Francis Pryor's Blog, page 4

Late February: The End of the Wet?

First let me say a few words of welcome to anyone who has had the sound good sense to follow this blog having read my short piece (‘I wouldn’t be without…’) in the Correspondence section of the March issue of the RHS magazine, The Garden. So if you’re new here, this is a blog that has lots of garden stuff, mostly written for the benefit of gardeners and garden lovers. Sometimes I make forays into farming, archaeology, nature conservation and landscape history – especially of the Fens. I like to believe there’s something for everyone – but having said that, there’s no pleasing some people. Anyhow, if you’ve just joined us: welcome aboard!

I am writing this in the first week of March and we haven’t had heavy rain for almost a week. A couple of days ago the Met Office announced that February 2020 had been the wettest February of all time (or since records began, if you want to be pedantic). And I think that says it all. I also think we’re all rather fed up with it. Yesterday the electrician who has been sorting-out our various problems in the house and farm had been fixing something in the fuse-box that was making a persistent loud hum. Apparently it was a faulty contact. Normally, as he runs a very popular business, we’d have expected him to be a hour or two in coming, but no. He arrived very promptly: he said he was going ‘stir-crazy’ – absolutely frustrated with not being able to get out and get on. I know exactly how he felt. And of course water and ambient dampness don’t help any electrical work.

Latterly the rain fell as sleet and snow and it gave the garden a rather menacing and slightly eerie look, which lacked the fluffy Santa Claus softness of proper snow. Here are four pictures I snapped through open windows during the storm. The first is the view across the main garden from upstairs:

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The second is out of the front door, looking across to the driveway with the wirework dome. Three days ago Maisie pruned the fuchsias in the foreground down to the ground. They put on a lot of growth last year:

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The third was taken out of the back door. This is a snap-shot, not a carefully composed picture for a book, so I apologise for the three prominent dustbins (the little bin is for vegetable waste to go onto the manure heap). The winter-flowering honeysuckle (Lonicera purpusii) immediately behind the bin with the snowy lid was particularly good this year. The flowers are just going over and the first leaf-buds are starting to open:

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The fourth is a view from the French doors leading onto the poop-deck, whose pergola-supports rather dominate the picture. All our bird-feeders now sport squirrel-proof mesh. The small border behind the central post is still too wet to walk along. You can’t see it very clearly, but there’s water in the gutters on either side. The bed on the right is filled with the highly scented, dark pink rose Madame Isaac Pereire. The plants are only just hanging on and we worry if they’ll survive all the wet. They’ll certainly need a good feed in a week or two’s time:

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A couple of days after the last of the February wet, we actually had some sunshine. I was out walking the dogs and was heading towards the wood. At this point the wood is planted with hazel for coppicing and oak standards. But shortly after planting we found that strong winds were making it hard for the trees to get established, so we decided to sett a wind-break of black poplar (Populus nigra) tree cuttings, which has proved very successful and has drawn the slower growing oaks into fine upright specimens. What we hadn’t realised was that the poplar trees helped shade and drain the paddocks alongside them and this provided a superb habitat for field ants. At least that’s what I assume them to be. Field ants are famous for their anthills and these don’t seem to have spread into the neighbouring wood (which wood ants would have done). One day I must get an entomologist to identify them properly (hint, hint: Tweet me if you are one living locally). I noticed the first of their little anthills about fifteen years ago and they have grown steadily ever since. Now they have spread to the other side of the farm, where there’s another colony of at least half an acre. I reckon the one in the picture is slightly larger.

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And here’s a close-up of those anthills. As a prehistorian I can’t help thinking that they closely resemble tiny Bronze Age round barrows, complete with the slightly flattened or even depressed crowns. With barrows these depressions are largely the result of Victorian antiquarian-Vicars doing ‘excavations’. In the case of the anthills the excavators are far more welcome: they’re made by the sharp pointed beaks of green woodpeckers. We now have about four pairs of resident green woodpeckers who waddle about the fields, or fly over the garden, stuffed full of ants and making their wonderful, deafening calls, which are known in the west country as Yaffles.

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I first began to notice the ant-hills around ten years ago when I was topping the grazing in the autumn. By then they were tall enough to catch the revolving blade of my pasture-topper. For a few years I was ably to lift it by setting the tractor’s hydraulics up a notch or two. But now they’re too high even for that, so I’ve stopped topping the grazing. If anyone is going to dig into those ant-hills, I would far rather it was woodpeckers than my tractor.

My final picture was taken at the very end of February. It shows Chicken Lane, the little lane/footpath we planted when we laid out the garden, farmyard, wood, paddocks, house, barns and orchards in 1994-5. The various wild and semi-domesticated forms of plum (Prunus, sp.) were planted as a semi-formal line of rooted cuttings along the left-hand side of the lane (which gets its name from the chickens that peck and scratch their way along it, in summertime). On the right-hand side you can see more spaced out, taller alder (Alnus glutinosa) trees. Today the alders form part of a self-seeded and almost impenetrable hedge. Archaeologists still don’t believe me when I tell them that hedges can occur naturally: they don’t have to be deliberately planted. I think the emerging may blossom is particularly good this year – and it makes a change that the flowers are so well ahead of the leaves. As our climate grows ever warmer, the two often occur simultaneously – which spoils the effect.

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A final thought. Chicken Lane is acquiring a character all of its own. To be honest, I don’t think that either Maisie or I had a very clear idea of what it would look like when we planted it. But that didn’t worry us – we had more than enough to be getting on with. I think we both rather wanted the garden to come up with surprises that we could subsequently develop and improve. And that’s what has happened. So when we laid it all out, we were at pains not to cram the various features together. Plants need space – especially trees and shrubs. So is our approach less disciplined than that of a Capability Brown or a Gertrude Jekyll? No, I don’t think it is. But the English landscape – especially in eastern England – has become so open and impoverished since the war that traditional approaches to garden design have to be modified: nature must be allowed to return at its own pace: I fear that rapid tree planting or, just as bad, ‘rewilding’ will prove almost as aesthetically bland and culturally meaningless as the ‘grain plains’ that currently blight rural areas of lowland Britain. I have a double Golden Rule: respect landscape history and never force Mother Nature.

