Veg Plotting

I'm not given to on the spot decisions. My head usually spends too much time dithering over things my heart just knows are right. Finally I'll inhale deeply and take the plunge, just like I do at a swimming pool. Today's different. For once head and heart were as one immediately and now I'm a film producer :o Cinema's always been a major part of my life. In fact, I can confidently say that without it, I wouldn't be here at all. Dad and mum met completely by chance in the 1950s when the film broke at their local picture house in Birmingham. The lights went up and they started chatting. Dad escorted mum home at the end of the film, they started going out and well, I'm sure you can guess the rest... I saw my first film aged 4: Zulu at the ABC in Selly Oak. A surprising choice for parents to make perhaps, but I was transfixed. I had a box of Paynes Poppets and they went untouched for the entire film. Mum reckons it was the soldiers' uniforms - ...

Two of my favourite places in Chippenham are within yards of my house and I'm not even sure how much of them is public planting at all. They're very different to anything I've shown you previously in Out on the Streets . Both represent the wilder face of Chippenham's open spaces and are neither park nor wasteland. They're definitely not wilderness, as both are managed by the local council, and they provide vital green lungs for the town. The first is at the lower road entrance to our estate and is a small area of land bisected by the Hardenhuish Brook. In the middle is a reedbed - celebrated previously here at Veg Plotting for World Wetlands Day last year. Now this really is public planting, but of a different sort as the reedbed has been installed as a way of filtering and cleansing the runoff from the main road nearby. If it wasn't there, I wouldn't be able to use the brook further downstream for freshwater invertebrate identification workshops as there ...

Here we are - all ship-shape and Bristol fashion * - at the end of our rehearsal for Sing for Water West yesterday morning. This is what a choir of 641 looks like - you'll have to imagine the foreground (and more) filled with the massive audience we had for the afternoon. Umbrellas were much in evidence during the day - as sunshades! I sang on the far right of the photo and it was quite hard to hear the choir's other parts apart from our own soprano one from that position. When I slipped out to take this photo during our encore rehearsal of Shine , I was amazed at the incredible wall of sound we were making. Just after we'd finished our morning's work, The Matthew (see yesterday's picture) sailed by, so we gave everyone aboard an impromptu rendition of Bristol Ho ! Sometimes we had a little taster of what it must be like for those whom we were fundraising for. There was a standpipe available for us to refill our water bottles - the steward smilingly informing ever...

From Bristol Harbour we set sail When blowin' it was a devil of gale With the ring-tail set all avast the mizzen peak And the rule britannia plowin' up the deep With a Bristol Ho! Tow row row Foll dee roll dee rye dolly day It's Sing For Water time again! Chris, our choirmaster has been busy organising the first event in the south west and tomorrow's the big day. 600 of us will be assembling dockside at the Lloyds TSB amphitheatre in Bristol to sing our socks off for WaterAid . We're rehearsing there all morning and the real event kicks off at 2.30 pm. The Wiltshire Wailers will get things going in style with Now Let Us Sing and Bamba Lela - you can still hear us performing these songs on Chris' website together with the words for tomorrow's programme. We've seven songs to sing for the main event, which also shows off the talents of some of our local choirmasters as they've either written or arranged them. Seeing we'll be...

Ever since I started my public planting series this year, I've been waiting for the right moment to ask Can plastic be fantastic ? For years my daily commute ended at Bristol Temple Meads station where the most elaborate hanging baskets were to be found. As they were in the underpass section - the main thoroughfare to various train platforms - they were made from plastic as no self-respecting brightly coloured real plants would be able to survive the low light levels. However, this year they've disappeared. I suspect they've been hijacked by Kemble station - Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen said he'd been fooled by some there on How Britain Got the Gardening Bug recently, until they were taken down for dusting. So I shelved my planned post - though I was seriously tempted to make the 40 mile round trip to Kemble for you dear reader. Now I don't have to as I found just the thing on a very wet afternoon in Norwich recently. There's a great shopping area where one of t...

