Life must be filled up

Careful with that hoe

Tue, 13 May 2008 10:36:59 GMT

This is a foxglove called 'Primrose Carousel', named because the flowers grow all round the stem. I prefer the traditional 'all the flowers on one side' type but this is such a pretty colour. Thompson & Morgan started selling seed of it a few years ago, very expensively, and it was a big success. I grew some plants, was pleased with them and carefully saved seed to sow again. I have other foxgloves in the garden and none of the new plants I raised came true from seed. Every now and then though, one pops up, as seen above. Here's some more

I'm pretty sure this is a poppy called Chelidonium majus. This has appeared with the builders' weeds which is rather sickening as I once grew it deliberately from Hardy Plant Society seed.

Another happy self-seeder: Verbascum nigrum. I think it's a biennial and once you've got it you'll never lose it. Rather early for it to be in flower but this is one of last year's flowerers which I neglected, so it's behaving like a perennial.

An old cottage garden favourite, Sisyrinchium striatum. Tough as old boots and very keen on seeding. There is a pretty variegated form called 'Aunt May' which I used to have but like many selected forms it's not as perennial as the original.

The pretty Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica. This plant is virtually growing in concrete but I'm pleased to see it anywhere at this time of year.
The moral of this post is: don't weed too enthusiastically.

Greetings

Mon, 12 May 2008 07:40:12 GMT

Happy birthday land_girl! Have a lovely day.

The Unfortunates

Sun, 11 May 2008 16:24:32 GMT

‘It was just as well I had slipped off my ear correcting bandages…(or)…I would never have heard my mother’s screams.’ This book starts as it goes on: funny, strange, riveting. Poppy Minkel, the mustard heiress, is discontented with her lot and determined to escape from her mother, aunt and the rest of the family as soon as she can. They are a Jewish family, a family which somehow mislaid its Jewishness on the way from Duluth, Minnesota to New York in a search for better Society. So who are the Unfortunates? The huddled masses arriving in America before the First World War, the Irish, people who have to live without ‘help’ in the home. Poppy mixes with all these, with Parisian bohemians and the English landed gentry. She is so self centred, so ignorant of anything that happens in the world that doesn’t pertain to her that in 1939, her ‘pansy’ English friend has to force her out of France and she still doesn’t see what she has to escape from. By the end of the book we’ve been through two world wars and any number of births, marriages and deaths. Has Poppy escaped? In a way, she’s come home. I wanted to read this because I enjoyed The Future Homemakers of America so much. This is even better; in fact it’s dazzling.

Do you like pony books?

Sat, 10 May 2008 09:16:31 GMT

Then Listen Again to Saturday Live, R4 with Fi Glover. I got in from the market, sat down with a cup of coffee and a large slice of carrot cake, switched on the radio and heard the pleasant tones of Jane Badger, who has a blog (see left) and also a lovely site where she sells pony books. The strange thing is that although I've never spoken to Jane except by email I guessed at once that it was her speaking. (Jane, if you read this, I would sometimes like to comment on your blog but time and again Google tells me my password is wrong (!) and I can't.)

My marketing was very successful this morning. I fell in love with and bought a beautiful pelargonium with almost black flowers, called 'Black Butterfly'. Also picked up some herb and lettuce plants. For the small amount I need, it's just not worth raising them myself from seed.

Books were also plentiful today. A chap I mentally call Geordie because of his lovely accent had boxes and boxes of 'em, a pound each and he kindly called out to me 'children's books in this one!'. Much rummaging went on and an old chap said, 'we're like pigs in muck here'. True! I spent a tenner with him then did a little deal with a regular stallholder there which got me my money back. I'm thinking of starting a second blog, called maybe churchmouse or secondhandrose, all about how to live on very little money.

My advice

Fri, 09 May 2008 18:21:13 GMT

Alan. Sack Shula.

Misty mauves

Fri, 09 May 2008 14:57:23 GMT

This beauty is Geranium phaeum var. lividum 'Joan Baker'. When you grow geraniums in the mass they can have a rather weedy, fuzzy look (see below) but individually the flowers are lovely.