For new followers of this blog, Maisie is my wife, the archaeologist and gardener, Maisie Taylor.

Digging the Vegetable Garden: One of My Favourite Jobs of the Year

I know there’s a big danger about droning on and on about a wet season, but whenever I meet other gardeners that’s all we ever want to do. And it seems to make us all feel just a little less frustrated. I suppose it’s a bit sad. But anyhow. Recently, however, the weather has got a tiny bit drier – I think we’ve just enjoyed a full week without heavy rain – which is bliss! But I know it won’t last. Right now I’m sitting at my desk because I daren’t spend long outside. There’s a 70 to 75 m.p.h. storm force wind blowing and heavy rain is forecast in a couple of hours. It’s all part of an Atlantic storm – bequeathed to us by our American and Canadian friends, which has gathered force while crossing the ocean. Everything hereabouts is blowing and flapping in the gale – puts me in mind of a Trump tantrum. So I thought I’d do some writing while the storm () does her worst.

The vegetable garden stood up quite well to the wet, and most of the water drained into the path around it, where it remained stubbornly, looking more and more like a canal. I lifted the gravel with a heavy-duty fork and it worked for a bit, but while I was pruning the espaliered apples I trod it down again – and now we’re back to a canal. I took this photo exactly a week ago, on February 2nd, the day I started digging.

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Right now the ground’s so wet you can’t get on the borders without compacting the soil, which means we can’t cut-back last season’s perennials and annuals, which we normally like to start about now. Some people prefer to do this in the autumn, but we’d rather leave the seeds in place for our huge bird population to feed on during the coldest weeks of winter. In fact it’s too wet to do almost anything, except prune a few trees and shrubs and dig the vegetable garden. So here’s my very first bit of digging, done late in the afternoon of Sunday February 2nd. I know it’s only a small patch of ground, but I felt as stiff as a board when I headed in for tea. But I knew digging would get me fit. And it did.

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Just a week of digging is enough to get my limbs working again after Christmas. It’s a restorative process – and cheaper than a gym. While I dug I was visited regularly by a very friendly cock robin and a small brown hen (who has stopped laying for the winter). She was stuffing herself full of live earthworms – something I still find hard to watch even after almost five decades of digging. I know it’s fashionable to have no-dig gardens and raised beds, but I find my potatoes taste better and better as time passes and I put it down to the well-rotted manure I dig-in every winter. Oh dear, just had a thought: does this mean that visiting Vegans can’t eat my vegetables? Anyhow, this is what the veg garden looked like this morning (Feb 9th). I finished digging late yesterday afternoon and found I’d left my camera indoors, so didn’t take a picture – and besides, the light was fading. Still don’t know how I managed to hold it steady enough for a picture in the gale, when I popped out an hour ago. But it was looking good – and today my back feels fine. Digging seems to reach every bit of you: makes you feel supple. Shame about the chicken eating wiggly live worms, though.

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There was another short dry spell at the end of January and it was then I decided that I would have to do something about the state of the lawns. The previous day I had done my usual trip to Long Sutton market to collect brown shrimps and mussels and on the way home I noticed that a lot of people were out in their gardens mowing their lawns. The Saxon founders of the town had a good eye for landscape and they placed their new settlement on the low ridge of tidal silts that bound The Wash along its southern shores. That’s why the town of Long Sutton sits maybe a metre or two higher than the fen immediately to the south and west, where we are. This means that our land takes a bit longer to drain – but those chaps with their mowers didn’t seem to be having any problems. So I thought I’d give it a go when I returned home. And this was the result.

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I wouldn’t say for one moment that it was stripy perfection – and certainly not Wimbledon Centre Court standards. But if you compare the single mown stripe up the left-hand side of the Long Border, you can see just how very long the grass has grown. I’m aware the mowing did make a mess – and I even got the mower stuck at one point – but I simply had to do something. And now a full week later it is starting to recover: had I left it much longer it would have made the early spring cuts very much more difficult. Once our grass gets away it grows like a greyhound on amphetamines.

Towards the end of January Maisie and I decided we’d visit Cambridge University Botanic Garden, who have one of the finest winter gardens anywhere. I love going there and not just because it’s a fabulous garden, but because it also means I can have lunch in Yim Wah Chinese Restaurant. We used to visit Yim Wah when it was at Caxton on the old North Road a few miles west of Cambridge. I love that road with its trees set back and many 18th Century roadside inns. It’s also the world’s first turnpike (1663: see my The Making of the British Landscape, pp. 452-3). The Chinese restaurant was located at a cross-roads, alongside the Caxton Gibbet. Then the building burnt down and has been replaced by the ubiquitous clutch of look-alike fast food and burger eateries. I later discovered the Chinese family had moved to Cambridge – where their food is as fresh and delicious as it has ever been. Having said that, I do rather miss the gibbet: glimpsing death while you pig-out on noodles. But I digress…

To get to Cambridge we boarded a train at March station. I can’t remember what happened next: I think I might even have nodded off. Then Maisie woke me with a poke in the ribs.

‘We’re approaching the Welney Washes.’

That was all I needed to know. I whipped out my camera and grabbed several pictures. Sorry, I know there are spots of rain on the train’s window – but where else would you ever get such a fantastic view?

This huge expanse of winter flood forms between the two artificial and parallel channels of the River Great Ouse as they make their way in a dead straight line across the flat expanse of the Fens. Cornelius Vermuyden, who master-minded this drainage scheme in the 17th Century, realised that you must channel floodwater from the southern midlands across the Fen basin in the quickest manner possible, if you are to avoid further flooding. And this was the result: two wide artificial channels whose digging was interrupted by the English Civil war (1542-1651). The flood land between the two embanked channels is known as the Ouse Washes and from our train window I could see that they were deeply flooded. Note how the dryland beyond the bank to the right of the picture is far lower-lying than the water in the Ouse Washes. That drop was caused by drainage and the peat erosion that has happened since the land was initially drained three and a half centuries ago. You don’t need to be a hydrological engineer to known that it will pose major problems in the future, especially if sea levels continue to rise – as every respected climate scientist expects.

