Some Wild Garden Action

I came across this graffiti in Camden when walking along the canal a couple of weeks ago. Nothing like a wild-eyed Staffy to brighten my day!

More reading yesterday morning. I learned the Lib Dems won in our local elections -- apparently plenty of other voters felt as I did, that they were the most promising candidates on the ballot.

Then I took another walk after lunch, just a wide loop around the neighborhood via Maygrove Peace Park and the cemetery. The weather was perfect. It's so nice to get out and walk in a t-shirt. My only complaint is that we have had no significant rain for at least a month. It's dry as a bone out there, the ground is cracked, and although the lawn and most plants seem to be doing OK we could sure use some moisture.

I lost a couple of my cosmos seedlings to pigeons, which plucked the heads off them as if they were corn for the picking. And I lost my biggest zinnia to a slug or snail. I'm down to three surviving zinnias, four sunflowers and five cosmos.

Remember my old habit of picking up china shards while walking, on Hampstead Heath in particular? Well, I found these during my walk on Friday and added them to my bowl. Lots of Blue Willow, or something similar. I'm intrigued by that bit at far left with the lettering -- looks like "acs L" or perhaps "acs D." I tried Googling to figure out what it might come from. When I uploaded a photo, the AI assistant helpfully said, "This is a ceramic shard featuring cursive script." Yeah, thanks for that.

Further Googling tried to tell me it comes from this pottery, which is just wrong. The font doesn't match and the wording isn't right. I think it's French based on the fact that a word ends with "acs," but who knows. There's just not enough of it to tell.

We had a crazy week on the garden cam! Some very unusual activity and lots of it, which is why I have a nine-minute video featuring birds, squirrels, rodents, wandering pets and, yes, foxes. As usual I'll list everything below, with the most interesting moments in red in case you'd like to jump ahead.

We begin with Sharpie sniffing around. Then:
-- At 0:15, a little mouse comes out of a nearby bush. Man, that thing can jump!
-- At 0:36, Q-Tip (or some fox with a white-tipped tail) comes by.
-- It's followed at 0:51 by a black cat. This is not Blackie, who is all black. This is a different cat, much fluffier.
-- At 1:37, a fox is back. Looks like Crooked Tail. It sees something at the back of the garden and takes off after it.
-- At 1:51, squirrel and pigeon.
-- At 2:05, Sharpie is back, followed by Q-Tip, and then at 2:56 by Crooked Tail. (Again, my fox differentiation is not absolute.)
-- At 3:13, SQUIRREL PANIC!
-- At 3:22, Crooked Tail.
-- At 3:31, a starling.
-- At 3:39, squirrel long jump!
-- At 3:49, some kind of LBT (sparrow?) intimidates a pigeon.
-- At 4:10, a great tit flutters in, followed at 4:17 by a dunnock on the ground.
-- At 4:22, Crooked Tail is back.
-- At 4:34, a robin flutters up to perch on the camera.
-- At 4:53, you see my legs as I'm trimming our hazel tree. (I guess I count as wildlife!)
-- At 5:13, Crooked Tail comes by.
-- At 5:26, the mouse is back.
-- At 5:43, we see another tit hopping around.
-- At 5:59 we get some brilliant daytime footage of (I believe) Sharpie. It really shows off his or her coloring.
-- At 6:39, the dunnock is back.
-- At 6:49, I put down a couple of pork chop scraps for the foxes.
-- At 6:58, an unwelcome surprise! A RAT appears and carries away the pork! I've learned my lesson about feeding the foxes.
-- At 7:09, a fox appears and sniffs around, but the rat has apparently made off with all the food. This is followed by lots of coming-and-going by a couple of different animals, I believe, all within the span of about half an hour. They probably smell the meat but they're too late.
-- At 8:28, that friggin' rat is back.
-- At 8:48, a fox trots past. It's early morning, so you can really hear the dawn chorus, mainly robins and blackbirds.
-- At 9:08, there's a horrible screech, and then Pale Cat chases a fox past the camera!

The Bicentennial and Someone Else's Dog

Our clematis is blooming once again, and looking a little healthier this year than last. It has never really thrived but it's hanging on.

