Earth at Work

‘So, um, how long do you think you’ll spend in the shop?’ a chap with a clipboard and a questionnaire at Petersham Nurseries just outside Richmond asked us on Saturday.  My fella and I paused for a second or two before answering simultaneously:

‘Five minutes.’
‘About half an hour.’

No prizes for guessing who said what.  We had planned a long, muddy walk through Richmond Park but I’m afraid one of my weaknesses is that it’s almost impossible to pass a good nursery by – and Petersham was no exception. So instead of heading up Richmond Hill immediately, we ambled down it, strolled along the river for a little while and then nosed our way through an alley before arriving at one of the smartest garden centres in London.

The last time I was there was a little less than a year ago.  I’d visited on my own and was happy to wander between plants and benches, and admire the carefully chosen garden accessories inside one of two large glasshouses. At the time it reminded me a little of  Saint Verde, a South African shop started by trend consultant Neville Trickett.  Perhaps Trickett and the owners of Petersham are friends. Perhaps they just visit the same design shows.

This visit, however, was less satisfying and I found the whole tasteful affair rather too contrived.  There were designer Wellington boots and designer allotment accessories, designer cloches and pots and aprons as well as countless numbers of heirloom seeds which are, understandably perhaps, de rigueur these days.   I realised that I’m certainly not Petersham Nurseries’ intended customer, having grown up in a family that has turned ‘make do and mend’ into a belief system.

Our moment of departure came when a well-to-do customer huffed and puffed about being ignored by a poor shop assistant. My fella looked at me, exasperated by the imperious tone.  ‘Shall we go?’ he suggested, his voice carrying a note of pleading that I’ve not heard before.

Outside and back among the plants we stopped to admire another tasteful, weatherbeaten bench.

‘See that!’ he said, pointing to the price tag with righteous indignation. ‘A thousand pounds for a bench. A thousand pounds!’

‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Could probably find the same kind of thing at the Battersea car-boot market.’

We left, quickly, before the security guards and the man with the clipboard came to hustle us out, and made for the quiet of the park instead.

Pondering our visit on the train home, I began to feel that the Petershams and the car-boot markets of the world each have their place, and one would  certainly be poorer without the other.  I mean, if we couldn’t be inspired to scrounge a similar old bench from an auction or market, we’d never be able to say, ‘Ha! Got it for twenty quid: just stripped it, replaced the seat and backrest, fixed and balanced the legs – there were two missing, you know – repainted and finished it. Bargain, I tell you!’

If you are thinking of paying Petersham Nurseries a visit,  note that Ursula Buchan will be promoting her new book Back to the Garden there on April 24.  I’ve been dipping this collection of newspaper columns during the past few weeks and have found her quite enjoyable.

Love this.  I’m not sure where it comes from, having tried googling without arriving at much.  A friend wondered if it was from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo but not having seen the film (I know, I know, it’s a classic) I can’t say.  Any ideas on the origin of the mystery picture? Post your comments below if you have.

Sometimes the earth at work isn’t so beautiful.  This is especially so when natural disasters strike highly populated regions of less developed countries, where infrastructure, poor to begin with, is reduced to nothing.  Tris over at Wanderlust  is an aid worker helping to deliver emergency relief to disaster zones around the world and he’s just written a series of interesting posts about the earthquake in Haiti. Do have a look.

Ok. I know I promised you something planty in my previous post but I thought I’d slip in this teeny-weeny post  about  my latest cover shot without you noticing,  because if you can’t blow your own trumpet on your own blog, where can you?

The pic (of me) was taken by my sister after we spotted the cover mounted on the wall of Bloom, a wonderful restaurant in the KZN Midlands owned and run by Wendy Winthrop and her daughter, Sally Haigh.  You may recall that Sally is the wife of Mick, who makes whimsical ceramics for smart shops around the world.

Despite the financial perils of media work during recession, and it being a fool’s gold at times,  I enjoy what I do so much that after nearly ten years of it I still become ridiculously and rather embarrassingly giddy when I see things like this.   The cover, which  features Mick’s ceramics, belongs to the Midlands Meander 2009/2010 route map. Next to it is a photocopy of a piece I wrote earlier in the year for House and Garden.

Poor old belly button.  It’s looking worse for wear at the moment.  Well, what I can see of it anyway – and I do keep picking at it for a better look, even though I shouldn’t.   It’s covered up with bloodied surgical tape and gauze, along with three other puncture marks on my rather pale and squidgy tummy.

It began with a small but certain firmness between my hips, which was unusual because my tummy has never, ever been firm in any way. And let’s be frank, firm abdominal muscles don’t come without a lot of hard work, the kind of which I’d rather put into activities more interesting than press ups and crunches.

