mrsgarnettsgardendotcom

June 10th 2011,  A charming and merry little boy called Stephen Emmanuel was christened here on Sunday, having come all the way from New York for the privilege.  His delightful Mum and Dad had assembled a party, and borrowed three of my “wedding hats” to mark the celebration. It was all good fun, though his baptism card contained a full frontal nude shot of him wearing his new-born clamp, for which I think he won’t thank them in fifteen years time!

I had my little row of blue stitches out this morning, and after a check up in the hospital have been signed off as recovered, so that is a relief. This week I was supposed to be in London for two nights, but on Tuesday our morning train was stopped at Kettering, and we were advised to return north, after a “security alert” closed the lines into London, so I stayed in the same seat and this time went backwards through the countryside! Poor David had to pick me up again, only to take me once more to Chesterfield station early on Wednesday.

Two very busy days were divided by a charming piano recital in St John’s SS, by an Australian virtuoso, Alexander Boyd, who played real lollipop favourites, – Chopin Mendelssohn, and Ravel.  – like the Bee’s wedding, and the lovely things in the Tombeau de Couperin.  I came out, as usual, thinking, – well, I wish I had practised more, but would never in a million years have sounded like that!  A small but appreciative audience with many of his students there I think. He was born in 1975.  I sat in the cheapest unallocated seats, but my immediate neighbour in the more expensive ones, 2.6 ft away, turned out to be David Dimbleby.  I felt like asking him a question!

I thought, as I listened to the lyrical recital, of Barbara Thorley, our music teacher at Stroud High, who died on Ascension Day last week, June 2nd, and who taught me most of what I know about music and singing.  It seems so unexpected that she had died, and I regret not visiting her for years, as I promised in every Christmas letter we exchanged over the years. She was 83, and had the prettiest handwriting of anyone I have ever known. That at least never changed, although she stopped playing the piano after a stroke some years ago, and had battled with breast cancer off and on since her early sixties.

  She took us, in the Senior Choir  to win the gold cup at the Cheltenham music festival in 1969, and though I was never more than an average voice, it was a moment to remember, when we beat off everyone of the adult choirs to gain the prize. ( The cup was later stolen from the school front hall trophies cabinet, but that is another story.) I hope to go to her funeral in Painswick next Monday, combining it with a visit to my Dad, who turns 85 on June 16th.   

Barbara’s death further adds to the depressing toll of loved ones, family and friends we have lost this year, more than a dozen altogether. So many people are slipping off stage, never to make another entrance, and take all their talent and brilliant individuality with them.  I don’t know how I feel, except to realise that one has to grip on and enjoy life to the full, however painful or irritating or exhausting it is.  Life is meant to be lived!  I think of that great song from Gypsy, “Some people . . .“

 Now I must go and take my mother shopping, 89 and still keen to live in the world, not in her living room,  despite general frailties and a rather patchy short-term memory!

The face is definitely improving, my black eyes have slid down my cheeks to form  faintly exotic yellow patches, and I no longer scare little children. I went to the surgery to see the nurse today and we agreed to leave the stitches above my eyebrow until Friday, after I come back from London. That area is still rather painful and I am frightened by the thought of coming apart at the seams while in the big city.  I put my rapid recovery down to copious amounts of Vit E capsule oil smoothed in, alternatively  with olive oil. (Maybe that is why I am turning yellow!)  Tim and Clare came over from Liverpool with Lucy for Saturday night and we had a lovely visit. I hope they enjoyed it as much!

Having a little extra time I copied my blog bits and pieces over to a Word document and realised how careless the spelling has been, so I corrected it all. I apparently can’t spell apparently, or cockerel, – must be the Gloucestershire accent!  My excuse is that I have been writing this mostly on a laptop in bed at 4 in the morning. But we will try harder in future.  The bees are having to learn to read too, as Jane has written out little notices for them to tell them where to drink.  (Poor dear- it must all be getting too much for her!)

On the allotment, I have made the hot bed from the second old bookcase frame I was given, filling it with a bottom layer of cardboard, then a pile of horse manure, then some growbags and finally good soil from the end of the plot, and have planted courgettes into it.  No more rain since last weekend’s day of grace, so I was watering early the corn and potatoes, beans and peas this morning.  The country is divided between the NW/wet, and the SE- very dry. We are just on the east side of the middle.  More terrible floods in the mid-west of the USA, and drought in China.  Fires in Arizona, – another bad aftershock in Christchurch – who said weather people lead boring lives!

