Victory

A few weeks ago our last sleeping tree flowered. Neither of us can remember it flowering before and with the strange, mixed spring that we've had it was a surprise. We'd cut the hedges to improve the spring light levels to see if we could coax our sleepy friend into life, but that was more hunch than scientific method. On Sunday I noticed that it has bunches of cherries.

Victory.

I'm an engineer. Applying a proven solution to a problem is the whole point of engineering. But I'm an engineer from a background in biology and although biology is entirely deterministic, its arcane processes conspire to create the illusion of chaos. The human mind has its limits, there are processes which are impossible to hold in mind, and there is a vast hinterland between art and science which can only be explored with inuition, populated with strangers: architects and psychologists and so on. So when an intuition bears fruit, that's a source of joy to me. I hope no one saw me dancing around the tree like some new-age loon. Next to it is a small Gala apple which was rotten when we arrived. Over the years, I've cut back a rotten branch, let another grow to replace it, cut the next rotten branch and so on. This autumn I'll prune it and it will be a healthy tree with thick branches and a good shape. One of our new pears got fireblight and I spent a whole summer managing its retreat until it became a full rout. I cut the main stem two feet from the ground. Now it's growing away. Next to that is a quince which almost died from black spot in its first two years. That was another rearguard action, stripping leaf after leaf until it hit its stride, suddenly greening and thickening. Now it takes the occasional black spot on its leaves in its disdainful stride. Mrs Snoutindingle once delved into the hedges that I'd carefully renovated, hacked splendid holes in them and freed three apple trees that we thought were wildings and turned out not to be. Higher in the garden we pruned a sad pear tree and discovered that it was a double graft, a comice on a conference on a quince rootstock and next to it, there's a hybrid of the two. All four now bear fruit. There is a Wealthy apple hidden in the Big Hedge which the good lady discovered and has been treating for its nasty fungal excressences. Our last planting was a "dead" Medlar that we bought from a Fenland market for a tenner. We heard the lady on the stall give a little sing-song laugh as we walked off with it. This year it has flowered in abundance - its flowers have a delicate marshmallow scent - and the fat lady can go sing all she wants. We bought a dried up standard olive tree for a tenner from a nursery. "Last legs, but the pot would be nearly that" they said. Five years later it's thriving, surrounded by its children: cuttings in various stages of growth. My sister bought me a Kumquat tree for my birthday. That died too, turning brown in its pot so that even Mrs Snoutigdingle doubted that I could revive it. Revive it I did. In fact, for whatever reason, the only trees that I can't save are the ones that are presents from my Mum.

Desert Spring

These High Plains are the estranged sibling of the Fens, determined to be different, yet underpinned with the same sinews and bones. The Fens are at sea level and water is never far from the surface. The High Plains are a mile high and thousands of miles inland. Where the Fens are a natural extension of the ocean, the High Plains are extensions of the desert. In summer the Fens steam, if not with water then with miniature thunderclouds of water-bred insects rising from every bush. In summer the High Plains burn with thin heat and it rarely rains but when the rain comes it comes in mighty thunderstorms. The Fens are always damp and never far from rain or the soft, damp mist. In winter, the dying vegetation of the Fens rots away and anything that is left is more often than not blackened with mold so that in the winter the Fens darken further. On the High Plains, winter dries and bleaches every standing plant so that some, like the Tumbleweed, dry up and break away, rolling across the open spaces. Where the Fens are graduations of dark green and black, the High Plains are a consistent sage green on grey and red soils, run through with rivulets of pale matte gold.

