Panda Food for Thought.

I have not forgotten Tian Tian and her plight. As you can see, she is welcome in my garden at any time.

I have seven different types of bamboo growing here, spread around the garden. But, I should add hastily, they are not spreading varieties, but clumpers. They will eventually increase in girth, but only slowly, unlike some types which you need to plant and stand back as they race away.

Bamboos are very special plants, as bizarre in their habits as the Giant Pandas who feast on them.
Like the pandas, they have strange, sometimes self-destructive habits. Some may only flower once every few decades, even once a century, and after flowering they may die. In this way whole forests can be wiped away, and the pandas who need them must travel to a new habitat.
The bamboo in the photograph was grown from seed after a plant I bought flowered and died in its first year with me.Luckily it is easily grown from seed.The specimen above is about fifteen years old and eight feet tall, so a forest can be reborn at a speed which makes it almost possible to watch.

Many of my bamboos came from Jungle Giants, a very interesting nursery which supplies a wealth of information  as well as a wide range of plants.
I think my garden is now mature, like me, and I can simply appreciate what I have seen grow there. With the bamboos there is a lot more to appreciate than just sight. There is wonderful flickering movement and soft noise, like rain falling. They give stature and form to the garden all the year round, and now I also have a constant supply of canes of any size to act as support for other plants. Indeed, I may put up a sign at the gate to say 'Pick Your Own Bamboo Canes'.
I am not using them to their full potential, but in time I may be inclined to build a fence, or a little tea-house for Grand-daughter, or another oriental-type bridge. The possibilities are there.

In this country bamboo is not as appreciated as it is in the Far East, where bamboo groves are an aid to contemplation, symbols of strength and uprightness.
'Strength and uprightness', I think as I potter in my own bamboo grove
Exactly what I need as the arthritis kicks in.
Inspirational.

In Sympathy with Tian Tian.

                                              Portrait of Bundles of  Panda Joy by National Geographic



I have to stop reading the news. It's all getting too much, emotionally, when one had barely recovered from the tension and excitement of that Other Birth.
Now I learn that Tian Tian, the Giant Panda up there in Edinburgh (rented out from the Chinese Government), may be pregnant.
She is moody, off her food, and won't cooperate about having a scan.

Well, fair enough.
Many of us will be able to recall the nausea, the tiredness, the mood swings, but few of us will have had to face the indignities suffered by Tian Tian.
Public artificial insemination by different donors, endless speculation about our partner's abilities, doubts about our own capabilities. People are already questioning her mothering skills, and foster parents are lined up before pregnancy is confirmed.And if she does give birth her offspring will belong to the People's Republic of China and will be returned there at the age of two.
I wouldn't co-operate either.
But there is huge money in panda production.

If Giant Pandas find it so uncongenial to reproduce that they can't or won't, perhaps we should try to see things from their viewpoint?
Are they telling us that they don't want to be in zoos? Could it be as simple as that?
Do they reproduce when left well alone, free-range in their bamboo forests?
Or are they telling us that they have had enough of the whole business, and if people want pandas they are going to have to engineer them for themselves?
A friend who has recently visited captive baby pandas in China tells me that in order to obtain the necessary ingredients for artificial insemination the panda keepers have to fire up the prospective fathers by showing them Panda Porn, because male pandas basically can't be bothered.

Tian Tian and her partner, Yang Guang have been together for two years and had two attempts at mating, but their hearts were not in it. They obviously just don't care, either for each other or for the whole idea of sex and parenthood. And looking at the outcome of a panda pregnancy in the first few weeks - would you?
Admittedly the birth may be comparatively easy - Tian Tian might not even notice, but an new-born panda does not tug at the heart strings in the way that some other tiny animals may.
Infant pandas, as opposed to new-borns, are the toy-makers' dream, cuteness personified, but they clearly do not create the same sort of enthusiasms in their parents.

Why is it all so unattractive for them?
Surely  pandas are trying to tell us something?

Meanwhile, back at the zoo, one of the pandas' keepers feels that, 'it's all just going to explode'.
Poor Tian Tian.

Nameless fears.

Here I live a simple life, with hardly an app in sight - and then I come across this, and my humble upstairs loo seems such a blessing, such a source of relief and relaxation.

Imagine, if I'd been about to upgrade, at the cost of just under four thousand pounds, to a lavatory that I could control from my smartphone (if and when I buy it).
It's such a temptation, isn't it? A lavatory that you can control while sitting on it..........to make it play music, or puff warm air and warm water, or flush itself and spray deodorant (sorry, I mean activate fragrance release). I could have been so motivated, because as one ages it's a nuisance to have to reach for the flush handle, and a bit of music and fragrance is always nice.

I have a rack of books on the back of this door, but you have to lean slightly forwards to get them. I have short stories, poetry, a book of Beryl Cook's painting and several Viz annuals (which I have to remove before younger visitors arrive) among other treasures for short-term reading, so this small room is not without resources. Admittedly, I would have been hesitating over the music bit of the app, because I actually prefer Radio 4, or Chopin or Bach, and I would need to ensure that these are available while enthroned.

So, anyway, thank goodness I hadn't indulged in the smartphone, the app, or the luxury loo because I know what would have happened. The several smartphoned visitors to this house would have increased my water bills and caused me considerable discomfort and concern as the music, bidet and fragrance release functions were activated with  potentially amusing consequences. Family weekends would have become hilarious for some, expensive for others.
How we might all have laughed and cursed.

