Dahlias and dogs in the dark
It is not often the girls pose for photographs, and they are so colour-matched to the decor of my cottage that they are practically invisible. I am featuring them in pride of place in the header, not because it is a good photograph, but because it is so rare a moment.
On the subject of dahlias though, a blog post about them in Gather, as well as the sharing of a whole ebook on everything I know about growing sweet peas. Because if you want a successful sweet pea season, what you do now really matters…
Monday 10 October
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At times, I am frequently overwhelmed by how little I fit into my day. Do you ever get the sense that you rush around all day, but then when you go to bed, you can't actually work out what you have been doing?
There is the every day stuff, keeping up with the bills and the laundry and trying to persuade a mechanic to do something about the warning lights in the car. There is the job stuff, which means I have to go and sit in an office for a few days a week, and answer the phone in the night when I am on call.
There is the garden and the field and the photography and the emails and the writing and the stuff that I could broadly consider 'Gather' which is, of course, an antidote to all of the other stuff.
And then there is all the stuff that I am not doing but I feel like I should be doing. Reels for one. Pinterest. (Apparently the time to put Christmas up on Pinterest has already been and gone...) Reading all the books on soil that I have bought but not opened.
I have been watching productivity gurus on YouTube intently to attempt to find the key to actually getting things done.
Apparently setting a timer and just getting started is the thing.
Tuesday 11 October
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I sit down at my desk with a coffee and set a clock running for fifty minutes. Like most psychotherapists, my concentration runs in fifty minute blocks. I have typed ten words when I hear the whir and the crackle of the hedge trimmer. Our local farmer, Mr L, does the hedges and ditches around the churchyard and, for a bottle of wine and a small financial token, he'll turn the tractor round to do one more pass and take the top off my incredibly tall native hedge. I can do the sides easily enough but however hard it is cut back, it is fifteen foot tall by October.
I dash out to check that he is willing. We take some time to admire the exquisite smell of the autumn morning, with its sweet fragrance of sap and leaves sharpened by the cold air. We catch up on Parish Council business and house prices in the village. Whether we will ever get the pump at the front of the cottage to produce water again as it did in his childhood. We range over children and families, successes and tragedies, to whether I am still loving my Land Rover. We bemoan the fact that Defenders always leak in the rain although, despite this, I do still love her. We reflect on why the soil is wonderful on one side of the village and awful on the other and who or what might be responsible.
Time passes and Mr L says he has to go to Exeter to collect some parts and that he will be back in the middle of the week to do the hedge. I watch my breath, cloudy in the cold sunshine, as I turn back into the cottage. I climb the stairs to the study and, as I sit down at my desk, my timer goes off.
I can only conclude that productivity might be overrated.
Wednesday 12 October
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Much of the beech around here, and there is a lot, for it is very much beech country, is still green. This is excellent if you would like to preserve it, for it is green beech that needs to be put in hot water and glycerine. If it has already started to colour, the leaves will simply fall off. I am not preserving though, I want the golds and the soft ochres.
I mix them in an urn with the warm-coloured dinner plate dahlias. I seem to have accidentally bought a cerise one, 'Engelhardts Matador', which is truly awful. I cut it for a Gather blog post (a feature I manage to resist calling 'Keep or compost?') and it disingenuously photographs as a gorgeous deep red. I am not fooled though, it has to go.
If you do want a truly beautiful red dinner plate dahlia though, I heartily recommend 'Spartacus'. Joanna Game would recommend 'Labyrinth Red'.
Thursday 13 October
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A day trip to Cornwall to visit a truly memorable venue for an exciting new project with aforementioned Joanna Game. We stop on the way for coffee with The Garden Gate Flower Company and Three Acre Blooms. I cannot describe the joy of talking with people who share the same passions, who live in the same world, who speak the same language. Of course we touched on the state of the industry and the future of flowers, but my highlight was finding out which famous florist never scrubs their buckets.
And then on to Prussia Cove. I will share lots of photographs and films of the day when we start to share more about this, but here is a little taster.
Friday 14 October
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The last of the blackberries. The last quince came down from the tree and landed with a thump on the grass. There are now more John Downie crab apples on the floor than there are on the tree. (All the yellow ones last longer.) The season seems to have shifted. I hear tales of frost in other gardens, of dahlias blackened and cosmos ruined. No such thing here, but I know it is only a matter of time.
Sunday 16 October
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In anticipation of their move and of a possible frost, I label the dahlias. Once lifted, I defy anyone to tell one dahlia tuber apart from another. The only way to be sure is to label the plants with a flower in bloom, which means before I cut another armful for the house and before any frost smudges their identity.
There are a handful that I have long since forgotten the name of, and I do my best with a description that hopefully will jog my memory when I come to take cuttings in the spring. 'Nice soft pink, good shape.' 'Lovely red, shows pollen early.'
As old as they are, there is no mistaking the Cornels though. They make magnificent plants with an abundance of strong, upright flowers. They are everything a dahlia should be.
