Trees

I wonder, some times, what the opposite of “green-fingered” is. I consider myself to be “botanically homicidal”, or perhaps “yellow-toed”, or possibly “a crap gardener”, but I have never let this put me off. I have kept a string of sickly house plants ever since I was old enough to dig up bits of garden and put it in pots, and now have plants all over the house struggling for survival against all the odds including an Aspidistra called Gordon, our longest surviving house plant, who is mostly looked after by Barny and re-potted by visitors who take pity on him.

Jabberwocky HQ is the home of a small and neglected patch of grass we like to glamorously call the back garden, and we have long been intending to turn this into a beautiful and functional kitchen garden with which we could feed the Beast. The plan would be to grow all out own herbs and fruit, and to produce jams and pickles and other such grub with which Barny could experiment. Last year priorities were very firmly Jabberwocky-based, but this year, with a slightly greater understanding of Jabberwockys, business and how to combine the two, we are hoping to be able to get a few things done outdoors.

For this reason my parents drove themselves and their insane dog up here on Saturday, so that we could plant trees and the insane dog could first kill and then eat the flowerpots. I was also keen to show off my contribution to the world of toasties for lunch, so marked out the locations for the trees with a few handy flower pots and then nipped inside to see if I could rustle up anything even half as nice as Barny’s ones. The flavour of choice was goats cheese, rocket and onion marmalade, and I am delighted to report that aside from the broken toastie pan, dropped toastie and post nuclear mess in the kitchen, they turned out really well.

Meanwhile the insane dog had taken to opportunity to rearrange/kill the remaining flower pots, and was bouncing around the garden in disgrace. We returned to digging, and trees gradually started to appear in the garden. They looked weak and rubbish in the freezing January air, but the ground was warm and surprisingly moist thanks to the pathetic winter so far, and trees were springing out of polythene bags and into the ground like beautifully.

At that moment Barny arrived back, and the insane dog nutted him squarely in the crotch.

As the sun beat a hasty retreat to warmer parts of the planet we managed to get a string of fruit bushes and another tree planted while the insane dog tried to play fetch with the saplings. Despite this we now probably have enough fruit to keep us going all summer. Not exactly this summer, and probably also not next summer. Eventually though we will have sloes, elderberries, cherry plums, four different types of apple, three types of pear, greengages and hazel to accompany the dead herbs on the patio and the nearly dead bay, and no one needs to get nutted anywhere.