Tag: nature

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.