heuchera – Page 2 – derrickjknight

A New Brother

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Jackie, on an even duller day, continued her creative cultivation. My contribution this morning was a raked redistribution of the now rather rutted gravel on the back drive. In doing so I gained even more appreciation of the efforts of Richard in shifting shingle from his beach hut described in ‘Like Shovelling Water Or Coal In A Bunker’. And the ground I was working was at least level.

This afternoon I scanned a batch of colour slides from June 1980.

This one of Jessica was taken shortly before Sam’s birth, in University College Hospital in Euston Road, on 19th.

Here is the new arrival at two days old. He must have had decent fingernails, hence the protective mittens.

Cradled by his Mum he slept peacefully,

then shared his first joke with her,

and was introduced into the eager arms of Matthew

and Becky.

While I was drafting this, the rain having desisted, the light was just good enough to photograph the view from my window including part of the front garden, where can be seen

euphorbia, tulips, daffodils, pansies, heucheras, hellebores, borage, with a glimpse of

the crab apple blossom, to the left of which, out of shot, a couple of owls, of course, stand sentinel on the fence.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s marvellous steak and mushroom pie, sauteed potatoes and peppers, carrots, and cauliflower in a cheese sauce; followed by treacle tart and cream. The Cook drank Hoegaarden and I finished the Cotes du Rhone.

Early Morning Lovemaking

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Now, please don’t get too excited. It’s birds I’m referring to. Pigeons, to be precise.

I am no good at sexing birds, so I’m not sure which was which in this couple, although I suspect that it was the female who remained aloof whilst her suitor performed on the trapeze.

Not greatly impressed, she turned and flew away. He swivelled on the high wire and set off in pursuit.

Jackie continued her mammoth weeding and planting in the garden.

My contribution was digging out bamboo roots that had strayed into the gravel of the Oval Path. This also involved lifting border rocks and replacing them after removing the interlopers. Afterwards I ambled around with watering cans, and, of course, a camera.

We are daily enjoying new tulips,

including these parrots.

We inherited some prolific yellow wallflowers along the back drive.

Encouraged by them Jackie added these beautifully red-veined ones last year,

and these varicoloured erysimum Red Jeps quite recently.

Another recent planting is mesembryanthemums,

seen here in situ beyond the russet heuchera.

It was so hot this afternoon that we took cold drinks on the Castle Bench because it was in the shade. There is a little table each side of the seat for drinks. Jackie sat on the right. I sat on the left. She is left-handed. I am right-handed. Work it out. Until she twigged what was going on, we both rested our glasses in the middle of the bench. Then we swapped positions, and there was nothing between us.

This evening we dine on Jackie’s delicious sausage casserole, carrots, cauliflower, and new potatoes. She drank Hoegaarden and I finished the fleurie.

New Arrivals

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This morning we all joined the other customers in the cafe. Poppy did actually eat most of what was on her plate.

An hour or so later, Jackie and I set off back home, reaching there early in the afternoon.

Aaron had moved a clump of ornamental grass further back in the Palm Bed,

and removed rust from most of the furniture in the rose garden and painted it with Hammerite. Here we have a reclaimed armchair seated under the arch with a church candlestick behind it.

Pansies are flourishing;

the Snake’s Head fritillaries proliferate;

our numerous heucheras now have flowers;

and cowslips,

geranium Phaeums,

and grape hyacinths are new arrivals.

This evening we dined on a Chinese takeaway from Happy Days in Pennington, and, between us, finished the Broadwood’s Folly English white wine.

Veritable Carpets Of Offspring

Aaron this morning cleared more brick paths of weeds and began painting the Ace Reclaim bench with white Hammerite in order to combat rust; Jackie continued planting, weeding, and general maintenance work;

and I finished off spreading the Landscape Bark around the rose garden beds, thus offering The Head Gardener, who had begun the job yesterday, a certain minimal assistance. We need a few more bags to complete the task.

Each day now, we have more emerging varieties of

tulip,

daffodil,

pansy,

and primula.

Speckled fritillaria Jackie planted in the autumn thrive in the cryptomeria bed.

