Arne Herbs Nursery Blog

Grumpy old blog

Anthony Lyman-Dixon — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:46:00 +0100

Grumpy old blog or yet another way for the government to waste your money

This is nothing about herbs, ...

SPRING BLOG, SORT OF

Anthony Lyman-Dixon — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:46:00 +0000

SPRING BLOG, SORT OF

For many years I have regarded the first day of spring as the one on ...

Bible Gardens with Lytton Musselman

Anthony Lyman-Dixon — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 10:35:00 +0000

“FIGS, DATES, LAURELS AND GOD”

I know that Alistair Campbell, the Blairite spin doctor said “we don’t do God”, but bear with me, presumably you switched to this blog because you have some sort of interest in herbs and you were probably brought up in either a nominally Christian or Islamic country so it may have some passing relevance to your life

Christmas was very much spent in the company of God, I don’t mean that literally, but Jen had given me Hitchen’s polemic “God is not Great” then various family members did their typical C of E thing, ie, “we’ve been to church, not sure why but it might look good on our score cards when we arrive at the pearly gates”. More particularly Timber Press had sent me their excellent” Figs, Dates, Laurels and Myrrh” by Lytton John Musselman to review and the Herb Society allocated me 400 words space in which to do it, effectively reducing two millennia of culture to the status of a Christmas cracker motto. I thought it appropriate therefore to do it a bit more justice here.

Actually herbs and the Bible are an unfortunate combination, the invocation in Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” has resulted in the premature cremation of thousands of our predecessors and that story in 1 Kings 21:2 about Ahab, described by evangelists as “The wickedest man in the Bible” (what no Judas?!) and his wife Jezebel, “The wickedest woman in the Bible” snitching Naboth’s vineyard to turn it in to a herb garden has shown up herb growers in a bad light at least among the fundamentalists

The problem for Christian creators of biblical gardens is that whilst the Bible is the infallible word of God, God left it to a lot of extremely fallible mortals to interpret his word. This means firstly that many designers have felt free to substitute plants to fit in with environmental constraints, and secondly, modern translators almost invariably evangelists rather than horticulturalists, perpetrate hideous inaccuracies on the grounds of “accessibility” or as we prefer to call it “dumbing down”. Try googling “Bible herbs” to see senseless zealotry made manifest.

It is good therefore that Musselman has come to shed some light upon this darkness, as he says, he both “loves the Bible” and is a highly qualified field botanist so although many of his conclusions accord with Frowde’s 1896 “Helps to the Study of the Bible”, still in print today, he has the advantages of using new and supposedly more accurate translations than the King James AV, his research is backed by the latest scientific evidence and finally, he not only covers a larger geographical area than his predecessors but embraces the Koran too. Moreover, his work is well presented and beautifully illustrated.

The difficulty of Musselman’s task though is demonstrated by a photograph of Origanum syriacum captioned “Hyssop”: This seems wholly justified in that biblical commentators for over a century have recognised that “their” hyssop is more likely to have been an Origanum than a Hyssopus. He writes that Origanum syriacum is “a plant known in English as Syrian Hyssop”. It isn’t, if only because until very recently Origanum syriacum was almost totally unknown in England, we only started selling it, raised from American seed two years ago. Hyssopus officinalis doesn’t get a mention: Thus, when he writes, “Hyssop may have been commercially available, perhaps in the same way it is today” he is almost certainly referring to the Origanum. None of this has stopped the web site of one of those loony American herb farms recommending not merely Hyssopus as being suitable for a Bible garden planting, but many other herbs that would have amazed Jesus and his disciples if they had happened upon them in the desert or found them on a local market stall. If we, on either side of the Atlantic can’t agree popular names, we are scarcely likely to agree on the identification of plants from a text written millennia ago in a dead language. Not that this should be seen as a carte blanche to bung in any old weed on the grounds that a third party can not argue with one’s subjective interpretation of the word of God. This may be an obvious point, which Nigel Hepper made twenty years ago in his   “Planting a Bible Garden”, but it continues all too frequently today.

