Banana news
Today's breaking news, there are two shoots emerging in my collection of sad little empty pots.
More accurately, there is one shoot in one of the pots in which I planted banana seeds, and one has mysteriously migrated into a pot which contains bamboo seedlings. They are very recognisable banana shoots, they have a stiff tubular appearance which will eventually unfurl to become the characteristic banana leaf.
The weather here has been exceptionally wet for the past few days and all my pots are saturated. My biggest concern is that the shoots will damp off in the cool weather.
I can only identify one of the seedlings, it is the purple flowering banana, Musa Ornata. The other; roaming banana, could be one of half a dozen varieties, we may never know.
Way out West
Just in case you wondered about the name, there was a reason, in fact a couple of reasons why I chose it.
In 1910 Arthur Stanley Jefferson performed at the Ealing Hippodrome (AKA The New Theatre/Ealing Theatre/Lyric). He was part of the Fred Karno troupe, amongst whose other luminaries was Charlie Chaplin. In his capacity as understudy to Mr Chaplin, Stan Laurel (formerly of Ulverston, Cumbria), followed the flow and went to America. The Hippodrome, incidentally, was designed by Frank Matcham (architect of the London Coliseum, Palladium, Hackney Empire and many more). It was demolished in the sixties, and an entirely unremarkable building replaced it, now occupied by WH Smiths. The only things that can be said about this unattractive structure is that it is reputed to have a haunted stockroom, where the dressing rooms used to be, and the IRA bomb managed to miss it, a wasted opportunity.
At the peak of their popularity, Laurel and Hardy visited the UK as a part of a European tour, and on their itinerary was Ealing. Not this time the Hippodrome, but rather the Walpole Cinema, converted from an Ice rink in 1912, and still functional in my childhood. Contemporary reports have the streets clogged with adoring fans.
I have never been a Laurel and Hardy fan, but the more I discover about their background, and their sheer performance intelligence gives me a great deal more respect for them than I used to have. They were genuine craftsmen and both respected and valued their audience, which I suspect is rare these days.
shock horror
During a random wander in the garden this afternoon, I noticed with utter amazement that my
Oullins Golden Gage tree has borne fruit. The tree in question is planted against a tall south-west facing wall and for nine years has done sod all.
This year it has one solitary perfect fruit, after all this time. I hope it tastes good, or it may be firewood time for the wretched plant.
I think plums are the most sublime fruits; the debased wooden tasteless things that are sold in the supermarkets bear no relation to the reality. On the other hand, they are fickle, stroppy trees producing branch breaking crops one year, nothing the next.
I guess this applies in spades to the older varieties, the qualities that give them value to the consumer: flavour, identity, idiosyncracy, have been replaced by the supermarket mantra of product recognition, shelf life and transportability.
There is no way that a fruit farmer can manage his business growing rare fruits, if the tree has a hissy fit and does nothing for a couple of years, he might go out of business.
My local farmers market (hooray for farmer markets!), has an apple seller who is strictly seasonal, among the varieties he sells is a cooker called
Cow Snout which I love, I've been unable to identify the tree at Brogdale (national apple collection), and he tells me that he has just the one tree, so maybe I shouldn't chop down my
Oullins Golden Gage just yet, it may surprise me.
bugger...
The Monkey Puzzle tree (Araucaria Araucana) that dominates my neighbour's front garden has fruited. Well, actually, it developed fruits two years ago, but now they have ripened, and there are little angular seed pods everywhere. The Monkey Puzzle is an Andean native, and was introduced to this country by Archibald Menzies in the 18th century, whilst on a plant hunting expedition it is reported that; dining in Chile he pocketed some of the nuts from the table, which he subsequently germinated during the voyage.
Menzies seems to have been a man after my own heart, he was threatened with court-martial as a consequence of a dispute over his greenhouse on the quarterdeck of the Discovery.
I picked up a couple of the seeds, and picked at them (there are hundreds), and couldn't detect anything even vaguely seedlike. Subsequent enquiries have led me to discover that the blasted plant is dioecious, and requires a male (as are Holly trees, Date palms, and asparagus), so the chances of the seeds being viable are miniscule.
There are two more monkey puzzle trees in the locale (within 500 metres), neither of which are more than ten feet tall, unfortunately they take up to forty years to reach sexual maturity, and there is no way of identifying their gender until they achieve that maturity (also a problem if you are trying to cultivate Holly).
I suspect that we may well have ended up with the first Chilean Pine feminist collective, although I have no intention of being here to find out, the last backlash of the formerly disreputable elements who used to make this an interesting place to live, may have left us an unabashed collection of lesbian trees to embarrass the four-wheel drivers.
http://www.victorialodging.com/archibald_menzies.htm
Ferns, how can they be so complicated?
