You and your racist garden!

OK so the lefty sociologist didn't merely jump the shark, he did a back flip and double somersault over said fish:

“Gardeners’ Question Time is not the most controversial show on Radio 4, and yet it is layered with, saturated with, racial meanings.

“The context here is the rise of nationalism. The rise of racist and fascist parties across Europe. Nationalism is about shoring up a fantasy of national integrity. My question is, what feeds nationalism? What makes nationalism powerful?”

Dr Pitcher said the “crisis in white identity in multicultural Britain” meant people felt unable to express their views for fear of being called racist, so expressed their racial identity in other ways, such as talking about gardening."

Apparently all that talk of 'native species' and 'pure soil' is giving Dr Pitcher palpitations - a sort of belief that liking gardening is really a manifestation of 'blood and soil' nationalism. Now what we're seeing here is one man's projection of a perceived crisis onto anything and everything he sees - so gardening becomes fascism because everything he doesn't understand or appreciate is fascism.

But like many things, gardening is an import - something from soft and sunny southern Europe. And those Southern Europeans weren't taken - here's Tacitus:

"The climate is unpleasant, with frequent rain and mist, but it does not suffer from extreme cold."

And the truth is that 'native' doesn't really apply to many plants - at least in the British context. As Maggie Campbell-Culver described in her delightful book, "The Origin of Plants":

A small number of plants did somehow survive the onslaught of the millions of years of ice to emerge triumphant into the post-glacial period...There were in all probability no more than two hundred or so species in total, certainly little growing that could have been turned into a sustaining meal or a posy of flowers.

So nearly all of the plants and trees we love - the daffodils the bluebells, the horse chestnuts and the lilies - arrived after the ice age had finished. And a goodly number - even such forgotten plants as Alexander - arrived because humans like to grow them in fields or gardens.

My garden - a glimpse is in the picture above - has the regular mix of 'native' and 'non-native'. There's a willow tree, yellow flags, currants and primrose - all pretty native. And then we've rhododendron, geranium, azalea and Japanese acer - definitely immigrants. But what of the the more recent mish-mash - the fancy hybrid primula, the tea roses, the day lilies? These plants - immigrants all - are the real glory of the English garden because gardeners have tweaked, crossed, selected and encouraged them to become the splendid things they are today.

It is this magic - the human intervention that makes for the wonders of our gardens - that our lefty sociologist fails to understand. Perhaps a bit of this is the snobbery of the urban trendy, the dismissing of gardening as something that boring old people do in dull old suburbs, but there's also a profound ignorance about the garden, the way in which we try to balance the natural order with the new and exotic.

So the idea that talking about gardening is suppressed racism may be gibbering, dribbling nonsense but underlying such a statement is something else - an ignorance of the garden, the dismissing of the pastime as some sort of 'white, middle-class' obsession and the desire to make something as quintessentially English as gardening somehow an ethnic marker rather than a cultural wonder.

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The ghastly fascism that is the EU...cont...

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This is a state grab of monumental proportions:

A new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to "grow, reproduce or trade" any vegetable seeds that have not been "tested, approved and accepted" by a new EU bureaucracy named the "EU Plant Variety Agency."

It's called the Plant Reproductive Material Law, and it attempts to put the government in charge of virtually all plants and seeds. Home gardeners who grow their own plants from non-regulated seeds would be considered criminals under this law.

And worse than just a state grab of control, the grab is done at the behest of corporate partners - the big seed producers like Monsanto and Du Pont. Put simply this is a repeat of the manner in which the EU destroyed the non-OEM car parts business - to the cost of consumers - except this time it's you, in your garden than is being controlled.

This is quite simply fascism.

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I think they're called gardens?

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You have to giggle when greens and planners come together:

Green party-controlled Brighton & Hove Council has published draft guidance to encourage developers to include food growing areas in new building schemes.

Clearly important to our green pals is this growing:

"We already have strategies in place aimed at encouraging food growing and releasing more space for people to use.  So it makes sense to see how every new development can contribute to these goals."

I think they're called gardens!

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Why we garden..

I mean - look at my rhodies! Aren't they brilliant. And all I did was stick them in the ground and make sure they don't get choked by brambles, nettles and ivy!

Wonderful stuff and so easy!

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Nuts!

Well that's how it feels sometimes. You look out the window in the morning, the radio sputters out whatever news items our masters have decided we merit hearing and then Classic FM play more Vaughan Williams - I never knew just how much that man wrote (or should I say steal as I don't think he actually created an original tune in his life) and I certainly have no idea why he gets played so much. Especially that screeching, squealing, "Lark Arising" - it's like an out of tune banshee.

Nuts, I say. Nuts.

In this case walnuts - which aren't my favourite nuts - but which are pretty fine in Kathryn's banana cake. Walnuts, of course, feature in a (probably forbidden) piece of doggerel:

The dog, the wife and the walnut tree,
The more you beat them the better they be.

I'm not about to conduct this experiment - I don't have a dog and Kathryn punches harder than I do - but the beating of nut trees is an interesting idea. And here's why:

‘The old custom of beating a walnut-tree was carried out firstly to fetch down the fruit and secondly to break the long shoots and so encourage the production of short fruiting spurs’: M. Hadfield British Trees (1957).

Fascinating stuff! And, as I said at the start of all this, nuts!!

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Friday Fungus: Grow your own!

Found these "Mushroom Dowels" from Mr Fothergill - it appears you drill a hole in a hardwood log, bang the dowel in and lo, oyster mushrooms! All seems pretty simple - just need a log!

What I do have is a pair of tall stumps - one sycamore, one ash - in the garden. Problem is that the instructions require the log to be wrapped in plastic and "left to incubate in a warm location at approx. 25 degrees C for around three months." Will be experimenting with this option come the Summer as well as initiating the search for a log!

Right now though there's nowhere in the house that's consistently at the required temperature so we'll be waiting for spring.

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Symbiosis....

Gardeners know that, as you dig down comes the robin. For sure, that robin's mostly interested in the worms and grubs you're turning up - with the prospect of goodies from the earth. But he's also a friend - we feel joined in our labour by part of nature.

The robin lives in our garden because it's managed. We turn the soil unearthing food, we build sheds to nest in, we plant trees and bushes to roost in and, when the weather's bad we put down food. And that robin thrives - along with his brother, the blackbird and cousin, the wren. It's worth coping with the cat to live in a place of abundance.

This symbiosis - our pleasure for the robin's food and shelter - is central to our relationship with nature. It isn't the relationship of the 'bunny-hugger' - oo-ing and ah-ing at the pretty birds. The robin isn't an especially friendly chap but an aggressive, territorialist. Woe betide any other robin that wanders onto his patch!

No, this is a symbiosis of appreciation and recognition, of impermanence, of interdependency and, at the bottom, self-interest.

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A little on the glory of the garden....

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After a day hacking. chopping, digging, mowing and trimming I feel rather better than I did yesterday. For sure most of my body feels like someone's been over it with a meat tenderiser but the garden now looks cared for - able to grow a little, to bud and to flower.

And the garden needs this care. After a week of so of letting it rip and few judicious cuts, a little reality for the burgeoning green stuff and termination for the weeds that get in the way of the garden's glory.

Nature does the good stuff - what I do is make it possible for that to happen.

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