All is now revealed

Buddha bust

Sadly I was unable to witness such a pathetic last stand in its entirety. Like many other footie loving romantics I had expected England to finish top spot in their group, a position that would have seen them play on Saturday 26 June. However, due to our heroic team’s performance against the might of the USA, Slovenia and Algeria, they ended up finishing second in the group – a spot that meant their game with Germany would take place on the Sunday, a date that would clash with…MY SECOND EVER OPEN DAY FOR THE NATIONAL GARDENS SCHEME!!

Well thank you very much Robert Green, Wayne Rooney and Emile Heskey et al – I was expecting hundreds, nay thousands of garden lovers to make the sojourn to East London, but your earlier shennanigans on the pitch meant they stayed away in droves to watch your pitiful kick about with Germany. Perhaps you’d like to donate a fraction of your wages to the National Gardens Scheme to make up for the shortfall that I and others opening their gardens took on the gate?

Good, I’ve got that off my chest. Despite the football, I had a great day. Opening at 11am and closing at 5.30pm, almost 100 people paid £2.50 each to squeeze into my garden, eat cake, buy plants and chin wag. There was also the added attraction of a lovely Japanese film crew, who were spending their second day in the garden collecting material for a documentary about the NGS that will air on the Japanese NHK channel in the autumn. Apart from capturing me sweating, swearing and shouting at the kids before opening the doors to visitors, they caught me acting as a courteous host, welcoming all who crossed the threshold into my house. They also questioned some of those who had paid the entry fee, asking them what they thought of my 30ft by 15ft space.

Japanese film crew at work

My kids being filmed for documentary

Laetitia and Rob strike a pose

Michelle Wheeler aka Garden Girl

Other VIPs to step foot in the garden were Sensei Rod Butler and his wife Lucy. Rod runs Shotokan Karate England – if you didn’t know, my son Louis and I attend a karate club in Walthamstow that belongs to the organisation. After spotting Rod and Lucy at the gate, Louis ran down the garden path to tell me, snapping off a branch from a gorgeous Nicotiana mutablis in his haste. Fortunately, apart from a ceramic pot holding a spider plant being knocked off its perch and cracking in half, this was the only damage I have to report.

Lucy and Sensei Rod

All in all a great, but tiring day. Many thanks to all who came and helped raise over £300 for charity. And many, many thanks to those who helped out -Theresa, Helen, Alis, Liz and Sarah, you are all stars. Oh, and if you fancy seeing some more pictures, especially of all the wonderful cakes baked by Sarah and Liz, head over to Sarah’s blog.

Purdey reclines on the alpine sink

Poppy kicks back in the sun

The mighty Hardy Perennials

Haven’t got a clue what I’m going on about? Let me explain. If you’re sat in front of the box at around 6pm, these are opening words you’d hear spoken by Dermot Murnaghan, a man oft described as the housewives’ crumpet and the host of BBC2s long-running quiz show, Eggheads.

Each week, or is it every day? Or possibly every hour? A team of five challengers with some kind of loose connection take on the Eggheads, a team of individuals that have won just about every quiz going, from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to the Weakest Link. On past shows there have been teams of challengers forged from The British Beard Club, from pubs and from just about every work place you could think of, but last week, a team of five gardening/horticultural writers, The Hardy Perennials, decided to pit their combined wits against the Eggheads.

Who was in that team? Well, little old me, Kris ‘don’t call me Chris’ Collins from Amateur Gardening, Matthew ‘got any news?’ Appleby and Gavin ‘I’m a former Mastermind contestant don’t you know’ McEwan from Horticulture Week, along with Jack Shamash, a freelance journalist at Hort Week. Bizarrely, another team featuring some gardening types were in the studio a few days before us – among their ranks were James ‘I’ll have a P please Bob. Oh bugger I’m on the wrong show’ Alexander Sinclair and Chris ‘don’t call me Kris’ Collins.

Facing us, and the only barrier to a big pot of cash, were the Eggheads. A team of five (picked from a possible seven) quiz overlords. On our show, which probably won’t broadcast for a year, were Barry, Kevin, Judith, Chris and Pat. Sadly my favourites weren’t on their panel – Daphne and CJ de Mooi, the most handsome man in quiz land.

Anyway, rather than ramble, here’s my Eggheads diary.

4.01am – Woke up half an hour before I needed to, but decided to get up anyway. Made a cup of tea, got dressed and watched an episode of Eggheads on the iPlayer.

4.50am – Phone rings. Taxi driver tells me he’s outside. Why couldn’t he just tap on my door softly or toot his horn. Pah! Taxi drivers these days. They’re not like they used to be.

