The Stones are not tres bon

Bloke wakes up in hospital and sees the doctor standing over his bed. ‘Mr Jones, I have some good news and some bad news for you…I’m afraid we’ve had to amputate both legs…but the good news is I’ve sold your slippers”

This week and a bit has been a little like that – not that I’m in anyway less able
to audition for the part of Tarzan than I was previously, just that every small pleasure has been in some way tainted by a similarly significant tedium. At Chelsea Flower Show a couple of Mondays back, the weather was scorcio, the company* fabulous and the show itself much more to my liking than the previous year. Small gardens and large almost all had something to take my largely food-focusing eyes. One even had John Cooper Clarke reciting poems. There was a perfectly fine, specially commissioned one but nothing to touch the few of his back catalogue he squeezed in before. Like this one….

Lydia, Lydia
Get rid of your Chlamydia
Only an idiot
Would ever consider yer

I got talking to him thanks to a coincidental chat with the garden’s designer that suddenly included him – it would’ve made my week had he not spent a good 15 minutes trying to convince me that the Stones were still the world’s best band. Give me 35 years and all the dosh there is and I reckon I could come up with more than a couple of decent albums and the odd ok single. By the same measure of greatness Herman’s Hermits should be on a stadium tour.**

John John
The Stones are not tres bon
John
anyone
if asked, would say ‘non’
John

I repaired to the food tent for some chips. They were fantastic. I couldn’t find any salt.

Enough: I’ll try to take the glass as half full. So, while I have 200 apricots affected by a potentially lethal combination of brown rot and blossom blight that has already done for 3 plums and a few dozen apricots….I will brush over them and focus on the couple of areas that are doing that lovely shift from trying to get a foothold into knitting together to great a place with its own identity.

Last year, after a false start a few years ago, I laid down the foundations of a forest garden. This involved a lot of mulch mat and some trees that one day should grow large. It looked a bit sad if truth be told but when you’re planting trees and most perennials you do develop an imagination, seeing it for what it will be rather than what it is. Or perhaps that’s the growers self-deception. The year before I’d created an allotment, I’d called it a climate change allotment, and a 21st century allotment – both zipping off the tongue less lightly than the Big Daddy splash. I still haven’t found that phrase that encapsulates the loveliness, sustainability and deliciousness all in a kind of three word West Country haiku – one day. Suggestions on a virtual postcard most welcome….

Both spaces take the idea of forest gardening – planting in tiers using all or fewer of all the forest layers from canopy to subterranean – and both areas are dedicated to getting only entirely delicious food in the process. Almost everything (the ‘almost’ is a safety net, I think it’s all) is perennial. Almost everything is edible, and if it’s not it’s there to draw in beneficial insects or fix nitrogen so that the edibles get an easier ride. More on how the forest garden is evolving next time…or the time after if something more interesting comes to mind. What’s going on in the allotment is fascinating enough.

Having settled in and adjusted to their new home they’re getting on with being quietly impressive. The Himalayan rhubarb is flowering like crazy, up to 11 feet high and rising, and even a kiwi is flowering…

…as are all three of the varieties of chaenomeles, including the Cido…

while all the chives (Black Isle and White chives below) are throwing up differently coloured variations of flavour in their leaves and hollow stems.

I’m a little fascinated by the Himalayan rhubarb and it’s mad flowers. I shouldn’t have let it flower if I wanted to eat any, but I wanted to see what it looked like when allowed to do what it fancies. It’s getting ridiculously tall….

…with the flowers opening out into amaranth-like tassles

…even the stem is incredible

Never mind the individuals, the allotment itself is just starting to come together, to shift from a scattering of seemingly randomly placed plants to the beginnings of a place. The plants are starting to grow towards and even into each other. Relationships are quietly being formed.

The Rubus spectabilis, with its sweet-tart berries, is giving the gladeye to the Moroccan mint….

…the Scottish lovage is giving the truck drivers flash to the blue honeysuckle (which in turn is popping out incredible berries, usually the first of any fruit ready to eat here)…

…and the Japanese parsley is getting overfriendly with the creeping strawberries…

…while the young American bladdernut enjoys a little protection in the shade of the Himalayan rhubarb.

And the Egyptian walking onions are wandering their merry way around. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a weird combination of all that’s good about spring onions, shallots chives. Green hollow leaves poke enthusiastically up at the first sign of warmth, developing small bulbils (mini-onions) that gradually weigh the leaves down towards the ground until they touch the soil, allowing the clutch of bulbils to root and grow into a new plant.

This is what they look like as they develop and release new centres where the bulbils grow and throw out more secondary leaves….

..which in turn form more bulbils, which release more leaves…and so it continues – ‘walking’ around your garden, giving you leaves and bulbs as it goes. If you like the sound of them you can order them from Edulis.

And the bees are going mad for the comfrey.

* Mostly spent with Laetitia M, Lia L, Emma T, James AS, Tamsin from English Garden magazine and Nina, the queen of the Malvern shows.

**Which of course they should.