Crocus Plantsman's blog

Nature is quite remarkable sometimes.

The weather warms up a bit and suddenly every road verge and scrap of spare ground turns from grubby green to a livid yellow. This is the triumphant march of the dandelions, make the most of it for very soon the council mowers will be out in force and all that yellow will be shorn.

They are a very opportunistic weed, popping up really fast and swiftly going to seed before anybody has really realised quite how many of the darned things there are. In gardens they are a pest but on roadside verges they are quite jolly.

Quite interesting facts about dandelions include:
The common name comes from Dent de Lion, French for lions tooth.Other countries have other names: in Bulgaria it is called ’deaf’ because the seeds are rumoured to cause hearing loss.
Portuguese children also call them “o teu pai é careca” (your dad is bald) due to a game which consisted on blowing on a dandelion. If it was left with no seeds, that would mean the other kid’s dad was bald. I must remember to play this game with Joe Swifts children.

It can be used in salads although tastes pretty nasty unless blanched which involves covering a plant with a bucket so it sends out pale and etiolated leaves. Even then it is not really a massive asset to a sandwich.

Other culinary uses include roasting and grinding the roots to make an ersatz coffee.

In the language of flowers the dandelion symbolises happiness and is a promise of total faithfulness. NB Gentlemen, This does not necessarily mean that a bouquet of dandelions will guarantee a good evening.

It is apparently good for treating urinary tract infections.

That may be more than you ever wanted to know about dandelions but, here at Crocus, our mission is to keep you, the browsing public, informed and on the ball.

I know, I know: this blog post is late. Again. Sorry

In my defence I have been rushing around like a blue-arsed fly* but I also realise that that is no excuse for such neglect of duty.

Anyway.

On my travels around the place I have been heartened – as I am sure you are too – by the leaves springing onto trees all over the country. On Thursday I was near High Wycombe and was stopped dead in my tracks by a beech tree in a field **. It was just coming into leaf and had that haze of lettuce green against a fabulous blue sky. The tree itself leans close to the ground on one side and is an almost perfect specimen.

Tall, dashing, commanding, handsome and just a little world weary. Everything I have often wished to be but have only managed the last .

Beech are lovely things – and adaptable. Plant one in the forest or a field and it will grow into a magnificent deciduous tree. Plant it in the garden as a hedge or topiary and it will keep its leaves for most of the winter: brown leaves admittedly, but still fine. The young leaves can be added to salads and are quite sweet and cabbagey or you can make a liqueur called Beech Leaf Noyau by steeping the leaves in vodka (or gin or white rum) for a few weeks, straining it, adding a bit of sugar syrup and  there you go….

Other good things about beech: good firewood, excellent for nesting, great climbing trees and before paper was invented most Northern European societies used beech wood for writing. The word “book” apparently is a derivation of the ancient words for beech.

* This is an expression which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was invented by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1970. I would like to invent an expression that ends up in the OED, it would be interesting.

** You know that you are middleaged when you are struck dumb by trees.

Is it right that my feet should be quite this cold in March? It seems unfair that this month not only came in like a lion but is exiting without changing its costume. I was going to write about my rapidly emerging daffodils and how they are always out for my daughter’s birthday but, alas, I cannot as they have disappeared under another blasted snowdrift and are showing a marked reluctance in the area of flowering.

Pity as I was going to go on about picking them when she was a chubby fingered toddler which would have melted your heart and thoroughly embarrassed her – if ever she chose to read her father’s drivellings. Which is unlikely.

So instead I have been thinking about literary gardeners, in particular the fearsome Angus McAllister who was Lord Emsworth’s gardener in the Blandings Castle novels of the great P.G.Wodehouse. I suppose that there must be some people in the English speaking world who have not read Wodehouse. I pity them and urge them to mend their ways at their earliest convenience.

McAllister was very protective of his domain and held strong views on a number of subjects – not least the picking of flowers, a habit upon which he frowned. Wodehouse’s description of the gardens goes as follows “They were bright with Achillea, Bignonia radicans, Campanula, Digitalis, Euphorbia, Funkia*, Gypsophila, Helianthus, Iris, Liatris, Monarda, Phlox drummondii, Salvia, Thalictrum, Vinca and Yucca. But the devil of it was that Angus McAllister would have a fit if they were picked. Across the threshold of this Eden the ginger whiskers of Angus McAllister lay like a flaming sword.

As a general rule, the procedure for getting flowers out of Angus McAllister was as follows. You waited till he was in one of his rare moods of complaisance, then you led the conversation gently round to the subject of interior decoration, and then choosing your moment, you asked if he could possibly spare a few to put in vases.”

He was, as the name suggests, Scots.

Other fictional gardeners include Samwise Gamgee (the hobbit who went off with Frodo in Lord of the Rings), Chance the gardener played by Peter sellers in ‘Being There’ and Pat, the White Rabbit’s gardener in Alice in Wonderland (who may well have been a guinea pig).  There are two in Shakespeare’s Richard II who spent some time pruning ‘apricocks’ which sounds alarming.

There are others but I will save them for another snowy miserable day when I am again starved of blog material.

* The picture above is of an emerging Hosta, previously known as a Funkia.