ideas for 2018 - I want plinths

I went out into the garden today. There were some flowers, but there were also many, many problems. My lovely Moroccan occasional table, for example. It's suffered this winter, and I'm not sure it's repairable. No idea what I should get next. Something like this, maybe?

These things (Primitives by Moncada/Rangel) are supposed to be plinths. You put display items on top. I think they'd work well for plants, too. Something trailing for the red three-limbed stand, a big Giant Heather column erupting up from that green bowl. On that green three-part base? (It's actually the best match for the existing table) (I could make one of those, surely) A huge and blousy tiger-bright wallflower.

I want a second home

I may have mentioned before how much I value my pot plant at work. Originally rescued from a bin in the foyer of our last office building, I have nursed it from a pitiful, desiccated stem with a tiny  pompom of leaves (it's nothing special - just your standard Dracena Marginata, aka the Dragon Tree) into a vast glossy beast with a prounounced wiggle from all the times it's been turned to find the sun in the ambient gloomery that is our office.

Periodically we're banned from keeping plants, and it comes home for a bit. Then people start to bring in plants, and it comes back in again. Technically we have a clear desk policy, but then technically the plant isn't on a desk. Technically I'd like more plants, to be honest, especially since the mature trees outside our windows all came down.

More specifically? I'd like my office to look like this:

Now that's what an office should look like. They call them Second Homes, exotic hubs full of curated selections of innovative businesses, making all the magazines with their crazy scenes. 

Everything filters through to the public sector in the end, of course. We'll probably get Second Home type offices just as the gang doing this lot right now are obviating the need to have an office at all through uploading their consciousness and outsourcing their bodies.

In the meantime though, maybe I could manage just one more plant.....

the garden inside the split willow tree

The trouble with the middle of winter is that pretty much every time you walk past something kind of cool it's too dark to photograph. The split willow on the tow-path with hart's tongue fern growing in it, for example; see how leaf litter and sawdust and broken bark (lots of dead bits, gnawed by insects, in this tree) has made a tiny garden, and now it's growing ferns?



Well no, not really, because it's so dark I can hardly see anything. And look what's growing, under the ferns, lost in a tangle of spider webs and beetle frass:



I need to get some of this stuff back to my garden. I quite fancy a bit of a stumpery.

moss on a tree-trunk on the tow path

Moss is a marvellous thing. There's a lot of it, on my roof, where it regularly falls off, and scatters across bits of the garden, souring the herb pots and clogging the drainage. I retrieve it and put it into places - mostly around the base of the water-butt - where nothing much else will grow so I'm cultivating a moss garden. At the moment it's based on chunks of concrete I had left over from clearing the garden. It could do with some need some big old lumps of wood for it, though. This is  a cut tree on the tow-path. It's even moister down there:





That's willow tree, grey and textured bark. I think I need to go on a bark hunt.

the ivied terrace house

There's a poem I half-remember from my childhood, where we had to learn a poem a day. If you learned the poem successfully by lunch time, you won a house point, or was it three house points?

It was quite an unfair game, as only a few people would ever get the opportunity to try and recite it. Sometimes you would be allowed to write it, but that was hardly fair on the non-writers in the room. Also memorising to say and memorising to write were quite different things. Should you do one? Should you do neither, like a lot of my friends did?

It's left me with random shards of obscure poetry rammed every which way into my brain.



Consider this:

Beneath the richness of an autumn soaked sky
The pigeons idly flutter about the ivied grange
Years of dust and chaff hang in the dim within
Where [something] horse's breath once steamed

I can't find the poem, but there is far more poetry written than even google can contain. Screeds and scrolls of sentimental Victorian verse for children.



When I see a house like this one it's impossible not to think of such things. Somebody lives here; observe the recycling box, the bolted Cordyline. And yet the ivy, sprinting to cover the windows.



A garden half-way to a fairy tale.

these plants are hardcore

While it's not exactly an earth stood hard as iron water like a stone winter (yet - we still have time) I'm still rather impressed by what's in flower out back:

So far, so ordinary. A bit of Christmas Rose, a Snowdrop, and the Winter Jasmine (the clue's in the name). Pale, wintery colours. Delicate. Pretty.



OK, it's not unusual to see Roses in winter. Quince is a notoriously early flowerer. And Chickweed will sprint to flower in a few days, of course, move along, nothing to see here..





Hebe, Marguerite, Confetti Bush, Sweet William popping out another flower to replace the ones it lost in the snow, my Lime green Chrysanthemum putting out another bud....

