Nature Table - Prelude

It is half-term.  I cast my mind back over half a century and remember collecting horse chestnuts for 'conkers', fallen acorns, autumn leaves and bringing them for the nature table that stood at the back of our classroom.   

We had an old-fashioned state primary school and an old fashioned fourth year juniors teacher.  Calculating his age I would guess that he could have been born any time between the end of the Nineteenth Century and the First World War.  Strict discipline was enforced.  Forty two of us sat pair by pair in a room divided into the girls' area and the boys' area (our playgrounds were similarly segregated) behind desks with hinged lids and inkwells into which we dipped our nibbed pens.  We did not move.  We wrote in sloping Victorian copperplate script.  I have the recollection that he came from one of the Pottery towns of Staffordshire, Burslem, I think.

Did he communicate enthusiasm for nature study?  To my mind, no.  His passions were for British History, English Composition, Geometry and Perspective Drawing  and I failed badly in the latter two.   My inspiration came from home.  We were fortunate.

 

Summer Jasmine in Winter

Today as I opened the greenhouse door ready to step in and cull some salad leaves a scent filled my nostrils.  The fragrance was compounded of geranium and jasmine with a note of oriental mustard, once I had cut it.  The jasmine, a well-established rescue plant from my family,  is normally by our front porch and is sheltering in the greenhouse over winter.  A few bright periods last week, under glass, persuaded it to twine into flower.  What a beautiful exotic surprise this was.  Many memories mingled - hot foreign holidays, the associated intense scent of lilies brought to me in hospital after my diagnosis of diabetes, or more sombrely, the funeral bouquets laid on the low shelves of crematoria.

At home it was too cold to grow jasmine, or perhaps the fashion for giving it as an indoor houseplant had not reached British supermarkets.   So we had the outdoor scentless winter jasmine with little bright yellow flowers.  Much later, when engaged in gardening work we tended these.  Like the polyanthus starting to flower up here, the pink cyclamen and the tips of emerging bulbs, winter jasmine has always been a promise of sunnier days to come.

Salad under glass

About a week ago my husband heaved our 'salad crib' over the lintel of the greenhouse to its winter home.  I had previously sown it with a salad leaf mixture: kale (not a success - I should have known this), rocket (always a success) and oriental mustard which is doing well, though quite small at present.  This latter crop brought back memories of the weekends we used to volunteer at the Copped Hall Trust, near Epping Upland, which as I may have written before, is well worth a visit.  Early on Sunday mornings we would pack a picnic and motor up the drive towards the Hall's Walled Garden which is still in the process of restoration.  It has a southerly aspect and we would sit outside for lunch in our shirtsleeves, even on autumnal days.   We were offered the chance to cultivate some mustard in a ruined greenhouse which was awaiting its rebuild.  Those strongly flavoured greens grew to a good height and lasted well into the winter.  

Up here, our mustard has more the nature of a 'garnish' which I add to pep up supermarket lettuce - locally grown by preference.  I hope it lasts through the winter under glass. I have sown more rocket too.  Lancashire's coastal glass houses, like those of our former home, the Lea Valley, once supplied our region and beyond.  I wonder if those times will ever come again.