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And now I want to move away from the big picture to a couple of plants that have helped raise my spirits in these rather ghastly times. The first is the evergreen tree Garrya elliptica, sometimes known as the silk-tassel. It’s a native of northern California, but seems to do very well in England. We planted ours against the south-facing gable end of our house, about 15 years ago, and it has grown far more vigorously than we expected. One day I think I’ll get it under control, but every February the tassels descend and then it has a magic all of its own. You can’t beat it.

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My final picture is of the winter-flowering Clematis cirrhosa ‘Freckles’. I love this plant: simple, elegant flowers, unfussy foliage and it blooms throughout most of the winter. Ours grows immediately outside the back door and it brings a smile to my face every time I walk past it. Winter flowers are often like that: they seem to speak to you directly.

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I posted pictures of the robin and the hen on my Twitter feed @PryorFrancis

Oh Dear, What a Wet Season…

The rain showers kept coming. As my favourite commentator, Brenda from Bristol, would have said: ‘Not another one!’. The rain started more or less the weekend after we opened the garden for the National Gardens Scheme, back in September (note for your diary: in 2020 we’ll open on the weekend of September 20-21). At first the wet was just irritating. It meant, for example, that long grass in the meadow couldn’t be cut until it was a bit too long – which meant in turn that it had to be raked off in places (hard work!). Some areas, such as the orchard, even missed their late autumn cut. But even so, there were compensations. The summer growing season had been warm and wet, which meant that trees grew well and the red stemmed white willows (Salix alba var. Kermesina) laid down vigorous new stems, which glowed a good colour in the late autumn sunshine.

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The constantly passing shower clouds would often form strange patterns at dawn and dusk and I noticed this rather strange stripy effect on two or three separate occasions, when I got up early to do my first stint of writing.

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But there were a few other benefits. The ground water table had been very low for several years and the pond would remain dry for many months. I was actually getting quite concerned for the well-being of the many hundreds of newts and toads who depend on its water. At first the almost ceaseless showers seemed to be having a minimal effect and the pond stayed stubbornly dry. Sometime in later October, water began to accumulate, first slowly, then quite rapidly. This photo, taken a few weeks before Christmas, shows the water at its correct level, which is more or less at Sea Level. Ignore the willow trunk in the foreground and look instead at the three trees growing out of the pond. They are semi-evergreen Swamp Cypresses (Taxodium distichum), from the southern states of North America, and are just starting to shed their leaves. They’re one of the few trees that can happily grow in near-permanent standing water. If trees could dance, that’s what they’ll be doing now…

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Thanks to the roots of the many hundreds of trees and shrubs that we planted over the years, some parts of the garden remained passable, if not exactly firm underfoot. The Nut Walk was just such an area, but as you can see I haven’t been able to get out and rake up the leaves, which we normally put in bags and use as leaf-mould in a year’s time. The grey squirrel problem has become so severe that we only managed to collect a couple of dozen hazel nuts. They start picking and opening them in July – weeks before there’s anything inside the shells to eat. It’s SO annoying, although I must confess, I do quite like looking at them when they play on the wooden pergola, which we call the Poop (as in Poop Deck), at the back of the house.

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The rain eased-off briefly in early December and I was able to get this post-leaf-fall view of the wood and the meadow. There’s something very English about such a simple scene. I have to say it, but I often find modern gardens can be over-designed and a bit too clever, with far too many contrived views and vistas. Sometimes something as simple as trees, grass and woodland-edge can possess a dignity and charm that’s irresistible – for me at least!

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And now to the floods. I think what made them – and still makes them – so destructive and difficult to manage or deal with is the fact that the soil was already completely saturated by the time the heaviest rains started to fall, in November and December. Usually when floods happen they tend to be one-off events: sudden massive rainfall usually followed by weeks of drier weather. That way you can get back on the land after four or five days. But this season I haven’t been able to get back to the vegetable garden at all. Runner bean plants are still there, with their bamboo cane frame starting to lean at an impossible angle. And I certainly haven’t been able to barrow-in the manure to do my usual early winter digging. I’m about a month behind in the vegetable garden. Here’s a shot of the floods along the edge of the meadow, at the end of the Serpentine Walk.

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Here’s another view of the flooded area, which you can see lies in a clear line or row. If this was anywhere else in Britain, you’d say that the water was lying in the furrow of an abandoned ridge-and-furrow field, but in the Middle Ages the silt Fens of Lincolnshire were farmed in a slightly different way, that didn’t involve the raising of high, heaped-up ridges. Instead, local farmers dug widely separated, parallel shallow ditches known as dylings. Very few of these still survive as surface features, but they often show-up in very wet conditions. I’ve counted about six running parallel across our garden. This one is particularly clear – in fact it’s a great shame it isn’t still flowing!

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One job we have managed to do is to cut back the hornbeam hedges which have grown rather long and straggly of late. It’s a pretty heavy and demanding job and my hip won’t let me do it. So I employed Jason, who did a superb job and is as keen about good hedge-clipping as I am. It has been good to see them straightened-up and rejuvenated. Jason’s YouTube website is well-worth visiting.

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So that’s it, but only for a short time. I’m aware I haven’t done a blog post for just over a month and that’s because I’ve been up-to-my-neck with signings of The Fens and I’ve also been very busy working on my new book for Head of Zeus, which I’ve got to finish by the autumn. So I’ll be back shortly. The rain has held off for almost a fortnight and I’ve been able to do a little light work on the garden – usually involving several sheets of plywood and wellies. I’ve been living in wellies of late!

 For the benefit of my non-British readers, Brenda was famously recorded on the BBC greeting the news of a recent General Election with the words: ‘Not another one!’ in a strong Bristol accent.

