[Roving Episode] It was a day in spring
Malus × domestica and Taraxacum officinale (apple and dandelion) take to May's springy stage in this special on location recording that starts deep in the beach woods and bursts into the orchard.
https://ko-fi.com/bendark
Episode overview:
[00:00:16] Ben talks winter and spring weather and how it affects the growth of plants like apples and bird cherries, and why he decided to record the episode in the woods rather than at his desk. The ground is covered in beach kernels and dry leaves, making a crunching noise when stepped on.
[00:02:48] The winter aconites are blooming staggered, possibly for an advantage. The area will soon be deserted of pollinators, but was once covered in flowers. The author wishes they could experience the beauty forever. They walk past an understory U tree.
[00:05:12] Discussion of spring in the UK and Denmark, including the appearance of dandelions and their potential use in producing rubber for car tires. We also examines the anatomy and function of dandelions, including their papas and role in seed dispersal.
[00:13:59] Blowing dandelion seeds not all bad. Dandelions hard to grow, try not cutting lawn too short. Seed-eating beetles help reduce dandelions. Leave lawn longer for fewer dandelions.
[00:16:20] Apple blossom time is perfect when buds are half open and half closed. The king bud produces the best fruit. Apples need cold for proper formation of flowers and lack of cold causes poor pollination.
[00:24:01] Observations of diverse species in grassy understory with small apples on dwarfing stock, well-pruned for fruit. Seeing a variety of heritage apple trees with grafted and non-grafted roots. Also, discussion of a recent planting project and a classic rose ACA flowering.
[00:30:50] Bee landed in hair, hair wild, no time for vines, thanking supporters.
Transcript
It's a terrible garden for weeds, this is. You know, sir, I am aware
Speaker:of that tree. They used to keep a boy here in the old days.
Speaker:Nothing to do all day but pull up weeds.
Speaker:Hello and welcome to Dear Gardener with
Speaker:me, Ben Dark. You join me sitting on a tree stump
Speaker:in the woods, the best sort of place to be on a day like this.
Speaker:It's hot out there a bright, bright blue sky.
Speaker:We have no sign of any cloud, so the woods feel
Speaker:like refuge for the first time this year,
Speaker:just about opening the beach leaves, which means that the
Speaker:apples that I'm going to go and see soon will
Speaker:certainly be out. They're pretty closely tied, I think.
Speaker:It's all due down to the temperature in the month before.
Speaker:So it doesn't really matter how cold January is or December is.
Speaker:What matters is how cold the end of March and April is. That's what
Speaker:tells us when the beach is going to open, when the apple is going to
Speaker:open, when the bird cherry opens. Those three are
Speaker:good indicators all at the same time.
Speaker:Anyway, I'm here because I had sat down at
Speaker:my desk to record an episode with some
Speaker:talk about teasing out napita
Speaker:and watering pots. And then I looked outside and
Speaker:it was all so beautiful and
Speaker:so beckoning, so I thought, well, why not take the mobile
Speaker:equipment and see what's going on
Speaker:in the woods and beyond? So here I am. There's going to
Speaker:be a bit of crunching as I stand up. We had a mast year last
Speaker:year, huge production of beach kernels and
Speaker:they are still flapping about
Speaker:on the floor. Well, not really flapping about, they're spiky little things,
Speaker:they make a good noise underfoot and I'll be walking on those.
Speaker:And there's a lot of dry leaves now. A couple of days are dry
Speaker:and what had seemed a flat centimeter
Speaker:thick mat has fluffed up into
Speaker:last year's old leaves, so they'll be crunching about in a second.
Speaker:What about weed killer for the dandelion?
Speaker:Would you like me to get some, sir? No, I prefer my own.
Speaker:I've got the materials. I wouldn't put it down. This dry weather,
Speaker:sir, tends to lie around, needs to soak in, you see.
Speaker:Not the way I use it, Jay. Not the way I
Speaker:use it.
