We have been in an international state of fizziness now for the past six months (about) and when it all began I was full of good intentions. I would organise my photographs, write a book, read the many back copies of The Garden that litter my office, cook, read books, walk, garden and write copious blog posts.

I have managed walking and gardening quite easily. The cooking still lags, the copies of The Garden are mostly undigested and this is my first blog posts for many, many weeks.

The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley…..

I am sure I am not alone.

So what have I done? there have been no shows and no travelling to interesting (or exhausting) places, no judging has happened, few gardens have been visited and nobody has been to see me. And yet the months have passed. It has made me realise that perhaps retirement will not be as dull as I anticipated.

Oddly, I seem to have more clients than ever before – I can only put this down to people spending too long looking out of windows at their gardens while valiantly trying to work from home. After a while they have realised that things could be better so they have, very sweetly, called me. I am thoroughly enjoying myself at the same time as feeling a little swamped at moments.

At this point I should write something incisive and intelligent but instead I have discovered (thanks to a Tweet from the ever soft Arabella Sock) that you can find out which words were entered into the dictionary in the year of your birth. These are some of the words that appeared in 1959 (yes, I am that old even though I have the complexion of a freshly laundered virgin) and are particularly apposite to my general state of mind and the times in which we live.

  • Amuse-bouche
  • Codswallop
  • Isocarboxazid (an anti-depressant)
  • Jerry-rigged
  • Life -support system
  • Hovercraft
  • Counterproductive
  • Navel-gazing
  • Punch up
  • Spandex
  • Wankel engine
  • Zooanthroponosis – which, if you Google it, is even more apt for 2020 than Nutjob

I am listening to Celluloid Heroes by the Kinks (which is not their best**) and the picture is of the view from my office which has comforted me over the hug free months.

**Don’t step on Greta Garbo
As you walk down the boulevard
She looks so weak and fragile
That’s why she tried to be so hard
But they turned her into a princess
And they sat her on a throne
But she turned her back on stardom
Because she wanted to be alone.

Rudolph Valentino
Looks very much alive
And he looks up ladies’ dresses
As they sadly pass him by
Avoid stepping on Bela Lugosi
‘Cause he’s liable to turn and bite
But stand close by Bette Davis
Because hers was such a lonely life

If you covered him with garbage
George Sanders would still have style
And if you stamped on Mickey Rooney
He would still turn ’round and smile
But please don’t tread on dearest Marilyn
‘Cause she’s not very tough
She should have been made of iron or steel
But she was only made of flesh and blood

You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard
Some that you recognise, some that you’ve hardly even heard of
People who worked and suffered and struggled for fame
Some who succeeded and some who suffered in vain

You find me swept up in the midst of show season. Cardiff is a distant memory, Malvern a glorious triumph, Chelsea as exciting as ever. Next I hurtle on through Chatsworth, Gardeners World Live, Hampton Court, Moscow and Tatton Park.

At that point I will be quite weary and ready to go and lie around somewhere in France to eat cheese and read my book.

Big ball border – named after the large ball (obvs) that covers a bit of ground so foul that nothing thrives.

However, it is not to write about shows (although I do have one quite interesting tale to tell but that will need to wait) that I am making one of my increasingly infrequent visits to this blog but to brag shamelessly about my own garden which, for the first time since we moved in nearly four years ago is not looking too shabby.

The Gravel Garden outside my office.

The first season consisted mostly of drumming our fingers while the builders finished off and the next couple of years were about planting and working out exactly what on earth I wanted to do with the garden. I am still not quite sure where we are going – there is no particular end plan – but we are having fun getting there.

The hill border -= which consists mostly of debris and rubble from the house.

So, this season, all the plants we have put in are getting some heft and covering the ground.

Pond settling in nicely. We put in five fish about eighteen months ago: we now have about fifty.

