William Shakespeare who by any other name..

I chose this rose, the William Shakespeare - which is one of David Austen's English roses, for his colour rather than his name, and he does smell sweet; as a bonus, he has the ability to withstand the constant rain of this summer. 'The rain it raineth every day,' as Will S himself observed.Maybe it's because this is a rose absolutely packed with petals, and they hold each other up, whereas other roses fall apart. I only planted him last year, and he's only just getting going with the flowering, but giving me great joy as an autumnal treat.



Another treat is the salvia patens, 'Cambridge Blue.' I'd find a better name. 'Mediterranean sea,' for example. It's so hard to find really blue flowers, most of the so-called blues are actually purple. I don't want to look down on them - another delight of the garden is the blue clary sage, which has flowered solidly from May till now from an autumn sowing last year. Salvias do well in my chalky, well-drained chalky soil. Being well-drained is an asset this year, of course.

My grandson came to stay last week, and I made a scarecrow for his amusement, inspired by dog-headed scarecrows at Knightshayes garden in Devon, which we visited on holiday - which has also inspired me to order elephant garlic to grow next year, garlic being another thing that loves my chalky garden. They looked so cool, being so enormous. Max named the scarecrow Apple, which is probably appropriate for our garden at present. We've more or less finished the flood of Tydeman's Early Worcester, a wonderful red apple with a perfumed taste, which doesn't keep at all. There's a lot of stewed apple in the freezer, and I've given a lot of apples away. Now we're onto the keepers; the mystery apple that I ordered as a russet but which is a cox relative, an equable, well-performing chap, absolutely delicious. Then we're onto Sunset (another cox relative), which is growing deeper and deeper red now, but still isn't ready to pick, and last of all, the dwarf Cornish Gillyflower, which only produces a few apples, but they have the most wonderful complex spicy flavour.

It's official that it was one of the coolest summers for years, and some things have performed poorly - predictably, all the mediterranean vegetables, though courgettes have done OK. I have less winter squashes, but the yield isn't bad. But leafy veg have been wonderful, in spite of slugzillas, and the French beans and borlottis haven't done at all badly. Till now, we have been self-sufficient in vegetables for about six weeks. The raspberries have had their best year ever; about 500 grammes a day and yummy. They seem to adore wet weather.

Anyway, here is Apple the scarecrow. Matilda the real dog doesn't approve of him at all and keeps barking at him. I think he's rather appealing.



If it had been left to me, though, I'd probably have called him Peter Quince after the character in the Midsummer Night's Dream, but also after our quince tree which is literally weighed down with fruit, even more so than the sunset apple, and the path between the quince tree and the fruit cage is completely blocked as a result, The fruit is just lying on the grass. Quince jelly beckons, quince cheese, and also I shall go on the internet to see if I can find a recipe for pate de coings, French-style! I shall take a bagfull of them to Quaker Meeting on Sunday with a pile of printed recipe sheets, I think..


The cyclamens, which my daughter Jo said were like scared cats, sticking ears and tail in the air, are blooming all over the garden, and I do love them, but also now we have autumn crocuses. The German name for these is 'Herbstzeitlosen,' which is beautiful, and hard to translate, but means 'autumn timelessnesses.' I saw them first, not in gardens, but growing on roadsides in Upper Bavaria when I was sixteen, like something from a fairy-tale, I thought - and they still seem to me to live in a realm of dreams. They're the colour of dreams, too, I feel.

The worm in the bud..

Or rather the slug on the lettuce - or rather the lettuce inside the slug, or the snail. The lovely hollyhocks pictured above are riddled with rust - I haven't taken the leaves off because they are to some extent masked by the surrounding rampant vegetation. Down below is a snail doing relatively little damage on a seakale plant, whose tough leaves the gastropods can't munch - but as for my poor lettuces - I have had to resow and even the beer traps haven't saved the current upcoming crop from the horrible huge red slugs who, empowered by the damp weather, wander across the lawn seeking what they can devour.


And then there's bindweed - at this time of year most rampant, and since my neighbour on one side doesn't do anything in the front garden, it is overflowing and smothering my winter-flowering viburnums and I haven't yet had time to deal with it.

I'm not really moaning - recent events would make complaints about bindweed and slugs rather frivolous, though the slugs do seem a bit like rioters and looters, this year. I know they have a role in eating decaying vegetation, but my lettuces aren't decaying... I really actually am doing this post because I didn't want to portray the garden as a paradise where nothing goes wrong. Far from it!




So that picture was my perforated dahlia plant, though it does still seem to be producing nice flowers, which we bring into the house, so it's not all misery! In fact, at first glance you'd never notice the things that go wrong.




