RATIO AND PERSPECTIVE

My garden is excruciatingly small. There's hardly a plant in it which can't be swiped by something on the washing line. My house, though practical, is un-scenic and has plastic windows. The garden is enclosed. That, of course, is good. But small surrounded by tall means something is always in shadow. On its east side is the house. On the north and west are walls - built from an ugly brick out of which tar oozes. On the south side is a wooden fence which used to look ok but then I used the wrong preservative and after that it didn't.

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One of the most useful advices I was given before having children was to lie on the floor to check the world from a rolling infant's point of view. That way, you notice the forgotten lead, the un-used and un-protected electric socket. So there I was, lying on the floor, doing my health and safety check and thinking . . . my! is it boring down here! The front of the sofa was long and high and monochrome. The carpet, similarly dull, stretched into the distance. Pictures on the walls were distorted and unintelligible with great spaces of nothingness in between. Windows were a huge glare of light.

So our house became a low-to-ground art gallery with pictures propped along the front of the sofa. Painted ants marched along the skirting board and I stencilled cows and clowns above them. It was then we arrived with the idea of crowding space. Your feet don't need much room to stand on. Why waste all that carpet with nothingness when there could be books standing open and onions to roll into bowls?

This added to my own experience of life too. Because I have epilepsy and keel over from time to time, I see the world only too often from a prone position. I already knew how chair legs seem awfully tall when you look up at them, how angles are all wrong and the ceiling is a million miles away. Ground level view was interesting but not beautiful. Decorating it gave me something to look at too! A new perspective.

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How does this relate to a small garden? It makes it bigger, that's what! When your eye is level with the grass, you can't see much further than a few blades. The scene is filled with the immediate. Anything further than few inches is now another world. So even a small garden becomes a multitude of little worlds - a universe.

I like to see things grow. I like to look at a leaf. I'm not very good at landscapes. I know I used to be more aware of the longer-view because I can remember gardens from my past. But 'close-ups' and 'down-to-grounds' are more important nowadays.

I've also got very good eyes. Not that they work well in a conventional way. Without glasses I can hardly see at all. But they are very good at seeing things as I'd like them to be rather than how they really are.

So my garden looks bigger than it really is. I have elastic vision - one which pushes boundaries, increases the number of plants. A single daffodil becomes a crowd. Two a collection. A tree is a copse. A vine a vineyard.

That explained . . .  I can think about showing you photographs. (On another day!)

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This post follows on from The Overarching Principle.

You may like to know I've now posted pictures - Size and Perspective Illustrated.

THE OVERARCHING PRINCIPLE

My garden has gone through several phases.

The first was the 'We've just moved in and the children need a paddling pool and a slide' stage.

Then came my jungle period. This was my favourite. I buried us in roses, clematis, honeysuckle and jasmine. Visitors might have been pleased to be offered machetes as welcome-to-our home presents. They either liked it or didn't. I did. But, in the end, the plants changed from exuberant to destructive and it all had to come down.

Next came foxgloves. And sometimes there were huge, luxuriant tomato plants.

The most recent phase has been to watch what happens when the world is left untended. I've enjoyed this. I've placed pots and seed trays around the place and waited to see which plants will sail in on the wind and grow in them of their own accord. I've let what will grow - grow . . . and have refused to tend any of it and have learnt for myself all sorts of things I already knew; the way plants left in seed trays stay small while the same varieties in big pots grow tall; that plants which survive under snow may die in drought; I've watched green leaves turn red under stress, seedlings come up between paving stones while invitingly bare earth has been left . . . bare.

This stand-back-and-watch phase has lasted three seasons. Recently, I began to sense that however riveting I found all this my family had begun to yearn, ever so slightly, for a softer landscape. Hence all the moving around and digging up and cutting back and altering the heights of beds which I mentioned in a previous post. We are now at the beginning of a new stage . . . the self perpetuating garden.

There are plants already in situ which I'm letting be but the overarching principle for the next few years will be to have a mixture of perennials and self seeding annuals.

 I'll wind it up then watch it tick.

I mention all this because I've been taking a few photographs - inspired mostly by Janet at Plantaliscious who asked to see my Great Wall of China terracing. I'm happy to show them - but not on this blog which is intentionally wordy. But I don't want my other blog (Esther's Garden Notes) to be overburdened with paragraphs.

So I'll see if I can do a few combination posts - words and explanations here, pictures there.

But not yet.

I will need to say something about scale and perspective first.

Which will be the next post.

Though, having said that, there may be other posts intervening, posts on other subjects. So goes the free-wheeling nature of this blog!

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BOOK RECOMMENDATION

Brief post.

One purpose.

To say this is the most beautiful book I have ever read.

Rooftoppers

by

Katherine Rundell

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HOW TO TELL A REAL HAIR FROM A NEMATODE

I've never needed 'to tell a real hair from a nematode'. Indeed I've never needed to tell a real hair from a fake. Nor have I ever knowingly met a nematode. But someone has - and they've come to Esther's Boring Garden Blog in search of information and advice on how to distinguish between them. (I know this because the query 'how to tell a real hair from a nematode' shows up in the search information.)

It would be presumptuous to suggest I know anything much about nematodes. On the Biowise website (confess family interest) I find out they can be used to control pests like codling moths, carrot fly, cabbage root fly, onion fly, leatherjackets, sciarid flies, cutworm and soil-dwelling beetle larvae like chafer grubs (dot, dot, dot) and with Wikipedia I find they can be microscopic or a metre long, depending on variety. On the same page it estimates there may be a million different species of nematode; 28,000 have been identified, of which 16,000 are parasitic.

The RHS page on pest control helpfully points out a pest has to be physically present for it to be infected by a nematode-borne killer disease or eaten by a nematoidal predator and the best time for arranging this is between April and September. The Natural History Museum site says 250 kinds of deep sea nematodes have been found (with pictures you might not like to look at) and iSpot has a photograph of a Neanura muscorum (whatever that is) with nematodes hitching a lift on the hairs of its head. HAIRS! At last! I've tracked down hairs - not hairs on a nematode but a nematode on hairs. (You can see lots of pictures of Neanura muscorum on the BugGuide site and I think I can say with reasonable certainty none of them are wearing wigs.)

After this, I found a video of a nematode (hydatoxi lualba) from a hair root. It was moving around; not very interestingly and accompanied by unrelated scuffles - but I didn't like it. I began to feel sick - and came to a queasy full stop when I read about its association with several horrid human conditions (which we won't go into) and then got confused because at the end of this short entry it says that it (the nematode in these circumstances) is probably an artifact.

Now, to me, an artifact is something made by an artisan. Perhaps an iron-age spear head? But who would want to 'make' a nematode? Obviously, I had the wrong end of the stick. A stick I didn't want to hold on to. So I let it go.

But at last I understood why someone came to this blog looking for information on nematodes and wigs. Quite a short trot round the internet looking for proper information - and one is bound to be so disconcerted light relief is welcome. Almost any kind. A bit of Bach. Buddy Holly. Beach Boys. Buxtehude. Even the twaddle you can find on Esther's Boring Garden Blog. The choice, it turns out, is between being bored and throwing up.

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Random Baroque

Beach Boys

Buddy Holly

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