Flu

30 July 2009

I am not, heaven knows, a serial conspiracy theorist, but let’s just suppose that, like the Millennium Bug, this flu pandemic is run by someone’s P.R. department - in this case of the pharmaceutical industry. The papers can’t turn down flu stories. The genius who gave it its rather nasty name should be getting royalties. So far (and I’ve got it) it is not nearly as bad as the common

Seven stone steps

27 July 2009

Just home from our woods in North Wales with a glowing sense of achievement. We have left something for posterity: not more trees, but a feature that could be puzzling archeologists centuries from now.

It starts with a pond, mere or tarn (the Welsh llyn seems to make no distinction). A body of water, anyway, some hundred yards by thirty, that I made eight years ago by damming a stream through a new plantation of spruce and pine. This is up in the hills, at 700 feet or so, overlooked only by the heathey ridge of the Rhinogs. There is a forestry road, but no footpaths. As soon as I made it I wanted to swim in it. The bottom is soft, though, and there are snags of old roots to discourage you.

So I planned a wooden jetty with a ladder to get me out into the deep water.

Climate change

28 July 2009

You don’t need to be a follower of Nigel Lawson or Ian Plimer on the question of climate change to demand a rather more rigorous use of evidence. Gardeners are assumed to be soft in the head. An editorial in this month’s The Garden is typical of the confusion that is served to us as gospel. The headline is ‘Climate change may finish Cottage Gardens’. It then quotes an official from the Met Office saying ‘It is quite possible our gardens will look really different in 20, or certainly 50, years from now.’ It certainly is.

The report then shifts to 70 years hence, ’in 2080’, when ‘if no steps are taken to curb greenhouse gas emission,’ average

Long term view

20 July 2009

The giant woodpecker I heard in the trees at the end of the garden turned out to be a BT engineer up a ladder making adjustments to a telegraph pole. It was planted, he told me, in 1945, and still good, apparently, for another ten years or so. He explained how to read the labels that tell you the pole’s age and height, a skill I immediately put into practice on every neighbouring pole. My best find: the one that carries my calls over the moat from the house to the road - dated 1934 (and 26 feet high). It doesn't say whether it's pine or Douglas fir.

winter kind. Lots of people die of that, remember.

Now I’ve started, I’ll go further. It seems to be taken for granted that we are all scared to death of death. Few of us look forward to it (and they, of course, can be criminalized). 200 of our army have died in Afghanistan to ward off (we are told) a repeat of 50 dying in London.

Don’t let me start on Iraq. I’ll stick to us, and the sterner stuff we used to be made of.

Better still, to your relief I’ll return to gardening.

It would look slightly mysterious, as though it was expecting a boat. When I got there last week, though, I suddenly saw a better answer. We had drained the pond to explore the bottom. These hills are full of huge flat stones. We could make a flight of steps up from the depths to the sedgy bank. There is a famous path of steps like this in Cwm Buchan, ten miles north, attributed in legend to the Romans.

What would the Romans have done if they had had a Komatsu? This massive engine, in the right hands, can arrange ton-weights as delicately as pieces of marquetry. Wyn Owen, who owns the surrounding hills and the sheep that mow them, could part two blades of grass with its huge bucket. He spent a morning unearthing slabs, shaking them free of earth by tossing them in the air and catching them. In the afternoon, with the blue water of Cardigan Bay in the background, we placed them to form seven giant steps from the bottom of the pond to the bank.

It will have to fill again from the stream before I can run down them, splash in and swim away. The idea fills me with excitement. I understand the pleasure Richard Long (now at Tate Modern) gets when he leaves his traces on nature.

summer temperatures are 'likely to rise more than 4° C’. According to Hilary Benn, the heatwave in 2003 saw ‘average daily summer temperatures 2° C above average,’ ’estimated to have caused an extra 35,000 deaths in northern Europe’. Clive Lane, of the Cottage Garden Society, ‘has already seen …… primulas and violets struggling to survive.’ At Rosemoor Chris Bailes is happy to see Tetrapanax payrifera thriving, ‘though Rosemoor is in a frost pocket’. Same here. If more evidence of global warming were needed, the exciting new feature at Newby, well north of York, is an avenue of olive trees. My doubts about this are more aesthetic than meteorological.

We have been lucky, over the past 26 years (since the winter of 1982/83 in fact) to have got away with growing plants traditionally labelled borderline for hardiness. Last winter was too cold for a few. But to extrapolate from gardeners’ experiences to global trends is absurd, and the R.H.S. should know better.

I hurried back to ask my woodpecker friend if 75 years is an unusual lifespan. ‘Pretty good’, he said. ‘We’ll have to change it soon, but it’s still safe.’ ‘What about the new ones?’ was my next question. ‘Hopeless.’ he said. ‘They don’t season them or pickle them properly any more. They used to age them for two years, then pickle them in creosote. Now they’re just fresh trees given a pressure treatment with wood preserver. I have far more trouble with the new ones.’

I wasn’t surprised. Telegraph poles are not the only timber that comes green, unseasoned, not properly treated and ready to rot. We’ve had to replace a gate post after three years. Does no one believe in the future any more?