Self seeded foxgloves are gaining a foothold, shrubs are filling out and herbaceous plants are spreading so that they at least cover the worst weeds – out of sight is out of mind. This blog then is a pictorial boast about how various areas are coming together. I will look back at these pictures in a year or so and complain but, right now, they are pretty darn good.

I am listening to Cate le Bon singing Cyrk. The featured image at the top is a great joy called Philadelphus delaveyi f. melanocalyx: looks amazing, smells even better.

I feel the urge to write a blog: this does not come upon me as much as it used to which is a pity but this is the story of my week as it has been quite a busy one. My dear wife is away swanning around San Francisco for a fortnight so I am left to my own devices which feels quite odd as I am not used to it: I feel oddly lonely and wish I had a dog.


Monday:

I am driving to Cornwall. The journey is uninteresting except that I get the chance to marvel at how very swift and speedy the A30 is when you cross the Tamar. A road that I remember being clogged with caravans and cars dripping with canoes and bicycles. I know this journey very well but that does not make it any shorter. Driving is boring- not for me the thrills of double de-clutching and a stirring of the mezzanine at the sound of a revving engine. All that petrolhead stuff leaves me a little cold and I look forward with pleasure to the self driving car.

I have a car that is relatively comfortable (although I would like a bit more padding in the seat) and pretty much drives itself so all I have to do is not crash into anyone and stay awake. That is where the problems begin – staying awake. I am of an age when the occasional nap is very attractive and I often stop for a quick snooze. I do exactly ten minutes and start again revived: no alarms, my body seems to automatically know when the ten minutes are up.

Autumn lines on a Helford Beach

So if I cannot sleep and cannot move much (beyond a bit of bottom shuffling and some stationary dancing) then the only options left to me are listening, talking and, of course, eating.
Talking is okay but there are only so many people who I can call – my wife gets understandably miffed if I keep ringing up expecting her to chat to me in order to stop myself nodding off. She has other things to do with her time.
Listening is important and I am spoiled for choice: radio, music, podcasts and an Audible subscription. I tend to listen to a bit of everything but mostly to audiobooks- I have been accompanied this week by Louis de Bernieres , podcasts from the Skinny Jean Gardener, Ear Hustle, 99 Percent Invisible (the Episode about Hawaiian shirts), No Such Thing as a Fish and Ben Dark’s Garden Log (such a sexy voice) and a general shuffling of music which always starts (for some reason) with the soundtrack to Hamilton. For years it automatically began with Rilo Kiley so I guess it is a nice change.

The eating is more complex as I flip around a bit. On this journey I had wine gums (Maynard’s and Haribo), butter mintoes, black grapes and some Bahlsen biscuits. In the past I have gone through many permutations of travel picnic: highlights include Polos,Galaxy Ripples, Fruit pastilles, Liquorice Allsorts (bad idea) small Mars Bars, salted peanuts, bananas,Haribo Starmix, Jelly Babies, flapjacks, humbugs and Roskilly’s fudge. Not fearfully healthy you will notice but I am pretty sure that anything eaten in a car does not count if one is trying to eat healthily. What happens on the M6, stays on the M6.

Whatsoever I eat I realise it is not because I am hungry but simply because I driving is booooring…especially on the way back. I stagger in carrying crab from Kernow.

Perch Hill Garden

Wednesday:

Now I am driving to Sussex where I am teaching a day for Sarah Raven at Perch Hill. I have only been to the garden in the dark if deep midwinter so it was a great pleasure to wake up in the garden and a jolly day was spent with me talking a lot to the assembled gardeners. Nice people. Nice day not very nice drive home – for some reason my sat nav took me through Royal Tunbridge Wells. Seems a perfectly decent joint place but quite sluggish in the traffic department. Got home and decided I deserved chips so diverted to the Arctic Fish Bar in Chipping Norton.

