Thomas Fairchild (1667-1729) was an English gardener who was based in Hoxton, Shoreditch, a stone’s throw away from me here on Old Street. Fairchild corresponded with the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, establishing with him the existence of sex in plants.
Fairchild is famous for scientifically producing an artificial hybrid Dianthus Caryophyllus barbatus which was a cross between a Carnation and a Sweet William. This was earth-shattering stuff, and the god-fearing Fairchild kept the secret for a number of years before finally presenting it to the Royal Society when he lied, claiming it was accidentally created.
The flower, known as Fairchild’s mule (the mule, a cross between a horse and a donkey which cannot breed), did not produce seed which would grow. We now know that this is because the Carnation and Sweet William are, in botanical terms, too-distant relatives of one another.
Fairchild wrote a book which is of interest to London-based growers. In it, he writes of our tiny city gardens, “nosegays”, “where a little is only to be had, we should be content with a little.”
Fairchild’s Garden, at the foot of Columbia Road flower market, was once a very scruffy park, but Hackney council has recently renovated it. It’s looking quite spiffing I must say…
Here one can read the memorial stone which was erected many years later over his earthly remains.
I thought it was a nice gesture to leave a couple of flowers on top of the stone. A Zinnia and Rudbeckia grown in my own garden.
How did this happen? From collecting records to collecting jam jars?
It all started with Greek beer bottle tops. That was my first collection. As quite a small person. Then we came home and in the rubbish bay behind the leisure centre I found a huge box of bottle tops. At first, I was delighted.
I’ve had to stop collecting jam jars recently, in fact. You don’t need that many jam jars for collecting seed. I have enough to survive the next two zombie apocalypses.
You are supposed to pick seed from the strongest plant. None of my “Giant Yellow” sunflowers were very spectacular – but that’s not going to dissuade me from replanting it next year. Maybe its progeny will have a better handle on Old Street?
Once the Velvet Queen sunflower has dried out, I will do the same with these seeds.
BuckwheatYarrowLimanthesBorageCalendulaPhacelia
In the past, I’ve grown more buckwheat. Mainly because as a household we eat a lot of the stuff which we buy, and it’s interesting to see how it grows. The takeaway is that you’d need an awful lot of acres to grow enough to be able to use it as food.
The Yarrow, I’m uncertain if the seed of this will work. I picked it up as a pot from Kirsten Hartvig, so I don’t know about its germination etc.
The Limanthes, Borage, and Calendula are now in their third generation from home-saved seed. The Phacelia? Lord knows whether this will work but it was lovely this year, smells fabulous and the bees adore it.
NigellaPoppies
Nigella (second gen) and Poppies are drying from shelves. And the Nasturtium from Findhorn will give me plenty of plants. I might even sow some of these now. Note to self, sow thinly.
I don’t have much in the way of garden equipment: a trowel (which I bought, somewhat ironically, from No Dig guru Charles Dowding), some secateurs, a couple of watering cans, some propagating trays, a soil blocker, and some gloves. I like it like that.
However, my son bought me a dibber for my birthday. And it’s a very nice thing! The perfect complement to my seed cells.
Here I transplanted some zinnia seedlings into a planting box.
Out they come, and in they go!
And here they are a month or so later. Note the copper tape, which seems to work to repel slugs…
Unlike with last year’s batch, temperatures in my HotBin have been solidly in the green on its dial. It’s been steaming away. I’ve been filling it up with uncooked vegetable kitchen waste since February, when I set it up after the scaffolding had come down. I’ve been mixing these GREENS with BROWNS, these fine wood chips, and paper waste. If anything, I would say I need a higher proportion of BROWNS in future, but it still smells good and aerobically composted.
The cats were pretty fascinated as I prized off the lid and scooped out the very bottom later from the HotBin. It looks pretty disgusting, I’d agree.
The first thing was to sieve the composted material. Because it’s a HotBin, and by its very nature moist, the result is not a fine tilth, but more like a cakey sludge. That’s a problem I was determined to solve.
Because I’ve found that my own compost is too much like a Black Forest gâteau, I’ve given a lot of thought as to what to add to it to give it some lightness and also the ability to drain better. In the past, I’ve used Perlite, but it’s not really doing anything in the soil.
So, after I’ve come across it repeatedly in my research for “The Garden”, and I’m a huge fan of the Carbon Gold range of compost mixes, I thought I would try amending it with biochar. In the past, I have used Carbon Gold’s own biochar amendment, but I need larger quantities than the small punnets I can get from them.
