'Chatsworth House'

Ah, the internet.  It has given people such an opportunity to express themselves, and not just through posting porny selfies or demonstrating their mad skillz creating cute costumes for their cats then posting pictures of pets dressed as former Communist party leaders and captioning them ‘Chairman Meow’. 
Occasionally though one finds a fine example of that dry English wit that typifies the nation in the most unexpected of places, and just has to be celebrated.
I have recently taken possession of a fish pond.  No problem, I know what to do with fish ponds, you fill them in and plant barbeques on them.  However, a quick consultation with the Internets reveals that this is ‘likely to cause distress’ to the resident fish.
Putting fish up for adoption is also trickier than it first appears.  The traditional way of disposing of fish, by setting up a bent funfair stall that requires the average punter to spend roughly the cost of a Koi before winning a fish in a bag, is now frowned upon.  One solution is to give the fish to pet stores for ‘rehoming’, although when you read on you discover that they can end up being rehomed in the digestive tracts of other pet shop residents, which I sure as hell hope means other pets rather than Crazy Phil behind the counter.
Accordingly, I have to take care of them before I work out what to do with them. 
Step one, food.  No problem, the local hardware store sells what appears to be vastly overpriced confetti that the fish seem to enjoy.
Step two, oxygenating the pond.  Did you know that fish need oxygen?  Strange, given their choice of environment.  But as it would appear the fish are not going to make a great evolutionary leap any time soon, the oxygen has to be introduced to the water.  This is done by splashing the surface of water surface.  Thankfully, the English weather has managed to do this on a grand scale recently by the simple means of rainfall by the budketload.  The Internets also recommends a wee fountain.  (That is, a small fountain rather than one styled along the lines of Brussels’s most famous spurty splashing feature).
Ever the optimist, I reckon a solar powered one is the best interim fix and hop on B&Q’s web site to see if they sell them.  They do, so check the comments section.
And there it is.  A five star review in every sense that explains the product is, essentially, a little fountain that spurts a three inch jet when the sun is out.  However, it’s the opening sentence that steals the show, encapsulating in five words the aprirational essence of the back garden water feature, the mentality of the gardener and the self-effacing humour that typifies the English condition. 
The review begins…’It’s not exactly Chatsworth House’.
Genius.

The Great Walls

Remember that moment in Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong’ when you thought ‘oh oh, I think this movie might be a bit shit’?  You know, the bit just after the BBFC certificate vanished and just before the theatre lights came up? 
A much better ‘King Kong’ was the one featuring Kurt Russell.  That version made sure that you didn’t even see the monster until half way through, meaning that the suspense was such that you were by that point chewing the fingernails of the person in the seat next to you, having run out of your own.  That movie had some flaws, sure, in particular the giant ape hand that I suppose looked realistic as a giant leather mit, but also reminded one of those huge oversized boxing glove seats.  The best feature was The Wall.  It was clear that it was ancient, but regularly repaired, and anyone driven to engineer on that scale was shit scared of whatever was on the other side.
The best King Kong, of course, is the original (movie, not actual creature).  It scared the shit out of me when I first saw it, so it must have blown the minds of the original audience.
Walls, especially big ones, are iconic. 
When the Chinese decided that a fence just wasn’t going to cut it, they didn’t fuck about.  One can just imagine the tender process, with the Emperor being presented with ‘The Big Wall’, ‘The Huge, Fuck-Off Wall’ and, of course, ‘The Great Wall’.  The Great Wall was the most reasonable priced, and the rest is non-sweary history.
Hadrian, in a move that is probably retrospectively supported more by English people then even the most fervent ‘Yes’ supporter in the forthcoming Scottish independence referendum (have they decided on the question yet?  If it’s ‘Do you agree that Scotland should remain part of the Union’, some people are going to be busy swapping badges) famously walled off Scotland from Roman occupied Europe, in a move that even today means there are few straight walls north of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
A wall is a statement.  Build one round your estate and you are making a very definite statement.  And that statement is ‘poachers will be shot’.
Domestically, walls around property boundary lines tend to be low, ornamental.  It’s more a suggestion of ‘this is mine and…actually, this is mine, fuck off’.  It’s the sort of statement that used to be made by mounting an enemy’s head on a pole, the sort of provocative move that is now only equalled in suburbia by any instruction starting with the words ‘polite notice’, before going on to say something about ethnic minorities not being welcome.
Come the big blow over Christmas, it was all about fences.  Traditionally, these wooden dividers of garden boundaries are to be found marking the edges of property lines.  After Christmas, quite a number of them were no longer strictly aligned with the property line.  Some weren’t even aligned with their original postcode.
Well maintained fence panels and posts held firm, or went over as one.  Well maintained panels acted like spinnakers when attached to weaker posts and sailed into the distance.  My panels were approaching heritage status and so it was a case of storm 1 – fence 0.
Between Christmas and the New Year a common sight in any DIY store parking lot was a stream of people exiting with one or more new fence panels.  Not owning the sort of working class vehicle capable of transporting panels, and worried that any attempt to attach a panel to a roof rack, given the weather, would result in the car turning into a glider, I had mine delivered.
I did, however, treat myself to an electric screwdriver.  Like any bloke issued with kit that looks a little like a gun, I immediately held it at hip height and made ‘bang bang’ noises.  One wonders if when soldiers are issued with their sidearms, they pretend to put up shelves.
Even though non-sonic, it was the bloody business.  Turned a chore into a joy and the new fence is a joy to behold.  Not sure if it’s giant ape proof, but it’s rather more attractive than a head on a stick.

