Craig

When something cataclysmic happens in your life, it seems to absorb everything. I thought long and hard about whether to write about this, but in the end it just seemed really strange, and wrong, not to say anything at all.

My husband Craig died last week. He was the love of my life. He was the sort of person everyone loved, in fact: charming, kind, patient, generous, sociable. He had a kind of glamour about him, thanks in part to the fact that he was tall and handsome, but also because he never seemed to take life too seriously. He approached life with a smile, and he approached death with huge bravery.

Craig and I had many friends, dozens of whom have written to say how much they will miss him. Affection and respect for a wonderful man is the theme that runs through these letters, as well as tributes to a newspaperman who, during his long career in cut-throat Fleet Street, managed always to retain a sense of decency and kindness towards his colleagues.

Ironically, we never saw as much of these friends as we could have done. We were always promising each other that we'd socialise more, but the truth was that we were perfectly content with each other's company. Our idea of heaven was to be together.

Craig had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was first diagnosed with it last year, and after a course of chemotherapy, was told that he was in complete remission. This year, it came back with even more force. It affected his bone marrow and chemotherapy - at least at a level that he could tolerate - proved ineffective.

I miss Craig so much that I can hardly bear to think about it. Instead, I try to look back at our time together - so many memories of the happiest years of my life.

Blooming November

The onset of winter is so often seen as the death of the year, a rather depressing time when we withdraw to a more interior life and peruse seed catalogues in front of the fire, or feel guilty about unplanted bulbs. Some of the plants in my garden, however, actually come into flower about now, which I always find cheering and intriguing. It's a comforting reminder that life goes on, even in the darkest times.

Flower clusters on x Fatshedera lizei (Fat-headed Lizzie). This one is 'Aurea Maculata' and it's a really lovely plant: tough, untemperamental and looks especially good on a north-facing fence like this, because it always appears to have sunlight on it. The clematis is Clematis armandii 'Little White Charm'. It's supposed to be less vigorous than the normal armandii. Hmm.

A Fatsia japonica in full bloom. This one is in a pot, but that hasn't stopped it flowering. Since I took this picture, it has become an even more spectacular froth of white, but I haven't had time to take a new photograph.

Flower buds on the loquat (Eriobotrya japonica). It's a bit late into flower this year, probably because we've had a cool summer. Normally by the beginning of November, it's in full swing, providing food for the last of the butterflies. The flowers aren't very spectacular but once they come out they scent the whole garden with a frangipani fragrance

Flower buds on Tetrapanax papyrifera. As you can see, the inflorescence is very similar to those on the fatsia and fatshedera, which isn't surprising considering that tetrapanax was once classified as a form of fatsia. Apparently, the flower spikes can get up to a metre long, but I haven't managed to find any pictures of tetrapanax in flower on the internet, so I've no idea if this is true. It was quite difficult to take this picture as I wasn't really tall enough to get level with the flowers, so had to stand on tiptoe with the camera above my head.

Little women

I'll say one more thing about the American election and then I'll shut up. (Maybe.)
Something that really makes me laugh is the way the wives stand behind the candidate, nodding and smiling. (Cindy McCain seems particularly prone to this, but I don't want to seem partisan. I'm sure Michelle Obama does it too, and every other candidate's spouse, for that matter.)
How many wives and partners do you know who stand behind their husbands nodding and smiling whenever they say something? (Outside of Afghanistan, I mean.)

In my experience - and I'm speaking personally here - they're usually shaking their heads, and butting in before Hubs is two seconds into a story, saying something like: "No, no, no, it wasn't like that at all. It was Dave who was wearing the leopardskin thong, not Pete, and Amanda had the Polaroid camera." (You can see I've been reading Kiss My Aster one too many times.)

Or the interjection might be along these lines: "No, it was Tuesday we bought the new washing machine, not Wednesday. Don't you remember, because that was the day your mum had to take her cat to the vet and a freak lightning bolt destroyed No 22."