Irish Dancers shaking their ankles in Belfast

Friday:

Now I am driving to Birmingham Airport in order to fly to Belfast for the Britain in Bloom Awards 2018. I like Belfast – it is manageable, buzzing, affable and not at all Arlene Foster.It has humour and beauty in equal measure. I am here to dish out the Britain in Bloom Awards. This is a joyful marathon as you may not realise how many categories there are that come under the guidance and rules of BinB – small Coastal villages through urban districts right up to cities. Suffice to say that the ceremony starts at 5:30 and continues (with a break for dinner) until around 11:00. My job is to whip up frenzies, keep the clapping going for as long as possible and generally keep things moving. It is quite knackering -especially after a rather long week – but hugely satisfying as the people who attend are very deserving of fulsome praise and all of them are having fun. We also had a band, Irish dancers and a chef who sang popular operatic arias while flirting disgracefully with all the women in the room. Fabulous stuff but guess who has to go back on stage just after the entertainment? yup, you guessed it – oldish bloke in a suit.

Tropical Ravine, Belfast Botanic Gardens

I stagger back to the Premier Inn (surprisingly comfortable beds) just before midnight and wake up in the morning with time to kill so I wander around, go to the botanic gardens (nice newly restored Tropical ravine) and have a haircut before heading back to the George Best Airport and the short hop to Birmingham.

Three journeys, three nights away from home. It is really nice to be back in front of the fire in time for soup and Strictly.

I am much preoccupied with flooring and guttering.

One of the nerdier sides to my character includes a strange fascination with drainage. I don’t exactly know where it sprang from but I think it came from many happy hours damming and diverting small Scottish burns when I was a child. Stacking pebbles and sticks in cold, gin clear water in an doomed effort to hold back the stream. I imagine that my parents looked on fondly imagining a bright future for their elder child as an engineer. Constructing huge dams spanned by elegant bridges in exotic places across the world. Hurriedly jotting down innovative and perfectly balanced formulae for the load/density co-efficient on the back of a Manila envelope.

Sadly it did not work out quite like that but I have still maintained an interest. I enjoy (and please do not think ill of me for admitting this) rodding a blocked drain. I like the cold fish feeling that you get on your arm having spent time lying flat in a puddle groping for the bottom of a blocked gully. Clearing gutters amuses me greatly and digging long drainage trenches gives me immeasurable pleasure.

I am sure Dr Freud would have lots to say on the subject but it is probably all about that moment of release. When the blockage is finally freed and with a joyful gurgle the water rushes on its merry way. A couple of years ago some misguided person decided that I should have an entry in Who’s Who. This may have been a cynical marketing exercise to try and make me cough up £115.00 for a copy but it meant that, under the heading of ‘Recreations’ I could put ‘Drainage’.

At the moment I have an excuse as I am buying gutters and digging soakaways for our new house which is currently being torn apart by some sturdy builders wielding  jackhammers and wheelbarrows.

Flooring is another small obsession: I had a fantasy when younger that my luxury item, if I was asked on Desert Island Disc,s would be a never ending pile of good quality York stone in random sizes. My plan was to amuse myself while awaiting rescue by paving the entire beach. Now that my back is not as strong as it was I have changed my wish to a bottomless bucket of Lego which is much lighter but will still keep me amused for many hours. We are trying to decide on both indoor and outdoor flooring so that little obsession is being stoked on a daily basis.

God, my life is so full of excitement and thrills. I am not sure what state I will be in by the time we get round to choosing bathroom fittings and banisters.

Mag-1

Anyway, it gives me the excuse to show you a picture of what will, one day, become my new garden. We have a few months of chaos left before we can move in and we can concentrate on anything other than digging up floors and knocking down walls. But one day, I can start gardening again.

Although there will still, fortunately, be drains.

Among other things we are working towards a big website and blog rejig. Hopefully Luke and Petra will have done their thing and we can have a bit of a relaunch in January.

I am listening to Buzzcut Season by Lorde. The picture is of the leaf of a Magnolia grandiflora.