily watering and starting to come into leaf. The best thing, and one of the reasons we bought it, is that it is acting as a sign post to the garden for birds, which seem happy to share the small space with us.  

Under an Elm Tree by William Morris

"Midsummer in the country — here you may walk between the fields and hedges that are as it were one huge nosegay for you, redolent of bean-flowers and clover and sweet hay and elder-blossom. The cottage gardens are bright with flowers, the cottages themselves mostly models of architecture in their way. Above them towers here and there the architecture proper of days bygone, when every craftsman was an artist and brought definite intelligence to bear upon his work. Man in the past, nature in the present, seem to be bent on pleasing you and making all things delightful to your senses; even the burning dusty road has a look of luxury as you lie on the strip of roadside green, and listen to the blackbirds singing, surely for your benefit, and, I was going to say as if they were paid to do it, but I was wrong, for as it is they seem to be doing their best.

And all, or let us say most things, are brilliantly alive. The shadowy bleak in the river down yonder, which is — ignorant of the fate that Barking Reach is preparing for its waters — sapphire blue under this ruffling wind and cloudless sky, and barred across here and there with the pearly white-flowered water-weeds, every yard of its banks a treasure of delicate design, meadowsweet and dewberry and comfrey and bed-straw — from the bleak in the river, amongst the labyrinth of grasses, to the starlings busy in the new shorn fields, or about the grey ridges of the hay, all is eager, and I think all is happy that is not anxious.

What is that thought that has come into one’s head as one turns round in the shadow of the roadside elm? A country-side worth fighting for if that were necessary, worth taking trouble to defend its peace. I raise my head, and betwixt the elm-boughs I see far off a grey buttressed down rising over the sea of green and blue-green meadows and fields, and dim on the flank of it over its buttresses can see a quaint figure made by cutting the short turf away from the chalk of the hill-side; a figure which represents a White Horse according to the heraldry of the period, eleven hundred years ago. Hard by that hill-side the country people of the day did verily fight for the peace and loveliness of this very country where I lie, and coming back from their victory scored the image of the White Horse as a token of their valour, and, who knows? perhaps as an example for their descendants to follow.

For a little time it makes the blood stir in me as I think of that, but as I watch the swallows flitting past me betwixt hedge and hedge, or mounting over the hedge in an easy sweep and hawking over the bean-field beyond, another thought comes over me. These live things I have been speaking of, bleak and swallows and starlings and blackbirds, are all after their kind beautiful and graceful, not one of them is lacking in its due grace and beauty; but yesterday as I was passing by a hay-field there was an old red-roan cart-horse looking seriously but good-humouredly at me from a gap in the hedge, and I stopped to make his acquaintance; and I am sorry to say that in spite of his obvious merits he was ugly, Roman-nosed, shambling, ungainly: yet how useful he had been — for others. Also the same day (but not in the same field) I saw some other animals, male and female, with whom also I made acquaintance, for the male ones at least were thirsty. And these animals, both male and female, were ungraceful, unbeautiful, as ungainly as the roan cart-horse; yet they were obviously useful, for they were making hay before my eyes. Then I bethought me that as I had seen starlings in Hertfordshire that were of the same race as the Thames side starlings, so I had seen or heard of featherless two-legged animals of the same race as the thirsty creatures in the hay-field; they had been sculptured in the frieze of the Parthenon, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, imagined in literature as the heroes and heroines of romance; nay, when people had created in their minds a god of the universe, creator of all that was, is, or shall be, they were driven to represent him as one of that same race to which the thirsty haymakers belonged; as though supreme intelligence and the greatest measure of gracefulness and beauty and majesty were at their highest in the race of those ungainly animals.

Under the elm-tree these things puzzle me, and again my thoughts return to the bold men of that very country-side, who, coming back from Ashdown field, scored that White Horse to look down for ever on the valley of the Thames; and I thought it likely that they had this much in common with the starlings and the bleak, that there was more equality amongst them than we are used to now, and that there would have been more models available amongst them for Woden than one would be like to find in the Thames-side meadows.

