bgarrulus

In Horto Veritas

For the first 20 years of my city existence I lived in flats. The last one was a ‘double upper’ on the 6th and 7th floors of a towering New Town tenement. From its windows the islands in the Firth of Forth were visible. At night, you could see the lighthouses blink if you looked up from your plate at dinner. None of those flats had access to a private outdoor space. I hadn’t really noticed this deficit until, expecting our first child, we moved to a house with a garden. Suddenly there was terroir to manage. A terraced town house is, by its nature, a tall thin thing and the back garden was similarly narrow: the width of the house and about 40 yards long. The previous owners were artists and keen gardeners who had divided the elongated space into ‘rooms’ and crammed it with interesting plants. The trees and shrubs had grown so tall the various rooms afforded almost complete privacy. From the most distant section you couldn’t even see the back of the house. We flitted in October just as everything was dying back but I was thrilled to open the back door, day or night, and enter a private realm. What lay dormant beneath the ground was a mystery yet to unfold.

I was brought up in the Ayrshire countryside and worked on the family farm during school and university holidays. We had a large garden lying a sobering 600 feet above sea-level, but the weather in the west is mild. Mostly. There were two lawns, many mature trees, a pond, formal bedding, fruit bushes, vegetables, cold frames, a potting shed and three greenhouses. One of my father’s enterprises was a hotel in town and the garden looked nice enough to use as a backdrop for wedding photos before the couples attended their reception at the Royal Hotel.

Ayrshire farms were once notable for their ash and willow trees but there have been casualties even before the current horror of ash die-back. We had a huge ash towering over the gates to the drive and another one near the top of the garden close to the stack yard. It became senile and dangerous and so was reduced to a massive trunk about 15 feet high. Our engineer, whose garage was opposite the felled tree, remarked that there was now ‘a hole in the sky’. We topped the amputated bole with an old door which we nailed down to create an observation platform. Camouflaging water-sprouts grew up around it and we improvised a rope ladder with pieces of kindling and baler twine. An overgrown shrubbery around the base of the tree was our cowboy ‘hideout’.

My father loved gardening but most of his time was taken up by his business interests and public work, so he employed a full-time gardener. Dad retained an interest in his tomatoes, dahlias and chrysanthemums which he raised in the greenhouses. An elder of the Kirk, he supplied the church with a flower arrangement every Sunday and corn sheaves at harvest thanksgiving.

Apart from annual hay-making in summer, I laboured in the dairy on the bottling and cartoning machines, drove a milk tanker, delivered milk and did a bit of garden maintenance on the side. We had a green ATCO 14-inch cylinder lawnmower. It had a two-stroke petrol engine with an accelerator lever on the right side of the handlebars and a clutch on the left. You revved it up, engaged the clutch, and the mower lurched off, leaving the classic stripes in its wake. The longer grass stalks survived the ATCO and after mowing I crawled about obsessionally, cheek to the ground, cutting them off with shears. Aesthetic and strategic control remained with my father and the gardener. Every year, in early summer, the borders around the lawns were planted out with bright red and yellow begonias and grey echeverias with orange flowers. These tender souls spent the winter sheltering on trays in the potting shed. The larger flowerbeds near the house were planted with antirrhinums (snapdragons).

My father had a vision for the garden as a place of casual but controlled elegance. For a while he employed one of our retired tractor men as gardener. I was very fond of Willie who could be hilariously funny. He loved gardens, but mainly as a means to grow prize vegetables. We held an annual staff horticultural show in the lorry garage which we children were allowed to enter using random stuff from the garden. None of it had a chance of winning against dedicated competitors like Willie. He had a strongly developed sense of order. He would chop off any herbaceous plants that strayed onto the the paths or lop low-hanging cherry branches if he saw that they were clipping the car aerials on the way up the drive. As my father surveyed the latest scene of devastation, Willie would declare, ‘That’s it a’ square’t up again, Mr John.’*

The fruit and vegetable parts of the garden supplied the house in the traditional fashion. All summer we pillaged the strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries and peas. Appropriately the strawberries were bedded on straw and netted against avian depredations. We crawled about under the nets to pick the strawberries – which was delightful as long as you didn’t kneel on a slug. My mother said we should whistle while we worked to stop us eating the berries. We always had fresh salad and new potatoes with our summer meals. Mum made pies from the gooseberries, rhubarb and blackcurrants; the crusts supported by a variety of ceramic flues in the shape of blackbirds or elephants.

It is never a good idea to start digging up a garden before you know what’s there. Each fresh season in our new home brought unexpected delights as things emerged from the ground or drab shrubs unexpectedly burst into bloom. I was never all that keen on herbaceous borders, preferring the simplicity of shrubs and grass. Inevitably some plants will hold less appeal than others. I don’t much like hydrangeas or forsythia. A garden also needs refereeing on a regular basis to stop the bullies taking over. Some decisions were taken for us as elderly or weak trees came down in storms or subjects succumbed to disease. A garden is not like furniture. Everything in it either grows or dies. Only the Japanese seem able to maintain a permanent structure. The loss of a tree or plant should always be regarded as an opportunity to introduce something new – or simply let in more light for the survivors. In the end, I began removing things to avoid presiding over a Scottish version of The Lost Gardens of Heligan.

A garden offers respite from the pressing issues of life, simplifying matters to a choice of plants, physical toil and the changing seasons. I particularly liked strenuous landscaping projects both for the beneficial exercise involved and the eventual satisfaction. These tasks afford the same release as playing sport, freeing you for a while from life’s bewildering options by imposing a simpler set of rules. Like Peter Sellers’ character Chance the gardener in Being There, I imagined myself ruling a mini empire and making Delphic pronouncements to friends about herbaceous perennials or formative pruning. My wife’s mother didn’t share my new enthusiasm. I once complemented her on her own neat garden to which she smiled wearily and said, “I just see a lot of work.”

I suppose it is a lot of work, additional unavoidable chores for the weary homeowner, but a day spent working in the garden is a pleasure to me. Regular injuries are however inevitable. I don’t venture outside thinking, ‘Today I will probably get hurt,’ but I am not put off by the prospect. The tariff of danger varies with the gravity of the task, from tree-felling to a spot of light dead-heading. I have occasionally worked on trees on the boundary of the garden with rusty spiked railings lurking below. I have imagined the casualty admission note, ‘This 65 year old retired radiologist was attempting to…’

Plants teach you a kind of delayed gratification akin to agricultural sowing and harvesting. Like very slow fireworks, you stick them in the ground and retire for 12 months – or 24 months – or, in the case of my Tasmanian Leatherwood, 10 years. Leatherwoods are famous for the delicate flowers that appear in late summer and high-value honey.

I bought mine as a small sapling in the shop at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens after admiring a splendid columnar specimen in full flower next to Inverleith House. As the years went by, my purchase grew painfully slowly and remained bereft of blooms. After a decade of disappointment, I stood before the the scrawny specimen, my hand hovering over the bow saw, when I noticed a single perfect flower. The next year there were more and now it is covered in blossom and attendant bees every summer.

One of the trees I took out with a very heavy heart was a russet apple. Although russet apples are hard and dry (and do the russet thing of going brown the instant they are cut open) they are sweet and stew well. We had fun weaning both our children on home-grown apple purée. But this russet was right in front of the proposed site of a new summer house. After seeing a lovely American crab apple, Malus dartmouth, in the Botanics, I ordered one online to compensate for the sacrificed tree. It arrived at my work from a nursery in Yorkshire, bare-rooted, 7 feet long and furled in black plastic. I lowered the roof of my car, stuck the long unwieldy parcel between the passenger seat and the transmission tunnel and with the top end protruding backwards, set off for home. A colleague saw me en route and asked me where I was planning to drop anchor. I planted the tree in the lawn and staked it low down for two years. It took well and it is a mass of blossom in the spring. If not picked for cooking, red and orange apples the size of table tennis balls hang on into the winter months like Christmas decorations.