For ground cover we have such as

buttercup-yellow celandines

and deep-blue vincas.

Many self-seeders need to be kept under control. Cropping up everywhere we have, for example,

purple honesty,

and multi-hued hellebores which drop veritable carpets of offspring. Unmanaged, this dense brood would choke the rusty heuchera to death and cover the brick path onto which it is already encroaching.

We are still marginally ahead of the game in the race to have the garden ready for spring, but nature is catching up by the day.

This evening we dined at Lymington’s Lal Quilla. My choice was king prawn Ceylon, and Jackie’s, prawn bhuna. We shared egg fried rice, an egg paratha, and an onion bhaji; and both drank Kingfisher.

‘Sign That, Dad’

You may be forgiven for imagining that there can be no more new plants emerging in our garden. On the other hand, you may anticipate many more. Today I offer:

colourful purple chives which sit well among the flaming heucheras;

this unidentified peach rose;

the rambling geranium Azure Rush, which makes good ground cover;

and the crinodendron Hookerianum, or Chilean lantern tree that was incorrectly identified as Chinese last year.

This morning I sprayed herbicide on the fresh weeds coming up on the back drive. This gave me the confidence, later, to walk to the postbox on Christchurch Road, and possibly to continue across the field to as far as the wood. I took one look at how overgrown the footpath has become, thought better of it, and returned to Old Post House. Just think, if this were in the 1960s, I would not have needed to walk anywhere.

Now it is time for the second of my Five Photos – Five Stories.

You may know by now that during the nineteen Newark years I commuted to Kings Cross. This sometimes meant that I had a little time to kill. On one such occasion, about 1994, when I had given up wandering about outside the station fending off a persistent ‘working girl’, and decided to sit inside until departure time, I received a phone call from Sam.

Jessica’s and my son, knowing there would be a photo kiosk in the station, asked me to take a couple of photographs in the booth, for a school project he was engaged in.

And Sam was such a truthful boy.

Anyone who has used these photographic facilities will know that first of all you have to adjust the seat so you don’t take a shot of your torso. You then must try to smile in time with the flash, which is anyway inclined to catch you by surprise and give you scary, startled, eyes. You probably will need several attempts.

I had plenty of time, so I persevered.

A day or two later, our son wandered into my study where I was engrossed in working out the three-dimensional crossword I was compiling to fit into Mike Kindred’s grids.

‘Sign that, Dad’ he said, thrusting a folded sheet of paper onto my manuscript pages. He knew I would trust him, and probably not ask what it was about. I didn’t ask, and duly complied.

Jessica, scarcely more devious than Sam, decided, for my birthday, to take me out on a surprise trip somewhere down the A3. As she drove us into the Surrey countryside, I found myself wondering which National Trust House, had an event on.

I hadn’t noticed what was in the boot of the car.

On Jessica drove, into Sussex. I began to smell some sort of a rat when I spotted the airplane symbols on the road signs. Was there any attraction near Gatwick? Not that I could think of.

When we arrived at the airport, I turned to a smiling Jessica, and asked what we were doing there. I didn’t have a passport. ‘Oh yes you have’, she cried, brandishing the updated one I had carelessly allowed to lapse.

A weekend in Paris ensued.

It was Becky who provided the photograph, taken, I think that December, on another invasion of my sanctuary.

This evening Jackie and I dined on her superb chicken jalfrezi, with pilau rice and egg paratha. She drank Hoegaarden, whilst my choice was Doom Bar,

Diverted From The Task In Hand

A stiff breeze set our flaming foliage flickering in the strong morning sunlight casting shifting shadows. As I gently ambled around, I pulled the calf of my dodgy leg. Following the last two stormy days, I now have another excuse for avoiding weeding.

The beech is now fully plumed;

as are the Japanese maples;

and the prunus pissardi

to which a few stubborn cherries cling, reflecting glints of light.

Only a few minutes after I discovered that my shot of a hot heuchera was out of focus, the sun had moved on to a slightly cooler one. (please Mr. WordPress, you should know by now that when I type ‘heuchera’ I don’t mean ‘heaters’).