Speaker:The last winter aconite. Last winter
Speaker:aconite just poking out there. They seem to have a slightly
Speaker:staggered flowering. I don't know if it's a particular
Speaker:population, flowers later, or if
Speaker:these ones are going for a second flush. Suppose I could go and have a
Speaker:little look.
Speaker:I think it's probably their first flowering. They just gone for
Speaker:a little bit, little bit of a later thing. Probably gives them some sort of
Speaker:advantage to have a population that doesn't flower all at once.
Speaker:It's a beautiful, beautiful, very long
Speaker:antennaed moth or a beetle disappeared
Speaker:into the woods and litter. Anyway, soon this place
Speaker:will all be bare and deserted. There's only a few litter pollinators remaining.
Speaker:Most of them have moved away into the
Speaker:open fields and gardens. But a month and a half ago, this really
Speaker:was where it was at in
Speaker:terms of flowering carpets of
Speaker:an enemies everywhere. It was one of those moments.
Speaker:I think it was two weeks ago, I was out in a similar woodland,
Speaker:looking at the most beautiful galaxy of
Speaker:anemones from a bud. And it was a moment when
Speaker:you wish I wish I knew less about plants. I wish I was
Speaker:seeing this for the very, very first time and could
Speaker:somehow convince myself that it would go on forever, that it
Speaker:wouldn't be over in just ten days,
Speaker:fading away for another year. That's why everyone
Speaker:gets into mindfulness, isn't it? To make these moments
Speaker:not extendable. Enjoyable. Enjoyable as we experience
Speaker:them. There's a bit of crunching here as I make my
Speaker:way out past a brilliant
Speaker:understory U for you, who has never seen
Speaker:the toporous trimmers.
Speaker:Driving an old file into the ground. Drop one of the tiny packets
Speaker:into each aperture. Do this in the case of each dandelion,
Speaker:taking a separate dose to each.
Speaker:And here we reach the woodland edge with some little
Speaker:bits of grass.
Speaker:And the first dandelion.
Speaker:This is definitely dandelion week.
Speaker:I was back in the UK a little bit
Speaker:last week. Lovely living between two
Speaker:countries like this,
Speaker:because you experience spring
Speaker:twice, almost. And if there's something you really, really enjoyed in
Speaker:a bit of UK spring, you can hot foot it over to
Speaker:Denmark, where starts are pretty similar,
Speaker:and you can experience it again two weeks later. So that's
Speaker:a tip for anyone that really
Speaker:enjoyed a bit of this spring or really like something they're seeing now.
Speaker:Book yourself. Train journey, car journey,
Speaker:not a flight, because you'll ruin my podcast and come out
Speaker:here and see it again. I suppose you do get
Speaker:people who behave almost like the
Speaker:groupies who follow a band around the country and go to every
Speaker:single one of their shows. You could slowly walk
Speaker:north with the wooden enemies singularly came out
Speaker:at wooden enemy pace.
Speaker:Anyway, coming around the corner now, past these rotted
Speaker:old stumps, gnarled old trees.
Speaker:Yes, with the UK. The UK was wet and warm.
Speaker:We had a couple of days of absolutely torrential rain
Speaker:and then those blissful evenings where
Speaker:you get dry under dove
Speaker:gray sky after a whole day of wet and everything is
Speaker:glistening and suddenly the worhub is 200%
Speaker:more alive. Every single hedgerow is
Speaker:covered in those tiny glass like new
Speaker:little snails. And little slugs,
Speaker:so sweet little slugs that you could make a
Speaker:Disney cartoon out of. They look so charming.
Speaker:Lots of those eating the garlic mustard.
Speaker:And in the UK, the main dandelion crop,
Speaker:the main dandelion flush, had gone to seedhead,
Speaker:which was a delight for my son, who is a
Speaker:big dandelion puffing fan puffing.
Speaker:It incredibly ostentatiously. Gets down to dandelion
Speaker:level, squatting on his haunches and does that big
Speaker:toddler blowing out a candle puff that incredibly
Speaker:inefficient. All noise
Speaker:and rasp and no actual air
Speaker:until the seeds go away. So he really
Speaker:enjoyed that. But here we have our dandelions out
Speaker:and yellow.
