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Snippets from the Summer of 2025

The Cottage Gardener

The Web of Childhood

As Graham Greene said “Childhood is the credit book of the adult writer” and this is true in so many of the great British writers. In the case of the Bronte sisters after the tragic deaths of their older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth at the ages of 11 and 10 from TB, respectively, the family retreated as a unit to the relative safety of the Haworth parsonage and developed a sort of scribblemania, as Branwell their brother described it based on their wild imaginations’ interpretation of the untamed moors behind them. They called it The Web of Childhood and it inspired not just their books such as Emily’s much praised Wuthering Heights but also the imaginary world created by Anne and Emily called Gondor.

Similarly, Laurie Lee begins his epically famous semi-autobiographical novel about his childhood in Slad in Rural Gloucestershire called Cider with Rosi by describing his terror of being set down in the long grass outside their new home when he was about three…….

I was set down from the carrier’s cart…..the June grass amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above and around me…..thick as forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and lept through the air like monkeys…

The story is lyrical and poetic and perhaps a little exaggerated but nevertheless captures childish innocence and wonder as well as a love for the landscape he was spawned by. It is illustrated by Lees request to be returned to the hills he loved so dearly when his adventures across the globe were long finished and he met his maker.

Tolkein also based some of the scenes of his books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings on areas found in suburban Birmingham where he spent some of his childhood . For example, Moseley Bog where he played as a child does capture some of the essence of the old forest with its tree Ent guardians as described in the semi-mythical Celtic spirit of The Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, it does need a lot of lubrication now, and probably 100 years ago too, to coax the child-like wonder of quite modest wild places into the legendary landscapes of these wildly imaginative books.

Certainly who I am and what I love was formed by the eternal summers of childhood on the North Norfolk coast and now with rewilding I was pleasantly surprised, having returned in mid-March 2025 that the place still has the rural charm I remember with huge herds of deer, pheasants and hares squaring up to each other. I even got a glimpse of my favourite bird the silver wraith of the Norfolk marshes, the Barn owl.

The Fens

I’ve been driving through the Fens all my life. Its rich, black soil and long straight dykes were always part of the journey to Norfolk, often conducted at a snail’s pace behind a tractor.

I had always wanted to write something about how they came about but never really was sufficiently well informed to offer anything new. To change this I took myself off to Peterborough in June 2025 and rather overoptimistically booked myself in for 6 nights. The white nights in Peterborough are obviously not what they once were and in the final death knell to the run down town centre I would suggest they ran to be Capital of Culture in 2030…

There are 2 places near Peterborough that give a snapshot of the development of the Fens. Helpston, in the direction of Stamford, is the birthplace of John Clare who witnessed first hand the enclosure of the land and loss of biodiversity as flowers were replaced with crops. His moving poetry describing this has become more well known now as industrialized agriculture dominates Britain in 2025, particularly the fertile fens like the industrialized agriculture of the Netherlands.

Thorney describes the social aspect better. Under the stewardship of the Dutch Engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, a gang of labourers were hired to tame the marshes of Thorney into agricultural land. There were Scottish and Irish navvies too but a large proportion were Huguenots who were escaping religious persecution in Northern Europe. They had settled previously at another fen in Yorkshire at Sandtoft for a similar project but abandoned it due to the resentment of locals.

In the Fens in places such as Thorney the local population lived off the land, eating fish and fowl from the waterways and also using plants such as the reeds for thatch. What was proposed represented a very real threat to their way of life. In fact, it meant in retrospect that they would no longer be self sufficient in food forcing them entirely into the cash economy, something land owners always rub their hands with glee at.

Even though Cornelius Vermuyden was bankrupted by the scheme it was eventually enacted by the hard work of the Huguenots into highly productive land. But the main beneficiary was the Earl of Bedford, the owner of the land, as the soil was now some of the most fertile in Europe and the nearby population, faced with starvation were forced to work the land in return for currency to pay for their bread. Many fell into opium addiction; such was the desperation of the situation, whose control was unrestricted at that time.

