Community garden planting went well...

Maysie Garden -- Grand Planting Party

Glorious weather, lots of people turned out to join in the digging over and planting, we had photographers from the 'Great Book of Tottenham' project and a BBC News crew -- and by 3pm the garden was planted up and we'd even cleared up afterwards. Next session: Friday 22/10 afternoon, starting 2pm -- checking all is in order, possibly popping in some more low-growing decorative ground-cover plants. And if you see this in time, look out for us on BBC TV news this evening Mon 18/10.

In advance, I'd hovered between worrying we had too many plants lined up, and worrying that we wouldn't have enough. This session was to fill the middle of the garden with plants donated from local gardens, underplanted with crocuses and daffodils. The west side is (mostly) the warm 'gold' side -- yellows, oranges, reds, hot colours. The east is (mostly) the 'silver' side -- pinks, blues, purples. The middle bed is certainly stuffed pretty full -- with the soil still quite warm, which should help roots settle in before the winter cold. Around the garden edge and the centre-north bed needed to be mostly left clear for roses, lavender and a magnolia which will be sent when the cold has stopped growth -- but we put crocuses and muscari, dotted the surface with purple bugle, forget-me-nots, creeping jenny etc just so it didn't look too bare in the meantime.


Thank you to everyone who helped -- Audrey grew violas, wallflowers and primroses, Oscar stored the bulbs, brought chairs, tools and an impressive fencepost-digger spade, Paul vigorously de-turfed; his and Dorothy's hose watered it all in at the end; Lynda gave alliums, amelanchier, much advice, a hamamelis, a magnificant ice-plant (sedum sempervivum) and more plants; Sue L brought acanthus, bergenia and japanese anemones; Sue P gave many plants and loaned tools and gloves; Kazuko baked a delicious banana cake; Ben, Alice and Scarlet planted up the scarlet and orange bed; Jon and Christine, Maysie's nephew and his wife came down from Herts bringing some Hayhow family plants; Anne, Sarah, Gloria and others popped in for an hour or so to pitch in. Gavin at Grace Baptist Chapel loaned tables. Mahomed and parks staff from the Council dropped by -- the latter bringing slabs for the pathways and bags of compost and manure. Breannan and Thomas from the Bernie Grant Centre's 'Great Book of Tottenham' project took photos.

And a BBC news crew, following up the 'eight churches in one road' story about Lawrence Rd -- front page of Tottenham Journal last week -- saw us all as ideal local colour for getting some residents' comments on the story.

Photographs from Scotland (2)

On Saturday 9 October, we drove a circular route from Crianlarich through the Pass of Glen Coe (see previous photograph) to the coast at Ballachulish, down the coast to Oban, and back via Lochawe and Glen Lochy. (I give this information so that those of you who are inclined can look it all up on a map.) While in Oban -- where the sun shone, and we had a wonderful sea food lunch in Ee-Usk on the harbour -- we took a short boat trip out to see the seals on a small island offshore. Here's a photograph of them basking in the sun.



P.S. Our waitress in Ee-Usk was Latvian. Our waitress at the Crianlarich Hotel the night before was Hungarian. One almost begins to wonder whether there are any Scots still in Scotland....

Photographs from Scotland (1)

Here's a photograph of the Pass of Glen Coe, taken mid-morning on Saturday 9 October. It was a wee bit windy; but the blue skies! The (almost) shirt-sleeve temperatures! Very unseasonal, for the Scottish Highlands, but you wouldn't have heard us complaining -- oh no....

Happy Birthday Rosie!

Hope you had a good day!

Adventures in plumbing...

Grand planting up day for my 'Maysie Memorial Garden' on Sunday -- so busy list of things to do today. Sitting on loo working out which to tackle first -- go down allotment to dig up plants for the community garden? No, better wait until the washing machine had finished doing the sheets and hang them out to dry before I set off, so could draw planting plan while waiting.... When I noticed steam coming up around the hand-basin next to me:whaaa? Before brain had got much further than 'really shouldn't be doing that -- what's going on?' water started dripping down around the hand basin, then a full-scale little waterfall, sopping carpet. Aaargh! Emergency! emergency!

By the time I'd managed to clear the stopcock cover in the greenhouse, found a screwdriver to unscrew it, another to lift it off, and turned off the water, there was a fine lake on the kitchen floor downstairs, water dripping through the kitchen light fitting, and sopping carpet upstairs. Phoned plumber: £140 all-in, with you within 2 hours -- seemed reasonable so I went for it, with 12 month plumbing insurance cover thrown in. Next hour or so was mopping up the kitchen lake -- always have a floor mop, even if you routinely never bother mopping; putting newspapers down on bathroom carpet to soak up the sop; borrowing more newspapers from neighbour to soak up the sop.