In the end gardens are transient things that depend on an individual or group having the energy and determination to create something out of the incessant flow of nature. Gardens reward the gardener and give pleasure to others but neglect rapidly leads to decline and an overgrown garden is a poignant sight. To some, gardening will always be a dreary chore. Whenever I get overenthusiastic about its charms someone will say, ‘Well if you like it that much, you can come and do my garden.’ To which I always reply, ‘What would be the point of that?’

*My father was initially in partnership with his two brothers and since they shared a surname it was necessary to differentiate between them by calling them Mr John, Mr Willie and Mr James.

Harvest and the Big Mill

Now westlin winds and slaught'ring guns
Bring Autumn's pleasant weather;
The moorcock springs on whirring wings,
Amang the blooming heather:
Now waving grain, wide o'er the plain,
Delights the weary farmer;
And the moon shines bright, as I rove at night,
To muse upon my charmer.

Song Composed in August
Robert Burns

The end of summer is marked by lengthening shadows, the inward creep of sunrise and sunset, and the first hint of a chill in the air. Leaves that once showed a range of pristine greens are dull, holed and tattered. The harbingers of autumn are already rustling in the gutters. Apples, plums and elderberries bend the boughs and vagrant wasps become stupid and aggressive as their colonies decline. The garden display recedes to a limited palette of crocosmia, Japanese windflowers and Michaelmas daisies. An art teacher friend told me he didn’t like asters because they heralded the beginning of autumn term and the close of his seven-week sojourn as a part-time artist and full-time lotus-eater.

Pavement Michaelmas daisies or asters in decline, early September

In the country, the seasons had more practical implications. Once the hay was secured in July, attention turned to the harvest. In wet upland East Ayrshire wheat was never an option and barley varieties that could be relied upon to ripen and stay upright in the rain were a later development. As a boy, the farm depended solely on a third cereal, oats, as a grain crop. Oats are known as ‘corn’ in Scotland. The corn was used for cattle feed over the winter. Before the advent of silos, corn was stored in open bunkers in outhouses – an open invitation to vermin. With some corn in a noisy pail, and a head collar and rope hidden behind my back, I used it as bait to capture my pony.

As Dr Johnson pointed out, oats are fed to horses in England but in Scotland they sustain the people. Oatmeal was our rice. The tall stiff stems of oats resist beating down by the weather, slowly yellowing and displaying their grain in ears, covered by papery chaff. The traditional method of harvesting oats does not involve a combine harvester cutting and threshing the crop in a single process. My only experience of a combine as a boy was on my uncle’s farm south of Dalkeith in Midlothian. I watched as the great machine made its dusty progress across his dry wheat fields, eating up the cereal. The grain was spewed out into an escorting trailer and the straw deposited in long rows onto the field. To a farmer, a cleared stubble field is indeed a delight.

On the west coast farm of my youth, the process of harvesting oats was more complicated and protracted. Once ready, the field was opened manually using scythes, the cut corn was bundled into small sheaves by tying a few stalks around it. Then the reaper-binder, towed by a tractor, moved in. In addition to the tractor driver a second man perched on a seat on the binder itself. The binder featured a wheel similar to one of those paddles on a Mississippi riverboat. It gathered the corn onto the blades where, shorn, it dropped onto canvas belts. These carried the stalks upwards where they where automatically tied into bundles with ‘binder twine’. Tines chucked the completed sheaf out sideways onto the field as the machine progressed. In that state the corn was not yet ready for storage and required further drying in the field. This was done by creating stooks of several sheaves propped against each other. Manual labour was required to stook the sheaves, a process that exposed our vulnerable arms to thistles and insects. My father, an elder, supplied a couple of nice yellow sheaves to the church as decoration for harvest thanksgiving.

Once sufficiently matured by wind and sun, the sheaves were forked off the field onto a trailer and taken to the stack yard, a small field that was part of the farm steading. There they were built into large round Monet-esque stacks. The stacks were set on a base of boulders to keep the straw off the ground. Sheaves were stacked radially with the wider bases to the outside. The stacks could be as high as the roof of a farm building with a thatched conical top. A canvas tarpaulin hap was placed over the stack and weighed down by roped-on bricks to protect it from the weather. Like the loose corn in the outhouses, the crowded stacks supported large numbers of birds and rodents attracted to the free food. It is the origin of the seed-eating chaffinch’s name. Stacks looked great crowded together. I loved their bulk and their sweet smell.

Once the stack yard was filled, there remained the business of threshing; of separating the oats from the chaff and straw stalks. Safely stored in stacks, threshing could await the arrival of the ‘big mill’. The mill men would tour the neighbouring farms with their threshing machine, dealing with everyone’s stacks in turn. My mother was expected to feed the visitors, who arrived at the usual, extremely early, agricultural hour. I recall waking up in bed to the smell of bacon, tobacco, engine oil and sweat emanating from the kitchen downstairs.

The mill was powered by a long belt drive from a stationary tractor. The grain dropped into hessian sacks and the straw was fed into an adjacent baler. As the stack went down, its inhabitants were revealed. Trouser legs were tied with binder twine, the base of the stack was surrounded by unrolled chicken wire, sticks were taken up and the dogs were sent in.

The men would entertain us with stories of rats running up trouser legs. One of them claimed to have trapped a rat against his back by flexing forwards to tighten his shirt on top of it. His colleague then dealt with his passenger using a broken brush handle. He then pulled his shirt out and the dead rat dropped to the ground. After the mill had been, the stack yard reverted to a wildflower meadow and playground with its resident ducks, bantams and chickens. One of our henhouses was in the stack yard.

Later we did manage to grow and harvest barley which was stored in a silo tower. The silo made a good viewing platform but the effect on farm life was striking. The bounty of stored or spilled corn was no longer available and the population of finches, rodents – and the predators who depended on them – crashed.

Numerous stacks are a reflection of a farm’s productivity and prosperity. My grandfather who began life as a tenant farmer was famously stern, business-like and astute. As a young man, just after the First World War, and after he had almost died of Spanish flu, one of his friends asked a favour. He needed to meet his young lady’s parents to ask for their daughter’s hand. The friend was nervous about the outcome of this encounter and asked my grandfather to accompany him. The visit to the parental farm was set for a Sunday after church. The two lads arrived in good time to find the family had not yet returned from worship. No one was at home. Taking his responsibilities seriously, my grandfather grabbed his friend’s arm urgently and said, ‘Quick, let’s go round the back and count the stacks!’

Not vernal show'rs to budding flow'rs, 
Not Autumn to the farmer, 
So dear can be as thou to me, 
My fair, my lovely charmer!

Ashes to Ashes

Ash die-back seems to get little attention in the news media. This disease is going to kill 80% of Britain’s ash trees, cost billions, and threaten native species that are dependent on the tree.

Ashes in an advanced state of decline on the Mortonhall Estate, Edinburgh

It is caused by a fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, which originated in Asia. It has little effect on Chinese ash species but the European ash evolved without exposure to it and the effects have been devastating over the last 30 years. The disease first emerged in the south east of England. While it may have arrived naturally, we were importing thousands of infected ash saplings from Europe up until 2012.

Badly affected young tree in the foreground with a healthy-looking older specimen in the background on the right.

The fungus invades the nutrient channels in the wood and the tree’s response to this results in the channels becoming blocked. The branches distal to the blockage die. Dormant buds proximal to the affected branch sprout, giving the typical appearance of bare branches with new growth close to the trunk. Dark diamond-shaped patches develop on the dead branches. Young trees are affected most severely. Older trees show some early resistance but eventually die. Once you know the signs, it is obvious the disease is everywhere. Newly-established trees planted at great expense for their amenity value are succumbing.

