Harry Dodson… my too-late hero

Ah Harry... what might have been.

Starting a garden from scratch sends you all over the place looking for help and inspiration. I stumbled recently across the 1980s DVD The Victorian Kitchen Garden, which gets about 1000 5-star reviews on Amazon and stars the amazing Harry Dodson. If you are at all interested in gardens, history, TV or life in general I cannot recommend this programme highly enough. Harry Dodson was head gardener at Chilton Foliat in Wiltshire and was tracked down by researchers wanting to make a programme about the lost arts of Victorian kitchen gardening. From the start he’s a TV natural – of course he wouldn’t make it past the first screen test these days, being too old with wonky teeth and no TV nouse whatsoever. But his knowledge, passion and ease swiftly take over the programme, and he became a household name as a result. The programme itself is spectacularly unshowy, informative, and completely involving. Harry died in 2005, long before I gave a hoot about gardens. He is my new hero… but a little too late.

Until now, my first among gardening heroes has been Monty Don, who is also a TV natural, and completely mesmerising about the meaning of plants and gardens… but how different these programmes are. Harry makes Monty look a bit flash and his programmes seem (I can hardly bear to think it) superficial. Monty digging a muck heap – never! Monty wearing a jacket and tie to work the garden – absurd! Monty living the garden and not just presenting it – if only! The Victorian Kitchen Garden could never happen now – Harry’s wrong for today’s TV and the show would be edited to within an inch of its life. And anyway, the ways of Victorian gardening pretty much died with Harry – a fact which adds great poignancy to the final show.

I have learned so much from the programme, and am going to try one or two things – namely the ‘hotbed’, which isn’t a description of the UK poetry scene, but a way of turning straw and cow manure into a greenhouse-style warmth for propagating plants out of season (actually maybe it’s not so far from poetry afterall….). One thing I am not short of at Cove Park is cowpats, and maybe I can finally find a use for one or two rather more productive than as a holiday destination for Scotland’s bluebottles.

You can see in the picture there a couple of tops from Victorian cloches. I covet these now, they are beautiful creations, perfect for popping on top of the hotbed, and like much else Victorian, lovely in their perfect match of style to function. This gardening business is just one wonderful discovery after another. This may be why someone close to home recently said that I reminded them of someone… Who? I asked eagerly, hoping for someone creatively significant, an icon, possibly with tragic overtones… Sylvia Plath? You remind me of TOAD, said my former loved one. Toad of Toad Hall. One enthusiasm after another! Having recently watched the cartoon with my daughter, (starring Rik Mayall as Toad) I can see the terrible, awful truth in this. I’m still cross though. Poop Poop!

Drains and Buds

These are BUDS, people! My darling buds of er... March

There was a time, a considerable time, most of my life in fact when I did not give a single thought to drainage. Drains were things that happened to other people… old people or people in Dickens novels dying of cholera. Over the decades, however, my interests appear to have narrowed and in the (adapted) words of 80s sage Boy George, there’s nothing I like more than a nice cup of tea and a moan about drainage.

The thing is my lawn is composed almost entirely of moss and reeds. I have not found any definition of lawn in any book that incorporates these elements as parts of a viable lawn. A large part of my garden overhaul is attempting to reduce the amount of lawn space so that mowing the lawn is not reduced to the Sisyphean task of shaving a vast whiskery field.

Moss I think is under-rated as a lawn surface. It’s soft, springy, and can be striped beautifully with a mower. Its soft yellow colour I think is rather nice in a place where green is pretty much all there is. Reeds are a different matter. When you have reeds on your lawn, it’s rather like mice in your house. They might be natural, they might just be living things trying to make their way in the world but they’ve got to go, by whatever method will work. Call me old fashioned, but it’s not nice to have reeds in your garden and it’s not nice to have mice in your house.

Spot the grass.

You’ll see here I have dug some of them up and replaced them with sand. This is an attempt at improving drainage. My lawn used to look whiskery, now it looks like it’s got psoriasis. I’m thinking I may put a bit of compost and grass seed over the sandy patches and try and encourage the lone blades of grass elsewhere to band together and take over, a bit like supplying arms to a guerrilla army in the hope they’ll overthrow the hostile regime. I don’t know if it will work. I have a lot of reeds and moss.