Postcard from Highgrove

As the Prince of Wales explains in the short video that you watch at the start of the tour of the gardens at Highgrove, one of his greatest pleasures is knowing that the garden is enjoyed by visitors. I'm entirely convinced, for a couple of reasons. The first is that as Prince of Wales, surely you are likely to get great pleasure by having panda and chips for breakfast, just because you can. Also, Highgrove is unsigned and difficult to find. To take a tour of the gardens, you send off for tickets and are sent a date, a time, and directions. A satnav will do you no good, instead, you navigate through the Cotswolds back roads in traditional fashion, with a map and keenly developed bickering skills until, at some seemingly random point, you pull off the road onto a drive.

It's here you think you've made a wrong turn, because you appear to be driving up a very ordinary drive. Thus it comes as something of a relief when you see the policeman. He is there to check your tickets, check your ID and presumably check that you are not a threat to national security, the monarchy, or the monarchy's flower beds.

Before your tour starts you are told that there is no recording at Highgrove. Anyone who has seen Alan Titmarsh's interview with HRH PoW probably wishes this rule had been applied sooner. No cameras or mobile 'phones are permitted. Given that Prince Harry had just that day graced the Internet with his crown jewels and that the ginger nutsack had, pardon the phrase, gone viral, we could understand the sensitivity. Then they explained that you were not even allowed to do sketches. This, I thought, was a little bit harsh.

The Prince explains in his video that he wanted to create a garden that feeds the soul and delights the eye. Certainly I felt my soul, and pockets, lighten as, for the first time in what seemed like a decade, I wandered around without a mobile, a camera or even a wallet (although you are encouraged to return to your car to retrieve the latter and then visit the shop at the end of the tour).

The garden at Highgrove is actually a number of differently themed gardens, separated by walls, or features of the landscape, or hedges. They are also the repository for many of the gifts that the PoW has been given over the years. Most of us, on receipt of a charmingly hideous ceramic knick-jack, would leave it on the doorstep of a charity shop like an unwanted baby in a Victorian novel, but the PoW does not have that option.

And he gets given a lot of crap. And it all goes in the garden.

And it's fascinating, cemented into walls, or paths, or garden structures are plaques or ornaments that he has been given. The is a fabulous 'wall of gifts' made up of carvings made by apprentice masons - it looks like a jigsaw church. And the are bronze busts of HRH in the garden. One might think that having bronze busts of yourself is a sign of egomania and it might be...if you kept them in the house. Busts of yourself in the house can only serve one useful purpose - somewhere to keep your hat. In a garden though, they are decorative and charming. Ironically, thanks to the attention of birds, they could actually use a hat.

The garden is a delight and the tour is clever, first teasingly showing you the private garden area right next to the house, through delightful and very effective iron gates, then taking you into it. After all the secrecy and security, once you are in the grounds you are essentially invited to wander around and touch as much as you want - just don't stray from the group or you will be shot and added to the compost heap.

There are delights and surprises for the eye and the walled garden, with fruit and herbs, feeds both the soul and the senses and, if my scrumping skills had been as well developed as they were in my youth, would have fed the stomach too.