A small number of our native ashes appear to be resistant but recovery by the spread of these varieties will take at least 50 years. The cost in terms of loss of the beneficial effects of the trees and clearing away the dead ones has been estimated at £15 billion by the Woodland Trust.

https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/tree-pests-and-diseases/key-tree-pests-and-diseases/ash-dieback/

Faceneck

Within my school year group, my 17th birthday in March 1971 was rather late compared to my peers. Many others had passed their driving tests by the time I was eligible. This was an almost unbearable delay to me, desperate as I was to escape from the farm and hit the roads. I had been entertaining other plans involving motorcycles and Heinkel bubble cars – both of which one could drive aged 16. Thankfully my parents resisted – otherwise I probably wouldn’t be around to write about it. In the 1970s road deaths among young people, and young farmers in particular, were common. A farming family that sat opposite us in church consisted of two sons and a daughter. First one son, then the other were killed in car accidents and the father wore a black armband to church from that time onwards. I used to watch him dozing through the sermon beside the two women and wonder how he had borne the loss. My older cousin, also a farmer, liked fast cars and had come within a whisker of disaster on a few occasions.

Obviously such considerations of mortality meant nothing to me as I was convinced, like all young men, of my skill and invulnerability. I was sure I would survive. My father started out teaching me but having driven cars on single track roads and fields since age 11 I was prone to drifting into the middle of the road which unnerved him and an instructor was engaged. He said I was clearly competent but years of unsupervised driving had left me with a lot of bad habits to unlearn before the test. One habit I kept quiet about was secretly driving on public roads long before it was even legal for me to hold a provisional licence.

The day of the test came and I sat it in the family Hillman Hunter Estate. During the test we passed our business offices in Ayr road. My father came out just at that moment and waved to me. I remembered that waving to people during the test was a fault and ignored him. I passed at the first attempt.

At 1500cc the rear wheel drive Hillman was lacking in power but could be put into a very satisfactory and predictable sideways slide on corners if you threw the back end out then steered into the skid. I also double de-clutched in rally style – something I actually had to do on the milk tanker I drove because it lacked a synchromesh gearbox. We started going on very long evening expeditions all over the county instead of doing our homework. We discovered pubs we thought no one would know us in and played darts and drank beer without fear of detection by parents or police. We thought.

My friend Davy had met some girls at the ‘French Summer School’ for music and language students held at West Linton. The summer after passing my test these girls turned up at a similar event in Cumnock and Davy thought we should take them to Ayr and show them the bright lights of Ayrshire. On the way there we were overtaken in humiliatingly easy fashion by a Jaguar saloon and feeling my honour impugned I set off after it as fast as the Hillman’s 1500cc could manage. Even with the accelerator flat to the floor we were struggling to keep the Jaguar in sight – then I noticed an odd noise and smoke began to rise out of the footwell. I had succeeded in blowing the engine. We walked to a phone box and summoned assistance from home. Later dissection revealed I had melted the shell bearings onto the big ends. With a fleet of milk lorries to service and maintain we had a large garage on the farm and three mechanics: the head engineer Bill Bunce, a second in command and an apprentice. Bill had three daughters and I had an absentee (for business reasons) father so we had spent a lot of time chatting in the garage and going on fishing expeditions together. The Hillman had to go to the garage and have Bill rebuild the engine.

Undaunted, we borrowed a milk lorry and used that for the next evening’s excursion. Some locals spotted two youths and two girls crammed into the cab and called the police assuming the lorry had been stolen. Fortunately the police didn’t find us. The upshot of the blown engine was that my father was without his everyday practical farm transport and he decided that I should have my own car to avoid this happening in future. I began looking through the papers for a likely candidate and found a 9 month old Mini 1275GT for sale in a garage in Kilmarnock. Dad was too busy as usual so Bill and I set off to have a look at it.

Bill was a massively built Londoner with a matching large personality who loved everything mechanical. He also loved dogs, guns and fishing. He walked into the showroom and announced to the startled salesman, “Is this where you get the bargains?” We looked at the mini. It was white, had the Clubman grille with red ‘go faster’ stripes and ‘1275GT’ running along the sides. The seats were black and the interior smelt strongly of stale cigarettes. It had belonged to a salesman and had done 15,000 miles in just 9 months. It was priced at £750 and I loved it. Bill had a look inside the engine compartment and did a couple of circuits inspecting the bodywork. He said it was very high mileage and we weren’t interested at that price. To my consternation he turned and walked away. At that the salesman dropped the price to £730 and we did a deal.

Adrian, a friend of Davy’s, had been trying to remember the name of David Coleman as in Sportsnight with Coleman (https://youtu.be/2Im_FnXiCHg) and groping for the right word, came up with ‘Sportsnight with – Faceneck’ for reasons known only to him. I suppose it was his version of thingummy. The ridiculous name stuck in Davy’s mind and we ended up calling the car Faceneck. It amused us at the time.

On her way to Norway with her Cibié spots

By today’s standards the car was not fast, taking about 12 seconds to reach 60 mph and it struggled to get over 90 mph tops. However the sensation of your backside barely clearing the road and a driving position that forced your knees up round your ears was fun. The gearbox was awful, like stirring a box of rubber balls with a stick – and the engine would overheat in summer. You could get round this to an extent by turning the heating up full blast and opening the windows. My father reluctantly accepted this fait accompli and phoned up his insurers to discover that fully comprehensive cover for me was going to cost £250, about a third of the price of the car. His detachment from the whole process was such that it was only when he borrowed the mini to take our cleaning lady home that he discovered its performance. “You be very, very careful in that car,” he warned me afterwards.

Faceneck featured a ‘racing handbrake’. Basically there are no ratchets until the brake was fully on making it a pull-on pull-off brake. A binary bake. This allowed you to do handbrake turns. You threw the wheel right or left and pulled on the handbrake sending the car into a huge spin, doing a 180º to face in the opposite direction. You then pressed the button on the handbrake which instantly fully released it. I garaged the mini in one of the free bays in the hayshed behind the house. The shed is visible in the front view photograph filled with hay bales. One night in the early hours after the usual late night chat with pals I decided to practice handbrake turns on the tarmac surface in front of the shed. It was all going brilliantly until on the fourth or fifth attempt my headlights picked up my pyjama-clad father furiously signalling me to stop. It was apparently difficult to sleep through handbrake turns.

At age 17 such a vehicle was intoxicating. I drove everywhere as fast as possible at the limits of adhesion and timed myself over various regular routes. My father now had his estate car back but very soon the mini was in the garage. I started in a low-key way, skidding on ice and ending up in a ditch on my way home from rehearsals for the school play. My cast-member passenger was very understanding. Things progressed from that point onwards. I went through fences, over fences and finally rolled the car over completely having gone up and embankment on a tight bend. That repair involved Bill ordering an entire new body shell from British Leyland and reglazing the windows. My mother once borrowed the car to go shopping and while parked the Dowager Marchioness of Bute reversed into it with her Rolls Royce. As a result, when I sold Faceneck, the only original parts left were the seats, the engine, the wheels and one of the doors.

Amazingly, I was allowed to bring the car to school and park it with the teachers’ cars. As I had done throughout my school days I always went home for lunch. On returning for the afternoon session I did get into trouble for demonstrating to my fellow pupils how I could generate wheel spin changing from first to second gear as I entered the playground.