“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life…de dum…de dum…”

We Brits are meant to be good at keeping our peckers up and smiling through adversity. But lately I’ve been having trouble finding my pecker, let alone keeping it up. Everything seems so gloomy and pointless. And it all came to a head yesterday, Thursday December 12th, 2019, the day of the General Election. We did some gentle shopping in Holbeach, then called in at the Sutton St James Village Hall where the Polling Station is always to be found. Maisie and I then dutifully marked our ballot papers and had a nice long chat with the two charming ladies who were checking names and forms. I think they were a bit bored: I wouldn’t have said the place was exactly overcrowded with eager voters. We got back to the car, just as the rain began to start. And it rained steadily all the way home. The wind picked up and the dogs seemed very reluctant to be taken for an afternoon walk. So I let them play in the barn. The rain got worse and I could see the puddles out in the fields growing by the hour. Parts of the garden looked a bit like Venice. By the end of Election Day I emptied 13mm from the rain gauge.

Our chickens are still laying so we had boiled eggs and homemade bread for supper: simple, but very nice, as the eggs this year have had wonderful yellow yokes and are bursting with flavour. Maisie’s bread is always lovely. After supper we both did something we rarely do: we looked at the internet news on our phones, since the BBC was not allowed to report on the General Election until after the Polls closed at ten o’clock. There were pictures of endless queues and of youngsters lining-up to vote in various universities across England. Everyone seemed to think that the ‘Youthquake’ – involving three million newly-registered young voters – was going to transform the election from a Tory landslide into something else (nobody seemed quite certain what).

At ten o’clock, the BBC announced the result of the exit poll – usually a fairly accurate predictor of the eventual result – and the Tories under Boris Johnson were going to win with a majority of about 50. We were both amazed, if not actually stunned. I grabbed another glass of cheap port and tried to read a book. Then I went upstairs to bed – and the radio. Despite my best intentions, I didn’t stay awake and listen: the port took over and I snored my way to a fairly deep sleep. When she came up half an hour later, Maisie tried to get me to stop snoring (a sharp shout in my ear usually does the trick), but this time she failed. By now the earliest results were starting to come in and Maisie realised that the Exit Polls had probably been correct. Very kindly she decided not to wake me up. So she listened to the gloomy tidings alone.

At three AM I woke up, only to hear that the Tories were winning what looked like a major landslide and that Labour and the Lib Dems were having something of a car-crash. I started to feel a dreadful pall of black depression creeping up on me. And then something very strange happened. Maybe it was a latent sense of survival. Or perhaps my publishers were sending out subliminal messages to me: don’t go all gloomy or you’ll never finish your new book. Remember, the deadline is the end of June and you’ve still got fifty thousand words to do…

But whatever it was, the pall of gloom started to dissipate. I almost felt a sense of relief. At least we knew what was going to happen. And maybe now that he’d won such a major landslide, Boris could tell the extreme-right members of the Tory Party to leave him alone; perhaps the new Brexit deal wouldn’t be as suicidally hard as we had expected? It was a thought. Who knows, what if Boris didn’t try to paddle or punt the British Isles across the Atlantic to cuddle-up to that nice mister Trump? I didn’t really believe in any of these thoughts, but suddenly they seemed possible. And if the trade and political severance of Brexit wasn’t too hard, one day we might be able to return – when, that is, my generation dies off and the saner younger generation gains control. Again, it was a thought.

So that’s how it is. I detest what has happened in the Election, but the years of uncertainty were starting to get me down. I also loathed the growing hatred, racism and intolerance that Brexit seemed to foster. I don’t think for one minute that the lurch to the extremes of right and left will cease, but maybe it’ll slow down as the febrile, testosterone-fuelled atmosphere of hatred starts to abate. It would be so nice to think about things other than a sort of politics that somehow ignores what really matters. Climate change and global warming, the rise of religious fundamentalism and the disintegration of nuclear weapons agreements should be occupying politicians’ thoughts. Not Brexit. And as for me? I want to write books and meet the lovely people who read them – and you can’t enjoy things like that if you’re feeling all knotted-up inside. I may be wrong, but I think my pecker might be starting to ascend…

The Fens: And Now for the Audiobook – read by the Author!!!

I’ve always liked the idea of audiobooks: something you could listen to on demand. The trouble was, we lacked the technology. Cassette tapes and CDs etc are fine, but bulky – so downloads have to be the answer. And then, of course, there are those endless commuter journeys, which by and large I’ve been spared as I have either worked at home or have lived close by my various digs. But having said that, I do travel to London quite often, to see publishers and the like, and often catch commuter trains, where many of the regular passengers are listening to audiobooks or podcasts. And again, it makes excellent sense and is far more relaxing then reading which can be very difficult on a noisy, over-crowded train. On with the headset, and into the book. Silence. And then another world.

I had that other world very much in mind when I wrote The Fens in the first place. So it was quite easy to slip back into it when I re-read it for the audiobook. Recording audiobooks has been quite a journey of discovery for me – and one I’ve enjoyed hugely. Like many such journeys it has also been a humbling experience: if I were to do it badly, I’d be letting so many people down, but at the same time I didn’t have many opportunities to hone my technique. I’m not an actor, but for some reason I’ve always been able to read out and reach an audience. So that was a skill I had to work on – and I only had four days of recording to do it. It was quite a challenge.

In actual fact, I’d be telling a fib if I said that The Fens audiobook was my first one, because it wasn’t. That honour goes to PATHS to the Past, which I recorded in a single, day-long session, in 2018. If I’m strictly honest I have to confess I can’t remember much about it, other than the studio was somewhere in London and I stumbled out of it absolutely shell-shocked, drained and exhausted. I’d no idea that concentration on a text could be quite so mind-numbingly intensive. I’ve always respected actors, mostly I suspect because I’m a crap one myself, and that session in front of the microphone convinced me of their huge talents and very great discipline. I never got a download of PATHS, but I’ve managed to hear a few free minutes on the web – and it doesn’t sound at all bad. So please rush out and buy a copy (Francis, was that written with sufficient enthusiasm? – Ed.).