I finished the tour with scented hands as a result of all my herb handling. This is a remarkable place and shows you what any gardener can do with some imagination, vast wealth and a dedicated gardening team. It is the quintessential English garden, down to the borrowing of ideas and of plants and artefacts from around the world to give the impression of being in another country, to the extent that the is a rather lovely Moorish garden near the house, complete with tinkly water feature.

And even if you do not like gardens, it's interesting to see, though not record, where all the gifts have gone and, if you have ever given HRH a gift, you may wish to go to check to see if it adorns a place of prominence, or a suitably shady nook.

For all the wealth and the privilege of the owner what comes through is a vision for an organic, sustainable garden (sustainable meaning in this case never throwing anything away and finding a use for everything) and incredible attention to detail, both from the garden's owner and the gardeners themselves, who toil away like elves in green polo shirts while the tours wander around them.

The guides are interesting too. Luckily, the Cotswolds has a fair proportion of posh ladies to draw on during the season when the garden is open to the public. If you do visit, my advice is to read up on your gardening facts, as they do love to tell tales of visitors who don't know a sheep from a shrub and in the true spirit of recycling the ignorance of today's group will form comic fodder for tomorrow.

As a garden, it's still a work in progress, although anyone who walks around the RHS show, especially the Spring show at Malvern, will see much that is familiar in style and planting. As a house Highgrove is interesting, on the one hand a three story substantial farmhouse, on the other hand not what you would expect as the residence of a future king (but just what you would expect if you were familiar with the Britannia) and as an experience, a fascinating opportunity to stroke the herbs of a member of the royal family.

Most impressive of all? We couldn't finish the cakes from the afternoon tea, which were promptly boxed up for us to take away. The urge to eBay was strong, the urge to finish them later with a cuppa stronger still.

An Englishman's garden

The English have a particular relationship with their garden that perhaps nobody else in the world shares apart from the Arabs. In a desert climate, greenery and water are signs of luxury. Sharing your garden is, in an inhospitable climate, a sign of hospitality. How wonderful to spend the day underneath a tree, shaded from the sun, listening to water flow while pondering if one was sitting on vast reserves of oil.

So too, for the Englishman, the garden is intrinsic to his ideas about hospitality, and water is at the centre of all he does. This is not a trait shared by the Scots, who mainly cultivate heathers of different colours and creatures that can graze heather which can then be deep fried. Nor the Welsh, who due to their climate are expert at growing two types of flora: those that look good when shaped by a prevailing wind and so are better at growing horizontally rather than vertically, and mould.

In the late nineties and early part of this century, a conspiracy between the BBC and those that owned 90% of the world’s supply of decking introduced the garden makeover programme and with it the idea that your garden could be just like another room in your house. For the English, a race particularly fond of getting as far away from members of their immediate family as possible, this seemed like a great idea, even if it essentially meant decking a two foot square at the top of the garden and retiring up there with a chair and some beer.

It was odd that this love of gardening ever needed reintroducing. The English have always loved to tame nature, especially if they show off by ripping up the landscape and then replanting it to look ‘natural’. Or just show off, with naughty topiary, or knot gardens (presumably beloved of Elizabethan sailors). In terms of hospitality and gardens, nobody does it better than the English, by adopting the practice of digging a bloody huge trench in your garden and filling it with water. It is an accepted convention that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and if that means a moat to deter double glazing salesmen and boiling oil for carollers, then what could be more English?

While the majority of houses are today tragically un-moated, it’s also true that the majority of houses with gardens are inhabited by those whose attitude towards hospitality is ‘come safely to my place of rest and eat a burger that will, in four hours, make you just shit your kidneys’. The barbeque, very much an outdoor event, allows the Englishman to combine beer and naked flame, two things for which he has both a fascination for, and no control over. Cowslip, new mown grass, petrichor – these are all the smells of an English summer but are any of them as representative as the smell of lighter fluid and charcoal as the inpatient chef commences combustion on another marinated masterpiece?

While fire may be the measure of the hospitality of the English host, water is at the centre of the world of any English gardener. The interesting thing about a water butt is that it is absolutely no bloody use at all when it is full, because filling it requires the heavens to open. And after a few days of dry weather, it’s empty, unless one is the sort of gardener who is able to make Sophie’s choice about which of your thirsty plants are going to get a drink today.

