Gossamer
Along with the other anonymous night workers that keep the world ticking over – street sweepers, factory workers, nurses, night bus drivers, office cleaners, bakers, fishermen – a spider was hard at it while the rest of us slept last night.
Am always intrigued by spider webs; the regularity is fascinating but so, too, are the anomalies, which you can see here and there in this one. Makes you feel like saying, ‘Oops, dropped a stitch’.
Everything’s Jammy
Amusing piece by Sarah Vine in The Times yesterday about the resurgence of jam-making in Britain:
My mother, who came of age in the late Sixties, would far rather spend September soaking up the last of the summer’s rays with a gin and tonic than slaving over a hot pot, skimming off froth and washing endless sticky muslins.
For her generation, jam-making was an activity that only bored housewives on Valium and the fiercer members of the Women’s Institute indulged in. It was laborious, exhausting, just another redundant domestic activity that she was only too glad to be shot of.
How curious then, that in this fully liberated age, home-made jams appear to be enjoying a resurgence…
There’s a fine line between old-fashioned and retro-chic, and jam-making appears to have crossed it.
The full article includes recipes, from the WI Book of Preserves, that use blackberries, crab apples, damsons and rose hips. Remember, however, that you read about blackberrying and jam-making on this blog first. (Sometimes I am so on trend I stun even myself.)
Wots going on ‘ere, then?
Picked a handful of lavender, mostly crisp and spent, from outside the walled garden at Brockwell Park on my evening walk today. I stuffed it my jacket pocket and forgot about it until supper time when its scent was drawn out by the heat of the kitchen.
‘Is it legal to pick it?’ my 12-year-old friend asked, eyes wide, as we discussed the flowers over boiling potatoes and stewing apples.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it matters very much.’
Peppermint Cream, English Toffee or Hazelnut Praline?
Heaps and heaps and heaps of glorious things to see at the London Design Festival taking place in the city this week; do look at the site and links, even if you don’t live in the city. Choosing what to do is like trying to decide on a selection of chocolates and I admit to being a little overwhelmed by it all. That said, I do hope to make it to the Serpentine Gallery to see an aluminium pavilion designed by Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa shortly – well, at least before it’s dismantled.
Will post pics if they’re any good.
Coinciding with the festival is 100% Design, which claims to be the UK’s leading architecture and design event. I’m looking forward to putting my pass to good use and am particularly interested in an entire section devoted to sustainable design. Should be very interesting.
Fiddling on the Roof
There was a time when having a roof garden simply meant growing a few struggling plants in a collection of sun-weathered pots on a roof terrace. Yet as rising temperatures and declining biodiversity in inner cities take their toll, roof gardens are becoming increasingly popular. Just think about all that unused space up there – and the potential of gardens to moderate temperature and foster urban wildlife.
Installing a proper roof garden isn’t for the faint-hearted – there are structural considerations to be aware of for starters – but if you have the time, money and will, the results can be spectacular – as these roof gardens featured recently in National Geographic prove.
Click here to read the full article, which I found on the blog of green architect Justin Bere.
The Mighty Have Fallen
Artichokes. Cut down now that their flowers have passed.
In full flower they seemed enormous although, considering that size is relative and that the garden isn’t actually that big, I expect they were something more akin to a size 14 model at London Fashion Week.
I was more intrigued, however, by the husk of seed and stem that emerged after their moment of splendour had passed. Beautiful.
A Writer’s Garden
Beautiful piece about Roald Dahl’s garden at Great Missenden in the Telegraph, which you can find here.
The garden is open today. I am sorry to have missed it – and not to have told you about it earlier. Another time.
The only place in the garden where time has stood still is the locked shed where Dahl sat with a writing tray balanced on his knee. There everything – from the fag-ends in the ashtray, to the ball of silver foil formed from KitKat wrappers – remains just as it was when Dahl sat there inventing his fantasies.
Tomatoes, Clothes Pegs
Been ill with flu this week, so today two simple shots that I took in the garden this morning.
Some cherry tomatoes (above) which we have been growing from seed collected from some particularly good tomatoes bought at Sainsbury’s earlier this year. I doubt the Lords Sainsbury had that purpose in mind when they put them on shelf but no matter. They are called ‘Vittoria’ and although there are plenty of young fruit, they’ve been taking their sweet time to ripen. I hope they get it over and done with before the cold weather sets in for good.
And some clothes pegs on the line. I know it’s only gravity at work, but they seemed so disciplined hanging there on the line, one after the other, that they reminded me of toy soldiers waiting for a young emperor’s command.
Speaking of rulers, I was interested to discover that a pair of spiders has been turning a corner of the garden into small, silken empire. Pity the unsuspecting insect that enters that territory. I’ll post photos if I can get something on a dewy morning.
With an old woman’s wheezes,
xx
Growing Things
Something more from Nigel Slater – sorry, you will have to indulge me this topic. In this clip from Guardian Online, he promotes his new book Tender: A Cook and his Vegetable Patch.
Funny hearing someone speak after you’ve read them for years. He seems so earnest about growing your own that I half expected him to cry. Not surprising, I suppose, since the man can make eating a frugal bowl of lentils sound romantic and not something to be done out of necessity.
View; Chestnuts
Surprises from the upstairs bus window this morning: conkers ripening on chestnuts; leaves withering; pears dripping from a tree.
Speaking of chestnuts, did you know there is a World Conker Championship? You don’t, however, have to travel all the way to Northamptonshire to play the game: any park with a horse chestnut tree nearby will do. Find a fallen conker, make a hole in it, then thread a shoelace or length of string through it. The objective is to hit your partner’s conker with your own until one of them breaks. The hardest conker wins.
Usefully, you can cheat at the game by using a conker you gathered the previous year and allowed to harden. Quite.
Horse chestnuts, incidentally, are not the trees from which those delicious roasted chestnuts originate, and which Bonne Maman sells as beurre de marron (chestnut butter). Those are more likely to be the fruit of sweet chestnut trees.
My favourite celeb chef, Nigel Slater, had this to say about chestnut butter in the Guardian recently:
My favourite is to use it in a dessert with meringues. Crumble the meringues into a bowl, fold in a little whipped cream, squeeze the chestnut purée from the tube over the top, then spoon over some melted dark chocolate.
Yum.
I don’t expect horse chestnuts taste of anything much, really. Better just to beat the hell out of them on a playing field.
3 comments