People telephone and say “Oh you are still there!” hopefully delighted, which is preferable to a disappointed “Oh are you still there?!” Unfortunately my daughter who was supposed to take over and allow me to put my feet up, was struck down by a horrible disease and although now recovering, won’t be fit  to take the pressure for at least a year. When the problem first manifested itself, the question was whether to follow the allopathic route or look at the alternatives.  With renowned surgeons on one side of the family and two lots of successful herbalists on the other, it wasn’t a straight forward choice. Mention hospitals in this country and everyone will respond with a personal horror story. OK, so she’s safe in France, but uncomfortably close to my own experience is the well publicised bloke in Dijon who received such a dollop of radiotherapy for his prostate that …oh never mind.  Of course she could have gone to the circle-dancing sorority of Greenham left-overs. They would have tickled her feet, gazed into her eyes, told her that her chakra lines were out of balance and given her some withered up old roadside leaves to eat. I am highly relieved therefore that having given the weirdos a go, she abandoned herself to the hazards of conventional medicine. It was a hideous experience, which has probably confirmed her allegiance to anything else that might optimistically be supposed to work. Either way, she was asking for Matricaria seeds  and those of  half a dozen other species within hours of coming round though had she asked me to send her a set of scalpels the relief would have been no less. With regular requests for plants arriving from France this month, the sooner she gets going again the better. Meanwhile a recent press release has authenticated the reputation of  Colchicum for dealing with some types of cancer, something that was known to medieval physicians so it’s good to know the allopaths are on the ball albeit slightly belatedly.. Another report has distinguished between Phytotherapists and herbalists, claiming that the former are safe and the latter are the ones that look at the planets, use funny water and chant over their concoctions. It’s good that the distinction should be made but I fear that until the public learn to cope with words containing more than three syllables, the whole lot are going to be lumped together as “herbalists”.

Two years ago, I realised that the seeds we collected and laid up to dry out prior to storing, were crawling with bugs. So I put one of those toy fly killers you get in gifty catalogues in the seed store and was amazed by the number of moths it caught. This year I installed a commercial fly zapper and within twenty four hours it was almost clogged with a range of  corpses that would have brought tears of joy to an entomological researcher. Clearly a large number of these creatures had either just hatched from,  or were  about to lay their eggs in the seeds. The next step will be to put some sort of insecticide in with the seeds which will inevitably cause tut-tutting amongst the organic freaks, not that we sell seeds anyway. Most plants in the wild protect themselves with secondary metabolites and it is these chemical by-products of metabolism that provide both protection against predators and the therapeutic properties exploited by humans. A plant wholly devoid of chemicals wouldn’t be just useless to humans, it would be as dead as the Pythonesque parrot, so it’s scarcely surprising that when yummy mummies asked us in the market whether our plants were “organic” and I answered “what do you mean by organic?” they could never give a coherent answer and it was less time consuming just to give them a straight “No”. In factI dislike most factory-derived chemicals intensely and it’s our policy  to avoid them where ever possible. Sometimes though, plagues do descend upon us and it is necessary to give the plants a helping hand to ensure their survival. The clouds of butterflies, hover flies and dragon flies that flit around the nursery  (not to mention those that get zapped on the insectocutor) are a testament to the success of this philosophy. .

Somewhat paradoxically, potential customers who have watched too many telly gardening programmes, regularly tell me that they have spent hours laboriously “preparing their soil” with all manner of  fertilizers, both “organic” and stuff out of a bag, and asking what wild flowers they should plant and when. They are invariably disappointed when I tell them that they should have left well alone and that wild flowers require minimum fertility to thrive. This applies even more to Mediterranean herbs like thyme and taragon. Fertilizer not only ruins the flavour but encourages them to put on a lot of  soft lush growth which almost invariably kills them at the first hint of frost . An opportunity to be “organic” then, and without the sanctimony and smugness that usually accompanies it.

I have been invited to a reception in an “august setting” in London as part of a conservation initiative. It’s not that I ceased to be a member of the hosting organisation several years ago but the fact that it is linked to the Olympics that has had friends falling about in hysterics. None is unaware of my total antipathy to sport in all its manifold forms and I am far from alone in having groaned when Paris failed to get this ludicrously expensive sop to ethnic minorities. Sentient non-white-Anglo-saxon-prots (are we allowed to call them that in this PC world?) endlessly lament that they are stereotyped in the media as being good for nothing except sport and rap music. Now that these prejudices are so massively reinforced, one can not help but  feel sorry for them.

Given the inner city riots, the smashed-window logo of the Olympics seems highly appropriate so I shall definitely attempt to avoid the whole UK and London in particular, next summer, but just in case I can’t escape I have already begun hoarding videos. The leap of imagination in associating this farrago of tat with saving endangered species either displays both inspired opportunism and initiative, or jumping on bandwagons and clutching at straws. Unfortunately the amount of carbon already expended on the site will be a cow’s fart compared with that about to be expelled by the jet engines bringing in participants, their girl friends, the press corps and their grotesque political hangers-on, not to mention shunting them to and from  their luxury hotels and stadia. Therefore I think jumping on bandwagons is a more likely inspiration than creativity. Inviting me to the party smacks of sheer desperation,  Nevertheless  I turned over the invitation half a dozen times to see where the small print had hidden the “donation of £x required” and couldn’t find it so decided it would be fun to accept. The conservation cause is laudable and it offers an intriguing chance to mingle with “household names” whose sartorial infelicities, marital infidelities and general  absence of talent is on display every time I open the AOL homepage to get my e-mails.. Given the  venue, the canapes should be OK though doubtless these will have to paid for by listening to an excruciating “presentation” from an overpaid quangoteer. Should be interesting though to hear how the conservationists twist the games into a greeny virtue. Once endured, a London trip will be an opportunity to visit the excellent South London Botanical Institute or perhaps Handel’s house. Did the great man really attempt to heave his irritating soprano, Cuzzoni, out of the study window? I don’t know, though given what a tetchy bloke he was, I am sure he would have done so if he had to contend with her temperament during  the chaos and disruption of the Olympics.