The reason that the English react so badly to hosepipe bans is not because they like to wash their cars themselves. In this age of metered water it is now actually cheaper to go to a municipal car park where half of the bloody spaces have been taken over by some blokes with a shitload of fairy liquid and a jet wash and have them do it for you, but rather because they genuinely cannot fathom why, when rain seems to fall, for free, out of the sky every single fucking day, water companies can’t hold on to some. Have these incompetent arseholes tried putting out some buckets? No? Why not?

From vine to wine, it's all fine

This has been, in every way, a ripe year for British fruit. The harvest has been bountiful and the fruit itself, taking an invented figure, at least 20% plumper and juicier than average. On the Imperial measure, that's at least one third of a smiling child more than normal and on the Summerisle scale, it means that demand for virgin sacrifices is down one on previous years.

The branches have hung heavy with fruit and the hedgerows were busy with birds at first flitting from branch to branch, then lunging from branch to branch before finally crashing heavily from branch to branch as their now almost spherical forms provided inspiration for any passing app maker. While in the supermarket the bumper harvest brought about by unseasonable, unreasonable but very welcome warm Autumn weather went unnoticed because while more of a product should mean it gets cheaper, rocketing diesel prices meant that transporting the stuff from farm to shop was getting more expensive, it was very noticeable in the fields, in those little roadside stalls you get when you travel the back roads, in the increase in demand for sugar, glass jars and other jam making accessories (jam making kitchens, the crystal meth labs of the English middle classes), and in back gardens.

Especially mine. This was the year that Jeremy, my vine, came good.

Not to say that in previous years he's not tried, it's just that this year he's had help.

Previously, Jeremy has fruited, with tiny buds slowly turning into grapes and those green grapes turning a luscious deep, dark purple (causing me to look again at Jeremy's tag and try to recollect if I had intended to buy a white-wine, sorry, a green grape vine, and had accidentally grabbed the wrong stalk in the garden centre. Of course it may have been that three or four years ago I was going through a red wine phase, which would certainly explain both my choice and my inability to either recollect my intention or to grab the right vine if green grapes had been my intention), I looked on them with pride, turned my back, heard a grey whoosh and turned back to see no grapes and a grape-laden squirrel shooting up a tree, just out of twatting-with-a-spade range.

This year, however, a more relaxed attitude to regimenting the garden has led to the borders growing in a 'wild garden' fashion. The idea was to encourage wildlife such as butterflies and bees, while freeing up valuable drinking time by avoiding excess pruning or trimming. Have no fear though, my lawn has been kept in pristine condition and could, at any time, have been pressed into service as a surface to play croquet, bowls, cricket, polo or, after one particularly close pass with the mower, snooker, on. The move towards wild gardening has led to the arrival of sentinel cats who, apparently, like nothing better than to curl up in the long grass and snooze away the afternoon, watched resentfully by squirrels who are now too scared to enter the garden. Hence the vine has been unmolested and hence there has been a bountiful harvest of grapes.

The cats are tolerated not just because they are even better squirrel deterrent than me running round the garden in my pants swinging a shovel round my head and screaming my dread squirrel-slaying war cry of 'Die Tufty Dieeeeeeeeeeee!' but because they don't crap in the garden. I have nothing against cats in and of themselves, after all, spinsters need love too, but I do have an objection to animals that crap in my garden. Obviously, these cats are fastidious and have decided that nothing puts a cramp in your nap when you are entirely covered in fur quite like poo. This is plainly a view shared by the fox that also took up residence for a short spell this summer, and who could be seen snoozing in the sunshine, moving only when the setting sun threw a long shadow across the lawn and he was required to pick himself up, wander a few yards into the sunshine, and drop down again. I thought for years that foxes drew their energy from bin raids and leftover chicken tikka masala, but apparently they are solar powered. So an uneasy peace reigned in my back garden in the summer of 2011, with the fox, the cats and myself all studiously ignoring one another's existence. I've no idea if the truce will be last and fear some sort of fur, fangs and faeces version of a Tombstone showdown moment next time round.

For this year though, all was calm, the only sounds the uncorking of lunch, the occasional sizzle of a sausage on the barbecue and the sound of my tomato plants, and Jeremy, growing. If ever there was a year for growing tomatoes, this was it. It's amazing that water plus sunshine can equal fruit, and free fruit at that. The things grew even taller than I am, and by August I had had to construct a Heath-Robinsonesque framework of bamboo canes held together with gardening twine to support the vertical and horizontal growths. By the time the crop was done I think there was more bamboo than tomato plant but the result was pleasing not only in the sense of getting free food, but of course the blokish sensation of having built something. The tomatoes tasted great, although the choice to go with two varieties, one that is traditional red when ripe and one that is yellow, caused some early confusion in trying to determine when a yellow tomato is ripe - answer: when it's very yellow.

