Books, Gardens and Tom Jones

Garden: Yesterday we visiting Houghton Lodge gardens near the charming small town of Stockbridge, Hampshire, with its posh shops and galleries.  Houghton Lodge has three alpacas and a trout stream, an old walled garden with ancient knarled espalier fruit trees and a hydroponicum. A beautiful unusual old house, once a fishing lodge.  Here's their website, which explains about hydroponics - growing plants without soil.  At Houghton some of the flowers are in white gutters hanging from the greenhouse wall and apparently city dwellers should be growing their own veg in one of these special systems in future (Hm?)  Incidentally, I learned that orchids are in transparent pots because their roots like the light.

Reading. Just finished Small Wars by Sadie Jones.  It's a tense story set in Cyprus in the 50s and has, she reckons, resonance with current wars.  Hal is a typical Army officer of the day, it seems at first.  His beautiful wife Clara and the twins accompany him to Cyprus, where atrocities on both sides of the conflict start to have an effect on the closeness of their marriage.  Here's a review.

Sadie Jones doesn't shy away from describing bloody battles and indeed much of the narrative is from Hal's point of view.  The book is well researched.  She does get some tiny details of e.g. military etiquette wrong and I think it is brave of her to write about a war and a period that many alive will still remember. 

I used to know a great many traditional Army officers and, on reflection, I'm not entirely sure that Hal would behave as he did.  A good if harrowing read, but not quite as gripping as The Outcast.  I'll definitely read her next book.

Saw Tom Jones at the film club.  The DVD was somewhat blurry, but I still enjoyed the young Albert Finney. Animal lovers might find its rollicking hunting scene too gory.  Eating scenes great fun and full of gusto, of course.
Must admit the village hall seats are agony if it's a long film like this one.  Better on the sofa perhaps, with Tom?

Another glorious English garden

Mulberry? Later: sorry, it is nothing like a mulberry I now realise. As you will see from the comments, Dark Puss says it is cornus capitata, evergreen dogwood. Have googled it and he is right (as usual). Today must take a pic of my variegated dogwood, beautiful in the early morning sun.

Another marvellous late autumn visit to the garden at Bramdean House, near Alresford, Hampshire, which is open for the National Gardens Scheme several times a year, but also by appointment. Here is the rather plain website.

All above photos by Rory Vereker. The strange woman under the gigantic sunflowers is me.

I could have posted about twenty glorious dahlia pix but didn't want to go over the top. I've got a sudden crush on them but don't expect everybody else to share my enthusiasms.

Bramdean is very near Hinton Ampner so you could see them both in one fell swoop, if you phoned in advance.

Back to a lost world

This week we visited Hinton Ampner, Bramdean, near Winchester, left to the National Trust when the last Lord Sherborne died in the 1980s. I’ve been there several times, but this year the garden seemed more colourful and more of the house had been opened up. It was fascinating to look at old photo albums and to listen to recordings of the former family and staff talking. Lord Sherborne's sister, a grand-sounding old lady, said that her parents, not much interested in children, were disappointed when two girls were born first, then at last there was a son, followed eventually by a third daughter, so there was a triumph and three disasters, as she sadly put it.
A useful household hint: one needs two bell-pulls in each room, one to summon menservants and one to summon maids. (photo credits - Rory Vereker)

Mr Whicher and the Yellow Book

Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, meticulously researched, very well written, deserves all the praises heaped upon it. Moreover, not only is it a true who-and-why-dunnit, but it also sheds light on Victorian middle-class values and customs, and on police work in the 1800s. However, I don't much like books which dwell on the gruesome murder of a small child and the character of the murderer, so I didn't especially enjoy it.

To more cheerful matters, I have now received my copy of the National Gardens Scheme Yellow Book for 2009, see one of their photos above. I love visiting and nosing around other people's back gardens, large and small. It's so interesting what amateur gardeners achieve in the tiniest gardens - sometimes it seems to me they do just as well or better than the pros.

You can buy the Yellow Book for your county if you don't want to splash out for the whole of England and Wales.