I include, for the sheer joy of it, a picture of my willow buds. My willows are happy! And so far remain uneaten! It is very exciting to see. The green rises up the willow whips, a bit like blood returning to a limb. As it reaches the tip, out burst the furry little buds. The little offcuts I stuck in the soil without much hope of anything happening appear to have taken root. This is amazing stuff! I am glad this plant is on my side.

My vegetable seedlings – carrot, spinach, rocket and coriander seem to be doing quite well. The smaller ones spend their nights in my little growhouse, the rest of them seem to manage outside on a pallet. I promised I’d discuss slugs, but they need a diatribe of their own. The drains have taken me over this time. I’m drained.

The Arch and the Fedge

The archway to heaven

Enough with the willow! I hear you cry. But no, I can’t stop, because willow is the answer to all my decorative prayers. I may not be the answer to its prayers however. I have laid down a tough challenge to the whips that make my arch and my ‘fedge’. The soil in this part of the garden is quite shallow, in some places just a few inches before you hit a bed of shale. The soil itself is a good solid mixture of clay and peat – ideal for making a wattle and daub house but for delicate roots to wend their way… er not so much. The arch is sitting in about 5 inches of compost, and then I have added a nice thick layer of bark chips, and also popped a few bricks on top to give a bit of stability. It will be a little while before the willow realises its home is not all it seems…

Because the willow was shipped to me at the maximum height of 9ft, I had to improvise to create an arch of the proper proportions, ie. not a rather tragic tee-pee. To do this, I joined two whips on opposite sides by tying on another whip, bent over to create the arch shape. This means that the whips on each side do not have to meet and be tied together. When they grow in the spring, they can be woven in then, and hopefully the structure will be reasonably established by the time the bracing whips have died. I felt a bit guilty sacrificing some of the whips in this way. They are all so vigorous and full of potential that it’s a pity to use some simply for architecture. I’m going to have to toughen up, I can see.

Stability is an issue. An arch doesn’t have the support a dome creates for itself. You’ll see I have added some bracing whips at the bottom of each side, and as the arch grows I will bend more down back into the ground. It still wobbles slightly in the wind, but hopefully being thin-edge into the wind this will never be too much of a problem.

Can you see what it is yet?

So far so Blair Witch. My next plan has been to create a ‘garden within a garden’ by making a fedge. I should start by saying how much I hate the word fedge. I am a poet by trade, and something of a purist and I hate clumsy amalgams of words. Fedge is like ‘webinar’… it sets my grumpy little teeth on edge. But I’m getting used to it, mainly because it is accurate. A fedge really is part fence, part hedge… and you can’t say fairer than that I suppose.

The fedge encloses a rectangular space right across the middle of the garden. Long gardens like mine can look even longer and rather boring if they are simply bisected by straight paths, so positioning the inner space in this way forces the path to go round the side in a – hopefully pleasing – semicircle. The inner garden is going to be used for – wait for it – vegetables! I’ve never grown my own vegetables before, and am starting with carrots, spinach and rocket. The veg garden within a garden will have raised beds and faces south-west so will hopefully do well. The fedge will I hope operate as a bit of a wind-break as well.

NEXT TIME on HORRENDOUS GARDEN CHALLENGE… vegetables, and SLUGS.

The Wind in the Willows

My first willow effort

I love willow. Willow is about the first plant I have come across that seems actively to want to help me in my garden overhaul. Willow is amazing. Willow is my new best friend, and I may have gone a little willow-mad. But wait till I list some of its fine qualities, and you will see what I mean, perhaps. A whip (technical term for young sapling with no branches) can bend double and not break, a bit like me when I was 7, walking my arms backwards down a wall to walk along as a crab. Willow takes me back to a childhood world of bendy possibility.