Eventually even my father’s patience and detachment ran out and I was told the car had to go. His exact words were, “You’ve had your beard, you’ve had your long hair and you’ve had your sports car. It’s time to settle down.” I was 20. At that time I was sharing a flat in Watson Crescent with Hans Kubon a Norwegian dental student. The cost of living was so high and the exchange rate so extremely weighted in favour of the Krone that Norwegians could buy cars and even flats with their grants. Hans wanted to buy Faceneck. Accordingly, we arranged to travel together on the ferry from Newcastle to Bergen. After a pleasant holiday staying with Hans and his parents in Kråkenes, I left the car behind.

In 1989 I was completing my last Senior Registrar attachment at the Western General before taking up my consultant post. We had to go to the Northern General on a Friday afternoon to do the plain film reporting. As I was leaving one evening I noticed a white Mini Clubman approaching the exit. I checked the number plate: it was SCS 730J. The car was waiting in a queue to join the traffic on Ferry Road. I rushed over and tapped on the passenger window. The woman driver reached over and wound it down. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “But where did you get this car?” “I bought it off a Norwegian dental student when he went back home,” said the lady, who turned out to be a nurse in the hospital. “This was my first car!” I exclaimed, overcome with excitement, “I sold it to that dental student.” The lady beamed. “I’ve had it ten years. My husband hates it but I love it!” At that point the queue moved forward and she had to say a hasty goodbye. I watched Faceneck disappear down Ferry road.

Making Hay

Haytime at Crofthead in the mid-Sixties. Big cousin and younger brothers on top, me at the wheel.

Every summer we made close to 100 acres of hay. My father disapproved of silage which he thought tainted the milk. In Ayrshire, at around 600 feet above sea level, we made our hay in July. The tractormen did the more skilled tasks of mowing and baling, but working the cut hay and gathering it in was anyone’s job. Bales of hay are heavier than straw, oblong in shape, and secured by ‘binder twine’ which burned your fingers if you let them slide along the cord. Usually it was better to dig your fingers into the bale to lift it. Until your hands toughened up, dried thistles or grass stems under your fingernails were an unpleasant hazard.

The baler would chug along, dropping bales at intervals across the field as it consumed the lines of hay. As children we were too weak to lift bales but we got a few pennies for rolling them together into heaps. This made it easier for the men to fork them onto trailers or the old milk lorries that were drafted in for the season. Later a bale ‘sledge’ was acquired which was towed behind the baler. It consisted of a wooden platform with stout steel prongs mounted behind it that supported the bales until the miniature stack was complete. The task of arranging the bales into a triangular pile resting on these forks at the back of the sledge was brutally physical and was conducted in a choking cloud of dust and flying fragments of dry grass. The ram on the baler rocked the whole rig back and forth making it difficult to keep your balance. Once a pile of 10 bales was constructed, a lever at the side released it onto the field. This had to be done sharply to avoid the pile tipping over. The process then began again.

I started driving tractors at 9 and cars and lorries at 11. Aged 9 I was insufficiently heavy to depress the clutch on a tractor using gravity alone. I had to brace myself against the steering wheel and push down with all my strength. On the way back up, with the spring resisting, controlled engagement of first gear was tricky. The accelerator on a tractor was a lever mounted on the steering column and it stayed wherever you put it, fixing the revs. My favourite tractor was our ancient ‘wee grey Fergie’ (Ferguson TEA 20) which had 4 forward gears and was quite fast. You started it by depressing a brass button with the inner side of your right lower leg and pushing the gear lever into ‘S’. It also had a ‘Ki-Gass’ button which I never understood. I loved the smell of fresh hay and diesel.

At first I simply drove the lorries or tractors between the piles of bales in the fields, stopping at each one so that the two-man team could fork them up to whoever was building the load. The older lorries’ gearboxes lacked synchromesh so I learned early how to double declutch to changing down smoothly. This was useful later when driving cars at rally speeds around country roads. As I got older and stronger I graduated from driving to load-building, learning to lock the bales together like laying bricks.

Bales varied in length and some of the longer ones needed slammed into any gap that was slightly too small. Kneeling down, this took considerable strength and timing, especially when the team with the pitchforks were trying to bury you in more bales. I never made it to pitchforker status. The relentless parade of tractors and lorries shuttling from field to hay sheds meant that the men with the pitchforks were in constant action. In addition to strength and stamina, timing was needed to get the bales onto the top as the load rose higher.

Whoever had built the load would also drive it back to the farm for unloading and storage in the hay sheds. There was an element of taking responsibility for your construction skills. On the lorries we simply relied on gravity to hold the bales in place but the biggest tractor-drawn trailer loads overhung the sides and were so tall they often had to be roped to cope with the big sways caused by negotiating ruts at the field gates. This made riding on top of such loads quite exciting. Even if the load held – and sometimes it didn’t – the branches of nearby trees would threaten to brush you off your perch.

On really hot days little whirlwinds would pick up loose hay and deposit wisps of it onto the tops of nearby trees. Rain usually meant work was suspended. As a small child I remember sitting on top of the last load of the day along with the men in the pitchfork team as it left the field. As it started to rain, one of the men lifted a bale out to create a space for me. I jumped in and they placed the bale across the hole for shelter. It was very pleasant to ‘coorie-in‘* as my refuge swayed back and forth.

Before baling, the hay needed to be sufficiently dry to stop the shed turning into a massive compost heap. The weather was critical to this. While it takes only three consecutive dry days to cut silage (which is preserved by fermentation) at least two weeks of dry weather are needed to get any significant acreage of hay. This rarely happened. In the worst years prolonged rain could turn hay that was almost ready into a blackened mess fit only for burning. My father sometimes called Prestwick Airport to get an indication of what was coming towards us over the Atlantic. If it was rain, you might bale hay that wasn’t quite ready rather than lose it altogether. The longer the mature hay lay in the field, the less its nutritional value.

The tractor men ‘opened’ the fields of long grass by cutting the ‘end-rigs‘ next to the hedge first, then cutting the rest of the field into long rows. After the top layer of grass had begun to dry the rows needed turned over. The older turning machines used the movement of their wheels over the ground as a source of power. Later I used a more modern ‘Acrobat’ rake with 4 large yellow wheels of sprung tines which rotated by being dragged over the ground. Set separately these would pick up two rows of drying grass and flip them over individually. By rearranging the 4 wheels into a single line the Acrobat could be converted into a rake for clearing any residual hay left after all the bales had been removed. Whether turning or raking, it took a long time to do a whole field. A cleared field was described as ‘redd‘. Clearing up at the end of a day was getting ‘redd-up‘ as in; ‘We’ll need tae get redd-up, it’s lowsing time‘. Lowsing or loosing probably refers to the unyoking of horses or oxen at the end of a day’s work.

One summer while turning a field, I noticed a hint of putrefaction as I reached the end rigs next to the hedge. Returning to the same place on the following set of rows the smell got stronger. The next time it was detectable far from the hedge and became quite overpowering. I stopped to investigate. Over the hedge, trapped in a ditch by thorns, was a black-faced ewe, still alive, but with her hindquarters seething with maggots. It’s a distressing image I cannot seem to erase from my mind. A couple of seasons later I had a parallel experience – but this time the smell was sweet. As I approached the source it was obvious that it emanated from a huge mound of wild honeysuckle, its yellow flowers covering the hedge.

Once turned and dried on the reverse side, the maturing hay needed ‘tedding’ – using a tedder of course. These machines were power-driven from the PTO (Power Take-Off) on the tractor and their job was to throw two rows of drying hay into one large row, fluffing it up in the process. This allowed the sun and wind to further dry the hay ready for baling. The machine I favoured had two horizontal rotating wheels with large tines attached. We called this process ‘wuffling’ as one make of tedder was actually called a ‘Wuffler’. Once, when enthusiastically experimenting with how fast I could turn round on the end rigs, I miscalculated and wuffled the hedge. Bits of hawthorn flew in all directions and I bent some of the armatures. Our engineer had to straighten them with a welding torch and a hammer.