The Riches of Terroir

It has been in the news recently, as of October 2025, that concentrated orange juice has significantly increased in value- increasing the price on supermarket shelves in the region of 50% and upwards. Strangely, despite places like Southern Spain and Portugal being ideal for orange production they actually produce little orange juice and so it has emerged that certain Brazilian corporations have a stranglehold on the production of orange juice for brands such as Tropicana.

Ofcourse, this is partly to do with other factors such as pest and disease outbreaks in places such as Florida, another key supplier of orange juice, and the inclement weather in other parts of the world where oranges are grown for juice.

The way the world is now too much agriculture is conducted in the third world, mainly due to labour costs. This is despite the fact that many places and cities have been shaped and/or become increasingly wealthy on the back of a horticultural product. But it is important to remember that the skills needed to grow and produce food are no less important now as long as we still need to eat.

The wealth created by the stranglehold the Banda islands (in East Indonesia) had on Nutmeg production from Elizabethan times persisted well into the early 20th century. Indeed, Dutch Burghers were able to live out lives of aristocratic idleness on the dwindling fortunes in their crumbling colonial mansions until that time on the sale of a spice. So valuable were the Banda islands at one time that the British were able to swap it for Manhattan island with the Dutch.

This craze for nutmeg was fuelled by the belief in Britain and other parts of Europe that nutmeg could cure many ailments such as plague. This kickstarted the race to The East Indies and those salty seadogs that made it back such as Nathaniel Nutmeg, became immensely wealthy. Eventually demand declined and the British uprooted various nutmeg trees with their soil and successfully began to cultivate these trees for commercial production in other places like Singapore.

But for a while the remoteness of the Banda islands, combined with a climate and soil perfect for Nutmeg production, since they essentially grew wild all over the island created a perfect storm for the creation of spice millionaires.

Los Angeles is a less glamorous story, when you compare it to the development of Hollywood there. But certainly the perfect climate of Southern California, and particularly Los Angeles for growing oranges, with effective research and development into new, more exciting and better cultivars and the ability to store water from the nearby San Gabriel mountains created a perfect storm for that horticultural industry.

Tied in with an availability of cheap labour this meant that orange production did kickstart the development of the city of Los Angeles until other services and industries took over. Most of all the initial wealth of orange production resulted in the construction of many attractive mansions in various places in California, including Los Angeles, which in tandem with the good weather made it an attractive place for well to do people to move to.

Closer to home, C.J Schuler also makes a convincing argument for the role that the Great North Wood( as opposed to the Weald or Great South Wood in Kent and Sussex), which did at one time stretch from Deptford to Croydon, had in the development of London. This was through the use of its timber for ship building, the provision of charcoal for our blacksmiths to make weapons from and the wood to bake bread to feed our soldiers and families.

This is ofcourse a obvious point that wealth was originally tied to the landscape that spawned it. But unfortunately so much of wealth creation now is done by people in suits via financial services and technology that we forget the very important role nature had in our development and still does lest we forget and nature flicks us into the ocean…….

A Few Snippets Here Celebrating Spring- Eternally a Time of Hope

The Cottage Gardener

Daffodils

Near where I live in Dulwich, at the Lordship Lane end of Friern road is a memorial to some civilians including children, who were killed by the infamous doodlebug bombs, whilst waiting for a bus during World War 2.

It’s a forgotten spot with a few small trees and scruffy grass where the buses wait before they return to central London. But in spring, at the time of greatest hope as life renews again in its cycle, it erupts with a beautiful display of golden miniature daffs. A fitting tribute to those innocent people that died there.

Despite daffodils being the national symbol of Wales, albeit a relatively new one it is Cornwall that is synonomous with daffodils in my mind, at least. They are still widely grown there commercially because the mild climate allows them to flower early for shipment to other parts of the UK. Indeed, the biggest daffodil farm in the world is opposite St Michael’s Mount near Penzance (4000 acres). The industry did take a bit of a battering during the 2nd World War when food production took centre stage and many different varieties of daffodil were thrown out into the hedgerows. Famously, in the Tamar valley near Plymouth the daffodil went the same way as mining and disappeared from the region with the wilding daffodils on the sides of the road the only reminder.