Yesterday was unremarkable. I read The New Yorker in the morning, specifically Jill Lepore's article from a couple of months ago about the Bicentennial. As the USA prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary with all kinds of grandiose, Trumpian plans and schemes, she looked back at the 200th anniversary to see how we handled that. I was a child at the beginning of 1976 -- nine years old, to be exact -- and I remember the Bicentennial as a time of unity and celebration. As Lepore described it:

There was no end to the kitsch: Bicentennial beer mugs, flatware, dishes, glassware, placemats, and salt shakers; little glass Liberty Bells; patriotic yo-yos and egg timers; Bicentennial coffee grounds and coffeepots; Red, White ’n Blueberry ice cream; Bicentennial Barbie with a white lace mobcap, a flouncy red skirt, a blue bodice, and white pantaloons. You could get a Bicentennial auto loan and screw Bicentennial license plates onto your new car. At diners, where you likely ate off placemats made to look like replicas of the Declaration of Independence, your coffee came with Bicentennial sugar packs, displaying a short but sweet biography of an American President, and your 7 UP in a commemorative sixteen-ounce bottle. You could wipe your hands on Bicentennial towelettes, featuring a silhouette of Paul Revere on a horse. Kellogg’s ran a Bicentennial contest (“Make a picture of your favorite American Revolutionary hero—like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, or others—eating a good balanced breakfast”); entrants got a red-white-and-blue kite. Campbell’s soup cans came with an offer for a Colonial Campbell’s Kids Doll. Log Cabin maple syrup was packaged in a special Bicentennial flask.

This is the kind of stuff I remember, along with a third-grade class trip in 1975 to see NASA's Bicentennial exposition at the Kennedy Space Center. We all rode a bus across the state and I remember gigantic rockets and lots of machinery and the Vehicle Assembly Building with the Bicentennial logo on the side. (I also developed a fever on that trip and I got a vanilla shake at McDonald's -- weird what we remember.)

What I'd forgotten, or more likely never knew, is that the celebration of the Bicentennial was as mired in politics as the semisesquicentennial is now. As Lepore outlines in her article, Lyndon Johnson launched the planning with one committee, which Nixon subsequently disbanded, installing his own people. As Nixon's administration became mired in Watergate, the planning eventually fell apart, and states and cities were left to manage their own celebrations.

Hearing that it was all such a political nightmare even 50 years ago somehow puts our modern situation into perspective, though it doesn't justify Trump's expenditures on a vulgar triumphal arch and schlocky sculpture garden.

In the afternoon I went for a walk on Hampstead Heath. I really needed some exercise; now that I'm not walking to work every day, it's too easy to sit around the house. Even with all my gardening, I feel like my fitness is slipping. So yes, I am going to get out more and work off some calories. (When we get a dog that will help.)

Speaking of dogs, this random dog ran up to me with a gigantic log in its mouth, which it apparently wanted me to throw. I did, and the log broke in half, and the dog then insisted on trying to carry both halves, which led to no end of canine frustration. It was out with a dog-walker, and eventually moved on with the rest of the pack.

I also passed this leaning pine tree, which has been leaning for as long as I can remember. Over the years it has been secured with cables to adjacent trees, and been braced from beneath with two gigantic posts. I blogged it before back in 2020, before the bracing. I wonder why there's such an effort to save this bedraggled tree? It must have some historic significance. (And here's the answer, courtesy of Google: It's known as the Constable Pine, drawn by artist John Constable in the early 1800s when he lived near the Heath. I learn something new every day!)

Tree Fern and Elections

I took this from the upper floor of a double-decker bus, hence the weird downward angle. This little shop is apparently a combination of Dollar Store (or Pound Shop) and Bed, Bath and Beyond. You can get men's socks for £1, Colgate toothpaste for £1, a bath mat for £1. The proprietor in the doorway looks like he's keeping an eye on the man in the green sweatshirt at far right. I imagine people steal stuff from those bins.

Why was I on a double-decker bus? Well, when I left the library job in mid-April, some co-workers gave me a gardening gift certificate that can be redeemed at various garden centers around the country. The closest one to us is a posh little place in Maida Vale. So I headed down there to see what I could get with my gift card.

I got several annuals, like petunias for a hanging basket and a little clump of mixed annuals for a pot on our front porch. I also got the geranium above, even though I really don't need another geranium. Isn't it an amazing color? (There was already a valerian growing in this pot, so I put the geranium next to it!)

