Glove affair

I freely admit it. I am not man enough to garden without gloves. It’s therefore a bit of a mystery to me why my hands manage to get quite so grubby and gnarly – obviously I can wave the wizened things about as a sort of gardener’s badge of honour, but it’s a different matter when the mere sight of them causes passing children to run off in tears and the bloke at the supermarket checkout to recoil in horror on handing over your receipt.

My hands are not the most elegant appendages you’re likely to encounter. Even at the best of times there’s no disguising their form: generously sized square palms with five short, sausagey digits attached at regular intervals. They’re a bit rough – calloused, scratched, in spite of my best efforts usually betraying some earthy signs of the day’s activity – but they’re good, honest hands. Since I left off piloting a desk through the corridors of commerce and opted instead for a hard day’s graft in the open air they also appear to have grown in size, which is alarming to say the least. This hasn’t happened visibly, but recently it’s been the devil’s own job getting my gloves either on or off, which led me to the rash decision one day last week to forgo the hand protection for just half an hour. And in that short time my mitts became veritable pincushions with every bramble and thorn possible finding its way through several layers of flesh. So I finally did the sensible thing and bought the next size of glove up, which do leave a little room at the top of some of the fingers but at least I don’t have to cut them off my hands whenever the phone rings. (The gloves; not my fingers.)

An improvement, then, but still not perfect as somehow I seemed to be making a habit of getting thorns buried in the fabric of the glove itself – impossible to see but not to feel, as they persisted in digging in to the skin.

All of which has led me to these RHS-endorsed Gold Leaf gardening gloves (“for people serious about gardening”, if you please) – so fiendishly expensive that the same pair had better still be going strong when I drop dead, rake in hand, several decades from now. There’s a range of different options: gloves for light pruning, gloves for heavy pruning, gloves for cold weather and for gardening in the wet. The ones I’ve opted for have a reinforced palm and finger tips, a waterproof liner and a thermal layer, and are pretty comfortable. Whether or not they’ll be any good, time will tell – so far they’ve survived a week, and the only slight niggle I have is that the various linings make them a little tricky to get off, but not as much as the clearly-too-small gloves of recent months.

But if they can stop my hands looking and feeling like a pair of peppered hams hanging off the end of my arms, that’ll do for me.

Hole Park

To the rather posh Hole Park near Rolvenden for the Wealden Times Midsummer Fair at which, disappointingly, nobody got murdered and Inspector Barnaby failed to appear. But then someone pointed out that the spelling was entirely different and so this rather awful joke doesn’t work anyway. Most disappointing. The fair was a pleasant way to spend a few hours though (Bill enjoyed being made a fuss off). We look forward to going back in order to explore the gardens, the only part of which we were able to see on this occasion was the impressive formal lawn and pond, with accompanying yew topiary, including some fairly (and surely inadvertently) rude shaped specimens at the end of the terrace, unfortunately just out of frame in the above photograph. Rude Topiary, surely there’s a market for a coffee table type book on the subject?

Bill eyes the rude topiary, unimpressed.

Plant rescue

I’ve collected a few waifs and strays over the past week, with the intention of bringing them home and nursing them back to rude health. Whether or not their actual fate will see them consigned to an obscure corner of the garden and left to fend for themselves only time will tell, but the intentions are honorable, and the chances of seeing the thing through appear better than average as they’re all plants I’ve been keen to introduce here anyway.

Plant number one was not so much a waif as a child of cruel neglect, rescued from an otherwise very good nursery in Maidstone where I found it nestling between specimens in finer fettle. It’s a hardy geranium, a cultivar of the dusky cranesbill Geranium phaeum, the Mourning Widow. A native of European woodlands it’s quite happy in dry shade, which makes it useful as well as attractive. Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor’ sports mid green leaves with a dark port wine stain. It’s notable for tall, delicate flowers on which, unlike most hardy geraniums, the petals are reflexed – held backwards – exposing the rude bits of the flower to all and sundry. Inappropriate behaviour for a mourning widow you might say, but each must be allowed to deal with grief according to their own fashion.

Dead heads and seed pods

The specimen in question had flowered and was busy diverting its attention into producing seed, doubtless one of the reasons it looks so ropey, with scarcely a leaf, although this doesn’t explain why it appears to have outgrown its pot. I suppose I should have haggled for a discount, but I’m not very good at that kind of caper, and it was only three pounds fifty. Tough as old boots, these things, so having dead headed it and given it a good drenching of a seaweed based plant tonic I fully expect it to be loutishly romping through the borders in no time.

Patients two and three came together, rescued from the compost heap at the site of a border I’ve been clearing for replanting. They will be be considered most ordinary to some, but closer inspection reveals them to be rather wonderfully constructed, even if they do grow with unabashed vigour. Firstly, we’ve the perennial cornflower Centaura montana, with its beautiful delicate violet blue petals and decorative filigree work beneath. Grows well just about anywhere that isn’t waterlogged, and will even put up with a bit of shade. A useful and, again, tough old thing, not dissimilar in that respect to the red valerian Centranthus ruber, with its generous purple red flower heads and slightly fleshy leaves and stems. Although it will grow happily in reasonably rich soil of a garden border, it seems more than happy to grow in and on walls and self seed quite liberally. However, unlike something like Corydalis which enjoys similar positions it has a tough, woody root, so you might want to keep an eye on established clumps to avoid any damage to the mortar.

Which just leaves me to be a sort of horticultural Florence Nightingale, I suppose. I shall need a lamp.