Wisteria

Some things move you.  Other things leave you cold.  Meadows move me, real ones, not synthetic jump on the bandwagon ones.  Trees move me, big trees, native trees, the trees on our boundary: oak and ash and hawthorn and holly.  Bedding plants don't.  Lavender hedges move me.  Roses grown on swags of rope don't.  Bluebells and sea pinks move me.  Begonias don't.  I don't know why.  I could have a go at trying to explain but it is not all rational. 

Wisteria moves me.  It always has.  It is ludicrous in some ways.  It is a plant which is so over the top it could be a climbing, rampaging begonia, and yet somehow its lushness and its falls of flower stay just this side of kitsch.  It remains subtle, even whilst taking your breath away.  The delicacy of the leaf pattern reminds me of rowan and ash trees, both of which I love.  The flowers are like coming upon a waterfall.  A few years ago my parents lived in a house in Devon which had been a small manor house and had then been divided into four houses.  Each of the four houses was a beautiful place although technically the two middle ones were terraced houses I suppose.  The end house had a beautiful wisteria which gathered the others to it.  When it flowered the whole building regained its unity.

So I have wanted a wisteria for years.  For most of my life I lived in houses with gardens so small than wanting a wisteria was a nonsense - I would like a wisteria and here is the six foot of fence I can offer it.  Silly.  In our last house we had a bigger garden, still a city garden but with a wall and a sense of space.  Ian built a pergola for me and I spent hours and hours thinking and reading about what to plant on it.  The planting included a wisteria but I didn't know then that you should only buy a new wisteria plant in flower.  A plant which has not yet flowered might take many years to get there.  Even a small plant in flower will continue to flower from year to year.  So I chose my wisteria very carefully, bought a young plant and watched it for five years grow bigger and better and fail to flower.  We sold the house and left never having seen the wisteria flower.  That house was sold again recently and we looked at the details on rightmove as you do.  There in the garden was the pergola and the wisteria in full flower.  So it did happen, ten or more years on, just not for us.

As part of my ongoing enquiry into open space and enclosure I have wondered about intensifying the sense of enclosure in the side garden.  Ian built a structure for me on which to make a living wall.

This is not a good picture.  I see it as a wall of planting, as good in leaf as in flower.  I know that now it looks like a very open fence.  Trust me (this is me talking to myself as much as anything).  It will work.  It might take a while.

The planting in the side garden is very foliage heavy and at the moment is very purple and orange.  That sounds odd I know but it doesn't look odd.  It looks rather glorious just now.

I am hoping that the foliage will help to anchor the wisteria when it eventually gets going.  So yesterday we planted a Wisteria sinensis Prolific.  I have tried to find a hardy, vigorous plant as our conditions can be harsh.  The soil is full of stones and many things will not grow up here.  I see no reason why a wisteria won't it it is coddled a little in the first year or so.  So we (by which I mean Ian) dug a hole four times as large as the pot and backfilled it with soil and compost.

You see what I mean about the soil.  It does not look promising.  Whenever I see Monty Don on Gardener's World working his rich dark soil I do not know whether to weep or have a wry smile.

In it went.

Close your eyes and use your imagination and you can almost get the idea.

Open them again and you find it looks like this.

Close your eyes and again.  Image not mine but courtesy of psychotropia.

Now to try to keep it alive.

Stilling the mind

What do you do when your mind gets stuck in a track, running round and round in a repetitive, fruitless worrying at something you can do nothing about?  It doesn't happen to me often.  I don't think of myself as an anxious person at all.  I am naturally quite calm and even tempered, cheerful by default, inclined to have a good time whenever I can with family and friends, good company, a glass of wine and good food.  So it always surprises me when one of the inevitable anxieties of life somehow gets a hold of me and I find my mind running round and round with it, like a hamster on a wheel.

Sometimes gardening helps but it didn't today.  I was weeding down in the native tree bed.  The mindless, repetitive nature of pulling weeds can be calm and soothing, the sun on my back, almost like a meditation.  But today all that mindless repetition  just seemed to allow me to run round and round in my mindless nagging worry.  I tried all the stuff about mindfulness, concentrating on the moment, feeling the sun, seeing the colour of the nepeta against the shocking pink of a hardy geranium, but it didn't work.  Whatever the self help books tell you, it doesn't always!  I decided to weed hard for an hour or so.  Then at the very least I would have achieved something while my mind went round and round.

