Tag Archives: raununculus

Planning for Growth

Winter morning Beds

It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter.  The clocks have changed back, the evenings have drawn in and every day when I get in from school one of the first jobs is to light a fire in the log burner.  The leaves have gathered in the corners of the back garden (when they are not clogging the gutters) and two panes of glass were blown out of the greenhouse the other night.  

I have not been overly busy in the garden although I am optimistic about this winter and the promise beyond it.  Despite the gloomy repetitious idiocy that passes for news at home and abroad, I am taking winter as a time to prepare for the spring and ensure that come March / April all will be well in the garden.  To quote my favourite gardening character from a movie:

“In a garden, things grow . . . but first, they must wither; trees have to lose their leaves in order to put forth new leaves, and to grow thicker and stronger and taller. Some trees die, but fresh saplings replace them. Gardens need a lot of care. But if you love your garden, you don’t mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish.” (Peter Sellers as Chance, “Being There”).

In the movie Chance,  the simple gardener, is mistaken for political savant.  The words are as easily applicable to the current political storms as they are to gardening.  The meteorological winter is likely to come to an end around March.  I suspect any Brexit-induced winter is going to last many more seasons or even years.  Is this why so many voters ticked the “leave” box? 

I think not.

One day this Brexit war is gonna end.  I just hope that there is something left at the end of it worth having.  In the meantime my therapy remains in the garden, planting bulbs (ranunculus, daffs and aliums) as well as sweeping up leaves and pruning roses and fruit trees.

“As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all be well.” 

Let’s hope our political roots are as well cared for as our horticultural roots so they are still intact when Winter is over.

Red Sky In the Morning…

 

 

 

Laughter and Forgetting

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Overwintered kale and kohl rabi planted out

My memory fails me.  It always has.  But these days I do not seem to have the faculties to hang on to the most basic information.  I could not even remember the names of charities I give regular donations to so trying to remember the names of flowers is mostly beyond me.  I have taken up learning Spanish in a vain attempt to kick-start my neurological faculties, but so far my elder brother’s fears that I will soon start speaking  espanol more fluently than him are completely unfounded.  No te preocupes, Paul.

One of the unfortunate side effects of living next door to my father and delivering his paper to him each day is that I can see first hand where my symptoms might have their origins and where they are headed.  Genetics can be blamed for so much.  The other day the OM told Mrs B that he was thinking that we could make a wooden herb trough  outside the back door and that he knew where to source some wood.  The fact that the trough was my idea, the wood had been sourced by me (discards from the edge of the astro at school) and that Mrs B would already know all this, seemed to elude him. Selective memory, perhaps.

And yesterday he was cursing his luck that a birthday invitation he had received fell on the exact same day that we have agreed for the family party in the summer:  11th July.    I demurred and told him that the family party was on 2nd July.  He was relieved – but then exasperated and even a little deflated when I took a look at his invitation to see it was for 11th JUNE. He had not only got the date of his own party wrong, he had mis-read the date of the new invitation.  I don’t get annoyed – I worry that this is what I have to look forward to.

And I pity my wife and children.

Mind you, Mrs B already has a handle on this.  I identify with Tim Lott writing in the Guardian, speaking for many middle-aged men, who claims his memory is not as bad as his wife and kids tell him it is – but he has no way of knowing.  How can you know?   There is probably a way of ascertaining it, but I have will have forgotten it.

In the garden the only way I remember what tasks await me is to walk around and actually SEE what I need to do.  Always been a bit of a visual learner, me.  Mrs B makes plans; I just react to what I see and take it as it comes.  I guess that is one of the reasons we have made it thus far in our partnership, still able to remember the good bits and laugh about whatever might have slipped my (our?) mind.  Milan Kundera had it about right when he wrote that

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

(The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)