These plants are so useful when you have a lot of shade.

Today I have been planting sweet peas. They were sown in February and haven't much of a root system, so I would always prefer an autumn sowing. I don't grow them properly, just up what is called an obelisk and of course isn't an obelisk at all. I wanted them placed for ease of tying in and cutting so they haven't got the best soil. Good luck, little plants, hope the slugs don't get you!

Garden News

Thu, 08 May 2008 16:48:47 GMT

What a difference a few sunny days make to a garden. One day you notice that the borders have filled out with green mounds; the next, geraniums and aquilegias are flowering. I also note that the sun has started to dry out the soil so if I don't get rid of those builders' weeds soonish, I won't be able to get a fork in the ground. It was too windy today to photograph anything tall so here are some smaller plants in flower now.

A white form of the common Bugle, Ajuga reptans

Pink Lily of the Valley. This is very vigorous and is springing up in the grass.

This is Geranium pyrenaicum. The flowers are small but there are plenty of them and in quite a strong mauve. Next to this plant is a white form. They are rather weedy as they seed around a lot but they're so pretty I don't mind.

Today's job was pulling up all the forget-me-nots and cutting down the pulmonarias.

Greetings

Thu, 08 May 2008 13:36:14 GMT

Happy birthday to white_hart today!

Lilac Time

Wed, 07 May 2008 10:39:20 GMT

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

Not that these flowers are at Kew but on a terrible leggy ancient old bush in my garden. The flowers are waving in the sky; I couldn't even cut any for the house without a stepladder. Still it wouldn't be May without lilacs. Continuing the theme, I was given this book as a Sunday School prize.

Not my favourite LMA (that's An Old Fashoned Girl) but nice to have.

A dog is for Christmas...

Sun, 04 May 2008 09:36:18 GMT

...not just for life, as Bubble once famously remarked in Absolutely Fabulous. This morning I went car booting. No luck, rain threatening, rather miserable really. I spotted a crowd around a van and let out an involuntary Aaaaw! A bucketful of adorable puppies, with their Mum looking glumly on. Now you see a lot of dogs at boot sales but not often for sale: yes FOR SALE. I couldn't believe it. People are always telling me I ought to get a dog for company, but I feel a dog is a bigger reponsibility than I could take on right now. Yet I could have bought one this morning, on impulse, for £24.00. The pups all looked lively and healthy but this is no way to buy a dog, or sell one. This is wrong.

Let's hope none of these puppies needs help from our local Waggy Tails Rescue

Sermons in books

Sat, 03 May 2008 20:01:58 GMT

Sebastian Faulks has been asked by Waterstones (© all broadsheets) to list the forty books which have most inspired him. You can see the list here. Faulks is a clever chap and a real whiz on R4’s The Write Stuff. Sadly, I don’t like his novels but I was interested in seeing his picks. Strange that the same person who loves David Copperfield (yay!) can go for unreadable Henry Green.
Today’s Telegraph has a ‘Books that touched our souls’ page in which their ‘star writers’ pick another forty books betwen them. A N Wilson plumps for Shakespeare and the Bible (quite right!) amongst others, self deprecatingly acknowledging that it's like being on Desert Island Discs. Other people's choices are more surprising. The Tibetan Book of the Dead? I don’t believe him. Three cheers for the picker of The Compleet Molesworth, which I do believe is profoundly philosophical and have actually been inspired by.

Have a go?

Cripes!

Fri, 02 May 2008 21:19:02 GMT

Is it me, readers? Ho, ho, ho.

Things are greening up

Fri, 02 May 2008 17:14:07 GMT

This evening's view, looking towards Badbury Rings.

Urban spacemen

Fri, 02 May 2008 07:41:57 GMT

I love elections. This morning I watched the southern news and heard a Labour councillor, or possibly ex-councillor, say with a completely straight face, "Over the past ten years most people have seen their standard of living rise and an improvement in public services." Huh? Surely the exact opposite is the case and this is why his party has just lost control of Southampton council? Wakey, wakey.