Under the elm-tree I don’t ask myself whether that is owing to the greater average intelligence of men at the present day, and to the progress of humanity made since the time of the only decent official that England ever had, Alfred the Great, to wit; for indeed the place and time are not favourable to such questions, which seem sheer nonsense amidst of all that waste of superabundant beauty and pleasure held out to men who cannot take it or use it, unless some chance rich idler may happen to stray that way. My thoughts turn back to the haymakers and their hopes, and I remember that yesterday morning I said to a bystander, ‘Mr So-and-so (the farmer) is late in sending his men into the hay-field’.

Quoth he, ‘You see, sir, Mr So-and-so is short-handed’.

‘How’s that?’ said I, pricking up my Socialist ears.

‘Well, sir,’ said he, ‘these men are the old men and women bred in the village, and pretty much past work; and the young men with more work in them, they do think that they ought to have more wages than them, and Mr So-and-so, he won’t pay it. So you see, he be short-handed.’

As I turned away, thinking over all the untold, untellable details of misery that lay within this shabby, sordid story, another one met my ears. A labourer of the village comes to a farmer and says to him that he really can’t work for 9s. a week any more, but must have 10s. Says the farmer, ‘Get your 10s. somewhere else then’. The man turns away to two month’s lack of employment, and then comes back begging for his 9s. slavery.

Commonplace stories of unsupported strikes, you will say. Indeed they are, if not they would be easily remedied; the casual tragedy cut short; the casual wrongdoer branded as a person out of humanity. But since they are so commonplace -

What will happen, say my gloomy thoughts to me under the elm tree, with all this country beauty so tragically incongruous in its richness with the country misery which cannot feel its existence? Well, if we must still be slaves and slaveholders, it will not last long; the Battle of Ashdown will be forgotten for the last commercial crisis; Alfred’s heraldry will yield to the lions of the half crown. The architecture of the crafts-gildsmen will tumble down, or be ‘restored’ for the benefit of the hunters of picturesque, who, hopeless themselves, are incapable of understanding the hopes of past days, or the expression of them. The beauty of the landscape will be exploited and artificialized for the sake of the villa-dweller’s purses where it is striking enough to touch their jaded appetites; but in quiet places like this it will vanish year by year (as indeed it is now doing) under the attacks of the most grovelling commercialism.

Yet think I to myself under the elm-tree, whatever England, once so beautiful, may become, it will be good enough for us if we set no hope before us but the continuance of a population of slaves and slave-holders for the country which we pretend to love, while we use it and our sham love for it as a stalking-horse for robbery of the poor at home and abroad. The worst outward ugliness and vulgarity will be good enough for such sneaks and cowards.

Let me turn the leaf and find a new picture, or my holiday is spoilt; and don’t let some of my Socialist friends with whom I have wrangled about the horrors of London, say, ‘This is all that can come of your country life’. For as the round of the seasons under our system of landlord farmer and labourer produces in the country pinching parsimony and dullness, so does the ‘excitement of intellectual life’ in the cities produce the slum under the capitalist system of turning out and selling market wares not for use but for waste. Turn the page I say. The hayfield is a pretty sight this month seen under the elm, as the work goes forward on the other side of the way opposite to the bean-field, till you look at the haymakers closely. Suppose the haymakers were friends working for friends on land which was theirs, as many as were needed, with leisure and hope ahead of them instead of hopeless toil and anxiety, need their useful labour for themselves and their neighbours cripple and disfigure them and knock them out of the shape of men fit to represent the Gods and Heroes? And if under such conditions a new Ashdown had to be fought (against capitalist robbers this time), the new White Horse would look down on the home of men as wise as the starlings in their equality, and so perhaps as happy."

First published by William Morris in Commonweal on the 6th July 1889 .

Click here to download a pdf version of the above article.