Later there were more clouds and less sun. I sat outside for a while, which was rather disappointing for the starlings who would fly towards their nest behind our kitchen fascia board, and, noticing my presence, do a mid-air about-turn and wait patiently on one tree or another wondering what to do next.

Here are three of the prints from 1985 that I scanned today:

Lousia’s attention wandered a bit in this one.

Jessica and I and our children spent several holidays at Instow with her brother Henry, sister-in-law Judith and their two children Lucy and Nick. On an early one of these, that same year, we drove somewhere in Devon, where Jessica’s cousin was a vet. I don’t remember the name of the village where we enjoyed a summer fete, but I did record the event at which

Sam was so transfixed by a Punch and Judy show, that his attention was also diverted, from his apple.

At Louisa’s third birthday party at Gracedale Road, Matthew enjoyed amusing the children.

This evening I tucked into the scrumptious cottage pie that Jackie had left me, adding green beans and cauliflower.

An Ecological Balance

We had some overnight rain; the first for about three weeks. To write that in April, the month identified in UK with spring rain, has been hitherto unimaginable. The French term for our ‘April showers’ is ‘giboulées (showers) de mars (March)’. Could we be going that way?

Refreshing drops were retained by the garden plants such as:

tulips,

prunus amanogawa,

pansies,

euphorbia,

and heuchera.

Yesterday’s dove feathers, clearly discarded by a larger, ravenous, avian predator, provided an example of nature’s food chain in action. Further evidence of the process was to be found this morning.

Last evening, unaided after all, Jackie had emptied the second small pond, dragging out it’s container and turning it over on the concreted area. We have decided to fill in the hole.

The underside of this small lining bath sheltered a couple of dozen snails. As she overturned their refuge, applying her own philosophy, she invited the thrushes to feast. This morning the concrete was strewn with scattered shards.

Particularly in London, where slug and snail pellets containing poison such as metaldehyde, are widely used to kill the very unpopular molluscs, thrushes that feed on them, so ingesting the toxic substance, are a vanishing species. In the natural course of events snails eat plants; thrushes eat snails and thrive. The ecological balance is upset when snails are tempted by humans into.eating poisoned pellets. They die; thrushes eat snails; poison passes into thrushes; and thrushes die.

Gardeners care more for their birds than they do their snails. And even more for their vulnerable plants. Perhaps they should eschew poison and allow themselves once more to hear the tapping created by thrushes bashing open the shells on stone. Non-toxic snail bait contains iron phosphates. I don’t know how effective they are.

This evening we dined on oven fish.and chips, and pickled onions. I did the cooking, such as it was; the timer failed to sound; the fish and chips were a little crisper than ideal.

The Gate Of India

A very straggly flowering cherry tree in the front garden needed Jackie’s heavy pruning last year. It has responded magnificently.

A mahonia and more heucheras are blooming, whilst an earlier flowering example of the former that has been allowed to grow into a tree now bears clusters of seeds.

Late this afternoon Jackie drove us to visit our friends Barrie and Vicki who moved to Poole a few months ago. Barrie drove us around the town, pointing out the old town and various new developments, ships in the harbour, the two bridges, the old Customs House, Sunseekers boat builders, and the splendid parks that back onto their building opposite the cricket pitch. Barrie is a wealth of knowledge, not all of which I was able to retain at first hearing, but the journey itself, on a sunny evening was fascinating and enjoyable.

After this we were treated to a meal at a rightly recommended restaurant, ‘The Gate of India’. The food, service, and ambience, were excellent, and it was interesting that this large establishment, even on a Wednesday evening, was full of diners.

Main courses laid out on our table were chicken buna for Jackie, chicken moglai for Vicki, chom chom chicken for Barrie, and fish naga for me. There was mushroom rice for Jackie and pilau for the rest of us. We shared onion bajis, a naan, and a parata. Jackie and I drank Kingfisher, and our hosts drank diet coke.

The empty glasses indicate, as is often the case in restaurants where the food is freshly cooked, that we had finished our first drink before the food arrived. That was not a problem. The only tardiness they showed was in presenting the bill. We all enjoyed our meals.