I remember being a bit surprised that I had to read the entire text of PATHS for the audiobook, but as it was 40,000 words long (less than half that of an average book of 90k words), that seemed quite reasonable. But it was still very ambitious to expect a newcomer to do it in a day. But we did it. A few weeks ago I learned that The Fens was to be recorded by audiobook specialists W.F. Howes, at their studios in Rearsby, just outside Leicester. An email told me that we’d be recording the entire text. At this point I came close to wetting myself: The Fens is just over 120,000 words long! How could any sane person possibly read such a vast text aloud without going hoarse or insane – or indeed both? I had visions of Maisie driving to Leicester to collect my twitching semi-conscious body in the sheep trailer filled with lots of fresh wheat straw… Then I discovered that we were expected to complete the marathon task in four days, divided into two recording sessions, of two days each. That sounded a bit more manageable. But only a bit. I have to say, it was still very daunting.

I took a taxi to the studio from the hotel just outside Leicester. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the fields looking wetter. Ridge and furrow was standing out, as if it were the Middle Ages and the River Soar was in full flood. The taxi had to turn round a couple of times, as the road ahead was under water. This has been the wettest autumn I can recall. We eventually got to the studio and I was taken to the recording room.

From the outside, the studio looked like any other light industrial building. But once inside it was very different. The main recording room contained two sound-proofed booths; each one had a mixing desk directly outside its only window. This was where my sound-recordist, audio engineer and producer – all rolled into one charming individual, Lewis Hampson – was to sit. As soon as I entered the room he greeted me and asked the all-important question: would I like a cup of tea or coffee? Once he’d handed me my tea, Lewis showed me into the booth. I have to say it was quite snug, but then it had to be: its walls and ceiling were thickly lined with black foam to absorb any traces of echo or noises off. The foam lining also ensured that it grew hot (any air-conditioning would have been far too noisy). I sat in a swiveling chair in front of the only window, which looked-out onto Lewis and his array of screens and complex digital jiggery-pokery. On my side of the window was a narrow ledge on which was perched an iPad. This displayed my book, page-by-page, and I was able to scroll down through it, avoiding pictures, by simply using my finger on the screen (happily I’m quite at home with reading e-books on my own iPad). A huge microphone was suspended just above the screen and there was also a very large and well-padded set of head-phones. The headphones allowed me to communicate with Lewis, just outside the window.

As soon as I’d finished my mug of tea we started recording. I remembered from doing Paths to the Past, not to read too fast and I tried to keep half an eye on the sentence to come – it’s a bit of a knack, but worth it. I think we had a couple of false starts, but once I’d got going we did a full half page before I stumbled. Modern digital recording is wonderful because it allows the editor outside the window to stitch-together sentences that get broken during recording, but it’s up to the reader to match the speed and tone – which isn’t always as straightforward as it sounds. Slowly, as I read, it all started to come back to me and it was very weird – almost as if I was writing it again, but for the first time. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s how it felt: déjà vu, but fresh and newly experienced. As the minutes ticked past I began to get into my stride and by half an hour I was scampering along. Then a few gurgles started in my throat, so I got another cup of tea. That worked for a few minutes, before, that is, the dreaded tummy gurgles began. At first, I ignored them. After all, people sitting alongside you in the tube don’t hear tummy rumbles. I’ve even been known to let slip the occasional small fart – providing I know I’ll be getting off at the next station. And I always get away with it: as the train pulls out I never see people in my carriage retching or holding their noses. No, they continue to stand, immobile and distant, avoiding all eye contact. Typical London, in fact. But to return to the recording booth: I continued to pretend the gurgles weren’t happening. And then it happened. Lewis cut in:

‘Sorry, Francis, can we re-do that last sentence? Take it from “The Must Farm boats…”’

I decided not to question him and started to read, yet again. Then the gurgles resumed; this time with added strength. Not so much gurgling liquid, as boiling lava. Again Lewis cut in:

‘Sorry, Francis, one more time:’

He wound the recording back and I started again:

‘The Must Farm boats were discovered…’

But that was as far as I got. This time the gurgle was a real wig-lifter. They may well have heard it outside the booth. Lewis was smiling broadly.

‘Let’s pause for a cup of tea and a breakfast bar. They usually calm stomach noises down.’

And he was right. They did. I had two. But once back in the booth it took about ten minutes for the gurgles to resume and the ultra-sensitive microphone picked them up, loud and clear. But Lewis had another trick up his sleeve. He rose to his feet and came round to the door at the back of the booth. He said something, but I couldn’t hear him. So, feeling rather stupid, I removed the head-phones. He was pointing at the floor in the corner or the booth, by my left foot. Then I saw what was there: a plump, soft cushion.

‘Hold that across your front and then we’ll see how we get on.’

And I did. And it was miraculous. One or two thunderous gurgles did manage to penetrate the cushion and be picked up by the microphone – but only a few. Maybe half a dozen all day.

There’s an interesting twist to this story. Everyone over 60 is sent a bowel cancer faecal smear kit every two years until they’re 74. You take the samples, send them off, and then receive a short ‘all clear’ letter, if you’re lucky. But about a month previously I had received a letter from Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Huntingdon, informing me that my bowel cancer smear had produced traces of blood, which might, but only might, indicate cancer in its early stages. So they had booked me in to have a colonoscopy (where they insert a small television camera in your rectum and look for cancer). It sounded rather grim, but the process wasn’t at all painful and the TV pictures were superb. I love glimpsing my insides – and this was in full, living colour! During the investigation they discovered 5 polyps (small usually harmless growths) – which they removed (live, on telly!). Then, when I got home I realised that my tummy had calmed down: the gurgles had ceased. So the next time I record an audiobook I won’t need that cushion!

And (this is written a week later) I’ve just been told by the hospital that the polyps were benign. LONG LIVE the NHS!

As part of the lead-up to the release of the audiobook on December 19th, I’ll be recording a live public interview on my Facebook page. Needless to state I’ll be doing this at my publishers, Head of Zeus, in London, as our broadband out in the Fens is far, far too slow. The interview is scheduled for 1.00 pm (1300 hours GMT) on Monday December 16th. So do watch it if you can – and feel free to ask a few questions.

And finally here’s a picture of me in the recording booth at W.F. Howes, taken by Lewis Hampson. At that stage in the recording, I had yet to acquire the cushion!