5.45am – Arrive at Heathrow Airport in need of coffee. Bump into fellow team mate Gavin. Make way to gate where I find Matthew Appleby wearing a crumpled shirt and trousers (or is he still in his jim-jams?) – apparently he was still in bed when his taxi arrived, so had no time to iron his clothes.

6.55am – Flight to Glasgow. Read 1974 in Nick Kent’s Apathy For The Devil – this book is highly recommended. Notice Matthew Appleby and Gavin are napping. This must be a tactic to conserve energy for the fight head, so decide to join them in the land of Morpheus.

Kris sneaks off for a ciggie with new best mate Johnny Vegas

9.30am – Briefing at the BBC. We learn which Eggheads we are taking on. I’m disappointed that CJ or the mighty Daphne are not part of their team. However, I do spot Daphne on some stairs at the BBC and wave to her. A bizarre spread of breakfast type foods have been laid on for us in the green room – one croissant, one banana, a handful of cereal bars and two apples.

We arrive at the BBC in Glasgow

Who wants the croissant?

9.45am – We were all asked to bring a selection of clothes. Costume lady suggests I wear a red long sleeved T-shirt. Matthew Appleby has to borrow somebody else’s shirt.

10am – Into Makeup.

10.30am – Back in the green room. Researcher runs through some dummy questions. Before this I’d fancied the music round, but most questions are about opera and classical, not b-sides of Who singles. The team decide that I must still tackle the music round if it comes up.

11.15am – We take our place in the studio. The Eggheads enter and introduce themselves, followed by the show’s host Dermot Murnaghan. Matthew Appleby wonders why Dermot sits on a cushion.

Cue music. Dermot’s intro spiel. He then introduces us.

The first round is TV and Film, Kris Collins’ pet subject. He decides to take on Egghead Chris. And beats him. Next round is…Music. Aargh. I choose to go head to head with Judith. In a hotly fought contest I emerge victorious. Sadly Matthew and Jack fail in their challenge, which left just three of us in the final. I’m not going to spoil the ending, you’ll just have to wait until it’s aired.

12.30pm – filming is finished. Our flight back is not until 7.30pm. To kill time we visit Glasgow Botanic Gardens, Willow tea rooms, Glasgow School of Art (the degree students art show was on – there were some interesting items made from dead flies) and several local hostelries.

Kris Collins bumps into new Doctor Who, Matt Smith

Gavin in the Willow Tea Rooms

11pm – arrive back home to Walthamstow. Collapse, go to sleep.

Visit my garden and help raise bags of cash for charidee

Why was I apprehensive a few months ago? (I don’t like to second guess, but you were going to ask that, weren’t you?) Well, to put it simply, I didn’t think I was up to it. Over winter my garden suffered some horrific loses that left me with some really big gaps to fill and I’ve been so bogged down with work that I’ve found it difficult to dedicate any meaningful time to the garden (and, err, this blog. You didn’t notice? Phew).

But with the date of the opening looming, something had to give and the pressure of not wanting to rip off those prepared to cough up the £2.50 entry fee to see my garden spurred me into action. So, a weekend was put aside to hoick out dead plants, weed, overhaul the greenhouse, tame overgrown shrubs, remove a carpet of cat poo, and to treat my shed and deck with preservative. Job done.

Since then the holes in the beds have been filled with some fantastic new plants, including a mouth watering selection of shade loving shrubs and perennials from Saffron Walden’s finest, Beeches Nursery.

Elsewhere, the patio and deck have been consumed by a delectable selection of edibles, most grown from seed earlier in the year. And here’s the showing off bit…I’ve got six different tomatoes, eight types of chilli pepper, tomatillo, golden berry, aubergines, water melon, sweet potatoes, climbing courgette, strawberries, three types of potato, edible fuchsia, honey berry (a type of lonicera) and masses of other fruit, veg and herbs, including a Chilean guava (proving you don’t just need a climate change farm in the south west to grow such things, a tiny urban plot in East London will do).

If any bloggers are in E17 on 27 June, please drop by. I’d be delighted to embrace you and give you a tour of my small, but soulful garden – they’ll plenty of plants for sale, merriment and some delectable cakes baked by Walthamstow’s own flame-haired domestic goddess, Maison Cupcake.

Over and out.