Eric’s Trampling

Even in the restaurant last night, my camera was not safe from Flo’s clutches. Here is a photograph she took of her mother:

For those of you who have suggested the obvious Birthday/Christmas present, we bought one for this talented photographer a couple of years ago, but she didn’t bring it with her this time.

This morning, albeit painfully, I made it a couple of hundred yards to the post box without a stick. Despite the increasing use of e-mails and texts to communicate in writing we still post letters in these historic boxes. How long the increasingly costly service will manage to survive is open to question. Like most of the country’s telephone boxes this one has fallen into disuse. They remain a tourist attraction in London, but elsewhere the mobile phone has rendered the landmark red cabinets largely obsolete.

There is a gap in the hedge alongside the field, through which the farmer gains access between the rows of parked cars. Glass jars had been lobbed into the hedgerow where cherry blossom now blooms.

We have an interesting ornamental cabbage in the garden. I played with maximum saturation on this heavy crop.

The heucheras are now flowering,

which is more than can be said for anything planted under the bird feeders where Eric tramples,

before going on walkabout (photographed by Flo yesterday).

The sausage content of Jackie’s classic casserole comprised chipolatas from Lidl combined with Tesco’s finest pork and red onion. The other usual ingredients contributed to the rich, tasty, sauce. Mashed potato; and crisp carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli were the supporting cast. I finished the cabernet sauvignon, while Becky and Jackie drank a melange of rosés.

Chips And Gravy

Vine weevil larvae have been feeding on the roots of Jackie’s prized heucheras. Our eagle-eyed head gardener spotted the wilting plants yesterday afternoon, lifted what was left of them, scraped off the infestation, and placed them in water to encourage new growth. The rubber duck is keeping its eye on them.
Favouring those in pots, these voracious intruders, less than the size of a little finger nail, destroy the roots of plants, requiring a painstaking process of filtering the soil to eradicate them. This is made more difficult by white material often found in compost. Jackie dons rubber gloves and weeds them out, repotting the affected plants. This is the damage that they do:
She continued the task this morning.
Not being tempted to repeat yesterday’s trek, I took my normal walk to Hordle Cliff top and back. Friesan cattle occasionally amorous, clustered on the slopes at the bottom of Downton Lane, created fascinating random black and white patterns as they huddled together. When any one was subjected to an attempt at mounting she simply walked away, leaving her suitor with no alternative but to flop back in embarrassment onto all fours.
Along the coast road, a tidy up crew were clearing away the barriers and filling in the holes left during the replacement of the street lighting. Interestingly, there is no street lighting on our stretch of Christchurch Road, with its 60 mph speed limit, approaching a crossroads, although there are three or four lamps on Downton Lane, each one placed on a bend.
Possibly flourishing in the sea air, the mushroom crop, producing its own intriguing symmetrical patterns, increases daily.
On an early morning shopping trip, Jackie had noticed Lidl were selling oil filled radiators. You never know when you might need one, and with this store’s surprises you have to be quick to catch them before they disappear, so we went back this afternoon and bought one.
Afterwards we put in a good stint on the back drive. Jackie continued the creation of her lengthy flowerbed on one side, and I dug up more bramble and ivy roots.
A mixed grill to rival that of The Plough at Tiptoe was produced by Jackie for our evening meal. With the addition of peppers and onions hers was rather less dry than that of the pub. She included neither beef steak nor lamb chop, but the large gammon steak made up for that. I could just about manage to eat a tiramisu afterwards. Jackie drank Hoegaarden, and I finished the Lion’s Gate wine.
One of the attractions for me of The Crown Inn at Everton is that chips and gravy comes as standard with their steak and kidney pudding. It is otherwise infra dig to pour gravy over chips. Chips must be dry, and it is mash that must be dowsed in gravy. Having witnessed me betraying my penchant for this culinary crime at The Crown, Jackie provided gravy for my meal tonight. She didn’t think it really appropriate for a fried egg, and therefore didn’t partake, but for me it was perfection.