Gardener’s Question Time, Live

Gardener’s Question Time does me a power of good. It comes on just after Sunday lunch and as soon as Eric Robson has introduced the panel I’m away. The weather forecast wakes me up in time for the last question and I’m then ready for whatever the world has to throw at me, such as my tea.

I should add that my tendency to drop off is my fault not theirs, and if anyone has any doubts about whether this is an entertaining programme, I’d recommend that they go to see one of the shows being recorded. The panel move about the country; a year or two back I saw a show being recorded in Windermere and tonight it was our turn, in Grange-over-Sands. The strength of the programme is that it’s not scripted; in fact the panellists don’t get to see the questions in advance, so everyone has to live on their wits. Which they do, splendidly. Tonight Eric Robson was in the chair and Anne Swithinbank, Matthew Biggs and Bob Flowerdew were there to answer the questions. Anne Swithinbank has a way of illustrating what she’s saying with flamboyant gestures and took no notice of Eric Robson’s pleading eyes which said “We’re on the radio dear”. She’s also a mind reader as she recommended Tithonia (quite an unusual choice) on the very day that I’d marked it to buy in my seed catalogue. Bob Flowerdew is very close to being batty, but he gives his answers with such wit and panache that nobody minds. Eric Robson and Matt Biggs are as sharp as newly honed secateurs and in fact there’s more humour in one edition of this radio show than in a whole series of Gardener’s World under the lugubrious charge of Monty Don. The audience tonight was too busy laughing for anyone to snatch 40 winks, even me.

Alex Kerr’s ‘Dogs and Demons’

“Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars, standing in the garden, nodding your head to the bees as they sing of the dews and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you?”
~Okakura Kakuso – ‘The Book of Tea’

When Alex Kerr wrote, in “Lost Japan” about the changes which had taken place during the 20 years he had lived in his adopted country he told the story with love and affection. Ten years later, in ‘Dogs and Demons’, his love has turned to hatred, his affection to scorn. His book contains as much bile and bitterness as the angriest divorce petition. His anger is directed at a corrupt bureaucracy which wastes countless millions on absurd construction projects; on a supine population who take no interest in the environment and allow these projects to take place; on an innate conservatism which won’t allow other nationalities to immigrate or integrate; and an educational system which brainwashes its youth into never questioning authority.

Alex Kerr’s analysis is accurate, but his conclusions are wrong. When he says that the bureaucracy is powerful and intent on extending its power he’s describing bureaucrats everywhere; whether in Japan or elsewhere they’ll get pleasure from standing at a drain and pouring other people’s money down it. In Japan the money is wasted on construction projects, in England on sink estates.

And his pleas for Japan to become more like the United States, with all sorts of bossy pressure groups, open borders and an educational system where anything goes would result in Japan losing that specialness which appealed to him in the first place. Perhaps he just grew tired of being in a place where things got done and you never had to worry about your wallet being stolen.

A Birth Day Celebration

Now that Midwives has taken over from Downton Abbey as everyone’s favourite, the usual questions are being asked about how authentic these tales of childbirth in the old days really are. They should ask my mother, whose story of the day she had me proves that life then is about as far removed from how things are today as you could imagine. There was no pain relief and no attentive Dad, but she did have a bottle of Champagne on hand. Her confinement took place at home, where a nurse was on hand, who came equipped with a gas and air machine, but didn’t find out, until it was too late, that she didn’t know how to work it. The doctor had been called, but he arrived when it was all over, as did my father. This is how my mother described things in a letter to her parents the following day:

“After Charlie (my father) and the doctor arrived they made a hammock of a sheet and carried me through into my own bedroom and we straightaway celebrated Jonathan’s arrival with a bottle of Champagne. And never has wine tasted so wonderful to me! The doctor, whose only part in the whole procedure had been to take my pulse, then retired to the lounge with Charlie and between them they drank all but the dregs of that bottle of whisky you brought us from Scotland. Nurse and I were disgusted with him, but actually I was too happy to be mad about anything. Jonathan is Charlie’s choice of name – he cabled it to you before I could decide whether I wanted it or not. An hour after Jonathan was born we were all discussing how soon it would be wise to start with the next!”

The “next” didn’t arrive for 15 months and the doctor drove home merrily at half past ten, happy with a job well done. Yes, Midwives is spot on.

Un Homme, Une Femme et Un Chien

I liked the film ‘Un Homme et Une Femme’ so much as a young man that I went to see it 7 times.  The simple love story, directed by Claude Lelouch, was a sensation when it first came out and won 2 Oscars and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but is forgotten now.  It’s French through and through and all those years ago I thought the two stars, Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant impossibly romantic.