Yoga helps when you can get at it.  When I started I was so bad at yoga that the very idea that it could have any calming or relaxing effect was laughable.  Now that I have been going for about three years I remain resolutely unbendy in some areas, pleasingly flexible in others and always come home from a class feeling mentally and physically ironed out.  No yoga this week though as I am away tomorrow and will miss my usual class.

So this afternoon's calming, feelgood arsenal consisted of:
one Solero icecream, eaten on the bench in the sun,
half an hour of quite difficult knitting, needing enough concentration to absorb my mind but providing the rhythmical physical satisfaction of handling the needles,
half an hour with a cup of tea watching the chickens scratch and then watering the scented leaf geraniums,
half an hour planting out euphorbia oblongata seedlings in the cutting garden.

 

And slowly the mix of being outside and both doing things and doing nothing worked its magic.  By tonight I had hopped off the hamster wheel and packed it away in its box.  This evening we walked up the hill as usual.  Walking is the other great way for me to still the racing mind.  Whenever I walk the very action of putting one foot in front of another makes me feel good.

So there you are: tea, chickens, knitting, walking, yoga, planting things out in the sunshine.  I also find that
talking to those I love and walking and playing with dogs are great calmers and cheerers.

What works for you?

Plant me now drop

A bit of a family crisis whizzed me away for a few days.  I suppose this will happen from time to time now with my father's illness.  It is always hard to know whether the right thing to do is to drop everything and go or whether to sit it out up here.  This time I did drop everything and went and that was undoubtedly the right thing to do.  I ran around sorting things out and sat around keeping both my parents company and my sister and I shared some of the problems and felt, as always, how lucky we are to have each other.  I left still feeling I could stay and that there was more be done.  And now I am home again, feeling torn as ever, and also feeling out of touch with my normal life.

Time to take stock of what has been happening in the garden.

Just before I went I received another load of plants from Plant me Now, the online garden centre which has been asking me to test and review plants.  This time it is bedding plants, something I don't normally use a lot of.  It does however include pelargoniums, which I do use in pots in front of the holiday cottage, and dahlias which I have started to use in the cutting garden.  They really work well there.  I can feed the soil enough to make them much happier than they are in the garden and I can grow them in enough  profusion to cut them with abandon.

I had three forms of Geranium Maverick, red, white and star.

 

I shall use these in pots of a single colour.  As usual the plants came well packaged and well watered.  I potted them on as soon as they got here and they are currently in the wooden greenhouse and growing by the day.  They come as large plugs and put on a lot of growth very rapidly.  I have been overwintering my geraniums for a few years and it is only now that I see these new cuttings that I realise quite how tired looking my older plants had become.  I will take cuttings from these later in the year and make an effort to replenish my stock more frequently I think.

The other plants in this month's delivery were dahlias:

 

Dahlia Labella Piccolo Lemon

 

 

Dahlia Labella Piccolo Coral

 

 

Dahlietta Rachel

 

 

Dahlias are fabulous hardworking plants which flower and flower but which aren't easy for me to incorporate into my foliage heavy, naturalistic planting in the side garden.  This way I can have them as a big burst of colour.  Again these were good sized plants, beautifully packaged as always, and growing away strongly in the greenhouse now they have been potted on.  I will try to get these out over the weekend. 

 

All these photographs are from the website.  The plants are still quite small.  I have tried various internet based plant buying and I am really impressed with Plant me Now.  They won't wean me from my love of nurseries and it remains as true as ever up here that plants which I propagate myself from stock which is already growing up here cope best with our conditions (altitude, stony soil) but for bringing in a boost to the garden or to containers they are really good quality plants.

 

 

 

This is my photo of some of the plants which came earlier, in April, as very small plants, now producing a pot full of sunshine.

 

I really need to get out into the garden.  I need to spend quite a bit of time on my Welsh.  I need to walk up some hills in preparation for the week of dry stone walling which is coming up fast.  I need to stop thinking about what is going on in Devon and be here, now, in my own patch.  I need to clone myself.  But the sun is shining and I am looking after our daughter's dog while she goes for a job interview.  I think I will take the dog to the beach and throw balls.