Then for good measure, and because I’m a little concerned about the possible acidity of my mix, I added a handful or two of Moorland Gold which I’ve been trialling. Really, I’d like to be making all my own compost. I bought too much this year. It seems crazy to be buying compost and throwing away organic matter from the household.
Because I only scooped out the bottom layer, this process only resulted in four small pots-worth. I moved four Lemon Tree seedlings into these pots, which I have grown from pips. There’s a lot of light on the roof garden, so I’m hoping these thrive.
In the course of my research for my book “The Garden” time and again, I came across the work of the husband and wife Eugen Kolisko (21 March 1893 – 29 November 1939) and Lili Kolisko (September 1, 1889 – November 20, 1976).
They shared with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer the role of putting the flesh on Rudolf Steiner’s biological theories. It is my understanding that, while Pfeiffer was tied up on other Anthroposophical business during Steiner’s “Agriculture Course” lectures, the Koliskos were present at Breslau for them. This was the birth of the Biodynamic movement, which this year is celebrating its centenary.
Eugen Kolisko had a perhaps broader range of interest than his wife. This above is my copy of “Zoology for Everybody” (1944) that I discovered in the bargain bin in the bookshop at Emerson College. But his other works include writings on nutrition, natural history, geology, chemistry, medicine, even fiction.
Lili Kolisko, on the other hand, was dedicated to the scientific method. Early on, pursuant to Steiner’s esoteric ideas about the function of the spleen, through her microscope she discovered a new type of speckled platelet, which she and Steiner termed “regulator cells”. This reminds me somewhat of Wilhelm Reich’s microscopic investigations.
As much as Steiner himself celebrated her work, she was met with a cold shoulder by the medics and scientists of the Anthroposophical Society. These internal disagreements between the couple and other senior figures in the movement effectively drove them from Germany to resettle in England in the thirties. Eugen Kolisko died relatively shortly afterwards in 1939 leaving Lili in penury and eking out a living sewing purses.
10 Euros on eBay.
In 1936 Lili Kolisko published “Moon and Plant Growth” in which she showed, by means of statistics and these beautiful photographs, how the influence of the waxing and waning moon could be used to optimise sowing. The Biodynamic idea is, in short, that you should plant root vegetables on a full moon, and leafy ones on the waxing moon.
Agriculture of Tomorrow in the library at Steiner House.
The couple’s book, Agriculture of Tomorrow (1939) is probably their masterpiece. Although Eugen had compiled the research with his wife, just as they were about to start writing it, he died, leaving the task to her. In it, they set out a series of experiments exploring the influence of the moon and planets and the role of chemical elements on plant growth, and upon the subject of nutrition. They also perform a scientific breakdown of Steiner’s suggestions for the renewal of agriculture.
In a sentence that could be penned today, in the book’s introduction Lili writes, “I want to write therefore about the regeneration of agriculture, which is the basis of the physical existence of men. Without proper food mediating life-forces to the human organism, human beings cannot grow strong and healthy, nor become able to develop the clear minds and moral strength we so urgently need.”
Among the photographs in the book (see below) you can glimpse the Kolisko’s house, Rudge Cottage, Edge, Stroud in Gloucestershire. Lili Kolisko died there in 1976, and it’s interesting for me to reflect that at that very moment I was living only 3 miles away in Lypiatt, Stroud.
Because I am in Gloucestershire often, with two uncles and aunts living just outside Stroud, and on this occasion travelling back from Wales, I thought I would drive past their old house and have a look.
But why restrict yourself to the hip retro New Age music of the eighties?
The algorithm introduced me Chantress Seba, an inheritor of the tradition of Black Vedantists such as Alice Coltrane and Laraaji. Her vocals are technically exquisite, but never emotionally robotic, as such virtuosity is in the hands of the helium divas. Her little Hispanic detours are entrancing.
There’s a distinct West Coast vibe to Finn’s bucolic strumming in their rendition of the Shiva mantra. I like how the image of the duo in the mountains is subtly undercut by the traffic racing along the B road in the distance. The recording of both it and the Ganesh mantra is interesting in itself, closely mic’d, they must also be processing the audio with some reverb. The result has a curiously hallucinatory indoors-while-outdoors quality, evocative of inner meditative spaces.
If you’ve ever been curious about the reality of the stoned high of bhakti, clock these guys’ intoxicated, rapt expressions.
Towards the end of June and the wet weather we’ve had has collided with the glorious sunshine, making everything very lush. It’s looking so beautiful and the bees and hover flies are enjoying themselves.
But there’s more to come. The dahlias, zinnias, echinacea, and poppies have yet to bloom. My neighbours, who look down on me, tell me they are enjoying it.