... Walsingham Sometimes I'm amazed at how little I know about my own country and its history: I didn't know a place like Walsingham existed until a couple of weeks ago. During medieval times, this was the second most popular destination for pilgrims in England - Canterbury was the first - all because Lady Richeldis had visions of the Virgin Mary in 1061. Today pilgrims still make their way to Walsingham and shrines and churches of the Catholic, Anglican and Russian Orthodox faiths are crammed into an otherwise small village. Many of the houses seem to be used for housing pilgrims, with glazed pottery plaques dedicated to the saints adorning their walls. I say seem as the door of the one dedicated to St. Anne opened whilst we were passing to reveal a bent old lady intent on watering her potted plants. This made me think some of them might be almshouses. Even the village shops are in on the act - there's a gift shop with a nice line in the largest, most ornate crib scenes ...

Click to enlarge image if needed. Paired photos from top to bottom: Top - The usual kind of modern housing estate front garden; Middle - my version of it from the side and above; Bottom - common design issues: drain covers and extra parking spaces Regular readers will know that I very rarely show my front garden here on the interweb. That's because I don't really want to reveal exactly where I live in Chippenham. However, for this month's Garden Bloggers' Design Workshop I've cast caution to the four winds and roped in a few of my neighbours to help out too. Our house is 10 years old and sited on a fairly typical modern housing estate. This means the gardens are small, especially the front ones. The minimalistic planting provided by the builders tends to be just like the top two pictures: a minute patch of lawn surrounded by a hedge of something tough like Lonicera nitida, or side boundaries comprising a single species like the pictured Rose of Sharon ( ...

Ever since I took Tea in the Garden with my SUP friends last year, I've been waiting to have a try at making elderflower cordial. It's deliciously airy, refreshing taste is just like drinking a glass of summer. This weekend's sunshine and plentiful hedgerow flowers meant it was the perfect time to start. However, I was lacking a key ingredient: some citric acid. A search around town yielded nothing. Brewing shops are quite some distance from here and an internet order might mean a delay until the flowers are past their best. Fortunately I found just what I needed in my trusty Jekka's Complete Herb Book : a slightly different recipe using ingredients I had already. It makes lashings of elderflower cordial at a fraction of shop prices. Ingredients 4.5 litres water 700g sugar Juice and thinly peeled rind of 1 lemon 30ml cider or wine vinegar 12 large elderflower heads Method Shake any bugs off the flowers Bring the water to the boil and pour into a st...

If you're in North Norfolk, a boat trip out to see the seals at Blakeney Point is a must. Most of the coast there is a mass of salt marsh, sand dunes and secretive river creeks that eventually meander out to sea. Blakeney Point is a large sand bar across one of these and also a National Nature Reserve. You'll find lots of unusual plants and well camouflaged birds eggs amongst the sand and shingle, but the main reason for going there is one of the largest colonies of seals in the UK, about 500 of them. There's common seals (the grey looking ones) and more confusingly the grey seals (the black looking ones). We were about a fortnight too early to see the newly born common seal pups, but dark, unfathomably curious eyes bobbing just a few feet from our boatside ones, were just as exciting.

Almost completely at random (i.e. find a cottage in North Norfolk that's centrally located, reasonably priced and for 4 or more people - we always like things to be a bit more roomy on holiday) we found ourselves based in Great Massingham - all the villages in North Norfolk have cheerful signs like the one pictured. It's just how an English village should be, with an extensive village green and with not one, but four massive ponds. These came complete with bulrushes, yellow flag irises and a multitude of quacking ducks, some of whom were found outside our door every morning in spite of Squid, the cottage owners' cat. A place with a traditional church, sadly not one of the intriguing fortress style churches found elsewhere in the area, but built from the same materials. A thriving village shop plus a pub rescued from the ashes of the deceased Rose and Crown and resurrected as The Dabbling Duck . An object lesson in how a community/council partnership can restore the beati...