OK, spring enough. I'm going to plant some broad beans.

wear your lawn on your shoulders

My lawn's days are numbered. A pile of pots in waiting on the terrace out back will shortly form its replacement, in hardy, low-gorwing shrubs. For who has time for a lawn any more?

Jacob Olmedo, that's who. 

It would be a mistake to view these garments as only friendly to the model physique. Remember to put your jeans on and you have a perfect punk/gardener jacket, though it's probably best not to lean back on Mum's sofa while wearing it.

The hydroponic textile appears to be an attractive egg-shell coloured version of that gardener's fiend, capillary matting. I have some of that, filligreed with tomato roots I lazily allowed to grow through it through lax potting-on.

A double layer of black bags under that, electricians tape over the seams to stop it leaking round the staple points, and you'd have the DIY version of that jacket. I might opt for tighter sleeves though; it would be good if you could garden in it.

new year shopping binge

I haven't planted broad beans, or sweet peas. So I snapped up a cheap internet order from Seedaholic  (their hand-finished packaging takes me straight back to my small press days), ended up in Wilkos and bough £7 worth of seeds (masses) and today headed off to the cheap garden centre on the bypass looking for roottrainers which they absolutely had in stock, and seed compost of course (that stuff is so HEAVY). As I was leaving I saw the racks of orchids at post-Christmas sale prices.

This greenish beauty had checkerboard leaves and a ridiculously long flower-stem. Resistance is futile. She came home with me.

The pink thing next to her was bought on sale. I am the redeemer of reduced plants.This lady being attacked by birds, however, was sensibly left where I found her.

ten top trends for 2018

So, since the new year I've been mainlining the various catalogues I've been sent (you get a lot around Christmas) aiming to extricate trendlets; the emergent messages from what's available, what's good, what's interesting. Of course, it all gets mixed up with what I like and what I want, but nevertheless, trends have emerged. So here's what I reckon we'll be loving in 2018:

• Pastel coloured vegetables - everybody is going gaga for Mangetout Pea Spring Blush, and its cousin Sugarsnap Opal Creek, but see also Tomato Striped Stuffer, Cauliflower Sunset, and Cucumber White Wonder, Rosa Bianca Aubergine, as well as the ridiculously barbie-hued Radish Bluemoon and Redmoon.  
• Dead Hedges - bang in stakes or posts a suitable width to suit your garden (Alys Fowler suggests 50cm, but I reckon you could do something useful for the bugs with a handspan apart, if you do a bit of hurdling) and use it as a repository for your woody non-compostables. Very useful for when your brown bin has blown away in Storm Eleanor.
• Op art plants -  black and white together, and we're talking proper black and white. Antirrhinum Night and Day doesn't cut it. You need something exotic like Ipomoea Sweet Caroline (see also Tropical Waterfalls) or the exquisite Ying Yang Bean.
• Chameleons - colour changers are having a moment. See Calibrachoa Chameleon, destined to be ubiqitous this summer and its big brother, Petunia Chameletunia Mango. Nastertium Orchid Flame, cycling through oranges and golds, and Sweet Pea Turqoise Lagoon, which can't decide if it's pink or blue.
• Tropical waterfalls - Does it look unreasonably tender for our climate? Does it have a tumbling habit? Step forward Lotus Fire Vine, Lofos Burgundy Falls or Compact Pink, Datura Double Golden Queen, Jacobinia, Rhodochiton Purple Bells, Ipomoea Cardinal Climber or Purple Heart, and Dolichos, the Lablab vine you will enable our Fearful Climate-changed Ballardian Terrace Life Fantasies this summer. Order Lysimachia Goldilocks to fill in the gaps.
• Christmas coloured Zinnias - Queen Red Lime is looking good, as is Zinderella Peach. If Zinnias are too much work for too little return, try Dahlia Floorinoor and enjoy the look year-on-year.
• Delicately patterned and coloured fruits - Fig Tree Panachee, with its antique stripes. Raspberry Valentina with its apricot hues, Billardiera (see also Tropical Waterfalls) and the astonishing ice-hued Blackberry Polarberry.
• Cocktail Calendula - 2018 is the year of the Marigold according to one of the catalogues (the others seem unaware) so celebrate with Calendula Fruit Twist, Calendula Neon, Orange Flash and Calendula Snow Princess. Or, as seems more likely, the pile of random marigold seeds you have saved in a brown envelope somewhere.
• Flaming ground cover - Coleus Black Dragon is a good start, add height with Celosia Dragon's Breath; add cool yellow sparks with Kirengeshoma if you're shady and Achillea Gold Plate if you have sun.
• Aquilegia Tequila Sunrise - My final trend is just a plant, but I think it will get around this summer. Probably not literally, I'll be astonished if it breeds true.