 



Breakfasting in cafes miles away

It is one of the oddities of modern life that you can wake up on a Welsh hillside and have your poached egg on toast and cup of tea for breakfast as you do on any other day.  That same night you can go to bed in a flat in central Munich on the edge of the Victualienmarkt with the unaccustomed light from a street lamp glowing gently on the parquet floor.

A hundred years ago southern Germany was a train ride, a ferry journey and more train rides away.  If you had made this journey in 1913 it might have taken you two days from London, even if you had been travelling as fast as you could, or three if you were starting from here in North East Wales.  You would have marvelled at the speed of modern travel.  You would think yourself fortunate to be living in the railway age.  After all if you had done the journey in 1813 you would have had to go by horse and carriage.  That might have taken you about two weeks, maybe you could have cut the time a little if you had a desperate need to travel quickly and could throw money at the problem.  But faraway places were far away then.  Is it a wonderful thing to be able to get on a plane and experience another country in the space of a day?  Or does it diminish experience to turn travel into a blur, to fail to see how the land changes, how the houses in one place are made of stone and in another of brick, how  the angle of a roof reflects snow or rain?  Am I being overly romantic about the impact of slow travel?  Would you even notice these things if you trundled through Europe in a carriage with the curtain drawn at the joggling window, feeling a little sick?  I think you might.  I think slowing things down helps you to understand and appreciate place.  And yet it was a fine thing to wake up in Munich and to go out for breakfast just round the corner and for life to be different.

Two days in Munich, two in Salzburg.  We travelled by train between the two cities.  In Salzburg we stayed in another beautiful flat (both via Air B&B, highly recommended).  This flat was five floors up in an old building with a mezzanine bedroom up a steep yacht type staircase.  It was also fabulous.  To my shame I am not an extremely musical person and I had always thought of Salzburg as a place to go for music.  But it is also a place for architecture and history and food, all much more my things.

It is a place for little and large squares and gracious buildings.  I liked it very much.

From Salzburg  we took two buses to arrive at the town of St Wolfgang in order to catch a train up a mountain.  I don't know quite why watching a tv programme about a train which went up a mountain in Austria had resulted in our being there, instead of the usual murmurings about that looking interesting, followed by life mooching along as usual.  We are not train enthusiasts particularly.  We do like mountains but generally for walking up.  Perhaps it was the lure of getting to the top for very little effort, other than the effort involved in getting from Wales to Germany to Austria to a station by a lake at the bottom of a mountain.

I was very taken in an entirely non techy way by the fact that the train has to be higher at the back than the front so as to cope with the steepness of the ascent.  But what really transfixed me was the view from the top of the mountain.

We ate a ferociously Austrian lunch in a hotel on the mountain top which opens from May to September.  Ian's involved dumplings and mine sheep's cheese and a lot of onion.  Mounted heads of crows looked down at us from wood panelled walls.  I loved it.

Then we came back down the mountain, got on the bus, returned to Salzburg where we ate and slept, caught the train to Munich, ate a sandwich in the Old Botanical Gardens, took a bus to the airport and flew home.

Part of me hates air travel with its plastic food and its plastic air and the drudgery of airports.  But it was wonderful to be there.  I feel as if I have had a window into another world.  Once, a few years ago, we stood on the edge of a very beautiful square in Croatia, looking out across the polished stone at buildings which breathed power and history and civilisation.  The square was empty.  The air was cool.  It had rained earlier in the day and pools of water caught the last light of the evening.  We were travelling with friends.  We stood in silence for a few minutes.  "I must get out more," said our friend with Northern dryness.  I know what he meant.

Home and away

I love to go away and I love to come home.  A week in Devon, staying with my sister, helping to look after my brother and giving my parents a hand.  Being able to do this is one of the many reasons I gave up my big job.  When it works, and last week was a good week, it feels very right.  I know I am making a difference and to see the pleasure my brother takes in our company, to see my sister's children and stepchildren, to see my Dad smile with real happiness at a trip out he could not have taken by himself, to help my wonderful mum feel she is not alone, to chat with my sister and her partner when every one has gone to bed and to snatch an evening with my son and his wife, looking at the scan picture of their developing baby,  all of these things make me feel good, make me feel like myself.  But I missed Ian and I missed home and it was good to come down our drive, to see the view encircling me, to walk the garden and to sleep in my own bed with my own person.