Getting back to vines though, lets be clear, a vine has but two purposes; shade and booze. In sunny countries, like England in 2011, they are just the job for curling around your pergola or hastily lashed together framework of bamboo canes in order to provide welcome shade. Shade under which one can, if one wishes, set up a table and some chairs, and perhaps serve some cheese, with the wine of your choice. That's breakfast sorted, now all that remains is to call into work with a croaky voice, kick back and make the most of the day. Jeremy is not quite up to this yet, he was curled around my shed instead, but he is up to making wine! With a little help.

I have a friend who makes wine. Well, let me clarify, I have a friend who makes alcohol and alcohol products. To him, nature is something to be washed, peeled, sliced and then put into a bucket with a pound of sugar and some yeast, left in a shed for a couple of weeks, strained, matured in a bottle for as long as his patience can bear, and then drunk. He has made alcoholic drinks out of cherries, pears, rhubarb and, rumour has it, on one occasion a fox that was not quite quick enough after crapping on his vegetable patch. But never grapes. His vine has, mysteriously, always failed to produce grapes, even this summer.

So, I had a harvest of grapes but no knowledge of how to make wine, and he has all the gear and a good idea, but no grapes. So it was that we entered into an agreement, I would harvest and supply the grapes, he'd do all the hard work and we'd split the result half and half.


The process of wine making only fuelled the expectation of the result. I delivered the grapes to my winemaker and left him to undertake the initial stages. This resulted, a couple of weeks later, in a large bucket of grape juice. We then spent an evening straining the stuff into another bucket, while the dregs were retained. My wine buddy had a plan for those. The resulting strained wine juice was added to another bucket, sugar and yeast was added, a mysterious instrument called a hydrometer was used, more sugar was added, the lid was put on the bucket and the whole thing was returned to the shed.


Sheds have featured largely. Jeremy put on a growth spurts this summer and wrapped himself around my shed, while the fruit has turned to wine in a shed. With this in mind, various names for the wine were considered and rejected ('Vin diesel', 'Van Bloody Ordinary', Vin-mto', 'Grim grape') before we settled on the inevitable 'Shed red'. I think that the close involvement of sheds at every stage has leant a certain something to the wine itself, as it fermented away I was imagining that it would have notes of compost, porn and creosote.

Of course, as with all this home made stuff, potency can be a problem. I tried a glass of his rhubarb wine on holiday and lost the power of speech after half a glass, the use of common sense after the rest of the glass and the use of my ability to climb stairs after a second glass. Good stuff. I think.

Come decanting day, we had moved out of the bucket stage, which was something of a relief. While the reality of actually making something usually demystifies the product, and while the sieving, pouring and standing well back as the yeast and sugar got it on was tremendous fun, there is only so much romance to be had from a plastic bucket. But glass demijohns and tubes - this was much more like it.


The resulting wine is actually a rose, a beautiful pink, like the blush of a convent school girl just having her first inappropriate thought about the captain of the netball team. This was rather unexpected considering how dark the grapes were and one wonders exactly how dark the grapes are that produce those really deep red wines, I suspect most of them are beyond the visible spectrum.

I was told by my winemaker that the result tasted like a Beaujolais nouveaux. This would make perfect sense, as that is a wine synonymous with being drunk practically before the corks are hammered into the bottles. The idea for shed red, like all home made wine, is that you make it, bottle it and then forget about it for at least a year.

However, given all the excitement about this vintage, we had to try it. I would say that the result is...interesting. It certainly packs a punch and resembles nothing so much as a light and fruity lunchtime wine crossed with battery acid and the sort of spirit that one buys at a car boot sale to clear your car windscreen of frost, or possibly a home made cure for removing warts, stubborn stains and all traces of life in any awkward family member. Having said that, we finished the bottle.

I believe the correct term for the resulting wine is 'young'. Like all wines it should be allowed to mature and I have to say that putting it away has already improved it tremendously, in that I don't have to drink the stuff. At present, it's enough to look at it, sitting there gathering potency, and feel a warm glow of achievement and not just a little frisson of anxiety about what the stuff is going to taste like in a years time.

