Nobody Expects The Gardener To Be A Woman

Work is going really well. The bruise I have on my backside has been joined by sunburn after I failed to put SPF15 on my lower back, but life is good.


The biggest surprise for me so far has been the reaction to me being a female gardener (and from the odd snob to me being a native British gardener, since this sort of manual labour is seen as the preserve of the Eastern Europeans and Antipodeans). Two people, in passing, have commented. One said it was nice to see "a softer, more feminine touch" (ha - he's clearly never seen me pruning). And another was shocked to see a woman in such a physical job and asked what my husband thought of it all.

Now, the majority of my fellow garden bloggers are women, so I am sure you are all scoffing at the poor chauvinistic people I've spoken to. Some of you are gardening professionals, so I'm interested to know - have you ever had this surprising reaction? Do you smile sweetly whole being patronised, or do you have a pop at the sexist gits?

It's not as if there aren't any prominent female gardeners: Charlie Dimmock immediately springs to mind, and boy are my friends getting a lot of mileage out of comparing me to her!!

Battered And Bruised

Sorry for the silence since Easter. I started my new gardening job on Tuesday and I'm absolutely knackered! I have bruises, cuts and scratches everywhere, including a large black one the size of my hand just above my arse, from falling down a client's steps in the rain. I have been told that my skin will toughen up and that the first fortnight is always the worst. However, even when I was soaked to the skin, spending an entire day deadheading daffodils and pulling up ground-elder (my new mortal enemy), I was still having more fun than I ever did in my office job, so this is clearly a good move for me!

This week I learned that I'm pretty good at mowing lawns. I'm lousy at manoeuvring the lawnmower (so no one should watch me changing direction), but my straight lines are awesome. I learned that the designer I work for has several favourite plants, and that I need to read up more about how to look after them. And I learned that NO ONE who wants to maintain their own garden should, under any circumstances, plant a pampas grass. Ever. No exceptions.

Last Sunday I went to the Rare Plant Fair at Syon Park, where it was a pleasure to bump into Victoria! I have more ferns and a Euphorbia that's going to remind me of Spain every time I look at it. Yesterday I returned to Syon Park with my mother (more about that later), and next Saturday it's the annual visit to Akamba. Aren't I busy?

Some Pretty Things

Here's something to cheer up a miserable bank holiday weekend:


A bee orchid, spotted on a hillside just north of Ainsa, in northern Spain. And on the same hike, these thistle-type plants:


And the most beautiful little wood anemones on the banks of a stream:


Oh yeah, and some not so pretty but awesome things, like this enormous Agave (is it A. americana?):


I've never seen one so big growing outside of a botanical garden. Hell, I've never seen one so big growing outside!

Weeds V Prize Specimens

I've just got back from a 10-day geology fieldtrip, where I was one of the staff members driving the little buggers undergrads around the various outcrops. As I wasn't actively involved in the education of them, I was able to enjoy some of the non-geological aspects of the area as well as the geological.

And pretty much the first plant I noticed was this Euphorbia characias "Black Pearl":


You'd pay a lot of money for one of these in a garden centre - in fact, I can only find that variety available for mail order (and of course the relatively cheap £5 per plant is doubled in price by shipping at least). Yet they were growing wild as easily as dandelions do in the UK:


There was also Myrtis communis:


And I found the teeniest tiniest little daffodil I have ever seen, with flowers the size of my thumbnail:


Here's a planting scheme that wouldn't look out of place in a Chelsea show garden:


And I bet it isn't a cultivated one (although the marigolds are very popular potted plants in Huesca).

The most prevalent plants seemed to be the rosemary though, and they had the audacity to cover the outcrops the students needed to see:


They're some pretty big plants there, and I reckon that, while you can pick up a rosemary plant for £5 in Homebase, they'd cost a lot of money at that size and would take ages to get that big over here. I was waxing lyrical about the rosemary, when one of the undergrads in my car said "They're weeds in Italy". Which made me wonder why we prize so many different plants that are as common as muck overseas.


Then again, isn't everyone's prize plant specimen just another person's weed?