Not only this, but willow is vigorous. You can push both ends into the ground and they will both root! It sprouts leaves quickly, and there are few places lovelier on a hot summer day than inside the gentle shade of a willow bower. Best of all, it is grateful for what I can give it: an endless  supply of wet, wet soil. It’s not going to get all resentful on me, start fighting me prematurely, asking in the wilted way only a plant in the wrong place can why oh why have you brought me here?

I’ve always loved the romantic look of a willow bower, but assumed it took great artisanal skill to make one. Hence the great cost of having one made for you. But then I looked into it… and you can buy kits! They have a page of instructions and you need an afternoon, plenty of gung-ho ignorance and you can do it yourself! So I did.

It’s eight or so large whips stuck in a circle, each tied to its diagonal partner. Then two more whips per gap, crossed over and woven in and about to give shape and stability and reduce the amount of gap. This one has got its back to the sea (and the gate and the road and the wind) because not everything in the garden can be constantly looking out in the same direction, like old people through a nursing home window. It’s more private and intimate to look in sometimes, and well I’m determined the garden is going to be something to look at. Also, the bower is primarily for my 5 year old daughter, so its entrance faces in to the patio I’ve made, so she can see us when she’s playing.

A close up of the er... intricate latticework

You’ll see it is all planted through membrane. Membrane is possibly the greatest of all human inventions. It creates order where there is none. Weeds bash their sporey heads against it and cannot burst through. Cover it with something like gravel or wood chips and you have made an ‘area’ that cannot be destroyed! At least for a few years anyway. Willow needs to be protected from weeds competing with it, this is an easy way to do it. And it’s not like plastic – water and air pass through it. Only the light is held back, slowly obliterating the ambition of even the toughest weed – Ha!

The willow whips are planted in a trench of slightly improved soil: a bit of sand, some compost all mixed in with the original soil. As you can see it has a little entrance, a foyer if you will, and also a small awning. By July it should nearly be covered with leaves, and new growth simply gets woven in. I’ll keep you posted.

Truly in the grip of willow madness, I have now made a willow arch (to be covered in my next post), and will shortly be making a willow ‘fedge’. I have noticed that no one else in this immediate vicinity has made use of willow. I hope this is because they do not possess my startling inventive flair, and not because the deer and rabbits will eat it. I’ll find out. This is the only way the ignorant progress.

On being Capability Brown (when you’re not) – the beginning

Rhododendrus Triffidus Armageddoniscus

This is a challenging garden at the best of times. The soil here is acid (not pure acid you understand – it’s not Mars, but only certain plants will do well). The things that do grow, grow with unprecedented vigour. You can watch them grow. A rhody like this early flowering one is one of at least 30 in the garden and will sprout up to 3 ft a year. Leave them long enough and they turn into enormous, unwieldy trees. When I moved here, the garden was largely in darkness because this is what had happened to the rhododendrons (and every other tree or shrub). But more of that a little later.

I have every pernicious weed there is. I didn’t know what they were a few years ago when I lived in the Eden of natural-world ignorance, but I do now. Mare’s tail (spooky, flowerless, spidery – reproduces with roots and spores – oh my God!); ground elder (such a beautiful parent plant with soft white petals that you can’t believe its pure evil intent); creeping buttercup (urchin cousin of proper buttercup, it looks all pretty and innocent with its inoffensive warm flowers, but under the ground it creates a deadly matting of roots – and it will regenerate from the tiniest scrap left behind! Like a monstrous worm!). This is serious stuff people! Come the end of the world, these plants, along with the cockroaches, the bindweed, the docks, they will be all that’s left…

Living here and not tackling the garden was not an option. In a decade the plants would have have taken over and turned my house into something from sleeping beauty – but which would need more than a Prince and a wee sword of truth to get through. We don’t have much money and so I couldn’t employ anyone to save me from darkness and death by rhododendron. Also, it is almost impossible to get anyone to help even if you do pay them, or it was then. We were incomers, suspicion filled the gaps between the shrubs, no one wanted to help.