Later on as a teenager I would spend the summer mornings working in the dairy, loading milk bottles into crates as they came off the bottling plant, or get up at 4am to deliver milk for one of the roundsmen. After this very early start the dairy was finished by the afternoon and it was time to go to the hay fields once any morning damp had dispersed. My mother would bring refreshments out to us. It was lovely to take a break and sit on a bale under the shade of a tree eating sandwiches and taking tea from a flask. The men got a beer. It was good for morale. If it remained dry with no early dew, work would continue far into the evening, making escape to the pub before closing time increasingly difficult.

During the day, priorities might change and my father, who was supervising it all, would sometimes stop me working in one field in order to go to another or help out elsewhere. The constant drone of the tractor engine and the noisy machinery were like white noise. You stopped noticing it after a while. Paradoxically the racket and monotony of traversing a field over and over again allowed your mind to wander.

My father had a powerful whistle which he could deliver without using his fingers – something I never mastered. This was how he got my attention if I was working on a noisy tractor. Hearing his whistle, I would look up and see him in tweed cap, waistcoat and rolled-up sleeves, waving at me from the gate. He died when I was in my third year of medical school and while I was in a bit of academic trouble. The year after that, I was working a field when I thought I heard a whistle. Automatically, I looked down the rows to the end of the field, which was – of course – deserted. It was like a waking version of those dreams where you discover someone you loved and lost is still alive. My dreams about my late father finally stopped a few years ago and I no longer wake up just as I am demanding to know why he has kept his survival a secret from us for so long.

Building the hay into the corrugated iron sheds was tough. Each shed was divided up, by the girders supporting the roof, into several sections or ‘dasses‘ (another Scots word). These sections were stacked to the roof in turn. Open wooden trunking was placed on the floor of the dass to allow it to be ‘blown’ later. As the dass rose, the space under the curved metal roof got smaller – and hotter. Reversing into the shed was tricky and the men would amuse themselves by shouting false instructions at us:

‘Up the hill!’

‘Naw, doon the hill!’

‘Back, back, back, come on! Oh Christ you’ve hit it!’

The last dass in a shed was completed using an elevator to take the bales up through a small opening high in the gable end. In summer the roof was hot to the touch and the atmosphere inside suffocating. It was easy to overwhelm the unseen team in the shed by loading the bales too quickly onto the elevator. More shouting was required.

Inevitably, no matter how dry the hay was, it tended to heat in the shed; the same process that takes place in a compost heap. In an attempt to stop this happening a huge power-driven, heated, fan was mounted on a tractor to blow air into the trunking at the bottom of the dass. Steam would emerge from the openings in the gables in a satisfying way. The noise of the tractor engine droning on into the evening is associated in my mind with late summer, as too the glorious peace that ensued when the engine was cut, leaving just the sound of swallows twittering on the telephone wires.

Throughout the rest of the year the hay sheds were our playgrounds. We would build houses out of the bales or jump off the top of one dass onto loose straw on the lower one next to it. There is no recreational value to be had from a silage pit.

*snuggle in.

My mother Edith with a hay cart at Bearcrofts, near Grangemouth, before the War.

Not-So-Common Swifts

Common swift casualty, Tourettes-sur-Loup, Provence July 2014. The pale edging on the wings indicates a juvenile.

If any bird typifies Edinburgh in summer it is – or at least was – the swift. There are no house martins or swallows in the centre of the city; swifts are the only insect hunters we see overhead. The beginning of summer is marked by their arrival in May. We enjoy them for just three short months before they head off, juveniles first, in mid August. This spring, of 2021, was exceptionally cold and their appearance was delayed beyond the 15th of May, the date when I expect to look up and see one overhead. Their wings are long and stiff with a short ‘arm’ and long ‘hand’. They generate propulsion on the downstroke and the upstroke. Head-on, the wing action has a striking ‘whirling’ appearance as if the wings were rotating. Famously, they eat, sleep and mate in the air.

Swifts have very short legs and tiny feet. Indeed, they were once thought to have no feet at all – hence their scientific name Apus (a-pus, no feet). Apus apus, the common swift, is one of those select species that was so good, they named it twice. Convergent evolution has resulted in superficial similarities between swifts, swallows and martins but swifts are more closely related to hummingbirds. They also look a bit like smaller versions of the nightjars that precede them on the taxonomic list. The huge alpine swift with its white belly and wingspan of close to 2 feet is something else. I have seen and filmed one in Scotland, an experience I will never forget.

Swifts live up to their name. They are the fastest of birds in level flight, reaching 70mph. Peregrines can achieve greater speeds but only in a power dive. Swifts winter in Africa and are masters at using the winds associated with weather fronts to aid their movement. They won’t hunt in rain while they are in Europe and will fly hundreds of miles around bad weather to find food. They pack the insects into pellets in their throats to transport back to the nest. Swifts nesting in the west of Scotland have been tracked flying to Loch Neagh in Northern Ireland to feed. If the weather is bad and no food is available, the young birds in the nest will go into a state of torpor for up to 48 hours. Hummingbirds can perform the same trick.

When I moved to an upper flat in the New Town in 1979 I became much more aware of these birds. The top floor rooms had coom* ceilings with large single-pane skylights set into the pitched roof. I could watch swifts traversing that patch of sky from my bed – or my bath. Later in the season, ‘screaming parties’ of speeding swifts would hurtle through the airspace above the gardens at the rear of the tenement. I watched them from the common stair windows.

Gangs of screamers would pass low overhead at a beer garden we favoured in Morningside. I found the strange noise atmospheric and never unpleasant. Even then, 40 years ago, the numbers were no match for the fathoms of swifts and hirundines you see over urban areas in France and Italy but now they are even less common. This year I have only witnessed one small party over a friend’s garden, but they were a welcome sight. The most reliable place to see them locally seems to be over the tenements of Marchmont where presumably there are suitable sites for nests. Once airborne, juvenile swifts can stay aloft continuously for 10 months or more without ever touching down.

Historically, swifts nested on cliffs, in caves and in holes in trees. A small colony in the Cairngorms still does this. Deforestation meant a move to the towns where they used spaces under slates and eaves to nest. Swifts mate for life and re-use the same nest site. The nest is made from feathers and other detritus collected on the wing. Sometimes the nest material is eaten by clothes and carpet moths during the 40 weeks it is abandonned by the birds. Even more unpleasant are the huge blood-sucking ticks that have evolved to parasitise the birds. The equivalent size in a human being would be a shore crab crawling about in our underwear.

The reason the numbers in Edinburgh are so seriously diminished is uncertain. The lack of insects is a possibility, as witnessed by the current dearth of fly squat on the front of our cars. Increased affluence has perhaps resulted in Edinburgh repairing the more crumbly bits of its ancient built environment, reducing possible nest sites.

My office at the Western General Hospital and the coffee room next door looked onto a large enclosed area surrounded by the original 1865 Victorian sandstone hospital building, including a clock tower. The clock was correct twice a day. As usual in the NHS, the enclosure had been crammed with later, cheap, flat-roofed buildings including the dining room and kitchens. A pair of swifts nested in a hole in the wall below the clock tower opposite our offices. Probably the site of some old pipework, the hole was small and situated about 10 feet above the flat roofs. The birds would fly straight into this tiny aperture at top speed and I enjoyed watching them come and go.

Swifts prefer to launch themselves by dropping from a perch using gravity to increase airspeed. The lore is that swifts, with their tiny legs, cannot take off from a flat surface. Once, while eating lunch, I saw a swift exit the hole then plunge downwards crashing onto the flat roof. I was already preparing a rescue mission in my mind. ‘Watch!’ I said confidently to my colleagues, ‘It won’t be able to take off’. As I said this, the fallen bird whirred its wings and rose into the air with little apparent effort. Most texts now specifically say that they can take off from the ground. One winter morning I came to work and glanced out of the window to see that the hole had been cemented up. Not all maintenance is an improvement.