A mystery parcel turned up a few days ago from Jersey plants, containing 70 mimulus plants! Apparently I had ticked a box to receive a mystery bonus box of plants. So I felt even more like the old woman who lived in the shoe, horticulturally speaking.  If I could find something to line my hanging baskets with, I could start to move some plants on. I have eight basket frames. Ingenuity will come up with an answer I am sure, the garden centre had run out of fancy liners, which are expensive anyway, As my face still looks like a road crash, and I can hardly see out of one eye, I will look round the house to find something, – how about old woolly jumpers in a woodland shade. – we certainly have a lot of them about!

Food production round up. – the raised bed crop of pak choi are fully grown and we have started to eat them before they bolt. Bolting has been a problem for me this spring, due to the immense drought I think. but some of my red onions were in danger of producing flower heads, and the leeks all developed hard centres, not bad if you cook them, – quite tasty, but not the ideal way they should go.

 Lettuce in the raised bed, and in the allotment bookcase bed are all thriving. My radishes too have grown up nicely, so we are never short of salads.  The asparagus is over for now, and I will leave any future spears to grow on.  The broad beans are high and loaded with blossom. I staked and protected them with a string cordon when we had winds last week.

  Over the last weekend we had a full day of steady rain which has been of immense benefit. Rhubarb is producing well, and the strawberries are laden with berries. The woodash from the bonfires I fed to them really set them off.  I just have to have a stratgegy of helping them turn red without every bird, mouse, squirrel and slug in Derbyshire getting to them before I do!

I planted out  two square metres of cauliflower and cabbage plants the other day, I covered them with net tunnels against the  birds, and sprinkled organic slug pellets around each plant. Hmm. Next day went to inspect, every one had been eaten by slugs who also seem to have eaten the pellets.  I think I might abandon brassicas on the allotment and plant a load of potatoes in their spot from a sack in the pantry which have all chitted, and may make a late maincrop.

 I also have all the courgettes and marrows who want to be planted, but slugs go for them as well, so I have decided to construct a hotbed from another donated old bookcase, Lined it with cardboard, as I am following the principle of a US idea of building a garden up from nothing. I have a heap of stable manure and compost and of course huge piles of compost heaps from David’s hen hut cleanings out. We are never short of organic matter round here!  Slugs can’t get into a hotbed so easily. I will smear vaseline all along the edges of the wood frame.

The allotment has a huge crop of red poppies in full flower right now, and a load of little borage seedlings popping up as well. The bees look happy. I am wondering if the poppy seeds would be edible? – ever the peasant!

May 31st 2011

Such a lot has happened in the last ten days I haven’t had any time to catch up with the blog, which is a shame.  so here is a little round -up of events to get us back on track.

Firstly, Jane has her bee-hive installed at last on the allotment. She brought it back with a boxful of bees last weekend, and has been busy planting bee friendly plants and helping them settle in.  They seem quite calm and friendly, although I haven’t interfered with them myself!  A chap here on the estate who is an expert bee-keeper has been on hand to give her advice, and checked them over on arrival. They seem fit and virus free, because the last thing he’ll want is disease affecting his hives. The risk of a swarm is apparently one of the worst things you can have. Anyway more on bees later.

Chris went home to South America last Thursday, and we miss him so much. He stayed for four weeks altogether which was great for us, but mainly due to the fact that he had to go twice to Christie’s hospital for tests and to see the Consultant.

I went to London to work on Wednesday and Thursday and went to another brilliant concert, this time with the London Chamber Orchestra under Christopher Warren Green at St John Smith Square. It was wonderful. I can honestly say I have never heard finer string playing. They played Mozart’s K488 Piano concerto, my favourite piano concerto, and the whole thing was exquisite. – a young Ukrainian soloist called Christie something, who played with great finesse. Then they did the Jupiter again, but this time it just shone, pure gold, much better I have to say than the Cadogen Hall concert two weeks before.  I felt very emotional about Mozart dying so young and yet giving the world the apotheosis of music.  I also ate in the SJSS restaurant below and had a wonderful squash and goat cheese lasagne. Not bad for £10 fir the food, and £10 for my ticket.