The garden (I use this term because there is no other, but it’s not really a garden yet, and then it was just a dark, marshy field) is enormous.This is not a boast, but a cry for help. It stretches nearly 200 feet to the sea, and including the side border is getting on for 100 feet wide. And that’s just the front. It does it all again at the back – but on a hill! I deal with them in alternate years, there’s no other way (as yet, but I have a cunning plan which I’ll share with you later). I came to this from Oxford and a single window box where I attempted to grow supermarket basil (and failed. Don’t do this at home – I don’t know what supermarket basil actually is, but it’s not a plant. Expose it to any form of natural element and it immediately dies).

The roiling sea

The weather here is extreme, and getting more so. We have the gulf stream not too far away, so we can be preternaturally warm, and some people grow palm trees. The garden faces south-west (we look right at Arran) and when it’s sunny it is furiously so. But we are very exposed too, and if the wind comes right in off the sea at high speed it wreaks havoc. Last year, the sea gales came twice, and they were so fast and harsh that they burned off all the leaves in the entire garden – except of course the rhododenrons, who just looked a bit singed and cross. The privet hedge I lovingly planted had completely black leaves which fell off – in May. My new apple tree which had happily popped out some pretty blossoms, shrank backwards against its stake and dropped all its leaves in terror. If it had had a face, it would have had the expression of a scared teen at the high point of a rollercoaster. So I have learned that you’ve got to take account of these things. It took me time though. My Cottage Garden period, with the beds of 5 foot blowsy hollyhocks did not… er last long.

But when all that stops, the sun comes out, the sea takes its deep trembling breaths, there is nowhere more beautiful in the world. And I say this as someone who actually doesn’t like the sea. Or mountains. A garden can celebrate and take part in that natural spectacle. And I wanted that very much. I just had to get to it.

The last four years have changed a field into a template for a garden, and this is the fun part, where I can actually start to create something instead of simply assert myself against the landscape. I”ve learned a lot about landscaping and gardening in this kind of territory. I’ve come to like reading about flowers and gardening. I’m starting to grow vegetables this year (more on this also). I’d like to use this some of this space to share what I’ve learned and show what is possible for the ignoramus with a determined spirit. Forging a relationship with this inhospitable space is one of the most creative things I’ve ever done, and gives me great happiness.

A smooth transition to a new topic

Robert Frost Hosta

I’m an exceptionally nice woman, I don’t make a fuss and generally I aim to please. I applied these dubious qualities to my exit from the Poetry Society. Edward Mackay and I made no announcement and I made one blog post to get my name prised off the PoSoc website. Alas my politeness and discretion haven’t done me any good, as now my reasons for resigning are popping up as gossip in the Evening Standard.

Look, here it is plain and simple. I resigned because the Poetry Society has been held to ransom by a destructive feud at public expense between Fiona Sampson and Judith Palmer, and we as a Board were not facing this central problem, which involved two people not one, beyond simply backing a different horse than the previous Board. I’m not in any camp, which the Standard’s suggestion unfortunately puts me in. I didn’t expect perfection, but I expected better from us than that and I just don’t want to be part of an organisation that carries on like that. I was elected after a huge painful upheaval and that put me in an especially awkward position when I felt we were not doing what we should.

When mine and Edward Mackay’s resignations were downplayed so heavily, my suspicions rose, I’m only human after all. As the weight of cheerful PoSoc press releases mounted, I quietly directed some questions to the Chair of the Board, questions such as how much funding does the Poetry Society actually have (the Press coverage is a little confusing)? Does ‘restoration’ actually just mean to April or is there some better news? Have the stringent conditions ACE required for a new funding arrangement been met? I’m a member of the public after all, even if no longer a member of the Poetry Society.

Sir Stephen never replied. It could be that his computer has blown up, but I think he just didn’t want to. That hurt my feelings a little bit, yes dear blog follower, it did. But I’m over that now and well, it’s a discourteous world, people! I’ve been wanting to devote my blog to a garden makeover I’m doing, but I haven’t been able to make a smooth transition in topic. So hopefully this will do. I’m bored of the Board! No more! I’m bringing on the hostas!