The skins and stalks, by the way, were not wasted. Rather, this was used to make grappa. Grappa is, as anyone who has ever shuddered their way to a pulled muscle after sipping the stuff will know, notoriously vile. If it tastes goodj, you're not doing it right. It's supposed to be made of the leftovers when you have made wine and it is supposed to be rough as a mountain goat's arse in Lithuania's goat shagging season. Thus, the bar had not been set high, or had been, depending on your point of view. When the Shed Red was bottled the grappa was still in the bucket stage of the process, so we all trooped out to the shed for a sip. Itw was sublime. I think that served chilled, ideally so chilled that you don't actually taste it, it would actually be excellent.

Hampton Court

The Hampton Court Flower Show is billed as the biggest flower show in Britain. Which probably means the biggest anywhere, because nobody is as keen on gardening as the English, with the possible exception of subsistence farmers out in the arse-end of some hard-to-pronounce country whose continued survival depends on a good rice crop. It's also visited by the biggest collection of gardeners in England, from those that tend an estate to those that tend a pot plant with a name in the one sunny corner of their flat.

A perfect bowl of fruit, luscious, ripe and gorgeous, at the Waitrose display. This is possibly the most middle-class image ever recorded. Warning - they get really funny if you pick any of these and, like repressive regimes who hunt down those who favour democracy, they can find you in a crowd because of your stained fingers.

The English love to garden. This is for a number of reasons.

First and foremost it is because a large garden means that your nearest neighbour is a respectable distance away, hopefully separated from your home with a high hedge or two, and a moat. Your moat. The one with the genetically modified crocosharks lolling in it.

The secret of success is to have unconventional, strange looking plants in very regular lines, like modern art, nobody feels equipped to criticise something that looks that odd. Do not turn to the lady next to you and ask if she likes things ten inches long with a purple tip. If you do, don't wink while doing it.

Even a small garden can provide privacy, if your hedge is high enough or your feature wall is topped with razor wire.

And the English love to grow things. Beautiful flowers and bountiful fruit. If the beautiful flowers can be entered into a local competition to win you glory, that's good. If your bountiful fruit can be grown a couple of inches longer than the others in a 'largest marrow' competition, bringing defeat to your bitter rival, better still. If anything you grow can be converted into alcohol, better yet. And if you grow something that looks phallic enough to cause the Vicar to flee should you place it before him should he call fund raising, or give the organist a funny turn when you plonk it on the altar at harvest festival, that's perfection.

Intimating to the grower that his plants look artificial will see you chased the length of the floral marquee with an enraged yokel three short steps behind you.

The English grow gardens of flowers because they like flowers. They grow gardens of vegetables because they taste great but even more importantly, they remind us of the war when we were digging for victory. Look carefully at any decent vegetable plot and you will see a little Anderson shelter in the corner.

It's all about trade at the end of the day. Yet grabbing a handful of the nearby display and asking 'how much' is very much not approved of.

While the English love to garden in seclusion (the garden is a place for solitude, be it quiet reflection, furtive smoking or, that perennial favourite, the midnight interment of a hastily murdered unwanted house guest) yet oddly relish the crowds at a flower show.

It's as if some critical mass or tipping point is reached of people who spend much of their lives with potting compost under their nails and they start enjoying each other's company. Of course, the principal reason for this is that there is a sufficient divergence of interests that every need is catered for. If the show were, say, a festival of parsnips, then the natural aggression of the parsnip grower would mean that things would turn as ugly as a phallic root vegetable pretty soon, resulting in the usual mayhem and a display for only for soup.

An olive tree, what could be lovelier? Well, an olive tree with lavender beneath. If Greece adopted this planting method, they could export sachets of scent to keep underwear draws fresh as well as providing the worlds favourite cooking lubricant, hence doubling their economic prosperity. And they'd still be f**ked!

But at Hampton Court the lovers of the succulents and those who favour box can pretend a polite interest in the passion of the other, secure in the knowledge that their way is the true path to happiness, and that path is lined with the bedding plants of their choice.

In a simpler age, when farms were farms owned by families rather than agro-industried owned by the banks, this is what tractors looked like. Built to a human scale rather than the grotesque balloon-tyred tractors on steroids with enclosed air-conditioned cabs, GPS and hot tubs that farmers have today, it's true that the driver would occasionally die of exposure, but at least you could bloody pass him on a B road, rather than trailing behind for miles with only the occasional splod of manure flung from the tractor tyre to your windscreen to relieve the monotony.

