Helen’s Blog

Last year I picked my own veg… (Photo by Ruth Francis; click to enlarge)

I am generally a very unbloggy blogger –  I don’t normally share random immediate thoughts, although perhaps The One Show bit and my Charles Darwin post were a bit off  the usually fairly carefully thought-out rails.

However, I would just like to share with readers the fact that despite the hideous work-enforced neglect of my allotment this summer, I have just  eaten the most magnificent supper most of which came from my plot.

What did I eat?  Chicken (regrettably I can’t lay claim to that), cooked with onions and garlic  and tarragon (from my plot) and a dash or white wine (regrettably I don’t own a vineyard either)   with lovely chubby chard stems (the leaves were a bit coarse and holey), french beans and butter (regrettably no cow, either) with more garlic  and magnificent Charlotte spuds, carefully groomed to avoid the odd unfortunate tunnel,  cooked with mint and then steeped in a parsley/butter goo (I really must think about getting a cow…).  Totally delish.  And followed by the first of my  autumn raspberries.

But none of this would have been possible without my fantiastic friends who have  been down to the neglected desert and picked things for me. This post is for them.

Over and out.

One of my oldest and very best friends Richard Zatloukal has died in Thailand (where he has lived for years) – too early, of course, at the age of 67.

This always amiable, chain-smoking, hyperactive eccentric had extraordinary intellectual curiosity, was a brilliant wordsmith, a talented painter and had one of the best brains I have ever encountered.  In the dim and distant past he was a London barrister, but his interests were legion and he was an authority on, amongst other things, Japanese netsuke, beetles, poultry and – yes, you have guessed – herbaceous perennials, about which he was passionate.  His amazing book – about which Beth Chatto was most complimentary and found useful - can be accessed via  http://zats-perennials and is a good read, erudite and rich with  Zat-ish observations.  Do have a look and post a comment here, if you will.

Zat was truly a one-off (he would have hated the cliche and taken me to task for using it).  All those of us who knew and appreciated him – his close family in France, in Thailand and in England and his ex-wives of whom he was very fond –  will miss him terribly.

I have been exceedingly lax about keeping this going – partly overwork, partly the fact that, when not mopping up INDOORS after downpours (oh yes, drips just missing bowls and buckets everywhere), I have been gripped by a creative urge and have been digging up part of my lawn in order to augment/amend the border plantings.

There are ‘before’pictures here, of course, and my neighbour Cate helpfullystaggered around between VAT returns (she is an accountant) to take some muddy ‘during’ pictures but – guess what – has not had time to download them from her camera and send them to me.  But she will eventually.  And then I will explain what I have been doing and why.  I only hope the eventual ‘after’ pictures next summer will prove what I fervently hope – that it was worth the considerable effort.

Butterflies love Buddlejas

The BBC’s One Show is my televisual guilty secret.

Apart from the fact that it coincides with my finishing things I absolutely have to do each day, indoors and out, I like the cheerful content and the chemistry between the presenters. And sometimes they have really interesting features.

Tonight’s programme visited Bristol (of which I am proud to be a citizen, originally) with Mike Dilger talking about plants that had perhaps been introduced from around the world via the docks during their heyday in the 19th centry.  He highlighted Buddleia, or –  to be more au courant with my spelling – Buddleja, and most importantly B. Dividii.

Even when I was very small and walking to school each day in Clifton in the 1950′s, I was very acutely aware of this plant.  It poked out from every crevice in the eerie  relics of down-at-the-heel houses on the steep cliffs that bordered the cities heavily bombed docks (an area now largely embellished by the presence of the fabulously restored S.S. Great Britain, and some fairly chi-chi housing and attendant wine bars, of course).  Then I called it ‘bombed-site-weed’.  But the scent of the lax, unkempt bushes and the proliferation of butterflies clearly made an impression.

In my little garden there is scarcely space for any of Buddleja dividii’s close realtions, the most lovely silvery-leafed Buddleja ‘Lochinch’, more compact and delicate Buddleja ‘Nano Blue’, nor the spring-flowering. fluid-outlined, tree-like Buddleja alternnifolia.