I've bought some seed (spores) for a black New Zealand Tree fern (Cyathea Medullaris), and just at the moment I'm slightly boggling at the complexity of the germination procedure.
The seedsman who sold me the seeds/spores very kindly included a germination guide with the item, this is only two pages of A5, 8 point type. The level of aseptic technique apparently required is in the realms of that which I had to use in the days when I was a medical technician handling dangerous pathogens and radioactive materials.
I can quite see how these methods might be necessary, ferns, after all, produce spores by the million, and I have absolutely no idea how many spores I have purchased, or what their germination rate is.
So, next weeks fun and games will involve sieving compost and sand (the instructions even say what gauge of sieve to use). I don't have a microwave, so I can't nuke the growing medium as instructed, I'll have to use plan B which involves lots of boiling water.
Still, if it all works out, I'll have lots of little ferns hardy to -4 degrees apparently, so they can live outside with the olives and the citrus.
I'm having a citrus overhaul at the moment, I've repotted my tahiti lime, and it is very happy and covered in flowers. Next up will be the variegated lemon and the limequat, both of which are looking a bit stressed. It has been very dry and not hugely sunny so I'm not especially surprised.
The plant that's most happy at the moment is my grapevine, which is covered in fruit, let's hope we don't have a wet september, or they'll all pop.
leaving home...
The garden is heaving with birds at the moment, fortunately the cat that lives upstairs is capable only of staring, and limits herself to catching frogs which she slowly flattens.
The various nests that dot the garden are beginning to eject their broods; outside my bedroom window there's a wrens which has appeared every year for the last five or so. I haven't seen the chicks yet, but there's been a lot of squeaking. I was most pleased to see the family of long tailed tits, I counted nine new chicks bouncing noisily and energetically in one of the apple trees. My researches lead me to discover that they can have up to twelve eggs in one brood, which must be hell for a bird the size of a ping-pong ball. I've now seen newly fledged robins, great and blue tits, blackbirds, as well as the now ubiquitous collared doves.
What I have been missing, thus far, is butterflies. I suppose with an energetic bird population this may not be entirely surprising. All we have is the occasional cabbage white, a great survivor, since most cabbage round here comes from Waitrose, and has been sprayed to within an inch of its life. The buddleia is just starting to flower, so hopefully there will be some better news soon. Nobody has any nettles any more, the foodplant of larval red admirals, peacocks and tortoiseshells, round here, if it isn't sculptural, or ornamental, then it's in a skip before you can say knife. I have a four foot high buxus sempervirens whose crime was that having been trained as a pyramid, the tip died off. Into a skip pronto, it is now a natural shaped small bush, and quite happy with it.
The Avril Lavigne experiment (see Parrots v. Skater punk) has been quite successful, at any rate my gooseberries are still there. Although, bewilderingly, one of the dangling CD's was carried off, and I found it on the other side of the garden, I blame the foxes, no taste in music.
missing...
I'm having a bit of a worry; I've a friend who works at the Bloomsbury Theatre, lives in Hackney and hasn't responded to my text messages. For those not in the know, the number 30 bus travels through Hackney and Bloomsbury on its travels, the exploding bus on thursday morning was right in the zone.
I had many texts enquiring after my health, for which I am truly thankful, and which slightly startled me, but my efforts to contact my friend, whose workplace is adjacent to the bus explosion, have got nowhere.
There is a point where I guess you have to pick up the phone, her theatre has been out of action until this weekend, so I couldn't call them. I found a very sad and desperate website which lists those people who have not been found or identified, but are missing. I scanned it with dread, but there was no record of my friends name.
I was struck, however, by how cosmopolitan the list of names of the missing was, I love and hate London, I love the mixture and the muddle, the fantastic variety; I hate the pursuit of the dollar, nothing is sacred if there's enough money behind it, but the one thing you can't take away from London is that it's open to all. Not always welcoming, cheery or friendly, but open nonetheless.
I was heartened today, when I happened to be in the Sainsbury in West Ealing (close to Southall), to witness the very nice young man giving away free copies of the Daily Mail being ignored and rebuffed by evidently ethnic brits, hoorah for the red,white and blue! I love multi-ethnicity, I think I can claim to be reasonably multi-ethnic myself.
I'll let you know if there are any developements.
Post-script; All is well, she hadn't got my messages until this morning, although everything at the theatre is pretty chaotic it is still business as usual.
nomenclatura
Just a quick word of explanation about the naming of things; the theatre industry has a tendency to renaming things, hence my appellation;
lampy, a kinder descriptive than
sparks or
sparky, another common term.
We lighting people get off lightly (sorry), by comparison with the other disciplines; carpenters, or
chippies are also described as
wood butchers, sound operators are universally known as
noise boys, and those responsible for TVs and projection are called
videots.I'll update this theme as more choice terms cross my path.
