Swift Gardening

 

I thought I’d ordered a swift and nostepinne.  But two days went by and there was no reply to my email.  Whimper.  Here you are trying to support local/indie talent and not order from frelling amazon and THEY DON’T ANSWER.

They answered.  Today.  There was a spam bin involved.  WELL OF COURSE THERE WAS A SPAM BIN INVOLVED.  THIS IS WHAT SPAM BINS DO, IS EAT GOOD MAIL AND LET THE TOXIC GARBAGE THROUGH.*

I now have a swift and nostepinne coming.  But the indie talent are still a business, drat them, and they’re not sending them out till MONDAY.  Monday is three days away.  And then it still has to get here.

Fie.**

I spent a good deal of the afternoon in the garden again, working off Lack of Swift.***  There’s a rather unfortunate Spending Time in the Garden Syndrome however.  You’re not a big bedding plant person—you’ve already let the labour-intensive thing get out of control by having too many roses, you don’t need bedding plants too—you’re a mental case of course, gardeners are, but you have no illusions about ‘tidy’ or ‘design’.  Stuff goes in where there’s room† and the weeds are really healthy because the one thing you are usually pretty good about is feeding.  So you look at the labyrinthine wilderness out there and you think, all I really need is a few good days.

The garden at the cottage is tiny.  All I need is a few not-freezing, not-raining afternoons—!

Wrong.  The more you do the more you see.  And the more you see the more you DESPAIR.  Having got most of the urgent stuff potted up or potted on††, the most hostile of the roses tied ferociously back††† and (semi) pruned as necessary, I was reduced to WEEDING today.  I actually like weeding‡ but when the forest of ground elder closes over your head and the enchanters’ nightshade twines up your ankles and pulls you down—and enchanters’ nightshade grows fast enough to do this, if you stay somewhere too long, levering up wild poppies or creeping buttercup or those black-leaved pansies that look so cute and innocent and have long almost-invisible roots reaching to China or possibly Mars—AAAAAAAUGH.  I’d rather be winding hanks of yarn.

What’s the weather this weekend?  I should probably hoover the floor indoors before my friend arrives on Monday.  Just don’t let me notice how much else I should be doing. . . .

* * *

* Griselda is in Pago Pago and all her money has been stolen and would I please transfer the entire contents of my bank account to the Evil Scam Holding Syndicate so she can get a glass of water?^  But . . . but . . . I had a cup of tea with her yesterday afternoon and she didn’t say anything about Pago Pago.  There must be some mistake. . . .

^ Which is about what the entire contents of my bank account would be worth.  Tourist traps are expensive.

** NOW.  NOW.  I WANT THEM NOW.  —You know I’m expecting a mere eight-months’-old puppy to calm down and stop being a manic git.   Clearly we were made for each other.^

^ Hellhounds open one eye.  Possibly one eye each.  Does whatever this thing is run?  Can we chase it?  —I think a swift on end given a push downhill might canter a bit.

*** Stop laughing.  Hmmph.

† And sometimes when there isn’t.  That’s where the tiered effect comes in handy.

†† Although it’s been a bad season for mail-order errors.  The usual response of big on-line gardening sites is ‘keep it and we’ll send you the right one.’  Or ones.  I didn’t actually want four hundred and twelve osteospermums or nine hundred and sixty apple blossom geraniums, some of which actually are apple blossom geraniums, and which are all going like thunder and will need somewhere to put their roots down soon.  I was poised to send the sellers photos of their errors as evidence but they must have a certain percentage of goofs built into the system.  Do they keep track of who protests?  Do they put tick marks against your name?   Or merely fry in oil the staff responsible for the blip that caused Hampshire to be carpeted in non-apple-blossom geraniums?

And of course, like every other year, I am waiting breathlessly to see how many of my dahlia cuttings grow up to be what I ordered.  I go on ordering them because they’re so much cheaper than tubers—and the awful truth is that I rarely have a cutting failure, while my tubers rather too often decide that the accommodations don’t suit them, they were looking for something a little more up market, with designer chocolate on the pillow and free wifi.  But cuttings are wildly unreliable in their own fabulous way.  Up to about a quarter of the frellers are anything but what you ordered.  It does make you wonder, speaking of staff, what the staff are, you know, smoking.

††† That faint unfriendly humming noise you hear, like a nest of wasps in a bad mood, is the sound of various whippy-stemmed roses with known violent tendencies gnawing through their restraints.^

^ I am still sad I didn’t get around to buying the ‘some days it’s not worth gnawing through the restraints’ t shirt before they inexplicably cut it.  There are still cheap knock offs available—and one of these days when it’s not worth gnawing through the restraints I will probably buy one—but this one was a QUALITY t shirt.

‡ There’s a quote out there somewhere that I am failing to google into confirmation, that says something like ‘No one is a gardener who doesn’t like weeding’ which is just a specific-object version of one of the quotes on the blog’s quote thingy:  ‘The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.’  Yep.  You don’t like rewriting, don’t be a writer.  Anthony Trollope may have got away with turning in his beautiful copperplate handwritten first drafts to his publisher, but you and I won’t.  Aside from the beautiful copperplate part.