The show is a meritocracy. The show gardens, large and small as well as the displays of flowers and vegetables in the floral marquee are there to be judged and ranked. The judging panel choose carefully which garden deserves gold, silver gilt, silver or bronze medals, balancing a desire to fairly reward beauty and hard work with, it would appear, a genuine desire to pitch visitors into a state of incredulity as they wonder why the hell a rustic cottage in a pastoral garden got a silver while what appears to be a lawn with a rotary clothes line festooned with fairy lights got a gold.

Garden sculpture. Presumably for people who find this sort of thing amusing. If, in front of the leapfrogging frog (Oh, I just got it!) there was a small boy holding a blender to catch it, that would be funny.

Either this is a fantastic bit of planting, or they just let a plot go to seed last year.

This year, the garden as social space was very much the theme. The English love eating outdoors, it's almost perverse that a race dwelling on an island with a climate so ill suited to it could develop such an affection for dining al fresco, yet the English have turned picnicking from an art into a science.

This shade of blue is only achievable by dedicated growing. By master gardeners. Who did LOADS of acid.

The advances in windbreak technology alone are staggering and the same principles developed by the English to keep tea warm long enough to finish when sipping the stuff on a rain-scoured seafront will probably be incorporated into the space suits for any future Mars mission.

The ultimate fate of anything found in any English garden, up to and including badgers, is to be adapted for alcohol. the perss is useful because after you have pressed the apples you can use it to print the labels. And kill Terminators.

So it was natural to see many gardens planned around tables and chairs and social dining in the garden. It was also good to see some honesty, with one of the small garden featuring a huge flat screen telly on the wall and a seating area facing it. The idea was that this was the domestic version of open air cinema.

These ugly bulbs will one day turn out to be beautiful lilies. There's probably a metaphor here about not judging things in an immature state. But I'm just wondering what would happen if you fermented these bad boys and turned them into an alcoholic beverage. Given tat lillies stink like a combination of dead flesh and urine (No? Just me then) I would dub any such concoction 'Loopy Juice'.

Next year, I hope to see this taken to the next logical step; the telly showing premiership soccer and a solar powered fridge full of beer placed nearby. If the garden is well screened with high hedges, then after dark it can become the Babestation garden - not so much for the al fresco perving but because if the models that channel features are rough enough to stop my principle nocturnal activity dead in its tracks, then it can do the same for the crap-happy fox and cat population.

Honest. Unpretentious. The greatest threat to the French since Wellington, Nelson or the clap. A vine that grows on English soil and produces great grapes. The English already brew the greatest beers in the world and distill the greatest spirits (scotch and gin). It was only a matter of time before they tried wine and when they do, they'll conquer the world. Again.

Green and pleasant land

The sunny Spring and wet Summer may have played merry hell with the cricket schedule (although given the years of training that the ‘Test Match Special’ team have had in talking about just about anything other than cricket, they were perfectly placed to bring the same world-class professionalism to bear on the ground staff rushing on and off with the covers that they do with the batting and bowling and to make it just, if not more, exciting), but it’s turned the garden into a den of plump lusciousness. My lawn has never looked so lush, nor the plants so…much like an out-of-control hedgerow.

While Jeremy, my vine, is looking promising, the tomato plants (grown from grafts, which is the plant equivalent of adopting a child once they are old enough top drive and buy you a pint, so getting around all that tedious business of raising them) are positively blooming. They are now taller than me, leading to my erecting a Heath Robinsonesque framework of bamboo and garden twine, anchoring the plants and keeping them upright. This is tricky, as they are loaded with plump tomatoes.

I put the growth down to their being grafts, regular watering, regular feeding and the blood of the odd stray cat.

I have a variety of plants, one grows traditional plump red toms, the other cherry tomatoes and yet another yellow tomatoes – and just out of interest how the hell know when they are ripe?

Ripening visibly are the grapes on Jeremy. They are turning from green to black and this year there’s a better than even chance that I will actually be able to harvest them. Previously, they have ripened and provided a feast for the local squirrels (or, as the Daily Mail would describe them, immigrants) but this year the cat population appears to have reached the tipping point where they have kept the grape guzzling critters at bay.

So this could be the year for wine. At last. This could be the year where the romance of wine making – throwing a load of fruit and chemicals into a plastic bucket, keeping it warm and hoping to Christ that it doesn’t explode or rot or result in the neighbours dobbing you in as brewing up a chemical attack – could result in something drinkable or at least the sort of thing that will remove stubborn stains.

