The New Jungle
We’re due a frost tonight. I’m moving to Antarctica. Then I won’t be tempted to try to garden outdoors. I think I’d have some difficulty getting really emotionally involved with lichens.* And they probably don’t have whitefly in Antarctica. You can turn your growlights on high and watch everything twine up your artistically plastic-swathed bookshelves**. Although hellhound hurtling would take on a whole new dimension in Antarctica.
Meanwhile, back in England . . . the new jungle. 
I know it’s a terrible photo but I’m sitting in the sink to take it at all. Ah yes the sink.
I have of course spent the last several afternoons in the garden doing things like potting up, potting on, and cutting back, so all kinds of little green things are at their most vulnerable. That clump of dead twigs in the sink, for example, is a borderline tender clematis that I thought had croaked by the end of last year, so I didn’t bother to bring it indoors when the snow started falling. I went to throw it out a few days ago and thought, well, it won’t hurt to chop it down first and make sure there aren’t any live stems left . . . and there were live stems, and while you can’t see it in this photo, there are tiny fuzzy pale green noses poking out all over it, including on a lot of the stems I was sure were dead.
You can barely see them but there are four small black pots at the foot of the fruit trees which are the white mini rose I bought at the florist’s about two months ago when there was about forty-five minutes of daylight per day and feeling the lack of Green Growing Things, preferably the kind that flower, was at its height. It promptly did what in my experience florist’s mini roses do, which is froze in its tracks and did nothing. It’s like buying cut flowers with too much foliage. But unlike cut flowers there’s the thrill of waiting to see which way they will go when they come out of their coma: will they live or will they die? About a fortnight ago this one(s) started putting out leaves like mad, and I thought, oh, great, I might get a few flowers out of it this summer before it crashes and burns permanently: mini roses and I have a tricky relationship. Now the other thing about florist’s plants is that when you go to pot them on you find there are two of them . . . except in this case there were four. In a pot the width of the palm of my hand. Much muttering today while I tried to untangle their roots. . . .
But the main item on the agenda of course is the rose hedge. Danae, who is a Hybrid Musk, should be okay: she’s in a huge pot next to Mme Isaac, and there she stays. But the two chinas and a tea are not going to like being enveloped in a frost*** on their second night outside their brown-paper incubator–and when they were still a small, live-plant-mailing-bag-sized hedge I was bringing them indoors for dubious overnights . . . so obviously I brought them indoors. 
†
Whereupon they peed all over the floor, as freshly potted ††(and watered) plants are inclined to do. And the little row of four pots on the table behind them‡ are rhododendrons: same drill as the mini rose, except these were decently two to a pot, and they flowered like mad for weeks. Like this. 
Gaudy. We like gaudy.
And tomorrow, of course, I get to take them all out again.
* * *
* I could be wrong.
** I’m glad to have my sitting-room back.
***Peter has suggested I get Atlas to rig some kind of roller at the top of my walls, buy some very large rolls of bubble wrap and turn my entire garden at the cottage into a greenhouse. Ha ha bloody ha.
† I brought Tipsy in last night. On afternoons I garden, hellhounds get their final hurtle late. And I thought uneasily that the air had rather a nip to it. I rushed to examine the thermometer when we got back and it said 41°F. Then it said 40. Then it said 39. Then it said 38. Then it said 37 . . . at which point my nerve broke, since I don’t want to let Tipsy get anywhere near a frost, and brought her in. By the time I went to bed it was 41 again. Sigh.
†† Some other evening I’ll do my rant about price stickers that don’t come off.
Oh, and yes, that is a bottle of Tattinger’s sitting on the floor. It’s a long story.
‡ The one by itself is sitting on a manuscript of positively exalted badness. I know I’m a cow–I warn publishers who write asking to send me books for possible blurbs that I’m a cow–but golly howdy gosh wow. Maybe I’ve just read too many mss. lately. There’s been kind of a run on. The latest one arrived a couple of days ago and I haven’t even got it out of its envelope yet. Maybe it’s a February thing. Maybe they’re like potted florist’s roses: you say yes to one and four arrive.
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