In the spring, around the many sinking creeks, the High Plains show their true and glorious colours. The tall, dried grasses sit on the shelves of the river-margins in thick yellow clumps like sunbursts. At this time of year they are as pale as ghosts. Imagine acid yellow with the acid faded out and then dried. This land is a mile high and flat in every direction and the winters dry out these grasses until they are almost like glass. The dryness means that they have hardly a dot of mold. In amongst these grasses, the blue-green sage bush creates a matte background. This dwarf forest of wormwoods with their thick, water-conserving leaves have a texture as dry as bones. I'm convinced that all of those artemesias fill the air with an indetectible but addictive fragance: an arid, airborne absinthe. The boles of cottonwoods rise from this straw-misted hinterland, following the rivers. Cottonwoods are the counterpart of willows on these riverbanks, although the willow has colonised America just like her European human counterparts. The trunks are grey with wounds of darker brown and black split out here and there. Higher up the branches are clay-grey as though dipped in river-mud, but washed with that same sage. In the sun they also glow with a curious brilliance. There is something strange about these trees, a limerence which drew me in. Like the deep black-greens of the Fens which radiate such powerful and obvious life-forces despite being as dark as the Earth, these desert trees are obviously alive and, more than that, virile. I stopped my car to investigate and despite pulling well off the  road, I encouraged a couple of truckers to curse my cultural insensitivity with their air-horns. The noise disturbs a red-tailed hawk which lumbers into the air stops its wings and banks into tight circles. It is no longer afraid and now it slips around the bare branches of the trees silently looking for any other creatures that I might have frightened from cover.

 Walking into the grove, I saw the source of that strange wash of bright brilliance. A fen willow will glow at the edges against black soil and black spring skies as they burst into leaf. The cottonwoods are no different. As the air warms and the winter rivers sink back the trees explode into growth, putting on two feet a week for a young tree and sustaining five feet of growth every year all their lives. On these trees the brilliant new leaves were showing through the cracks in their buds in brilliant spills of yellow and sage, subtly colouring the entire tree so that it shimmers with health. The desert pauses for breath in the tiniest crack of opportunity between winter and summer, and leaps into life.

Obituary

American English has died aged two hundred and forty years in a flurry of post-modern menu items culminating in an overdose of deep fried cheesecake.

Born in the flames of the finest writing in the English language to appear outside of a religious work, the American tradition had many fine guardians from Twain to Steinbeck, exporting grand new words and even grander ideas to the world. After a long struggle with marketeering, the relentless onslaught of verbisation, the steady loss of vowels, the US finally lost its power of speech. Hollywood visuals failed to fill the gap and after mocking the fall of the American Dream in the Walking Dead with its English lead facing the dumbstruck hordes, American English finally laid its head to its final rest.

Balance

I enjoy travelling in the US. It has its disappointments but then that's true of every nation. While I was watching someone tuck into a deep fried cheesecake, I tried to recall some of the things that make me smile about this great lunking galoot of a country.

Curiously, the things that come to mind often come with outragrous missunderstandings about food. We booked a hotel outside of Juneau, Alaska with a folksy name which turned out to be a hit with patrician older men travelling with their attractive young neices. In the restaurant there, I ordered salmon and sent it back because it was white, causing hilarity and uproar among the diners, most of whom had come a long way to eat the local king salmon as it started running. On a trip to Florida I went for a quick Mexican lunch with the team I was visiting and I ended up with seven plates. My inner 'eat it all up' parent was horrified. On the same trip, my host drove us fifty miles to a cuban restaurant where I had something with plantain which I very nearly described as awesome. Nearly. I once had two wonderful meals in the same week in Oakland. The first was after driving around looking for something vegetarian for my travelling companion. Her brilliant instincts found us a tiny Lebanese place where we ate falafel surrounded by the local Indian Bridge Society's annual outing. At the end of the same week, we visited a Thai restaurant where I ordered a simple fish dish. The waitress panicked, trying to explain that it was white fish, poached without fries, or chilli, or a sweet potato filled with caramel and marshmallows. I said that sounded wonderful after a week of wings and burgers, and I was right, it was. In between I had a clam chowder on Fisherman's Wharf which I managed to spread over myself like a four year old. But hey, in San Francisco if you feel you need to wear your food, not one single person would ever be so uncool as to even mention it.

Back in Oakland, we had a morning ritual of visiting churches, the bigger the better, as part of some spiritual quest or other of my companion's. The cathedral in Santa Cruz was a gorgeous confection in latin cream against a perfect, Californian blue sky, but the most awesome revelation of all was the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Oakland itself, set high on a hillside, Oakland spread below with the sun bleaching all of its horrors and San Francisco cross the bay behind, Alcatraz, Golden Gate and all, sumptuous in the brilliant morning. If anyone tells you that all American cities are soul-less, unplanned and utilitarian, they have somewhat missed the point, they can also be glorious. Washington DC is another grand city, but it's grandeur never quite looses its cellophane wrapping of faux and reminds me somewhat of a themepark built of limestone and marble, complete with gilded political roller coasters. That doesn't make it any less grand and  the Persians were almost certainly exactly as sniffy about the Acropolis.