Now, in early August, the michaelmas daisies, buddleia and Japanese anemones are in flower. Soon the swifts will slip away and the children will return to school. The days are already noticeably shorter and today it felt a bit chilly out of the sun.

*a sloping ceiling under a pitched roof.

The Ghastly Astley

To us medical students in Edinburgh in the late 1970s the Astley Ainslie Hospital (AAH) was known as the ‘Ghastly Astley.’ This was mostly for the satisfaction of the rhyme rather than any particular horrors it held. It was a rehabilitation hospital, one of the first of its kind, set in the majestic wooded grounds of a number of grand villas and a nine hole ‘ladies’ golf course. The oldest villa, Canaan House, dates from 1805 and I attended medical management meetings in it. There are mementoes of the Ainslie family there; paintings and agricultural trophies. Like many other properties ‘owned’ by NHS Lothian it was donated to the people of Edinburgh by a public-spirited benefactor long before the inception of the NHS. It is now being sold off and the money chucked into the black hole of NHS financing – where it will disappear without trace. Many other Edinburgh medical institutions funded by public subscription, such as Leith Hospital, have already been disposed of despite protests.

The history of the place is interesting. Lost in the mists of the sixteenth century is the chapel of St Roque. It was dedicated to a French saint who survived the plague and was fed by a hunting dog who brought him bread. He is usually depicted lifting his robe to display the bubo of the disease on his left thigh. A dog bearing a loaf is often alongside him. He is the patron saint of the sick and of dogs. His tomb and a church dedicated to him are in Venice.

King James IV of Scotland was very keen on St Roque (or Roch or Rock or even San Rocco) and his supposed powers of intercession with the plague. After assembling his doomed Flower of Scotland army on the Burgh Muir in 1513, King James prayed in St Roque’s Chapel which stood in what is now the Astley Ainslie grounds. The chapel is long gone. As it was being demolished in the late eighteenth century on the orders of its then owner, scaffolding collapsed killing several workmen. Work was delayed for fear of further punishment from God or the saint. Nothing now remains of the chapel and no one knows exactly where it was. There is a modest modern educational building near the spot. I briefly worked with Brian Pentland at the Northern General Hospital in 1980.

The area around St Roque’s Chapel was a refuge for many of Edinburgh’s plague victims and there are burial sites in the hospital grounds. Nobody is exactly sure where these are either. Also scattered around the campus are bits of ecclesiastical masonry including bosses from the roof of a church or chapel. One of them depicts Christ’s wounds with nails piercing disembodied hands and feet. Over the years these interesting architectural fragments have been pillaged – presumably for garden ornaments – and few remain. There is a theory that says the stones are from the dismantled Trinity Church which stood on the site of Waverley Station. However they could well be from St Roque’s itself. There are also a number of medieval wells in the grounds.

The fine nineteenth century villas that still make up parts of the hospital occupy one of the best locations in the city. Their huge south-facing gardens contained many rare plants and trees because several of the occupants had an interest in botany. The villa of Millbank was the home of Professor James Syme the famous surgeon. Born on Princes Street, his father was a lawyer and landowner. As a student Syme discovered a process for waterproofing textiles using rubber but didn’t bother developing it further leaving Mr Macintosh to make his fortune from it and achieve eponymous fame. If he had bothered, people would be donning their ‘Syme’ to go walking in the rain.

Syme rose to occupy chairs of surgery in London and Edinburgh. His home of Millbank was demolished and replaced by one of the AAH ‘butterfly pavilions’ but some photographs of it exist. Millbank had a huge garden with extensive glass houses growing exotic fruits; bananas, figs, grapes and pineapples. The professor enjoyed serving these to his dinner guests. In the morning Syme would inspect his ‘glass’ with his gardener before heading off to the Royal Infirmary to operate. The Infirmary was in Infirmary Street at this time.

There is an eponymous Syme foot amputation, preserving the heel, which he developed. He was a quarrelsome man, thought to be ‘correct in the matter but not in the manner of his disputes’. One of the people he quarrelled with was his former friend James Young Simpson, professor of obstetrics and the inventor of anaesthesia. Syme did not believe in anaesthesia feeling that it weakened the patient. The quarrel was only made up after Syme operated on Simpson for an abscess in his armpit that Simpson developed after he cut his hand during an operation. They were the two colossi of Edinburgh medicine, at a time when Edinburgh Medical School was a world leader. One of the arguments Syme did win, albeit posthumously, was over the siting of the last-but-one Royal Infirmary on the northern edge of the Meadows, inaugurated in 1879. The ‘Battle of the Two Sites’ centred around whether to build a new infirmary on the existing site or on the 11 acre grounds of George Watson’s Hospital off Lauriston Place. Syme died following a stroke in 1870.

Millbank

Syme’s eldest daughter Agnes shared her father’s interest in botany. She married her father’s assistant Joseph Lister, the future Lord Lister, who developed antisepsis and saved countless lives. Experiments into suitable sterilising substances took place at Millbank and Agnes assisted with these. The couple were married in the living room of the house, apparently in deference to Lister’s Quaker religious views, and a modest plaque on the side of the boarded-up Millbank Pavilion commemorates the event. Lister operated on my great grandmother.

John Astley Ainslie inherited a vast fortune on the death of his brother. An orphan, he and was taken under the wing of his uncle David Ainslie who had a house called Costerton near Fala south east of Edinburgh. It is now a roofless ruin. The two men were very close. John had already donated money to the construction of the new Royal Infirmary at the time of his death. The year after he graduated from Oxford he died in Algiers of unknown causes aged 26.

The family fortune passed to his uncle David who wished to do something to commemorate the life of his nephew. When David died in 1900 he left £800,000 for the founding of the ‘Astley Ainslie Institution’. This sum would be around £30 million in today’s values, apparently the largest bequest in Scottish history. He stipulated that the money should be invested for 15 years after his death so that its value might increase. World War One intervened and in the end the hospital was constructed in the 1920s to a very high architectural standard. The trust bought up adjacent properties to incorporate them into the Institute.

The parkland around Millbank included a nine hole ladies’ golf course and fine specimen trees. The hospital gardens were laid out by experts from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. ‘Butterfly pavilions’ were constructed so that invalids could take the air out of doors on their beds. The site eventually covered nearly 50 acres.

George Bald memorial bench: 45 years a gardener at AAH.

This brings us to the current sorry state of affairs. NHS Lothian is moving off most of the site to new premises in the grounds of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Morningside. Several of the splendid AAH pavilions have already been boarded up and local vandals have moved onto the site. The buildings have been aerosol sprayed and re-sprayed in a delinquent palimpsest of graffiti ‘art’ and windows have been broken to gain entry to the abandoned premises. Discarded bottles and cans and burnt-out fires litter the grounds. A former pigsty in the pine woods (an abandoned Christmas tree scheme apparently) has been interestingly redecorated several times but the pavilions just look grim. Tennis courts to the west of the woods have long since been taken over by self-seeded sycamores. My wife Catherine and I are very familiar with the site. We live nearby and have walked our dog there for 5 years. Catherine has painted several views of AAH.

We are told that a large part of the site has been sold for residential development which is likely to mean there will no longer be any access to the lovely grounds for responsible locals. The physician superintendent’s house has already been demolished and replaced by a row of high specification terraced town houses by Malcolm Fraser. Goodness knows what the fate of the architectural remains and the listed 1920s buildings will be. There is an Astley Ainslie community trust and a campaign to keep some sort of communal access. Ian Rankin whose son stays in the adjacent Royal Blind accommodation has become involved.