The garden is racing along without me.  There are tulips and mounds of fabulous foliage in the side garden.  There are nettles and docks and bindweed and ground elder wherever I look.  Today I am focussing on the tulips.

And the swallows are back.  For a couple of weeks I have seen them in the skies above the field but today, for the first time, I saw one fly in and out through the door of the old stone pigsty where they have nested every year since we came.  I stopped and waited for a while, hoping to see them come again, but they were wheeling high in the sky above me.  I shall just have to keep my fingers crossed.

Coming back to the garden

I never garden in winter.  I can't really see the point of winter gardens with dogwoods and snowdrops even though I have plenty of both.  In winter I come inside and read and knit and crochet and write.  I hate getting cold and wet in the garden and I quite like it every year when the time comes when everything stops growing and there is nothing I can do.  It is done for another year.  Close the door, light the lamps, pull your chair to the fire.

This year however I have turned my back on the garden in a big way.  Usually in winter I do at least some thinking and dreaming.  By January I am starting to engage with the idea of gardening and I might read about gardens or spend time making up plant lists or musing about what to do in one area or another.  This year I did none of that.  I had lost my gardening mojo.  I had fallen out of love.

I think there were two strands to that.  One was the extent to which over the late summer and autumn I had begun to feel deeply unsettled and "out of place".  That is principally to do with my father's increasing ill health and my own desire to be part of what happens to him and my mother as they face this stage of life.  I can see that my presence helps them, both practically and emotionally, and living five or six hours away I was constantly aware of the tug of love and guilt and the need to be somewhere else.  It is hard to garden with passion when you feel like that.  That has settled down to some degree as we have found ways of supporting them that depend on significant scheduled visits rather than daily proximity.  The other strand was a gardening reason.  I am very aware that what I call a garden is really a field with some very early planting in it.  I feel my way towards what I am trying to create.  Mostly my vision holds strong enough for me to be able to see it even when others can't, with the occasional patch when the whole thing blurs and melts like running wax.

Three things happened last year which challenged my sense of what we are making and which made any claim to vision seem ludicrous.  The first was a visit to Beth Chatto's garden which I blogged about here. This really rocked me by making me feel that my garden was not a  place to walk into. I realised that there was not enough enclosure and that in embracing the openness of my hillside and the beauty of the views I was in danger of creating a vantage point, not a place to wish to be in for its own sake.  Partly in response to that I set to work to produce an area of meadow to walk into.  You would not believe the work I put into that.  Creating an annual meadow is not for the faint hearted.  I dug and raked and attacked perennial weed and sowed and watered and dug up docks.  The result was deeply, unsettlingly mixed.

Some parts were just glorious.  Some parts were just a mess of docks and couch grass.  I did not take any photos of those bits but there was way too much mess for the effect I wanted.  So I came towards the end of summer knowing that I needed to do something different but not really knowing what it was.  And then the third thing happened.  Ian and I went to visit Veddw, the garden created by Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes on the Welsh borders near Monmouth.  I loved Veddw.  I slipped into it like a fish into water or a swallow into air.  I felt very much at home in it.  The hillside site, the dense, lush planting, the sharp lines of the hedges and the overflow of self sown plants all contributed to a feeling that this was what I was trying to do: to create a place which could be nowhere else, which was a hymn to the place, a world founded in a place.  Anne and Charles could not have been more hospitable.  Veddw could not have been more beautiful.

It took a couple of months after we got home for the experience to begin to take shape in my head and what took shape was a slow and sad realisation that what I am producing here is not a garden, not as Veddw is a garden, not the garden I had in my head.  What I am doing here has no cohesion.  While the side garden has its own beauty and the kitchen garden its own functional charm, the field which we have slowly and laboriously brought into cultivation is not yet a garden.  The little orchard works.  Today, full of daffodils and early leaf, it is a good place to be as the trees begin to establish.

