Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker

Yesterday, December 10th 2011, was the centenary of the death of one of the greatest botanists Britain has ever produced.

A long Wikipedia citation tells us that Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was one of the greatest British botanists and exploreres of the 19th century. Darwin's closest friend, he was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for twenty years, in succession to his father, Sir William Jackson Hooker.

From the age of seven Hooker attended his father's lectures at Glasgow University, where he was Regius Professor of Botany. Regular readers of this blog will know of my travels in the footsteps of another eminent botanist and plant collector, David Douglas (1799-1834). Douglas was mentored by the elder Hooker in Glasgow and in the later part of his collecting career all his collections tended to go first to Glasgow for Hooker's examination. There are many letters from Douglas to Hooker, and Douglas certainly knew the infant Joseph Dalton Hooker

The leadership of the Hookers of Kew led directly to Kew Gardens having the status and pre-eminence it enjoys today. Although burial in Westminster Abbey was offered to Sir Joseph, close to Darwin's grave, he is buried alongside his father in the churchyard of St Anne's Church on Kew Green, only a short distance from Kew Gardens.

Kew's own site also summarises Hooker's career (of course), here, and there is a further very comprehensive wesbite devoted to Hooker here.

Hope you find this interesting; all blogs need a bit of erudition from time to time!

Where ladybirds go in winter

In any dark and sheltered spot they can find, by the look of this lot revealed when I lifted these roofing sheets from their temporary resting spot.


Interesting mix of colours and spottage. Different species perhaps?

Singalonga Bastard Trenching

Today I are been mostly Bastard Trenching, aka Double Digging but the old name is more appropriate in, oh, so many ways.

Not familiar with Bastard Trenching? Well, let's ask Eddie Cochran to explain....

3 Steps to Bastard Trenching

Now there are three steps to Bastard Trenching
Just listen and you will plainly see
And as life travels on
And things don't grow at all
Just follow Steps 1, 2 and 3

Step 1 - You dig a trench so deeply
Step 2 - You fill it full of old poo
Step 3 - you fill it in again
Now that sure seems like Bastard Trenching to me

The formula for Bastard Trenching is very simple
Just follow the rules and you will see
And as life travels on
And things grow tall and strong
Just follow Steps 1, 2 and 3

Step 1 - You dig a trench so deeply

Step 2 -You fill it full of old poo

Step 3 - you fill it in again

Success guaranteed!

Tidying up & bringing in

No sign of winter yet, thank goodness. This time last year we were only 10 days away from a massive dump of snow and seriously sub-zero temperatures. I recall driving up the M1 and seeing -14C on the dashboard display. By contrast, greenhouse temperatures so far are positively balmy.Hope this isn't tempting fate! Don't blame me, he added hastily, if it all goes pear-shaped.

Nevertheless it seemed prudent to start bringing in stuff which has been on the patio all summer. Everything has been cut back a bit and watering has virtually stopped. But they haven't given up on flowering.
I've also got some salad leaves on the go (Radicchio & Chard) and am about to sow some winter lettuce (in November!).

Meanwhile the Wollemi Pine looks entirely happy; the recommendation is to not repot it until the Spring.

Sunshine

At last, some sunshine to break us free from the gloom and murk we've mostly had for the last few weeks. And so mild; look at this -

working in shirt-sleeves in mid November. I'm not normally this hardy.

I love it on days like today, when the sky is just wall-to-wall clear blue. My allotment site is backed with a big escarpment slope of mature trees and at this time of year, seen against the blue sky, they look fantatstic.
But it wasn't all lollygagging about doing a Fotherington-Tomas (Hello trees, Hello sky); I did get a couple of dozen Wallflowers in, for a bit of colour in Spring.


And, investing for the future (daft phrase - you can't invest for the past or present, by definition) I've put in another six Asparagus crowns, to supplement the dozen or so which are in already. We like Asparagus! These latest six -

you'll have to take on trust that they're in there because this is essentially just a picture of bare earth - will take a couple of years to start producing much but then they should last for twenty years (by which time I'll be 81 !!) Ye Gods, best not think too hard about that.

Leeks are still going strong, ditto red cabbage.
And today I had what are probably the last two raspberries.