“Accessibility” and “accuracy” are the words used to justify all these nonsensical infelicities. OK there are plenty of Americans out there too dumb to understand the KJAV (this isn’t to say that young Brits aren’t equally dumb, but nothing would induce them to pick up a bible in the first place, - not even if it came in comic book format with all the warring tribes of Israel armed with Kalashnikovs) but some of us including, one suspects, Christ himself actually enjoy the KJAV. After all, If Jesus had any complaints about the King James Bible, he would surely have zapped the writers and presumably those who promulgated it, as is laid out in Revelation 22: 18 – 19. So why mess with the text? Even Musselman himself balks at substitution of “Tumbleweed” in the NIV for the “wheel” in KJAV, (Ps 83: 13) Admittedly this could be more accurate in that the scribe possibly had Gundelia tournefortii in mind but inevitably it makes one think of the opening of a John Ford movie rather than the ungodly rolling uncontrollably down a slope into the pit of hell. It also brings to mind the polar opposite of the fundamentalist doctrine of “pedantry is all”, the black Madonna on the British Christmas postage stamps a year or two ago. This showed a striking ignorance of the gospel and a patronising tokenism toward blacks, a naive bit of tinkering in the interests of politically correct marketing and no less daft for it. And before some holy roller writes into complain, - yes we all know (well some of us anyway) about the Black Madonnas in Loretto, Monserrat, Chartres etc etc, but I still say those on the stamps represent a cynical marketing ploy rather than iconographic knowledge on the part of the post office designers.

Fundamentalists cherry-pick the bits they like according to how much money they will bring in, so that they modernise some features and retain the traditional aspects of others. Thus the BVM continues to appear in a million kitschy images in Catholic gift shops dressed like a Fra Angelico/Schongauer/ whatever nun-like figure, as she has done for centuries. That said, one company, one2believe, (really!) has dressed her up in a tee shirt and jeans making her barely distinguishable from Barbie herself. Normally however, this would be regarded as unsustainable in marketing terms so she’s allowed to keep her nice blue robes. Following this through, the Annunciation would take place in a mud brick hovel plonked down in a desert rather than a palace in a splendid garden. Bible garden designers take note! Oh well let’s take it to its logical conclusion and ditch the angel and Mary too since they are “just stories”

The Koranic references give Musselman’s book a unique fascination but the list of plants reflecting the restricted flora to be found in the desert, is necessarily much shorter. Arguably even more migratory and desert-bound than the Jews, the Arabs had fewer plants to experiment with and less time in which to grow them so even if we were to be given a controlled environment, similar to that proposed for Abu Dhabi, it would necessarily result in a rather boring garden. Fortunately, an Islamic garden is not necessarily the same as a Koranic garden, so that the magnificence of the Alhambra and the Generalife for instance only came with the combination of settled land tenure and a more clement climate

As far as interpretation goes, the problem is that like almost everybody else, Musselman uses the Dawood English translation which is extremely hard to navigate, This version follows sura one with sura ninety-nine and finishes with sura sixty-six so if Musselman had offered us cross references it would have been appreciated. If anything, identities are even harder to discern than those in the Bible, having eventually alighted upon Sura 48:18 for instance, one finds “tree”, but what tree? Certainly not the zukkum tree, which is found in hell and is arguably the best known tree in the Koran. It has never been identified, not surprisingly since no one has returned to tell us, but Musselman suggests Euphorbia abyssinica.

Musselman’s book is an enjoyable read whilst at the same time it is an invaluable tool for the designers of the ever proliferating Biblical and Koranic gardens. More fun though is its potential for stirring up blood-thirsty controversy amongst those dopey fundamentalists for whom the word of God is not quite enough.