Speaker:They're really good flowers. I know that I'm not alone in
Speaker:saying that the RHS this year is doing a big hero plant
Speaker:campaign. These things are no longer weeds, they are
Speaker:hero plants, and we should all be appreciating them
Speaker:in our lawns. And we should. We really should.
Speaker:I know there's lots of professional gardeners
Speaker:who listen to this podcast, who tend to nowadays
Speaker:be in the vanguard of the
Speaker:embracing weeds and getting rid of all
Speaker:of those nasty chemicals. Moving didn't used to be so, but now they are,
Speaker:and more often than not, them trying to convince their clients to go
Speaker:weed killer free. They can listen to this section of the podcast where I
Speaker:just pick up a little dandelion and pluck it and marvel
Speaker:at how amazing it is. I've got a little yellow one in my hand now,
Speaker:full of ants. I wonder what the ants are doing.
Speaker:I doubt they're harvesting the latex. You can
Speaker:make rubber from dandelions,
Speaker:not from our native dandelion, not from the Taraxicum
Speaker:aficionale, but from one of its
Speaker:Kyrgyzstani relatives. I think you're able to
Speaker:harvest that white SAP that just came out when I plugged that there
Speaker:and refine it in just the same way you do the
Speaker:rubber tree. It's the same compound
Speaker:at latex. Plants tend to use
Speaker:the same compounds. When a plant is producing
Speaker:anthrocyanins, it is not reinventing the wheel each time.
Speaker:It's using the same sort of stuff. And this is the
Speaker:right stuff to make tires out of. You could drive your car
Speaker:on dandelion tires one day.
Speaker:They know what those little creatures were doing. There's lots of
Speaker:life that lives inside a dandelion flower
Speaker:because it's such a rich
Speaker:bit of nutrient there when
Speaker:you're pumping the energy up to produce
Speaker:those petals. But particularly when the fertilizers
Speaker:have come and you
Speaker:have this race to develop seeds and get them
Speaker:away quickly before all of the little
Speaker:field grubs and beaters and things can get in there and lay
Speaker:little white worms at the bottom and start devouring them. Or you
Speaker:sometimes tear open a dandelion and
Speaker:you can see little black bits at the bottom. And that's where a
Speaker:little weevil has been in there eating
Speaker:and fallen out and pupating.
Speaker:I'm just opening another one up now. This is a dandelion
Speaker:that has been pollinated. The flowers are quite interesting.
Speaker:It's asterisfier, so it's all sort of
Speaker:disc and ray florets dandelion. The vast majority of them are
Speaker:ray florets, those fused petals
Speaker:in a tube that go out to create a great big pom pom.
Speaker:Looking at now, you can see the anthers
Speaker:rising in between the maturing from the
Speaker:outside and then pushing them on later. Anyway,
Speaker:the one that's pollinated is at the stage where it's developing
Speaker:the great pappas, the umbrella
Speaker:thing on the top, that will carry them away. I was reading
Speaker:once the role of the pappas,
Speaker:the papas. It's got a couple
Speaker:of things that it obviously carries. It it obviously is the parachute,
Speaker:but it's also a sort of protection.
Speaker:So if you are a snuffily sort
Speaker:of creature who's wandering around looking for a snack, a little
Speaker:ball of seeds presented to you on the long dandelions
Speaker:stem would be very tempting indeed. But you don't
Speaker:really want a mouthful of furry pappas
Speaker:on there. And the third one,
Speaker:they are incredibly good wicks,
Speaker:so they take up ambient moisture and this doesn't
Speaker:help them, particularly in flying, but what it does help is when they
Speaker:land on the ground, the papas
Speaker:can turn sideways and sort of suck moisture
Speaker:up to the seed from the air,
Speaker:which really helps that initial germination bit.
Speaker:It's a marvel of a marvel of
Speaker:evolution, really. The papas, the parachute, is dead cells.