I hadn’t given the film a thought for years and the only reason it came to mind is that the soundtrack is used as a motif for the passing of the years by Julian Barnes in ‘The  Sense of an Ending’. The record, Un Homme et Une Femme, was the sexiest song of the Sixties; its composer, Frances Lai, went on to write Love Story, which was the sickliest song of the Seventies.

In ‘The Sense of an Ending’ the protagonist kicks over the traces of his past and bitterly regrets doing so.  Reading the book rekindled my memories of the film but I wondered whether it would be wise to watch it again and risk shattering those memories.  I needn’t have worried.  It’s funny and happy and sad and everything I’d remembered.  And, as this video clip shows, it also stars the most joyous dog.

Boy’s Own Gardening Part 3 – Killing Mice and Slugs

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods”, or as it is usually put,
“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I arrived home last night an owl flew in front of my headlights, which pleased me mightily, not simply because owls are magnificent creatures but because the presence of an owl means the absence of mice.

Mice are insidious pests in the garden, the more annoying because the damage they do is below the surface of the soil, so you aren’t aware of it until it’s too late.  They like to nibble at roots and bulbs.  Two or three generations ago every gardener kept enough strychnine and arsenic in the potting shed to keep mice at bay and Poirot busy for a lifetime, but poisons wouldn’t do in the kitchen garden.  What would?  One idea was to use the device pictured above, which shows a brick being suspended by a piece a string, which the mouse nibbles through, whereupon the brick falls and squashes it.  This was described in Gardening Illustrated as “the most simple, inexpensive, and surest mouse-catcher ever invented”*.  On the same page in the magazine is a letter from a reader in which he tells of the fun to be had hunting slugs, which are baited with piles of bran:  ”My sporting time is early morning (before breakfast) and evening, and I cut the slugs in two with a knife.  I can safely say that with twopennyworth of bran, dotted down on my rockery, I have killed considerably over 1,000 in a few days, and still they come, only much smaller in size”.

*Gardening Illustrated October 11th, 1879

Dead Tree Ferns

On 15th March 1879, William Robinson shook up the gardening press by launching a new weekly paper, priced at 1 penny and aimed fairly and squarely at the amateur gardener.  He called the paper “Gardening Illustrated” and seven months later he was boasting: “Our weekly issue is now larger than that of the whole of the horticultural press of the United Kingdom combined”. Of course, in the days before circulation figures were published, there was no evidence for this assertion and it was hotly contested by his rivals.

Gardening Illustrated was launched during the craze for subtropical gardening, which Robinson himself had done so much to promote with his book, “The Subtropical Garden.”  But the public were beginning to realise that exotic plants don’t always survive in our climate and one of the early articles dealt with the problem of what to do with the trunks of dead tree ferns.  Nowadays most people would throw them away but the Victorians had more imaginative ideas.  Robinson recommended using the trunks to display ferns, with a large fern such as a Nephrolepsis or a Lomaria gibba (now known as a Blechnum gibbum) placed in a hole scooped out of the top, with smaller ferns stuck into the trunk along the side.

This is a problem very close to my heart, and I suspect, thousands of others, after last winter.  The photo above shows my tree ferns looking splendid after the first snowfall of winter, but the prolonged cold finished them off, so I was left with 6 lifeless stems. My solution, suggested to me by Mike Tullis of Inglefield Plants (himself the latest in a long line of Victorians), was to decorate the stem with Fascicularia bicolor.   I think it looks good.  All I need to do now is scoop out the top and insert a large fern for that William Robinson look.

Why I Love Japan Part 7 – The Slow Life

My home town of Grange-over-Sands is the archetypal slow town.  Its citizens, most of them being elderly, move slowly; for them the 30 mph sign isn’t a speed limit it’s an unattainable dream.  Grange is almost unique in the modern world in having an abundance of independent food shops so that you can do your weekly shop without visiting a supermarket – which is handy as there isn’t one.  It’s an ideal candidate for becoming a “Slow Town” under a scheme promoted by the Slow Food movement and last year, with the backing of Slow Food, I proposed this to the Town Council. Unfortunately my proposal was rejected, not on the grounds of cost (because I’d anticipated that by agreeing to underwrite the costs) but with the unassailable logic of their inherent slowness, or to put it another way, they were so slow witted and lethargic that they couldn’t be bothered.