If an area with this degree of historical significance and beauty ends up as just another anonymous overpriced, over-crammed, group of apartment blocks similar to others nearby it will be a great loss to the city and to the people David Ainslie imagined his bequest would benefit.

The Lantern of St Roque by Catherine Stevenson

Jaspers

In the Midlands and north of England wasps are commonly known as jaspers. No one seems to know exactly why. Is it a phonetic corruption of ‘vespa’ or a just the similarity in colouring to the mineral jasper? Maybe it’s a reflection of the wasp’s perceived character – like a moustachioed Victorian bully called Jasper. This presumed nastiness is reflected in our usage of ‘waspish’ as an adjective for unpleasant things – like a sarcastic sense of humour or a prickly personality. In America wasps are known as yellowjackets. Wasps exhibit aposematism, a warning coloration. Having noticeable jazzy colours helps other animals avoid being stung and the wasps avoid being eaten.

The Italian for wasp is vespa. Anatomically they are sharply divided into head, thorax and abdomen with only the slimmest ‘wasp waist’ connecting the latter two segments. Close examination of their black and yellow exoskeleton makes you feel that they are actually more evolved than we are. They are perfect, tiny, armoured flying machines carrying sophisticated weaponry. When aircraft manufacturer Enrico Piaggio saw the first post-war prototype of the scooter his company would take to world-renown, he exclaimed ‘Sembra una vespa!’ – ‘It looks like a wasp!’ – naming his product instantly.

Now is the time the vespal queens over-wintering inside our houses start to emerge from their torpor spent in the folds of our curtains and pelmets. We have had fewer dormant queens in the house than usual this year; just the one in fact, found clinging to the curtains in the drawing room a couple of days ago. I trapped her using a glass tumbler and a postcard and released her from the bedroom window. She cleaned her antennae briefly before zooming off over the garden.

Having emerged, the queens seek a site to build their grey papier mâché nests. The legend is that the Chinese invented paper after observing wasps chewing wood to make their nests. The rasp of their jaws on dead wood is audible to us. Typically they use old fence posts and decaying garden sheds as substrate. Wasps nests are called bykes in the North of Britain. They build them in hollow trees or in animal burrows and sometimes in the roof spaces of our houses. As a boy I can remember my father getting one of the men on the farm to destroy a wasps’ nest by pouring petrol down the burrow and igniting it – a tricky operation.

During the winter, as logs are brought into the house, sleeping queens come with them. Roused by the heat of the room they appear without warning, cruising around the Christmas cards and tinsel. They are magnificent insects and I never have the heart to kill them. I return them to the biting cold of the log store with no great expectation of their survival after this premature end to their suspended animation. I suspect they burn up too much of their stored fat in the false hope of refuelling from spring flowers.

Wasps are social insects related to ants and are said to exhibit reasoning (New Scientist 8 May 2019). In Britain there are about 9,000 species of wasp but we are only really familiar with the common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) and the German wasp (V germanica). They are very difficult to tell apart. The german workers have three black spots on the face. Wasps are pollinators and also useful predators of insect pests such as caterpillars and aphids and they should be left in peace.

The vigorous cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) familiar from shrubberies contains toxic amounts of prussic acid – hydrogen cyanide – which is the reason the cut leaves and stems smell faintly of almonds. Crushed leaves in a jar can be used to kill insects. It is said to be too slow a method to use on butterflies and moths who damage themselves as they struggle in their death throes. An artist friend of mine, Jim Dalziel, has an interest in entomology and once spent a summer afternoon capturing wasps and putting them in a jar with shredded laurel leaves. Once they keeled over he was able to use a magnifying glass to work out which were the german ones and which the commoner vulgaris variety. When we came round later that evening for supper he was keen to show off his new skills and invited me into his studio. Retrieving a folded-up piece of drawing paper from the bin, he opened it, promising to show me the key identifying features. It was immediately apparent to both of us that the numerous wasps had only been anaesthetised and were now quite annoyed to find themselves trapped in a paper prison. We rushed to return them to the garden before they attacked the unsuspecting company.

Unlike bees, wasps can sting as often as they please using their un-barbed tail-mounted weapon. The sting contains an alkaline form of venom, unlike bee stings which are acidic. This is the supposed logic behind our mothers putting bicarbonate of soda on bee stings and vinegar on wasp stings. In my mind, the hot-poker pain of a wasp sting is forever associated with the pungent smell of the vinegar my mother used. It was never effective as far as I could tell.

Once, on holiday at a villa in Umbria, I was stung by a hornet, the splendidly-named Vespa crabro, a much larger relative of the wasp. I was relaxing on my back on a Li-Lo in the swimming pool, contemplating the evening sky after a hot day driving around southern Tuscany. Paddling myself about I managed to trap a floating hornet between my upper arm and the side of the Li-Lo. The hornet, already distressed by its imminent death by drowning, stung me immediately. The pain was intense and persistent and a large indurated area developed around it which lasted for days.

Apivorus means ‘bee-eater’ but the European honey buzzard (Pernis apivorus) eats far more wasps than bees and is actually called the Wespenbussard in German. It’s not even a true buzzard as in the familiar Buteo group. Honey buzzards are secretive summer migrants and mainly breed in central and southern Britain. There are several breeding pairs in Scotland too but you are very unlikely to see them. Birds perch in mid-canopy to scout for prey. The claws are blunt for a raptor – rather like a vulture’s – and it uses its powerful feet to excavate wasps nests from burrows to get at the grubs. It has dense scaly feathers over its face to protect it from attack and the feathers are thought to contain a wasp repellant. The European bee-eater (Merops apiaster) also eats a lot of wasps. It is adept at knocking out the stings of bees and wasps on its perch before consumption.

Adult worker wasps are female and only live for an average of 2 weeks. Once the queen has begun the nest and produced the first few workers she becomes flightless and confines her activities to egg-laying. The workers are actually capable of laying haploid eggs that produce male wasps. The workers feed the larva on masticated caterpillars and aphids. In return, the larvae secrete a sugar-rich fluid which is the main food of the workers who cannot digest solid food. The colony expands to a maximum of about 10,000 individuals.

At the end of summer, sexual larvae, queens and drones, are produced which will mate before the queens seek out their winter quarters. When these sexual forms pupate the supply of sugary secretions runs out and the workers start looking for alternative sources of energy from any unharvested fruit such as plums and figs – or from picnics. The old queen dies and the social structure of the nest disintegrates. The workers start to succumb to starvation and cold and this is the time of year when we must beware the groggy, moribund Jaspers who still pack a punch.

Clematis montana var. wilsonii

We moved to our present terraced townhouse in autumn 1992. The front of the building was smothered by a huge clematis montana that extended onto our second floor balcony and also onto our neighbours’ balcony to the east. Squirrels lived in it and made dreys there.

In June of the following year it erupted into bloom. It flowers later than the commoner montana sp. It was immediately apparent that the flowers had a very unusual scent – of chocolate. In fact it was almost overwhelming when approaching the front door. This became a much anticipated annual event quite apart from the floral spectacle itself.

Over a decade later, in late June, we were about to drive to Fife to catch the car ferry from Rosyth to Zeebrugge. A classic (for Edinburgh) torrential summer downpour started. I had a quick final look around the house before leaving and was appalled to find water coming through the drawing room ceiling above the bay window. The neglected clematis had finally blocked the gutter running around the balcony. There was nothing to be done but to put a bucket under the leak and hope there was a dry spell for the next two weeks.

Cutting it back and clearing the gutters that autumn was a big job and I ignored the sage advice when dealing with a very mature plant – which is to take half away one season and leave the rest to the next. To avoid the extra work I simply cut it all back to first floor level and carted away an enormous amount of pruned branches and leaves. I refer to this sort of activity as ‘hackenbush’ in homage to Groucho and the waste as ‘prunage’ on the basis I like putting ‘age’ after verbs to make a noun.