Let me explain. When I was a kid I was given a thin paperback book called I-Spy Car Numbers, which was given to me by my parents as a device to keep me quiet in the back of the car on long journeys. The idea was that I would gaze out of the windows of the family’s blue Austin Maxi as it hurtled down the motorway and ‘collect’ the number plates of cars, which could be entered into the book to show where and when the car was registered. For instance, an NV prefix would reveal a car came from Northamptonshire, while RC appeared on the plates of cars registered in Nottinghamshire. The challenge was to complete the book by trying to find number plates for every county in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

I don’t think I ever finished the book – an Isle of Man number plate remained elusive – but this book did lead to a lifelong obsession with groups of numbers and letters. However I must make it clear that I have never felt the desire to stand at the edge of railway platform with a limp luncheon meat sandwich in one hand and a notebook in the other, while waiting for the British Rail Class 07 diesel locomotive 480686-480699 to shunt past.

No, my collection of numbers can be gathered easily from the comfort of my own home, meaning I’ve never had to don an anorak or fill a thermos with weak sugary tea to indulge in a bit of number spotting. For I, dear reader, collect word verification codes, the sequence of letters and numbers that often have to be entered into a box so you can enter a comment on blogs.

Sadly I’ve lost many of my favourite word verification codes over the years, but still clearly remember my first – cadig. A rare sequence of letters that I have never seen since. If any spots it, please let me know, I’d love to be able to jot it down again.

Unfortunately modern word verification codes lack the subtlety and the romance of those vintage codes, which were put together with the kind of skill that only an artisan with years of word verification training could attempt. Still, some new fangled codes cut the mustard – here are a few of my recent favourites that can be found in my collector’s book. As you can see 12 March was a great day for verification spotters.

Underchro – spotted at Silvertreedaze 11 March 2010
Clanclem – spotted at Lazytrollop 12 March 2010
Ungness – spotted at Soilman 12 March 2010
Rencess – spotted at Gary’s Garden 12 March 2010
Phorywo – spotted at Otter Farm 12 March 2010
Peliz – spotted at Claire Potter’s Eco Blogspot 13 March 2010
Ridenic – spotted at the Idiot Gardener 13 March 2010
Yr322 (a rare letter/number combination) spotted at Blogging from Blackpitts 14 March 2010
Subbatio – spotted at Sea of Immeasurable Gravy 14 March 2010

What's your favourite?

The simple formula of THAT title really appealed to me, so I snapped up The Bedding Plant Expert, followed by The Tree & Shrub Expert and then many others. Today, 17 sit on a shelf in my office, along with several earlier ‘flatties’ (slim volumes that were stapled together) that I‘ve unearthed in second hand book shops. This includes a 1967 edition of Be Your Own Houseplant Expert and the Vegetable Plotter from 1977.

Despite falling under the spell of the Expert series, I doubted the existence of the man himself. For many years I thought that Dr. D.G. Hessayon was a name made up by the publishing company or a nom de plume for a ghost writer. After all, Dr.D.G. Hessayon never appeared on television or in magazines, the name simply appeared on those instantly recognisable books. However, any doubts were extinguished when I worked for Amateur Gardening back in the late 1990s – I spoke to the Dr or Dave (as he signs his name) on the telephone for a story I was putting together about him landing a Guinness World Record for becoming the best-selling living author of the 1990s.

Anyway, why am I waxing lyrical about the enigmatic Dr H? Well, at the weekend his latest book, The Best of Experts, landed on my doormat. Essentially a ‘Greatest Hits’, this compilation is jam-packed with his favourite bits chosen from all of the books published over the years (I’m not sure how many that is, but there’s a whopping 23 titles still in print).

Flicking through the book I noticed that my favourite item hasn’t been included. This appears in the 2000 version of The Vegetable and Fruit Expert. Back then garlic was relegated to a short paragraph in the herb section, with the good Doctor warning the faint hearted: ‘If you are a beginner with garlic, you must use it very sparingly or you will be put off for ever’. Blimey. Gord knows what the Doc would have made of chilli peppers. Well, as luck would have it, the answer is provided in the very same volume. ‘Take care – these hot peppers can make your throat burn, eyes water and skin sting if you’re not used to eating or handling them’…What??? Were chilli peppers really considered such an exotic veg just a decade ago?

Despite nannying like this a little too often for my liking and still making use of pictures taken in the 1970s (those in The House Plant Expert Book Two, published in 2005, are sooo dated, featuring homes with swirling paisley carpets), I love the Expert books. They are dependable, honest and a constant in a rapidly changing world.

Over to you…

What was the first Dr. D.G. Hessayon book you ever brought? Do you have a favourite bit from an Expert book? Is garlic dangerous? Have you ever met Dr. D.G Hessayon? Please share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

A sad sight - a group of dead aeoniums

But it’s not just domestic rodents for whom the bells toll. Oh no, the shadow of death has fallen on my garden, abruptly ending the life of many of my favourite plants as I stood by helpless, unable to prevent them from respiring for the very last time. I am of course, referring to the snow, frost, rain and plummeting temperatures that walloped my garden over winter.

