jane brocket

makes a change

A break from tulips (although they are at a glorious peak just now) but still on a floral theme (above). Phoebe made these giant cookies using the recipe in Xanthe Milton's book Eat Me! which works stupendously well.

I'm not quite sure why the author needs to be photographed as a buxom Red Riding Hood or Cinderella in a baking book, but we can't fault her cookies.

Phoebe said this one was of the best cooking sessions ever because the results were so pleasingly professional-looking. Plus, the cookies really are huge.

But not as huge as this one that she made a little while ago. Move over James and your giant peach and make way for Phoebe and her giant cookie.

Oh, I can't resist. Not when they are glorious as this. Just picked five minutes ago.

sunday best

It's quite amazing how much fun you can have with tulips in the most ordinary of places.

Outdoors on a bench.

And indoors in a sink.

To answer questions:

I buy virtually all my bulbs from Peter Nyssen, a no-frills, totally reliable and extremely well priced seller. I've been using them for twelve years and have never had a problem. I also buy a few varieties from Bloms Bulbs when I can't find them in the Peter Nyssen catalogue.

We replant every year. Tulips are pretty much exhausted after one season and most hybrid varieties (the ones sold in markets and by florists and the ones you see here) put out a very pathetic stem second time around, if indeed they come up again at all. There are one or two hybrids that do come back (Ivory Floradale and 'Jan Reus' - third row down, first, third and fifth from left in the photo - are amazing for this), but if you want repeat action, you need to plant species tulips which are the tulips that grow in the wild and are not suitable for picking. I grow several types and love seeing them pop back up year after year. So I pull up most of the spent bulbs in June and anything left in the ground gets turned over when we dig and plant again in November.

tulip trajectory

Our tulips move from the 'triangle' (which almost always looks a bit patchy in tulip season because I pick quite freely) to the plastic washbasket which is my current stand-in for a trug.

They then move to the bench by the house where I trim the stems and take a few photos.

 

They come into the house and are sorted and put into vases/jugs/jars. I hesitate to say 'arranged' as I am reading the biography of Constance Spry who really did do amazing arrangements, and I think 'casually placed' probably sums up my approach more accurately.

Once this is done the vases etc are taken to the wide windowsill upstairs for a quick photoshoot and a closer examination of their beauty. Then the flowers are dispersed around the house in places where I can see them - we even have a vase in the bathroom so I can admire the various stripes and colours and blowsy petals while I am cleaning my teeth.

My tulip-growing also has a distinct trajectory and I keep all my tulip orders so that I know what to order for the next year. Some varieties aren't bought again, and some appear on the list every time. Parrot tulips - these are Apricot Parrot Tulips which have a very special floppy, languid extravagance about them - have been on the list since I first grew a dozen in a tiny back garden in the first house we owned. They are the most amazing things ever to come out of a paper bag of brown bulbs, and even after all this time, they still have me spellbound. They are one of the very highest points of the tulip trajectory's arc.

tulip distraction

A week without phone or broadband connection has made me realise just how much my mind has developed butterfly tendencies while I'm working on the computer. It's just too easy to escape from a tricky sentence or a pattern or a proposal by looking up something 'urgent' or 'important' or pretty when I should be grappling with the task in hand.

Local telephone cable boxes have been wrecked twice in the last week by people stealing the metals within and hundreds of homes have been disconnected. It seems this is a growing problem - I really don't know what they do with the copper but I bet they don't make nice little saute pans with it. 

So I have had a quiet and focussed week workwise, with tulips as my only distraction. And I find they have a lot to answer for. Nowhere near as much as the internet, of course (and a lot more wholesome), but I do find my eyes drift to the vases on my desk, or I wander outside to see what is going on in the garden and whether there are any tulips to be picked, and I spend far too long just looking at the kitchen windowsill (above) while waiting for the kettle to boil - and re-boil because I am in my own little tulip world.

monday's pick

'Ollioules', 'Helmar' and 'Rem's Favourite'.

