lunch in the meadow first time this year!

Ok, yes, I'm sitting on a plastic bag.

fever gardens

I'm clearing out my studio at the moment, and one of the things I've been finding is ruined little pocket art books. These were a regular feature at the charity bookshop I worked in for years, and we kept them filed in an impulse purchase box by the door along with Penguin 60s, little books of whatever and similar amuse bouches of the book world.

Periodically items from this box which perfectly combined mangled with magnificent came home with me. Toulouse- Lautrec reproduced in unforgiving monochrome. Masterpieces of Surrealism with all the rude ones ripped out. Pocket classic Hieronymous Bosch, spine-splintered and spilling plates.

When I'm ill (I've been ill) I spend my time asleep tumbling through weird, endless gardens and vast, stately houses, gripped by anxiety and a sense of not belonging. I house-sat quite a bit as a child, which might be where this comes from, long weekends of looking after incomprehensible parades of ill-behaved pets and shivering in front of unfamiliar televisions while ugly and valuable things loomed from the darkness all around me and flies buzzed in the ad hoc double glazing that was de rigeur for listed housing at the time.

There's little inspiration in these dark grim childhood gardens. Compare with the H-B psych-out garden:

Check out this amazing fountain design:

And here, an innovative owl box:

Here are some interesting ways with shrubs:

 And a delightful canopy idea:

Not to mention this startling statuary

Many many more details may be found here.

Now that's the kind of fever garden I could really get my teeth into.

the coltsfoot has arrived!!!!

These photos are from the tow path at between Iffley and Oxford, but I checked on the way home, with my neighbour whose front garden I am far too embarassed to photograph, even though I'm fairly sure they haven't even moved in yet, and sure enough their front garden is teeming with coltsfoot, too.

I'm not quite sure why my neighbours have a front garden full of coltsfoot. Up until the new owners  moved in, there was an unnerving stand of bamboo massing in their front garden, but still, every spring, in the gravelled front, a frantic fringe of coltsfoot would appear under the sprawl of bamboo.

You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the street as the new neighbours, in their first week, ripped out every shred of bamboo from the front garden. No more cables of bamboos heading pell-mell for the narrow ancient sewers, no more shoots testing the solidity of our thin concrete foundations. And the coltsfoot came up in legion quantities, yellow as the sun.

 First flowering of the Coltsfoot is a Nature's Calendar event. It's a marker of spring, a moment more definite than the daisy or the dandelion, which might spring up during a warm spell, earlier than the celandine, wilder than the snowdrop.

This patch on the tow-path is wonderfully reliable, and spring is here, maybe a little early, but all the more welcome for it.

the occasional garden by Saki

So, I have been going through my studio, and filleting all of my endless scraps and savings, and discarding everything that doesn't spark (so far: 3/4 of a blue bin full). Somewhere, tucked between eviscerations of old ladybird books, significant pages from gardening catalogues and endless eccentric cards sent to me endless fe/mail artists, cartoonists, strip-mistresses and surreally skillful crafters, I found this gem (in ripped-out-from-a-magazine form) of gardening glory, a ten-minute flash-fiction of social salvation in the gardening department through activation of shopping and the emergency brain. Here's the best Youtube version:

Oh, the Japanese Sand Badgers, the Suffragettes, the smugness. There's a beautiful, delicately tinted picture by Robin Jaques (better known for his children's book illustration) accompanying the article, which is seems a shame not to include, as it so perfectly captures the world of the fantasy, perfect, spectacular garden.

valentines in the gardenspaces of the internet

So, this week, as the fascination in the novelty of the love sausage has given way to the realisation that people (not necessarily the ones you've been anywhere near, but nevertheless real live people) have been giving each other Bacon Bouquets for years I found myself discussing ideas for a themed dinner party. But what to call it? The flower show dinner? Chelsea chops? Ah of course, the Magical Meat Garden meal....

But this being the world, and radical carnivory definitely being a thing, three American boys with a bacon salt obsession have roundly beaten me to it:

The watering can full of beer is a nice touch. The bacon tulips could have done with a bit more work. The prioritisation of calorie count over flavour doesn't gel with what I want from a meal.

The edible garden is not a new idea - the diorama that you can consume goes back to Hansel and Gretel's house, to Willy Wonka, it's a childhood idea with a touch of the sinister; doesn't the world look good enough to eat? What if it then turned around and ate you?