Plumber arrived: flexible woven-silver connecting hose to the hot tap had burst, routine replacement job for him. Just last year (or so), our previous bathroom flood, had been caused by similar flexible connecting hose to toilet giving way. So I got him to replace the cold tap flexible connector before it too got around to giving way, like I just know it would have done before long...

Current state of play: kitchen floor may still have puddles under washing machine and fridge, but its too dark to check them out today. Can't turn kitchen light on or it blows the house lights circuit -- so we will go out for supper this evening. Apart from lack of light to cook by, I just feel a mite too shattered to cook. Bathroom carpet taken up, airing over a couple of chairs until the bed-sheets on our clothes-horses are dry.

Didn't get down to allotment -- but did manage time to dig up forget-me-nots, lung-wort, bearded irises, golden creeping jenny, purple bugle, foxgloves from the back garden to help populate my new community garden at the end of our street.

A Week in Bonnie Scotland

We returned from a week of (mostly) glorious autumn weather in Scotland late yesterday evening, and the Truepeople will be on their way back to Australia via Singapore in a few hours' time. I'll post some pictures of iconic scenery and castles later, once I've organised the 500+ images on my camera chip into folders on my hard drive, but in the meantime here's a slightly blurry photograph of the seven of us (minus me) at dinner on our last night in Collegehill House at Roslin, outside Edinburgh. Mitchell is (as usual) clowning about instead of sitting soberly like the rest of us. (Children, eh?)

Pumpkins

We nipped out to the allotment this afternoon, between the rain, and harvested our pumpkin crop -- eight of them, of various sizes. A photograph appears above. Note the "handle" left on them, to guard against the possibility of rot getting into the stem, and thus into the pumpkins themselves.

It's our best crop for many years. We look forward to enjoying them over the winter....

Catching Up on Long-Outstanding Things

At the start of every year for the past mumble-mumble years, I tell myself that really, finally, no-shit-Sherlock, I am going to Catch Up On Things -- albumise those stacks of photographs, eliminate that reading backlog, complete the various DIY jobs that have been hanging around for, er. Pretty much as you might imagine, though, this never happens -- indeed, the last time I told anyone other than myself that I was going to Catch Up On Things, the person concerned (old bud Maureen) fell about laughing.

Well, now it's me who's laughing, because in a concentrated burst of activity during August and September (before and after our trip to Paris), I have -- a mere seventeen years after the actual trip -- albumised the photographs from our fortnight's tour of Ireland in August 1993. It was a daunting stack: the product of three cameras (mine, the Wugster's, Maureen's), which was perhaps why I'd sidelined it for so long, but once I started looking through it to eliminate the duplicates, the duds and the plain unuseable, it quickly became much more manageable. It was also evident how some of the colour values had faded with time, depending on the paper used -- those photographs printed on Agfa papers had held up well, but those printed using Konica seemed to have become rather darker and in almost all of the photographs taken on the walk through the woods from the Lower to the Upper Lake at Glendalough, printed on Konica paper, the greens had turned to black and the pictures therefore had to be binned. (Bummer.) Judging the colours in other batches of photographs wasn't helped by the fact that for much of the fortnight we were there the weather was overcast and grey -- for which the human eye compensates but pre-digital cameras couldn't -- and there were only three days which could have been described as at all sunny. (In some cases -- Croagh Patrick was one -- I replaced the pictures I took with actual postcard views, on the grounds that one could see more detail in the latter than provided by the grey-on-grey 35mm print.) Anyway, I now have two thick photo albums of the Ireland trip, including the impedimenta with which the pictures may be contextualised (maps, tickets, invoices, leaflets, instructive captions, etc.), and attach below the two photographs I have e-mailed Maureen as proof of my industry.

Of course, this leaves one or two other photographic records still to be albumised -- Andalucia, Madrid and Catalonia from 1998, 1999 and 2004; Pompeii and Herculaneum from 2001; Provence and the Loire Valley from last year; and oh, look, Australia's Red Centre and the Barrier Reef from 2006. (Not to mention, hem hum, Purbeck and Hadrian's Wall.) Quite a lot, in other words. But last weekend I went through to Wood Green for an afternoon's shopping with the Wugster and bought up W H Smith's and Boots's entire stock of expanding photo albums and photo leaf refills, and as soon as we get back from the trip to Edinburgh with the Truepeople in the first week of October I'll be getting stuck in once again.