(Until he was sacked for proclaiming the heretical doctrine that God created all men equal, Anthony Lyman-Dixon was a Baptist lay preacher in Connecticut. He hasn’t “done god” since)

NOVEMBER BLOG

Anthony Lyman-Dixon — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:04:00 +0000

NOVEMBER BLOG

Gosh, is it really all those months since I last posted anything on this blog site? Actually, it’s not that I haven’t actually written anything, the medieval glossary has been expanded to take in Macer’s herbal. It’s a vast amount of work because each of his hundred odd plant names has had to be checked for his sources (usually Pliny or Dioscorides) and his plant identities verified against those of both his contemporaries and modern taxonomy. Anyway, if you want a copy send me an e-mail. And no, don’t bother writing to tell me that Macer wasn’t Macer, I already know that, thanks

Then there was the report on Sicily for the RHS (referred to in a previous blog). They originally wanted about 3000 words and got 66,000 but then asked for some modern photographs and a commentary. It was time-consuming but a lot of fun to do. I must admit that I enjoy rummaging around in the baggage that gardening and more particularly, herbalism has accreted over the centuries. Showing that the influence of Sicily compared with that of Chrétien de Troyes, on the great medieval garden at Hesdin was minimal, is really going to get up the noses of all the three or four people in the world who give a toss about such things. But once people have got a “popular” bee in their bonnets, no matter how idiotic such as the-Romans-used-lavender-as-a-cosmetic one, there is nothing that is going to change their minds and they will go on writing books and posting things on their web sites regardless of the total absence of evidence to support their dogmatic assertions.

After that, my brain decided that it was becoming a touch fed up and so I wrote a somewhat “noirish” fairy story for the grand children. My daughter had accused me of telling her horror stories when she was little and asked me to do some for her own children. If they ever get past the politically correct susceptibilities of my agent, they will probably enjoy a far greater currency in the outside world than the academic slaughter of a few turgid sacred cows.

Meanwhile in the journal of the Mediterranean Garden Society, Caroline Harbouri asked whether anyone could name any villainous gardeners in fiction. Well, can you? It really is extraordinary difficult. The obvious candidate is Beatrix Potter’s Mr McGregor and I have to confess shame-facedly, that I never thought of him myself.

Has anyone else noticed that seeds are ripening a month later this year because of the foul weather? It’s the sort of thing that the BBC puts on its lunch time news when it can’t think of anything else to say. In fact because the idea of a cold, wet autumn conflicts with its monotonous nanny-state, politically-correct obsession with “global warming”, it probably hasn’t been as tedious about this as it is about most meteorological phenomena. Read into it what you may, we have had pasque flowers blooming in September, cowslips at the end of October and now primroses. I know I am against the BBC, Gordon Brown and the massed ranks of greenies on this, but I don’t blame my dirty old van, the fact that I flew in an aeroplane last April nor that I once forgot to turn off the light in the downstairs loo last month for the fact that my plants don’t know what season it is. We all get confused, moreover whilst I am as aware, if not more aware than a lot of politicians by reason of my job, of climate change, I feel it would be extremely presumptuous of me to blame myself. The way to stop this nonsense at a stroke would be to stop people breeding, but since this would ultimately be prejudicial to all our pensions, no politician and least of all myself, is going to propose it as a solution until it’s too late so we are stuck with a lot of stop-gap tokenism instead of a proper solution. All of which has diverted me from saying that, yes, seed collecting is still going full swing even as the November frosts chill our bones and whop up the electricity bills. Anyway I was just going out with my bucket to collect the Umbellularia seeds when the phone rang. So I answered the thing, any possibility of a customer, however fleeting at this time of the year, has to be pounced upon with enthusiasm and avidity. Fat chance. It was some bloke asking if I had fifteen minutes to answer some questions about the service provided by Lloyds Bank. Now I don’t suppose I am the only person on earth who dreads ringing Lloyds Bank more than any other phone call they are compelled to make, except perhaps Norwich Union insurance. We have all gone through a genealogical tree of pressing buttons to be asked by a robot with an incomprehensible ethnic accent to press another number before being cut off just when we imagine the goal to be in sight. So having told him all this, which he gave the impression of having heard a thousand times already that morning, I pointed out how much the bank charges for writing a letter and suggesting that if he wanted 15 minutes of my time, they should pay a compliance fee and stop whingeing about my overdraft. And then I went back to my seed collecting.