Further west in Cornwall, near Penzance whilst walking the coastal path between Mousehole and Lamorna Cove I was pleasantly surprised, in early March, to see many daffodils in the hedgerows flowering in the early spring sunshine with the more petite purple violets (with their faint old lady scent) skulking below. As Ted Hughes put it

‘ What a fleeting glance of the everlasting daffodils are…’

The sea is azure blue in Cornwall and the smash and grab of the raw Atlantic Ocean against the toothed cliffs is arresting. I’m sure John Le Carre thought so as he wrote in his cottage above the cliffs in Lamorna Cove. This pilgrimage of sorts to the place where some of the most profound dialogue I have read about human nature, love and the sad reality of life was something I had always wanted to do. And there were some stunning plants such as camellias in the steep sided valley leading to the cove but sadly the locals in the pub The Lamorna Wink were tight lipped about the real David Cornwell.

Anyway, Daffodils or Narcissi are named after the Greek god Narcissus because they seem to peer downwards, like Narcissus in his pool, and are so gay and bright that they probably would fall in love with themselves if they saw their own reflection like Narcissus. Perhaps that is why in the Granada production of Brideshead Revisited (after Sebastien is sick in Charles Ryder’s rooms) as an apology he fills his room with many different types of daffodils. Probably an appropriate symbol of homosexual love.

As Charles Ryder said he had been warned of the dangers of these rooms by his Cousin Jasper but said-

‘there were gillyflowers by his window that on warm summer evenings filled the room with scent…..‘

By gillyflower he means a scented flower but I’d always imagined he meant wallflowers which have their own connotations in courtship where it is used as a title for a number books in a type of whimsical romantic book of which there is a whole shelf at Dulwich library with names such ‘How to woo a wallflower.’

I have glanced through these books and given the content I can still flatter myself that if such dross gets published I may yet be a successful author even if my books are only read (as George Orwell put it) by desperate spinsters and the wives of fat tobacconists.

Madchester in the Spring Sunshine

When I told a friend that I was going on holiday to Manchester he looked puzzled. ‘Why?’ He said ‘To pay £100 a night for a B and B to watch the rain fall?’

Not to sound like Andy Burnham in a pitch to Michael Gove in order to get a few more quid for the levelling up fund but Manchester really is a great place now. Cosmopolitan, tolerant and even beautiful. So that rain cloud that brought the satanic mills to Manchester has now turned into an amazing rainbow of community although Im not sure Mancunians would put it quite like that.

Anyway when I arrived in Manchester in April the sun was shining and I could see the cherry blossom in bloom round the compact but beautiful cathedral in the centre of Old Manchester from my hotel window.

The hotel is quite famous because the IRA have tried to blow it up twice. The bar downstairs is certainly not the sort of place I would linger although in the morning they did a damn good Eggs Benedict.

Obviously the hotel does not attract the most salubrious characters either as they asked for a picture of my credit card to secure my stay and were really disappointed when they discovered that my bank, also for security do not display my credit number on the card.

The room looked good in the pictures but they had only wallpapered one bit of the wall…conveniently the bit in the photo and the windows and bathroom were not in good condition at all. At least if I had done a Liam Gallagher and thrown the TV out the window and used the wallpaper as toilet paper it wouldn’t have been very expensive to replace them.

There was also a surreal moment when I was locked out of the hotel because they lock the front door to the hotel rooms as a security measure. What they failed to consider was that the stairs to the hotel were accessible from the bar area so all you had to was walk round from there. So I was let in by a roguish, pumped man who had nothing to do with the hotel and was just drinking in the bar. It was a bit like the scene from the film Snatch (2000) when the two black men in it hold up a bookies, shoot themselves and then get trapped behind a security door until the larger than life Tyrone comes to see what they are doing because he is their getaway driver and finds the door easily pushed open.