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The Late Autumn Garden (or I Loathe and Detest Leaf-Blowers)

I’m writing this on November 2nd and what a strange autumn it has been so far. I don’t think I can recall a wetter season: we’ve barely been able to get into the garden since we opened, back in late September. I’ve never known the lawnmower’s wheels spin in the wet grass and soft ground so often. I know I’m not a big fan of garden neatness, but I’ve also never seen the lawns looking so grotty with big greenbergs of mulched grass, and tyre marks everywhere. There are leaves as far as you can see, but it’s too wet to rake them up – not that I worry about them much: normally we fill a few bags at the end of the season and keep them for leaf-mould in a year’s time. The thing is, I detest leaf-blowers, which have done more to disrupt the peace of the countryside than anything a mere tractor could achieve, even pulling a fifteen-furrow plough! And what do the noisy bloody things achieve? Why, they remove a few leaves that a fit and healthy person could have raked-up in half the time. I hate the modern obsession with neatness. It’s all about control – just like politics. We should learn to live alongside nature, where fallen leaves are a part of the changing seasons. They’re not even slightly the same as hamburger wrappers and other street litter. But I’m in danger of exploding … time to calm down.

We opened the garden on the weekend of September 21-22nd and thank heavens, it didn’t rain. In the end we raised almost £2,000 for the National Gardens Scheme, where the money will go to worthy charities such as MacMillan Nurses. Every year our visitors find something new to please them and in 2019 it was the fuchsias in the front garden. We’re reasonably certain they’re Fuchsia magellanica, var. gracilis but they are a particularly good strain. Maisie bought the first plant from a garden stall by the side of the road somewhere in darkest Norfolk, in those wild sandy lands east of King’s Lynn. The man said they were descended from The Queen Mother’s favourite plant in Sandringham garden – or was that invented as a clever selling point? Given the fact that Sandringham was just down the road, I’m inclined to believe it. Mentally I doff my hat whenever I pass by them. But seriously, they were looking fantastic this year. Rather remarkable, but they had been cut down to the ground by the harsh late frosts of The Beast from the East of late February and early March 2018. That’s quite a recovery.

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Fuchsia magellanica, var. gracilis growing up the wirework dome in the front garden. This photo was taken a few days after our garden opening in late September.

Wet seasons do have upsides, though, and this year it has been a profusion of enormous field mushrooms that suddenly appeared in late October. On our land they were growing in a field full of sheep and I spotted them through a hedge (for which I award myself top marks!), as I was driving by. They were enormous and I was able to pick sufficient to dry and keep us stocked-up all winter. Field mushrooms can be home to maggots, so it’s worth checking for small holes when you remove the stalk. Then we slice them up and leave them in trays on the top of the Aga (stove). They dry in a few hours and the smell is gorgeous. If you dry bought mushrooms they smell of nothing. Once dried they can be crumbled into gravy or simply added to sauces. Nothing, but nothing tastes better than dried wild mushrooms.

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Autumn produce coming home to the kitchen, with field mushrooms, dried (in the glass bowl), and fresh hot chillies and tomatoes from the greenhouse.

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Field mushrooms sliced-up and ready for drying. Keep the dark ‘gills’, as they are superb when added to gravy.

Various parts of the garden come into their own at different times of the year. The Glade, which is the otherwise very damp area beneath a grove of yellow alders and birch trees, is at its best in spring and early summer, when it’s carpeted with geraniums and late bulbs. During summer it becomes a shady refuge from the heat and bright colours of the long border. But in autumn its appeal is quite different: the turning leaves of the alders and the pale bark of the birches combine to give the area a unique autumn character, which seems to change every few days. I find it quietly satisfying and reassuring. A Garden of Smug Complacency, perhaps?

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The Glade Garden in October.

Slightly earlier in October the soak-away beds behind the barn were looking wonderful with a variety of tints and textures. Autumn colour doesn’t always have to be in-your-face: I prefer the changes to be more subtle. And I don’t think the damp soak-away beds (which take the run-off from the barn roof) have every looked better.

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The soak-away beds behind the barn.

My final picture, also taken in mid-October is of the Rose Garden. We never wanted our Rose Garden to be populated by roses alone – which is what the Victorians loved. No, we believe that roses look their best when set against shrubs and herbaceous perennials. Here’s a view of one end of the Rose Garden, with the wonderful North American river birch (Betula nigra), with its splendid peeling bark, on the left.

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The Rose Garden, with the trunk of a River Birch, on the left. River Birches thrive in very wet soils – which says a lot about our garden.

As Others See Me: a Frank Portrait

Doing lots of talks and book signings can sometimes become a bit of a chore, but so far the various events I’ve done to promote The Fens have been very lively. There’s been a wonderful feeling of engagement with the audiences. Maybe it’s because so far most of the places I’ve been to have been in or very close to the Fens. It’s great to have web-footed listeners! Quite often I’m interviewed before I speak by local newspapers and bloggers and I remember this one very clearly. It was a few days ago in Lincoln at The Collection, near the Usher Gallery. I arrived a bit late, following an excellent pub supper with two archaeologist friends (and yes, a real ale or two). My interviewer, Ellen, was very forbearing, because I don’t think I was making a lot of sense – I was in a rush and thinking about other things. Anyhow, she was both charming and patient and she converted my garbled words into something that seems almost coherent. And I love the cartoon. It makes me look (and feel) quite youthful! Now read on…

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In 1982, Francis Pryor fell over a piece of wood in a dyke and discovered a Bronze Age settlement around 3,500 years old.

‘It was an awful day,’ Pryor tells me. ‘Cold, wet, foggy. We’d been surveying along this dyke and we’d found quite a lot of interesting stuff but I couldn’t see how the things we’d found would really make a difference.’

But then, as he walked along the edge of a dyke, about a mile from the Peterborough shore, he tripped up on a piece of wood.

Continue reading on Ellen’s blog.

Off to a Cracking Start

Today began bright and sunny and it stayed that way. In fact, I think it was the sunniest garden opening we have every experienced. To our delight, visitors started to pour in from our opening at eleven, and the car park remained well stocked for the entire day. According to the weather forecast, today (Saturday 21st September) was the last summery day of the year, and autumn begins tomorrow. Earlier in the week, my weather app was forecasting a thundery breakdown tomorrow, but now things look much better; rain will get here, but not until later in the afternoon, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed for another dry day, although not as hot as today.