Ticking them off one by one -- Hever Castle

Last Sunday we went to Hever Castle in Kent for the day.

There's not much of the castle, as a castle, left -- the only original part is the medieval gatehouse and parts of its two flanking towers -- and it was reconstructed in the late fifteenth century as a country manor by Geoffrey Bullen, the grandfather of Anne Boleyn....a name which points to the reason for the castle's notability. Much of what one sees there today (apart from the exterior work) is the product of the restoration undertaken before the First World War by the wealthy American William Waldorf Astor, indulging his love of things European and medieval to create a neo-period family residence. (On the other hand, if you had the money you'd probably indulge that sort of fancy, too.) He also laid out the present grounds, transforming empty meadows into a series of gardens and a boating lake with a loggia and a fountain modelled on the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

We bought a guidebook, we visited the castle, we strolled through the gardens and (to finish) walked around the lake. We also made a short visit to St Peter's Church in Hever village, where Thomas Boleyn is buried, before catching the train back to London. Here are some photographs: of Thomas Boleyn's tomb chest in St Peter's Church (you will note that the carvings are in very poor repair, and that brick has been used to support part of the chest); a general view of the castle itself from the southwest, showing the medieval gatehouse and the exterior walls of the late medieval manor behind it; part of the Tudor gardens; a view of part of the rose garden, with the Wugster at far right, in the distance, about to thrust her proboscis into a flower (note also the yellowness of the grass, thanks to the summer drought -- something which is almost unheard of in these parts, doncha know); and a view of the loggia from across the lake.

Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

Yesterday afternoon we ticked off another in our list of places to visit: the Victorian replica dinosaurs at Crystal Palace in south London.

We had first tried to visit these sometime in the late 1990s, but found them off-limits because they were "awaiting restoration" -- i.e., had fallen into disrepair, but the money to conserve them and prevent further deterioration had not been forthcoming. It seemed that they were fated to moulder away entirely, but then the otherwise supine Bromley council -- the same Bromley council that had destroyed Ken Livingstone's cheap tube fares policy in the 1980s, and thus a favourite of Margaret Thatcher's -- woke up, realised what a tourist-attracting heritage item it had on its hands, and put together a funding bid. The dinosaurs were duly restored, re-opened to public access in 2003, and in 2007 were given Grade I listed status: the highest level of national listing.

As models of extinct creatures, they are in many respects very inaccurate -- the ichthyosaurus, for example, is depicted as able to come onto land to lay eggs, whereas it was wholly aquatic and gave birth to live young; the iguanadon and the megalosaur look more like dogs than lizards; the dicynodon has a shell like a turtle, whereas it is now thought to have looked more like a hippopotamus -- but they have been restored as they appeared to their Victorian builders not just because of their historical value but because of the insight they provide into the history of palaeontology itself: what the people of the time thought about the past, based on their understanding on the fossils then available.

Wikipedia's article on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs gives more information about them and their history, so I won't repeat that here. (Mind you, there doesn't seem to be much information about them anywhere else online.) In the meantime, here are some photographs, of -- in order -- the megalosaurus; a pair of iguanadons; two labyrinthodons (with people in the background for scale); the ichthyosaurus; and the megatherium. The tree the megatherium is hugging is original to the construction of the models; it is now dead, but because it continued growing after they were installed it eventually broke off the creature's left arm; if you examine the picture closely, you can see that the replacement arm is of a different colour.

(P.S. Nerdy travel note: we got to Crystal Palace by the recently re-opened and extended East London line -- so recently re-opened, in fact, that it's only just posted its first quarter's punctuality statistics. The line has also been rebranded, as part of the new London Overground network, grouping together a number of "orphan" routes which help fill the gaps between other services. We thoroughly approve.)

Another Entry in the JH-JN Leisure Visit Programme

Yesterday we went up the Lea Valley to see Myddelton House Gardens, the creation of plantsman E A Bowles, "one of the great gardeners of the twentieth century". To some extent, our visit was mis-timed: apart from it having been a very dry summer, which has had an adverse impact on all plants, we were a few weeks too late to see the Gardens' collection of award-winning irises in full flower. And the tea house and shop were being renovated, so we couldn't even have some wib and ebun....although the admission price to the Gardens had been temporarily halved for the duration of the work.

While there, we picked up a leaflet inviting us to "discover Enfield's hidden beauty", from which we realised that Forty Hall, another on our list of places to visit, was only a few minutes' walk away. So we went there too. The Hall, a Grade I listed building the earliest parts of which date from 1629, has much of its original plaster and stucco work intact, and is now run as a local museum and exhibition space by the local authority (much like our own Bruce Castle). Entry to it was free....which meant that, having been able to use the pay-as-you-go cash balances on our Oyster Cards to travel to Enfield, we had a really cheap day out.