The RHS is trying to double its membership and has launched a major initiative to recruit younger gardeners. I know this is civil-service speak, but you will catch my drift. Obviously, it’s A Good Thing. The younger generation, as we’re always being told, are the gardeners (ie our customers) of the future and the only thing that stands between us and the burning out of the planet (or, if you take the view expressed in the penultimate paragraph above, the sole cause of the burning out of the planet). Anyway having sat on one national and one local horticultural education committee, I have to say that I have no problems with children. Certainly, kids get bored out of their minds by adult interests and adult questions but if you can get them on their own, they’re fine. And that’s the first problem, get them on their own individually and you risk being accused of all manner of horrors, but nevertheless if you grab a bunch, you will find that they are totally ignorant of, but fascinated by all things green especially those that wiggle. Once they can be persuaded to actually put a leaf in their mouths, they sometimes realise they actually enjoy flavours and textures to which they had never previously been exposed. No, the problem is their wretched parents, the yummy mummys who have never learnt to say “NO” to their little darlings, who let their children romp heedlessly around the nursery secure in the knowledge that if anything happens to them, they can sue for massive compensation, backed by the dread department of elf’nsafety. However, even if the parents are happy in their complacency, irresponsibility and stupidity, any insurance claim would certainly result in the nursery losing its public liability cover and would be closed down on the spot. It follows then that I can not answer parents’ questions whilst simultaneously keeping an eye on their unwittingly suicidal children for them. In spite of a great big notice at the entrance telling parents that because of toxic plants and dangerous machinery, they must keep their children within arms reach at all times, I have had parents exhorting their children to eat unidentified leaves and escaped children rocking 47 kg gas cylinders, which would pancake them if they succeeded in pushing them over. Then we had one mother who so appalled the staff and myself by trying to get her children to sample all the plants on the nursery that we unintentionally convinced her that it was essential to make an advance booking at the local undertakers prior to approaching anything with leaves. The girls and I have managed to rear seven kids between us and haven’t lost any yet, but we have begun to wonder at the secret of our success. It seems a bit arrogant to say it’s all down to common sense, but can anyone come up with a better answer? Like I say, one doesn’t have to be a charismatic teacher to get through to kids, but the two essentials are firstly to grab and hold their interest and secondly to set firm guidelines as to what they can and can not do, (they are so surprised by this that they almost invariably comply) the alternative may literally prove fatal.

Summer blog

Anthony Lyman-Dixon — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 09:31:00 +0100

Summer blog

Interesting piece in ”Commercial Grower” 23 August 2007 about an initiative by the leading seven supermarket suppliers ...

Blog the Third

Anthony Lyman-Dixon — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 18:29:00 +0100

Blog the Third, King of the Wild Frontier (or something)

The sun is in his heaven, the roses have climbed with dreamy sensuous athleticism to the tops of the trees and combined their scent with that of the elder flowers whilst at ground level the lavenders are about to shoot forth into their dazzling porphyrogenic purple, - if you are too mundane to join me in Elysium perhaps I should just say we flog named varieties of Lavender in two litre pots for £4.80 a go. So with double the number of hits on our web site this week compared to the previous week, (which may have been the effect of Chelsea or this blog, who knows?) And with the whole place smelling like the cross between a queen’s boudoir and a fortified wine distillery, we could have expected a rip-roaring sell-out week .