In case you don’t know (and you probably don’t)

You’d think I had enough silence up here, far from metropolitan chatter, but I’ve lately come to understand how much I crave it. The sea on the shingle, the wind careering over the top of the house, the birds gossiping excitedly on the bird table outside my window… these are the kind of sounds that make it possible to empty my mind, and then fill it again with the thoughts I am so desperate to turn over during all the noisy parts of the day.

But I think I have been mistakenly silent myself on one matter, because I thought that mentioning it would be done by someone else, and because – well I want a quiet life. In December last year I resigned from the Board of the Poetry Society (as did Edward Mackay). We both resigned (for slightly different reasons) because we could not agree with the way the governance was going. I was particularly uncomfortable that I was not able to deliver whilst on the Board the kinds of things that those who elected me rightly expected. Last summer was a terrible time for those involved in British poetry, showing the British poetry scene at its very worst. I believed that as a Board we were recognising neither the depth of the problems faced by the Poetry Society, nor the depth of feeling in the membership who had put us there. I had so many messages of support when I was elected, and it troubled me greatly to think people were trusting me and I would not be able to deliver.

Edward and I both resigned at Christmas in part because we didn’t want to create needless fuss, or turn the story into something about either one of us. We thought the news would dissipate and everyone could get on with the celebrations untroubled by further controversy. I did assume, however, that at some point the Poetry Society would acknowledge that two of its Board had resigned. Yesterday I discovered that my name (and Edward’s) is still on the website as being on the Board and no mention has ever been made that we have gone. My friends, the membership, all are blissfully unaware that two Board members could not see a way to continue.

Aside from the insult that is to the contribution I and Edward made, it disturbs me because my friends and those who voted for me will think that I have endorsed various decisions which I have not been part of.  I wish the Society well, but my own reputation matters a little too.

Ladies and gentlemen who voted for me, I want you to know: I was thrilled to be elected; I did work hard as I promised, I did try extremely hard. My invisible resignation pains me not because I want some kind of limelight, but because it makes it look to you like I didn’t care, or worse – that there was something shameful about my resignation. I did care, and am not ashamed that I cared so much.

Nearly three months have passed since I resigned, and I’ve been working very hard at the things I love, enjoying my silence as described above. I’ve got to get the fact of my resignation out, but I don’t want to go on about it. I hope you will forgive me if I say that I am glad to be free to concentrate on other things. Warmest thanks to everyone to voted for me, and my warm admiration to everyone who worked so hard last summer at the EGM and beyond.

Haunts of the Poets

I never quite made it to London. A Canada-born northern girl, with a Scottish adolescence thrown in, I lived abroad before I seriously tackled the south of England. I barely even saw London before my early twenties, when an ill-advised foray into writing for men’s magazines took me to the top floor of Paul Raymond’s offices above his most famous Soho club, Madame JoJo. I wrote my first ‘proper’ poem as I like to think of it in a tiny room in a small Hungarian town long ago, but all my development as a writer happened afterwards in the bit of the south I finally came to and called home: Oxford.

Place means everything to me as writer, and nothing. An equally nomadic friend once told me that places are like people: you have a relationship with them and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Oxford was an accident, a chance encounter. It could have been a one-night stand, but turned out to be a fifteen year marriage, and we are still friends. My stay coincided with that of many other exciting poets who are still my friends today, and crucially, there was funding available which I won, and which gave me the money upon which all decent writing depends to survive. The place of Oxford was, for me, a confluence of several things essential to my survival and development as an artist. I had no other tie there, but I became myself there.

Now I live on the West Coast of Scotland, so different that it may as well be another universe. The only thing we have in common is that both populations breathe oxygen. I have mountains instead of meadows, seas instead of rivers and I am far from my familiar ‘cultural base’. But it is my home, and has, in a different way, profoundly affected my writing. My new relationship (to take the metaphor further) has been stormy and difficult. My landscape has demanded attention and forced me to change. My child has been born here and knows nothing else, and that too has a profound effect on what I consider home.