More’s the pity. All of them are lovely, tolerant, easy-to-grow and rewarding plants.

And their honey-scent is truly gorgeous.

In praise of ponds

This evening I went to see Creation – a film about Charles Darwin.

The film was absorbing  – somewhat over-emotional, perhaps - focusing heavily on the double trauma Darwin suffered as a result of his scientific convictions and the death of his daughter – and the rift they caused between him and his intensely religious wife. But it also reminded me (if this doesn’t sound too grand) of my own slightly unusual and privileged upbringing.

My parents were both agnostic academics – one a botanist, the other principally a zoologist.  I grew up – without really noticing it – in a scientifically charged background – no stone went unturned, no question un-answered, no fact un-checked or undiscussed.  In retrospect, time was spent directly or indirectly studying and observing every living thing around us.

It wasn’t regarded as even remotely odd that my older brother kept big hairy spiders in large sweet jars next to his bed and caught flies with which to feed them, or that he ’boiled’ small dead mammals in order to then reconstruct and study their skeletons (he went on, incidentally, to become a Professor of Oral Physiology).

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Tithonia

The best thing about blogging – as opposed to writing for a weekly newspaper deadline - is that you can simply opt not to for a while.

OK, so the graph that tells you how many people read your stuff  (the checking of which can become a bit of an obsession if you let it) gets dishearteningly un-peak-y –  and no doubt some of your readers give up on you –  but unless I feel inspired by something, preferably something horticultural, I don’t – can’t – won’t – prattle on.  And that’s that.

‘Inspired’ may not be the word for exactly why I’m writing this, but there are some lovely things about which to rejoice as the sun gets lower, the mornings brisker and birch leaves start littering the lawn.

In otherwise slowly sagging borders I love my clear blue Aster frikartii, the gangly spires of a slightly mauver-than-blue Aconitum, the  potted indoor Plumbago that goes outside and wafts about in an urn in the summer.

There are other things in containers, too: although the huge tender Agapanthus (variety unknown, probably ‘africanus‘) is past its best, its seed heads remain  dramatic while the equally vast annual orange Tithonia next to it keeps zinging on and on, as does a Mimulus aurantiacus in a battered old galvanized bucket.

Even just looking out of my office window I get an eyeful:  dangly strings of little ripening tomatoes, the Med-blue of Ceratostigma willmottianum and a perfect clump of yolk-yellow, black-eyed daisies – Rudbeckia fulgida, while through the French doors  just feet from my desk, the combination of the stripy Miscanthus ‘Cosmopolitan’ (just starting to flower) and a vivid red Persicaria amplexicaulis lording it over the fat, lazy goldfish in the nearby pond never fails to lift the spirits.

The huge agapanthus at its best in August...

And there are gorgeous smelly things out there  too – particularly on a windless evening. And so, a propos of nothing, my list of plants for the best late summer pongs goes like this:

• Trachelospermum jasminoides (this evergreen climber is in its fourth month of non-stop sweet-secnted flowering).

• Cestrum parqui (now a massive shrub – pruned annually like a Buddleia davidii – with little lime-y flowers in abundance that alas only smell after dark).

• Nicotianas: ‘Fragrant Cloud’ and suaveolens (both grown from seed from (Thompson and Morgan) seed.  The young plants of the latter were almost disastrously beloved by slugs - they only just made it through- but smell divine)

• Acidanthera murielae (a scented, white, refined gladiolus, best grown under glass crammed shoulder to shoulder in pots, brought outside in late summer to stand somewhere strategic – and treated as an annual, I regret to say).

• Elaeagnus ebbingei (Yes I know, this is sometimes classed as a ‘winter-flowering’ shrub.  But around here in Sussex it is starting to flower its socks off already and the air is full of lily-of-the-valley scent.  I used to grow this  shrub en masse as a hedge to hide a (consequently) ‘fragrant’ tennis court.  Ah, those were the days…. a tennis court?  You could almost fit this whole garden into one of those…)

Over and out.