But there are plenty of other diversions in Manchester aside from the gay quarter which is ironically on Canal Street with a memorial to the brilliant (and incidentally gay) code breaker Alan Turing who was shamefully treated by the British government and was forced into committing suicide because of his sexuality.

There are also a number of beautiful Victorian buildings such as the University and Victorian baths near Oxford road, Bury Market and its black pudding, Salford and Coronation street with Morrissey’s Salford Lads club, Chorlton( posh Manchester) where more Guardian newspapers are sold than anywhere else. Finally there is Cheetham’s library where Karl Marx and Frederich Engels met and discussed the plight of the working man in Manchester when it was the centre of the industrial world. At that time in the golden age of empire it was run by the ironic collaboration of Jews and Germans, centred around the Cheetham Hill area of central Manchester, just behind Victoria station.

Cheetham’s library itself looks so old and creepy that the BBC adaption of The Tractath Middoth was set here in the 2013 which is the story of a cursed book that two relatives seek to obtain or retain their inheritance.

The most impressive feature of Manchester is the new garden near the cathedral which remembers those martyrs, mostly young people, who were tragically murdered by a suicide bomber in the 02 arena just outside Manchester in 2017.

I did shed a tear or two at the immaculately tended and tastefully planted 0 shaped memorial there for the pity of human existence because we never seem to stop hating and killing each other for so little reason.

Tulipmania

Mike Dash has written a fantastic book about the craze for tulips that gripped the Netherlands in the 17th century called Tulipmania which made some people fabulously wealthy and ruined others. He tells the story of the auction at Alkmaar in the North of the Netherlands where an orphanage auctioned off its collection of tulip bulbs for a fortune at the height of the boom. It is considered the first financial bubble of modern times and is thus still part of the syllabus for junior members of staff in the financial services industry.

But Dash also talks about the origins of the tulip bulbs in central Asia and how the Turks took it from Tienshan mountains in that region and how it became one of the most important flowers in Islam because of its tolerance of heat and cold and its beauty. Dash claims its virus streaked flowers were more beautiful than any modern hybrid.

The reason it is revered in the East is because it bows its head to the sky, seemingly in humility to God, which is a particularly evocative image. The original flowers were red and thus a symbol of undying love as it was said they sprung up from where a man killed himself after hearing his lover was dead.

And so it is natural that it would be in the gardens of heaven where faithful Muslims would live in the most beautiful gardens drinking the wine they were forbidden on earth passed to them by their own personal harem. As tulips have to be tended by gardeners it was stated in the oral tradition of the prophet Muhammed that all gardeners would go to heaven, which I am naturally delighted to hear.

But we also have our holy plants in Christendom. One particularly unusual one is the particular hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna ‘Biflora’) which grows on the hills at Glastonbury and flowers at Christmas as well as in the spring. It is said that it sprung from Joseph of Arimathea’s staff when he was passing through Glastonbury and that the Puritans tried to cut it down in a fit of fanaticism during the Reformation but the tree was saved by cuttings taken by local people.

Anyway, a sprig is always sent by the vicar of Glastonbury to the Monarch at Christmas like the tiny pineapples of The Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall which were sent to Queen Victoria because they were so unusual.

Ofcourse this was a time when a pineapple didn’t cost £1 at the supermarket and were such an expensive luxury that some aristocrats included it in their coat and arms. Most amusingly, the Landmark Trust rent a property on a country estate in Scotland today that was built in the shape of a pineapple. A true folly!

But perhaps a certain kind of Tree of Knowledge can be found in the Botanical gardens at Cambridge. I don’t mean the apple tree apparently descended from the one that apparently dropped its fruit on Isaac Newton’s head but a semi-evergreen oak that keeps its leaves through winter…superficially a symbol of immortality but in fact probably a hybrid between an evergreen American oak and our own champion the English oak.