At certain times of year the cutting garden is a paintbox of colour.  Where we have created totally new planting, like the long bed in the lower part of the field which we call the native tree bed, the planting is, I think, good.  I am good at repetition and flow and at propagating and creating new plants that will fill emptiness on a scale which still daunts me after years of city gardens.  But there is no doubt that the most beautiful thing in this garden is the view and always will be and somehow the shapes I am trying to paint on the landscape are not producing that powerful sense of a heightened world which comes to you in the best gardens, which came to me standing in the Gravel Garden at Beth Chatto's, amidst the topiary at Levens Hall and looking down from the inscribed seat across the grasses and hedges of Veddw.

So I went away all winter and hid.  As spring came I wrote to Anne whose thoughtful, careful reply gave me much to think about.  Ian made me a willow hurdle for the side of the compost heap which once again proved that the functional can be beautiful.  Now I am not quite sure what to do.  Do I want to abandon my idea of creating something here?  No I don't, although I might have to accept that it will be a series of smaller creations rather than a world of its own.  It is quite likely that I simply do not have the wherewithal in time and talent to create something on the scale which I imagine.  I emerged after a long cold spring and found that the daffodils in the orchard and round the swing lifted my heart.  I laboured over planting them for three successive autumns and suddenly this year they were everywhere just as I had imagined.  I find I can't give up the idea of my garden even though part of me would like to throw in the towel, so I am feeling  my way towards something, although it may be something different to what I had imagined.

The key I think is in the meadow in the bottom third of the field.  At the top of the field you need to let the view sing and we have taken out some tree growth as Anne suggested so from the high point the view across the valley to the farms and the hillforts is king.  In the middle section the orchard and the cutting garden and the vegetable plots provide a unity which is functional and satisfying and which in a way is quite true to the people we are and the interests we share.  But in the bottom third of the garden you have the chance to lose the glorious tyranny of the view.  If I can find a way of walking into it, of getting lost in it, then I might be able to make the whole garden make more sense.  Last year it didn't work but I might have done it wrong.  It is a huge task.  There are docks galore this year, making much of the area a scruffy wasteland.  At the moment you can see all of last year's disaster, squared, and none of the small scale triumph.  The native tree bed runs along parallel to the boundary hedge and is full of lovely things but it looks adrift from the rest of the garden as it has since it was dug and planted three years ago.  A proper deep meadow with waist high grass and wide paths might be the answer.  Or it might not.  Karen came today and reminded me gently that she has been coming for most of the time we have been trying to make a garden and can see quite how much we have done.  I couldn't quite engage with her properly about it but she did cheer me up.

The jury is out.  I have sown poppies on the fire sites.  We have put Round Up on the docks.  I am digging up dandelions in the cutting garden.  I am feeling my way.  We can always put the whole thing back to grass and bring in sheep.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?"   Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto", line 98.

Living below the line - the final day (for me at least)

Somehow we have made it through to Friday.  I am torn between excitement at what I will able to eat tomorrow (shallow me!) and a strange feeling that I could carry on doing this for ages.  I eat my porridge made with water and carefully scrape out the last of the cheap pot of natural yoghurt to go with it.  I barely notice that my morning drink is hot water rather than tea.  Then I whizz out to yoga class, both as a distraction from thoughts of food and to share experiences with my yoga teacher who is the only other person I know who is doing this.

Patty has eaten quite similarly to me but she has had chick peas as well as lentils and a small amount of nuts.  I think she has purchased these with the money I chose to spend on yoghurt, which has been my only dairy.  She had intended to make baked potato the centre of her main meals but found that potatoes are just too expensive.  It is interesting to see just how much conversation the whole challenge has produced, both in the class and online.  Quite a few people in the class have not done the week in terms of living below the line but have spent time and effort thinking about how it might be done. I think that the exercise of really trying to work out how to make it work is worthwhile in itself if only in that it opens your eyes.  Another friend and her husband haven't been able to do it this week but are intending to do it together next week.  I am quite sure you can produce more variety if you can share your money but it is still a challenge however you come at it!  The moral support of doing it together is also a great idea although Ian has been very supportive in taking over cooking for him and his dad and in giving up alcohol and cheese himself for the week so that I don't have to sit and watch him!  I think I would have found this almost impossible if I had been preparing for other people the food that I like but couldn't eat.  This way I have been able to behave almost as if the only food in the house is the food in my bag in the pantry.

