Magic

Up our garden we have an ancient hydrangea bush that in most summers is heavy with large blue blossoms. This year there appear to be no blossoms emerging and I think that that is because of how harshly I pruned the plant back in February. However, it remains a healthy and well-established shrub and I have little doubt that next year it will come again. It won't do it any harm to have a rest year.

Doing a little googling about hydrangeas, I realise that I ought to fertilise ours some time because it has been neglected in that regard for years. Previously, I have just let Nature do its job without extra nutrients. You can buy special fertiliser for hydrangeas - to bring out the best in them. I must remember to buy some next time I visit our B&Q superstore.

Above is the common reason why plants like hydrangeas might wilt. Simply - not enough turgor pressure. The plant's cells are deflated but they can soon be re-inflated through watering - bringing rigidity back to the entire structure.

I gave our hydrangea a good watering after spotting its sagging condition this morning - as shown in the top picture. I believe I gave it eight bucketfuls. By this evening, the plant had really perked up. Its turgor pressure greatly lifted but there is a sense in which what had happened was quite simply magic!

Summer

Sweet Victoria plums in our garden

It is not over yet but this has been one of the loveliest English summers that I can remember. So many warm, sunny days. Swallows on the wing and ripening brambles in the hedgerows. There's a hosepipe ban and reservoirs are depleting but I am not complaining. This lovely summer has gone on and on. Currently, we are on the brink of our fourth official heatwave since the start of May.

Yesterday, Shirley's extended family converged on the North Lincolnshire village of Amcotts where her Auntie Marion lives. She had created the most wonderful and wholesome buffet with home-cured ham, tender beef, fresh salad, homemade quiches, lasagne made from scratch, rice and pasta and beautiful homemade desserts including cheesecakes, fruit salad, strawberries and Bakewell tart. All so delicious.

As I said to Auntie Marion before we left... "If only all buffet meals were as special as this one." Once again she had done a sterling job of it all.

We ate and drank outside and I chased Phoebe and her half cousin Winnie under the big two hundred year old  copper beech tree. Then they sat upon me - The Grandpa Bench and we laughed as though there would be no tomorrow.

Gunness Wharf by The River Trent near Amcotts

Back home plums hang upon our little Victoria plum tree in rude bunches - so sweet and bounteous as butterflies dance upon the breeze and black and yellow wasps threaten unwanted inoculations.

On Friday evening, I walked up The Limb Valley - through the trees and out into the sunshine before schlepping up to "The Norfolk Arms" at Ringinglow. There I enjoyed a pint of "Stones" before the fifty minute walk home - all the way down Ringinglow Road and then left at Dobbin Hill. At least it was all downhill so I didn't need to rest once. Just kept walking. All the way down.

And this is The Summer of 25.... so gorgeous that some might not register it till it is consigned to history and memory. Such a beautiful summer. If only they were all like this one.

White horses at the head of The Limb Valley, Sheffield

Tenant

In Berkshire, I sat out in the peaceful garden of our rental house and read the second half of "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Brontë . Can you see the garden furniture where I sat, turning the pages well into the summer dusk? Once I even fell asleep out there for perhaps half an hour and woke up in semi-darkness. The temperature was as balmy as it is meant to be on summer evenings and I felt relaxed - my mind emptied of the usual mental interference and wholly focused on Anne Brontë  's writing.

The novel was published in 1848. The "tenant" in the title is a young widow who has sought sanctuary in a place where she is not known. An air of mystery surrounds her and local people gossip about her, putting two and two together and making five. An eligible local young man called Gilbert Markham is greatly attracted to her but she spurns all of his advances.

It turns out that she had married a wrong 'un - a caddish upper class drunkard who was hell bent on pleasure  and treated his wife as a doormat. He even spoke insultingly of the young son they had conceived together.

I haven't given too much of the story away in case you ever choose to read this novel too. 

I found the early Victorian language quite easy to follow - so different from when I read my first Victorian novels when I was a teenager. Back then I stumbled along but with this novel I simply motored. It was easy - perhaps testament to my career in education and a lifetime of reading.

Here's a little sample:-

“Keep a guard over your eyes and ears as the inlets of your heart, and over your lips as the outlet, lest they betray you in a moment of unwariness. Receive, coldly and dispassionately, every attention, till you have ascertained and duly considered the worth of the aspirant; and let your affections be consequent upon approbation alone. First study; then approve; then love. Let your eyes be blind to all external attractions, your ears deaf to all the fascinations of flattery and light discourse. - These are nothing - and worse than nothing - snares and wiles of the tempter, to lure the thoughtless to their own destruction. Principle is the first thing, after all; and next to that, good sense, respectability, and moderate wealth. If you should marry the handsomest, and most accomplished and superficially agreeable man in the world, you little know the misery that would overwhelm you if, after all, you should find him to be a worthless reprobate, or even an impracticable fool.”

Yes - I know - not every reader's cup of tea but I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and of course, like Dave in southern Ireland, I have always been a sucker for the Brontës. By the way, Anne Brontë died just a year after "The Tenant of Wilodfell Hall" was published. She was twenty nine years old. She also left poetry and another novel - "Agnes Gray" which I have never read but which is now most definitely on my list.

War?