Sometimes one has to respond pdq, and fails to - as with this lovely winter squash,

suspended in an obelisk, that is growing itself round the obelisk, and I can't slide it out downwards without pulling it out by the roots. Ah, well, it will be the first to be eaten, cut out of the obelisk and roasted this autumn.


Things go wrong in writing, too, and in life generally, so should gardening be any exception? Of course not. But on the topic of the things that go wrong, I want to recommend a nice on-line magazine, beautiful photographs - the editor designs for the RHS - and useful tips. And yes, I do know him, but I wouldn't recommend these webpages unless I thought they were good. So do visit www.egarden.info/
And there is an article about weed-control, too! Though I personally loathe using weedkiller..

What wondrous Life in this I lead

Andrew Marvell's Thoughts in a Garden are undoubtedly misogynistic (think what fun I can have without you, ducky!) but there's no doubt that both sexes can find gardening pretty sexy. And when he wrote:
Ripe Apples drop about my head;
The lustrous clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wines;
The nectarines and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach -

he really did manage to capture the delight of fruiting time in the garden. Not that it's as effortless as that - the apples have to be picked up from where they lie if they drop - or plucked before they can drop - and it takes a lot of time to pick - not grapes, in my garden, but Japanese wine-berries. Of which more anon.



But it is wonderful to be surrounded by so much lavish deliciousness. We ate our Two Peaches this weekend; they grew on a small tree in a pot that I keep outside the kitchen window and have furnished a lovely view from the kitchen. They were exquisite, almost spicy and lush yellow, with a sweet juiciness the most delicious supermarket peach can't match. One of them was Huge, the other 'normal' size. I hope for more next year.



Though probably they'll never become as prolific as the quince, which started with one fruit, two the next year, four the year after that, then sixteen, then about forty - and so on till now it bears more than a hundred fruit and I am giving them away. They are clad in brown fuzz at present, later they will glow yellow among the autumn leaves.



Courgettes, of course, are arriving daily in this warm weather;



the autumn-fruiting (really late-summer fruiting) raspberries are beginning, and we already have apples; a Tydeman's Early Worcester that has been getting earlier every year. This is the first year they've arrived in July, though. They have the most wonderful perfumed flavour.



But the most glamorous apple in the garden is certainly the Sunset apple; already deceptively deep red, it looks as if it should be ripe, though it's the last we pick, in October.



I got two wineberry plants about eight years ago, having seen them in a potager open to the public, where the gardener broke the rules and let me taste. They have a flavour like no other berry, red stems which look marvellous all winter, and a turn for drama. The white flowers open, then once the bees have done their bit the outer case closes round the fruit, which stays in hiding till it's formed then 'ta-da!' they open their casing again and present the pale orange fruit to the world.


Later I re-read the memoir my father left behind and found that my grandfather actually grew them in his garden in the 1920s. My father said they had a flavour like no other fruit he'd ever tasted - they do - and 'set themselves freely'. They do - I have given a lot of plants away. I wish I could ring him up in the Beyond and tell him. If any spirits do the Internet and find this blog, please will you send its url to Frank Baker?

The Garden of Chesil Beach

My father, who rather disapproved of nature, used to tell the story of the Vicar saying to one of his older parishioners: 'Isn't it wonderful what the Lord and you have done with this garden,' and the old man replying: 'Yes, but you should have seen it when the Lord had it all to himself.'



There are many replies one could make to this, in particular the one that nature's (or God's if you like) way of creating gardens doesn't match with a cottage garden in an English village, or with making things convenient for human beings at all. However, sometimes nature does create a landscape that humans recognise as a garden. I think the word for garden in Persian is the same as 'paradise.'



On two separate walks on our holiday last week, we found paradise at the land side of Chesil Beach, between Cogden Beach and West Bexington, in front of Burton Mere. And it is really just the result of nature being left to itself - I checked with the National Trust.



When we were last in West Dorset, twenty years ago, local farmers were still able to drive down to the beach to collect gravel, and all that grew in that area were a few seakales. Now the seakales have proliferated




but in addition, there's a multitude of species: horned poppies, teasels in bloom, woody nightshade, sea pinks, mallow, wild carrot - and many more.



To walk along those gravel paths, taking in that treasure of colour and shape was to be absorbed, somehow, into beauty itself, to experience a joy that can perhaps best be expressed musically in the sound of the shorelarks overhead, probably not in words.


Seen against the backdrop of a clear, Mediterranean blue sky, this garden lifted me into a state of bliss, there is no other word for it.





Behind the beach garden is Burton Mere, itself a thing of great beauty, where the sere dead stems from last year float above this year's lush greenness, where the frogs chirrup and croak in the evenings -



-where a wonderful blue vetch, or maybe wild pea, flowers like the sky come down to earth -



and even my enemy the bindweed - contained here by the other vibrant growth - snakes upwards to become a thing of grace and elegance, supported by a ruinous fence conveniently left there in the service of the picturesque.