On the way home I stop and forage some wild garlic from down by the river in the bottom of the valley to put in my lunchtime soup and to use in my evening curry.  You see wild garlic foaming with white flower down by the river bank at this time of year.  All parts of the plant are edible: flowers, leaves, stems and roots, and it tastes strongly of garlic, the stems and leaves more so than the thin bulbous root.  The smell is so powerful it is filling the kitchen and I might have to put it outside.

Lunch is the last of the vegetable soup with dal in it, finished off with torn leaves of wild garlic.  The impact on the soup of the green leaves is surprising.  The taste and the texture are sublime although I am now smelling very strongly of garlic.  I have got into the swing of thinking in a foraging way now and I bring in some lemon balm.  Chopped up fine, the leaves make a faintly lemony change from the inevitable hot water.  At the end of lunch I am hungry and feel a bit desperate for more food, particularly fruit.   I would kill for an orange.   I go away to spend some time on the laptop and an hour later I find I am not hungry.  I wonder how often I keep on eating when, if I allowed my food to digest a little, I might find that I don't after all need any more food.

Just as earlier in the week,  I find that at about 4 o' clock I am truly, unignorably hungry and I finish the last of the onion bhaji mixture to make some tiny bhajis as snacks.  That keeps me going.  Dinner tonight is a fragrant biriani, made with cardamon, cinnamon and star anise to flavour the rice and chopped onion, carrot and parsnip.  I actively enjoy this one and am pleased to find that there is some left for tomorrow.

So, that is it.  The last of the meals has been eaten and I am nearly done.  Here is a stock take.

What have I missed?  Eggs, cheese, fruit, bread, wine, probably in that order.

Have I been hungry?  Perhaps a little but not really, although to prevent hunger I have had to be creative with fried porridge and ground elder!

Is there anything left?

Yes, here it is.  Quite a lot of porridge oats, rice and some lentils.  All the vegetables have gone, including the celery which I bought as an evening distractor from cheese.

Would I do it again?  Yes I would.  It has made me think about food buying, cooking and waste in a new way.  I don't think we are generally wasteful or spend a huge amount on our food.  We cook everything from scratch so we don't buy ready meals and frozen puddings.  Yet even so I have been astonished to find how much I spend on my normal diet and how little I can spend and survive.

What have I learnt?  That feeding yourself for very little is possible but that it is repetitive and restrictive in ways which we have long forgotten in our society.  That Indian cooking seems to provide the best template for producing tasty, interesting and nutritious food from cheap ingredients, especially if like me you like strongly flavoured food.  That being unable to spend much on food means you can just about manage if you stay home but that many of the small and larger pleasures of life are closed to you: the cup of coffee in a cafe, the slice of cake with a friend, the takeaway pizza,  the evening with wine and beer in a bar or pub.  That I can do it.  I really thought I might not be able to and part of the reason I didn't ask for sponsorship (besides the fact that we are constantly being asked for sponsorship for one thing or another) was that I did not want to let people down or be overwhelmingly embarrassed when I gave the whole thing up on Wednesday, unable to resist the lure of the cheese sandwich or the cup of tea or scampi and chips and a pint in the pub.

But I can walk away now, back to my scrambled eggs and my wine and my meals full of protein, unlike the families for whom this is the only way of life.  And I expect it is the fact that I could walk away at the end of the week that has helped me do it.  I don't really think that what I have done makes any difference to anyone except me, although I will be sending to UNICEF the sum of money that I would normally have spent on food for the week.  (In the end I decided to give the money to a local foodbank.) I hope others do it and think about it.  If enough of us did the same maybe we would make a difference.  Perhaps just thinking about it might make a difference.  I really don't know and don't believe that there are any easy answers.  It really has been interesting to talk to you about it and to hear your thoughts about the whole thing.  I also know lots more about cooking like this as a result of your suggestions and ideas, so thank you for taking the time to think and write about it.

So let us finish as shallowly as we started.  Tonight I am going to stay up until midnight and drink a glass of cheap fizz to celebrate doing it, finishing it, being alive and living in a beautiful place surrounded by plenty.

I wish I didn't smell quite so strongly of garlic.