At my digs in the Vicarage just round the corner from there, I talked to the vicar’s dad, a very spry 89 year old visiting from Arizona, where he still works as a researcher into soil depletion. He put his extremely good health down to grapefruit every morning, says it has the most vitamins in usable form of any fruit. the soil where it grows is important, – hence Arizona grapefruit is better than Florida. The grapefruits grown by my friends in Palm Desert California are also wonderful. He was called Jerry and said he moves round the world now, spending a great deal of time with his elder daughter in Bali, another son in New Zealand, and then comes here to London to catch up with the son who is a Westminster vicar.  David’s father, who died at 97, also had grapefruit every morning, so there must be something in it!

Things took a turn for the worse here on Saturday when David  and I had to go to A&E, after he was taken poorly. Thank goodness he recovered eventually,  but it meant he was off church on Sunday and they had to have their Rogation walk and faith lunch without us. He is still in constant pain after a prostate operation  x 2 last October, so this seemed a major set back. The GP has endorsed what the casualty doctors prescribed, and said the incident might actually be a sign of healing. 

Then yesterday I fell head first down a very slippery set of stone steps next door at DDD of D’s, so stupid, I tripped over a hosepipe, and ended up crashing down the flight. So I had to go back to the same A&E and now have stitches in my forehead, a massive black eye and suspected broken nose. I am not putting a picture on facebook!  But worry not gentle readers, I didn’t break my neck or even my fingers, just sprained various other parts, and have to stay in for a day or two or I will scare little children. Everyone has been very kind, and Debo came to visit first thing. For once I was grateful that she can hardly see and can’t make out faces, as she’d have had a nasty shock.  It’s a good thing I am the opposite end of the spectrum from a fashion plate, and usually don’t even remember to brush my hair before I go out!

I watched Benjamin Button the other night on TV, and it was extremely thought provoking, – the section about his beloved being hit by a taxi and smashing her leg was a bit like my little accident.  As I am now nursing my mother who is becoming tinier by the week and will soon fit into a doll’s house, the essay on aging and personality made a huge impression on me. Who are we? At what stage in our lives are we the essential us?  It’s a mystery!

That’s all for now, folks, but if I am confined to quarters, I may catch up with more blogging later.  I need to fill you in with garden events.

David bought me a Kindle as a present this week and I am quite entranced by it. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a slim line electronic reader on which you can store hundreds of books, and yes, it does soon feel just like reading a book. The great thing is how you can enlarge the print, so even with my weary old eyes I can read in bed. I have downloaded the works of Trollope, the complete Sherlock Holmes, all the Father Brown stories, and a complete set of George Eliott already, for the princely sum of £2.60.   (Some of these were in deference to David, so he has some comfort reading as well.)  A friend said I’d get one and love it when I did, so she was proved right.

Last night I was watching Alice Roberts undertaking various wild swimming adventures round the rivers and lakes of Britain, and as she quoted a lot from Roger Deakin, I downloaded his book, and have thus discovered  a new and wonderful diarist. I love adventures like this, discovering a new soul one can follow in print.

The rain has come, and well, despite various exciting looking clouds, has virtually gone again, so I spent half an hour this evening watering my vulnerable little beans.  I have been to Filey this week, taking my mother to celebrate her birthday, and it was great to see the sea, though looking after her meant I could not go down to the water’s edge.  Our neighbour in Edensor still goes sea bathing from her flat at Filey. She says it is wonderful, and “not too cold after the first six or seven times”!  I should perhaps have a go myself this summer.   Brrr!

Sunday May 15th.

The horse trials are on this weekend. Last week they were worried that the ground would be so hard they couldn’t hold them. -last year they had to cancel because the weather was too wet- but this week we have had rain most days, so probably OK.  I haven’t been yet but may be able to drive Mum over for a look this afternoon. Pip is the only dog I know who follows the cross country with huge interest. He follows each horse and rider come down from the top of the park and carefully watches them over the water jump by Queen Mary’s Bower. Spaniels and retrievers etc. look the other way and seem very bored.

Between showers we have been busy in the garden. My enthusiastic ordering from Jersey Plants has resulted in a pricking out nightmare of finding homes for 160 geraniums, 160 busy lizzies and 160 trailing petunias!  Entirely my own fault, but I became obsessed with  giving each infant plant a fair chance of a life. The green house is bursting at the seams with trays and pots everywhere.  I also have a tray of penstemens I grew and have still to pot on and there are loads of baby pansies in one of the big display pots I want to transplant and grow on.