I can imagine in the pandemic someone like the writer Robert Macfarlane, the nature writer and  Don at Cambridge holding lectures under this great tree but I don’t know this for sure except that he did lecture outside. Certainly much knowledge has been imparted under this tree. I hope this doesn’t inspire some nihilist to cut it down because it is so symbolic; like the sycamore on The Sycamore Gap in Hadrian’s wall. Although, it was  heartening  to hear the outpouring of grief over a tree that is essentially a weed in the South East of England, most obviously on railway sidings much to the irritation of the accountants at British rail. Bring back Agent Orange, chimed the administrators!

The Butterfly effect, Gardener’s Revenge and the Peas that Changed the World

The Cottage Gardener

Sea Holly- A Gardener’s Revenge

There was a famous plantswoman of the early 20th century who was supposed to be as great as Gertrude Jekyll, the queen of the English herbaceous border…..

Unfortunately, Miss Wilmott was a  headstrong lesbian in unsympathetic times, who snubbed the RHS and squandered a fortune. But she does have a well- known perennial of the herbaceous border named after her called Eryngium ‘Miss Wilmott’s Ghost’.

It was claimed, perhaps tongue in cheek, that it was named after her because she used to sprinkle it in her rivals’ garden designs to ruin them.

But surely the real way of destroying a rival’s design is the methodical shredding of bindweed roots with a Magimix and then spreading  them out in their garden with a sprinkling of soil to bed them down. As you can see I have thought this through- a gardener’s revenge tastes sweeter than the first crop of peas….

This is because every tiny piece of bindweed root will form a new plant. So I’m sure she would have been quietly chuckling as the tendrils choked the plants and maybe even climbed up to the bedroom window to finish the job on the unfortunate owners of the garden.

The Butterfly effect

Last summer, in August 2023, I was at Oxford station waiting to change trains for Worcester and both on the way there and coming back there was a red admiral butterfly resting on the platform. Perhaps she (something so beautiful can only be a she?) enjoyed pirouetting in the slipstream of the train like the fluffy seeds of Oxford Ragwort, the famous annual weed which found a similar habitat on the railway lines of Britain to its native habitat of Mount Etna in Sicily.

I reached out to touch it but it fluttered away before I could fulfil my fantasy of re-enacting the scene in Lord of The Rings when the Elvish king whispers something in the ear of a butterfly on his hand so as to send a message to the other side of the kingdom. The true butterfly effect……

Ofcourse, it may be the sheer proliferation of Buddleia davidii along the limey banks of the railway line that had caused the red admiral to rest at the station. This is in tune with Richard Mabey’s book about plants colonizing urban areas called The Unofficial countryside. I believe he borrowed the phrase from another hero of mine, George Orwell. In August they would have all been in flower with their purple wands contrasting well with the bright yellow of Oxford ragwort making the journey from London that tiny bit less Russian constructivist.

Buddleia is a common plant in the UK now, even a weed because of it pernicious habit of self seeding along railway lines and into mortar of walls. But it is relatively well-behaved garden plant which can be managed by even the roughest gardener doing the hardest of cut backs because it is so vigorous.

But to me is will also be emblematic of the summer holidays in Norfolk because our family home had two large bushes outside that were always covered with purple inflorescences covered with the aformentioned red admirals during the summer break.

Seemingly, other butterflies and moths don’t get a look in. It could be that red admirals are one of the few pollinators attracted to the Buddleia or in the unlikely event that they are very territorial like our favourite British garden bird, the robin; whose beautiful love songs in the bleak midwinter are in fact a warning to other birds to keep their distance.

The Geneticists supper

Gregor Mendel, A Moravian monk is the father of modern genetics. Although he was little known in his time in the 19th century; his paper on the subject was rediscovered, fought over and eventually accepted as correct about 50 years later in England.

His system of catergorizing seeds according to their genotype and phenotype using a system of capital and lowercase letters such as AA Aa and aa has allowed the development of deliberate cross pollination by man to produce hybrid seeds with extra vigour. This effectively means that his discovery has pioneered the era of modern farming and therefore population growth because hybrid seeds and the ability to identify and breed them has resulted in much bigger yields.