Not a bit of it, the Council stuck a sign at the bottom of the hill saying “Road Closed”. OK so the road three miles closer to Bristol is reminiscent of the one connecting Tirana to the airport before the Albanians did it up, and no less filthy what with the garbage fly-tipped from the sink-estates on the other side of the hill, but that’s nothing to do with our stretch of tarmac. When I rung the council some disinterested woman said she knew nothing about it but that someone who did would call back and of course didn’t. I tried again this morning and got some considerably more switched-on bloke who demonstrated that if there wasn’t a floor-level glass ceiling in the Bath Council offices, they should install one forthwith. He said that his lot hadn’t erected the sign, it was North Somerset, the adjoining Council. I suggested it was somewhat cavalier that they could invade neighbouring territory and trash the businesses on it. It would be good if they could follow Central Government initiatives and declare war over the issue. Of course both councils are taken up with the cruel dilemma of how they can appeal to the strident greenies and nimbys who make up a disproportionate amount of the local electorate by checking the expansion of Bristol airport, whilst continuing to line their pockets from it. Personally I am all for it, I am too deaf to be inconvenienced by the noise of the aircraft and look forward to the day when I don’t have to leave great plodding carbon foot prints all the way to Stansted when I want to see my children in France.

I shall start to worry about my carbon footprints when members of the government renounce flying around the world in the cause of the white-elephantine Olympics, not so much leaving a footprint as dropping the turds of an entire herd of elephants.

One person who did run the council blockade was the wife of a neighbouring nursery owner who launched forth on such a politically-incorrect tirade that the PM’s ears must have been incandescent. Obviously given the frequency of such comments and his radar-scanner like appendages, it’s not surprising that the area in between them has become burnt out. I thought how pleasant it would be to have her sit on my sofa with a glass of wine and heckle the Blairites on “Question Time”, such thoughts of course had nothing to do with the fact that her figure clearly hasn’t changed since she was 17.

Orders continue to pour in, keeping me reluctantly tied to the computers which enliven life by crashing constantly. If I was sufficiently energetic to be paranoid, I would say that the malevolent, virus-riddled brutes are picking on me, but ask anyone you know how their computer is functioning and you get the same groan, either that the man’s coming to fix it tomorrow or it’s in the repair shop. Incidentally my virus software insists that the computers are pristine, would that the Bristol hospitals or even my kitchen were in a similar state

As a result of the day-job plus the computers, the idea of turning my paper on the History of Sicily into a blog has gone a bit splatty specially since the theme overlaps with the report the RHS asked for in return for partially funding the trip. It all started out as an attempt to answer the old question of the extent to which Robert of Anjou and his daughter were influenced by Sicily in the design of their garden at Hesdin and how far their concepts rippled across Europe. Harvey says not one bit and others with all the wondrous ferocity with which an academic dispute can be imbued, take the opposite view I must admit that until I became involved in it, I was inclined to the latter standpoint but I have had to re-think and very fascinating it is too. Not just Robert’s fornicating monkeys which have captured (well, sort of) the imagination of garden historians everywhere, but the more gardeny sort of things like hard landscaping. One recurring theme in the investigation is the “Tristan” legend, discussion of its Sicilian connection has been knocking around at least since John Addington Symonds explored it in the nineteenth century. More recently it has been connected to ancient Persian legends as has the blue background of “The Paradise Garden” of the Master of the Upper Rhine. All of which is undoubtedly extremely tedious to those whose only interest in this blog is to try and get a clue as to why their mint won’t grow…. but just think how closely the ability to make a decent cup of coffee followed the Islamic migrations around the Mediterranean basin and you too will be engrossed.

Blogged again

Anthony Lyman-Dixon — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:15:00 +0100

Blogged again

Thanks to all you kind people who responded positively to my first ever attempt at blogging. You may have wondered what happened to me in that there was no follow-up. The answer is that I went to Sicily with the Mediterranean Garden Society and came back with pleurisy which wasn’t very nice but the effects of the antibiotic used to treat it were infinitely worse. All of which damped me down a bit and which is my excuse for giving a dire presentation on the history of Sicily from a horticultural perspective to the members in Palermo. I am trying to re-write it for those still interested and thought I would stick it on here as a “Blog of the Island” when it’s eventually done.