Getty Images

What is happening in Gaza? They keep referring to it as a "war" but as far as I can see, it is not a war at all. It is an obliteration, a persecution, a mass humiliation, a payback like never before - but not a "war". The term "war" suggests two enemies battling for supremacy and ultimate victory but in Gaza the current brutal episode all appears very much one-sided.

Israel has nearly all the chips - mostly American weaponry and even bulldozers with which they have been vindictively flattening entire Gazan neighbourhoods. The cityscape of Gaza now looks pretty much like Hiroshima after it had been nuked.

It seems quite flabbergasting to me that Israel is now playing a key role in the distribution of vital food aid in Gaza. Is that what generally happens in "war" - with those who have the upper-hand simultaneously providing aid  to beleaguered enemy citizens? I think not. No wonder hundreds of Gazans have been tragically killed in their desperate quest for sustenance.

Today. the BBC News said this: "Israel's security cabinet has approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to take control of Gaza City" so instead of the barbarous offensive being toned down, it is instead being ramped up. Given what has taken place thus far, such an up-scaling seems nigh on impossible to visualise  but there we have it.

By standing idly by thus far, Trump has effectively given Netanyahu carte blanche to perform what history will call genocide. But the truth is that Netanyahu will never extinguish the Palestinian spirit and the legacy of all this cruelty will, in time, inevitably ignite some kind of painful retribution. Netanyahu will probably not be around when that time comes.

(Photo: Eyad Baba / AFP)

Rectangle

In past times, pretty much all of England's significant country estates would have boasted a walled kitchen garden. As there were no supermarkets, growing your own vegetables and fruit would have been a sensible option - especially if you could afford to hire a couple of gardeners to do the work for you.

The walls acted like a windbreak and discouraged thievery. Within, you could develop a micro-climate in which plants might thrive.

Above - I snipped that aerial view of the kitchen garden at Hungerford Park from Google Maps. The derelict house from which I snapped that window photo is in the top left hand corner of the rectangle - also shown at the bottom of this blogpost.

I did take a few pictures inside the walled garden that I am going to share with you now...

Damsons

Giant thistles

Cynara cardunculus

Ian, Zachary and sunflowers

Old water tanks being repurposed to create a water feature

And finally, this is the ruined gardener's house from which I took yesterday's window picture...

Gallery

 
View from the ruins of the gardener's cottage at Hungerford Park

You are probably familiar with the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Normally, it is a notion with which I might take issue for words frequently perform tasks that a picture could never do - explaining, investigating and reflecting.

That aside, today's blogpost is  largely eight images I collected during our sojourn in Berkshire. To Dave and Mary in particular, I must apologise because I didn't capture a decent overall picture of the walled kitchen garden but I have sourced one that someone else took and plonked it at the end of this blogpost.

Vintage RSPCA collection box in Newbury

A sturdy English oak in Hungerford Park

Amateur landscape painting at the top of the stairs in our rental house

The cluster of lampshades caught my eye when we lunched in The Cobrizo Lounge, Newbury

Zachary at 21 months in the walled garden at Hungerford Park

Narrow boat on the Kennet and Avon Canal

Weathered effigy of a crusader in St Michael's Church, Inkpen.

It is probably Sir Roger de Ingpen - a Templar knight - who is believed to 

have founded the church in 1220 or thereabouts.

A tantalising picture of part of  the walled garden

Afterwards

The Forge, Hungerford Park

To tell you the truth, it was nice to have five days away from blogging. 

The rental house was perfect - clean and well-maintained and peacefully located on the site of what was once Park Farm - connected with the Hungerford Park Estate. Once a grand house was at the heart of the parkland but that was demolished in the fifties I believe. An interesting remaining feature is the old walled kitchen garden that is surprisingly still cultivated and contains a wide range of healthy plants.

One day I came across the Polish gardener who has put his heart and soul into the garden over the last five years.  It now operates as a wedding venue. There are tables and chairs and a sail-like awning where the hot houses once stood.

Hungerford was just a mile away. Perhaps I am a little ghoulish but I hoped to pay homage to the dead. Sixteen people killed on a bright August day in 1987.  Surely there would be a fitting memorial and evidence of continuing condolences. 

In the parish church the names of the dead were on a modern glass partition beside the vestry door but you could have easily peeled those names off. It was nothing special. Then in another neighbourhood, we parked Butch near Hungerford Town football ground in order to visit the memorial garden.

To my surprise, the remembrance of the slaughtered sixteen was incidental - tagged on to a brick gatepost with the flower-less garden beyond principally being a tribute to townsfolk who died in World War II.

We looked after Zach for three nights as the wedding celebrations proceeded. He seemed magnetised by his grandma but suspicious of the monster known as "Grandpa". Still, he was as good as gold. 

Zach and his parents returned to London on Sunday afternoon, leaving Shirley and I with two nights and  one and a half days to ourselves. We had Sunday dinner in  "The Dundas Arms" in Kintbury and Monday lunch in "The Cobrizo Lounge" in Newbury. Monday evening's dinner was in "The John O'Gaunt Inn" back in Hungerford.

We also got to visit the church where the wedding had taken place and climbed to Combe Gibbet on Gallows Down where a tall wooden gibbet  reminds all passers-by of capital punishment. Near there, I also climbed over a field gate to reach the highest point in southeastern England - Walbury Hill.

More of this kind of stuff tomorrow.

Combe Gibbet