Here are some photographs -- two views of Myddelton House Gardens, each with the Wugster; and one of Forty Hall from across the lake, plus two views of its interior.

A Sociable Weekend

This weekend just past was (1) the annual summer picnic for Tottenham and Wood Green Friends of the Earth on the Saturday, followed on the Sunday by (2) the local version of The Big Lunch, in which neighbours get together in a convenient bit of street and sit around sharing food and drink. We had good weather on both occasions, despite which turn-out for the picnic was down on the previous year (itself down on the year before that) which suggests that the idea might be getting tired, and in need of a rethink. Turn-out for The Big Lunch, however, was up on the previous year, perhaps because it's only the second year on which the event has been held; this year, we had barbecues as well as salads and rice dishes. All v enjoyable, and here are some pictures -- one of the FoE picnic, with Judith, and three of The Big Lunch, with Judith in Aussie hat.

Big Wildlife Garden

Yo, all! No wedding pix and comments yet? Meanwhile: work set up a 'Big Wildlife Garden' web-site -- I've been keeping my diary notes in a Notepad file on desktop, and suddenly realised this makes them easy to share these little 'today in garden' snapshots with you guys...


Sat 18 Jul
Seed harvesting -- columbines, nigella, foxgloves -- and lavender heads. This year, a lot of the self-sower seeds will go onto our Maysie memorial garden. And I need to chase up the venue for February seed-swap day -- have already set the date as Sunday 6 Feb.


Fri 17 Jul
Maysie memorial garden: I have local'Make a Difference' funding from the Council to plant up a patch of greenspace at the top of our street into a community garden. It is currently bare grass, one plane tree, used for dog-emptying, street drinking, sometimes prostitution, with the car park alongside used by kids as kick-about space. £1100 doesn't go far once you measure up and start pricing! Basic plan is to buy in enough lavender and rose bushes to make an attractive, fairly drought-resistant and self-defending border around a big bed -- to be filled up with plants donated by neighbours -- and a smaller bed with a magnolia tree in memory of Maysie. Spring and a few summer bulbs, of course. I've set up a project web-site at http://maysie-garden.wikispaces.com/

Maysie was one of the founders of our residents association, lived all her life in the house her grandparents were in at the 1891 census, so had lots of memories of how life and this locality have changed over the years -- through the Depression, WW2, and onwards -- very tender-hearted and looked after local cats, dogs, birds and wildlife, and her neighbours. We feel her loss as the end of an era here.

Jul 16
Baby robin on the fence as I was giving a webinar this morning: first baby robin of the year. We don't normally seerobins or blackbirds here during the summer: I presume its a combination of plenty of natural food around elsewhere, and the dense foliage making it harder to see birds than when its bare in winter.

Jul 15
Evening primrose luminous in the twilight: its grown enormous, looming over the path just beyond the greenhouse against our back wall. I hope the moths are enjoying it -- have seen magpie moths here and at the allotment this past week or so.


Sat 3 Jul
Picking strawberries down the allotment -- and a bit of strawberry bed jumps up and into the pond. Frog sheltering from the searing sun beneath the leaves...





Fri 2 July
Apple tree is thick with fluffy baby sparrows. On counting, this turns into 5 spuggies and a couple of invisible rustlings. (It's a very small apple tree -- bought as a minarette but not kept strictly pruned.)

End of the reporting quarter for BTO's Garden Birdwatch logging sheet -- BTO is British Trust for Ornithology. The Garden Birdwatch is simple, quite fun and undemanding -- each week, you log the max number of different bird species seen in your garden onto their machine readable paper sheet (or enter it directly onto BTO web-site), at the end of the quarter their 'Bird Table' newsletter arrives reminding you that you should be at the end of the quarterly paper form. I log the weekly spottings in pencil, then at the end of the quarter ink in the sightings and rub out any lower-total bars, then send it off. Logging the sighting helps you recall the pattern of changes through the year -- we get robin, blackbird, wren over winter but seldom see them during summer. And it helps you note changes from year to year.




Thu 3/6: More swifts: the warm weather, with its winds from the south, should bring more swifts here from Africa, said Springwatch on TV. Sure enough I'm now seeing threes and fours, even half a dozen, at a time.

Fri 4/6: Ripping out spent forget-me-nots around back garden, and cutting back the jungle of sweet cicely along the shady fence. First crab spider of the season: fat white body, fell out among the compost. And first little black ladybird 'alligator' larvae. Am seeing small yellow ladybirds with many little black dots. And now first harlequin ladybirds appearing.