Sicily itself was great and the bugs in my lungs held off for most of the time and so I could enjoy the food, the hospitality of our hosts and the stupendous gardens without any problems. And the food really is all its cracked up to be, Italian with Arabic overtones though I expect for those who like their salads without fruit, and veg without any sweetener it was pretty revolting, but fortunately habitués of the Little Chef weren’t among us and we unanimously enjoyed fusili in fennel sauce, shaved courgettes in mint, orange risotto and Cannoli which look like brandy snaps and are filled with ricotta, sugar, almond, eggs, orange zest and Pistachios. And what they do with a mixture of mushrooms and aubergines (mixed, I suspect, with garlic, olive oil, sugar, capers and anchovies) is something offered to most people only when they get to Heaven ….so it’s probably just as well I experienced it the other day. The only sour note was on my final evening in Palermo when I took myself to the “Mensa del popolo”. When I was a student in Florence many years ago, the mensa was where the students could get a reasonably good meal cheap; the one in Palermo is where you can get a foul one expensively. It was abysmally served too. Never mind, perhaps they were protesting against the “our” Iraqi policy or something and didn’t like Brits.

Got back to find amongst the great pile of messages, a request for plants for a University Minoan garden. I know we specialise in historic gardens but this is the sort of query that makes my job both challenging and pleasurable. Obviously roses are the first plants that come to mind, but what sort of roses? Having just written something for the Historic Gardens Foundation about classical roses, my mind is more boggled than ever and did the Minoans use their plants medicinally or were they gourmets? Hurrah for Andrew Dalby whose “Siren Feasts” offer a few clues.

On roses, a friend has become somewhat hissy about a Midlands stately home slagging off Eleanor of Aquitaine as a poisoner in an attempt to draw in the coach parties. OK it all happened eight centuries ago, but the publicist should know better than to inflict a form of spinning more worthy of the late and thoroughly unlamented Blair on a historic garden. To ball-breaking feminists, Eleanor was, and is, the ultimate role-model, a patroness of the arts, a pious benefactor of repressed women, a valiant crusader and brilliant administrator both of her own and her husband’s domaines. She coped with one husband, Louis VII who, in popular parlance wouldn’t get it up and another Henry 2nd of England who got it up all too frequently and not within the sanctity of marriage either, before chucking her in the slammer when she complained. Finally, her children married into every ruling house in Europe taking the glory of Aquitaine and the Angevins with them. And god help the man to this day, who says any different, like for instance that Eleanor was a crazed tart who, inter al, slept with her uncle, screwed half the Islamic Mediterranean fleet, wrecked her two marriages, forced poor little Rosamund Clifford to drink toads blood, encouraged her chaplain's sadistic fantasies about mistreating virgins and egged-on her creepy sons to destroy the Angevin empire. So the point of all this is not whether she poisoned the unfortunate Rosamund whose unflattering statue stands in the centre of the Rose garden, because she obviously didn’t, but whether there is any justification in raking up some malevolent, politically motivated story, no matter how ancient, to flog more tickets to moronic tourists at the gate. Personally I think it is grossly unethical and given the controversy already achieved, likely to prove an own-goal

All these crazy stories have a starting point and apart from my personal bete noir about the Romans using Lavender in their bath water, I have recently read of Amazonian explorers plucking pineapples from over hanging trees, that Charlemagne was a great horticulturalist and that the Arabic rulers of Medieval Sicily grew their own tomatoes. Doubtless all guaranteed a yet firmer place in posterity than they have attained already. Oh yes and further on roses, since Rosamund was supposedly poisoned in 1176 and Rosa gallica versicolor wasn’t recorded until 1583, it is scarcely likely that the rose itself was named in her blessed memory. Sad to see an author as respected as the late Roy Genders repeating the story, but like I say all these tales have to start somewhere, though we can’t blame Genders for this one, it seems to have been knocking around for a lot longer than him.

