Raspberry Thieves

Strawberry Thief was the name given by William Morris, the eminent Victorian designer, to a pattern for fabrics and wallpaper.  It is still popular and I have just checked an image on the internet to see if my memory was correct.  I recommend a visit to Morris's historic home in Walthamstow, East London.

This time I was immediately struck by the stylized way in which Morris depicts his pairs of thrushes.  Delicately poised and mirrored amid the fruit, the pairs pluck a strawberry by the stem or pause to sing.  it is a lovely design, but at some remove from reality.

A blackbird does not pluck raspberries by the stem.  He lands on a branch and begins to peck at the droplets (a gardeners' rather than technical term) working his way through a ripe fruit.  At this point, my husband usually catches sight of him and bangs on the kitchen window.  He flies away.  At a later stage he may decide to sing.  He does not sing from amidst the fruit he is consuming, but selects a wall, a fence, a shed roof, a tree or a television aerial: whatever gives him a good vantage point, alerts others to his territory and on summer days enables him to catch the rays of the sun.  

But then, who would buy a wallpaper depicting a blackbird on a television aerial?

 

In Search of a Rhubarb Recipe

I have used my mother's 1982 omnibus edition of Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course so many times that the book almost falls open automatically at fruit crumbles. Our rhubarb is plentiful at present so I thought it could be time for an alternative rhubarb cake or dessert.  So I turned to my maternal grandmother's original hand-written recipe book which has been added to and passed down in my family from before the First World War.  I am certain of this because I discovered my grandmother listed in the 1911 UK Census (about a decade before she married) at the same address she has written in the front of her book. 

My search for rhubarb puddings turned up a collection of recipes from the writer Ambrose Heath cut and pasted from the Manchester Guardian by my mother who inherited the book some time after her marriage - I would guess the mid 1950s.  (Another recipe for bread puddings has the dateline Friday April 6th 1956). The instructions in these newspaper cuttings were those of an early age with details of how to make a 'canary pudding mixture' for rhubarb sponge, unfamiliar dry measures: 'the weight of an unshelled egg' and liquid measures: 'stew with a gill of water'.  

Many recipes need adaptation, and these 1950s ones would have required both a journey back to the pre-metric years of my youth and a significant reduction in the proportion of sugar or syrup used, to take account of my diabetes.  I have found even with the good and reliable Delia that the amount of sugar in a fruit crumble can be cut by at least a third to no noticeable effect.  So I looked up a recipe promoted by Diabetes UK which I found in the magazine The People's Friend some time before we moved up here in 2014.  Easy, freezable, clear, with metric and imperial measurements, and importantly for me, reduced sugar and information on how many calories per serving (approx 95g).  I've now made it three times and it works.  



 

In clover

My husband has not cut our back lawn for several weeks.  This is not because he dislikes mowing.  He did this for customers many times, quickly and efficiently and now with our pocket handkerchief sized lawn and an electric mower handed on to us by my family it is done in a matter of minutes.  And I record our gratitude also for the outside socket installed by the helpful guys who did our complete electrical rewire last August.

The lawn care regime is now regulated by current ecology advice (for which consult the RHS website) and a fondness for wild flowers.  In our lawn we have white clover, visited by bumblebees, an unidentified variety of small yellow flowered plant eaten by the woodpigeons, daisies and buttercups.  The latter are his favourites.  He will however take a sharp tool and remove dandelions and plantains.

I have mixed feelings about this.  I recall the Fifties when lawns were cut as short as carpet.  When the lawn grasses grow straggly I want to nag him to get out there and do something. But I like daisies too and I recall the sweet scent of clover on hot days in the south.   Do I really care if our lawn with its apple trees in the midst looks more like an allotment patch than a bowling green or the football pitches in the park behind us?  Each to its own purpose.  Our lawn continues to be shared with the birds and the bees.

Penstemons and Pinks

Taking penstemon cuttings is a job for my spouse.  In my opinion he does it well. The current situation with these and other plants is as as follows:

•  About six 'struck' first time and now are out in the back looking healthy.  We (husband) have just moved the original plants to a hole made available by the removal (husband again) of a rather sick shrub.  More cuttings were taking prior to this and are in the potting shed under cover.  Husband is hopeful these too will strike. The garden centre originals looked good for a season and then failed to thrive as anticipated.  So from now on we will be propagating our own penstemons and accustoming them to the realities of life. (I am also hopeful that the ones moved to the border will recover.)
• Pinks: a bargain buy from the superstore.  Lovely scent.  Recovering after a hard winter in soil which husband has devotedly enriched.  He has taken about a dozen slips and is hopeful.
• Hollyhocks from seed: collected originally from a gardening customer in Chingford, sown last year and collected again.  Being nursed in the potting shed.
•  Sweet Williams: a great plant.  Why buy a bunch in the local emporium when you can grow your own?  Sown by me from saved seed.  Original plants a gift from our neighbours.  Pricked out carefully by my husband (another rescue job) and now also recovering in the potting shed.  
•  Hellebores: my next project.  I have just collected seed and am drying it out in the shed.

When I look back to our former life in the south-east I can see how my gardening priorities have changed.   We took on three allotments in various states of disrepair and it was in the autumn of 2008 that I first felt like growing flowers on our allotment and planted out some miniature daffodils by the shed.  But the need to keep adding to cultivated space always took precedence.  Flowering plants were given or scrounged and wedged into odd corners.  Now the situation seems to have reversed.  We grow a limited amount of our own food and, in the mature garden that we have taken over, we are adding the flowers we like.  It is all very satisfying.