I’ve never been much of a July and August kind of guy. When you have skin like supermarket pastry, it takes three weeks’ sunbathing to stop being transparent; plus I grew up wanting little more from summer than to stay in playing records and watching every delivery of every Test match.
May and September are my months. The frothy hedgerows, elderflower, chiffchaffs singing their name loud, the pleasure of warm evenings in dipping sun; the gratitude that it’s here at last.
I’ve been gardening. ‘Gardening’ has always sounded trivial to me - something you do when you have too much time on your hands - and I’ve leant towards ‘growing’ to describe what I do as it sounds more essential; that was ok when I had 17 acres of smallholding to play in, but our garden is very much a garden and there’s no avoiding that after a year or two of seeing what already grows here, I am gardening in it.
It has me feeling like I’ve returned to somewhere I used to call home. It’s very different to smallholding - here, I might have room for 1 or 2 of something rather than 50 or 100 - but I already feel like I know each of those 1 or 2s intimately.
I see the each of the flowers on the young mulberry (below), I know how many medlars are forming on the tree, I’m aware how quickly each of the Apios americana plants are twining up their stake.
When I ran courses back in the early days at River Cottage, so often people would be in paralysis - making plans for the day they might have an acre, perhaps 2 or even 10 - as if waiting for their real life to begin. I loved turning those blank 17 acres into a place like no other - a vineyard, orchards of pecans, sweet chestnuts, perry pears, a forest garden; thousands of plants, in perhaps the most diverse ‘garden’ of edible plants in the country*. And yet, these few square metres of garden are giving me equal, if different, pleasure.
Today, I noticed ants farming aphids on the solitary angelica. A few species of ant might move in on a plant where aphids have set up home, gathering them into flocks; the aphids feed on the plant’s sap, and the ants stroke them with their antennae, tucking into the honeydew they release. In their gratitude/self interest, the ants protect the aphids from potential predators. This I knew.
The time not spent looking after 17 acres meant I could nose around a little more about what’s going on, and discovered that some ant species stack this seemingly equitable exchange a little more in their favour by secreting chemicals that inhabit aphids’ wing production; they might even bite off any that develop. The black garden ant, Lasius niger, happily farming away in the clip, can even secrete chemicals in its footsteps that tranquillise the aphids, preventing them moving too far: whatever it takes to keep them in a flock.
Insert your own clumsy metaphor for modern capitalist society.
What breaks up this questionable alliance? Parasitic wasps - against which ants are as useful as a marshmallow sword - or when the ants - realising that the flock has grown large enough to be depleting the plant - carry aphids to a new plant within the ant colony’s territory.
A little less doing, and it’s surprising what you see.
So, expect more windows into this garden as it develops, more ideas for plants you might be unfamiliar with - edible tree leaves like Toona, the delicious fruit of the Chilean guava, blue honeysuckle, orange balm, and more.
May means Chelsea Flower Show. I was there last week - a cracking year for gardens it was too - and making cocktails on Mark Gregory’s brilliant garden. It really took the Chelsea idea of how edibles and ornamentals work together so far forward. In what might be described as a peculiar and hilarious thought, you see at the start of this clip, just behind Jo Whiley, the tan sleeve of someone taking a pic of me making cocktails in the kitchen? That is Tom from Succession. I am on ‘you can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greg’s’ Tom’s phone. I am on ‘you don’t hear much about syphilis these days; it’s very much the Myspace of STD’s’ Tom’s phone. This ridiculousness pleases me greatly as he is perhaps my favourite TV character since Paulie Walnuts.
And lastly, something I hope you’ll enjoy listening to - much of which has been filling my ears this month - while you (hopefully) idle in the garden, enjoying it being itself.
Thanks for reading and being part of this.
*Martin Crawford’s forest garden in Dartington might just take the biscuit.
One rather than a hundred