I think the garden is looking better than I have ever seen it before. The borders are still full of flowers and the roses have never looked better. That’s because we haven’t had too much sun to bleach out the blooms. Lots of people have remarked about the wildlife; a huge variety of butterflies, and there have been several visits by hares and voles. And if you look across the meadow there is just a hint of developing autumn colour.

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The Long Border waiting to receive the first visitors

So do come and join us tomorrow, there’s loads of tea and cake, and a well-stocked plant stall and my brother-in-law Nigel has brought along a bookstall of second-hand gardening books. All our profits go the National Garden Scheme who support Macmillan Nurses and other, mainly medical, charities. But charity isn’t the main reason for coming; an open garden is a very English summertime event, which brings people, plants and artistic creation together; it’s also cracking good fun, so do come tomorrow if you can. We are open from 11 until 4 o’clock.

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Nigel and Rachael at the tea counter before the hordes descended

Early Autumn: Getting ready to Open the Garden on September 21st and 22nd

Why is it that when deadlines approach, things always seem to go pear-shaped? I’m tempted to mention the Brexit fiasco, but it’s all too inept, divisive, dishonest and depressing. So let’s return to reality and what has been happening in the garden. August was a difficult month: warm, humid and rainy. August 11th brought fierce Atlantic gales. The next morning my walk with the dogs revealed broken branches on some of the black poplars, which will have to be chain-sawed off in the winter, but not before then, as black poplars are notorious for ‘bleeding’ sap if they’re cut back at this time of year. Later that morning we had to go shopping for supplies, but our journey down the front drive was abruptly halted when we came across a large branch that had been blown off one of the pollarded willows near the pond. It completely blocked the drive and couldn’t be dragged out of the way, as it was still partially attached to the tree. A couple of hours later I’d cleared a path through – where would I be without my trusty chainsaw? But I now knew it was time to re-pollard the willows. Yet another job for the winter – and professional tree-surgeons.

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The broken willow branch across the drive.

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Close-up of the tree. The scar left by the torn bark and sapwood will be home to green woodpeckers in a couple of years, if neighbouring trees are anything to go by.

Opening the garden for charity through the National Gardens Scheme is very rewarding and it’s also very hard work, especially in a wet year like 2019 when weeds seem to reappear two or three weeks after you’ve cleared them. Some parts of the main borders have been completely weeded four times already this season. Normally I’d reckon on doing it twice. But opening also provides us with incentive to get jobs done that we might otherwise defer. A case in point is the dogs’ daytime run and kennels in the barn. The dogs prefer the shade and airiness of the barn on hot summer days and in the past we used to make a lash-up arrangement for them using hurdles, bales of straw and anything suitable that came to hand. Then in the autumn we’d clear it all out of the way before the sheep came in for lambing. But now that we’ve stopped lambing, we decided to make the dogs a more comfortable, permanent daytime home in the barn. So I bought ready-made wooden fencing panels and with our neighbour Jessie’s help we’ve constructed quite a smart new run, complete with two old kennels that I’d previously contemplated putting on the bonfire. The new canine compound will allow visitors to the garden to enjoy Pen and Baldwin, but we must first prepare Health and Safety notices to ensure that nobody gets licked to death by either of them – a slimy, if rather warm and lingering demise.

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The new dog run in its final stages of preparation by Jessie.

Another slimy Health and Safety hazard is the decking of the patio or poop-deck at the back of the house, from where our crack Tea Team dispense vast quantities of tea and cakes (at VERY reasonable prices) during the open weekend. Because the air in Lincolnshire is very clean and unpolluted, algae grow readily and within a few months, especially in a warm, wet summer, the decking can become highly hazardous, especially on wet days. So that was why I asked Jessie if he’d very kindly bring along his brand new power washer and give the poop a quick blast, when he’d finished work on the dogs’ run. In the event it took him three and a half hours, but the results have been fantastic, largely, I gather from Jessie, because of a new rotating brush-head, which proved extremely effective. This view shows the decking during cleaning. It was miraculous. I won’t suggest that visitors could wear high-heals, because that would be silly, but the poop deck will be fine, even if we get a shower or two at the opening.

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The poop-deck half-way through its cleaning.

Opposite the poop-deck at the back of the house is one of those sunless, north-facing beds that can often be such a problem for gardeners. It’s on the dark side of an L-shaped brick wall that supports two large fig trees and hides the fuel tank for the Aga. We’ve tried growing all sorts of plants there, mostly without success. Then about ten years ago Maisie decided to use it as somewhere for pot plants. And what a success that has proved:

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The pot bed behind the fig tree wall. The large leafed-plant (not in a pot) at the centre is a Tetrapannax papyrifera ‘Rex’. The big square pots at either end contain Mahonia eurobracteata subsp. ganpinensis ’Soft Caress’.

Our heavy, moist soils can often make it difficult to establish certain plants and over the years we’ve found that growing shrubs in containers is a good way to build up a strong root system. The two large pots with Mahonia ‘Soft Caress’ will probably be emptied next year and the Mahonias transplanted to a dry bed elsewhere in the garden. Incidentally, ‘Soft Caress’ is well-named as it isn’t even slightly prickly, unlike most other Mahonias whose dead, dry leaves can be very painful indeed when weeding without gloves. We were given the Tetrapannax as a potted sucker by our niece Rosie Sutton (a professional gardener with the National Trust) and it has taken a few years to get established; but now it’s starting to grow vigorously, with huge leaves that give the bed a wonderfully exotic, jungle-like feel. With any luck we’ll be able to start transplanting suckers ourselves in a year or two.

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The path behind the barn on July 24th, with Hostas in full bloom.

When I took the photos for the last blog post there were simply too many good pictures to use, so I’m showing a couple more to remind us of past glories. The Hostas were as good as I’ve ever seen them and their flowering was superb. Maisie was very worried that we didn’t manage to spread the ground around them with sharp sand, grit and wool balls that expand to repel the slugs that can so rapidly honeycomb their attractive large leaves. But she needn’t have worried: the Hostas were to provide a cool, damp and sheltered refuge for quite a large population of toads who made very swift work of any passing slugs. Thank heavens they’ll never become Vegans.