Speaker:It is an equivalent of our hair and things,
Speaker:but they can open
Speaker:and close, draw themselves in and open up again and
Speaker:close up again, depending on whether it's a nice day for
Speaker:flying. That all depends on that little pad
Speaker:at the bottom, that little apical thing.
Speaker:It's.
Speaker:Hello, Martin. Hello. Martin armstrong
Speaker:here. Look, I'm sorry about all this kerfuffle about the Velanoeth estate.
Speaker:Why, why don't you pop over to Mayfield for
Speaker:tea? We can chat about the whole thing informally and I'll
Speaker:show you around the garden. I'm rather proud of it, actually.
Speaker:When my son was doing all the blowing, we got all sorts of people saying,
Speaker:oh, he's not going to be very popular, the dandelion seeds
Speaker:flying off in the area, but they would have all come off anyway. And he
Speaker:probably actually did them a favor because the way
Speaker:he had to huff at them probably means they weren't
Speaker:mature seeds he was sending out anyway. So he's probably
Speaker:done some sterilization efforts for
Speaker:those of the world who hate dandelions in their lawn.
Speaker:If you do hate dandelions, if you do hate dandelions in your lawn,
Speaker:my advice would be not to cut it. So, sure,
Speaker:dandelion seedlings, well, their germination
Speaker:rate is tiny and generally what happens is a lot
Speaker:of them get eaten by seed eating beetles. There's a whole,
Speaker:whole host of generative seed
Speaker:eating species, but there's a particular one,
Speaker:I can't remember what it is. It's amos, something like that.
Speaker:Amethyst. The sun beetles.
Speaker:Amora. Amora might be the sun
Speaker:beetles, and some of them specialize in just
Speaker:eating dandelion seeds.
Speaker:So a couple of matchbox full of those and
Speaker:then just don't cut your lawn so short because they're tap root species.
Speaker:The dandelion wants to develop a really big root
Speaker:system and that's what it really focuses on first so they're very vulnerable
Speaker:to getting outgrown by surrounding
Speaker:grasses, even by surrounding clothes in that very,
Speaker:very early stage. So leave it a little bit longer and you have
Speaker:far fewer.
Speaker:As I was saying, my dear Martin, all would be fine if it wasn't for
Speaker:these deuced weeds. Yes, measure about
Speaker:a martyr to weeds. Now, my gardener was saying it's because we
Speaker:are surrounded by fields here. My clients are adamant.
Speaker:I see the majors left the tea thing. Sit you down. Sit you down.
Speaker:One lump or two, please. I'm afraid I am a little and
Speaker:you must have one of these buttered stones. Excuse my
Speaker:fingers.
Speaker:We're in an orchard right now. You probably heard the Gate
Speaker:Creek open just walking up to
Speaker:one of the apples here. It's perfect. Perfect apple
Speaker:blossom time. You don't want to catch an apple blossom tree too late because
Speaker:you lose the pink. The pink in an apple is concentrated on
Speaker:the backside of the petal and strongest
Speaker:when they are tightly, tightly furled. And you get a suggestion
Speaker:of pink in the veining and a blush on
Speaker:the back later on, but you see far less of it. So you
Speaker:want to find a tree like the one I'm looking at now that has half
Speaker:buds open and half buds closed. They're funny
Speaker:little things, these apertures.
Speaker:This one, the king bud, is just over. So I don't know if you've ever
Speaker:looked at your aperture. Go and go and look at them. You'll find that
Speaker:generally they are all clusters
Speaker:of five or sometimes six flowers,
Speaker:sometimes seven as well on each tip
Speaker:bearing or spur bearing bit. And there'll be one bud,
Speaker:the king bud, that opens before the others.
Speaker:And that's the bud that apparently produces
Speaker:the best fruit. It opens first, it'll be open on its own for a few
Speaker:days and then these lateral buds start doing their business.
