Camellias, redux
My camellias arrived yesterday. Remember I decided I could wedge in three more camellias . . . and ordered seven?* I feel like writing a sharp note to the poor nursery**, which is only doing its job well: hey, you, you don’t have to show me up so fast! I came home from some swoop past/through something yesterday, found two long thin cardboard boxes*** . . . my delivery instructions read: beside house behind gate beside bins, and that’s where they were. † I said ‘arrrgh’ or similar and went straight past them.
This morning when the alarm went off†† it was 37° and sleeting. Joy. Hallelujah. I lingered long enough to get around a cup of tea and then had to bolt for it–but then I usually have to bolt for it, and bolting is quite a good thing in cold falling slush. ††† It had nearly turned to rain by the time we got out again but Peter for some reason had still not climbed on his bike and come up the hill to meet me.‡
Sunday morning is the one morning a week I may actually do a little pottering. You know pottering, puttering, messing about? There are seasons of my life when I forget. But Sunday mornings after ringing I buy flowers, chocolate, and a copy of THE WEEK‡‡ and then I come home and put the chocolate in the cupboard, throw out the old flowers and cough cough arrange the new ones‡‡‡ and drink tea and–probably–do the rest of last night’s dishes. Peter plays bridge Saturdays so hellhounds and I will have eaten dinner at the cottage and I will not have finished doing the dishes because I will have been running out of time to get the blog posted before 2 am so I can get to bed early enough not to need a wheelbarrow§ to get me to the tower Sunday morning.
This Sunday morning I broke my camellias out of their cardboard dungeon§§, with sloppy little bursts of wet cloud drizzling down the back of my neck and causing the necessary expenditure of bad language to increase dramatically. It was done at last, however, and I have a tiny forest of dazed-looking camellias . . . including one, poor thing, which is in flower. That’s my little ringer, a sasanqua, which is to say it’s supposed to be trying to flower now, not next spring, and I bought it because they had an OFFER on any of three sasanquas, and this was the cute one. I’ve been thinking about trying one anyway–I’m always looking for things that flower either early or late, although many have a nasty habit of being tender that comes with this feature, as it does indeed in this case–but it is also fragrant (I think sasquanas generally are?), and I’m a sucker for smell. I’ve been at the mews all afternoon, but when I took the hellhounds out for their afternoon walk§§§ we marched smartly back to the cottage where I left bemused hellhounds in their harnesses while I wrapped my new tender creature in swathes of bubblewrap–oh, gods, the Swathes of Bubblewrap tyranny: the winter version of the Too Many Pots to Water tyranny–and tucked her next to a house wall. Note: she smells divine. Foie gras to unknown luminescent leftovers in the back of the fridge, if she makes it through this winter I’ll buy another one of her ilk in time for next autumn.
However, for your delectation, I have wasted far too much time cruising the internet for camellia photos, and here’s my latest assemblage. I told you I was going for formal doubles this time.
Alba plena
http://www.growquest.com/Camellia%20&%20azalea/Alba_Plena.jpg
http://www.duchyofcornwallnursery.co.uk/Camellias/Camellia%20Alba%20Plena.htm
Ave Maria
http://www.duchyofcornwallnursery.co.uk/Camellias/Camellia%20Ave%20Maria.htm
http://www.nzcamelliasociety.co.nz/Jap1/1.jpg
Dahlohnega
http://www.esveld.nl/htmldiaen/c/cajdah.htm
http://www.camellias-acs.org/display.aspx?catid=3,137,149&pageid=210
Elizabeth Weaver
http://www.camellias-acs.com/display.aspx?catid=3,137,150&pageid=244
http://www.trehanenursery.co.uk/product_info.php?id=45
E G Waterhouse
http://www.duchyofcornwallnursery.co.uk/Camellias/Camellia%20E%20G%20Waterhouse.htm
http://www.camellias-acs.com/display.aspx?catid=3,137,150&pageid=230
Les Jury
http://www.shootgardening.co.uk/sitePlant.php?plantid=1427
http://www.duchyofcornwallnursery.co.uk/Camellias/Camellia%20Les%20Jury.htm
and Gay Sue, the sasquana
http://www.rhododendrons.com/camellias/product/17915/1
http://www.duchyofcornwallnursery.co.uk/Camellias/Camellia%20Gay%20Sue.htm
* * *
* At least I don’t do this with dogs. Like other people we could possibly mention. Ahem.
** Trehane, www.trehanenursery.co.uk I’ve mentioned them before. I’ve bought camellias from several different nurseries but I’ve found Trehane to be pretty seriously the best.
*** Anybody else out there buy big plants by mail order? The good nurseries really have their shipping act down. You get a long skinny cardboard box with the pots, first wrapped up individually in plastic bags, tied or stapled at either end facing inward, so the fragiler part of the plants themselves are protected. Heavy boxes have plant stakes in the corners as stiffeners. Getting the little suckers unwrapped again, however, is an experience redolent of bad language, tantrums, and little scraps of plastic drifting away on the breeze like butterflies. Other than that, it’s a great system.
† It’s always nice when delivery persons can read. I once spent a fortnight wondering where a package had gone. Eventually discovered that it had been put in next-door’s conservatory, the delivery man having been under the impression (somehow) that this L-shaped building, with two front doors with two different name plates beside them and two different house wall colours, for pity’s sake, and a clear demarcation line between, were all the same house. And my neighbour had gone on holiday, and the person picking up the post very reasonably never looked in the conservatory for rogue packages.
†† I get to bed after 2 on a Saturday night, I set an alarm.
††† Then I messed up Grandsire Doubles. Well, it was not kind of Edward on a Sunday morning to call a single on the very first return to lead when I was going to have to do long thirds. This is where a sense of rhythm would be handy: someone with a sense of rhythm could just ring a few extra blows in thirds place and never mind not being able to see what bells she’s over because it’s Sunday morning and the sleet has made her brain cold.
‡ Wimp.
‡‡ Which I’m about to subscribe to because the newsagent ran out of the issue following the American election and I was so cross. There may be only one American who lives in this town, but he might have anticipated that even the English would be interested in the outcome.
Speaking of which, Blackbear sent me this link the day it came out: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/us/politics/22obama.html?ref=us ^ about Hillary and her secretary of state prospects, which clearly wants to make ‘yes’ official but has to content itself with ‘is said to’ and ‘would’ and how they’re not going to announce it till after Thanksgiving. And meanwhile the Chicago Tribune published this today:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-hillary-clinton_sun_finalnov23,0,5813736.story
although if someone wanted to tell me that the CT was an impenetrable bastion of hardline Republicanism, I would be very happy.
And now this looks pretty hopeful, which is also from today: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/us/politics/23hillary.html
^ And don’t miss clicking through to the sweet potato and butternut squash soup, although I don’t put white potatoes in mine any more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/health/nutrition/20recipehealth.html?em
‡‡‡ I’m going to do a little photo series on Flowers Indoors some day too
§ with driver
§§ Somebody tell me why a freshly sharpened pair of secaturs which can chomp through clematis stems and apple tree and jasmine twigs like me through a block of Green and Black’s gets all hopeless and sissy and jellyfishy at the prospect of cardboard–wet cardboard–and plastic string.
§§§ In the dark: and it’s still another month till the solstice
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.