As yet I’ve really no idea how many plants have gone to the great compost heap in the sky – this will become more apparent as spring moves forwards – but there are some obvious casualties. My prized fence-trained red lobster claw (Clianthus puniceus), which was smothered with buds a few weeks ago, started to wilt without warning and looks worse by the day. Elsewhere, a Nicotiana mutablis that had been looking fairly perky is now limp, a sorry shadow of its former self.

A flaccid clianthus

But my greatest loss is not a shrub or perennial, it’s a succulent. Actually, not just one succulent and not just any succulent – I’ve lost loads of aeoniums, a group of plants that I have collected avidly for many years. In previous winters I’ve managed to keep my tender beauties alive by stowing them away in a heated greenhouse. However, this year I decided to see whether they’d survive if I just insulated the greenhouse with bubble wrap and covered the plants inside with horticultural fleece – the answer, was an emphatic NO.

My Aeonium tabuliforme was the first to go, the green plate of leaves turned swiftly into something that resembled a country pancake or cow pat, while a Aeonium ’Ballerina’ was hot on its heels. Many others have met a similar fate, but my greatest loss is for a very rare hybrid of Aeonium castello-paivae that produced a mass of wiry stems with a cascading habit. I’ve only ever seen one example of it for sale and I bought it. Sadly, it’s now a bunch of wizened branches and crumpled leaves.

But am I unhappy, desolate or down in the dumps? Well, it’s at times like this that I seek solace in the wise words of Cher: ‘I’m strong enough to live without you, strong enough and I quit crying, long enough now I’m strong enough, to know you gotta go’.

How about you? Did you lose any treasured plants over winter? Let me know and we can comfort each other in our hour of need.

Anti smoking advert

Actually, as the canny among you will have already deduced, I just made that up. This is actually me hamming it up in the Horticulture Week offices back in 1998 in a picture that eventually found itself onto a mocked-up cover of the magazine that was given to me when I left for pastures new. Back then I was a devotee of ciggies and would happily work my way through 20 or so a day.

So why am blogging about those slender white sticks that are affectionately known as coffin nails, fags, cancer sticks or doobies among enthusiasts? Well today is No Smoking Day in the UK, so to mark the occasion I thought I’d look back on my life as a smoker and reveal how I kicked the dirty habit.

I smoked my first cigarette when I was about 11. It was a Players No.6 that I’d sneaked off my granddad, who had a 60-a-day habit. I remember sharing this ciggie with a few friends in the local allotment (see, there is a horticultural element to this after all) and recall that one of our number was caught by his dad. In order to disguise my own baccy breath from my parents, I chewed on a handful of grass that I plucked from the verge that ran alongside the allotment path. Obviously I’d have been better off crunching on some mints, but as unlikely as it sounds, it actually worked as my folks didn’t twig on at all.

In my mid teens I couldn’t afford to buy my own cigarettes, so took every opportunity to obtain the demon weed from whatever source presented itself to me. There was one notable occasion when my parents arrived back home from holiday in France with a carton of duty free Benson & Hedges that they bought for granddad. I couldn’t risk letting such a golden opportunity escape, so decided that I’d raid the carton.

But how? If I took an entire packet from the carton my granddad would have noticed. My plan was ingenious. Using a scalpel I opened the cellophane wrapper carefully, slid the carton open and removed a single packet. I then took every cigarette out and chopped about a 1cm off the ends with the knife. After inserting each ciggie back into the packet, I closed the carton, slid it back into the cellophane and stuck the edges down with glue.

I thought my ploy was foolproof and enjoyed a few thin roll ups from the tobacco I had stolen – unfortunately, my plan backfired. Rather than put the ciggies back the right way up, so that the filter showed, all my granddad could see when he opened the packet I had plundered were 20 ragged ends that looked like they had been cut by a blunt scalpel. Fortunately, he never smelt a rat and blamed Benson & Hedges for tardy workmanship.

I smoked on and off for many years, but decided to quit completely eight years ago. It was partly because I was about to become a dad for the first time and because I’d simply had enough of smoking. It wasn’t easy and I took Nicorette micro-tabs for much longer than is recommended – but I haven’t smoked a ciggie since.

Have you managed to quit? Couldn’t ever imagine giving up? Please feel free to mark No Smoking Day by sharing any smoking related tales here. And for those about to give up…I salute you. Good luck!!