As for smiling, the "little woman" is usually rolling her eyes in exasperation.
Come to think of it, how many wives do you know who merely stand behind their husbands? Without shoving them out of the way to get a better view?

The American dream

This has been a busy week, so apologies to all of you who took the time to comment on my last two posts and failed to get anything in the way of a response from me. (Don't think I'm not appreciative: one of the very best things about being part of Blotanical is the intelligent feedback you get from other bloggers). My husband Craig managed to escape from hospital for a week and I've been at work as well, so I haven't had much spare time.

Craig goes back to hospital on Monday for his next blast of chemo, so he'll probably be in for at least another week. I'll be busy visiting him, and going to work. Not much change there then, except for the fact that work will be even more manic than usual because of the American elections.

We get very excited about any elections at The Independent. Polls in Zambia and Israel currently have our attention as well, but we get particularly excited about American ones. (During British general elections, of course, we go way beyond excitement into full-blown obsession.) And of all the US elections I can remember, this has been the most exciting.

Here we have a young black man, who stands for new beginnings, facing an old white man whose selling point seems to be experience and a steady hand. Change versus the status quo. That's what most elections boil down to in the end, when you think about it, but along the way, there have been some exceptionally entertaining moments, thanks to Barack Obama's epic battle with Hillary Clinton, and then the controversy over John McCain's choice of VP.

I'll be staying up to watch the coverage on Tuesday night and working flat out the rest of the time. Does any of this have anything to do with gardening? Yes, it's going to be another week when I won't get my bulbs in. Or spike the lawn. Or get the turf dressing on. Oh, well...

Frozen bananas

We were set to have the first cold snap of winter in London this week, with temperatures going down to -2C (28F) overnight. That may not seem much if you live in Nebraska or Norway, but for London in October, that's quite cold.

Anyway, just as I was cursing the weather for catching me (and my bananas) out, the Met Office seems to have revised its forecast and while it's still going to be pretty chilly, I don't think we're going to have any big overnight freezes after all, thank goodness. Not this week, anyway.

In previous years, I've used "banana houses" to protect my Musa basjoo, or hardy bananas. These were made of 2" x 2" timber, about 15" square, and about 6ft high. (My husband did the tricky bit - like making them.) I cut the bananas down to about six feet (you chop all the leaves off, then saw the stem to the height you want it, using either a pruning saw or, in my case, a bread knife). I then wrap them up in yards of horticultural fleece, put the frame round them and staple split bamboo screening roll to the frames, to make them look more attractive. The fleece does a good job on its own, but it doesn't look very nice: in fact, it looks rather weird and ghostly on a winter evening, and not in a good way.
At the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Wisley, they use straw, stacked incredibly neatly within chicken-wire frames, and topped off with pretty little minarets and domes made of polythene. The idea is to keep bananas frost-free but to let the plant breathe (so it's not really a good idea to use bubblewrap), and to provide some sort of "lid" to stop rain going down inside the plant and freezing, hence the polythene minarets.
I'd ideally like to use straw because it looks so much more attractive, but finding enough straw to do the job in the centre of London is a bit of a problem. I'd probably need a couple of bales. I'd really love to know how to make the polythene minarets too. If anyone from RHS Wisley reads this and fancies giving a masterclass, please do get in touch.
However, having gone to all the trouble of making frames and so on, I felt a bit silly this spring when, after yet another mild winter, I had to unwrap the bananas in early March because they were putting on so much growth. A couple of London gardening friends who also grow sub-tropical plants told me they never bothered to protect their bananas. So long as they were in the ground, they said, they seemed to survive quite well. So this year I decided to dispense with the frames, and the fleece, and just leave the Musas to get on with it.