Speaker:So if you are there for a day where you have the king buds open
Speaker:and maybe one lateral bud and three lateral
Speaker:buds still to come, one in pink tight furl, one in
Speaker:just opening and the other in
Speaker:almost ready to if you squeezed it,
Speaker:it would be open stage. That's the best time, I think, to look at apple
Speaker:trees. They are my favorite
Speaker:blossom tree, I think. I don't like them.
Speaker:Too heavy with blossom. You know, when you see a really heavily
Speaker:blossomed ornamental crab apple species
Speaker:and you can't see through it, I think that loses a little bit of the
Speaker:magic and romance. You want to have a little bit of a
Speaker:little bit of gap and green behind. The green also
Speaker:helps because they do flower with the new leaves.
Speaker:I think they work really well together. That pink and white and green and that
Speaker:special, that special gray green,
Speaker:that special velvet green that covers
Speaker:the calyx and the flower stalk.
Speaker:It's something that you probably don't even notice when you
Speaker:see an apple tree. But I think it does. I think that tone, that gray
Speaker:green is such a good offsetter,
Speaker:as anyone who has painted their door in
Speaker:that color recently will no doubt know.
Speaker:It almost tends towards powdery mildew color.
Speaker:I suppose that's beautiful in a way as well.
Speaker:Anyway, yes, those things that block Prunes Canzan, which I
Speaker:was talking about last week, is a key example of that, that completely block
Speaker:the sky are lovely, but they haven't got the joy
Speaker:of the blue or the gray or whatever
Speaker:else is going on in the environment behind them. I've been
Speaker:reading a lot of Priest recently,
Speaker:as I like to do, and I'm
Speaker:a great proust advocate. And don't worry about being
Speaker:regarded as pretentious because you'll end up enjoying it and you can't be pretentious
Speaker:if you actually do enjoy it. I'm reading
Speaker:Sodom and Gamora or The Cities of the Plain, which had his fourth
Speaker:book in that Remembrances of
Speaker:Things Past series. And there's a wonderful bit
Speaker:just after the period of
Speaker:horrible self indulgent mourning for
Speaker:his grandmother when
Speaker:he realizes how horrible he was all
Speaker:the time and he snapped out of it, the narrator by the
Speaker:apple trees in blossom and
Speaker:the sight of the blue sky between them. There's a great passage
Speaker:and he's talking about seeing them with this blue behind it
Speaker:as if they had been painted by the best sort of amateur painter.
Speaker:And then suddenly the sky turns and it grays and turns
Speaker:to slashing rain and it's after these
Speaker:two solid pages of proper bruce and
Speaker:text where you don't get a paragraph break, you suddenly get
Speaker:a little semicolon. It was a day in
Speaker:spring. I think about that a lot this spring. It was a day
Speaker:in spring when I'm missing my wooden enemies
Speaker:and mourning that they're gone for another year. It was a
Speaker:day in the spring. Anyway, those are the apples.
Speaker:Those are my thoughts on them. They're good plants for Denmark. They do
Speaker:well here, the apples. Apples need cold.
Speaker:It's essential to their flowering
Speaker:and producing. They start all the flower buds,
Speaker:flowers and plants and trees, they start working well in advance of what we
Speaker:think. All of these buds that I'm looking at now and getting such
Speaker:great pleasure from probably started developing around harvest
Speaker:time last year. But they
Speaker:kind of develop as just do anything.
Speaker:Like, here's a bud, we'll decide what to do with it later. And then
Speaker:it's the temperatures which trigger the chemical symbols and the hormonal
Speaker:symbols that let's put this one into a branch, let's put
Speaker:this one into a flower. And not having cold winters, messes that
Speaker:all up. And also messes up the
Speaker:late winter, early spring, messes up the
Speaker:actual formation of the individual flowers. Just letting these
Speaker:bunch of Hollywood makers go off to wherever they're
Speaker:going. Messes up the formation of
Speaker:the flowers. So the late January,
Speaker:February, March time is when all of those cells are
Speaker:differentiating themselves inside the buds I'm looking at now,
Speaker:when they say I'll be an ovary, you be a pistol,
Speaker:you be an anthro and you be a bit of pollen. And it's pollen
Speaker:is always the last one to come. So if you don't get any cold
Speaker:in late spring, you get plants without pestiles and without pollen,
Speaker:which are useless for producing any apples.
