5 things that make my garden grow ...

Do you know which is the most important must-do of them all when it comes to successful gardening?

The answer is, of course, to keep the gardener happy. When the gardener's got the hump about his/ her lot in life the weeds will surely thrive - as I'm sure Socrates or Freud or Aesop, or someone very wise, must once have observed.

Now in our case the gardener is, for the most part, me. I get some help with the heavy lifting, and the tree-pruning, but for the rest of the time our little London garden is totally my responsibility. And here's the five things that keep me going when I get started on the job:

1. Kneepads

Ta-dah! Very now, very chic.

OK so I'm not going to have Victoria Beckham knocking on my door any time soon looking for style tips, but these little mamas keep my knees together when I'm pulling out those nuisance weeds from between the cracks on the patio. And unlike the twee 'kneeling boards' that come in chintz and shades of pastel, they're always where I need them - on my knees. Yours for £5.99 down at the hardware store: you'll wonder how you ever lived without them!

2. Laundry soap

Just to be clear: I'm the polar opposite of a high-maintenance West End princess. Heck, I've never been in a nail bar in my life, but I hate, hate, hate getting earth under my fingernails. It's just so ... well, grubby. So here's what I do to get around the problem: I use the laundry soap in something after the fashion of a cat using its scratching post. I dig my (not very long) fingernails into the soap so that I get fresh-smelling laundry soap under them. Then I put on a pair of wax-sealed gardening gloves, and I'm ready for anything. At the moment I'm heavily committed to spreading well-composted farmyard manure around as a spring pick-me-up for my soil. With my gloves and laundry-soap ensemble my nails are virtually bomb-proof. When I'm done I just come inside, wash my hands in the normal way and the soap dissolves leaving me with a set of sparklingly clean nails.

3. A little pleasant company

In my house I always have a happy little furry presence lurking somewhere round my heels. And he totally loves being out in the garden. He races around, full of the simple joy of being alive. It's not always good for the hellebores and the crocuses, which he trots over with abandon, but he's a great inspiration on how to kick back and enjoy the blue sky, sunshine and a rollick in the fresh air.

4. Music

Spotify rules the airwaves around me. I'm a really big fan, with a drive-time playlist that will take me from here to Timbuktu without having to listen to the same track twice. Out in the garden today I had Madge playing her 'Ray of Light' Album, which totally rocked my morning. I've got this great little Jambox gizmo, which fits in my handbag along with my iPad mini, to play me happy wherever I go.

5. A good cup of Rosie Lee

Being Irish I like my tea to be copper coloured and very, very strong. We have our own tea blends back home, which can be tricky to find here in England. Happily for me, I've got a good local source of Barry's Irish breakfast tea, which does the trick any time of the day. Here it is served up in my favourite Emma Bridgewater mug, al fresco in the sunshine. Perfect!

Happy Thursday!

Bonny x

Killing weeds without deadly chemicals ...

Today I 'm waging war. I'm having my revenge on all the nasties that grow between my paving stones. And I'm determined that my battle will be won without recourse to chemical warfare.

Normally this is an issue that gives me serious pause for thought. The thing is that, whilst I don't much like the nasties growing in the gaps, I don't want to poison my son, my dog, myself or any of the other little critters who happen to pass this way. I'm sure that whatever they put into commercial weedkiller these days doesn't pack the punch of weapons-grade plutonium, but we just don't know what its long term effect will be on the chap with the fluffy paws who's forever trotting over the residue left behind, or on his human pets for that matter. So, you see, I'm all in favour of not taking any chances.

And that's why I'm using this little lot:

That's right, my arsenal for the fight consists of some super cheap, no-frills malt vinegar, salt and my any-old liquid soap that happened to be stationed at the kitchen sink.

I usually keep the spray bottles that household cleaners and laundry sprays come in. It's one of my little foibles: I can find a hundred uses for those things.

So I got this one, washed it out and put a label on so that I'd know what was in it. It would, after all, be a bad result if I sprayed it on the laundry, and we all ended up smelling like left-over chips!

Next I added a good pinch of salt to the spray bottle, along with a decent squirt of the liquid soap and then I topped it up with the vinegar and gave it a good shake to mix everything together.

Now for the before and after photographs ... .

 Some of my flowerbeds are bordered with flat-end bricks, where the nuisance weeds are difficult to dig out and like to make their home. This is how this one looked after I'd had a go at pulling them out in a hissy fit:

You can see that the leafless stumps still looking infuriatingly green and healthy, with a sort of 'I'll be back in no time' smirk on their weedy faces.

I sprayed them with my magic potion a couple of days ago, just after I took this photograph.

And this is how they're looking today:

Ha ha ... not so perky now! 