The following spring I waited nervously for signs of life. I was relieved when shoots appeared from the stumps and grew rapidly for a few weeks. Unfortunately, and quite suddenly, they wilted heralding the demise of what was once a magnificent specimen. There was nothing to do but remove the rest of it and learn the lesson. June was never the same after that.

At the time I had no idea what variety the montana might be. I’d never heard of a chocolate-scented clematis. Thanks to the internet I eventually identified it as the variant wilsonii using the brilliant expedient of googling ‘chocolate scented clematis’. Duh..

https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/91934/Clematis-montana-var-wilsonii/Details

I found a supplier in the West and ordered two plants as insurance. I trained them over a metal arch on the east wall of the back garden and used it to frame a bench.

C. montana wisonii on the arch, scented deciduous azalea to the right and rosa ‘Fantin Latour’ to the left. All have a very nice smell.

Although the new plants’ flowers do smell faintly of chocolate they do not seem to have the power of the original – which is very disappointing as it is otherwise just a late flowering C. montana. In a fit of horticultural enthusiasm I have twice taken multiple inter-nodal cuttings in successive years, all but one of which have died of fungal affliction – and the sole survivor is not looking too great this year. Reading around the subject I have perhaps left taking the cuttings too late. I feel defeated by it now and regret promising friends a rare scented clematis, an offer I find I cannot fulfil. I would have settled for even one survivor to plant in the front garden and mitigate my crime. Perhaps in time it would have grown to be a nuisance to someone else.

March Dust

As I write, in keeping with the aphorism, March is showing leonine tendencies having been peacefully ovine at the outset. My birthday is located at the beginning of the month on March 4th, which is “the most commanding day of the year,” according to our old dairyman. A pun that was never quite funny enough.

Spring is the time for meteorological aphorisms and coming from a farming background these sayings had some practical significance. Now that I have substituted gardening for farming there is still some utility in knowing what to expect. My grandfather would say, “February fills the dyke, be it black or be it white,” alluding to the tendency for huge amounts of precipitation of either type in that month. There is a codicil to that saying of which I was unaware as a child; “But if it be white, It’s the better to like.”

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/february-fill-dyke/pwGPaRuoX83Vdw?hl=en

This year we had both. Dreadful Somme-like mud and flooding followed by hard frost and heavy snow – which was certainly preferable. When walking an energetic Vizsla conditions underfoot are crucially important and it made me think of another longed-for sign – March dust. The lengthening day, the waxing of the Sun’s power as its angle to the Earth steepens added to a bit of wind-induced evaporation produces that welcome indication that the land can be worked again. The blackened sods pale and the mud on tarmac and paths slackens its grip. Dust blows about in the dazzling light. At least that is the theory. Climate change may modify these old adages.

Miniature daffodils, possibly a variety of *Narcissus asturiensis*

Not having to ‘work the land’ these days, such considerations are less relevant to an urban existence. Perhaps they are less important to farmers too as so many cereals are now sown in the autumn to germinate before winter and so get off to a flying start in spring. To a gardener the progress of the early year is marked instead by flowers.

It’s important to have something to cheer you in the depth of winter, but to me there’s something slightly depressing about winter jasmine and its screaming yellow successor, forsythia. I much prefer witch hazel with its little streamer-like petals and fantastic orangey smell – and it looks so nice with a bit of snow on top.

Another mood-enhancer in the shortest days is winter (or sweet) box, Sarcococca confusa. Oddly, its scientific name means ‘flesh berry.’ The sweetness refers to the exotic scent of the inconspicuous flowers which are borne in mid-winter. I planted it at the front door to greet winter visitors and in the back garden as evergreen punctuation. Its habit is looser than Buxus but vigorous even in quite deep shade. Sarcococca originates in South East Asia and our Chinese neighbour says the scent makes her nostalgic.

The spring sequence of herbaceous plants that exploit the light passing through bare deciduous trees begins with winter aconites and snowdrops. Our snowdrops are spreading rapidly through the lawn but I haven’t the heart to mow them down before they die back naturally. This makes for great untidiness in late spring and early summer.

Iris reticulata is found from the Caucasus to northern Iran and is presumably an alpine species. The flowers are evanescent and the leaves very fragile. Like the muscari grape hyacinths it is a welcome relief from all that yellow. Apart from the omnipresent snowdrops, I have more hellebores than any other winter flowering perennial. Most of these are the early-flowering ‘Christmas Rose’ types whose drooping heads have to be tilted up to see their full splendour. The later-flowering Lenten Roses don’t seem to do so well with me. I like to cut off last year’s leaves to get the full benefit of the flowers.

Daffodils are underrated in my opinion, probably because they are ubiquitous. I like the green ‘non-scent scent’ of the big ones. Many dwarfs and poetica species are properly scented. One miniature daffodil has been following our family around for a very long time. Originating in my grandfather’s farm – which is now lost under the satanic mills of Grangemouth oil refinery – they were introduced to several of our family’s gardens. They are very short, with swept-forward tepals and coronae. The leaves are greyish green. I think they are a variety of Narcissus asturiensis but this is an amateur ID. They did not appreciate the woodland nature of our garden and I am now on a salvage mission, growing them on in pots with fresh compost every year in the hope that they will grow forth and multiply.

Returning to shrubs, the witch hazel is now past – although we have excellent autumn colour to look forward to. The hybrid Camelia x williamsii is just getting into its stride. Old photographs show it as a shin-height shrub when we moved in 28 years ago. It is now towering over us. I suspect it is the variety ‘Anticipation’ and it was always a favourite of our daughter. The huge peony-like flowers drop off without wilting in a strange unnatural way, carpeting the ground in puffy pink blooms. I once floated a few of the shed flowers in a bowl as a table decoration for a dinner party. It intrigues me that another member of the family, Camelia sinensis, is the source of tea. The shrub flowers and is hardy even in Scotland. Scottish-grown tea is available.

The gaudy star of the show, waiting in the wings, is our magnolia. Magnolias are ancient plants from the dinosaur era and they evolved before bees. The theory is that they were pollinated by beetles. They have a strong association with France. Magnolias as a group were named in honour of the French botanist Pierre Magnol (1638 – 1715). Our variety is a Magnolia x soulangeana. This is not quite so ancient having been bred by Étienne Soulange-Bodin, a doctor and cavalry officer in Napoleon’s army. He was superintendent of the Empress Josephine’s gardens at Malmaison.

I desperately wanted a magnolia of my own having suffered from magnolia-envy for many seasons. I bought the potted sapling at Hopetoun Garden Centre. The label said it had pale lemon, almost pure white, scented flowers. It did not prosper in its first location, so I moved it. Although it did flower and the blooms were spectacular I noticed that some branches had died. Despite this, vigorous shoots remained and I persevered. The tree gained in strength and began flowering profusely. Being red/green colourblind it took me a while to notice that the flowers had changed in character and now had a red flush at the base of the petals and no scent. It eventually dawned on me that the tree had been taken over by the rootstock it had been grafted onto.

One of the original huge Magnolia x soulangeana flowers

We are past the vernal equinox now and the clocks have been put forward for arcane reasons I can never understand. Something to do with the milking and Scottish schools… At least in this lockdown year there was no boozy dinner party to compound the effects of ‘losing an hour’ as my mother used to call it. April is imminent. So often a ‘cruel’ disappointing month relapsing into cold weather and damage to the tender shoots of recovery. April ‘showers’ are such a euphemism. Perhaps, like last year, we will be lucky and have one of those warm springs that comes on all summery and incongruous before the leaves are fully out.

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