Speaker:So next time, if you find yourself cursing, as I
Speaker:frequently did in this very, very long
Speaker:lingering winter, you find yourself cursing that.
Speaker:Think of the apples, think of the cider,
Speaker:think of the blossom that you will see in the spring.
Speaker:It's all going to be worth it.
Speaker:My father in law is a chemist and he had some of them analyzed.
Speaker:If you look here, you'll see a small hole has been punched in
Speaker:the bottom of some of them and then covered over. Yes, I see. And these
Speaker:ones contained arsenic. Yes. Well, it's a ticklish business,
Speaker:gentleman. I'll see what I can do.
Speaker:I'll need the urine sample and these chocolates for analysis by
Speaker:our people. In the meantime, Mr martin don't
Speaker:accept any more tea invitations from the Major. That's just the trouble.
Speaker:He keeps on inviting. Mr Martin, whatever you do, don't go.
Speaker:Very nice. There's lots of understory
Speaker:things. You really can see the difference that leaving grass
Speaker:makes. The mowing here is obviously
Speaker:done by machine. You can see that because they have quite
Speaker:large turning circle around the tree where
Speaker:they can't get close enough. If you had a pedestrian mower, you'd be able to
Speaker:get closer and they haven't left it long deliberately,
Speaker:but they're not able to reach under each tree. And the
Speaker:diversity of species under the trees is fantastic.
Speaker:I guess partially it's because these are small apples on
Speaker:dwarfing stock, well pruned for fruit, which means well pruned
Speaker:to get light through, which means they're never casting a dense shade, but they
Speaker:are able to provide a little bit of shelter
Speaker:and protection. They're not baking like
Speaker:you get in a large flat lawn. Under this one,
Speaker:we've got little speed wells looking absolutely gorgeous
Speaker:there. Lovely little plant,
Speaker:just two anthers. And then
Speaker:you've got great collection of daisies. You've got
Speaker:the fading remnants of something ornamental,
Speaker:something from a lily family.
Speaker:And you've got celendine over
Speaker:here. We've got a dock. Over here.
Speaker:We've got cancer mum growing underneath
Speaker:this one, which is very exciting to see this
Speaker:cardamom protensus, which is the cuckoo
Speaker:flower. Now this seems right, seeing this on
Speaker:a sunny day. It always seems to me to be
Speaker:a plant that you should be seeing in the wet.
Speaker:Apparently it strikes very easily
Speaker:from leaf cuttings. Watching a video, I can't
Speaker:remember who put it on the internet of how to strike that from
Speaker:leaf cuttings. It's quite good. Pink is a bit pinker than
Speaker:the so it's not pinker. It's a bit more mauve
Speaker:than the apple blossom above. Got a bit more of that
Speaker:brassica Ethernet. It's got a classic brassica
Speaker:shaped the flower very cruciform.
Speaker:Anyway, in terms of my gardening, this has
Speaker:been a fairly shy old week with
Speaker:a trip back to the UK and a lot of looking after.
Speaker:The young boy, I haven't done so much. I did do some
Speaker:planting with him at his nursery on Grandparents
Speaker:Day. I pretended to be the youngest grandparent there because he doesn't have
Speaker:grandparents in this country. Grandparents Day is a big thing going
Speaker:and plant plants. We put in some of my seedlings,
Speaker:which I've grown myself, which is pleasant, and some of
Speaker:that supermarket salvia, and hopefully
Speaker:there'll be the best plants there, beat all the other grandparents
Speaker:and I can be the youngest and the best garden out of all
Speaker:the grandparents. That would be very satisfying. Now, this is a proper tree,
Speaker:I think, that here they're growing
Speaker:a huge variety of apples and they're almost doing it as
Speaker:a demonstration of different heritage varieties.