The spray bottle makes it really easy to direct the weedkiller to the cracks between the stones so that there's minimum wastage. And there's nothing in the mixture that's likely to cause much harm to man or beast ...

... which is a really good result for these guys!

Happy zapping,

Bonny x

Chiswick House, Camellia Festival

The gardens at Chiswick House are pretty close to the top of my hit-parade. I love just about every aspect of the place from the wonderfully formal statuary and topiary, to the lake with its little classical bridge, to the funky, modern cafe where they serve tip-top cappuccinos.

They were originally laid out by Lord Burlington and William Kent in 1729, marking the inception of the English Landscape movement and are believed to have been the inspiration behind other spectacular landscapes such New York's Central Park.

And, right now, if you should venture over in that direction you will also have the wonderful Camellia Festival to enjoy. It runs throughout the month of March.

As it happens Chiswick House has one of the oldest collections of camellias in the western world. They are housed in a splendid conservatory that was built back in 1813 by the Sixth Duke of Devonshire.

Chiswick House Conservatory, London

His first idea had been to grow exotic fruits there. He tried his hand at figs, peaches and grapes.

Interior, Chiswick House Conservatory, London

Different rooms within the huge building were kept at different temperatures to suit the Duke's delicate fruit, and to make them crop at a rate that would feed consumption over a stretch, rather than all ripening together and having to be made into jam! They think that he may even have had a stab at growing pineapples, the absolute height of decadence, in the end pavilions.

By 1828, however, the Duke had been seduced by another exotic newcomer: the Camellia, newly discovered from China, and regarded as the ultimate in garden chic. Sea captains were bringing them over, no doubt with cargos of Camellia Sensis leaves (that'll be tea to you and me) to sell to the nurserymen, who then sold them on to the gardeners of the aristocracy.  Before long the Duke had amassed a stunning collection, some of which, including the famous Middlemist's Red, still survive there today.

Middlemist's Red, Chiswick House Conservatory, London

Middlemist's Red, Chiswick House Conservatory, London
200 year-old camellia

Middlemist's Red, Chiswick House Conservatory, London

Yes, I know - Middlemist's Red is pink! But let's not be sectarian about our reds versus our pinks. It is, after all, a lovely, deep, dusty, thoroughly well-bred sort of a pink.

Middlemist's Red Camellia, Chiswick House Conservatory, London

John Middlemist, who cultivated collectible plants at his nursery in Shepherd's Bush, is believed to have imported this beauty from China in 1804. It was originally planted at Kew, but in the 1820's the Sixth Duke acquired it, and brought it over to live at Chiswick. There is only one other known example of this variety, which is growing in New Zealand.

Can you just imagine what sort of a tale it would tell, if only it could talk?

I spent a very happy hour pottering around in this magnificent conservatory, enjoying the perfect beauty of the camellias, inhaling the sweet smell of narcissi and hyacinths, which have been artfully arranged throughout, and savouring the tentative warmth of the sun, whose rays were amplified through the glass windows so that they almost persuaded me to shed my coat. It was sublime.

 I loved the stripy flowers, the deep red flowers, the delicate pink flowers and the impossibly perfect white flowers.  They made me think of Coco Chanel, who's probably the most famous camellia-devotee of them all. The story goes that her lover, Arthur "Boy" Capel presented her with a beautiful bouquet of camellias in 1912, whereupon they immediately became her favourite flower.

And, as I'm very happy to take my style lessons from Coco Chanel, all I've got to say on the subject is, "Vive la Camellia!'

The flowers are open for viewing until 30th March from 10:30 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. every day except Monday. Admission is £5. You can find out all about them here: Camellia Festival

Enjoy!

Bonny x

Mulberry granola

I started making mulberry granola by accident!

Mulberry Granola

You see I'd set out to make flapjacks, but the recipe went disastrously wrong. I'd forgotten to add mashed up banana and grated apple, which were binding agents in a very healthy flapjack recipe that I make for Emi, my son, from time to time.

There was an ominous smell of burning that ought to have had me running to the oven to check things out, but I was busy multi-tasking and didn't manage to tear myself away from whatever I was doing in the other room. As a result, when I finally opened the door I was faced with something that was much too crumbly to cut, and that wouldn't hold together in the way in which a flapjack ought to.

So I nibbled a bit, and it didn't taste too bad. I looked at the mess, scratched my head and wondered if there was anything I could do to salvage the situation. All that luxurious dried fruit seemed too rich to feed to the wild birds. After a moment's thought it occurred to me that my tray full of crumbs looked a bit like a slightly overcooked granola mix. Bingo! Eureka! That was it. I'd inadvertently made granola! I tried it with a few spoonfuls of Greek yoghurt and it wasn't half bad. It wasn't perfect as I'd burnt it slightly, but with a bit of tweaking I reckoned I could make something really tasty next time round.