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The Small Border, with Hemerocallis Hornby Castle in full bloom in the foreground.

Unlike the beautiful leaves of Hostas, those of Hemerocallis (Daylilies) can look a bit tired in early Autumn, but in common with the Hostas they also provide nice damp protection for toads and newts at a time of the year when the main pond has been dried-up by the roots of the willows and Swamp Cypresses (Taxodium distichum) surrounding it. I sometimes think that modern gardens, especially those in towns and suburbs, can often be a bit too tidy. After all, a weed is just a plant in the wrong place: they aren’t some kind of existential threat, as they are often portrayed in magazines and on television. So I don’t tend to remove the leaves of plants like hemerocallis and I certainly don’t knot the leaves of daffodils, as used to be seen in ‘neat’ gardens of the ‘60s and ’70s. Like mature human beings, older plants should be encouraged to flop about a bit.

High Summer 2019: Hot and Wet

I think last Thursday, July 25th was the hottest day I’ve ever experienced and at 38.7o Celsius (101.66o Fahrenheit) the thermometer in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden agreed with me: an all-time British record. But it was the humidity that made it feel so intolerable: at times I wondered whether I wasn’t about to drown in my own gravy. Yuk! Meanwhile, while I was sweating indoors (it was FAR to hot to be out in the garden), the plants in the borders were growing like rockets, including, of course, the weeds, which are now about to seed and are causing us moments of high anxiety. Remember the old gardeners’ adage: one year’s seeding; seven years’ weeding? But in this blog post I want to cast such gloom aside, and have a look at the non-weeds out there in the garden, First however, I want to bid farewell to an old friend and welcome a new, youthful helper.

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Old gives way to new: my 1964 International B414 (left) and its replacement: the John Deere 4400 compact tractor (right).

My hip replacement operation has proved a huge success and every month I find I can lift heavier weights and do jobs that would have been impossible a few years ago, but having said that, there are things which are perhaps best not attempted. Fighting-off angry rams is an obvious one, but pressing down with my left leg on the incredibly stiff clutch pedal of my old International B414 is another. This is especially true because the PTO (Power Take-Off) for the rear grass-topper is only engaged at the bottom of the clutch’s travel. So you really do have to press-down extremely hard – and hold it there. I was finding it very painful indeed before my operation, but now I’ve decided it can’t go on. So I’ve bought a new tractor with much easier, automatic controls and no nightmare pedals. I said a new tractor, but in reality it’s a John Deere 4400 compact, which was built about 2000 – almost twenty years ago. It’s also fitted with smoother garden tyres that won’t leave the deep ridges of the old B414. It’s also vastly more manoeuvrable. Having said that, there was a large lump in my throat when the old B414 left us. It’s funny how attached one can get to rusting steel, solid seats, stinky fumes, leaky hydraulics and rigid pedals. But now back to the garden in high summer.

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The high (12 feet/4 metres?) flower spikes of one of the New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax) in the pond garden.

In a mad Trumpian world, where those who deny climate-change are not regarded as bonkers, it’s sobering to think that ten of the hottest UK summers have happened since 2002. And you can really see it in British gardens. We grow several varieties of Phormium, the New Zealand flax, which loves our heavy damp soils. It was always regarded as half-hardy, but not now. And this year the flowers have been breath-taking – so good, in fact that they almost look out-of-place: almost (and I do mean almost) too exotic!

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A view along the main border, with Hemerocallis (foreground, right) in their final flush.

Not surprisingly the borders have all looked magnificent, if somewhat over-blown. Some plants have become positively bloated and we’ve noticed there’s been quite a lot of wind-damage, with snapped flower heads and collapsed stems. The main double border looks very luxuriant, but then so does the lawn grass! I’ve never known such a season for mowing – my mower’s fuel bill is scary…

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The small border in late July.

Because it’s much narrower, the small border, which runs parallel with the main border, to the south, seemed to close up as the plants along it grew so huge. We had laid the garden out following Christopher Lloyd’s principle of two-person access. He always assumed that most often gardens are visited by couples rather than solitary individuals and we made all our paths just that little bit wider, as a result. It’s always nicer to go round a garden with a friend, than alone.

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The Front Garden in late July.

And when it comes to lavish growth, the Front Garden must surely take the biscuit: the supposedly miniature rose, The Fairy (the pink flowers in the foreground of the picture), has grown way beyond her normal patch and is spreading across the paths. Currently she is threatening to take over the house. She will have to be cut back quite severely before we open in September 21-22, or she will be lacerating visitors’ legs.

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The main garden in late July, viewed from upstairs.

But when you step back from the flower beds and borders, everything suddenly falls into place and forms a delightfully harmonious whole. I love this view from the bathroom window. Makes brushing my teeth even more of a pleasure (surely you don’t mean that? – Ed.). Most of the flowers you can glimpse – mainly shades of yellows and reds – are Day Lilies (Hemerocallis).

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And finally, the garden that has benefited most from the warmth and the wet: the veg garden. Frankly, I can’t recall a better year for courgettes, onions, broad beans, tender-stem broccoli and lettuces. The main crop onions in the foreground (and here I have yet to arrange their stalks and weed between the rows for the tenth time – or so it seems) have grown vast and I’ll be giving half the crop away to friends and neighbours. But the earlies, which I planted in the first week of January are VAST! They’re the row just beyond the main crops in the foreground and they’re the size of small dogs! And you might have expected them to taste of watery nothing, but they don’t: they’re sweet and delicious and if you can find one small enough to fit on the BBQ, they are beyond description – ambrosial!

Oh yes, before I post this rather over-the-top account of the garden, I feel I ought to report that my first three book-signing events for The Fens were all totally sold out and that book sales are fantastic. My right hand positively aches from signing my name so many times. Many thanks to everyone who attended – I do appreciate you coming, especially when I saw how hot many of you were in that big hall in Ely! Still, it was a very good night with a wonderfully Fenny atmosphere. I do like Fen people.