Balboa Park, Broadening the Mind and Bletting

I am languishing in that gloriously indulgent state of post-holiday torpor where everything needs doing and nothing gets done. This predicament is not helped by our medlar crop (all one of it) which catches the sunlight far more impressively than a stack of unopened post and entices me outside for a spot of medlar-gazing every time I am in danger of doing something useful.

Travel broadens the mind; or in my case, the mind and the waistline. Having eaten my way around sunny San Diego (with a few L.A. days thrown in for good measure), I have returned to icy Norfolk besotted with a vegetable I grow only because it is sown when I am raring to get outside and prod some seeds into the soil and it crops so quickly that I feel clever in the catch crop department. There has never been any great desire to actually eat it; until now. I refer, of course, to the potentially fiery and rather beautiful radish. Who could have imagined the transformation from compulsory (because we grew it... again) to desirable (we want to grow it again and again) achieved by showing these little beauties a pan? Next year I shall embrace the humble radish, elevate it out of the compost bin and place it proudly atop the pedestal of great veg (I only hope that my culinary skills are sufficient to fulfil this pledge). 

Calotropis gigantea - Balboa Park Botanical House

It would be a long way to travel solely to expand our experience of salad veg, but thankfully California has much more to offer than revelatory radish dishes. Seeing a creature for the first time is a significant event and despite the fact that the internet is brimming with pictures to download, I like to record these moments with my own camera. I would love to share one of my hummingbird photographs with you, but while I was adept at capturing the flower a hummingbird had just left, the hummingbird itself resembled a clod of clay with blurred fins attached. I now have profound respect for anyone who succeeds in photographing hummingbirds; give me a bumble bee any day of the week.

It was while on a visit to Balboa Park in San Diego that the unthinkable happened: I actually heard myself declaring that the botanical house was so beautiful that I wouldn’t mind if it contained no plants (I was clearly driven to distraction by my failure on the photography front). Happily, this building, which is one of the largest lath structures in the world, is home to a couple of thousand plants, so there was no risk of having to eat my words along with a side order of fries and a slab of Monterey Jack cheese. Away from the botanical house, the rose garden was a mass of colour. Roses bloom here from March to December and with 2,500 plants and almost 200 varieties which are clearly labelled, this is more than a great backdrop to wedding photos; it is also a fabulous resource when selecting roses to grow. The adjacent desert garden is impressive; but the extraordinary juxtaposition of the winter-flowering rose garden and the desert garden will live with me long after the holiday weight gain has been worked off (if indeed I ever get round to enough exercise to burn a single calorie). 

Cacti and succulents against a backdrop of roses

One of the joys of blogging is that, like travel, it can broaden the mind. I particularly enjoy reading about gardeners’ experiences of growing plants in different parts of the world and it is always fascinating to discover that a benign plant in my corner of England is a rampaging bully elsewhere on the planet. I was serenading a plant with superlatives in California when I was stopped mid-flow by a local, who explained that the object of my passion was the bane of his borders. A weed? How can anything as attractive as Asparagus densiflorus be dismissed as a weed? 

Asparagus densiflorus

Perhaps I should look more appreciatively at my own weeds as someone, somewhere might be envying those frothy clouds of ground elder flowers or the beautiful twining stems of bindweed. On the other hand, perhaps I should stop dreaming and start weeding. First though, I will pour myself another coffee and spend a few moments pondering bletting my solitary medlar.

Christopher Columbus meets Walt Disney in the Orchard

There is a curious pattern of behaviour prevalent among gardeners whereby we garden for relaxation, yet we are incapable of sitting down and relaxing in our gardens because some little task will catch our attention and before we know it, we are gardening again. In our house it is known as Gardeners' Relaxation Aversion Syndrome (GRAS). 

Christopher Columbus took the vital first step towards remedying GRAS in Europe by introducing the hammock. When lolling in a hammock, the gardener's eyes are diverted skywards and away from all those little gardening tasks and should a weed be detected, the effort of exiting a hammock in haste is enough to subdue any desire to spring into action. The indigenous people of Middle and South America called the hammock the “cradle of the gods”; I like to think of it as the “cradle of the gardener”. 

A hammock with a view in Tuscany

My own research, involving rigorous relaxation in hammocks and more than a few extremely pleasant garden visits, suggests that the most effective treatment for GRAS involves a combination of hammock and orchard, so in the name of research (along with a passion for growing food and a love of orchards), I have been planting more fruit trees. 

Last year I popped a medlar in the farmhouse garden. I did this because in the seventeenth century, Culpeper credited the medlar with "making joyful mothers". It's a pretty enough thing, but I can't say there has been a significant increase in maternal joy in our house. Perhaps that will change when it fruits. To add to the medlar, we now have apples, pears, plums, gages, cherries, mulberries and quince in the orchard. Anyone might think that Walt Disney was directing the planting, which was overseen by a wise owl

with a pheasant surveying posts

and Sprout doing the fetching and carrying....(and no, we didn’t whistle while we worked). 

Planting trees is an investment in the future. These saplings are unlikely to support fruit for a year or two, let alone a hammock cradling a chocoholic welly-shod gardener, so I am going to plant a couple of sturdy, highly secured posts adorned with honeysuckle to support my cradle. Of course, the probability of finding my dream cradling device - the heated hammock - is about the same as the likelihood of the pheasant fitting on the seed feeder, but we shall both remain optimistic.

Come spring, I will lie in my hammock in an orchard filled with bird song and apple blossom. Mr and Mrs Pheasant and their jolly brood of young will parade past Sprout as he slumbers contentedly in the meadow grass under the watchful gaze of the wise owl. I will close my eyes and give thanks for Christopher Columbus' discovery and its soothing influence on GRAS, before leaping from my cradle in an ungainly fashion as GRAS reminds me that the lawn needs mowing.