If the idea had been proposed in Japan, I’ve no doubt it would have been welcomed enthusiastically.  The barrenness of being busy, as Carla Carlisle puts it, is something well known to the Japanese,  whose working hours are punishingly long. “Slow” is big in Japan, so much so that whole cities have become “Slow Cities”*, and the Slow Food movement has more members in Japan than any country except Italy.

The extraordinary thing is that whilst most Japanese opt for the city life with no access to a garden or an allotment, the possibility of living the good life is greater there than in any other developed country.  This video tells the story of a young couple, Sean and Misa, who were given a farm in Shikoku rent-free on the sole condition that they cultivated the land to prevent it from being reclaimed by the forest.  There are dozens of abandoned farmhouses in the same community and all over Japan, and so the opportunity taken up by Sean and Misa is available to many more.

*Here’s the ‘Slow Life’ Declaration of the Japanese city of Kakegawa, which I think is rather lovely and should be read, ever so slowly, to the Town Councillors of Grange:

The practice of the “Slow Life” involves the following eight themes:

SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.

SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).

SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.

SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably and ultimately, to conserve our environment.

SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.

SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.

SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.

SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.

Why I Love Japan Part 6 – The Bathroom

As I lay groaning in the hotel bedroom in Taipei, certain I was going to die, the thought occurred to me that no-one knew where I was. I’d checked into a cheap hotel and, in the days when you thought twice before picking up the phone to make an international call, I hadn’t told anyone where I was staying. In my delirium I convinced myself that when the maid found my dead body the hotel owners would avoid any annoying questions by throwing me and my belongings into the river.

Taiwan isn’t the only place I’ve succumbed to ‘Delhi belly’ (as a matter of fact I’ve had it in Delhi) but I’ve never suffered in Japan, even though I’ve experimented with some of the world’s strangest food there. There’s an irony here because if you were to choose any bathroom in the world in which to spend an excessive amount of time, it would have to be Japan. Their toilets are wonderful. They are there to pamper you, with heated seats and a button which operates a spray of warm water to clean your bottom. There’s a separate button, as a diagram helpfully explains, for washing a lady’s front bottom – gentlemen are advised not to press this button by mistake. Some models will play music or the sound of running water to hide any embarrassing sounds, and the more advanced models will automatically close the toilet lid after use. This last feature would explain why the divorce rate in Japan is so much lower than it is in England – they don’t have arguments about leaving the toilet seat up.

These space-age toilets (known as washlets) are universally popular with Western visitors who often ask why they aren’t used back home. This is a mystery – one of the strangest statistics I’ve been given is that Toto, the largest manufacturer, sold 1m of these toilets in Japan over the course of a year and only 4 in the whole of Europe. One of the reasons for their lack of popularity here may be our reluctance to broach the subject. I’m reminded of the Texan visiting a posh country house who, when asked if he wanted to wash his hands, replied: “No thanks Ma’am, I washed them on the rose bed on my way in”.

The Moss Gardens of the Lake District

As we drove through the Lake District, my Japanese friend was particularly taken by the dry stone walls which bounded every field. He was also impressed by the rich colour of the moss which is growing spectacularly in this warm, wet, winter covering every shaded surface. Sometimes the dry stone walls would, themselves, be covered in moss, creating a vivid verdant sculpture. This is how the moss would have looked at Koke-dera if we hadn’t visited it in the dry season. The Lakeland moss seems to have an extra dimension as it climbs up the trees as well as covering the ground. Because it’s everywhere we take it for granted, but the truth is we have a thousand Koke-dera’s right here on our doorstep – there really was no need for me to travel 6,000 miles to see a moss garden.

Alex Kerr’s ‘Lost Japan’

Every Japanese business has an English name and there’s something very endearing about the fact that they never quite get it right. The best boutique hotel in Fukuoka is called “With the Style”; the largest second-hand book shop is “Book-off” (there’s a branch of the same business, which sells second hand computers with the wonderful name of “Hard-off”). I was browsing through Book-off when I can across a book by Alex Kerr called “Lost Japan.” What a find it turned out to be. Although Alex Kerr is an American, the book was originally written in Japanese and in 1994 it won the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan, the first time a foreigner had won the award. The book tells us what it’s like to live in Japan and how Japanese society works.

When the author first came to Japan in the 1970′s, he noticed that when people left the countryside to live in a town, which they were doing by the thousands, they wouldn’t bother to sell their house in the country, they’d just abandon it, sometimes without removing anything – they’d leave the furniture, the bedding, even utensils. He went searching for the house of his dreams in Shikoku and fell in love with an abandoned wooden house with a thatched roof, which he bought for $1,300, and set about restoring. He called it Chiiori, “the house of the flute”, and what he did was so unusual that it’s now become a tourist attraction.