Ernest Wilson and the Regal Lily

The first lilium regales are out in my garden! They haven't got their stamens unstuck yet, though.



When I look at them I always think how their ancestors came from the Min River Valley, a place I visited in the year 2000 when with my husband and my two daughters (aged 19 and 22), we travelled in South West China. Much to the surprise of some of the people we met in various backpacker hostels 'I've never seen a family travelling together.' We saw some wonderful and amazing things and endured some hideous discomforts, too.
Towards the end of the time, we went on a Chinese tour from Chengdu in Szechuan to Jiuzhaigou, one of the most beautiful places in the world. The route took us up this steep-sided valley into Tibetan Szechuan, and up to Songpan, nowadays a pony-trekking centre as well as the most important town in the area - the thing I remember best at Songpan was, though, the wonderful meat and vegetable pasties we bought from local women in the market-place, and on the return trip, when our guide, whose job it was to make us visit as many tourist-trap retail outlets as possible, hadn't thought about giving us lunch, we forced her to stop in Songpan.

This was good news for the local women, who had quite a few pasties they hadn't yet managed to shift, and good news for our Chinese fellow-travellers, who were just as ravenous as us, but too well-mannered to impose on the tour guide. I can still remember the expression of frustrated rage on the latter lady's face.

Anyway, the valley in which Songpan is located is very beautiful, and very Tibetan, as the photograph shows. Sometimes uncomfortably so; I remember local labourers shaking their fists at the Chinese tour minibus. But most people were very friendly, and lovely to meet.



I was thrilled to see plants that grow in gardens here growing wild there, like the clematis tangutica sprawling with its yellow Chinese-lantern flowers by the road side, like Traveller's Joy does here.




At Jiuzhaigou I saw (among others) several species of roses, recognisable by their leaves, and was delighted to see a paeony, not in flower, but growing there, wild.

What I didn't realise then was that the Lilium Regale, one of my favourite flowers - I had them in my wedding bouquet - came from a hillside above Songpan. We didn't see any, though.

They were collected by a young man called Ernest Wilson (the same name as my late father-in-law and my brother-in-law, but not from Northern Ireland.) If you ever go to Chipping Campden, there is a memorial garden to him there, planted with many of the many plants he collected. He saw the Lilium Regale on his third trip to China.
'In the Min Valley' he wrote 'the charming Lilium Regale luxuriates in rocky crevices, sun-baked throughout the greater part of the year…' He writes of 'the city of Sungpan, nestling in a narrow smiling valley, surrounded on all sides by fields of golden grain, with the infant Min, a clear, limpid stream, winding its way through in a series of graceful curves. In the fields the harvesters were busy, men, women and children, mostly tribesfok, in quaint costume, all pictures of rude health, laughing and singing at their work.' And he describes the Lilium Regale; 'Not in twos and threes, but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tense of thousands.' The lilies grew in among coarse grasses and scrub - meadow-flowers, which is an interesting thought. Maybe I should try naturalising them in my pocket-hankie meadow?




Wilson, of course, reduced the numbers of the lilies rather a lot, by collecting over 6,000 bulbs - and I do wonder how many are left now. Plant-hunting was an Imperialist project - conservation wasn't an issue for the men who did that work. But Wilson paid a price for his coup. He was caught in a landslip and his leg was broken in two places.
He was taken back, in a sedan chair, to Chengdu, and nursed by the Quaker missionaries there. Davidson, who set his leg, wasn't actually a qualified doctor, if I remember rightly - anyway, Wilson felt he did a superb job.
Other plants in my garden that Wilson collected include: clematis armandii, rosa moyesii, viburnum davidii and clematis montana rubens. But not, apparently, clematis tangutica, though he does list them in his A Naturalist in Western China.

On a different note: when I was doing medieval German literature as part of my course at Durham, we were told about the hermits whose knowledge of and consumption of roots showed their wisdom. Of course many rooted vegetables have poisonous relatives. But I - not at all hazardously - collected some baby carrots and our first new potatoes for dinner yesterday. I do love the feel of those pale egg-like tubers in my hand, and a bunch of newly-pulled carrots is a delight to the eye before it becomes a gastronomic delight.