Speaker:But they're all grafts, all grafted onto
Speaker:extremely dwarfing root stock, so they never get particularly
Speaker:big. And all grafted at the same height,
Speaker:at sort of well above
Speaker:hip height, between sort of hip and nipple height,
Speaker:they branch out. And so you don't get the wonderful forms that apples grown
Speaker:on their own root stock do, nor the wonderful size.
Speaker:And here we see an ancient for apple trips which
Speaker:aren't particularly long lived species, an ancient apple that is obviously on its
Speaker:own rootstock. So branches, low branches at
Speaker:knee height and splits off into three
Speaker:directions, twisting each one like a leg,
Speaker:like the symbol for the Isle of man.
Speaker:And it's glorious to see and it's big and it
Speaker:looks noble as a tree.
Speaker:I was reading that even extremely vigorous
Speaker:root stock will never grow a bigger plant than a plant on its own
Speaker:root stock, as it were.
Speaker:This one, I think, is definitely I can't see any sign of historic
Speaker:grafting, so it's on its own root stock. And there's a little egg here.
Speaker:Can't see any nest up there. Maybe someone robbed that
Speaker:from a nest deeper in the forest and put it there.
Speaker:There's a great deal of bees looking up
Speaker:into the canopy of this tree. You can see some bumblebees and some honeybees fluffing
Speaker:around in there. Apple trees have a good
Speaker:combination. A classic. This is such a classic flower.
Speaker:Classic. I'll do a bit of looking pretty with pink and white and I'll do
Speaker:a bit of smelling nice with a few
Speaker:benzene compounds in linear smelling it now actually,
Speaker:these are the ones I can't smell. Maybe that's maybe
Speaker:I've been by damaged by the various
Speaker:illnesses that have swept through the global population.
Speaker:But you can here we go. This one's just got king Bud.
Speaker:Just open this one king. But yes, there we go. And that's that sort of
Speaker:cleany, fresh heat, benzoid alcohol kind of
Speaker:fragrance. So the bees are going for that and they're going for the looks.
Speaker:And it's just a good bit of classic rose
Speaker:ACA flowering. I love to see it.
Speaker:Anyway, probably time to head back to my
Speaker:bicycle now. I got to get back to the nursery and
Speaker:pick up the boy. I might take a bottle of water with me
Speaker:and water my plant, because I bet
Speaker:none of the other grandparents would do that. Bet they'll all forget.
Speaker:Then. I'm guaranteed to win.
Speaker:Just going to pass this little hoppy blackbird out
Speaker:onto the gravel path and down through an avenue
Speaker:of malice. Proper ornamental
Speaker:crab apple here, doing exactly what I said it shouldn't.
Speaker:Creating a dense wall of blossom.
Speaker:Yes, come across and have a cup of tea. I've got some cakes
Speaker:and things in. Kettles boiling. What about it?
Speaker:I don't know if you heard that bee landed in my hair.
Speaker:My hair looking quite wild at the moment. Maybe it thought that it was
Speaker:a good place to find a hole to nest
Speaker:in. Maybe some of the curls looked
Speaker:like old wounds on a tree trunk.
Speaker:Anyway, I had a little buzz around in my hair and it was gone.
Speaker:Now I'm
Speaker:not going to go. I'm not going to go down there. I don't have time
Speaker:to go and look at the vines. We'll have to do it another time.
Speaker:Anyway, thank you very much for joining me on this little walk
Speaker:through the woods and out into
Speaker:the orchard. Before I go, I must say a
Speaker:very quick thank you to Martha, who supported the podcast on
Speaker:COFI after last week's episode. It really does
Speaker:help me to do this and to not have to
Speaker:put Adverts through the middle of it and all that sort of
Speaker:stuff. So thank you very much to you and thank you
Speaker:to everyone else for listening to this.
Speaker:See you again very soon. Thank you and bye bye.
Speaker:Times are getting tough and the folks are cutting down. They even decide
Speaker:to do their own gardening. They're all gardening.
Speaker:Take my advice and knock off for a while. The Happiness Boys are on
Speaker:a rampage. Fred has helped
