VICTORIA PLUMS -- SUNFLOWERS -- APPLES -- BURGEONING 2002: 10 October 2002
A-HL e-mails a comment on the page NEGLECT (see link at the foot of the page) that is elsewhere on this site. "Have you not noticed," he asks, "how prolifically everything has grown this year, not only your Victoria plums?" He is right. Since writing that item I have noticed more than one plum tree -- and other fruit trees -- bowed to the ground under the weight of the excessive crop. It seems that wherever I look I spy ten- or twelve-feet high sunflowers in front gardens. And the beautiful, pale-green-leafed tree that someone was mad enough to plant in a tiny back garden not far from me some ten years ago has shot to skyscraper height.
In the one-time Garden of England, still known as the county of Kent, R J Harris, taking a September week's break, finds roadside fruiterers selling boxes of 'apples for horses' (!) for £1.50 per box, and Victoria plums for 40p per pound. The over-supply is such that the unfortunate Kent growers are almost at the dreaded give-away stage. Also, only this morning a columnist in my favourite UK broadsheet reports picking blackberries endlessly from his neighbourhood's hedgerows. He marvels at their overwhelming size and flavour, and notes their superiority to the supermarket variety.
Without doubt, if it's green, rooted, perennial and possesses branches, it has burgeoned this year.
In the UK, that is.
It would be interesting to know how gardens in Europe or, say, Australia or Canada or the USA have fared ('R J Harris's Moon Gardening' is being used, I note, beyond Britain's shores. See link at the foot of the page).
As soon as the head gardener is back on duty in Cornwall I must bring myself in touch with his experience in the walled kitchen garden at Tresillian, and find out how he explains Nature's extraordinary performance in 2002.
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