Sat5/6: Wild Day Out, Alexandra Palace

Bioblitz first spot: great spotted woodpecker seen from bus on way in to Natural England Stall, where we had 'make a kingfisher' bag-charm as a very popular activity for kids and parents. Taking a break, met a group of lichenologists examining one of the stone staircases, and was given a fascinating rundown on what they'd found by the NHM expert: seventeen different types, including black cyanobacteria botches and a white lichen with orange-red fruiting bodies that was a sign of warming climate. I asked about the whitish lichen patches I'd seen along local streets; 'like chewing gum patches, as the man said. Something muralis. They used to grow on house roofs, but an orange leafier species is apparently taking over there as urban pollution levels reduce. HOwever, it can't cope with being trampled on, as the muralis can.

The kingfisher bag-charms are made from turquoise and orange felt shapes, with a dark blue felt beak.


Sun 6/6: Planting out clary, agustache and alyssum seedlings in FG2. It was a jungle of creepers gone wild: white jasmine, silvery crimson virginia creeper (henryana). This spring, I got a local lad to help me rip them all out and hack them back, and am turning the space back into a flower garden. Just in time to rescue a ceanothus that seemed to be going under -- had put out very few leaves. I put in two rose bushes: a David Austin 'William Shakespeare' deep crimson which is supposed to have a fabulous oold-fashioned fragrance, and a crimson-and-white striped Rosa Mundi (rose of the world). According to that useful source, 'something I read', car exhaust fumes actively destroy flower scents, by binding to their molecules. We'll see whether Wm Shakespeare prevails -- my old-fashioned pinks, and even the jasmine, seem to get drowned out. Its only the soapwort, Bouncing Bet, whose delicately spicy fragrance really seems to come out on top in the urban air.


Tues 15/6: to allotment at the end of the day, to clear a patch where the climbing bean seedlings now in the greenhouse can get their feet down while we go off on hols. This means I have to rip out flourishing poppy plants just about to come into flower -- hairy, shaggy-leaved field poppies and smooth silvery-leaved 'breadseed' (or opium) poppies. I leave a good specimen of each, growing at the edge of the bed, so we will have some flowers there. Also weeded out: groundcover of speedwell and scarlet pimpernel, and a robust ragweed which was also just setting buds. If there'd been any sign of the yellow-and-black striped 'football sock' caterpillars that turn into crimson and black cinnabar moths, then I'd have left the ragweed.

"You Look Amazing!"

Judith and I were at the Cartoon Museum yesterday evening, at the launch event for the new exhibition on Children's Animation (we are paid up supporters of the Museum, so receive invitations to these events as a matter of routine). Inevitably, it was too crowded for us to view the exhibition properly, at least until the media types who'd come along to swig free wine and be seen by their fellow media types began to thin out; then we had an enjoyable time re-acquainting ourselves with Noggin The Nog and The Clangers (the exhibition has a complete diorama, with all the puppets and models), and confronting for the first time Bob The Builder and Peppa Pig (which by comparison with Noggin look very pale and uninteresting, but perhaps that's just childhood nostalgia talking). Anyway, as we were gathering ourselves to leave we -- or at least I -- was suddenly accosted by two women, one very sharp and attractive in black and the other more nondescript. "You look amazing!" said the sharp and attractive one. "What hair dye do you use? Where did you get your shoes?"

Then she unleashed the kicker: she was looking for a second husband.

I hastily introduced Judith -- "Your friend?" "My wife" -- and the conversation reverted to my hair colouring and my shoes. I could satisfy them as to the identity of the former (L'Oreal intense dark red), but as the shoes (white cork-soled sandals with flower detail on the cross-strap) were bought in a charity shop I could only say that I didn't know the name of their manufacturer. (For the record, I was also wearing a pleated grey denim mini-skirt and a pair of big dangly ear-rings: half-moons with chain loops. In other words, pretty much what I usually wear, to work or anywhere else.)

They took my picture. Then we left. I think that's the first time I have ever been quite so brazenly propositioned....

The Garden, in the July Sunshine

The heatwave which has characterised the past two weeks seems to be coming to an end as fresher weather (and more cloud) moves in from the west); but in the meantime here are some pictures of our garden in the sunshine -- the tomatoes in the greenhouse (which had only recently been planted out when we went to Purbeck; now look at the size of them); the tomatoes in the garden (how much smaller they are by comparison); the pond and its associated collection of pots of different sizes; the blackcurrant bush, with berries just about ready to be picked; and a display of flowers by the greenhouse.