gardening

Watching The Clock: Black & White Sunday

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Talk about conflicting interests. When I’m at work on my allotment I continuously wage war on dandelions. They are shown no mercy, bar resorting to pesticides. And yes, I know they are very helpful plants – the roots plunging deep into the soil strata and releasing otherwise inaccessible nutrients into the topsoil.

On the other hand, on the way to the allotment, camera to hand, I have a lot of time for them. They are of course in the farmer’s field, and not on my plot, which helps to foster a little appreciation. I find their seed-head ‘clocks’ endlessly photogenic. Looked at closely, they have a mysterious and mesmerizing quality: the perfect design of their parachutes, each one programmed for relentlessly unavoidable procreation.

And so, even as I feel my spade-hand twitching towards a ruthless uprooting, I’m also thinking ‘live and let live’. There are other good reasons to love dandelions. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that these plants possess great therapeutic qualities. Herbalists have long used the roots for healing liver conditions, while the leaves and flowers act more on the kidneys (not for nothing is the dandelion’s country name piss-in-the-bed.) You can use the young leaves in salads, while the roasted roots make a passable coffee. Meanwhile, the dandelion in the photo is also auditioning for a special effects role in Star Trek.

Black & White Sunday

Does My Beehind Look Big in this?

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Up at the allotment the globe artichokes we did not eat earlier in the summer are flowering, and the Red-tailed Bumblebees think all their breakfasts have come at once. In fact they’re trying to scoff them all at once too. The flower, after all, is a VERY BIG thistle. This makes me wonder if the huge expanse of ultra-violet attractant doesn’t over-stimulate the foraging impulse, thus explaining the manic bee rootling  that has them scrabbling, bottoms up, through the petal forest to reach the sweet stuff beneath.

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Those with longer legs seem to cope best, but I’ve already had to rescue two. They seem to become mired in the petals. Either that or they’re simply spaced out on the sugar rush.

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Macro Monday over at Jude’s

Today In My Garden

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Never mind the Olympics, it’s all gold in and out of the garden on Sheinton Street. Over in the field the wheat is  ready to  harvest, and inside the hedge  the  Rudbeckia is towering up a good six feet tall. This morning it is rather windswept, but the yellow flowers look good against the blue.

Its parent plant once grew in my Aunt Miriam’s much loved Devon garden. That’s her fork in the first photo. The tines are twisted, making it unfit for gardening, but we keep it permanently planted as a keepsake and also as a perch for the local robin.

Beneath the Rudbeckia the feathery plumes of Golden Rod have just started to flower, and below them the red hot flowers of Helenium  are making their own carnival parade. All the stems (below and above) belong to a single plant. They pretty much have the red end of the spectrum covered. The bees love them too.

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Happy weekend everyone!

Oh, my love’s like a red, red…radish? Or the joy of growing one’s own dinner

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Even if I say so myself, with radishes as beautiful as these, you can see why Mother of Rapunzel so craved them that she sent poor Father of Rapunzel scrabbling over the witch woman’s garden wall on nightly radish-scrumping missions.

We all know what trouble that led to, and hopefully there will be no similar repercussions (whether the enforced letting down of over-long hair from tall towers or the scratching out of princely eyes ) from eating these dear little Cherry Belle radishes. Because eaten them we have. They took pride of place in the salad that accompanied Friday night’s dinner.

And the secret of this particularly successful, if small-scale production, was to grow them in a large plastic flower pot inside my allotment polytunnel. You can see them growing in the bottom left-hand corner, along with the component parts of many other future dinners:

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This week at the Daily Post photo challenge the theme is:
Dinnertime

Apologies to Robert Burns for the radish intrusion.

Also I don’t think Jude has yet featured radishes in her April garden close-ups challenge.

Passing Glory ~ Three Old Roses

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This lovely rose grows up the wall in our back garden. Please meet Gloire de Dijon, also known less picturesquely in English as Old Glory. It’s a cross between an unknown tea rose and Souvenir de la Malmaison, an old Bourbon rose, and was introduced to the world by one Pierre Jacotot in 1853. He lived in Dijon, France, a place also famous for its mustard.

When the rose is fully opened it has dense whorls of pale peachy-pink petals that change colour as they age. Their scent is mesmerizing – notes of clove and jasmine that transport me back to Zanzibar where jasmine sprigs were nightly placed beside our plates at the hotel where we ate dinner.

And once the roses have passed their best, even dead-heading them is a delight – crushing fading petals  between my hands, inhaling their last fragrance that also soaks into the skin, and can be smelled for hours.

Like Sue Judd at WordsVisual, I’m drawn to the aesthetic of decaying plant life. I think there is great beauty here – these lingering shades of erstwhile glory.

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Thursday’s Special: Three of a kind

Please visit Paula to see her own lovely study for this challenge. And definitely go and see Sue Judd’s stunning daffodil study at the link above

Never Mind Warhol’s Banana…

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…just look at my spuds!

 

This is my take on the Daily Post’s ‘life imitates art’ photo challenge – a posterized  still-life of last summer’s allotment harvest. I suppose you could also call it a potato print. Anyway, it is my nod to Andy Warhol’s poster art:

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Andy Warhol’s Banana

Of course, as a gardener, I regard anything I grow as a work of art. Coming up next are borlotti beans, corn, zinnias and dill – rendered on the kitchen table after the Flemish still-life school:

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Looking ahead to this year’s garden produce art works, I’m  just hoping that my asparagus beds might do something wonderful, then I could come up with something like this. I have the red currants:

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Dutch, active 1683 – 1707
Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants
1696
Life Imitates Art

Winter Garden From My Window

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It’s the final week of Jude’s Winter Gardens challenge over at The Earth Laughs In Flowers. This, then, is the view of my garden captured on Saturday afternoon. It’s as much as I’m prepared to show you at the moment, so dreary is it after weeks  of rain. Also there was a definite lack of gardener-input in the autumn. Things just kept on growing and it was hard to know when to chop them back.

So they didn’t get chopped, and the place now has the look of a garden version of Miss Haversham’s attic. But you may just spot (in the bottom right hand pane) a small clump of tete a tete daffodils. Even they  aren’t planted, but are sitting on top of the soil. They were tipped out of a pot bought last spring, at which point I had every intention of re-planting them. Oh well. Neglect hasn’t stopped them thriving. They started flowering at the end of December.

I have to confess that I’m a fair-weather gardener, at least where dampness is concerned. And it really is too cosy indoors. Also unlike the garden, the house is now clean and tidy, which was the real reason I took the first two photos – to document that tidiness is possible. And I’m sharing the proof with the world in an attempt to stem backsliding tendencies.

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But housework and fair-weather gardening aside, I am getting twinges of planters’ itch. My first delivery of vegetable seeds arrived earlier last week – all those crisp packets of pent-up potential, and now it is February. Hurray! Time to sow the peas and leeks in the allotment polytunnel, and start off the aubergines and sweet peppers at home.

And talking of sweet things, my first sowing of sweet peas on the kitchen window sill is already sprouting. So apologies to Jude for not quite sticking to the winter garden plot. I’m  finishing  this post with thoughts of summer, and deliciously scented blooms to come. And I know she won’t mind because she knows very well that it’s forward-dreaming that keeps gardeners going through the long winter season.

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copyright 2016 Tish Farrell