One which is pretty rare to come by nowadays. You can get bunches of carrots in supermarkets and also, of course, in farmer's markets, but they can't match the flavour of something that comes almost straight from the earth to the pot. Oh, the feel of those waxy new potatoes against my tongue, and the scent of new carrots… and the sweetness of spring cabbage, which you only get with fresh-picked..

quaking grass and dog daisies

I have a lot of quaking grass growing in parts of the back garden - the original plant was given me by a friend after I'd tried and failed to grow it from seed. Why this was so, I can't understand, since it has subsequently self-set itself all over the place, and - since I brought a couple of clumps to the front early this spring - it will probably now spread all over the front. I don't mind, I love to see its seedheads quivering in the slightest breath of wind. It was my turn to do the flowers at Quaker Meeting on Sunday, so I brought a bunch of quaking grass, sweet peas, love-in-a-mist heads, and what I call dog daisy, being a northern lass originally, but down here they seem to call it oxe-eye daisy. I think the dog-daisy name is apt, and you can see from the picture that the dog likes sitting among the flowers. They grow in my pocket-handkerchief of meadow, underneath the biggest apple tree, and make a nice contrast to the little apples at present.



The apples got really red early on this spring because of all the warm sunshine in April, and I hope this will mean they have a spectacular colour. I do prefer to grow fruit trees, rather than sterile flowering cherries; you get the wonderful blossom but then afterwards you get the fruit which is beautiful for a long time before you get to eat it.



Back to quaking grass - of course, taking it to Meeting for Worship was a pun, and an apt one, because we got our name - applied as a term of derision - when George Fox told a judge to 'Tremble at the name of the Lord.' The quaking grass does that rather a lot. One new attender got up and ministered about the grass, which she thought was catkins, and she talked about how nervous she felt giving ministry, because she thought she hadn't been coming long enough, and how she felt shaky - just like the grasses. But she spoke about the beauty of the seedheads, very eloquently, and I found myself seeing them in a different way. Afterwards I told her it was quaking grass - which caused amusement among several Quakers, and I am on to supply seedlings in the autumn, when we have our next plant-swap. I only hope none of them will turn out to be couch.. shouldn't do, though, because the leaves - or blades, should it be? are quite broad.

I have been picking red-currants inside the fruit cage, while the dog roams and lurks around outside like the biblical Satan, wishing she could be in there devouring them. Or maybe like the 'hosts of Midian' in the hymn. Gardening is fruitful of many reflections like that. But the red-currants are maybe the most beautiful fruit, like little globes of scarlet glass.

After the Rain

There has to be something about the structure of my garden that both reflects and feeds into the structure of my writing. And the moods of the garden surely affect the way I work. A garden is like a novel, really, you have a plan, but it modifies as you go along and encounter the realities of the plot (unintentional pun, but it works!) I told a friend recently that the garden's like a piece of music, always moving, always changing - but that applies to fiction, too. It has its own rhythm and pace, its moments of splashy excitement, then the quiet sections that build up to new intense action.



The garden also feeds me and my husband in a real, corporeal way. And the slugs feed, too, though so far only one of my lovely Salad Bowl lettuces, with their yellow wavy-edged leaves, has been munched. They're pull and come again lettuces, and keep going for six weeks or so if I keep picking, giving us generous salads several days a week. They have a faint bitterness that intensifies as they get older, but never too much, and make a wonderful salad just on their own, with oil and vinegar dressing.



and today there are redcurrants ripe, two bushes in the fruit cage, one outside. Like strict Islamic women, the one that's gone outside is veiled, though you can see its berries, so maybe not so strictly veiled after all. It's the birds who have to be kept at bay, though, not the male sex. I guess the black netting is rather sexy veiling, actually, like the little hat with a black net veil that my grandmother used to have, and that I used for dressing-up when I was little.



After the rain, most of the flowers are sated with wetness, drugged with it, hanging their heads. But the bearded irises are alert, bright and cheerful, odd for flowers that flourish in dry conditions.



The garden is a thing of viewpoint. I tend to plan it to be seen from the house, but it opens up vistas, as I walk round it, that I never expected, and because the viewpoint is new, it's more attractive to me. I like it that not all of its sights are visible from the house. Going inside the corkscrew willow isn't just a way to get a fine shower-bath, but is another way of seeing the garden.

I think this also has something to do with the novel - writing first drafts I always have to stop myself just pushing the plot forward '- and then this happened, and then that happened -' Bah! but to change authorial position and look at the narrative differently.

My rain-tubs filled up again last night, for which much thanks. Oh, the blissful sound of water gurgling into them, after I'd almost emptied them. I have five rain-tubs, with a combined storage capacity of about 1400 litres, but it's amazing how they empty in dry summers.

I was glad, though, to have the one that drains the shed roof empty, as the water smelt of old cabbage leaves, and when I got down to the bottom it was full of worms. How they got in, I have no idea; all my rain-tubs are covered, and worms don't live on shed roofs, surely? Or in the gutter round the shed? The Germans do call them Regenwürmer, which means 'rain-worms' so maybe the clouds are full of worm-eggs.

I cleaned that one out with liquid soap and now, hopefully, it will smell nice till the next lot of worms come out of the sky.