Working in London Wed and Thurs, thinking about trafficked children and little slaves across the world we are campaigning about, and made me think the difference between me fussing about my tiny plug plants and how we throw children to the most horrible fates. Something biblical there about sparrows falling.

Jane and I between us are collecting a good supply of possible things to sell on the plant stall we have discovered we are down to run at our open gardens “Hidden gardens of Edensor” day on July 2nd.  She has raised twenty or more little sages. I have bits and pieces all over, but must think what I can sow now which might be sellable in 6 weeks time.  Certainly  there will be some geraniums, bls and petunias! Come over and see the little allotment!

The peas and soya beans have both been a disaster to seed even in the greenhouse. They have dissolved into a little patch of flour in the pots!  I must have had the compost too wet. – never seen this problem before. On the other hand the peas I sowed straight into the grown under a net have actually come through the soil at last, so I may get some sort of crop! Good news on the kitchen window system for the courgettes and marrows, as I have several good specimens of both, and Jane has given me a cucumber plant. I will have enough salad producing plants and summer crops now I think. Two butternut squashes also germinated, – I usually have no luck with squashes.

I have planted out all the sweetcorn now with little french beans round the outside lines. Jerusalem artichokes behind them are doing their own thing and I haven’t the energy to pull them up, – I rather like JAs anyway. Asparagus produces three shoots a day, enough for a sandwich. Our salads are all good now though, and my radishes will be ready in a week or so. They have recovered from the pheasant predations but it put their growth back a fortnight.

The broad beans have benefited from the rain and are now more than 1ft tall. They will flower soon.  The potatoes too are up and looking quite flourishing, I keep earthing them up. Last year’s drought in April and May gave very poor crops but I am more optimistic this time as the showers have been quite heavy.

Sad news on the chick front, the last broodie produced three lively live chicks but two have since died  for no apparent reason, so she too has just one solitary chick. Not very good, six chicks altogether from three clutches.

In London I had a very quick meeting with Penny who had come up to a St Bart’s reunion day,and promised I would do some more thinking about her Karamojo street children project ideas. I then went off to the Cadogan Hall  to hear the Orchestra of the Swan and John Lill play Beethoven’s 3rd, after a flier had been pushed into my hand on the South Bank last week. Very glad I did, they are very crisp, tight young orchestra with excellent sound. John Lill was so good it was almost like turning on a record. very competent indeed but experienced and reliable rather than heart wrenching.  Maybe B3 doesn’t need that kind of emotion anyway.  The hall looked just like an old URC church on a grand scale. I wonder if it was once. huge balcony where I sat in the cheapest seats!  Last night here, we had a concert by Rennaisance Voices, a very good local chamber choir who have been going for a while, in aid of “Friends of the Peak District”. Mainly 16th and 17th century pieces. Lovely sound, but by the end of the evening one kind of feels one’s had enough of the Tudors.  That’s all for now folks!

Sunday May 8th

I remember this song from my childhood in the 50s, when it struck a particularly mysterious chord for me, “mother cried!”  Why should one’s mother cry over rain?  But it impinged on me somehow the power of weather.  Well at least we have had some rain, showers on Friday night and then another decent soaking yesterday morning. My whole garden seems to be heaving sighs of relief, and eveything has had a deep drink like a giraffe..

As a result Jane and I have both been able to get on with some planting.  Jane has put in some cabbage plants under a hen run I had, a Fort Knox for brassicas after her previous planting disappeared overnight.  I have put in 20 Galaxy Runner bean plants into the trench which has been waiting for them for a long time now, just crossing my fingers about a late frost, and I will probably follow them with the same number of borlotti beans today. 

 I also planted out my sweetcorn plants as they looked ready to move and were getting very pot bound in the green house.  They have gone in in a triangular block filling in the gap between the rows of spinach and carrot and the potatoes.  I think I will plant a dwarf french bean in between  each two or three.  Meant to be the Mayan  way, though  I still can’t remember the third classic member of the trio. All the corn is currently under plastic tunnels, for protection against pheasants and cold winds.  The potatoes are showing and I have earthed them all up.  More rain today please – we need to get the moisture right into the ground.