I'm all agog for the results of the London mayoral election, even if it did sound on R4 this morning as though Londoners were voting for a mare.

Free book!

Thu, 01 May 2008 16:41:07 GMT

Thanks to my Flist I had a heads up for the latest BlogaPenguinClassic giveaway and this time I was lucky. But I've been allocated The Wind in the Willows! Whatever will I find to say about it that hasn't been said before?

Edit. Sorry, this link doesn't work properly but you can easily find the page.

April books

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:57:11 GMT

I don’t seem to have finished many books this month. Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf is an ongoing read and very good it is, too. As part of that read I’ve dipped again into Mrs Dalloway (goodness, those first pages are a wonderful piece of writing) and A Room of One’s Own.

Pretty much a month of light fiction with three novels by Katie Fforde. Stately Pursuits has a young woman saving an ‘istoric hice and getting her man, both rather easily. In The Rose Revived three heroines work together on making money and love. Some nice and technical stuff about canal life in this one. Of the three I most enjoyed Wild Designs, about an older woman (nearly forty!) with three teenage children, not enough money, a garden design to finish for Chelsea Flower Show and a wonderful new man her conscience won’t let her fall for. Amusing, full of domestic details and lots of gardening: what’s not to like?

I’ve already written about the next four books:
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, Barbara Comyns
The Interpretation of Murder, Jed Rubenfeld
Black Swan Green, David Mitchell
Wild Mary, Patrick Marnham
After Wild Mary I had to reread The Camomile Lawn. Strange to see I must have bought this twenty years ago. It seems quite bad now, full of cheap shocks but at the time I enjoyed her novels as they came out. I suppose then they were new and different.

Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma, Diana Birchall.

Past Caring, Robert Goddard. This is the first book I’ve read by Goddard which has any longeurs in it. An unemployed history graduate is given the task of finding out why a forgotten Edwardian politician, Edwin Strafford, Home Secretary in Asquith’s government, lost his job and lived for years in exile in Madeira. Of course there is more to this than meets the eye and the investigator is soon in trouble. Unfortunately the key source for solving the mystery is Strafford’s Memoir, which is printed in full and is very boring. Stay with it, readers, and it gets better.

The Pact, Jodi Picoult. I didn’t like this as much as My Sister’s Keeper or Plain Truth.
The World According to Bertie, Alexander McCall Smith. See earlier comments. Haven’t quite finished this as I keep falling asleep over it in bed.
Grey Mask, Patricia Wentworth. As far as I know, this was the first Miss Silver book, published in 1928. I loved it, just confirming that I much prefer her earlier books. But what a long career!

Book of the Month? A toss-up between Barbara Comyns and Jed Rubenfeld and I’m going for Our Spoons Came from Woolworths as the one I’m most likely to read again.

Gardens in books

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:24:06 GMT

No hope of any gardening this afternoon as it’s pouring with rain, so I’m looking at gardening in books. The last Katie Fforde book I read was The Rose Revived and I realized that all her books were going to be a reworking of Pride & Prejudice and Bridget Jones. I just know that Hugh, in that book, looks exactly like Colin Firth but as the book and the TV series came out in the same year, how could the author have known? Spooky. Now I’m enjoying Wild Designs, mainly because there is a lot about gardening in it. So I’m wondering about books in which gardens play a central part. No cheating with ‘lovely gardens’ or ‘bright flowers’ but detailed and accurate descriptions.

I’m not including Elizabeth von Arnim or any other writers whose books grew out of the garden, as it were, but novelists who like gardening themselves and manage to make it part of the book. Elizabeth Jane Howard is rather good at this. E M Delafield and Angela Thirkell, both favourites of mine, are rather nasty in their books about people who take gardening seriously. Then in Jane Austen’s novels the people most interested in gardening are the Rev. and Mrs Norris, not agreeable characters. There’s no doubt in my mind which is the best ever book about a garden and it is of course The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This was my favourite book as a child and I’m sure it’s influenced my ideas of what a garden should be like ever since.

So I’m looking for suggestions, especially for books by men, where my mind has gone blank. Only don’t suggest The Cement Garden.