Mendel became a monk in Moravia principly to escape poverty and it gave him the freedom to conduct the research of his choice.

Eventually he chose to conduct experiments on the genetics of peas which was either lucky or clever because the genetic attributes of peas can be mapped if traced over a number of generations.

As a by product therefore, there was a huge surplus of fresh peas for the monastery’s kitchen. Indeed when teaching his pupils , in his other role at the monastery, Mendel would often throw a handful of peas at a student that was day dreaming.

Anyway, the chef at the monastery was one of the most able in Moravia (modern day Czechia) and many young girls wishing to go into service trained with her. A particular speciality was rose hip sauce for meat dishes but the peas would have been well used too in pea soup, pork and potatoes with steamed peas and then perhaps some apple strudel with whipped cream( no peas, however sweet in that, I hope) .

Perhaps all this did offset the problematic issue of celibacy but not only were they eating delicious food and frankly fresh food does not get much sweeter than fresh peas but these peas were the by product of some extremely important scientific experiments that were to change the course of farming and history.

Like so many things it often strikes me how people don’t realize how important an event is at the time even. Never have the peas pushed round the plate by a fussy, pimply youth been of such significance!

Plants I’ve Known and Loved- Going over Old Ground

The Cottage Gardener
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Almond trees

To show that I’m not a completely irrational tree-hugger I would say that I was never particularly fond of the almond tree that stood outside The Clocktower, my childhood home. It was a sickly thing and not easy to climb which was a significant point to a child obsessed with Just William who believed there are only 2 types of tree in the world- those that could be climbed and those that could not be climbed…

I can also not remember it flowering very well unlike the almond blossom with its background of rose tinted light captured in various Impressionist paintings that still inspire people to romanticize the South of France.

But ofcourse Almonds are much better suited to the Mediterranean climate found there and also in California which is now a centre for Almond production.

I was surprised to discover that Lubeck, a Hanseatic port of Northern Europe, with no almond production to my knowledge, has developed a reputation for producing top notch marzipan, including my personal favourite, Marzipan hot chocolate, consumed in the attractive cobbled square nearby.

Lubeck is a bit of a honeypot for tourists as it has managed to salvage the Hanseatic merchant houses from the machinations of the RAF. Hamburg ofcourse is beyond reproach in that regard but some Germans feel quite bitter about it when they see the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge.

I was talking to the curate of St Mary’s church in Lubeck on this very subject and he described, in contrast to the horror of the war, the fact that his uncle James (an Englishman) was in a plane above Lubeck dropping ‘friendly’ bombs whilst his future wife was in the burning rubble of the town below as a prelude to their meeting and subsequent marriage. As is said in that great film Shawshank Redemption when the two lead actors meet again in the paradise of the Mexican Pacific coast ‘Hope is a good thing….perhaps the best of things…’

Not Much Room for a Mushroom

As I wrote in my first book I was very keen on foraging particularly for mushrooms in my younger days. This was inspired by the mushroom forays we went on in Thetford forest with the lengendary Peter Jordan, now sadly no longer with us. I learnt a lot and those walks filled with anticipation and excitement are still very clear in my mind even though they must have happened about 25 years ago now.

But such is the dulling influence of the supermarket aisle and lack of practice I have lost my confidence even when I heard that my godfather and his wife, Lif were having Karl Johannes(the Swedish word for Boletus) mushrooms again in East Yorkshire as a regular lunchtime treat. Lif used to grind the unused mushrooms into the lawn with her heel,when the mushrooms were beyond consumption, and it seemed to spread the spores sufficiently to keep the kitchen well supplied.

I think the final nail in the coffin so to speak, and fortunately it was not my coffin, was the recent incident when a woman served up Beef Wellington to her ex-husband’s family. Three of his relatives died after that meal whilst mysteriously she and her children survived unscathed which was a most suspicious set of circumstances given the acrimonious nature of their separation.