Alex Kerr laments the loss of the Japan which he first encountered when he arrived in the seventies. But in one respect the Japan which he loved is still there. Strangely, although property prices in the cities are amongst the highest in the world, no-one wants to live in the countryside, which is still littered with abandoned houses, which can be acquired for a song. The irony is that millions in the cities hanker after the Slow Life. If they cared to look they’d find that it’s there, right under their noses.

Mrs Beeton and Jamie Oliver – the Bogus Cook and the Pretend Gardener

When I was fresh out of university and even more naive than I am now I came across a family called Elliot who published a series of books known as “Elliot’s Right Way” books, each written by a different expert in their field. They covered dozens of topics, from driving to bridge to gardening. I was amazed to find that the names of the experts were made up and that each and every one of the books were written by Elliot himself or one of his two sons. They were massively popular and earned a fortune for the Elliot family.

It was a similar story with Mrs Beeton, author of the famous cookbook. Her husband was a publisher and he got his wife, who couldn’t cook to save her life, to pretend to be an expert and together they cobbled together a cookbook relying entirely on the expertise of others. Lots of howlers crept in, such as advice to cook carrots for 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 hours. Mr Beeton went on to produce a gardening manual under his wife’s name, which was ridiculed in the gardening magazines.

The Beeton story came to mind today when I read that Jamie Oliver has been named as one of the country’s most influential gardeners*. Now, there are two things we can say with certainty about Jamie Oliver. The first is that he can cook (unlike Mrs Beeton). The second is that he’s no gardener. He’s been named as an influential gardener because the DIY store, Homebase, have employed him as their new face. It happens that I’m a regular at Homebase (see - http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2011/11/11/over-wintering-cannas/) and I’ve seen ‘Jamie Oliver’ branded plants on sale there. I thought they were poor quality and over-priced, and I’ve got a feeling that that view was shared by others, as they featured prominently in the half-price “bargain corner”, looking rather worse for wear.

Influential Jamie Oliver may be, but it’s a poor sort of influence if the product is as bogus as the name of the author on an “Elliot Right Way” book.

*The Telegraph, “Meet Britain’s Most Influential Gardeners“, by Tim Richardson.

Cesaria Evora Remembered

Like Amy Winehouse, she was compared to Billie Holiday, and like her she had an addictive personality – in her case to men and cigarettes – and like her she died in 2011, although she managed, just, to reach her allotted three score years and ten.  But unlike Amy Winehouse, dying was not the best career move available to her.  Cesaria Evora only became famous outside her native Cape Verde Islands when she was 50 and already a grandmother.  Her first album, Miss Perfumada, released in 1992, won her 8 gold discs and she was awarded the Legion D’Honneur in 2008.  She was brought up in an orphanage because her mother was too poor to raise her and she suffered extreme poverty in adulthood.  Her life was more turbulent, more colourful and more productive than Amy’s and her talent was just as prodigious, but she won’t, more’s the pity, make the slightest dent on the British charts.

This video is of Sodade… meaning, appropriately, longing.

Why I Love Japan Part 5 – Prosperity

When my friend Kenji first came to England in 1972 he was given just one pound in exchange for a 1,000 yen note. This year he exchanged 1,000 yen for £8. This eight-fold increase in the value of the yen is partly a reflection of the rise of Japan’s economy and partly due to the relative decline of ours. In 1972, Japan was just beginning to export its odd little cars to the UK. How we scoffed. Who would dream of buying a Japanese car with a funny name when you could buy something British called the Humber Super Snipe? But soon after this my mother fell for the sporty Toyota Celica and now my family own four Japanese cars and every camera and TV in our house is Japanese.

I’ll never forget the sense of awe which I felt when I first visited Hong Kong and saw its soaring skyscrapers. Arriving in Tokyo today revives that feeling. It’s not just the buildings – everything is modern and up to date – light years ahead of our own capital city. I feel privileged to be able to share in that wealth when I visit Japan. I’m full of admiration for what they’ve achieved, but I can’t help feeling that when you add together all the Japanese stuff we’ve bought over the years, I’ve paid for quite a bit of it.