And that was how my granola recipe was born: by pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat!

Anyway, enough of telling stories. Here's what you need, and here's how to go about it if you'd like to give it a try.

Ingredients

250 g/ 9 oz rolled porridge oats
50 g/ 2 oz butter
2 tablespoonfuls of chunky peanut butter
3 tablespoonfuls of golden syrup or maple syrup (whichever you prefer)
200 g/ 7 oz of mixed dried fruit. This is what I added today, starting from top left and going clockwise: 40g barberries, 40g apricots, 40 g papaya, 40g mulberries, and 40 g golden sultanas.

100 g/ 3 1|2 oz mixed seeds [I use a mixture of roughly equal weights of golden linseed, pumpkin seed and sunflower seed]

Method

Preheat your oven to 160 degrees C/ 320 degrees F

Mix the rolled oats, dried fruit and seeds together to get an even, uniform mix.

Melt the butter in a saucepan over a low heat with the peanut butter and the syrup. Stir well to get a smooth, uniform liquid.

Add the melted butter/ peanut butter and syrup to the oat mixture and stir well so that the oats are evenly coated by the butter mixture.

Line a baking tray with a sheet of baking paper and tip the oat mixture onto it, spreading it out so that it is evenly distributed in a thin layer on the tray.

Bake in the oven for 35 to 40 minutes until golden and crispy.

Cool and store in an airtight container.

Eat and enjoy!

I was running around with no time to do anything last week and had to eat some store-bought granola. It cost me three times as much and wasn't a patch on this scrumptious stuff.

Bonny x

The Great War in Portraits

This morning I took myself off to see this exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. 

It sets out to tell the story of the Great War using the portraits of those who endured it. As someone who enjoys the tiny detail of history and is fascinated by how the great events impacted on the small lives of ordinary people, I found the exhibition deeply moving. Like many of my generation I find the scale of the sacrifice difficult to fathom, and the nitty gritty of the politics that led the world to war even more so. But here in the faces of the sitters is a story of bravado and pathos, triumph and despair, sacrifice and suffering that anyone can read. 

Of course the Great War shouldn't just be remembered from the Allies' perspective, which is something that the exhibition recognises. They have also included material that speaks of the experience of some of those on the other side as well. We see German soldiers, maimed and wounded by the British artillery, struggling with improvised gas masks and broken by the shackles of a truly devastating war. It reminds us that the suffering was universal, and the pain felt pretty much the same whichever uniform you happened to be wearing at the time.

 They have also included portraits of some of the women such as Mata Hari and Edith Cavel whose extraordinary stories live on in the popular imagination. And for my money Mata Hari looks every bit as exotic and mysterious as you'd expect her to.

Technologically, socially and politically we've come a long way in the intervening century, but here and there you catch a glimpse of something that looks disturbingly contemporary. Sometimes it's in the brush strokes of a painter whose style feels thoroughly modern, or it's in the expression of a young man whose reaction is one with which we can empathise immediately. This isn't just some dry treatise on a long-forgotten saga; it's populated by real people, who have only just slipped outside the hand-chain of first-hand living memory, and with whom I could identify at once

On one wall there is a huge montage of individual photographs, where celebrated flying aces, famous war poets, nurses, spies, prisoners of war, men shot for supposed cowardice and men celebrated for their undoubted bravery stand shoulder to shoulder. Clearly it is a modern construction, but it allows each one the dignity of his or her own space on the wall with a short bio to tell his or her story. I found this wall mesmerising, and I could have spent hours looking into the faces of the people shown there and reflecting on their stories.

This photo (below) was one of many that touched me. The happy-looking, handsome, young man is Private William Cecil Tickle, who volunteered for service despite being underage. He was killed in action on the third day of the Battle of the Somme, and his remains were never recovered. The hand-written inscription shown on the photograph is by his mother.  Almost a century later I could still feel her grief when I read how she'd described him as 'Mother's Billie Boy ... age 18 years ... one of the very best'. What an ocean of sadness must lie behind that simple epitaph.

And here's another handsome young man with an incredible life story. This is Lt. Walter Tull, the 'first person of Afro-Caribbean heritage' to become an officer in the British Army. Walter was born in Folkstone in 1888. His grandfather had been a slave. He joined up when war broke out in 1914, served in the Somme and was promoted to lieutenant in 1917, despite military law proscribing anyone 'of colour' from becoming a commissioned officer. He must have been a truly amazing soldier, who had to fight a whole other battle against the prejudice of the day to win his promotion. Walter was killed in action on 25th March 1918, and his remains were never recovered either. 

Entrance to the exhibition is free, and it runs until 15th June, 2014. Do go if you get a chance. It's well worth the effort.

Bonny x