Loving Jane

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:16:05 GMT

Gratuitous picture of apple blossom in the garden today, nothing at all to do with Jane Austen.

Yesterday evening I watched Miss Austen Regrets, Gwyneth Hughes' drama about Jane Austen and marriage. This was a very stylish and thoughtful production, based largely on Jane Austen's letters. What a fine actor Hugh Bonneville is! Olivia Williams was very convincing as Jane; she looked clever, as she surely should. I was shocked by how little the character wore. So thin as she was, you'd think she'd be freezing cold yet she was less well covered than her young niece. I was relieved when she put on a shawl. I haven't seen Becoming Jane, so can't compare the two films but I'd take a bet this one was better. I had low expectations, was totally absorbed by it and in tears at the end. So, back to the texts and for anyone who hasn't read it, Claire Tomalin's excellent biography.

Strange Goings-on in Scotland Street

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:02:33 GMT

I treated myself to The World According to Bertie now it’s in paperback. Goodness, it’s been on my wish list long enough. Of course I’m loving it as I can’t get enough of Bertie, Cyril and sad Matthew. But something odd has happened to the denizens of Scotland Street. I think they must have been reading the novels of Alexander McCall Smith because they are adopting the speech patterns of Gabarone. Take this: ‘Fathers don’t want their daughters to get hurt. And yet they know that there are plenty of men only too ready to treat them badly. They know that.’ Mr J L B Matekoni? Nope, Dr Macgregor, Edinburgh psychiatrist. Really? And here’s Angus Lordie: ‘If one wrote a note to such a hostess one would have to say: ”To one who stayed away.” Yes! That’s what one would have to write.’ See what I mean?

Oh, no, another book meme

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 07:25:03 GMT

This comes via sloopjonb. Must be American? Lots of these I've never 'eard of.
What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Bought this for a pound; it's still on the shelf unread.
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 Can't believe I've never read this. Perhaps it's due to knowing all about it.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights Read this for A-Level but also for pleasure
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary In French!
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies What?
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales In the original!
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir Wouldn't dream of it.
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Knowing where you've been

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:26:15 GMT

The weather was so fab today that I finished some jobs I usually do in March, like pruning the hydrangeas. Cutting down perennial stems in my largest bed I had almost a worm's eye view. I love this, being down on a level with the plants. Did you ever, as a child, spend time lying on the grass lazily watching an ant climb a grass stalk? Something like that only harder on the back. Back in the house I could 'see where I'd been' as gardeners say, as the view was much improved. I could also feel where I'd been, as my hair was full of seeds and other debris. This is why all Real Gardeners wear hats. I took a few pics while I was out.

If there's room in the garden for wild plants it's nice to have them. I have far too many wild arums and struggle to get them out of the borders. In a wilder spot I'm happy to see them looking sinister, like this.

Bluebells under an apple tree.

Naturalised anemones

I'm Sorry I'll never hear that again...

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:06:55 GMT

No more ISIHAC. My Friends are all posting on the subject and I wasn't going to bother but something sloopjonb said reminded me of this:

The death of a comic actor is felt more than that of a tragedian. He has sympathised more with us in our everyday feelings and has given us more amusement.
Leigh Hunt

Not that Humph was an actor and probably wouldn't have called himself a comic but I think it's what people feel.

Heads up: ballet on TV

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:10:42 GMT

A while ago I wrote about Darcey Bussell introducing a performance of Swan Lake on television. I've just noticed that the programme is being shown again on BBC4 this evening.

Flower du jour

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:08:59 GMT

A week ago I bought daffodils and lilies in the supermarket. The daffs were only £1.00 a bunch but they're over. The lilies are just opening and smell fabulous. I suppose there are all sorts of green reasons why I should not cheer up the house and myself with cheap supermarket lilies but I diskard them.

Not so fantastic Mr Fox

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:58:48 GMT

I caught this poor old fox sunbathing in the garden today and took the photo from the house. Poor thing. Its haunches are almost completely bald and it looks terrible. I'm sure someone must be feeding it and can't help thinking it's misguided kindness.