The Kiyosumi Garden, Tokyo

furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
an ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the splash of water
~Basho, 1686

When I asked Kazu Ishihara which were the ten best gardens in Japan (excluding gardens he had designed) his list included Kiyosumi in Tokyo (as well as, inevitably, a garden he had designed himself).  Kiyosumi has strong British connections because the tea house, which is now its focal point, was built as a guest house for Lord Kitchener and because the garden was originally built for a Tudor-style residence designed by the English architect Josiah Conder, the man who re-modelled Tokyo in the nineteenth century. Sadly, the house, together with nearly everything else he built, was destroyed in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 (what the earthquake didn’t get, the American bombs did).  But there’s nothing at all English about the garden, which is a typical Japanese “strolling” garden, whose pathways wind around a large pond.  Even in mid-winter the garden is enchanting but it looks its best, I’m told, in May and June when spectacular displays of iris and azalea come into flower.  But there’s a problem with including this garden in Japan’s top ten.  It borrows its scenery from some of Tokyo’s ugliest architecture, which intrudes into every aspect.  In fact it’s impossible to take a photo of the garden which doesn’t include a chunk of brutal concrete. I’ll have to ask Kazu to reconsider.

Note: The Basho haiku is carved on a stone monument in the garden.

A Stroll in the Emperor’s Garden

Alex Kerr tells the story of how he arrived late one afternoon at Kongo Sanmai-in, a temple that offers rooms to pilgrims and travellers and he was asked by one of the monks if he would like to see the Buddha in the main hall, but he said he was too tired. Later that evening, on the way to the bath, he passed a monk who remarked pleasantly how fortunate he had been to be able to see their Buddha of divine power. “Well, actually, we were planning to see it tomorrow”, he replied. The monk shook his head. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Sanmai-in’s Buddha is a hibutsu. Mt Koya’s other statues are sometimes put on display, or even lent to other temples, but this one has never left the mountain. This is the first time it has ever been shown to the general public. It’s called a five-hundred-year hibutsu. The doors closed at five o’clock today and you’ll have to wait another five hundred years if you want to see it.”

The “five-hundred year hibutsu” is good rule for travellers and today, finding myself in Tokyo on one of the very rare days that the Emperor opened the inner garden of the Imperial Palace to the public there was no way I was going to miss the chance to stroll in the Emperor’s garden. The word stroll implies a quiet contemplative walk, but what I hadn’t bargained for was the fact that the Emperor himself would be there with his family so I had to share the walk with 100,000 Japanese who didn’t want to miss the chance to see their Royal family. And so the fascination of the visit turned out not to be the Emperor’s garden (which didn’t amount to much after all) but the sight of his Palace, surprisingly made of concrete and steel, and the Emperor and his family waving at us from a balcony behind bullet proof glass and the enthusiasm of a multitude of Japanese, waving their national flag.

Why I Love Japan Part 4 – Beauty

I’ve yet to come across a deeply religious Japanese person.  The Japanese follow two main religions, Shintoism and Buddhism, but more, so they tell me, as a ritual or a superstition, than a matter of faith.  But they have a new God, which they seem to follow blindly, the God of Electricity.  Monuments to this God are everywhere, even in the most sacred Shinto sanctuaries. They are especially prominent on the mountain sides, as if to permanently remind us that the once beautiful virgin forests have been bulldozed and replaced with crytomeria pines. But it would be unfair to say the utility poles and pylons have ruined Japan’s urban landscape – it would be unremittingly ugly without them.  The phrase ‘urban jungle’ could have been coined to describe the concrete bleakness of Japan’s cities.

Where, then, is the beauty in Japan? Well, not all the architecture is grim – the skyscrapers of Tokyo rival New York and Hong Kong.  There is breath-taking beauty in Japan’s coastline, its lakes, temples and gardens.  But the essential beauty of Japan is in the small details – a simple flower arrangement or an ornament in a tokonoma alcove.

Japan above all is the land of beautiful people.  There’s nothing more depressing than standing in a queue behind an American who has let himself go – by which I mean let himself grow to twice his normal width.  In Japan size zero is the norm; people take pride in their appearance and often look far younger than their years.  Last year, at the Gardening World Cup one of the translators, who worked hard and played hard, had been out all night celebrating her birthday and the designers were wondering how old she was.  ”27″ said one, “No, 24″ said another.  She was 41, but like so many Japanese didn’t look her age because she hadn’t put on the weight which is associated with growing older.  Very few men or women develop the middle-aged spread which we think is inevitable, so that their waist measurement at 60 is the same as it was at 30.  The Japanese look good and to see them makes me feel good and takes my mind off those utility poles.