Tag: garden

Hips, Haws and Fairy Wings

Red and green should never be seen, says…well, it seems perhaps no-one. It is one of those phrases that many of us have heard and yet the origins seem to be somewhat muddy. It might be purely about fashion; that it was considered the two colours just didn’t complement each other. But, it seems as many people know the phrase as blue and green, so down that road we can insert any colour as the one not to be seen with green. There is also a view that it refers to the lights on a ship, green on the starboard side and red on the port meaning that, if you can see these colours when out in your own boat, you may well be headed on a collision course.

But, as it always does, nature defies the rules (whatever they may be) and red and green are often seen – and very pleasingly so. I took a five-minute sit outside after work today. The weather wasn’t particularly pleasant but I find I desperately need at least a few minutes outside a day to feel (vaguely) human. Armed with a warm drink* I sat out by our small pond and noticed that the seasons were showing their turning. Tangled waterfalls of red berries and green leaves are draping from the hawthorn trees. Towering
over my head and reaching almost down to the floor, they are like a vertical carpet of nature having a go at pointillism.

Behind me, a rose has gone to hip. I play the game, each year, of trying to balance the dead-heading of flowers to prolong the blooms coming out, but also leaving enough to turn to hips, because the birds love them so. I have made rosehip tea in the past, collecting, cutting, scraping out the insides and drying the hips and it was tasty – but, a lot of not very pleasant work. The inside of a rosehip is filled with prickly, sticky hairs and they all have to be removed or will be an irritant when drinking. It takes a long time to prepare so many fiddly little hips and I know from experience that I don’t really have the patience.

The honeysuckle flowers are all pretty much all gone now but the tiny, shiny red berries punctuate the long meandering tendrils. It doesn’t seem to matter how much or when I cut this particular honeysuckle back, it soon
swamps everything around it. The weeping crab apple tree is also in fruit now -and occasionally cat. (Big cat is a climber and it is not unusual to look out of the window and see his head peeping out from the top of the tree.)

And there is more to come, the pyracantha (the spiny, spikey, flesh-ripping beast that it is) will keep the blackbirds in snacks all winter and of course, the holly will be ready to decorate the house at Christmas time.

But we also have a scattering of fairy wings in what I (optimistically) call our woodland area (the shady bit under mystery tree**). White and pink cyclamen gather in groups, standing small but proud from their round tubers. Cyclamen have their seed heads on tight coils which when ripe project the seed head and seeds onto the ground – the sticky seeds are then sometimes moved about by ants. Just imagine if you could capture the pinging and flinging of seeds by the release of tensed coils on film – I can’t help but visualise it in some sort of Acme cartoon cannon style with some dramatic full-orchestra music going on behind the whizzing and whirring.

But this week hasn’t been just about flowers; pond life has had its show too. Poking about my mum’s garden, having a catch up on what has and hasn’t survived the ridiculous heat followed by winds and torrents of rain, we spotted a frog making use of the plant pot tray on her patio. It seemed quite happy and we think perhaps waiting for some of the dropped insect-based bird food from the feeders nearby. And we have a new resident, Gary. Gary is a snail who was doing the sterling job of keeping my niece’s fish tank clean. Alas, the fish are no more, which is timely actually, as niece is just about to head off to university. Needless to say, my sister was not about to keep a tank going in her daughter’s absence for just one snail, and so Gary was ferried over to our pond via a small tub with holes in and a fruit basket in the footwell of my car.

*If you’re interested; a mix of cacao powder, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon and star anise with hot water and unsweetened almond milk. Yes, yes I am ‘that’ person.

**We know it is a cotoneaster, but it was unidentified for so long, it will never be called anything but mystery tree in our house. *Whispers* it also has its own theme tune.

In comes I, in search of a surprise angry panther

This week has included  St George’s day, a day for which I have no particular affiliation, but I do have fond memories. Anyone who has read past blogs will know that I grew up in the folk world with all its wonderful, and yes, quite frankly odd, traditions and practices. One of which is the performing of mummurs plays: folk plays by amateur ‘actors’ (see, more often beer happy folkies) that usually contain within them, a sword dual, a dragon slaying and a quack doctor who would bring the slain hero back to life. (Although there are many, many regional variations.) As ever, they were often an allegory for the fight between good and evil as well as for the seasons and crops returning to life after winter.

When a character enters the scene in a mummers play, he (and traditionally it was always men) would announce themselves beginning with, “In comes I,…” and the discourse would often be held, in a strutting and goading manner and usually in rhyming couplets:

“In comes I, Saint George! An heroic man,

With steely sword, my shield in hand.

I fought the fiery dragon

And sent him to the slaughter,

And for this deed I won the hand

Of the King’s beautiful daughter.”

The reason I have fond memories, is not just of watching many of these plays at street fayres between bouts of morris and clog dancing, but of being in one during a solar eclipse – many years ago. We were in Devon, or Cornwall, or thereabouts (I think) so many folk camps blur into one homogenous folk life. On this day most of the campers made their way to the top of a hill to witness the mystical event and as the time drew nearer, a group of us set about a mummers play.

As strong as my memory of the beauty and awe of the eclipse and how everything fell silent as the shadow descended, and as much as I remember the strangeness of the feeling of such a magical moment; I just as much remember that the huge men’s trousers I had borrowed for the play, that were held up only with string, kept threatening to fall down as I proudly introduced myself: “In comes I…”   and then very nearly, out went dignity.

In the current situation, I have structured my time so that I work at my desk every morning, garden usually in the afternoon and if I have any energy left after cooking tea, set about my personal work later. As such, the garden is getting more attention than usual. This week, I have been on the hunt for a surprise angry panther. Let me explain. Last year, a flower emerged from amongst an area of, well, chaos, in one of my borders, that I couldn’t quite place. Popping it on twitter and asking for identification help, a gardener friend of mine replied that it was an agapanthus, but an unusual looking one. The best thing though, was that they told me that they called them angry panthers, and to this day, that is what I call them too. I know roughly where it is located but the ground covering mat of ajuga, pulmonaria and creeping cinquefoil, has hindered any precise pinpointing – hence the search.  So far, the angry panther remains elusive, but I live in hope.

Talking of elusive nature, the orange tip butterflies are a cheeky bunch fluttering about but never landing long enough to take a picture. And, I am pretty convinced I found badger poo in the garden. When I told MOTH to come and see something interesting, he was not at all convinced when I said it was poo, until he saw it and reluctantly had to agree that it was, actually, interesting. I have seen a badger in the garden before, so it is quite possible.

Other garden activities have been checking each morning whether any new veg have begun to poke above ground – potatoes, onions, climbing beans, courgettes and garlic are romping ahead leaving the peas and spinach wheezing and panting at the back of the pack. The weather is proving glorious for us humans, but as a gardener I am feeling the pain of nature trying to compete with increasingly parched earth. We have four water sources available in a variety of locations for wildlife, but it is the plants I feel for, trying to push through baked clay – and we are only in April! Perhaps I should write and perform a one-woman mummers play to the rain gods to see if we can entice them to show our land some mercy. Six weeks into isolation – this doesn’t sound quite so mad an idea.