On Youtube I have just seen a little video by a guy in the States extolling the virtues of nettles for urinary tract infections and nettle root for prostate. Harvesting my nettles is another job for this week then. I have some wonderful long wristed heavy plastic gloves I found up in the woods which are useful for this. The comfrey is 4ft high as well, so that is due for a cut and turning into tomato and veg feed.

Chick production is very patchy this year. One hen has four, and the second broodie is a devoted mother to just one little chick, which she dotes on, but she is big enough to have raised a clutch of 12 or more. The third hen’s eggs are due  to hatch today.  Two of my rescue hens have now died and a third has been eating all her own eggs, so will have to be killed unfortunately.  So not so good on the hen front just now. But David has bought a trio of bantam Wyandottes. gold laced and partridge hens and a Gold laced but double sex linked cockerel who is a very splendid little fellow, and calls through to the young Welsummer in the next enclosure with great gusto.

Hey, it is 6.09 am, and the rain is falling steadily, on the just and the unjust. I am going to get up and make a cup of tea.

 Saturday May 8th.  

When I came home from London late on Thursday night, David told me that a botanist had been round to say we have a very rare daffodil growing in the churchyard. It is white with a tiny smudge of yellow at the very bottom of its petals. I thought some of the ones in our garden were pretty rare as well, having watched a daffodil feature on “Gardener’s world” a couple of weeks ago, – you never know with these old Victorian gardens what will come up next, but they have all gone over now.

David rather un-conservationistly picked a specimen of our very rare daffodil which is now on the window sill in the kitchen being admired!  Not quite as bad as the vet I visited once in Bolivia who had stuffed all the rarest creatures and birds in the country and had them in his flat in La Paz (bizarre!),  but getting there.

London was like Paris or even somewhere like Lisbon with everyone sitting out along the south bank of the Thames in the now commonplace hot and sunny blue sky weather. I have found a wonderful place to stay, in an extended guest flat attached to a Church behind Westminster Abbey which one shares with the Vicar of the parish. There are four guest rooms, and it is the stuff of novels. There is a golden cocker spaniel called Oscar,who  reminds one of Luther’s “little golden dogs” he wanted to see in heaven. Twenty four guardsmen on their black horses, but  not in ceremonial dress, trotted past at 7.30 am. I wonder if one of them was the naughty horse from the wedding! They were out for morning exercise I suppose, clattering down Gt Peter Street. I always rush to the window when I hear horses.

 My day on Thursday was filled with visiting more Somalis, this time from the northern Somaliland.   I  was  accompanied by  a very bright girl whose family had come from Bangladesh, – her story as well was fascinating and totally positive about the human condition.  These encounters cheered one up so much, compared to the negative inevitability of the finding and killing of Bin Ladin.  One friend’s facebook page quotes a moving and sensible passage from Martin Luther King about the waste and regret even of an enemy’s death.  Stoical and implacable peace campaigners outside the House of Commons had their posters on high citing the 100s of thousands killed in the wars.   If 1 % of what we spend on  weapons could be spent on peaceful development, then those figures of death and wasted youth would come down. One of the first things the Somalian  eminent person had done was to set up skills training in carpentry, welding and bookbinding for boys at risk of being lured into militias. More than 1000 have now been trained and set on course for productive, peaceful and happy lives.  

Wednesday night I had been to the Festival Hall to hear the London Philharmonic. Excellent cheap seat in the balcony which gives one a bird’s eye view of the entire orchestra. Tchaikovsky’s 5th symphony, Brahms Meistersingers overture, and Strauss four last songs. I thought the orchestral soloists were exquisite, but the soprano came across as one big fat lady who delivered the songs con belto. I was pleased to see that the Times reviewer agreed with me the next day about that. They are so gorgeous but should have an aching intimacy about them which was completely missing.  There was a come and sing Messiah rehearsal going on in the ground floor lobby of the Festival Hall before this concert. Opportunities to make music abound everywhere in London. Handel would have been so pleased if he came back!  Next week I may go to hear John Lill play Beethoven in another concert, a flier for which was thrust into my hand. One could get used to this city living!

May 2nd

Double bank holiday weekend, and enough deep blue skies to satisfy even me. warm in the sun, but a wicked wind blowing, – “rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, ” – I should say so, the sky was a swirling mass of pink petals town off the cherry, pear and apples trees. For some reason the hens love to eat these petals and as they land in the hen run like spring snow, rush to chase and consume them. I wonder what eggs from hens fed on apple blossom taste like- we shall find out soon.  Chris says the eggs in Uruguay smell and taste a bit of fish, from the fish meal fed to the hens. Yuck.