On the same theme, Sue Minter took on Sapphire Gin for their very beautiful but wholly inaccurate and misleading advertisement featuring the botanicals supposedly flavouring their version of “Mother’s Ruin”. Trading Standards didn’t want to know, in fact in my experience Trading Standards don’t want to know about anything very much, and the gin people politely told her to get knotted. My reaction is that if a gin company can’t recognise the plants it claims to stick in its drink, it will probably end up poisoning its punters and I for one will stick to whisky.

Anthony

This day a blog is born

Anthony Lyman-Dixon — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:36:00 +0100

Here we go (I hope) It’s the 25^th March and this is the first day of my first blog, so you are very welcome. Moreover I admit that I have not got the first idea of what I am doing. The blog has been set up in response to advertising by the nice people who host the web site and urging by my long-lost albeit highly talented site designer. I have never in my life read a blog by anyone else and if you have opened this, well congratulations, because I have no idea how you got here and whether you can or will respond.

OK there is probably no point in introducing myself or the nursery because you have presumably already got all that off the web site so this is the subjective part of running Arne Herbs. I hesitate to say the “human” part, because Jenny is the acceptable face of Arne Herbs, indeed I told her the other day that in a crowd she makes me feel like Prince Charles when he was accompanied by Princess Di. So here I am, an awkward semi-retired (fat chance!) old man living with a lot of gluttonous semi-feral cats.

I tend not to open at week ends unless I know who is coming as too often visitors turn out to be those with incontinent grannies in the back of the car or those whose children “need to stretch their legs” but yesterday Mike Brown a fellow Medievalist turned up which was a genuine pleasure. It’s a good niche market to be in but the trouble with Medieval plus blog is that by definition there can’t be any “new” plants to publicise. I could have gone in the other direction I suppose and grown all the latest varieties of Basil most of which seem to be identical and taste rather disgusting and then there are all those mints supposed to possess the taste of every fruit you can imagine. If you want a banana, go and buy a banana for heavens’ sake, you don’t want to make it into a sauce to bung on your roast leg of lamb. Anyway your average Medieval materia medica consisted of about 700- 900 species, double that if you are a Chinese medieval specialist and add several hundred more if you are into folk American so I am sure there will be plenty to write about in the future.

Curious things happen at Arne Herbs, on Friday five mouse traps protecting the Echinacea angustifolia seeds all went off at mid day without catching a mouse. Jen ascribed this to the pressure of water droplets from the irrigation, but then today, Sunday, a dead mouse appeared beside the tray without any traps being sprung. I put this down to post traumatic stress disorder engendered by a trap going off besides its ear two days previously. Normally we empty the traps into the waiting mouths of the gluttonous pussies (they are banned from going into propagation because they are a bit dumb about recognising the true purpose of a seed tray) but this one, they refused to eat. Why?

And on Friday, the February 2005 sowing of Meum germinated. God knows how many hundreds of pounds worth of seeds we chucked away in the past before we realised that many, Umbellifers in particular, sit around for years before condescending to show us their happy little faces. Only when the nursery became too big for the 2.5 (yes it really does say 2.5 though since the three of us are part time, never starting before ten, that is probably a rather high estimate) of us to manage properly and we couldn’t tidy up the trays more than once every few years did we realise that this was A Good Thing. The result was that with so many more species successfully propagated, it takes even longer to get round to them, a vicious circle of ever-enlarging stock.

Gosh that was hard work. I’m not going to do this everyday, I have got a nursery to run, lectures to prepare and editors’ dead lines to meet but if you are very lucky people, you might get one of these things posted once a fortnight.. ….if not, I will wish you a happy Christmas now, while I am remembering.

Anthony