There might have been others, not even visitors, but casual by-passers, activating apps as they stroll past, on the off-chance that they will catch some luxury loo owner in situ. This is an affluent neighbourhood, with a very high-tech establishment just down the road. The news report describes this as a 'security hole' which is a fearful prospect.
In olden days there used to be fears of rats coming round the U-bend, but now it is cyber-criminals attacking our most basic functions. The thought that my lavatory could be a security hole is worse than a rat-attack.

Thank goodness, as it is I can relax with my simple wooden seat and enjoy the Beryl Cook artwork.

Blooming Where I'm Planted.

Gillie left a comment on my previous posting and included the thought-provoking idea of 'blooming where I'm planted'. I realise it's something I've always tried to do, although at a few times in my life it has become rather more a case of making the best of a bad job.
Sometimes I have been where I didn't want to be, more often psychologically than physically.
For the past twenty or so years I have been mostly here, at home in my Victorian house, in my labour-intensive garden, mostly alone in the last six years of widowhood, surrounded by memories and echoes.

The family house, once rather crowded, is now comfortably spacious.
My husband's workshop, which I wrote about here......... well, look what has happened. Most of the plastic boxes containing nails and screws, the containers for lengths of string, the countless drill-bits and other assorted bodging and hitting tools are still in place in their wall-mounted compartments.
But the main space of his workshop has become a store-room for baby equipment.........the pushchair, high-chair, bouncing-about-chair, the baby bath and other essential items in pastel colours.
What was a severely, somewhat guarded masculine space has bloomed into something quite other.

There is much sadness in the thought that my husband and grand-daughter will not meet. He would have been totally captivated by her, a willing slave, as indulgent with her as he was with his own infant sons. But I wonder if he would have emptied his work-shop for her baby gear. I suspect he would have built another shed for the purpose.

But he has built a shed for what will soon become her purpose.
He built Walnut Cottage for our sons. It was their playhouse, but then it became a bike store, and later still a wheel-chair store. Now it needs to become a playhouse again.

The pattern of my life here feels like the seasonal changes in the garden, from the growth and freshness of spring and summer, to the ripeness and maturity of autumn before tipping back into the quiet solitude of winter. I appreciate these seasons equally.
I need them equally in my life.

I am blooming, not exactly where I'm planted, but where I am irrevocably rooted.

Another Morning.

4.30 a.m. and dawn breaks outside my bedroom window. I am woken by the light, and then alerted by a cat stand-off in the road. Two of them contesting each other's right to be there. Vocal protest, postural threats, neither able to break eye-contact. Luckily, no traffic. Then a distant dog-bark gives them the excuse they need to turn simultaneously and run in opposite directions, dignity and social position more or less intact.

It is already warm, and I think of getting up and doing the ironing before the real heat of the day kicks in, for it does feel like a kick.
We are not used to this in England. The odd couple of days, yes, but not for any length of time. Not with temperatures over 30 degrees and the sky dotted with little clouds that barely move.
I think about the ironing, and then I think about not ironing.
My son is staying for a few days before heading off to distant lands again, so I think about food instead, and how I can prepare meals without cooking.
Then I go back to bed and try not to think of anything, but instead am unexpectedly swamped by sadness

I miss people.
I miss people who have moved away geographically, and those whom death has taken. I miss loves requited and unrequited and the complexities and richness they brought to my life. I even miss myself when young. I think I'd like another go at being young and try to do it better.
But then I see the complex web of cause and effect, and see that I could make very few changes without altering the essential pattern, and there is nothing I would want to change in the essential pattern.

I didn't expect it to happen, this getting old business. It crept up on me when I wasn't looking.
Like the cats, I was posturing, keeping eye-contact, maintaining my status and all the time age was creeping stealthily up behind me, so that when I turned to flee I couldn't.
I could walk with a certain dignity, but it had got me and I couldn't run anywhere.
So now I suppose I walk towards it, hoping that, like the dawn, it brings promise as well as threat.

On the whole, it would have been better to get up and do the ironing.

Early Next Morning.

I awake early, make a cup of tea and amble out in my nightdress to enjoy a few magical moments, like yesterday.
As I round the corner I see that my strawberry patch, source of pride and considerable enjoyment, has been appreciated by others.
Overnight the badgers dug out a bumble-bee nest.
That's wild-life gardening!

Early One Morning.

This is a section of my complex garden. Complex, labour-intensive, demanding.
At least once a year, just about now, I think I can't cope with it any more.
Everywhere I look I see weeds. The vine grows visibly, strangling everything it touches. To prune, or rather hack it back, I have to clamber up on a stone wall, and use a stepladder. Ground elder romps through the fence between me and a railway embankment, as do brambles and goose-grass and many other undesirables.

Every day I need to work here. I have to so something to try and keep control.
Some days I'm out here for hours, other days an hour is all I have.

I could be on a cruise.
I could be lolling about on a beach in Cornwall.
I could be on a plane, travelling to visit far-flung family.
But I'm not.
I'm face-down bum-up in the garden, finger-nails that have never known a manicure clogged with earth.

Then, one morning, this morning, I wake early. I make a cup of tea and go outside, still in my nightdress, and am surrounded by magic.
There is dew on the grass and the air is filled with bird-song.
The Crambe Cordifolia (on the left of the picture, by the lamp-post) sends wafts of honey-scent across the lawn. There are glowing jewels of colour in the herbaceous beds and on the rock-garden.
Stipa Giganticae shines golden and shimmers into the slightest breeze.
The sun is warm on my back, and no one except the birds and a visiting kitten can see me in my nightdress.
For half-an-hour I experience perfection.

No pain, no gain.
I wouldn't have it any other way.