Friday 19th February, 2016

Plot B top - the new forest garden of Nowhere in particular - Mr Joyce help me out here.

Friday 19th February 2016 saw some splodges of colour added to the somewhat acarpous working map of 'Plot B top'. While the name, 'Plot B top', works as a functional way of identifying one of the areas of 'the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular' it does little to express the potential fruitfulness and nuttiness of the plot and how it might be a horticultural and inter-cultural playground. "Plot B top" when spoken in English does emanate as a musical combination of articulated vowel and consonant locations but it is not enough for me. The more mouth filling and impractical name of 'the new forest garden of Nowhere in particular' is there to virtually exercise and tease the palate in anticipation of some slow and not so slow nutting and fruiting bodies to come. A sunny Friday morning saw Rachel and Ryan arrive with the first of some new forest garden denizens to establish, in slow motion, a new era of fungi enhanced nutty fruity forest garden 'perennialism'.

Ryan welcoming and introducing our new sylvan friends

a cohort of trees including

three of these truffled trees

one of these

and a dwarf self pollinating cherry that I forgot to take a picture of (i.e. the label).

Their approximate locations, in 'the new forest garden of Nowhere in particular', are splodgily recorded in the map above, with 'A' being the cobnuts, 'B' the filbert, and 'C' the cherry.

Rachel digging a hole for the filbert planting

Ryan setting one of the truffle inoculated cobnut whips in place.

Some limed compost was added - to assist with the cultivation of the truffles.

The soil was sufficiently light so we did not not add sand/grit.

Mulching with cardboard

More mulching with wood chip.

Grazing rye has been grown over winter in Bed 1 . 

There are hazels of various sorts growing elsewhere in 'the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular' and about this time last year I photographed a particularly beautiful and enchanting twisted or corkscrew hazel that resides in the (old(er) not so new) forest garden.

Forest Garden hazel in a time of flowering and pollination Feb'/Mar' 2015

The eminent, Mr Richard Maybe, considers the hazel to be a bush and thus we might adjust our 'tree planting' to that of 'bush planting'. Richard Maybe dedicates several pages of 'Flora Brittanica' to the folk lore and mythology of  the hazel, Corylus avellana. Bush or tree, perhaps it makes no difference to the sense of awakening signified by the flowering of the hazels around 'the allotment garden of Nowhere in particular'. The female hazel flowers and their vividly coloured tentacle-like styles are an exquisite sign of the changing of the seasons. The monoecious catkin & style florescence, along with the bushes other properties, makes it apt for mystical appropriation. Mr Maybe recalls the high esteem the Celts held for the flowering fruit (or nut); .. 'in Celtic legend they [hazel-nuts] are always an emblem of concentrated wisdom'. A meal of a brightly spotted sacred hazel nut fed salmon provided the mythical Irish hero, Fionn mac Cumhaill, with his legendary knowledge and wisdom.

It may well be with a tongue in cheek that I behold our 'new forest garden of Nowhere in particular' as a new home for some descendants of that mythical Hazel. While planting the cobs and filbert we wondered if we will actually manage to get a harvest of nuts when the trees/bushes start to fruit as there is a thriving population of squirrels around and about the allotment site. Would the sweet, compact and sustaining (wisdom imbuing) nuts be plundered by those fluffy tailed marauders? Would our efforts to prevent the squirrel plunder be thwarted by some sort of weird form of hazel nut fed sciuridian  intelligence? 

Maybe a better, more poetic name or title for that allotment plot would thwart the bushy tailed rodents. 'Plot B top' - so perfunctory. 'The new forest garden of Nowhere in particular' - what a mouthful. By the time you have uttered the latter, all the nuts will have been nabbed. Such a name might provide a spell like defence of the sweetnuts to come.  Come on, come on; some Joycean name by a gift of the gab, gift of the gob, gift of the cob, has got to be out there looking for a plot to call its home.