If I'm on a long trip, I often declare myself vegetarian for health reasons and, in these enlightened times there are places in the US where vegetarian food is entirely legal. In some tolerant corners of California you may even find a competent vegetarian chef. As you go south, things become trickier. It's often easier to have a rational argument about gun control with a random redneck than to convince a waitress that a chicken is an animal. Worse still, try starting an argument about bacon bits. It's true that bacon bits are almost entirely free of actual pig solid matter, but they almost certainly are smothered in bacon fat of some derivation. Of course almost every restaurant in the US will customise any order. This is because every dish contains everything and so almost everyone wants something pulled. Just don't order a simple cheese and ham sandwich with no salad or extras with a queue behind you, because they may not appreciate the wait while the terrified server consults the manual about how to serve that. You may even be arrested. "Just cheese and ham, sir? On wholemeal?"

Something else which I find endearing are the folks running mom and pop outfits out in the woods. I go to a lot of those and the cheese and ham sandwich problem has a different flavour. They hear an English accent and ask if American cheddar is OK in a hushed voice and here is something I don't understand. Why is it so hard for a big chain to deal with someone who doesn't want salad on a sandwich when all of these mom and pop places are connected by a psychic network. I swear I bought lunch three days running in rural North Carolina and two years later the owner of an identical establishment in coastal Maryland recognised me and knew my order.

That takes me to Sitka, Alaska. This was twenty years ago and a certain chain of sandwich shops hadn't made it to the UK. Lady Snoutingdingle and I stood at the counter of what we now like to call Subnormal and ordered subs. By the end of the order the poor baffled teenager behind the counter was on the point of tears. 'Just salad' wasn't in his vocabulary. Someone behind us had to rescue us 'she wants lettuce, tomato, no pickles, no cheese, not bacon-bits, no dressing, no oil.' The next day, we went to the bookshop across the street which had a coffee shop in the back. That was before that caught on in the UK too. Books. Maps. Coffee. I'm surprised we ever left. On that same trip we tried to find wholemeal bread in a supermarket. The shelf-stacker had heard of it, which was a start, and took us to a tiny bottom shelf in a mile-long bread aisle. They made us put that in a brown paper bag before we left, or the cops might take an interest.

The Last Sleeping Tree

There is one tree in the Night Planted Orchard which we have not yet been able to wake.

It will have taken four years to rennovate the hedges. Last year we pulled out stems fourteen feet long and turned them into rustic fences. Even then it took five huge bonfires to clear all the waste. That completed the western side of the orchard just before the birds called time on our marathon hedging efforts. That allowed so much more light into the orchard that we had a bumper crop in a year when most of the trees are supposed to be dormant. This year I cut the eastern side back, at least as far as the scrubby wood next door will allow. The shape and height is restored all around the orchard. In the section of the garden left to wildlife and wild flowers, I left a taller run but even the very furthest reaches, where the garden ends at a deep ditch and the fen begins, are now back to proper hedge height and trim. Now that the overgrowth is pushed right back, new growth can hold its own in the gaps. We'll take advantage of the delay from this late cold to lay some hedges in those gaps, perhaps plant some more damsons and sloes. Finally, in the autumn, we'll tidy up.

There are two objectives to renovating the hedges. One is to restore a fine set of country hedges to good health after years of neglect. The other is to bring more light to the orchard. During the process I discovered among the thick tree-like stems, a run of thinner, tamer wood. I took this back to its natural height. At the end of the day, walking back through the orchard, I looked back and saw that this old gap in the hedge aligned perfectly with a long gap between the willows at the fen's edge. In the morning, I discovered that this south-easterly gap floods the orchard with early morning light. Perhaps I would have started with that stretch if I'd known. Perhaps the light will melt the frost in the orchard and that might be a problem in itself - I've always tried to let the frost leave of its own free will - or perhaps, just perhaps, it might extend the light on the one tree that we have not been able to wake in the last five years. We think it may be a nectarine or a peach but whatever it is, it's too sad to set blossom with its pretty toes cold and damp all year.

Perhaps a regular morning sip at the light will cheer it up. We'll see.