It's also greed and destruction, the human effect on the environment rendered down and made safe as a toy for children, an amusement for adults. Variations like Heston's edible graveyard below (look out for some great reactions from Ulrika Jonsson!!!) make the links to death and destruction explicit:

It also links me back to a garden toy I had as a child, where you could plug tulips into flower beds. The tininess and the contrast with the messy perfection of real flowers fascinated me, as did the tulips. There weren't many tulips where I was growing up. Daffodils in spring and irises in summer, yes; but tulips had the touch of the exotic and impossible, luxuries you bought for a season, needing gardeners and lifting, and who-knew-what, and frankly providing worse value for money than Dahlias, for all their earwig-attracting ways.

I remember finding the toy (a cheap plastic import toy from the continent called something like Gemma's German Garden) very easily last time I was looking, but now it's been eclipsed, Brexit-style, by the rather union-jackish Britain's Floral Garden, though looking at some of the pieces, maybe it's just the case that everything's now being labelled with the name of the more famous toy, irrespective of which set it came from.

This weirdly compelling video juxtaposes the fantasy suburbia of Floral Garden with a hospital set and a stable set, creating a disquieting, unfocused contrast, and a curious reminder of childhood obsessions with tiny models of ordinary life:

There's also a certain fascination in the idea of presenting food grown in a garden as a miniature garden, although "Eat my Garden" is probably not the best name for the dinner. And of course I have to persuade the allotment to actually grow something first.

Happy Valentines, anyway, meat gardens, food garden and model gardens alike, or maybe (following this year's fashion for mangling the world valentines into something you're genuinely interested in) Happy Hortentines.

the allotment in january

I have tender patches, bruises almost, on the heels of my hands. Normally they're fine, but once in a while I'll knock them on something or pick up something large (a box of cat-food packets, for example) and there will be a little twinge, a sudden explosion. I was puzzled about the pain for a couple of weeks, the way it wained and waxed, wondering about RSI or yoga, or the way the exercise bike vibrates when someone's flailing on the treadmill next to it.What had been going on? I hadn't banged my hands on anything....



Oh, I thought. Oh yes. That, maybe.

Once a week I've been slipping up to the allotment between the end of the working day and the beginning of the evening. Digging for between fifteen and forty-five minutes, depending on how much time I have, how rainy it is, how bright the twilight is and, of course, my own patience. Digging in a basic, lazy way, peeling off the roughturf and couch grass and stacking the turfs.



So January on the allotment was kind of one note and has injured me a bit. Digging out couch grass, drowning couch grass, drying couch gass. Here and there I hit garbage - plastic sheets, tarpaulins, bin liners. It was probably all put down to suppress weeds, but the weeds grew through it, then over it and locked it to the ground. You can cut through stuff like this with a hard spade-hit, sometimes. Other times you're left chasing trails of weed-stitched semi-buried rock solid threads and mats through the soil, yanking it with the fork, trying to get it out. Either way, that's what happened to my hands.

Wildlife seen has included jackdaws, crows, kites, allotment fox and allotment cat. Produce has been sparse, just horseradish and sage. I haven't seen any of my co-allotmenteers, I've heard the gate go a couple of times, but not seen anyone. It's very much an allotment for introverts, which suits me well.

It's too cold to plant anything yet. But I'm making plans. There's a cylindrical yellow beetroot I grew a few years ago, that grows hard and roasts well. Salsify sounds like something interesting to try. Sunflowers.

But first, the rest of the allotment needs to be dug.

scenes from the winter garden

Firmly espaliered tree-screen in a prestige factory car-park.



Snow makes mazes look better by invoking the chill despair of being lost in the cold.



Decorate your garden (or maybe somebody else's) with an ironic estate agent's sign:



Ivy, the faithful friend of winter, must be trimmed into a sensible space:



Snow buries the garden dinosaurs:



The beginning and end of the suburban snowmen and their myriad accessories:



Cat says: what is this bullshit?

a frill of ferns

Against the white of the winter afternoon, as I was hurrying away to my allotment before nightfall, I saw a frill of feathery greens against the sky, growing out of the top of the NHS building (Raglan House) on Between Towns Road. This building and I have a chequered history, as I used to obtain my much-loathed contraceptive solutions from here, referred on after having been judged too complex by my GP. The Sexwise clinic has long since rebranded and moved on, and I'm not sure what happens here now. Mental Health, maybe?




The fringe of ferns is doing well. I'd love to have ferns like that in my back garden. There's a busy A road merge and mini roundabout below, and particulates and hot air sweep up from the heavy traffic, nibbling the mortar and inserting grime into the frontage. The scarp also peaks here, meaning it's a dumping point for gentle rain. That flat roof would probably do very well as a green roof.