Not enough to make a dish of raspers and cream, but nice anyway.

Finally, I see that it's the allotmenters trade union AGM next Monday.

At least they've made some effort to publicise it this time. With some trepidation (it's a meeting; I don't do meetings now I've retired!) I'm thinking of going to it.

You won't find this on an allotment

When I retired a couple of weeks ago my friends at work, knowing of my botanical past, chose an excellent leaving present.

They bought me a Wollemi Pine.

Until 1994 the Wollemi Pine was known only from the fossil record, from as long as 200 million years ago. Even today there are fewer than 100 trees in the wild, in a closely protected site in Australia. But they've been successfully propagated and sold on, and now I have one.
Here it is.


It seems quite hardy and unfussy, although it doesn't like wet feet. I feel very privileged to have it and up for the challenge of making sure it thrives. For a botanist it's like having a real live dinosaur in the garden.

Wot, no Garlic?

I seem to have missed the garlic boat. I went to the garden centre today to buy the usual three or four bulbs to start off in the autumn, because they do best after being exposed to a spell of cold weather during winter (although I've sometimes cheated by shoving them in the fridge for a fortnight).

Nary a garlic to be seen. Sold Out. Can't get any more. Sob. What's a fella to do?

I notice that Marshalls are offering garlic for planting in the spring. I guess I'll have to fall back on that.

Funny old world if you can't get garlic; I blame they vampires, putting a curse on the crop to save their own skins.

36 years ago....

.....I joined the Civil Service. Today I retired from it. Wha-hey!!!!!

No excuses now about not having enough time for the allotment (or perhaps I just need to be more creative about thinking up new ones?).

My allotment notebook has been filling up steadily this year and I've been thinking about getting another. As if by magic....

One of my leaving presents. Thanks Faye; perfect timing.

If I'd been using a brushcutter, with a blade.......

.....I'd now be doing a passable impression of Long John Silver.

Having just given my left leg a rather vigorous strimming at close quarters, just below the knee, (cue jumping about, cue eye-watering, cue shouts of CHUFFINELLE, cue chuffing big weals just below the knee) I am reminded precisely why I chose not to buy a brushcutter with a blade. It would have had my leg off! It's the same reason why I choose never to use a chainsaw.

Needless to say, I've been on a tidying-the-allotment theme today (no, it didn't extend to the shed roof, all too obviously from the previous post!). But I did get the hedge cut and all the paths (there are way too many paths) strimmed. It looks a lot tidier.

The leg-strimming was but the work of a moment, as these things always are, in a confined space and turning around with a running [petrol] strimmer & not paying enough attention. Hey Ho. Take more care next time.

And it was such a lovely day. Blue sky & sunshine. And the allotment is still being productive. Look at these leeks, and cabbages.

The Bishops of Llandaff are still at it too.

There really is a Bishop of Llandaff you know, I'm not just making this all up, facetious like. Here, see. In fact the Bishops of Llandaff are positively illustrious, going right back to Dubricius in 522. Curiously Roman name that, methinks. But if you look at the list of Bishops of Llandaff it's like a microcosm of British history. They start off Roman with Dubricius, go unmistakeably Celtic with Arwistil, Berthwyn and Bledri, then round about 1186 the Normans arrive with William de Saltmarsh. There's a patronising nod to the Welsh with Henry de Abergavenny in 1193. Henry de Abergavenny; I ask you? Is that tokenism or what?

But it's all de this or de that, including a couple of de Monmouths and a de Radnor, until around 1385 when the thoroughly Anglo Saxon (still conquest of a sort, of course) William Bottlesham managed to combine being Bishop of Llandaff with being Titular Bishop of Bethlehem. That would be an interesting commute.

Then it's all reassuringly straightforward until Joshua Pritchard Hughes (1903-1931) and the eponymous dahlia. It isn't clear why the dahlia was named after him. Was he a dahlia lover? Did he look like a dahlia? Did he die of a surfeit of dahlias?

Anyway, let's take stock. Today I've given you a Health & Safety tutorial, an update on the state of the allotment (and, in the previous post, the shed roof), a potted history of Welsh Bishops 522-to date, and set you a challenge to find out why the Bishop of Llandaff is named after the Bishop of Llandaff. Is that value-for-money or what?