The big purchase, though, was a pot for our tree fern. We repotted it just three years ago, and yet I was pretty sure it was rootbound once again. I'd put some bluebell bulbs around it that have never done well, and this spring I tried to take them out and replant them elsewhere, but I literally could not dig them out of the soil because the fern has so many dense roots.

So I got a huge pot, as well as some compost, and called an Uber, and then the pot wouldn't fit in the Uber, so I had to pay an £8 cancellation fee (!) and call an even bigger Uber XL, and all of that was a headache but I finally got the pot home.

And sure enough, when I tried yesterday, I couldn't get the tree fern out of its old pot. I pushed and pulled but that root ball was so tight that I eventually had to break the pot, which was heartbreaking because it was a really nice terra cotta vessel that we could have used for something else. (I remembered when we last repotted the tree fern, we had to cut its plastic pot off because it was similarly jammed up.)

Here's the tree fern, standing on its own tightly packed root ball. You can see how dense those roots are.

And here it is in its new home, able to breathe easier! I still couldn't get the bluebells out, so they moved with the fern.

Dave had argued for putting it in the ground, but I just don't know where we'd put it. We don't really have a place in the garden for such a big plant that likes shade and dampness. So it's staying on the patio.

This was my other big excitement yesterday -- voting in my first UK election! We were electing local councillors, not national offices, but the results of these elections are being weighed to judge political power nationally. The results are still coming out, but it looks bad for Keir Starmer and Labour and good (unfortunately) for Nigel Farage and Reform.

I voted for the three Lib Dem candidates in my area. I've always liked the Lib Dems and they campaigned tirelessly here. I even had one come to my door, which surprised me. No Labour or Conservative council candidates came to my door. We're still awaiting results so I don't know yet who won.

Voting in England, at least in my area, is very old-school. We do have to present a photo ID, and then we're given a ballot and a pencil. The ballot lists the candidates with a box next to each name, and we mark an X next to the candidates we choose. No computers, no punch cards, no touch screens. Then we pop the ballot into a ballot box and that's that.

I asked the seated man above, who was checking our registrations, whether it was OK to take a picture of the polling station. "I don't know -- no one's ever asked me that," he said, laughing. I told him it was my first time voting so I wanted it for posterity, and promised to take it from a discreet distance.

Dave is also eligible to vote but he wasn't feeling well yesterday so he didn't. (He said he didn't know who to vote for in any case.) He's staying home from work today, too. He's due to start some new Crohn's medication later this month but everything moves at a snail's pace with the NHS, so meanwhile, he's metaphorically limping along.

The Rejects

I thought it might be fun to do a post showing the types of slides I'm culling. Remember how I wrote several days ago that I go through each batch and discard about half of them right away? Well, here are some that didn't make the cut.

I have a bunch of slides from one person who had a terrible time aiming the camera (above). Their pictures tend to skew upward, so there's lots of sky or ceiling and the subject is squeezed into the lower third of the frame. (I've belatedly developed a fondness for this one, from 1967, which I call "Baby Contemplates Gigantic Sky." I might keep it.)

"Cleveden" (1968) -- Way too dark. There's not really any way to save an image like this. I can sometimes increase exposure and lighten shadows and make something workable but this one is beyond repair.

This one, of a ski lift in Austria in 1983, has the opposite problem -- it's too light. (And also too boring.)
 

I have several pictures of this 1982 scouting event, and they all look like this. It's almost as if someone was pointing the camera from their hip. Nice shot of someone's elbow. Is that person in the middle with the sleeping bag wearing a coonskin cap?

I have pictures from someone's African safari in 1975. I think they were taken out the window of a moving vehicle. Those brown smudges appear to be leopards.

Another person's camera just could not focus. I don't know whether this was the photographer's fault or the camera was broken, but in any case, many of their photos -- of similar events involving cars and motorcycles -- look like the one above.

This lovely 1977 photo is helpfully labeled "Park Hotel, Oban," just in case you wondered. Taken out the window of a moving vehicle, I'm thinking? (And also incredibly filthy -- I should have dusted it before I scanned it!)