Where shall I haunt when my poet days are over? It’s an atomised world now and so many of us do not stay in one place all our lives. I shall have a busy afterlife haunting lots of places, or perhaps, if I’m lucky enough I’ll finally get my opportunity alluded to elsewhere and go to New York where I’ll start a whole new movement of Dead Poets. Or maybe I’ll just be frightening cats.

Download the details of the Poetry Society’s exhibition, Haunts of the Poets, here:  Haunts of Poets at Poetry Cafe

On Hilary Mantel and my new life in New York

Did anyone else see the incredible interview with Hilary Mantel at the weekend? That woman is a seer… and an inspiration. Something she said resonated particularly with me. She said that if circumstances had not thwarted her she would have been something in politics. Circumstances did thwart her completely, endometriosis and its misdiagnosis damaged her body and took away many of her options, in effect forcing her to her desk and to her writing. But how interesting that inside the writer is the politician frustrated in changing the world, driven instead to change it through imagination.

Perhaps fiction writers are frustrated politicians. I often wonder if poets are frustrated lawyers. In many ways I am. One of the most beautiful elements of poetry is the elegance of its ‘argument’, not the finger-wagging sort, but the presentation of truth, the persuasion of the reader to see one’s world. What draws me to the world of the law is that same elegance of presenting a case, of persuasion, and most of all the principle of not choosing one’s case, of finding the truth in what you have been presented, regardless of your own conviction. It’s taking ‘truth’ out of the self, and yet investing all of one’s self in it. And it’s about finding principle in a world of human compromise. In my next life, not only am I going to New York and missing out my Britain phase (I’ve so done that in this life), but I’m going to law school. I know I’ll drop out and go and write poetry somewhere in that life as well, but it’s going to be great fun before I do.

Mantel said a great many fascinating things in that film, but a final thought to share with you. She said a childhood filled with secrets had made her great desire to be to know what was being said on the other side of the door, that ‘everyone’ wants to know if it is evil on the other side of the door. In fact she believes self-preservation depends on knowing if there is evil behind the door. The interviewer pointed out gently, ‘But not everyone thinks like that.’ With her magnificent blue eyes unblinking, Mantel said ‘Fools!’ That is what makes the great writer, or indeed the great politician, or indeed the great lawyer… that ruthless mix of curiosity allied with principle, that makes an uneasy person but a real artist.

Poetry Society Trustee Election

Thank you to everyone who voted for me. It’s an honour to be elected to the Board, and I’ll be working hard for you. It’s not an easy job, by any stretch of the imagination, and there is very little time to get things right. Anyone who was at the Poetry Society AGM last night will have felt the anger that exists among the membership, justifiably. We shiny new Trustees can’t change the past, but we can work our hardest to secure the future. We have to get a move on: anyone at the AGM also understands the peril the Society is in.

Thank you to everyone who voted at all, whether for me or not. I am delighted to be part of this Board. Democracy, wonderful though it is, can deliver unpredictable results, and I was not a little concerned that things might end up… a bit random to say the least. The result was very close in some cases – three re-counts had to take place, and a number of us were starting to wonder if the Hanging Chad might make its appearance. But the end result, to me as a member as well as a Trustee, is a strong first step towards building new confidence. Such thought was put into the voting; I am sure people had been researching beyond the 200 word statements to deliver a group of people with a range of skills and experience, ages and backgrounds, and who, just as important, are going to be able to work together. I am as pleased by the process (long and moderately tormenting though it might have been for the candidates) as by the result.

There are some excellent candidates who weren’t elected. I hope we’ll be able to call on their expertise anyway. And my thanks go again to Kate Clanchy, whose tireless work, imagination and optimism have made this new start possible. And I expect she’ll be keeping a close eye on us!

Today I think we can say the members of the Poetry Society have got a Board they deserve. A good one.

The Trustees are: Shanta Acharya, Martin Alexander, Polly Clark, Robert Hutchison, Sir Stephen Irwin, Edward Mackay, Kona Macphee, Heather Neill, Paul Ranford, Michael Schmidt, Laurie Smith, Stephen Wilson