Nos Da !!

"If you want to destroy a barn".......

.....a farmer once told me, " cut an eighteen-inch square hole in the roof. Then stand back."

Within ten years the roof will be gone, and when the roof is gone..... it don't take too long before the rest of the barn follows suit. This is in The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman.

I wouldn't want you to think that I'm demonstrating the truth of this with a controlled experiment on my shed roof, but it is beginning to look that way.



I really, really need to get that new roof on!

Time passes.....

....and it seems as though I haven't been to the allotment for ages and have done not-enough-work for far too long. And all of that is true. But all of that is on the cusp of change. Today is LWD15 - that's Last Working Day 15 for those of you unaware that I'm retiring soon (there surely can't be many left; I must have told everyone, everywhere??) .

So I'll have lots of allotment time. Errm? Well, that's after all The Jobs which I'm assured have been lined up, and the 2-years overdue Eurostar trip, and, and, and.

But it will be good to have more time and start to do things properly instead of in an almighty rush. I actually gave up my first allotment, almost 30 years ago, because I felt I was in a constant competition, which I wasn't going to win, with a load of pensioneeers who had all the time in the world. Ah but pensioneeeers now aren't what they were then; altogether livelier!!

All this is by way of preface to the fact that I did get to the allotment yesterday, found it to be, in Sheffield parlance, a reet tip, but left it a bit better. Here are a few before and after pics;


no prizes for guessing which is which. And I now have a sunroof in the shed (no shortage of sophistication here, I tell you).

Gotta fix that before the rains start!

Sloe-ly does it

Last year I got precisely 8 sloes. 8

This year, from the same [small] tree I've got two and a half pounds of them!!!

Here they are.



Should be enough for some sloe gin this year, to accompany the blackberry whisky and the plum whatever. Speaking of plum whatever, last week I was in Slovenia and was routinely given a shot of slivovitz after every evening meal. Very tasty and just the sort of digestif we needed. The allotment, meanwhile, is still pretty dry and unproductive, sloes aside, and heading for its autumn tidy. I feel a few bonfires coming on!

Loadsaplums

In common with just about everyone else I've got loadsaplums. This has been a really bumper year. This lot is just half the crop, off just one tree, and quite a spindly feeble thing at that. Some of it's branches were bent almost double and I could almost hear it sigh in relief as I took the plums off it.

So we're having Plum Crumble, Plum Bread-and Butter pudding, Plum sauce, Plum just-about- anything-you-care-to-name and the freezer is crammed full of them. Along with a good proportion of this year's blackberries and, dare I say it, some of last year's. Mind you I've seen a recipe for Blackberry Whisky which might get rid of a few of them!

And pursuing the alcohol theme, the sloes are developing slowly (sorry!!) but inexorably. They'll have a pressing appointment with a bottle of gin or two before much longer.

In the meantime everything else rumbles along slowly.

It's all desperately dry but I don't have time to get there in the evening to water and I no longer have time on my non-working Fridays and Mondays. That's because I no longer have non-working Mondays and Fridays (sob). I've volunteered to go back to full-time work over the summer to see us through a tough patch. I do miss my long weekends! But the upside is that I'll be able to retire a full month earlier. Roll on October 27th.

Meanwhile, down among the soft fruit.....

.....the blackberries are going great guns.

I picked a shedload this afternoon and as everyone knows a shedload is a LOT of blackberries. The Himalayan Giants (stomp, stomp, stomp, from mighty peak to mighty peak, through the eternal snows) are getting close to the end of their season, just as the Oregon Thornless are getting into their stride.

Behind the scenes the raspberries (Autumn Bliss. Actually, no they aren't; that was a reflex reaction. They're actually Joan J) are getting going. Aside, Blogger's spellchecker suggested "Behind the scones" instead of Behind the scnes. That's not bad and I do wonder sometimes whether typos have a secret life of their own

Elsewhere, both the Blackthorn and Plum trees are living proof of the benefits of shouting at them. B#gger all last year. A good shouting at during the winter = heavy crop this year. You think I'm joking don't you? The video of me shouting at them got unaccountably mislaid, but here is the undeniable result.