Rick Stein was always keen to point out how lacking in variety our diet is. A huge proportion of the world’s population is dependent on 3 crops; rice, wheat and maize. Yet there is so much variety and it is the same with the extent of the fungal kingdom, even if much of it is not edible, the diversity of species never ceases to amaze me.

For example, much like the horror film, Blood on the Devils Claw there is a species of mushroom that looks like claws emerging from a witches’ mushroom fungus and smells like rotting flesh to boot. It is called Clathrus archeri

Then there is the ghostly glow of the Jack o’ latern fungus (Omphalotus olearius) that does glow ‘Halloween Green’ in the dark although to the untrained eye, in the light, it can appear like chanterelles.

For those with a dentist phobia there are Hydnellum peckii mushrooms that resemble a tooth with drops of blood formed on it. I’m sure you are salivating at the prospect of these gastronomic delights just before you go out foraging yourself…..!

An English Gap Year

 Leif Bersweden spent his gap year summer going round the British Isles trying to see every one of the 52 species of Orchid that grow there. It was a hugely inspirational book; well written and funny as well as being informative.

The most important point about it was that it showed that wonder, even in the natural world, can be found below our very feet if we really look instead of having such a jaded palate that only the most exotic and exciting experiences can tickle our imagination.

In comparison, you might choose another more famous book about orchids written by Tom Harte-Dyke about how he went to the Darien Gap in Panama to look for orchids and how he got kidnapped before eventually escaping. A great book to read but in no way more interesting than doing such a thing at home, however brightly coloured or beautiful those tropical orchids were.

I was particularly excited by Bersweden’s description of the Lady’s slipper orchid (Cypripedium calceolus), saved from extinction by a group of stubborn Yorkshire naturalists when Victorian Orchidmania had stripped places were the Lady’s Slipper grows in Britain, such as the Yorkshire Dales bare. The plant was effectively put under decades of 24 hour surveillance in order to save it from pilfering hands.

The project has been quite successful as more plants have been raised from seed, encouraged to germinate by its tipple of Pineapple juice, so that it has been re- introduced to a few more sites in the North of England, whose lush grass, babbling brooks (although less so its nibbling sheep) make the perfect backdrop for such an exotic looking orchid which is red and yellow and not surprisingly in the shape of a slipper( picture at the beginning of the article- credit David Wilkinson). It also has an interesting pollination technique which looks carnivorous but is infact a way of forcing any pollinating insects to rub pollen off their backs at the entry to the flower.

Despite it being critically endangered in the British Isles the Lady’s Slipper’s cousin in Europe is more common. Nevertherless, it was with silent wonder, whilst visiting my friend known affectionately as Dodgy Dave in Estonia, that we entered a clearing in his woods near a small stream to find in all its glory a small colony of these orchids in full bloom. What’s more Dodgy Dave even kept his promise not to dig up the orchids to sell at the Sunday market in Tallinn or reveal their location so hopefully those orchids are alive and well.

Plants I’ve Known and Loved-Dreams and Realities of Allotment Time

The Cottage Gardener

The focal point of my allotment from my point of view is the apple tree called ‘James Grieve’ at the front of the plot which has had abundant harvests of tasty fruit for the last two years around mid August time- before that the tree was a young whippersnapper and was not thinking about reproduction…..

Rather like the Tree of Life in the garden of Eden it represents the fecundity of the red clay of our Brixton allotment site surrounded by gritty, urban South London. Or at least it does to me…my neighbours have a different point of view seemingly having hacked back my plum tree without asking me and attempting to plant some dreadful miniature conifer in its place which unfortunately died(Ha!).

Another neighbour has taken up residence on the old rubbish dump, like some Womble cruelly displaced from Wimbledon, reclaiming land from the knotweed, couchgrass and broken glass with gusto (Bravo!). Nevertheless, his actions are a little surprising as he used to be the head gardener at The Chelsea Physic Garden, a very highly thought of garden in horticultural circles. Maybe they will call this offshoot The Chelsea Physic Garden at The Brixton Dump. Indeed, it is a slice of The Physic Garden in Chelsea with its raised beds, huge echiums and other exotic flowers but I doubt the good news of this Guerilla gardening would ever reach The Chelsea Physic Garden as Brixton is in another universe as far as they are concerned.