I wondered what might have motivated someone to take this picture. It turns out the Park Hotel was one of two involved in a major fire that killed ten tourists in 1973. The fire was centered in an adjacent hotel, the Esplanade, but the Park's guests were evacuated. Perhaps someone passing by the scene a few years later took the picture because of that event? I believe both hotels were subsequently torn down, at least in part.

Anyway, as you can see, I have a lot of junk to go with the good photos. It's funny that people kept these slides in the first place, isn't it? Of course, they were ultimately discarded one way or another -- which is why I have them -- so maybe I'm picking through someone else's photographic trash.

I'm leaning toward throwing all of these, except the baby, in the bin. I see no earthly reason to save them.

Roses and More Slides

Our roses have started to bloom, putting a colorful splash in the center of the garden. They'll be at their best in about three weeks, I think. As you can see, the dahlias are coming along, too -- one of them is downright bushy and almost all the others have sprouted. Only one hasn't come up at all, and I suspect it's dead -- one of the new varieties we bought last summer. I think it's "Iron in the Fire," but I'm not sure.

Our yellow peony is blooming as well, and our other two peonies each have buds, so we should have some good displays there too.

I heard back from my slide guy over the weekend. He set aside a big box for me, and I went yesterday to Camden Market and picked it up, along with another full bin of loose slides from his shop:

Woo hoo! So now I have plenty to keep me busy for a while. I didn't even get a chance to talk with him, but after I picked them up I sent him a link to the Flickr album where I'm putting the scans as I complete them, so he can see what I'm up to. I suspect he thinks I'm a little unbalanced, so I'm going to leave him alone for a while. Part of my drive to acquire more is based on the fact that I want to keep slides from common sources together, because context says a lot about the images -- and if he still has more from photographers I've scanned, I'd like the additional pictures too. You know me -- I'm a completist. But I also can't drive the guy crazy.

I can't tell you how exciting it is for me to look at those bags. The mystery! The promise! Now I need to fine-tune my methods for organizing, cataloguing and storing all these images.

Otherwise, I'm still trying to catch up on The New Yorker (story of my life). Dave and I are now starting our TV-watching in the evenings with "The Golden Girls" -- I know! Such a gay cliché! But I never watched it very comprehensively when it was popular and we're enjoying the cozy humor. We're also finishing "Southland," an LA-based cop show that I loved when I first watched it about 15 years ago, and we're watching the newest season of "The Diplomat" and a show called "Imperfect Women" on Apple TV. The latter is quite a soap opera but it has a good cast, including Elisabeth Moss from "The Handmaid's Tale."

Prada

Dave and I had a little urban adventure yesterday afternoon. It was a bank holiday, so he had the day off, and we decided to get out of the house and go into town. We went to lunch at Pierre Victoire, a French restaurant in Soho that we both like, and then to see "The Devil Wears Prada 2."

The meal was very good, though I ate more than I would customarily eat in the middle of the day. I had French onion soup and a sage-stuffed pork roll, and Dave had duck confit. We then made our way toward the theater, stopping for coffee and some people-watching on Old Compton Street, aka "the gayborhood," which always offers a parade of interesting characters.

I found the drawing above on the sidewalk. It was very faint but I manipulated the photo to darken it and make it stand out more. I believe it says, "I had 2 lose you 2 eventually find someone worth living 4." Kind of an interesting message to pair with a drawing of two guys who look like Robert Stack playing Elliot Ness.

We saw the movie at the Curzon on Shaftesbury Avenue, and I'm happy to say we really liked it. Dave called it "a love letter to itself," which is true -- it followed the formula of the first movie, and of course most if not all of the major actors and characters came back. I think it gives moviegoers something that we all need right now -- a comforting immersion in fond memories as well as a world of glamor and beauty and luxury, and only hinted-at hardship that is never very clearly shown. Meryl Streep's character could easily have become a pastiche of her famous quips but she gave it depth -- not surprising -- and Hathaway and Tucci and Blunt were all excellent too. It was fun to pick out the cameos by people like Heidi Klum and Donatella Versace, and the scene where Miranda Priestly and Lady Gaga exchange venomous words was a lot of fun. We both agreed we'd see it again, given the opportunity.

