It's been so cold and so grey for the last few weeks that when occasionally the sun emerges and blesses us with its warmth you hear people talking about it as though it were a new or extraordinary phenomenon.
As last year I sowed some garden peas in a length of guttering under glass a few weeks ago. The other day I slid the seedlings in their compost into a trench in a vegetable bed and covered them with netting to keep the pigeons off. Now it's pea sticks I want. For some reason finding bits of shrubs and trees of the right size for the peas to wrap their tendrils round is always a problem. Hence the sight of this old geyser wandering about and picking up detritus after the wind has pulled down branches from the trees.
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Some have found that if no one else has commented they cannot find the comment window. This comment is an attempt to defeat the apparent attempt at censorship.
I appreciate your gesture but am cast down at the thought of your being condemned to utter the first comment on your own blog for ever and a day.
I also appreciated your phone call. Did you notice how we kept on chopping off the last few words of each other's sentences? A good sign. Lots to say.
An incidental link yesterday. My French lessons here in Hereford have lasted over a decade; before that my lessons in Sutton lasted even longer. Here in Hereford the lesson consists of one teacher and two students, all of an age. I'd been pooh-poohing the complaining pessimism of gardeners and this encouraged B, the other student, to look up the French for celandine because she "liked the word". Alas, her big Collins-Robert did not have it but P, our teacher, found it in hers; it's chélidoine - a word that I think was worth the effort. Yesterday evening, on Gardener's World, a section of the programme was devoted to celandines. Alas it was presented by the egregious Carol Klein (a dyed-in-the-wool gusher, given to repeating the word "really" and of limited vocabulary) - a sign for me to go upstairs and change into my PJs. As I cast my underpants into the laundry basket I heard several diapasons of Klein's voice (the words undecodable, thank God) through the floor. Later I drank rum
Ah, the old pea-sticks challenge. I like it though, it reminds me of early childhood games dimly remembered, pretending to be planting things by just sticking twigs and such like into the ground, a make-believe miniature forest. Then there is the added excitement of wondering whether they will take root and overtake in growth the peas they are supposed to be supporting. I finally mustered enough by raiding last year's forsythia prunings from the as yet unlit bonfire, but they still have some quite lively looking flowers on. Last year it was photinia,which have an interesting radial shape. Still haven't got round to planting the peas themselves under them though.
It was quite a while before I inentified the attractive tallish yellow flowers that come out in the hedge banks at about the same time as the red campion, alkanet and occasional bluebells, as greater celandine. They are utterly like the lesser ones.
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