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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Monthly Archives: June 2016

Gardening words: A veritable cabaret

07 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by sallynex in book review, garden words

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book, book reviews, Cabaret of Plants, garden books, gardening books, Richard Mabey

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It is a rare garden writer whose words make you look entirely differently at the plants you have known all your life.

But Richard Mabey has so far made me review my attitudes towards everything from bindweed and horsetail (in his very entertaining ‘Weeds‘ – you will never look at a patch of couch grass in quite the same way again) to fairy ring mushrooms (‘Food for Free’ – I retain a little of my natural scepticism on this one, as I’ve always thought foraging rather overrated and Richard hasn’t quite converted me, but he did provide me with a stonking good read).

So I was really pleased when my in-laws presented me with one of his books I hadn’t come across yet, ‘The Cabaret of Plants‘: and once again I was thrown headlong into a world where plants make you gasp anew in awe and astonishment.

The ‘cabaret’ is explained as the parts plants play in the ‘theatre’ of the world; but the play is one ‘full of mimicry and unexpected punchlines’ where anything goes and nobody is handing out stage directions.

It’s a good analogy: this book is setting out to rekindle our ability to marvel at plants, just for themselves: our ‘ancient sense of wonder’ at this most diverse and astonishing group of organisms.

The result is eclectic, to say the least. It’s a joy to read: Richard is a polymath who wears his learning lightly, but can’t quite help taking little darting excursions into the poetry of Wordsworth, Iberian bar snacks, the cult of the Green Man, South American shamans and their slightly dodgy drug habits, electron microscopy, the Great Western Railway and Amazon exploration in the 19th century, among other things. Many, many other things. It’s quite dizzying, and a little exhilarating.

And the plants…. Once more I found myself looking at my favourite organisms in the world through quite different eyes, opened for me by Richard’s swooping flight through rivers, oceans, forests and deserts, across the ages and scooping up characters and stories as he goes.

I loved the story of the moonflower, a cactus from Brazil which climbs trees with headily-scented flowers which open on just one night a year, when the moon is full. And the intriguing evidence that Mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant, is capable of learning. Then there’s the orchid which lives its entire life underground, and the poor lonely cycad, Encephalartos woodii, which found itself in an evolutionary cul-de-sac when the last individuals turned out to be male-only. One grows today at Kew, in the Temperate House if you want to visit. Nobody has ever seen a female, so the males in cultivation (and there are none left in the wild) are doomed to an eternal batchelor existence.

I could go on, but that’s to spoil this magpie’s nest of a book, full of jewels and shiny things to make you catch your breath in admiration. And all beautifully written, too, with a poet’s feel for language. I loved it. And best of all, I came away with one overriding thought: aren’t plants amazing?

This month in the garden…

04 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by sallynex in greenhouse, kitchen garden, my garden, this month in the garden

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asparagus, brassicas, comfrey tea, cucamelons, gooseberries, peas, quince blight, quinces, this month in the garden

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Lupins coming along nicely in the cutting garden…

It is June! Not very flaming, so far, but very busy. Here’s what I’ll be up to:

Making comfrey tea: the first harvest from my comfrey patch is in and stuffed unceremoniously into a bucket. Six weeks and a lot of whiffiness later I’ll have potassium-rich home made fertiliser.

Tying up peas: Why is it that just when you think you’ve tied in the last pea plant another tendril makes a bid for freedom? I am getting very good at tying knots…

LOTS of strimming

DITTO weeding

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Mmm…. comfrey tea stewing away (the bricks you can see just under the surface were above water yesterday)

Planting up the greenhouses: cucumbers and cucamelons in, tomatoes still waiting for the shelving-and-propagator setup to be dismantled

Shunting young plants out into the garden just as fast as I can get them out there – this time of the year we’re down to minimal hardening off (and occasionally none at all)

Fretting about my quince tree: it has developed worrying signs of quince leaf blight. It looks just like tomato or potato blight in that lots of brown blotches start spreading across the leaves. There is no defence bar picking off affected leaves – and that means nearly every leaf on the tree. And it’s a big tree.

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Peas – here Oregon Sugar Pod – making a break for the border again. Now where’s my string…

Harvesting asparagus: one of the best crops of the year. The spears are still largely spindly – the plants are in their third year – but I’m now getting some promisingly fat ones, too.

Planting up the brassica beds: slightly belatedly, as the calabrese have been fretting at their pots for weeks, but everything is now ready to go out under insect-proof mesh (I have already spotted at least two cabbage whites on the wing).

Netting the gooseberries: an enterprising blackbird found its way under the bushes last year and snaffled every last berry, but this year I’m a step ahead. I don’t think I’ve ever had to net gooseberries before – far too prickly for birds to bother with – but it’s my guess that growing them as cordons as I do might make them easier to pick for other enterprising creatures as well as me…

Wordless Wednesday: Handkerchiefs

01 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by sallynex in wordless wednesday

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Davidia involucrata, handkerchief tree, Nymans, wordless wednesday

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Davidia involucrata in full flower at Nymans Gardens, Sussex

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