Mind you, almost any colour looks better backed by a cardoon. They are backed by cardoons, and are pitched perfectly against the grey foliage of the cardoons and the lemon of the laburnum. The colour of the round umbels is a fabulously rich purple tinged with burgundy, the individual florets of each flower forcing themselves out in an arc of purple energy rather than contained together within an invisible globe. It is the perfect foil for Allium 'Purple Sensation'. Pure snobbery kept me away from them before and their ubiquity made me blind to the astonishing display of dripping lemon flowers. We planted it about three years ago and it is the first that I have grown. I am delighted with the way that this laburnum of ours has grown and flowered so profusely. But it was a lesson in trying to anticipate the way that wind can slip between barriers and compress itself to do real damage. But I put another, bigger stake in, got Sarah to push while I pulled and righted it again, and it seems untraumatised by the experience. It is in the southeastern corner of the Jewel garden, backed by a hornbeam hedge, but the wind had funnelled in and caught it when every petal and leaf was saturated, and this was enough to snap the supporting stake and half uproot it. The other morning, as I took my pre-breakfast wander outside, it took me fully 20 seconds to register that the laburnum (which has almost doubled in size and floriferousness) was tilted over at 45. The combination of an early leafiness, lots of sappy new growth and windy wet has meant that even the hawthorn hedges are keeling over with the weight of wet. And rained and rained, in squally showers interspersed with hot sun, so that if you wear waterproofs you get unbearably hot, and if you take them off the rain nips up behind you and makes you unbearably wet. The water is in the teasels because it has rained. 'Do you know, I asked her if she had got rid of the mower and she said, "Oh no, it is a real good 'un and we still need a mower."' 'Three fingers and a thumb! Doesn't bear thinking about, does it?' We both thought about it. 'And I don't know how she did it,' he said in his soft Herefordshire voice and a widening grin, 'but the silly old thing cut her thumb and three fingers of one hand clean off.' I smiled idiotically back. Apparently, the old woman's husband, aged 80-odd, was due to come out of hospital, where he had been for a month with a dodgy heart so she, aged 81, decided to mow the grass for him. Which brings me to the story of the old lady and the lawn mower. Added to this the stalks and the spines of the long leaves are armed with short, very sharp thorns that graze your wet skin, so that within the same wetting minutes the water is mingling pink with blood. As you pull the plant up, this water, (and by now there are three or four tiers of leaves with the accumulated reservoir of a teapotful) spills over your sleeves and trousers. The leaves are paired and linked at the base by a web of foliage, as between finger and thumb, so that a cup is formed, holding a generous cupful of water. Weeding teasels is a wet, painful business. Age coarsens them, and by the end of May the sun is sucked into the green, all delicacy replaced by vigour. When the light is behind them, the young, thin-fletched leaves glow like stained glass, catching light. ![]() ![]() For about three weeks in April and early May they are the best thing in the garden, the leaves upturned and streamlined as though the plant has just been shot like an arrow and landed in the ground. The time to move them is in October or very early spring, before the tap root gets delving, parsnip-fashion. The really annoying thing is that I have been pulling up hundreds of teasels over the past couple of days and would willingly have transplanted some but, like angelica, they have a long tap root and once that has established, they cannot be shifted. Other than that, they are not like angelica at all, except that I have an abundance of both where I don't want them and none in the spot that would serve us best. Like angelica, they do not spread very far, dropping rather than scattering their seeds, and like angelica they do best on wet, fat soil. They got into the garden via the riverbank a few years ago, and in certain places - especially the herb garden - have become the main weed, growing through the gentle dryness of sage, rosemary and marjoram like shining green eels. I was thinking about the old lady and the lawn mower as I pulled teasels, blood sliding with water down my arms.
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