Not everything is what it seems
Pictured above: Indigo King.
I did not expect to love it as much as I do. Richly coloured in absolutely gorgeous jewel tones, and still producing lots of blooms on sturdy stems, even in this heat. The sweet pea seed shop will be open for Gather members on 01 September in (fingers crossed) both the UK & the USA.
Monday 8 August
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I often write these journal entries in my head, long before I sit down to type them to you. This evening, I walk along the wide path behind the maize, looking towards the Quantocks in the distance. They have that haze that changes with distance, so the hills seem layered like a watercolourist’s first effort at a dramatic landscape. As we turn into the pasture fields, the long grass, part cropped by cattle and so escaping the hay-makers, seems even more golden than usual. I think about how I will describe this indescribably perfect evening to you. The soft but magical pink of the sky where it touches the land. The apricot intensity of the setting sun.
We walk back over the stream and all the dogs have noisy swims and long drinks. Maud comes back and shakes. I take off my sunglasses to wipe the droplets off and the colour of the world changes. It appears my large, cheap plastic sunglasses, bought from Sainsburys in an emergency after I dropped and shattered my last ones, have a built-in filter. I have, entirely inadvertently, got myself some rose tinted spectacles.
I can’t lie. They were wonderful.
Tuesday 9 August
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Don’t ask me who or when, but I remember reading about someone in California complaining about the weather. Not that it wasn’t lovely, it undeniably is, but because it is all the same. Relentlessly, predictably, boringly glorious.
I am starting to feel the same. England is meant to have seasons. It is meant to have weather so variable that the discussion of it forms the entirety of some social relationships. I don’t disagree with the heat per se; it is the sameness of the heat at which I am starting to chafe.
I have tried counting my blessings. In November, I shall be complaining about having to wash and dry three muddy dogs every single day and look back on this bone-dry time with fondness. I have washed everything I own, twice, just for the novelty of having laundry dry in hours. I haven’t worn a proper pair of shoes for weeks.
But I cannot pretend I am not ready for a change. I have started researching a late October holiday in western Scotland. I have a Pinterest board that is almost exclusively tweed. I am ordering woollen jumpers and wondering about choosing my next pair of long leather boots.
Wednesday 10 August
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I water early, focusing on the new plantings and anything in pots.
[An aside: I must tell you about roses in pots. I interviewed Becca of The Gather Gate Flower Company about roses for Gather and lots of people asked me to question her on roses in pots. I had a ‘The Lark Ascending’ in a pot that was looking a bit sad. I gave it a good feed, added a hazel dome to train in the laterals, and have watered sparingly. It looks utterly utterly glorious, both in terms of flowers and the foliage. Better than any of the roses in the ground. It just looks happy.]
I retreat into the cool of the cottage. A planning meeting with the American team in preparation for the US shop launch in September. The names of things causes some confusion (apparently beetroots are only a thing in the UK) although as soon as I learn that bronze fennel is call ‘smoky fennel’ over there, I determine to adopt the Americanism then and there. Such a perfect description. My seed packets will, from now, read ‘Smoky Fennel’.
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Thursday 11 August
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Dahlias are thought to be from South America and I slightly foolishly expected them to be unfazed by the heat. However, the flowers are smaller and fewer than in usual seasons and they, like so many other plants, just look a bit uncomfortable. Luckily my collection is unnecessarily large (I acknowledge that giving over so much space to them when I grow flowers for seed makes absolutely no sense) and I still have buckets to harvest and dot over the kitchen table. The established ones are doing much better than the new tubers that I added this year, proof if ever any was needed that Nature rewards indolence.
In fact, dahlias might be an exception to the live and let live model of soil care. The quality of flowers does seem to degrade over time and Paul from Black Shed Flowers did mention that the top breeders take cuttings in autumn, over-winter them under glass and then grow them on the next year to rejuvenate the variety. (This was a passing comment in a discussion about something else entirely so please don’t take it as gospel. If you know whether or not it is true, please do let me know.) Indeed, my Café au Laits are positively ordinary this year. I thought it was just that we were all so terribly bored of them. They never could hold a candle to Hamari Gold anyway.
Friday 12 August
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An ambitious walk. Even though I leave it late, it is still too hot. The hills of Netherclay are covered in cracks wide enough to turn an ankle in. The ditches and streams that the girls use to drink from on the walk have all dried up and we turn around early so they can get back to their usual swimming spot.
Although there is no official hosepipe ban here, I cannot bring myself to water everything that needs watering. What can be left will be left and what I cannot bear to lose will be tucked under tables in the courtyard for shade, or put on the east-facing kitchen windowsill. Which is why I have a very small Cercidiphyllum japonicum (a toffee apple tree) temporarily living as a houseplant.
It is amazing which plants seem resolutely unaffected (the Echinops, the yarrows, the smoky fennels) and which cause me palpitations. My precious squash wilt dramatically in the heat of the daytime sun, but appear miraculously recovered by dusk. I do not water them, but I do carefully cut off all the tips past the fruit to reduce the demands on the plant.
The poppies are all bleached the most pleasing parchment, and I start collecting them to hang on the cottage wall.
Saturday 13 August
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All the jumpers, the woollens and the tweeds that I ordered on Tuesday are due to be delivered. I hang about the front of the cottage, looking for the van. In between the tractors and trailers shedding a confetti of straw along the road are polo lorries. Polo lorries carry a lot of ponies and tend to be large but very low frills. (One of my greatest achievements was driving a string of eight top-flight polo ponies safely across two Australian states in what was, essentially, a cattle truck.) One of them passing this morning has a little livestock trailer tacked on the back, like one of those tiny cars pulled along by caravans. I can only hope they put the kit in that, not the littlest horse. I wince at the thought of hooves pounding on this hard ground.
Sunday 14 August
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I am off plumbers. Our hot water system sprung a rather dramatic leak into our neighbours’ cottage a few weeks ago. They were very polite about it but obviously we switched everything off until the plumber could come and fix it. Fix it they did, but they also did something that meant that all the pipework made a horrendous juddering noise whenever a hot tap was turned. I can only imagine that it drove the same neighbours demented and, as a result, when I left before the crack of dawn for our trip to the Isle of Wight the other weekend, I had to wash my hair in a bowl of cold water and the contents of a kettle.
The plumbers came out to fix the noise this week, helpfully fiddled with some settings to save us energy, and within twenty-four hours, we had no hot water. They’ve been out again and declared themselves quite quite baffled as to why this was but their attention has been enough to fix it and I am not inclined to risk having them touch it again.
All of this is quite a convoluted excuse for why I haven’t had the dripping tap in the kitchen seen to. It is, of course, incredibly wasteful and so I have taken to keeping an enamel jug underneath it to catch the drops, the pouring outs of the kettle (because good tea needs freshly drawn water) and the inches of warm tap water in the bottom of drinking glasses that seem to be scattered around the house. Given that the kitchen windowsill is now a forest of freckles lettuce, tomatoes I couldn’t risk losing, and anything that was looking vulnerable in the heat of the courtyard, this is the perfect little ecosystem.
Just in case you were interested, no, we still haven't got a new kitchen. The ceiling is still half finished and there are wires dangling from every wall and downlighter from every beam. It's a long story…
Have a wonderful week. Here's hoping for a lot of rain.
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