A visit to my gynae on Monday revealed I’d been growing a magnificent hemorrhagic cyst on an ovary, along with some – suspected -  endometriosis. I say suspected because endometriosis is a curious disease whose presence can only be determined surgically.  Although I’m not new to this, having had an operation for it  14 months ago, the news didn’t make me the happiest camper in the world.

‘We’ll need to take it out,’ the doctor said.

‘Can you do it before new year?’ I asked.

He widened his eyes; he raised his eyebrows. I don’t think he was expecting that kind of response.  He scratched his chin and looked at his diary.

‘How about Wednesday?’

And so it was that 48 hours later he ended up removing more gunge than he anticipated; I’m to go back for more in two weeks’ time.  The anaesthetic made me feel like hell but I’ve since made some observations.

1. South Africa’s healthcare is excellent – if you can pay for it. Despite living in the UK this year, I’d kept my South African medical aid going and I’m glad I did. My Spectator-reading gynae is a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and would, I expect, be as at home on Harley Street as he is on Jabu Ndlovo Street.  Only he’s much cheaper out here.  Having a laparoscopy on the NHS would have meant starting at the beginning, going through a GP, a gynaecologist and a specialist laparoscopic surgeon before joining a waiting list for a hospital bed.  I’m lucky my gynae maneuvers cameras and lasers in addition to delivering babies and taking smears.  But the people I really feel for are the South Africans whose only option is state health care, the management of which is, in many instances but not all,  shambolic, thanks to our overburdened and poorly run Department of Health.  For more on this do read Karen Little’s excellent blog, Just Up the Dose.

2. The nurses prayed at the beginning of each morning.  Whether or not God exists is one thing, and whether their faith resulted in better delivery is another,  but I like that this is a country where people are not so bound up in  officialdom that they are not free to do these things.  The sound of their singing, complete with harmony, was beautiful to hear.

3. Lots of people have endometriosis but I didn’t know about it until I was diagnosed with it.  And here is one of the great mysteries.  Doctors don’t know the cause of endometriosis and they can only manage it symptomatically – usually by removing damaging tissue from the pelvic cavity through keyhole surgery.   There are many euphemisms for periods, ovaries, uteri and associated  problems, and those horrible, sexist jokes about ‘ladies’ problems’  and ‘that time of the month’ circulate on email endlessly.  I know we’re in a much better place than, say, 40 years ago, when there was probably no preserving treatment, but let’s start calling things by their proper names.  We might find a cause and a cure sooner that way – and my belly button may not have to be reshaped so ignominiously ever again.

On a lighter note, happy new year!   The picture was taken in Lions River, KZN Midlands, one of my all-time  favourite places, earlier this week.  Promise that the next post will be about something more planty.

I’ll not deny it:  in the context of Bloglandia it’s been an age since I last posted.  I’m not sure how the past month went by so quickly, but it did and, by gum, we’re almost at the end of the year.  Apologies if you’ve visited recently, especially if you came here from my post on the Guardian gardening blog, and found no-one at home.

Being away from home is not that far-fetched a metaphor, actually.  At the moment I’m a hemisphere away from wintry Brixton, in the depths of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, South Africa.  My soundtrack this evening isn’t the perpetual scream of south London’s emergency vehicles but rather a summer chorus of bats, frogs and night birds.  To my delight, my feet, legs and arms are bare, even though I’m outside on the veranda.

What, then, does a picture of  marzipan fruits and well-worn cake decorating accoutrements have to do with anything? Well, I’m home for the holidays, and this afternoon it fell upon us to decorate – admittedly rather belatedly – the Christmas cake.  No matter that it was 32 degrees outside and that it would have been more appropriate to spend the afternoon in the swimming pool – there are some traditions that must be maintained at all costs.

We mutter about this, of course, because we know that eating vastly calorific food intended for northern winters, rather than southern summers, is peculiar, to say the least.

It’s also true that most ritualised practises shift over time and space, and  I doubt our simple Christmas bears much resemblance to the original English variety, just as our childhood diet of fabled England – cream teas, If,  the Famous Five, country houses, Colin Firths and Hugh Grants – leaves modern England wanting.

This year our wire tree is decorated almost exclusively with Zulu beadwork and I don’t think a Brussels sprout has ever graced our diningroom table.  The timing of our meal was based entirely on the weather report and whether it would be cool enough at midday for a heavy lunch.  Earlier in the week our neighbourhood carol singers arrived wearing Father Christmas hats and sang in beautiful Zulu harmony.

Yet to abandon our annual Christmas ritual, handed down over generations, would be unthinkable.  At the very least it would  loosen the roots that anchor us in the soil of our past,  and link  us to my family’s ancestors, who packed and unpacked their bags in India, Australia and most of southern Africa, and, in the spirit of that time, took with them and adapted to local conditions the small, comforting traditions of  ‘home’ wherever they went.