Ode To The West Wind
No blogging yesterday as I was at the hospital again. It’s a real hassle, as it takes over an hour to get there and the same back via a bus, a ferry and a tram, which is all very picturesque, but exceedingly tiring. So I took the opportunity to stop at the market on the way back, on the principle that one journey out would be less fatiguing than two. I also needed to stock up on spices, and almonds and sesame seeds and Chinese and Indian ingredients, gram flour, fenugreek, that sort of thing. Because of my taste being impaired by the flu I’ve been overspicing and have run through my stock.
Because it’s still bitterly cold I found the incredible bargain of two full-grown fatsia japonica for a fiver ( plants are cheap right now, it’s the late spring and the stall-holder had hit on the sales tactic of advertising them as ‘inside now, outside later’ which was very enterprising of him. Obviously it works, as I bought some.) I am a sucker for plants, especially cheap ones. Getting them home via public transport in my currently debilitated condition was another matter entirely and now I feel like I’ve been run over by a bus. The plants look fantastic though.
I have lots of zonal pelargonium plants waiting to be potted on and hardened off and seeds to be planted but nothing can be done while it’s so cold. I have some shrubs to go in, that again beacuse of the cold were an amazing bargain at 2 euro each – 2 floribunda roses, Virgo and Dame de Coeur, and two peonies Duchesse de Nemours and Karl Rosenfield. They’re all very fragrant – I don’t see the point of a garden without scent, and I want to have a whiff of glorious frangrance evry time I open a window. There’ll be night scented stocks and nicotiana in containers under under the windows and cotton lavender, rosemary, thyme and sage in the spot by the fence that’s rocky and gets full sun. There’s also loads of tiger lily bulbs from last year and the red and white Asiatic lily bulbs I got cheap last year to be potted up, all of which are also fragrant. They all flower at slightly different times so hopefully I’ll have scent all summer. In the autumn I’ll be planting some winter jasmine and wintersweet, and in future that’ll carry fragrance all winter.
The good thing and bad thing about gardening is it takes time. You have a picture in your head but it takes years come to reality, and you don’t know whether it worked or not till then. It’s all trial and error. But none of the hard work and uncertainty really detracts from the sheer pleasure of being surrounded by growing, beautiful things, whether it’s plants or cats, or children for that matter – rather it adds to the experience.
Anyhow I’d really like to get the garden whipped into shape before I have surgery so I have somewhere warm to sit and recuperate – this late spring is making it very difficult indeed – but today I need a rest.
So much is happening so fast right now, what with the slow implosion of New Labour and Bush’s visible mental breakdown, not to mention outright declared civil war in Iraq, that the US and Uk governments seem to entering some kind of endgame, a slow death-spiral; land just for the moment I’m going to sit and watch for a bit and just enjoy it the schadenfreude – so many blogs to read, so little time – although I’ll be doing so with the trepidation that comes of knowing there’s an unstable nutter on a hairtrigger in the White House and Brown is Blair, only fatter and more Scots and with an even odder speech impediment. That some of best writing of the past few years has had to come out of a such a political disaster as Bush and Blair’s folie a deux is cold comfort to those suffering the consequences .
Later on when I’ve had a good catchup I’ll post whatever interesting links I come across. Then the rest of the day is a mental health day. Although so icy cold it’s a beautifully clear, blue sunny day and finally the sunlight is actually reaching our postage-stamp garden, so I’m going to wrap up warm, take a book outside, put some jazz on loud to drown out the fuckwit across the way who thinks sunshine is an opportunity to get his pneumatic drill out, and try and imagine it’s spring.
Why the Shelley link in the header? Shelley wrote that poem when revolutionary fervour wa sweeping Europe. He scented freedom on the wind. Let’s hope we’re smelling the same thing too.
Image of sky over Hoek Van Holland from Hoekse Pier’s Flickr gallery of The Netherlands