It's easy to become blase about tender plants in London. There's almost an element of machismo about it: good grief, you say to people, I never protect my pelargoniums/cannas/hardy ginger/oleander/echeveria/tree ferns, or put them under cover. Besides, I don't have room for a greenhouse, and I don't have a conservatory and a surprising number of things will brush through the odd frosty night.
This rather swaggering, show-offy approach evaporates pretty quickly at the first sign of a real, sustained hard frost, however, and one can be found scurrying around the nearest garden centre buying up bubblewrap and fleece.
I suspect we're about to have the coldest winter for years. I suspect I'm about to have a real, sustained, hard panic.

Dicksonia antarctica during a rare frost last winter. Ironically, though this looks dramatic, it didn't even go brown. It's quite a big one (the fronds are about 6ft long), and it's been in the ground about five years

Tosh on television

Browsing through Nigel Colborn's wonderful blog, Silvertreedaze, the other day, I found a post where he said he was a bit allergic to gardening programmes and, having watched a recent episode of Gardeners' World, he was left with the impression "that the programme makers at the BBC must think their audience is composed of people with a mental age of three, the I/Q of a courgette and Attention Deficit Disorder to boot".
This is such a good point. I've often wondered about this too. People who watch gardening programmes tend to be older, and, I would bet, reasonably well-educated. Even if they're not older, they're certainly interested in expanding their knowledge of the botanical and natural world and, probably, the world in general. In my view, this makes them potentially an extremely intelligent audience.
So why treat us as if we're stupid? Is it because the programme makers themselves are thick, and incapable of coming up with any decent ideas? If that's the case, I'd like to make some suggestions. These are the gardening programmes I would like to see on television:

The Plant Hunters

This could be a great series of wonderful adventure stories, combined with stunning locations, about the men who brought back so many of the plants we all grow today. The stories of people like Reginald Farrer and David Douglas could be intertwined with information on the plants they found, and the sort of habitats they explored, so we'd all know how to grow the plants properly. (Viewers might be advised to grab a box of Kleenex first though.) Roy Lancaster would be the obvious choice to present it, but he'd probably be deemed too old (ie, over 12).

The new plant hunters
The people who are doing exactly the same job, but in today's world.

Grumpy old gardeners

Like most people over 40, I get absolutely sick of the cult of youth. I want to hear people like me having a heated discussion about the things I'm interested in: organic/green gardening; instant impact; the British native plant debate; whether gardening programmes have dumbed down; are men better at gardening than women; are lawns ungreen. There's six programmes for a start. I think the participants should be female too: I'd suggest (mischievously) Helen Yemm, Anne Wareham, Janet Street-Porter (who is a keen gardener); Germaine Greer (ditto) for starters. Anyone who has strong opinions and doesn't give a stuff about offending people, especially the RHS. If the BBC doesn't think this would be photogenic enough for mainstream terrestrial TV, why not put it on the radio?

Plant profiles

Geoffrey Smith did a wonderful series about 20 years ago where each programme dealt with a different flower (rose, tulip, primrose etc). He looked at the history, mythology and symbolism behind the flower, as well as how to grow it. It was fascinating, and not exactly expensive programme-making. Why doesn't someone do it again?

Climate change gardening

This could look at how gardening trends have been and will be influenced by the changing climate, not only in terms of one's own backyard but also by factors such as the rising cost of energy and the impact horticulture makes on the environment. At the very least, it could be a Gardener's World one-hour special. No, on second thoughts, not a one-hour special. Do it properly!

Trees
Anything on trees, although the BBC, strangely, seems to be able to make quite good programmes about trees. Perhaps that's because trees come under the heading of science, nature and environment, rather than leisure, so they escape that terrible tendency to turn the programme into 'entertainment'. And the Meetings with Remarkable Trees series was based on a book, so they didn't have to think it up themselves (though they did a good job). Sadly, I missed The Trees That Made Britain series, and was annoyed to see that it's unavailable on the BBC's much trumpeted iPlayer and it's not available on DVD. Was it any good?

Right, that's enough ranting from me. What would other people like to see?