This is our azalea bush, looking good at pretty much its peak. I found it last week with wilted blooms and realized the poor thing desperately needed water, and thank goodness the flowers bounced right back. The "Pink Spider" portion of the plant, at upper left with the pink flowers, is so different from the majority of the bush, even though the whole thing was sold as a "Pink Spider" azalea. I am still mystified about whether there are two different plants potted together or one plant with some weird genetic quirk.

Geraniums and Garden Updates

This is a type of geranium that we have growing around our back steps, from the patio up to the garden. When I cleared the steps last summer, I trimmed it and put some cuttings in a pot on the patio, and now they're blooming up a storm. That's the lattice back of one of the patio chairs behind it.

Our pink geranium is blooming as well, but the plant looks terrible -- very lanky and straggly. This should teach me a lesson about pruning. I knew I needed to cut it back early this spring but I avoided that task and now it's too late and we just have to live with it. The flowers still look nice, at least.

I just spent about half an hour cleaning up the kitchen before sitting down to blog. To my way of thinking there is nothing worse than waking up to a dirty kitchen, but Dave made stuffed shells last night and I couldn't fit all the bowls, pots, pans and colander into the dishwasher. So I ran what I could and left the rest until this morning. Ugh. And then I wound up hand-washing the big baking dish anyway, because that darn thing -- with lid -- takes practically the whole bottom rack of our modest-sized European dishwasher.

Anyway, it's done now. Mr. Clean could eat off our cabinets.

Dave and I spent all day yesterday at home. I repotted two gigantic hydrangeas that we have growing in containers. They'd been in their pots for years and the soil had gradually broken down and become compacted, so much so that the pots were only about half-full. I pulled the bushes out (easier said than done!), added new dirt and replanted them in the same pots, now full to the brim. We considered putting them in the ground but the only space we have is in the far back of the garden beneath those gnarled old elder trees and our Japanese maple, and I just couldn't face digging through all those roots.

It feels good to settle the question of what to do with those hydrangeas. We've been debating it for ages and finally I thought, "I'm solving this problem."

I've almost finished going through my latest batch of old slides, culling the useless ones and setting aside the good ones. I texted the slide dealer again about acquiring the rest of his stock but haven't heard back. He seems reluctant to sell them all to me, but he won't just tell me that, which is perhaps a cultural thing. I am probably being very American, brashly breezing in and wanting the whole shebang and metaphorically waving my dollars around, and perhaps he's concerned about being left empty-handed, with no slides for his customers to browse. Maybe he likes selling them piecemeal. Maybe he's suspicious of why I want them. I can only guess.

I could ultimately give him back the ones I don't want, which would solve my problem of what to do with them all. But obviously I don't want to do that until I've been through the rest of his, so he doesn't mix them all together. I don't want to keep re-buying the same old slides!

I think I have to assume his silence is his message and I'll talk to him about it the next time I'm at his shop. Meanwhile, there are plenty of old slides and photos out there, and I'll just keep my eyes open. This is a long-term project, whatever it is.

Here's the latest download from the garden cam. The best part, I think, comes right at the beginning, when I had the camera mounted on our maple tree, looking toward the back corner of the garden. In daylight -- so we can see his or her beautiful coloring -- Sharpie climbs up our log pile, jumps to the top of the wall and goes over the fence into our neighbor's yard.

After that:
-- At 0:20 you'll see the tree (and camera) swaying on a very windy day. I had about a thousand clips that looked like that because the movement kept setting off the camera. You can hear our wind gong chiming.
-- At 0:36, a quick shot of a curious starling. I've moved the camera back to a position on the ground.
-- Beginning at 0:43, various vulpine comings-and-goings, Sharpie at first and then Crooked Tail.
-- At 1:19, we get a glimpse of a fox (Q-Tip?) with something stick-like in its mouth. I see this fairly often but I can never work out what they're carrying around.
-- At 1:25, I put down some scraps from a steak dinner. About three hours later, Crooked Tail comes around, sniffs at it cautiously and carries some of it off. 
-- At 2:29, just a few minutes later, Q-Tip comes and eats the rest, again surprisingly cautiously. I thought they'd wolf down those scraps.
-- At 3:16 the fox runs toward the camera and I'm pretty sure tries to "mark" it, but fortunately we don't see evidence of that.
-- And finally, some random sniffing around by, I believe, Crooked Tail. (All my fox identifications are tenuous because I have such a hard time telling them apart!)