What’s required, of course, is a decent name. Vin something and, in expectation of the taste, the front runner is Vin Diesel. I rather like Vin Shed also, or is that Vin Petit Chatau, or plain old Vin Shitoh! That said, why bother with any poncy French merde at all – I rather like ‘shedwine’, it hints of the exotic, a taste of porn and creosote.

Shine a light

In a fit of misguided horticultural enthusiasm as few years ago, I invested in a half dozen solar powered lanterns for the garden. I figured that we were at least five years away from genetically modifying plants to the extent that they would actually glow in the dark, so if I wanted garden lighting in the meantime, I had to get some hardware.

I have, on the whole, greatly enjoyed my little garden lanterns. I’m not sure whether they act as a deterrent for garden pests such as foxes, or whether the animals, instead of being driven away by the little circles of light, instead appreciate some lighting to see exactly where they are crapping, but it was fun at night to look out of the window and see the little twinkles (lights, not a slang term for foxes in the act of crapping).

A few summers of rain and winters of frost and snow took their toll however, and as of last autumn the solar panels were misted over and the rechargeable batteries denuded. My lanterns were nothing more than metal mushrooms sticking up from the edge of my lawn.

That was until a few weeks ago where, as a result no doubt of an unseasonably warm and sunny spring…one twinkled back into life. Excited beyond measure, I bought some fresh rechargeable batteries, gave the solar panels a wipe and awaited the result…which was a half dozen lanterns shining brightly.

That one lantern survived the winter is a very cheering thought, that all the rest did also makes me happier than anyone as raddled by wine and cheese as I has a right to be, but that I now have my lanterns back for the cost of a packet of batteries has me grinning every dusk as they wink on. It may be one step away from floodlighting the place like a goods marshalling yard but if it were up to me I’d have a dozen more of the things. As it is, I have restricted myself to the solar powered fairy lights that wind around my shed and which, in turn, my vine has wound around, so that come the evening it takes on the appearance of a plant glowing in the dark. Who needs GM?

I can’t stand the rain…

Okay, it’s time to break out the snorkel and check the new-born for webbed fingers. I know it’s Wimbledon-time but this is taking the piss. It’s raining!

No, I mean it’s like St Swithen and Noah looking out and saying ‘better take an umbrella’. It’s wet. But the wet is coming in ten minute packages. And it’s a week’s wet! It’s so wet I was draining my rain-barrel into the drain. It’s so wet I was battling ants who were driven by the water into my house (so far the winner appears to be me and my mastic gun sealing every micro-crack at the back of the house, but they are sneaky bastards).

It’s so wet that I almost, almost, regret putting lawn feed on my lawn a couple of weeks ago, when it started raining. One word: meadow.

Bald patches, moss, clover, bare patches, those patches where I hammered the gazebo into last summer…all gone. Fertiliser and a LOT of water = knee high grass.

Plenty of nose

In a recent presentation (powerpoint, natch) to the French President, the impact of global warming was illustrated, not with images of stricken Banglideshi children flooded out of their Nike factories, but by the movement of the optimum weather for growing champagne grapes away from France and over to SE England.

Sacre Blu! Say the French.

Formidable, say I. I was especially tickled because I learned of this the week after planning a vine in my very own back garden.

Jeremy is now firmly embedded and, I hope, thriving. Indeed my next mission is to source some poles and stuff for him to climb along.

In the meantime, I am occupying myself by daydreaming about bottling my first run of Château Macnabbs and doodling logos for my ‘vineyard’. So far the leading designs are a stylised bunch of grapes or a Ford Transit bearing the words ‘Van Ordinaire’.

Something tells me that the combination of clay soil, together with contamination from cat pee and creosote from the nearby shed, will ensure my vintage will be rather ‘vin de table’ but, as long as none is actually spilled on the varnish of the table in question, I trust we’ll be okay.

Don’t know if I’ll actually get a crop this year but this has not stopped me from starting to look at wine making kits and preparing to say at parties that ‘I’m into wine production, in a small way’. Bloody small in fact. Indeed, I’ve promise a few friends a bottle of the Château Macnabbs ’08 and even then I think I’m pushing my luck although, thinking about it, maybe the answer is to go with those miniature bottles you get on aeroplanes.

HUmmmn, wonder if I can get a hop plant from somewhere? If I put my mind to it, I might become self-sufficient in booze!