Chris has been home four days now, chronically tired and with a sore throat for the last two months, but otherwise in good shape considering.  Chatsworth has been loaded with visitors today with long queues in and out. I took Chris and his friends, who have two small boys, to the children’s farm and adventure playground.  Saw the little piglets, orange with black spots, very attractive, though not sure what the mix of breeding.  They also had pigmy goats which reminded me of my goat Susanne in Ghana in 2006. I wonder what became of her in the end, but at least we saved her life for a while. 

My bean nursery has been doing well in the greenhouse, and I will have sufficient for the bean poles I have already put up.  24 galaxy runners, 30 borlottis, about 16 dwarf french which I want to intercrop with the sweet corn.  There is a third plant in the classic trio of corn beans and . . . ? but I can’t remember what it is!  I also have a tray of soya beans but they yet to germinate. – I have them on the high windowsill in the kitchen now.

I am also so pleased to see that my courgettes have germinated nicely, and the marrows are following along today. 140 busy lizzies came in 1/2inch plugs last Thursday and I have pricked them all out and they seem fine and starting to grow a bit.  I have high hopes that these busy lizzies will sell mother’s house for her, as she claimed they did the old one in Gloucestershire. “You can do a lot with a busy lizzy, ” she used to say.

On the allotment, I spent an hour watering on Sunday morning. The sun and wind are drying everything out.  It must be at least six weeks now since we had any rain to speak of.  My new potatoes have come through, and there are also tiny lines of spinach and carrot seedlings, – the pheasants – who are now Mr and Mrs – maybe won’t let them stay in the ground for long.

 It even kept fine for the wedding of William and Kate. All very perfect, and tremendously conservative. The two things I thought jarred most were not inviting the two Labour prime ministers, gross bad manners by some decision maker,  when one saw who did go.- and the Ruritanian like military uniforms everyone was dressed in, even the 89 year old Duke of Edinburgh. It gives the impression that military values equal the height of honour and prestige, (not so)  and that we are a war-dominated nation, like the Spartans. 

I  also hate the sight of the Busby bear skins, and think of all the dead bears. One horse tipped off its guardsman and galloped off home to its stable, overtaking the Royal landeau apparently, though we weren’t shown that on TV.  Good for the horse.  But anyway. W and K managed it very well, and I wish them all the best for a quiet life. He has a very sweet disposition, and she has great peace and poise about her. The DDDof D came home and wore her wedding hat to Church on Sunday. She’d had a very good time, though I am sure we saw more of the actual ceremony than she did (if her eyesight had permitted it anyway) from where they were seated in the transept.

April 27th- Chris has taken off from Sao Paulo by now and is coming home across that huge black ocean through the night. I see the planes pass overhead and still wonder. – the amazing mad trouncing of gravity, turned into a daily tedium of transatlantic commuting.

Rooks are nesting in the enormous trees at the end of our garden. Remembering the cacophony they made in the trees at Baslow, and the way they screeched and fought all summer over the hen food makes it hard to love them as birds. But this evening against the blue sky which still persists here, even with a northern chilly wind, I watched them wheel and soar in effortless fun and the miracle of their airborn antics made me wonder again.  We can become prosaic about almost anything. But flight still astounds. My son, who started so small, now spans the world, forced to travel back and forth, back and forth. He has grown to hate it. I long for him to come home, and he will tomorrow, just for a short while.

In the greenhouse the beans are literally jumping out of their pots. Wonderful little beans, runners, borlotti, galaxy and safari. you can almost watch them grow.  I have also planted a tray of soya beans, but none have yet germinated. I think I must bring them in to the kitchen, where squash and courgettes are currently enjoying the constant warmth from the Aga.

Our friends Trevor and Barbara Hicks came to lunch today. Trevor has just published his poems- we went to the book launch last Wednesday. They are mainly religious, but/and very good indeed. He is Canon Poet and writes a lot about mystery and Cornwall, memory and Mary. I wish I had written some of them, -high praise from me.  He is gifted. Comes from Fowey, like my distant Cornish connections.-His poems made me homesick for a land where I shall never live.