The tulip triangle is full of tight green flowers on the brink of unfurling and showing off for all they are worth.

time warps and tulips

Enfin. At last. I've been looking forward to the cool, dewy mornings when I can go out in my dressing gown and Birkies and pick from the daffodil wall and tulip patch (we plant blocks of daffs in a gap between a fence and a low wall - it's useless the rest of the year, but just right for daffodils - and tulips go pell-mell into the 'triangle' which is a patch of ground that I like to think of as my garden allotment). And today this is exactly what I was able to do.

What with the silence and peace due to the lack of planes landing and taking off from Heathrow, and the absence of any telephone or broadband connection for a couple of days thanks to BT, life felt very bucolic and pre-Industrial Revolution in the garden this morning. And the pickings were rich; a lovely assortment of daffodils and single early tulips. Then there was tea and very old-fashioned printed newspapers. It was like being in an early morning time-warp for thirty minutes or so and very pleasant for all that.

lines

 

For me, the Van Gogh exhibition today was all about lines. Lines and lines of people waiting to get in (thank goodness I'd booked our tickets weeks ago). Lines and lines of neat writing in Dutch and French insterspersed with the most beautiful pen and ink drawings you could ever hope to receive in a letter. More lines of people waiting to get close to the original letters behind glass, and yet more wiggly lines of people weaving in and out of the crowds standing in front of the more famous paintings.

 

But the really interesting, revelatory lines were those in Van Gogh's pen ink and graphite drawings, something I hadn't really seen before. In some drawings he barely uses a curved line and yet the image is alive and full of movement and vigour and energy. In other, later drawings, the swirls and curls are thick and bold and all too often indicative of inner turmoil, like internal storms expressed with reed pens and quills. (I was also struck by the number of bare pollarded trees he drew and painted which somehow look very sad and unnatural.)

I love going to exhibitions and galleries with one or any of the children because it's intriguing to see not only how they respond, but also to what they respond - often quite different images to those I prefer. Today I went with Tom and Phoebe who came out liking the big landscapes and the portraits respectively. And then, thank goodness, there were no lines in Pret on Piccadilly, which we made sure wasn't going to go out of business today. (Have you tried their Choc Bar??)

happy bunch

I'm picking my first few bunches of daffodils and tulips at last. I left the earliest daffodils in the ground because the garden needed them more than I did after such a miserable winter. But now that there are enough to go around, I am picking lots of daffs and admiring the range we planted last autumn (I always get a nice surprise when I see what I chose because the minute the bulbs are in the ground I forget what we put where). I still like the childishly simple ones the best, the ones with six flat petals and a contrasting centre.

There are also some tulips ready to be picked, but these are late and sporadic, plus I think we have some tulip virus which is making them look a bit spotty and less than gorgeous. I am hoping that the rows of tulips about the burst into colour won't be affected, but I'll just have to wait and see.

 Usually I keep like with like but as I don't have enough yet to arrange flowers by type, I am following Phoebe's flower-arranging dictum and I am making happy bunches of mixed flowers instead. They really do look happy which makes me feel happy. This is the mixed bunch on my desk, looking very much at home in the mix of books, needles, papers, pens, pictures and machines.

We are also a happy bunch. Easter holidays, sunshine, study trips to interesting places with schools, and a less hectic routine are all having a very positive effect.

in and out of stock

I must point out that although Amazon is showing my quilt book to be 'out of stock', it has not yet been in stock. This is the default message when a book is due to arrive after the planned publication date (in this case March 15). So please do not think that they have sold all their copies when in fact they haven't yet had them. The only place where the book is in stock is the V&A Museum shop, and that's because they took specially arranged advance copies to coincide with the quilt exhibition.

I should also add that the US, Dutch and Australian editions all have different publication dates, and that it's best to check with local booksellers' sites for information.

out now

[detail of one of the quilts in the book]

I am reliably informed that The Gentle Art of Quilt-making is released this week and will be making its way into book shops and onto websites.  As Bridget Jones might say, this is 'v.g.' (and, happily, 'calories:0').