I am also not fully sure I understand why he would eat anything from that soil…..heaven knows what has been in there especially with all the foxes and cats running about. That being said the foxes do a grand job of keeping the birdies off my fruit bushes in high summer so they aren’t all bad.

The blackcurrants have been a raging success; encouraged by bucketloads of Dulwich stables’s finest horse muck. Although because the berries mature at different speeds and the fact that July is peak gardening season I rarely pick that many of them.

Apart from the apples and blackcurrants there have been few successes except some solid showings from green manures such as buckwheat (which my fellow allotmenteers did not recognize much to my hubris) and phacelia (this plant has a very pretty purple flower adored by bees).

My main success has been to develop a system of Lasagna gardening that saves my gardener’s back from heavy digging by layering organic matter such as leaves, grass cuttings, manure etc. on the soil and placing cardboard on top to discourage the weeds. It has been modestly successful tied to a method of rotating the plots for cultivation so they build up fertility in a similar vein to the way Amazonian Indians clear patches of rainforest, use them for a few years and then as the soil decreases in fertility allow nature to reclaim them and restore them to biodiversity.

But actually in terms of vegetables- I, the champion vegetable grower (Monsieur ‘Poireaux’ MacDonald), is a pinprick of the horizon. The one major success I did have was growing Jersey Royal potatoes in the very early years of my allotmenteering. It was a mild spring so even though I planted the potatoes quite early, in mid-March, there were few hard frosts and then there was the right mixture of warmth and rain to ensure a bumper harvest of potatoes. The correct name for them is International Kidney, only when they are grown in Jersey’s rich soil are they allowed to be sold as Jersey Royals. Still I’m not selling them (just eating them!) and they grew so fast that I had many jacket potatoes stuffed with an assortment of bean and tomato stews with a Greek salad on the side to make even make the most Facist vegetarian coo in pleasure. My secret? Just beginners luck and more Dulwich stables’ finest although saying that it was a bit fresh so they did have a bit of scab…

Dare I admit my favourite thing to do at the allotment site is to listen to music, preferably The Lark Ascending, and watch my neighbours work. I usually sit in the shade of a huge sycamore in all seasons except winter and watch the birds, alas not the girls, float by.

Dare I admit in the wake of the cutting down of the sycamore tree on Hadrian’s wall at The Sycamore Gap (the scene of marriage proposals, picnics, lovemaking and god knows what else…) that the Sycamore is rather a common tree in London where the lack of sheep, which of course proliferate the fields of the North of England, mean that the seedlings are rarely grazed into oblivion. This means that places like railway sidings in London are often covered in sycamores.

Still its cooling, serene presence in all seasons is very calming so I can forgive it promiscuous nature through helicopter self sowing in the raspberry patch below and am glad that Thames Water’s laid back approach has meant that some over zealous allotmenteers ( including myself) have failed to execute this particular sycamore by shouting from the tree-tops ‘Cut it Down!’.

Of course, there are more sycamores at the wasteland at the back of the allotment site with an under-storey of brambles whose delicious blackberries have meant that it complements its layering shoots, barbed wire stems and aggressive root system with a self sowing apparatus that is frankly a gardener’s living hell.

I hope that this area can be tamed one day by an organic process and my fantasy is that I will buy a large quantity of the Japanese Loquat fruit from the Afghani fruit seller in Tooting and plant the stones through the wild wood that exists currently so that as climate change takes hold they will by succession turn the current area into an orchard with deliciously lemony apricot fruits. Whether they would be vigorous enough is unlikely although not impossible as I tried the process first in my own garden and some of the stones did germinate. Possibly they would not be quite vigorous enough to out compete the brambles but I would be there to lend a hand….

But I think it is necessary to day dream when you garden. Rarely will the results turn out as you hoped but the results may surprise more pragmatic gardeners.