Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice
When you have spent almost an entire sunny weekend day indoors, there is nothing like popping outside and being confronted by a sea of hobbling marathon runners to make you feel like a total slug – especially if the only constructive thing you have done all Sunday is make Lemon Drizzle Cake.
Lemon Drizzle Cake? Well, it began with a homemade recipe book I bought last week at the Open Garden I mentioned in my previous post. I love homemade recipe books, especially when they are called things like Other People’s Cakes, as this one is. That said, I must admit that the recipes in this one do sound a little suggestive – Granny Meg’s Fruit Cake with Ginger, for instance, or Nellie’s Gateau au Chocolat. I’ll stop before I blush.
What got me onto making cakes this weekend was a miserable packet of malted biscuits I’d bought, earlier in the week, in the hope that they’d fill a little tea time gap. My, was I disappointed: they tasted of precisely nothing, the reason for which became abundantly clear as soon as I read the ingredients list (which I ought to have done in the first place). It was palm oil and corn syrup, rather than butter and sugar, that were sinking their way to my hips. What a shameful waste of calories.
This does, however, bring me to two blogs I’ve wanted to tell you about for some time. The first is Wandering Gaia, belonging to science and nature writer Gaia Vince,who has the kind of career I’d love were I more intrepid and better at figures. Previously an editor at Nature and then New Scientist, she’s travelling the world looking at how climate change is affecting those most vulnerable to it. She’s already visited Indonesia, where natural forest is being cleared to accommodate our palm oil habit.
The second is from über blogger and ladies’ man James Alexander Sinclair, usually of Blogging from Blackpitts, who has begun (ok, a while ago now) with some mates a blog all about biscuits. Unsurprisingly, it’s called Encounters with Remarkable Biscuits. I’d recommend a nice cup of tea and a happy hour dipping into it.
The picture is of some blossom, which I’m beginning to think is all rather too ephemeral for my good mental health. You spend months anticipating the stuff, it arrives and, before you know it, it’s over, gathering in papery drifts on the pavement. That sounds like a lot of things, actually – a slice of Lemon Drizzle Cake being one. I’d post a picture, only it’s all gone.
Thank God for Spring Sunshine and Magnolias
Walking along Half Moon Lane in Herne Hill this afternoon to see an Open Garden (beautiful; full of hellebores, forget-me-nots, wallflowers and daffodils), I recognised the sense of relief and well-being I felt last year, when I took these photos of some magnolias in Kew Gardens. See? So pleased was I to be in some sunshine after what I thought was a long, dreary winter that I pointed my camera directly at the sun to make sure it was real.
The date on these pics is March 15, which marks this spring out to be nearly a month later than last year, although, to be fair, some magnolias have already been out for a week or two. Having grown up with almost perpetual warmth and sunshine, this winter has felt like an eternity.
But before I get het up on dates and figures and what we think plants and sunshine ought to be doing at certain times of year, read this lovely piece from A Single Swallow, by Horatio Clare:
Like birds, we take our cues from seasons, from the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun. But we have formalised our calculations into a rigid but invisible web of grids, of time and space, which theoretically tell us when and where we are. The problem is that though there are many repeating mathematical patterns in nature and cosmology, the rhythms of the earth fluctuate outside the calculations we have designed to contain it…We talk of early springs and late summers as though the seasons were somehow out of joint, while it would perhaps be more logical to consider that it is our neat calendar of hours, days and weeks, with their chain of ‘seasonal’ festivals that is inaccurate.
(I’ve just spent about twenty minutes trying to find that piece which I read last night at about 1am, noted and then neglected to mark on the page. It’s on page 280, if you’re interested.)
He has a point, hasn’t he? Clare refers chiefly to swallows and their migration, which he follows through Africa from Cape Town to rural Wales, but I think it has bearing on plants, too.
Still, it doesn’t diminish my pleasure at having just cause to walk bare legged, wear sunglasses and drink ginger beer in the middle of the afternoon once more.
PS Being close to the flight path to Heathrow, I’m so enjoying the peace and quiet of not having the drone of aeroplane engines overhead at all times of day and night. That said, besides those travellers who really do have places to be, I can’t help feeling for fruit, cut-flower and vegetable farmers whose livelihoods are held ransom by a volcano on the other side of the world – and by what some would say is an untenable economic system, the vulnerability of which is now laid bare. The Guardian has an interesting piece on the subject here
Pimp your Pavement
Have you been into a Poundland lately?
Before you choke and splutter on your tea, I’ll say that it’s a brilliant place for buying random necessities like toothpaste, knee highs and deodorant for a fraction of the price you would pay in supermarkets or chemists.
Surprisingly Poundland, well, in Brixton at least, also has a fair selection of seeds, bulbs and even bedding plants, which at, er, a pound a bag makes them a bargain. With spring in the air and pollen in my nose, I’ve recently spent more than a few minutes looking at the brightly coloured varieties and wondering what to do with them.
The sad truth is that they’ve remained on shelf, for the garden that I share with its owners is simply too refined, too sedate, to suffer a garrulous band of newcomers from the wrong side of the tracks. So, how do I rescue said plants from a life of halogen lighting without causing horticultural disharmony and – if you’ll excuse a pun on that cliche – a riot of colour?
Queue Richard Reynolds, the enterprising man behind guerillagardening.org and his new project – and one after my own heart – called Pimp Your Pavement.
Heard of it yet? It’s encouraging us, or everyone within sight of pavement at least, to plant up its empty spaces, tree pits especially, with flowers and shrubs, and the Pimp Your Pavement website gives good hints and tips to help you get your own section of pavement looking more cheerful.
In the past, Richard has tackled some quite large projects, notably the neglected municipal areas close to his flat but, for the average person, taking on that kind of thing can be rather daunting, and without tremendous commitment it is almost bound to fail. The last time I tried guerilla gardening, in Durban some years ago, a little Felicia amelloides I planted and hoped would spread was repeatedly mown down by a municipal tractor driver merely doing his job.
The small dead space beneath the tree outside my front door, however, is rather more manageable and less likely to receive any attention at all, save the odd bit of fertilizing urine from one Brixton’s many dogs. Time to head back to Poundland.
She’s Here!
What I loved about this spring day (yes, she’s here, spring is finally here):
Putting bed linen out on the line to dry for the first time since, er, October, and leaving the sun and wind do their work.
Making lemon cupcakes with two twelve-year-olds and realising that it doesn’t matter if the icing isn’t perfectly smooth, or that the sponge didn’t rise as much as it ought to have done. Together, butter, sugar and flour will taste good no matter what you do to them.
This year’s first tulips.
At the end of the day, a man leaning out of a top floor window and having a fag.
Hearing a delivery man wish a customer well with her pregnancy.
The deep-plum leaves of a prunus against a sage-green wall.
To the west, the sun setting over a hundred chimney tops, which made me think of this:
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