A Bit Of A Catch-Up

First of all, Woody has responded well to the magic juice provided by the vet. No more coughing and he's eating tremendous amounts of food and... he loves everybody. Especially Hannah, Evie and Martha, and even Nellybert.

Then there was the matter of Bert's book choices. Strumpet City was turned down because it was too big and he fell in love with David Sedaris. Bert never ceases to surprise me.

On the subject of books, First Daughter was laid low with COVID-19 for a week and has since made a full recovery. I asked her if she'd filled her downtime with books or streaming. She told me she'd just sourced a book, a dystopian novel set in Ireland that she'd hoped would fill the hours. But, because of current real-life events, the novel proved to be a tough read. If only I'd known I could have loaned her my small collection of Eva Ibbotson romances.

Speaking of which, it was Ganching who alerted me to Eva Ibbotson's adult fiction which, as Ganching informed us, Ibbotson wrote for 'very intelligent women with the flu'. It just so happened I'd already found three of those novels in a charity shop and hadn't got round to opening them as I thought they'd be a bit saccharine. I'm on the third one now and finding it and the previous two quite delightful. 

Zoe getting the Covid spurred me to book my free jabs, flu and the coronavirus. That happened this morning and straight after I was off to Antrim to breakfast with Jazzer. We had a quick look around the charity shops to see if we could find a particular kind of knee-length boot that Martha needed to complete the Buffy the Vampire Slayer costume she wanted to wear at Halloween. Unfortunately, we did not find them except we did but three sizes too small.

Then we went to Dobbies. I was quite excited about this as the last time I was in a Dobbies (somewhere near Lisburn) I got the most gorgeous crocus bulbs and some  Nasturtium 'Phoenix' seeds . Nothing appealed to me at Antrim Dobbies apart from a new pair of cuttings snips. The prices were sky-high. I discovered that the monster deliciosa I dismantled (because it got too big) and turned into six new plants would have cost me £120. We could not wait to get out of it. I won't be back. At least until the spring of 2024 if the world still exists then. 

Back at Jazzer's, I gathered nasturtium seeds from her plants. Mostly Phoenix. Funnily enough, she has a lot of them in her garden because I grew them from my collected seed and accidentally gave her all the seedlings because I'd neglected to label them. 

So that is my catch-up. I will try to get a few posts in over the weekend as I am going to Norfolk and London next week and Will Not Be Blogging.

And speaking of London, I heard the sad news this week that an old friend from Ballymena had died there at the start of the month. Kevin was one of the people that sent my life spinning in a new direction. And that's a story on its own. 

He was a good bloke. Too good for Ballymena.

Rhus Typhina or Stags Horn Sumach

How hard must it be to find someone selling this shrub for less than £30?

I first bought it in a 2litre pot at Ballymena Market. back when it stood on the original Fair Hill site, planted it at our first home on the Dreen Road where it flourished.

We sold that house to Clint and we knew he wasn't a lover of flowers. He was going to dig everything out! And he did. But, before that happened I returned to the garden, dug out suckers and potted them on. It took a while, a long while before we organised our new garden and decided where the Stag's Horn Sumach should go.

Too long. The Rhus Typhina was potted (and doing very well) in 3litre pots but, by the time I went looking for them, were gone. Nowhere to be found. Completely disappeared. Bear in mind that they were six or seven plants, among several thousand. It was a plant nursery after all, and my sumachs were lumped in along with the rest of the For Sale plants and some utter low-life landscaper type bod had arrived up someday, on a day that we weren't around and stole them. This light-fingered shit probably took other stuff as well but we don't keep track of lonicera, clematis and random shrubs so who knows.

That was years ago and I still haven't replaced my furry-branched sumach. There have been other sumachs but not Rhus Typhina. I'm old now, how many years have I got to appreciate those velvet branches and the unsurpassed Autumn colour. I could spend thirty quid being robbed by some pack of English bastards, charging me stupid postage and a further six quid surcharge for being from Northern Ireland, Channel Islands or The Fucking Hebrides like having to get on a boat means we get to be robbed. When I KNOW there are people within a ten-mile radius with Stag's Horn Sumach TORMENTING them with suckers and all you'd have to do is let me dig them up and I'll swap you a clematis, or some crocosmia Lucifer and as many aquilegias as you can carry.

What's brought this on, you might ask? Bert and I, this very day sailed to Dobbie's Nursery in Lisburn, which emporium offered Rhus Typhina on its website. I knew it was a Fool's Errand, websites being notoriously unreliable entities. And of course, I was right. I got into a conversation with one of the (Greenmount educated) sales assistants. It was an interesting and enlightening conversation. Apparently, crocosmia Lucifer is still a thing and also, the website is a nonsense. All that it means is that Dobbies knows Rhus Typhina is a plant, they've heard about it and might have sold it once, several years ago. What else can I say about Dobbies? It is very expensive. Araucaria that Bert sells for ten quid they sell for forty. There is a butchery? There is. I find that strange. The women's toilets are weird. The toilet cubicles are flimsy and cheap looking. The wash hand basins are shaped like flowers. They look stupid and hard to clean. I did not think of flowers, just bacteria.

Despite all this, I bought stuff. Strange stuff. Unusually coloured crocus, weird bean seeds and nasturtium seeds that are supposed to look like orchids. Dobbies has a chance to redeem itself. If these corms and seeds fulfil their promise I might return.

I still want Rhus Typhina.